Secular Humanism

Great Debates
81

What we ACTUALLY have here is a reading comprehension failure, a lot of projection of prejudice, and folks who claim to be rational reacting in a most irrational manner.

I didn’t call YOUR nonbelief “illusion”, or belittle ANY of you for thinking that way. People just jumped in and ASSumed it.

I DID say Der Trihs blanket condemnation of all religion was imflammatory. I DID say that I would find living with the constant tribulations I endure, believing that it was ALL there is, and no justice in the end, a pretty damned depressing idea. I Did NOT say those with faith were better or more ethical people. I DID say that they had extra reason or incentive to TRY to be.

All the rest was a bunch of trigger happy folks going off half cocked, throwing around insults because of their SUBJECTIVE filters took insult where it WASN’T

Fail is right. Failure to communicate, failure to tolerate anyone who thinks differently, failure to shut up long enough to hear and understand what’s being SAID, not what you THINK was said. Failure to at least assume the best rather than the worst. In short, the intolerance and asinine claims came from YOU (as a group) not from me.

If One doesn’t have to prove disbelief, then I don’t believe several of you are half as mature, rational, and intelligent as you like to THINK you are, please PROVE it, “cite please”… Now you can take that as an attack, as a challenge, or just plain frustration with being treated like shit by supposed adults that claim to have the ethical ability to know better.

Do unto others…

82

Unbridled poppycock.

I take it, then, that you have the ability to distinguish religious music, previously unheard and source unknown, as such should it simply be of sufficient beauty?

If so, please inform me how you do this.

83

Simple really, listen to the lyrics and message contained in them as well.

Actual listening is a skill that’s greatly underrated… and Poppycock makes wonderful toffee popcorn

84

I do, quite well. You have neither.

“Squeeee … kitties!” is not an argument for anything, let alone God.

Evidence is evidence. It’s something that’s convincing even to someone who ISN’T predisposed to agree with you.

If the only evidence you have is stuff that’s convincing to people who already agree with you, then you don’t really have any evidence at all.

You typed a lot for someone who doesn’t care.

Oh, but it does. You see, I worry about people’s SOULS. Everyone’s … even yours. And by souls I don’t mean that silly mystical Christian thing. I mean the beautiful spark of cognition, that tender knot of self-awareness, that precious dance of evolved neurons that exists within each human skull. Religion eats away at people’s souls. It eats away at the best part of us, the part that questions, that explores, that figures things out. It takes the knife edge of primate curiosity, the edge honed so sharp by millions of years of natural selection, and blunts it with facile answers and easy moral judgments.

You’re better than religion. Someday, I hope you realize that.

85

[quote=“Da_Mikster, post:75, topic:599688”]

…Are faithful folks more law abiding than non-believers? That wasn’t MY premise. It was yours. So I’ll leave that to you…

Your earlier post:
…“Those that make sure they do right because they believe it matters to their deity? Or those that do wrong and don’t care because they don’t have one, and worry only about maybe getting caught by the police? The second is where a lot of the really bad stuff in our society IS coming from.”
The second is where a lot of the really bad stuff in our society IS coming from."
See that there?
Your memory chip may need to be replaced. Or provide, last time I ask, some sort of statistical/objective evidence for your assertion?

86

Well let’s just see what you did say:

Are you really so insensitive that you don’t see that as provocative and insulting? You think my belief takes the wonder and beauty of the world and replaces it with something tawdry, and that I don’t see anything beyond bills, quiet despair, and future worm food?

If you don’t want people belittling your beliefs, then just STFU about them. Those of us without faith don’t go around prosletyzing or putting nasty comments about God on your currency. We didn’t insert a phrase about atheism in the pledge of allegiance. We don’t ask you to hold hands before dinner and say thanks for being without faith. You can pretty much live your life free from being bothered by us. I just wish you would do the same.

87

Okay, you nice folks demand objective proof of a subjective experience… shall we get existential?

First, before I describe God to you. Will you please perform a much simpler task? Describe red to a blind person. Or if you prefer, describe the song of a nightingale to a deaf child.

Now… On to God

You demand tangible proof of God. Something you can sense, measure and quantify. What are your senses? Touch, vision, hearing, taste, smell, time are basic ones. But how do you prove what you sense is “objective”? Can the senses be fooled? Magicians do it all the time with vision, so does the simple movie. Can I mix inert chemicals together and have you taste a banana? How about touch or any of the others? Yes, all can be fooled, separately or together… this objective thing is getting rather complicated, isn’t it?

Ration? Reason? They can be trusted. Right? But would a person intuitively know if theirs was flawed? The Sociopath, the Psychopath, the Schitzophrenic all experience a reality and thought patterns that differs from what many people consider “normal”. Does a shared delusion make it “real”? Does a rejected truth make it false? Is a belief in “nothing” quite possibly actually just a belief in an alternate something?

