Actually, it is you and others in this thread who are bailing straw. A Straw man argument is when you say the other person is saying something they are not. I am not attributing any statements to you or any other member of this discussion or of atheism at large. I am merely asking for some guidance in my own new found atheism.
I see a lot of dogmatic assertions like, “I am better than you because I do not need a God to guide my behavior.”, but in my estimation, terms such as ‘better’ or ‘worse’ imply some objective sense of measurement. As I see no reason to believe that there is a rational metric by which we can derive morals, then that statement appears meaningless to me.
Sure, I can see the point of ethics, rules of behavior pertaining to certain contexts that may be required for that project to function properly. IE, it would be hard for a woman to go to a gynecologist if she thinks he is going to manipulate her for sexual purposes. She may avoid going to the gynecologist out of fear for her safety. That’s an ethic, it’s not moral. I see no reason why a gynecologist sexually abusing his patient is ‘immoral’, even though I can see why it would be ‘unethical’. This only matters in so far as the practitioner cares about the outcome however.
As I said, I am questioning everything that I ever held to be true, as the entire cultural hierarchy and aesthetic was previously determined by the central theme that God organized the universe. Without the socially proscribed roles that were determined by my place in the culture, I do not know where I stand, or whether I should cling to prior notions of moral purity as they were all built upon a non-existant foundation.
When you believe the jury is still out on something, that means you haven’t yet accepted to believe the claim is true. When this concerns God/gods, this makes you an atheist. An atheist doesn’t have to believe there are no gods; he just has to be without belief. One who hasn’t made up his mind is still without belief.
I don’t think he’s confusing atheism with nihilism. I think he’s saying that a conversion to atheism from theism can cause nihilism, and is asking us to find a belief structure that is neither theistic nor both atheistic and nihilistic. While this isn’t necessarily so, it is certainly a common occurrence, at least temporarily. If one finds that the basis of their belief structure is fundamentally flawed in some way, it is natural to enter a period during which questions all of one’s beliefs which is akin to temporary nihilism.
It’s a belief (or a lack of a belief) about the knowledge of God. Therefore it’s both about God and knowledge. We’re mincing words here. You can use the terms weak and strong atheist if your prefer. The point made was the same.
Society and our culture hasn’t been majorly determined by this theme since the Enlightenment, unless you’re secretly posting from Riyaad or the Vatican.
So it’s iconoclasm for iconoclasm’s sake, then? Why do you think that your social context disappears when the metacontext of deity does?
You may not agree, but despite the often-repeated idea that all atheists have in common is their non-belief, in practice, that’s not actually true. No social idea arises* ex nihilo*, IME, and atheism has a solid philosophical and cultural base for its moral stance, firmer even than the theistic one. So if you don’t know where (hypothetical) you stand, it’s only because you’re not looking around you.
Taking off the blindfold of solipsism might help, too.
If I´m understanding you correctly you seem to be arguing that moral notions, right, wrong, whatever, live in some kind supernatural Platonic dimension of ideas, floating in the ether waiting to be rediscovered by our minds (or souls, whatever rocks your boat); and furthermore, that parallel plane of morality guidelines is god. Therefore, if someone claims to have a moral compass it must be channeling god for that.
That´s nonsense; right and wrong can (and are) derived from nature, or properly, the physical world. Case in point, if I get punched in the face it hurts, hurt is a negative feeling to be avoided, and since I´m not a bloody sociopath I won´t go around punching people in the face because I empathize with them and don´t see the point of spreading suffering just because I could.
God doesn´t get into it in the least.
Of course it’s about a belief about whether or not knowledge of God’s existence is possible. The point is that agnosticism is about whether or not knowledge of God’s existence can be had vs. atheism which is about whether or not you have a belief that God exists. By nitpicking and claiming that agnosticism is a belief about knowledge, you are the one mincing words as I never claimed otherwise nor is it a valid objection to my point.
The point of my post was to correct lekatt’s claim that one who hasn’t made up his mind whether or not gods exist is agnostic. One can be both an atheist and agnostic and one who hasn’t made up his mind if he believes any gods exist does not have a belief that gods exist- making him an atheist.
Just to echo and expand upon some previous observations, but part of the ability to engage in moral reasoning is the ability to take another person’s perspective. This process typically develops through stages during early childhood, so that in fairly early adolescence, most people have the ability to: understand that other people have a separate mind from their own; comprehend that others may feel and think differently about things than they do; have a fair guess as to the potential content of others’ feelings and thoughts in a given circumstance, and understand and agree that there are certain universal guidelines that ought to be followed.
The OP demonstrates that mswas completely lacks the ability to take (i.e. understand or describe) the perspective of others. She is completely unable to describe the perspective of an atheist. I would, like others have, strongly encourage her to continue to remove herself entirely from her moral decision making and continue to rely solely on whatever god she believes in. Were she to try to do so on her own, I fear the consequences could be dire.
