As pointed out, that’s not God. At all. And few people actually made any such assertion.
Hello ? “If we all do this thing, society will collapse, therefore we should have a rule against it” isn’t an argument ? And as well, he was speaking only of personal consequences, under the theory that an atheist is a sociopath.
And he’s a criminal, and will suffer the punishment if caught.
What’s “amusing” about it ? If someone announces that they are the ruthless enemy of everyone else - and that’s what he was claiming as his “atheist viewpoint” - they are a terrible person. It’s perfectly rational for people to be hostile to such an attitude.
Yes, it is. Empathy is an important part of human judgement, and makes you less dangerous to others. A lack of empathy makes you less rational/intelligent ( due to an inability to understand others ), as well as dangerous.
Of course I can. I can and do say that people following empathy tends to make the world better.
And people who claim as you do that they owe nothing are parasites. Go and live as a hermit in some mountains, without tools except those you make by hand if you want to be free of society’s obligations. And again, if the majority of people took your attitude and managed to implement it, civilization would fall and most of humanity die.
If true, so what ? Treating people as if they have rights makes society better for people in general. Treating people as if they have no rights only makes sense if you are sure you’ll never be a victim’s.
No, you haven’t. Compassion and fairness and rights and so on are good ideas because of the results they have. Whether they have some “higher morality” behind them is irrelevant; if you somehow proved that “higher morality” opposed such ideas, then I’d reject that “higher morality”.
False argument. Morality has nothing to do with God. You also are making the convenient unstated assumption that God and belief in him are positive moral forces, and that God has some right to say what is right and wrong.
Just like every religion, in other words, except that their goddess actually exists. Civilized, moral behavior, as a prerequisite requires that one ignores or rejects the barbarous, amoral influences of religion. All religion is a devil’s bargain.
There is remarkable similarity among atheists on the matter of the existence of gods.
You keep trying to claim some sort of innocence by suggesting that you weren’t talking about a specific atheist, or were somehow talking about yourself. I would be just as deluded if I thought anyone would buy into a similar justification, were I to propose that “Christians are extremely stupid” or “I’ve decided to become a Christian, therefore I will be extremely stupid.”
Gee, why would anyone be upset? I was just talking about myself?
(The transparency of this argument (i.e. The-Rodney-Dangerfield-Caddyshack-“It looks good on you though”-Excuse) is such that I’d suggest you slide slowly away from it out of embarrassment.)
My point is that essentially everyone believes in a right and wrong which are above their personal preference. Even those who nakedly pursue power and wealth generally go after some quasi-morality which enables them to do so and feel it acceptable, even a positive good. (Ayn Rand, late Antebellum slaveowners). Ultimately, this thing, this right and wrong is your God. I believe that his is a real force, with specific aims and personality. Other people don’t. But they listen to it nonetheless.
Overall, most people are better than their beliefs, which is a very good thing, because they hold some very bad beliefs. Those people wqho are worse than their beliefs are either very bad or hold very high standards, and often both. Didn’t the Communists believe in all kinds of wonderful things? Yes, indeed. A spoiled Saint is sweeter to Satan.
Well, that’s possible. I have a hard time following a lot of mswas writes. I sort of lost him about halfway. I actually got a lot more edification out of those arguing against him than anything else.
If you are right, then I supose I’m the anti-mswas. I suppose everyone does think this things are meaningful, though I think atheists are misinterpreting the source whence they get their meaning. Nature obviates all meaning. A thing is or it is not, and the question “How shall we then live?” is merely a one of personal taste or instinct. Nature is fundamentally random, without meaning, with any order being a temporary abberation which will emerge and vanish without import. In nature, and solely under nature, our existence is meaningless.
Our reason, though derived in part from nature, is fundamentally irrational. Yes, I know I just contradicted that sentence with itself. Reason may be limited by nature, by our senses and native intellect, but it is ultimately the thing whcih seperates us from nature. I consider reason a wide concept here: humor is an aspect of it. Animals do not laugh or crack jokes, although they can play. But a real joke relies not even so much on communication (which all animals have to a greater or lesser degree) but upon rational inferences which are proved wrong, or observations which we process in a certain way.
This is a similarly ill-formed premise to many others that I’ve seen you make, such as your argument against Dawkins’ proposition of a survival benefit to children who generally follow the commands of their parents. (For the observers, ITR champion suggested that this proposition would be disproved if any child anywhere ever did not follow their parent’s command.)
Similarly here, nobody has claimed that an atheist will be universally and perpetually empathetic and “moral”. As most researchers in moral, cognitive, or even general human development (and in fact, most thinking people) will tell you, we are all layer cakes. That is to say that a person may be categorized in the highest stage of Kohlberg’s system of sociomoral development, but may still nevertheless tell someone else that they are full of shit.
I cannot believe that you honestly think that any atheist proposed such infallability or omni-empathy, just like I cannot believe that you really felt that Dawkins was suggesting that all children always follow their parents’ commands. Either you knowingly like to employ obviously faulty premises for some reason, or you also have a severe lack of perspective taking ability.
