Have to disagree with you here. Theist religions are MUCH more nonsensical than the more philosophical creeds like Buddhism.
Christianity, for example, proposes that humans are flawed, deserve to be punished (by an invisible god) and yet can be explicitly saved (by this same invisible god) if they believe in him, do good works and/or are chosen. This is meant to be taken on “faith”.
Buddhism proposes that there is a lot of suffering out there and we tend to bring it on ourselves by getting overly wrapped up in ideas and material things that don’t actually contribute to our happiness. This is meant to be realized over time by sitting quietly and thinking it through.
God/Christ are worshiped as deities who control your eternal happiness. If they don’t exist, then Christianity is fairly meaningless.
Buddha is celebrated as a historical figure who thought his way to happiness and left behind a lot of good tips. If he didn’t exist, it doesn’t really matter, since you can evaluate these tips based on how well they help you on your own path to happiness.
Now I’ll grant you that a lot of silly traditions/rites/mythology/superstition have been built up around both of these religions. However, at the end of the day, only one of them asks you (as a core tenet) to have “faith” in things that you can’t personally verify.
Or you could have gone on to become a famous writer, film maker, musician, scientist, philosopher, teacher, or activist as many atheists and agnostics have done in American life. Most have not become victims – except of occasional criticism. And we all get that in spades.
Having the courage of your convictions does not mean lining your brain with hatred and clubbing those with opposing views with hyperbole and misinformation.
A father is as sacred to me as a mother and an old man as a child. I think I would grieve more for someone who had suffered a lot in death no matter who it was. I think we all learned as children that it is dishonorable to shoot a person in the back. Now I think it is dishonorable to kill anyone. I don’t kill most things anymore, but I do still point out wasps to my husband. (I know, I know…)
Is there anything “wrong” about finding monks of greater value? Is there anything “wrong” about finding everyone of the same value?
What specifically about the monks “religion” do you consider a delusion?
Yes, lots of good places in that area now. Anna’s Cafe is also around there, too, in Soi Sala Daeng. I don’t know how you feel about Irish pubs, but Shenanigans just got renamed Molly Malone’s and is now part of that chain, which I think is based in Phuket, or at least the Thai operation is.
WHAT PEOPLE MEAN BY RELIGION (THE DENOTATIVE SENSE OF THE WORD) IS NOT RESTRICTED TO “I HAVE A PRIEST WHO TELLS ME WHOM TO LOVE & WHOM TO KILL.”
“RELIGION” CAN REFER TO ANY THEORY OF COSMOLOGY & ETHICS BY WHICH ONE LIVES ONE’S LIFE.
There are religious non-exclusivists, who love all their fellow man, & would NEVER attack another human being for being an outsider. Not despite their religion; BECAUSE OF IT.
There are religions with an utter indifference to the existence or non-existence of gods.
There are religions that worship personal enlightenment.
YOU MOCK, & WORSE SLANDER, ALL RELIGIONS IN THE MISTAKEN BELIEF THAT THEY’RE LIKE THE WORST OF BIGOTRY. WHICH MEANS YOU’VE NEVER ENCOUNTERED BUDDHISM, SYNCRETIC RELIGION, TAOISM, OR THE GENTLER STRANDS OF MONOTHEISM.
YOU, IN SHORT, DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT.
Many people don’t realize it it, but that’s actually quite true. The Buddha supposedly said not to worship him like a god. It’s more a philosophy than a religion, technically. On the other hand, no one ever here cares one whit about that. As far as they’re concerned, it’s a religion and to heck with what the Buddha said.
And speaking of monks and Burma, there is a series of very good recent political cartoons on the subject from Stephff, our local French political cartoonist. You can see them here.
(The third cartoon down concerns a certain temple – unsure if it’s the Shwedagon Temple, as I’ve never been there myself, but I don’t think it is – that is supposedly raised above ground by the thought processes or whatever you call it of the local monks. However, people I know who have been there tell me it’s really cement that is raising it up off the ground. No doubt a special type of cement invisible to Burmese eyes, since they all seem to believe it’s the monks’ mental powers.)
Yeah, I know, Buddhism is so diverse & fragmented, & traditional Buddhism either syncretizes with polytheism or just deifies Buddha so often, that I was cringing when I wrote that. But I just get sick of people assuming they know what “all religion is.” (Though I can see some of my own tendency to oversimplify in Der Trihs’s arguments, & feel like I may have been unfair.)
Not more valuable, just less likely to insight violence. Kicking the crap out of a blind person is worse not because they’re more valuable, but they are less likely to hit you and less capable of defending themselves.
It’s not Shwedagon Paya, but a temple equally respected just outside of Pegu. The natural formation is a pile of boulders impossibly stacked on top of each other mostly painted in gold leaf.
A materialist may get ethics from philosophy. In my case, I have a couple of basic things; nothing that causes death, for the simple reason that we don’t get to take that back should we later change our minds. And then i’m a utilitarian on top of that. And yes, I would say to an extent there’s risk allocation there, not in decision per se but in the idea that my concept of what’s right and wrong is right at all. But I would argue that the same holds true for any religious person, in a different way; whereas my ethics are derived from my own ideas, a religious person’s ethics are often interpreted from another source, be that holy books or priests or so on. So for them there are two levels of wiggle room; am I possibly wrong about my religion? and am I possibly wrong in my interpretation?