Morality is a human construct, but it is not entirely arbitrary. It is built upon the foundation of human emotions. Some scientists have even argued that emotions evolved as a mechanism for regulating group behavior in ape societies. So, any moral system that we construct must correlate with natural human instincts for fairness, justice and decency. Otherwise it is unsustainable in the long run.
A moral system is also a communal activity, like language. It governs relationships between people, not people in isolation. So an isolated individual can’t just decide “killing is good” any more than an isolated individual can decide “the word ‘flurb’ means a furry woodland animal”. Language and morality both are the product of group consensus and if everyone around you says killing is bad and a squirrel is a squirrel you’re wrong if you say otherwise.
If humans weren’t human we would have a different morality. A race of intelligent cats would find loyalty to be immoral – everyone knows that good people look out for themselves and bad people leech off others. Trying to find some sort of purely rational and objective basis for morality is futile. It’s a product of our instincts.
As an atheist my conscience and my feelings are my moral compass. (As they are for most theists, I’d wager). Right feels right and wrong feels wrong. In cases where I’m uncertain I use logical reasoning to compare the situation with a simpler situation where my conscience can serve as my guide. Simple really.
I was attempting to succinctly describe the developmental process to Stage 4 (in Gibbs model) or Stage 6 (in Kohlberg’s model) sociomoral development, which isn’t typically acheived until 12 or 13 at the earliest. You are correct (if I understand your objection) that by age four, at least in Piaget’s framework, you should begin to see movement away from egocentric thinking.
Honestly, it’s pretty easy to work out a working code of morals that’s both self-serving AND in service of a beneficial society with a combination of utilitarianism and game theory – when it boils right down to it, “don’t do to others things you don’t want done to you” works in the real world (even better than the positive phrasing ascribed to later philosophers/religious figures, as it doesn’t imply obligation, but rather a simple calculus of long-term benefit).
Basically, a divine-less morality comes out of a shared agreement within a society that if certain things are agreed to be bad, then everyone who agrees to not do those things vastly reduces their risks, inside that society, of those things being done to them. Especially if there’s a societal enforcement mechanism. This can boil down to simple, almos morality-free choices like “drive on the left side of the road or the right”, all the way up to “should I steal from that person, knowing that I do not want to have my things stolen and that I benefit from a strong societal prejudice against stealing and those who steal?”
What can I say, my love-empathy endorphins got all fluttery when you posted. ;p
To all who found this offensive, I wonder why you empathize with this, when I specifically stipulated that I was speaking for no one else?
jackdavinci I applaud you for seeing through to the spirit of the argument.
It is very interesting how many atheists appealed to shame as a method of argumentation. I never once said anything about eternal punishment, and yet many posters automatically assumed that it was eternal punishment that guided the ideas. Rather the central theme was ‘behaviorism’ something perfected by the Jesuits hundreds of years ago. “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”, certainly eternal damnation played a part in the behavioral conditioning of the Jesuits, but it’s not a necessary component of behavioral conditioning. One can condition behavior without eternal consequences. Simple reward/punishment scenarios in the short term used when a child has no context for alternate behaviors can work sufficiently to determine the adult’s behavior.
So, if my behavior is determined by such concepts that were inculcated in my behavior by religious or pseudo-religious institutions throughout my life, based upon a Judeo-Christian framework, then it is right to question them. Whether it is, the Golden rule, the Ten Commandments, or “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The United States Government is based off of European institutions which were informed largely by the legalism of the Catholic church which in turn was informed by the legalism of the Roman Empire, where the secular functions of state were considered a religious matter. It is only recently that we have attempted to separate the idea of the state from the idea of the religious culture, to limited success, as the state is based off of the ritual of more ancient institutions. So if the progenitor institutions are religious in nature, then the edifice was born of religious concepts. So if I am to question the foundation of that edifice then I should be questioning it’s structural integrity as well, no?
As for love and empathy being emotions. I see a mistake here. Are they feelings themselves or things being felt? Many people would balk at the reduction of love to being merely an emotion. To the religious person it’s something real that is being felt as opposed to the feeling itself. With empathy, empathy is definitely not an emotion, it is the capacity to approximate the emotions of others, so the emotion being felt is that of identification with the other. This seems to be confused with sympathy. Just because I can empathically feel what you are feeling does not mean that I have to care. Sympathy means that I actually care about what you are feeling.
As for the self-interest, certainly there are evolutionary reasons for altruism, but it assumes that I care about the fate of the next generation for that to matter. When I am dead, what does it matter?