So my arguing that as a result of abandoning my moral foundation, I have decided to question the very basis of all morals, and include the possibility of allowing that I become a sociopath due to the lack of behavioral constraints previously applied by my cultural institutions, this somehow reflects upon you, and your feelings deserve to be exalted to such a state that I should be more careful about what I do lest I offend your feelings?
Sounds kind of solipsistic to me, as I wasn’t ever talking about you.
Let’s go down that road, shall we? Is it your premise that, absent God, you would most likely become some sort of nihilistic sociopath, because you lack any sort of internal morals and/or ethics, acquired (at least by most others, if not you) over a lifetime of interaction with others, to guide you?
Like I said, it may simply be reflective of individual differences in perspective-taking ability. I have the capacity to imagine that if I were to suggest that some group of people possessed some undesirable trait, other people might take offense. This ability prevents me from doing so, either directly or indirectly, and then wussing out when called upon it by batting my eyes and saying “But I was only talking about myself.”
Perhaps you simply lack this capacity to put yourself in others’ shoes. I can see why you would then fear slipping into psychopathy if not for God keeping you in line.
Of course it matters. If you are without rationality obeying rules laid down for you by an imaginary God, or rather what other people told you he said, then you are the sociopath you claim atheists are. If you are still listening to those others, you are a weapon in their hands; if you are not, then you are out of control and likely to indulge every whim and desire. After all, as God is imaginary or silent, morality derived from God, without even rationality applied to it or it’s consequences is purely arbitrary and subject to random change. You could decide tomorrow that eating babies is God’s Will.
Morality that supposedly comes from God is just coming from you, or from other human beings. And it’s completely baseless, having nothing to do with compassion or empathy or consequences; it isn’t really morality at all.
No, and that’s not the point. The point is an examination of the value of all things as the guiding first principle of my prior existance has been eradicated.
Hentor and Czarcasm The problem here is one of the accepted dogma. Sometimes you guys argue that atheists are not a group, and now you are arguing that there is some sort of group identity that goes beyond simply. “I don’t believe in God.” So which is it? Are atheists a group with a common moral and ethical identity or are they defined purely individually, their only common union being the lack of belief in something? (Sort of ironic that they are united by the lack of belief in something.)
I am saying that becoming a sociopath is a legitimate response to atheism as there is no unifying factor outside of that. Unlike a religion where there are more unifying themes than simply believing in God. A shared moral and cultural background unites the religious.
I made no comment about ‘all’ atheists, and that, not my OP is the main strawman in this thread.
Well, then why’d you start this thread? Any repercussions of you deciding to become an atheist, including your own personal definition of what an atheist is, are as much a matter of personal taste as your favourite movies.
It looks like your own personal definition of what an atheist is varies considerably from the personal definitions of others.
Actually, whether atheism was a monoblock and you were wrong about it, or atheism is a scattered individual thing and people disagreed with you, I guess the result would be the same. What were you expecting?
Only if you are already a sociopath; an attitude that religion encourages and enables. If eliminating religion from yourself makes you a sociopath, then you were always a sociopath. Just a sociopath who believed in a lot of silly nonsense.
If anything, giving up religion is likely to make someone less sociopathic, as they are more likely to be thinking about real people and not imaginary things like God and souls.
I didn’t claim that Atheists are sociopaths. And you are wrong here. If the culture shares the same edicts from God, then there is a unifying theme that can be discussed and measured. The origin of such beliefs are not subject to rational inquiry, or at least do not fall apart if shown to be irrational.
So, by your logic, there really is no reason not to eat babies. Whether God tells me to, or if as an atheist I just decide I want to know what a baby tastes like. It is merely social conditioning. How am I not a weapon in the hands of whoever is deciding the moral conditioning even without God?
You seem to be arguing for some sort of objective morality. How does one determine what is morally objective? You act as though it’s some sort of genetic imperative. If I can defy it and others can defy it, clearly it’s not a genetic imperative for everyone. If it’s not an imperative for everyone, then maybe it is right and good for some of us to be sociopaths.
You can call it your God if you want. I prefer to call it my surfboard. Sure, people get really confused when they call it that because they think I’m talking about something used in surfing, but…
Of course you did; that was the obvious thrust of your post. It’s the standard “Anyone who doesn’t believe in God is an evil monster and enemy of all humanity” propaganda the believers spout all the time.
Except they don’t, because there is no God. Instead, they have arbitrary assertions with no connection to reality, which can be changed randomly at any time.
No, it’s a matter of what’s better for humanity. Of what serves people, in general, better.
Because justifications like “Doing thus and so makes life better” allow you to judge your actions by objective reality. Basing your “morality” on God does not. If you base your “morality” on god, you don’t actually have any morality at all; just orders. Orders that are detached from reality.
No, I’m saying I don’t care if there is one or not. I care about the effects of morality on people.
