I did explicitly state it. I said that as God is the foundation for my entire cultural upbringing, I needed to question everything that was taught to me under the aegis of those cultural principles, if I were to become an atheist. Even in the OP, I didn’t say, “This is the kind of atheist everyone becomes”, or even, “this is the kind of atheist I will become.”, I said that I was reconsidering everything including morality and love, and considering throwing them out as quaint notions. Many people understood that right away and responded accordingly. Why the majority did not, I do not know. LilShieste, Revenant Threshold, Pochacco, Max Torque, MEBuckner, Shodan and others all got it right off the bat.
Jesus, guys.
The correct response to the assertion that atheism leads to sociopathy is to REFUTE IT. It’s called Great Debates after all.
And the correct response to a thread asserting that Jews kill Christian babies would be to REFUTE that as well.
Getting all pissed off and offended accomplishes NOTHING.
I think **mswas ** is dead wrong in the original thread, but proving him wrong is a useful exercise in defending atheism.
Occasionally wander outside of Great Debates and the Pit.
I saw a remarkably low noise to new information ratio.
And like Bossstone indicates, I can go read other threads. Just… I LIKE to discuss politics, religion, morality, etc. Apparently, here that’s not as much an option.
I do understand that there will always be a fringe. I understand that some posters are really rather smart. I also think that style matters. And redeemed asshole is still asshole.
I’m not sure if I like or dislike you. In other threads you seemed on topic and even funny. Other times, you just seem… a few shades paler than DT - and I mean it.
Spare me the social skills quip and hear what I’m saying… you’re talking like an asshole.
I do too incidentally. 
But the point wasn’t really to prove me wrong, it was to convince me that there is a valid reason to accept morality. The argument was made for morality, but not love.
That made no sense. But anyway, if you do believe it, then the central theme of that OP was not a hypothetical.
You really do believe that without God, there is no valid basis for morality. No?
As you know… the interests I have have been nicely cordoned off to GD and the Pit. If I wanted to discuss what I ate last night, I’d do THAT at work. Small talk annoys me.
I look in the other fora. My lack of posts is not a lack of clicking - it’s a lack of any of it intriguing me enough. I’ve posted outside GD and the Pit.
And thus far Great Debates is a misnomer on 10% of the threads. They’re either Great or their Debates. The other 90% is cool enough, but often - not the topic I care to discuss so much.
Which is why I was active in both threads - to debate the thesis on its merits there, and to to point out that mswas uses shitty debate tactics here.
Now I’m off to bed…
Right. Well, the answer is, then, you’re (the hypothetical you) wrong; people obey leaders for all sorts of reasons that are not founded in a leader’s divine right to rule. Do I really need to explain why your logic is broken?
The issue is the beliefs you’ve assigned yourself are so ridiculous that the answers seem self-evident. Claiming that American Democracy is an example of divine rule because leaders swear on a Bible is just incorrect.
With regards to love (which is a whole other kettle of fish that I know has been debated here before), in a nutshell, either you have feelings or you don’t. Most people do. To try to logic your way out of emotions that you are witness to, and then ask to be logiced back into them is an exercise in futility.
At any rate; off to work for the evening. Back online some time after midnight.
Well in the Pit, I am being an asshole intentionally. It’s a great place to excercise the colon. If a debate isn’t new info for you, then why bother with it?
Personally I feel like religious debates on this forum are too often hijacked by atheists who expect you to validate the existance of God, and cannot debate religion within it’s own context. There are some who try to make every debate about religion into a debate about whether or not God exists. This forum is actually quite low on actual content in religious debates. I don’t come here for theological analyses. I’ve been on other forums and seen discussions of Christian vs Buddhist redemption that would be miles over the head of the average Doper. Stuff that was so in depth I couldn’t even attempt to comment. Here the discussions of religion are mostly at the kindergarten level.
That other thread was inspired for me by **Der Trihs ** who makes moralistic arguments but provides no basis for them. I am often interested in Der Trihs viewpoint, but he’s not intelligent enough to expound upon it. You will never get a cite out of him for anything. He asserts and ignores any request for a cite. So I started a thread hoping that others than him would make more interesting arguments. You’re right, not much was said that was new. I got some cites to Mill and Kant that I could’ve pulled up on my own, and have incidentally already read. I also have a very obtuse sense of humor. Just like the Xenu’s pair o’docks thing, I made a joke about Schrodinger and Kant and KidChameleon took it way too seriously. It was in reference to a bit in the wiki article on Kant that said that the snowflake can’t be both white and not white at the same time. I didn’t necessarily expect people to get it.