And what about all those other people out there? Do they really exist? Or is it everything a construct of our easily fooled senses. Perhaps you are - to call up that old Chinese fellow - in fact a butterfly simply dreaming of being a man? Or a string of advanced computer code simulating self-awareness. Can you ‘prove’ otherwise? How?

Can you actually prove that none of your possibly illusory experiences aren’t affecting your possibly irrational judgement, and those who agree with you are not, in fact, figments of your own imagination? Perhaps you are, in fact, just a figment of mine?

Or perhaps are your entire existence is simply but a brief thought of God himself? Would you know that either? No, I can’t prove it, but can you disprove it?

“Objectivity” then probably is pretty much an artificial construct of your questionable subjectivity bent into a pretzel by a flawed logic. No? How would you really know?

Perhaps you’ll respond to this with the classic, “I think, therefore I am.” but is that truly any more “provable” than “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” You may choose to believe it, but you can’t really prove it either.

So, you choose to believe, based upon all those possibly faulty subjective things, that there is no God. While I see the hand of God in everything. Which is truth? Perhaps God ( if you will temporarily allow for the sake of argument to assume he exists) is the only one that really knows. Perhaps he’s even willing to tell… eventually. — Anyone with what we call common sense doesn’t trust a small child with a sharp knife - because they aren’t ready to judge how to safely use it, or really comprehend the consequences of using it incorrectly. Can you truthfully say with conviction that mankind is ‘ready’ to hear the “ultimate truth” …whatever it may be?

Meanwhile we comfort ourselves with what we think the truth might be. And my “security blanket” is no more stupid than yours. About the only difference is mine has a satin binding, and yours does not

88

What lovely dancing and hand-waving. It almost reminds me of the hula.

89

You didn’t address my point. Are you actually reading and thinking about what people are saying on here?

90

First of all, you should do some searches, because every point you make has been refuted time and time again around here.
Has god interacted with humans, and if so, how? I trust you agree that the supposedly inspired story of the creation of the universe is poppycock. So, how has god affected the world? Everyone who claims to have a direct conduit to the deity spout psychobabble to be found in the self-help section of any bookstore at best and calls to kill people with the wrong sexual preference at worst. How do you tell which is any of these really talk to god? How do you explain all the different religions?
As for objectivity, science has solved that one ages ago. No, you don’t claim what you see is objective, since our eyes can be fooled. You write it down, get other people to see it, and only accept what is common. Now we can film it, even better. The very computer you are typing on comes from this method of exploration, religion did diddly-squat in making our lives better in any real sense, only perhaps convincing people it is for the best. I’ll take my heart medicine over prayer any day, thank you very much. People who get hip replacements don’t have to deal with disabilities thanks to science.
Might I remind you that for most of the past 1,500 years Europeans almost universally believed in God and Jesus - and murder rates were orders of magnitudes higher than they are in secular European nations today.
Finally, no one has claimed or ever has claimed that people are better due to atheism. Atheism is just the lack of belief in any god. It has no moral content, and no directions for life.

91

Nonsense. The sum of the square of the length of the sides of a right triangle drawn on a flat plane is equal to the square of the length of its hypotenuse. That is one example of an objective fact that anybody can ascertain for him or herself at any given time. It will remain objective fact as long as there are flat planes and pencils. It is true for all right triangles drawn by all men and beasts - in fact it is also true for imaginary perfect triangles drawn only inside one’s mind. It is not subject to interpretation, and it is not filtered through anything.

THAT is what we mean by objective facts.

92

Amen, brother. That is one seriously sweet little piece of writing.

93

You believe this music moves you more than it moves others, but your belief doesn’t make it so. I find this claim of yours about your religion and your faith to be as arrogant and ignorant as anything you’ve said in this thread. But at least it’s a testable claim. MRI and related technologies are wonderful things. We could each be scanned while listening to music, and have our responses to it measured.

The music you mention transports me as well, moves me to tears and to a strange swelling breathless sensation, other works in other forms of art do so as well, but I’ve never felt I had to attribute that to any sort of god; rather I attribute it to both the artist’s command of the medium, gained through years of painstaking practice and a predisposition on my own part (caused by a lifetime of exposure to similar works) to be open to it.

94

I did address exactly what you asked, you simply chose to see it differently.

Yes, I’m listening AND thinking. Far beyond just trying to think up an answer to one up you, or put you down. Are you?

My answer is, again. Those songs and similar are more special, to my subjective experience than a secular piece due to the uplifting MESSAGE. Even when they are performed as an instrumental, the words are in my head.