As smilingbandit pointed out, there seemed to be a rather religious resentment to what I said, with appeals to some sort of moral understanding that is ‘self-evident’. Isn’t it a common trope to say that common sense isn’t actually all that common? It is interesting to me that many of the posts were devoid of rational appeals and merely appeals to shame with, “what’s wrong with you, you sick pervert?”, to, “well I am better than you because I don’t need a magical sky pixie to tell me right from wrong.” The flaw here is that I am not competing with you, I do not care if you think you are better than me or not because you have not established the rules that govern comparison. You arbitrarily and solipsistically prefer your position. That’s understandable, I am doing the same thing. The difference is I am not attempting to coerce anyone to my view here. I am not attempting to trigger shame behaviorism that has been ingrained by the pseudo-religious institutions to inculcate socialization. If I abandon those behavioral triggers, then the attendant shame as an accessory is also released. So it may be self-evident to you, but how can I even tell what it is that is self-evident? By what measure can I even tell that you all are agreeing that there is a common morality. Maybe there isn’t really, and you are all simply agreeing due to the social imperative to agree that there is such a thing as morality. You know how to behave contextually because you have been programmed to behave that way, and the tests of morality don’t really come into play that often so it’s easy and costless to claim to agree. Maybe the self-evident morality that many of you share is wildly different at it’s core because it’s derived from different amalgams of logic and emotion.
As for whether or not deriving morality from God is any more logical, that’s irrelevant. The notion that God gives you morals isn’t subject to rationality, it doesn’t matter. The rules were put in place by God, and you have some leeway to obey them or not. This is not perfect free will, as you cannot do anything you want. I doubt most of you can blow up a car with your mind for instance. So if it is your will to do so, your will is not free, it is constrained by rules that are immutable, at least for you. Maybe one or two of you CAN make cars explode with your mind. The unquestioning acceptance of a ‘self-evident’ morality doesn’t seem to show that there is any sort of logic behind the notion of free-will. You implicitly accept rules governing your behavior, rules that were largely decided by priests in temples millenia ago. It’s pat and simple to say that people acted a certain way before certain religious institutions came into being, but there is no method of verifying such a notion. Many cultures have very different notions of morality. Aztec temples soaked with the blood of 80,000 sacrifices, hardly resemble the same moral system as a Judeo-Christian culture. The oldest historical documents are notoriously disputed for authenticity of content, whether we dispute whether Abraham really existed, discuss the validity of Herodotus’s histories, or look at Egyptian hieroglyphics. The earliest writings on ethics and such were largely defined by religious institutions, from Jewish priests, to Hammurabi, to Zoroaster, and Akhenaten. We have no way of knowing what sort of moral or civil structure prior civilizations and tribes had. It is simply dogmatically accepted that morality derives from something other than religious behavioral inculcation. I would tend to believe that such behavioral inculcation is NOT natural based upon watching the social abuse in animal tribes that govern who gets to eat and breed, and by observing human history with as much attention that was devoted to inculcating moral behavior in the populace. I don’t think it follows that altruism is necessarily natural to the human condition. Certainly, we can argue that religion evolved naturally, but different threads evolved simultaneously and came into conflict in a violent dialectic with the victory of the superior system being decided in a trial by blood.
It’s doubly mysterious since atheism is, apparently, a sociopathic mindset.
Seems to me if you wanted to live as an atheist, the only thing that would change is you’d stop wasting time with whatever religious rituals you currently follow (unless you persist in them to be polite to the feelings of family members, or because you like the social structure the rituals provide). I don’t see it turning you into a killer robot, unless you were one already.
Zeriel and MaxTorque The problem though is you are both describing ways to develop a personal code of ethics, but not really morals. Everything you are talking about describes approaching problems situationally. Morals are what keeps us from killing someone when killing them is the approach of maximum utility. Game Theory only tells us that in MOST instances, self-interest and communal interest are maximized. If I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I can without a doubt get the hottest girl at the expense of my friends, there is no reason for me to concern myself with their futile attempts at getting the girl I know that I will obtain. It is only when competition for the prettiest girl is fairly even that it matters whether or not I seek methods of deflection to reduce competition. So when I have decided after my cost/benefit analysis such as it is, that the best outcome requires someone else’s death, what is there to keep me from doing so? Why shouldn’t I?
Don’t people like saying that there is no ‘single’ atheism? That atheism is as varied as individual atheists? If that is so, why is my argument considered a reflection upon all atheists?
It’s pretty obvious that the answer is no. The sounds we use to represent different words are arbitrary. The sound of a word is, however, constrained by the capabilities of the human vocal system. And meaning itself is determined by consensus. One person by himself can’t decide that “glory” means “there’s a knock down argument for you.”
Morals are like that.
There is no objective basis for morality. What a particular society considers good and evil is arbitrary. Those rules, however, are constrained by the capabilities of the human brain – our emotions, our innate understanding of fairness, our sense of empathy. Those rules are also determined by consensus. One person by himself can’t decide that killing is good.
If you’re willing to accept that language is a social construct, why is it so hard to accept that morals might be as well?
I imagine, were mswas’s post similar in that many theists thought it were a misrepresentation of themselves to the extent that they cannot love, for example, then there would be a similar ratio of insults to arguments.
I’d point out also that if your method of finding out the moral and empatheticness of posts by atheists is to count them up, and that you show incredulousness at the idea that most posts by atheists in this forum being moral/empathetic, that you must already have counted all posts in this forum. What was the result? Or perhaps you’re asking for evidence you yourself are not interested in providing for yourself?