I don’t agree with the definition of Love as an emotion. No one has addressed that. Love is something that inspires emotion, but there isn’t a single emotion called ‘love’. That’s why so many songs are written about it. Love can make one angry, or sad, or happy etc… Those are emotions, but love itself is not.
Well, then, expect to occasionally encounter pomposity and assholery. Like many other fora, a lot of posters would prefer to engage in semantic tapdancing than actually admit to being wrong. It’s a drawback, sure, but whaddaya gonna do? The level of discourse elsewhere can be much, much worse, and the feces flinging much more prevalent.
In general, I agree with this post.
sigh… know what? Once upon a time there was a troll. He pissed me right off. I’d poke and prod and all. People thought I was an asshole when all I wanted was the troll to behave honestly or go.
As to the assholeness - I do understand this is the pit. I’ve known that for a while. I’ve had some rather civil and enlightening discussions here. And I get that in the pit asshole is performance art. If you aren’t an ass in the pit, you aren’t doing it right - seems to be the attitude of some. But I digress.
In the other thread I felt you were being an asshole. I’d like to revise that. DT gets on my last nerve and I think I understand your response better now. I do find it unfortunate that the OP (though trying not to) ended up bringing other atheists into the umbrella of DT’s delusional state. It’s another reason that I personally want DT gone. I see little new information.
Which brings me to your point - if there is no new information, why bother? Seems a fair question for both of us. That’s no stab. Really kinda not. It’s just… sometimes a certain person or topic make us itch. And we scratch. I’m not sure it’s logical, but it sure is human.
It’s signal to noise.
It’s hard to say the other place was worse than here - not in regards to the topics I listed. Even if it did end up largely unmoderated. THERE at least, the troll had shame.
My hands are rather tied, so I need to make this as general as possible. But I would say there is a distinct difference between shame and altering one’s behaviour just long enough to not get banned, and then reverting to trolldom.
Emotions can inspire other emotions. Fear can inspire anger, jealousy can inspire hate…what makes love any different? Nowhere does it say emotions have to be simple. Love is an emotion, just more complex than most.
And now, really, to bed.
Oh for Christ’s sake, mswas. First principles?
Thing is, no one creates a moral code out of first principles. You theists don’t either. You may imagine that God has laid down a set of principles for moral behavior, but the trouble is, those are simply axioms of behavior.
You can claim that they must be true because God commanded them to be true, but what does that mean? What it really comes down to is that you assert them to be true, because–get this–God didn’t talk to you. You read a book by a guy who claimed God talked to him, and the book convinced you. You talked to your friends who read the same book, and your friends convinced you.
So you didn’t base your morality on God. You based it on what your friends thought, and what you thought. You didn’t base a God-damned thing on first principles.
Do you think murder is wrong? Why is murder wrong? Because God said so? But why does God saying “murder is wrong” make murder wrong?
Why is it that you imagine that your day to day behavior and the behavior of all the atheists you’re arguing with is so similar? Is it because they secretly believe in God, or that God gave them a moral sense even though they don’t believe in God?
The thing is, there is no absolute morality. There are no first principles. Human life really is meaningless. All we are is dust in the wind, dude. We’re born, we live, we die, it means nothing.
Except funny thing is, most human beings don’t act as if human life is meaningless. But let’s ask shy that is. Why do humans care if they live or die? Why do they care for their children? Why do they care for their friends? Why do they care whether Susie in homeroom likes them or likes them likes them? Why do they care about being happy? Why do they care about not feeling hungry, not feeling thirsty, not feeling lonely, not feeling pain?
And when we start thinking this way, the answer is obvious. We care because we are animals. And animals that don’t avoid pain and hunger and thirst, that don’t strive to live and reproduce are animals that don’t tend to survive. They don’t tend to reproduce. And animals that do struggle to survive tend to be overrepresented in the next generation.
You are the product of 650 million years of animal evolution, and every one of your hundreds of millions of animal ancestors over those hundreds of millions of years shared one remarkable quality: they all lived long enough to reproduce at least once. And most of their contemporaries cannot say the same, they failed to do so, and so their potential descendants never existed. Animals that have no interest in avoiding pain, or finding food, or finding mates don’t leave many descendants. And to the extent that the desire to avoid pain and find food and find a mate is heritable, such traits are constantly reinforced over and over and over again throughout the eons.
And so here you are. You’re an animal that was born, willy-nilly with certain inborn inherited traits. You have certain preferences that you didn’t choose. You want food, you want water, you want a mate, you want to be part of a social group, you want to avoid pain. These traits are meaningless. It means nothing to the universe that you want to live. Your birth, life and death mean nothing. Except you don’t care, you want to live anyway, because that’s the sort of creature you are, because creatures who don’t care about their lives won’t last long.