Can I explain it simpler? Lets assume for a second that your idea of “perfection” was a beautiful woman. What if she was physically beyond merely attractive, had voice was sultry, but her head was empty? Would it not lessen the impact of the “package”? - That’s my response to “fantastic” secular music… soo close, very decorative, but missing something…

What if the same lady was bright, interesting and articulate, but had a voice like a cat with it’s tail caught in a mangle? A lot of modern ‘christian contemporary’ stuff affects me that way..

It is the combination of music and message that makes those pieces more than the sum of their parts. Again it’s very subjective. I wouldn’t expect a non-believer to be moved by the message in the lyrics any more than I am with a song about sneakers. If you are, that’s cool by me. If not… we’re basically hearing the same words speak a different language. And it doesn’t make my experience any less ‘real’.

And back to “listening and thinking”. Sorry, but obviously many of your (as a group) prejudices are just as bad as you seem to believe mine are. You choose to read insult and ill intent into things that weren’t meant that way. Instead of asking for clarification, the results were about the same as if I had bumped a hornet’s nest. YOU are just as responsible for YOUR over reactions as I am for my possible lack of clarity. In short, the reaction, rather than being equal, was far beyond the action. Which is not to my mind a rational, reasonable OR ethical response. so since you insist the burden of proof is not upon disbelief, but upon belief justify or “cite:” please

95

In my original post there are three distinct lines of text.

The second line, is a specific question. You did not answer that question.

96

When you start talking about how blind we are for not understanding that cuddly kittens = God.

Yes you do; otherwise you wouldn’t be religious.

Because you know you have zero evidence to refute it with.

Oh, please. This forum is very polite and restrained.

Of course not, any more than I have to prove that Santa Claus, elves and goblins are fictional. It’s the job of the people making claims they exist to come up with some evidence for them; not mine to disprove an infinite number of false claims.

Ah, the old standard of bringing up communism to discredit atheism. Here’s one way that your comparison fails; forget about Communists, show me another group of mass murdering tyrannical atheists. Eliminate Communists and you have nothing. While I can eliminate any number of religious sect and still have plenty of bad examples. Communists were bad because they were Communist; atheism had nothing to do with their behavior. Religious irrationality and evil however has a global reach and extends throughout all of history; it’s not some aberration. Nor is the evil of religion restricted to the extremes.

Including such “good” deeds as massacring unbelievers and enslaving Africans and lying to people about AIDS and condoms and abortions and beating children for being gay. Basing your morality on God means you have no genuine base at all; you are just elevating your own prejudice and greed to divine status.

Yes, since its a lie or delusion. And one that causes great harm.

Because it doesn’t. And because even if we buy your own argument, those same people are only a doctrine change or crisis of faith away from running wild with an axe.

Oh, nonsense; God was always being portrayed as immensely intolerant. It’s the people who don’t go and terrorize or murder their neighbors for being heathens who have strayed from God as he is written to be.

They probably don’t have any True Scotsmen in them either.

Ah, yes; the good old retreat to solipsism. One of the final tactics of the believer confronted with the fact that his beliefs are totally detached from reality.

God as typically described is impossible, contradicting both the world and itself. So yes, I can firmly state that I’m not the thought of an impossibility.

Much more; I’m thinking right now after all. Nor is claiming to think anywhere near as ridiculous as claiming God exists.

97

[quote=“Truman_Burbank, post:85, topic:599688”]

If you’re going to tag team me, then you’ll have to patiently stand in line for response

How about a CLARIFICATION instead?----Too many people today have NO moral compass whatsoever religious or otherwise. Bored kids roll an old guy for kicks. Or join a gang and terrorize neighborhoods. People think it’s OK to steal from their boss, do drugs, sell drugs, insult, beat up, or even shoot people simply for being “not like them”. Too many folks have NO empathy either. They don’t give a crap how bad someone else is screwed as long as they get theirs. If they claim a religion it’s just LIP SERVICE, not a living faith. If they truly believed in ANY god (except maybe Mars), or even in humanism, they would NOT behave that way. THAT is what I tried to condense into THAT sentence. You folks CHOSE to get your knickers in a twist due to YOUR misunderstanding what was actually said, YOUR prejudices and YOUR lack of “objectivity”, not mine. I’ll accept penance only my own sins, not for yours.

Now, you were saying?

98

As opposed to when?

Of course they would; encouraging and excusing that sort of attitude has always been a major feature of religion. All you have to do is claim that something is God’s will or that what matters is the afterlife or the victim belongs to the wrong sect and you can excuse any atrocity, ignore any suffering and do it with a self righteous smile.

You’re just - again - claiming that religion makes people moral without providing evidence for it.

99

But do they have living kilts ?

100

Here’s where your answer fails: you assume that there is a certain number of genocides that a group can get away with and still be ok. You also assume that that number is higher than one.

How many genocides must be committed by atheistic groups before they become “bad?” And why do you not believe that “one” is not that number?