Just as I have to square my actions with my inner conscience and my idea of ethical behaviour, a religious person has their deity/ideals of choice to mentally check against. If religious people weren’t inclined to believe in wiggle room at the time of a conscience check, there’d be no need for confession.
Regarding the vitriol, as I noted, persons who seriously advance the “persons without the fear of the afterlife are loose cannons” argument scare the hell out of me. They seem much more likely to do something horrible or evil than any random atheist, both in theory and in my personal experience. And fear inspires defensiveness, inspiring attack. (I was going to say “preemptive attack”, but since I see the “absent the threat of hell I see no reason not to kill you” argument to inherently be a threat, regardless of source, I was therefore reacting to that, and not acting pre-emptively.)
One thing you seem to be forgetting in your above post is that, by your argument, the religious folk are also doing risk allocation - merely risk allocation that you (inaccurately*) are assessing to be 100% guaranteed risk. So the fact you seem to be pooh-poohing risk-allocation ethics strikes me as off the point and self-defeating: if risk-based ethics are somehow inherently ‘worse’ ethics, then religious people are in the same boat -or worse- than anybody else. They can’t escape the fact that there’s always a percieved carrot and stick hanging over their heads.
I note also that it is inaccurate to assume that the fear of damnation or other heavenly punishment is a 100% perfect restraint for all religious persons. Many of them believe in something called “repentance” or “grace”. Both of these allow a certain amount of moral slippage, as does the fact that a feiry aftermath is not as strongly stressed or as effectively impressed upon all believers. (I have seen this in practice, as well.) So this takes the 100% out of the religious risk allocation and really levels the playing field.
At this point it shoudl be clear that the “I would be evil without god, so you must be evil too” argument doesn’t hold water - there is nothing different about the religious and non-religious approaches in this argument except that they are assessing a different set of carrots and sticks. The only possible value this argument could have hinges entirely upon you demonstrating that religious folks have a tendency to assess evil actions at a higher level of risk than atheists do - which you have not shown. At best, you have argued (inaccurately) that religious folk assess things which they have been told are evil at 100% risk. You’ve given no substantial reason to suppose that atheists don’t come to the same conclusion of 100% risk about things that they think are evil - and you’ve given no reason to think that theists are more likely to reach correct conclusions about what is “actually” evil (which would be a hard standard to even define). Lacking these critical points, both of which have already been cast into doubt, the argument is worthless.
Now, not that it matters, (since the argument has been, in my estimation, utterly destroyed), but I shall address your questions about risk-assessment morality.
Regarding your example with the computer and banking websites, this is a poor example because in my estimation, there is 100% risk of getting caught. It’s a computer, for goodness’ sake. It records everything. Especially regarding a banking website. If I transferred money, your website would tell you straight up “transfer of $# to account ####” in your banking records, and you could easily ask about that and discover what I’d done. So in this example, I’m perhaps more compelled to be moral than a God-fearing theist, since there’s no way for me to ‘repent’ in the eyes of you or the bank. So, like I said, poor example.
So, let’s suppose that the money was instead lying in cash on the desk. No, wait, the larger the sum of money that’s there, the greater the proportional likelihood that you’re aware of it and would notice if it disappeared. It might not be as easy for you to trace the theft back to me, but there’s no way I can convince myself that there’s any decent probability that you wouldn’t notice it. So, even if I didn’t have anything but the fear of you catching me controlling my actions, I still wouldn’t do it.
You see, most people don’t say, “oh, there’s a 50% chance of getting caught, so there’s a 50% change I’ll do it.” There doesn’t have to be very much risk at all for me to start assessing the action as if the worst-case scenarios as if they were seriously possible. Of course, maybe that’s just me. Maybe most people are like “What? 1 in 5 people who try this die horrible agonizing deaths? I like those odds! Bring it on!!”; I dunno. But I’m certainly not like that, and neither is anybody I know (atheist or not).
But let’s suppose for a moment that I’m really quite sure that you’ll never notice that your wad of cash will be gone. Well, I’d still not take it, because I’d know I’d feel guilty about it later -and that I’d have a lower opinon of myself as a person (which are not the same thing).
Does this imply that if I didn’t have guilt (and I didn’t have a self-image of a law-abider, and I lacked risk-based morality), that I would take the cash? Well, I think this describes the class of actions that I don’t believe are wrong, and that I know I won’t get caught at. I generally do do such things, on occasion. (For example, I will occasionally exceed the speed limit by small amounts if I think it poses no risks to anyone (and thus isn’t ‘wrong’) and I think that I won’t get pulled over.) Now, let’s see if you can convince me that religious people are any different, in theory or practice. (Keep in mind that you’re talking about things that they wouldn’t feel guilty for, so it has to be things that that either their religion doesn’t proscribe, or for which they don’t take the proscription seriously. And I warn you, I have numerous counterexamples handy.)
Actually, I made a typo. I meant “over here,” with an O, as in Buddhists in Thailand, not posters on this board. (But posters, too, I guess. As I said, most Westerners seem to learn all they know about Buddhism by watching old David Carradine *Kung Fu * episodes.)