So you want to live. And you’re a social mammal with a very long developmental cycle, you require parental care for years. Some animals are born knowing how to do everything needed to complete their life-cycle, but many mammals are not, including humans. You were born completely reliant on your parents to teach you how to live. But of course, your parents aren’t infallible, they just got here themselves, and it’s easy to make mistakes. They tell you a mushroom is good to eat, but it turns out they were wrong, it was poisonous and you die. Too bad. But your death means nothing…except to them, because they’re the sorts of creatures who care about such things, if they weren’t they wouldn’t have even tried to teach you which mushrooms were poisonous and which were edible. So if you live, you’ll be the same sort of creature…unless you aren’t.
But the thing is, if you turn out to be a nihilist creature who doesn’t care about anything, the other creatures who do care are going to find it difficult to live with you. You aren’t interested in cooperating and living and raising children and avoiding pain like the other creatures, and so when you cause trouble for them they’re going to try to get you to cooperate with them. Since they don’t like pain, maybe they’ll hit you when you annoy them, on the theory that since they don’t like pain, you probably won’t like pain, and so you’ll avoid the behavior that annoys them. But if you don’t dislike pain, their theory will fail. Eventually they’ll end up killing you or driving you away, because they are compelled by their natures to fulfill their biological imperitives.
So why should you care? You don’t have to care, it is meaningless if you care or not. It all depends on whether you want to live in a social group or not. Whether you want to avoid pain, or not. Whether you want to live or die. If you don’t care whether you live or die, then what meaningful consequences can that social group impose on you? But you’ll end up dead, and then we discover something interesting, only the animals that want to live are still alive.
And so that’s the first principles of morality. How can I fulfill my biological needs? It doesn’t matter that my biological needs were not freely and logically chosen by me, because whether or not I freely chose them or not I’ve still got them. I live in a social group with other humans because I’m a social animal. If I were a badger I’d be happy living alone, but I’m not a badger, I’m a human. And so I’m compelled to live with other people, and somehow avoid pain and suffering as much as possible. Luckly it turns out that other humans are mostly the same as I am. And so I agree not to murder my neighbors, they agree not to murder me, and we all agree that if somebody murders someone else, the rest of us get together and punish the murderer somehow, on the theory that this will lead to a lower likelyhood of getting murdered in the future. And on and on and on, until we have rules about driving on the left side of the road and the correct salutation for a thank you letter.
Of course, some people really are nihilists and sociopaths in the sense that the typical biological imperatives that motivate most people don’t seem to be present in them. But so what? If they can live by the same rules as the rest of us, we don’t care, because they don’t harm us. If they don’t live by the same rules, then we typically try to modify their behavior in a way that would motivate normal humans. If that doesn’t work, they eventually find themselves locked up or dead. And now their sociopath and nihilist genes tend not to get passed on to the next generation. And it all means nothing…except to those of us that care. And our caring is meaningless, just like a snowflake is meaningless. But we don’t care that our lives are meaningless. Meaninglessness is meaningless. If the universe is meaningless it doesn’t matter a whit that the universe is meaningless. The meaninglessness of the universe doesn’t change my behavior at all, because my behavoir isn’t determined by the meaning of the universe or by God, it’s determined by the sort of creature I am. And that’s fine with me. If there were some objective moral compass, you could find the meaninglessness of the universe appalling, but there is no such objective moral compass. It doesn’t matter. I want to live even though my life doesn’t matter, just the same as a bug or a worm wants to live. And so what?
lemur the moment you made it about god being imaginary I knew u did not understand what you replied to so I skipped the rest. The entire context was about someone realizing god does not exist. If you cannot accept the initial premise then u do not have an opinion on it even if you think you do. I do not respond to, “god doesn’t really exist therefore…”, arguments.
Says who? Couldn’t you just shrug off the religion guff and keep the other parts of the culture? Heck, I was never a Christian but I still use English words that are derived from Latin and for me the year is 2008. Analyzing why I haven’t discarded these conveniences is a waste of time.
A pity you skipped it. It’s actually a very powerful statement of how atheists construct meaning in a meaningless universe and a direct answer to the nihilistic thesis you proposed in your GD thread.
If you don’t want to hear talk about God being imaginary, don’t post hypotheticals about atheism. That’s kinda the whole point of atheism, you know … .
Well written, Lemur866. I agree completely. It’s exactly how this particular atheist approaches life.