Well put Latro, I think you’ve put your finger on it. It sounds like Badger is ready to imagine the world without a God but he wants to make sure he (Badger) won’t go off on an amoral killing spree when he first thinks that atheist thought. It is a big step.
You are not far off at all, yet I feel I am light years away from making that final leap.
If there are some contradictions it may because I am just shooting from the hip dealing with an imaginary scenario.
Good call, Latro.
As an incidental note, my final step toward atheism was occasioned by the movie Ghost. No killing spree ensued.
Before I answer this question as honestly as I can I would like to qualify it by saying I don't think my answer is important because I would not trust myself to make these kind of decisions.
I do believe the world is approaching a saturation point in many respects. Not sure what that point would be but I believe it to be within no more than a couple of hundred years more likley less.
Killing millions of people might be and probably would be a decision to go to war. Most likely over competition for resources. My side would feel the other side pushing and they would feel my side pushing and at some point someone would throw the switch. If I were in that position I could throw the switch regardless of my belief or not.
#3, I think it may cause me to be just a tad quicker on the switch if I were in a position of this kind of power, but only in a situation of impending war. Forcing myself to imagine a situation of basicaly culling or pruning of the species as I would do a plum tree for intstance is difficult. It takes me back to an acting class I was in and assigned to play a child mollester who had kidnapped a young child.
The director screamed at me over and over, he said you don’t want us to believe your character and he was right. He would not let me off the hook, He said I could not come down off that stage till he believed I was that character. I eventually snapped and became the most evil monster imaginable. The director gave me a standing ovation and showered me with highest forms of praise. the girls in the group and some of the guys were actualy afraid of me after that scene and I eneded up quitting the class over it.
This is how that question affects me because at some level I feel the answer might be yes. It stesses me out trying to come up with a real life, plausible situation in which I would have to make that decision so I won’t go there all the way.
- I think I would be worse off as an athiest. I have enjoyed the thread, I have a bit more respect for your particular outlooks. But in all honesty just hanging this close to the edge for the last few days has left me a bit disheveled if I spelled that right. If I gave up God I feel like it would turn my life upside down. I never really relized how much I actually meditate in very short momentary shots until I started this thread.
If you’re having this discussion, it kind of sounds like you already did “give up God” and you’re trying to find a way to rationalize it away or put the genie back in the bottle, which doesn’t really work. And it doesn’t sound like your life has been turned upside down.
By the way, if you go atheist, please go easy on the “pruning the species” rhetoric. We have enough problems already.
Shucks, I didn’t even mention to badger that I’m a believer; I merely made a point a nonbeliever promptly copy-and-pasted, agreed with, and added to.
It wasn’t a direct statement but that is what I got from it.
By the way, badger5149, it’s atheist, not athiest.
He means that the people who would commit genocide are the athiest of all.
He’d like to take a minute, just sit right there.
badger5149, I suspect you are viewing atheism as some kind of nihilism. It’s easy to see why this might be the case, if an atheist rejects the main, if not only, cause for morality (at least to perception of the religious), then there would appear to be no barriers to morally dubious behavior.
Part of the problem is that we’re comparing a belief system with a negation of a belief system rather than another philosophy. When people say they’re atheist, they simply are saying “I don’t believe any supernatural entity exists and therefore cannot have given my laws to live by.” But it would be a mistake to assume that atheists have no motivating philosophy. Ayn Rand and I are both atheists but that’s where the similarity ends. Her belief system is Objectivism, mine most closely resembles Secular Humanism.
You might consider checking out the book Good Without God. I also find Peter Singer’s study into ethics very thought-provoking and challenging (but challenging in a good way).
So I think you’re looking at the wrong aspect of their belief system: instead of focusing on the thing they don’t believe, try asking what they do believe. Different atheists will answer the question differently.
Same thing as stops religious people from fighting crusades, committing murder, molesting children, burning people as witches, sending people to jail for saying particular words and…
Wait. Religious people do all this sort of stuff. Now I am confused.
All you kids can call me “Lord Og” if it makes you feel better.
“The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.
- Neil deGrasse Tyson’s response on Reddit when asked “What can you tell a young man looking for motivation in life itself?”
There are two times when you see a man’s true character.
1> When he is in danger and all the normal concerns of the world go out the window.
2> When he has absolute power and need fear no reprisal or punishment.
I do what is right because that is my highest ideal in life. Not for fear that I will be punished if I don’t. There is a huge mental gulf between doing what is right because you know it’s right, and only doing it because you fear God. Honestly, if you only do right things because you fear God, then you need to re-evaluate what kind of a person you really are (remember that bit above?).
If you really did stand before God at the end, since he knows your heart, would he be proud of you for being a truly good person, or would he know that you only did stuff because he demanded that you do it? And if you want to think about how that works, consider if you had two children. One always did the right thing. You could trust him to think clearly and be good. The other only did the right thing because he knew you’d whip his ass if he didn’t. And therefore you couldn’t really trust him, now could you.
On the other hand, I will admit that there are things in this world that I do not do for fear of civil punishment. This is the point of the Law.
Tell me - Are you familiar with the works of Shan Yu?
No, please PM me with more information. Thanks.