I still don’t get this. Pissed-off people get hostile and create problems. Not pissing them off (or at least not going out of your way to piss them off more than absolutely necessary) helps minimize these problems. What you’re saying is comparable to “if you decide to forego hitting yourself in the head with a hammer, you only do so because of an arbitrary leap of faith.”
Granted, if I could piss off my neighbor with absolutely no potential for negative consequences, I guess I’d be a fool not to do it. This is rarely the case for individuals, though. It usually involves invasion and mass slaughter and such.
When you finally come to the conclusion that there is no god, for a fleeting second all things are possible. But the kind of person who has made such a careful analysis will not likely stop there. You understand the world would be unmanageable if societies rules could be ignored. So you have to formulate a code to live by. I do not steal ,murder,or do things I find objectionable. I do not fear being char broiled for eternity. I fear diminishing myself in a very personal way. I can not pray or do a confession.to make it go away If I do something wrong I own it. To imply that atheists lack rules or would somehow be dangerous shows a lack of understanding for what an atheist really is.
Am I to understand that faith backed up by a great deal of evidence is equal to faith backed up by little to no evidence because both involve faith? Using this “logic”, 1=100 because both are numbers.
That God is not bound by the laws of arithmetic and logic. IOW, God can do anything, including that which is a logical contradiction, because He created logic, and (to the degree that it can be discussed, which isn’t very far) He could have created it different.
Because it has not been demonstrated that problems are bad. Suppose I don’t care if I piss people off or not, or they are powerless to do anything back to me. Is it then morally correct to hurt the weak and powerless?
Kittens can’t do anything to me, and I get a kick out of animal torture. Therefore, animal torture is morally correct. IYSWIM.
You are taking it for granted - that is, on faith - that there is some real value in not pissing people off, even if only for your own convenience. It might be clearer if I asked you to justify this stance to someone who doesn’t care if he pisses people off, and isn’t afraid of what they might try to do in return.
But for atheists, and others who deny an eternal or transcendent moral standard, it is always the case. After I am dead, I can suffer no consequences, negative or otherwise. Therefore, it makes no sense to say that I need worry about whether or not I piss anyone off. People who act morally, IOW, are simply not taking a long enough view.
It’s been explained to you several times before. At this point, I can only conclude that you are being willfully ignorant. I will leave you to it, then.
I guess I see the distinction, and (depending on how you think about it) you are correct. The traditional conception of God includes His status as the supreme moral standard. Therefore any perception of God in that sense will necessarily include a recognition of the necessity of pleasing Him (in your phrasing) by moral action.
This is sort of what I was getting at with the logical contradiction caveat I added. But, as I said, this is a side track, so I will just agree with you as far as it goes. Because you go on to say -
Insofar as religious folks are not acting on principle, then you are correct that they are taking it on faith that they are pleasing God by their actions.
Everybody is weak and powerless at some point. Heck, confronted by a man holding a machine gun, a 280lb football player is no more immortal than a 90lb anorexic. The force multiplication offered by modern weapons is such that no individual is ever (or can ever) be perfectly safe from a determined attacker.
In any case, I don’t know how you’re defining “morally correct”. I just prefer “ethically logical” to describe something I do and would prefer everyone does so life is generally more comfortable and enjoyable.
Well, my own convenience is actually quite important to me. Confronted by someone who clearly doesn’t care about his personal convenience (i.e. he’s perfectly content to create problems regardless of what happens to himself or others), my logical course is to stop that person or at least minimize his impact because if left unchecked, others will begin behaving in similar ways and my convenience will be jeopardized. As a result, I support the creation and maintenance of police departments, court systems and prisons that will deal with problems in the here-and-now and not ponder issues of the afterlife.
You might have a case if atheists actually acted this way (and I speak of individual atheists, please, not totalitarian regimes) in greater numbers than theists. Do they? As far as I can tell, a peaceable atheist and a peaceable theist can be neighbors, with the only difference being the latter’s preference for a particular set of rituals, harmless and of no discernible physical effect.
Based on my education in logic, I can safely say that this perspective is based on an incorrect understanding of how logic works. In reality it is safe to say that any god that is defined as being able to “break the laws” of abstract artificial systems within the bounds of those systems is a god that certainly does not exist. I don’t think that this thread is a suitable place to go through the effort of trying to educate you about abstract systems, though, so you can go on believing in your god, while I will rest comfortably in the knowledge that on this matter you are incorrect in your beliefs.
People who like kittens are common, and they will like you less if they discover that you commit animal torture on kittens. This will probably result in a decrease in the benefits you gain from interacting with them, in small ways from them not being friendly to you, to large ways such as preventing them offering you jobs and other major assistance.
The thing about atheistic morality is, you have to be able to think about and recognize potential consequences. This is admittedly not a skill required for the most basic forms of theistic morality, however I think you’d find that in practice most theists engage in exactly these sorts of calculations on subjects not directly addressed by their literature (and some subjects that are). Atheists simply do it for a wider range of issues, is all.
Oh, and I almost forgot: anybody who doesn’t care if they piss people off, without regard for the situation, is an idiot. Even if they’re a well-armed, powerful dictator. (How many of those types die of natural causes, again? See?)
This is only true if you are already dead. Persons who are still living have some undetermined span of life to live through, and many of them make the wise choice of trying to improve the quality of that life, such as avoiding getting the crap beat out of them for disregarding the consequences of their actions. People who care only about what happens after they die are taking such a long view that they can’t see what’s happening right in front of them.
Careful, though. You’re just replacing fear of God with fear of getting your ass kicked. In other words, you still live in fear. Therefore atheism = theism.
Sure, if “reasonable caution” = “outragous unjustified paranoia”. That’s the difference between a real threat and an imagined one, right?
And nobody said that the general outcome (ie: people acting morally) wasn’t going to be similar. So it shouldn’t be surprising if some of the causes for the moral behavior are based on vaguely similar emotions in the actor.
This is an interesting conversation. It seems that your basis for morality is an Ayn Rand type of valuation: at bottom life is good and death is bad. Yes?
Of course, most ways of dying look like they hurt, at least briefly. So I avoid those, and fear most forms of death, because I fear how painful they’d be.
Also, when the people I love are unhappy, it makes me unhappy. (Which would be a form of ‘mental displeasure’.)
There are people who I love who would be unhappy if I died, and even though I wouldn’t care about that after the death (assuming there’s no afterlife), I certainly am concerned about the notion at a theoretical level now. So I avoid even painless deaths, so as not to leave mourners behind.
If I outlive everyone who cares about me, and assuming other worries don’t stop me (the displeasurable anticipation of leaving something important to me undone, for example), then I would not be averse to a painless death.
Isn’t it more that things you enjoy are good and things you dislike are bad? Cue Shodan saying that you have to take it on faith that pursuing things you like is worthwhile.
Do you mean, ‘objectively good’ and ‘objectively bad’? If so, I don’t claim that. I do believe that if people weren’t so damned shortsighted then enlightened self interest + moderate amounts of empathy will generally result in an ethical system that is generally beneficial for society as well as the individual, but there are enough vauge and unprovable beliefs in that that the only real evidence I have is the example of my own behavior, which is hard to cite on the internet.
Oh, and if you meant personally good and bad, then of course pleasure is good and pain is bad (taking into account the side effects and long term effects, of course).
Then you shouldn’t put words into Shodan’s mouth like that. If he wants to say something as dumb as “it takes faith to know that pain hurts”, then he’ll say it himself.
I don’t see the difference between that and a lot of what he claimed takes faith earlier in the thread. I’d like to know what he thinks doesn’t take faith.
Okay, I see. You’re doing pleasure/pain, good/bad.
Sure seems like a simpler way to go about things that would put the world on a more stable, rational grounding.
Then again, I gain pleasure from being short-sighted. LOL Also, I’m a believer in quality over quantity of life so those things I seek out for pleasure aren’t much offset by fear of death or fear of emotional or physical pain from society or others since I can always painlessly kill myself and feel I got my money’s worth especially if I’m wired to gain pleasure from another’s pain and value my pleasure over theirs.
Still, it would be a more straightforward world your way.
Hey, the scary people are still scary under the religious paradigm. Once you’ve mastered the art of rationalizing your religion, rationlizing your behavior is child’s play.
