The whole comparison seems bizarre to me.
Christianity is a form of theism. Removing the theism from Christianity would leave a random collection of nonsensical tenets enforced by nothing. It wouldn’t even be a coherent philosophy.
Communism is, obviously, not a form of atheism. Removing atheism from Communism just leaves you with a slightly different political/economic theory.
Correct me if I’m wrong, here. I just can’t wrap my head around comparing the two at all.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
Karl Rove is an atheist. Who knew he was a Communist?
[/QUOTE]
:eek:
I think I’m going to shul Saturday.
[QUOTE=ITR champion]
Are you honestly asserting that saying that Christianity is not rational is not an attack on Christianity?
[/QUOTE]
¿¿¿Qué??? :dubious:
If you press logic, rational arguments on a Christian to explain its faith, sooner or later they´ll argue that you shouldn`t use logic to understand faith. The whole christian belief and faith is on its entirety orthogonal to rational inquire.
Claiming that stating Christianity as not rational is an attack on it is like getting up in arms because someone says the sky is blue.
I mean, heck, isn´t it practically the definition of faith that it is irrational? That it prevails in spite of conflicting, or even opposite empirical and logical evidence.?
[QUOTE=Crocodiles And Boulevards]
Can we have a show of hands? Atheists who are also implicitly communists?
I can’t believe that this argument is even being made. ITR is essentially arguing:
All atheists are communists.
All communists are atheists.
Atheists = Communists.
This is ludicrous. I’m atheist, and I don’t find communism logical or attractive at all.
[/QUOTE]
I think it could be quite reasonably argued that the apostles of the early church practiced a form of communism.
As to the topic as a whole, I think the OP’s argument is misdirected. If it was designed to counter an assertion someone had made that ‘without religion, no serious atrocity would ever happen’, then some of those examples might work, but it’s not - it’s attempting to circumscribe atheism as a system of belief/action functionally equivalent to a religion.
[QUOTE=Pochacco]
My personal favorite argument against God is this: There are hundreds of religions and they contradict either other all over the place. Clearly most religions are wrong about most of the things they teach. Therefore religious teachings are a very poor way to understand the truth about the universe. Barring some sort of empirical evidence to sort the wheat from the chaff, you’re better off just assuming that ALL religious teachings are wrong.
[/QUOTE]
Was just reading without any thought to respond until I saw this. Even though it’s somewhat off topic… But, this isn’t an argument either against God, or religion.
Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem shows that any sufficiently complex formal system must be either inconsistant or incomplete. Logic, and mathematics are systems that are designed to be consistant. Therefore, they will be incomplete. There will be true statements that can be formed within the system that can **never ** be proven true. I think religions are systems that try, (or should be trying,) to reach the truths that can never be reached by logic, and therefore, they are, of necessity, going to be inconsistant… within themselves. No religion is going to be even internally consistant. That doesn’t mean it’s useless. How else do you believe in the truth of the unprovable except with a leap of faith.
I love logic and science, but even scientists sometimes believe the unproven. Fermat’s last theorem was accepted as true for several hundred years before it was eventually “proven.” (The proof is so complex, people are still debating that it may never be completely verified.) And there are going to be any number of things we can state and accept, but never prove.
Just to make it clear, I don’t advocate that we ever stop trying to prove the unproven. Just saying that we may never prove it, and should be free to believe it anyways.
[QUOTE=ch4rl3s]
I love logic and science, but even scientists sometimes believe the unproven. Fermat’s last theorem was accepted as true for several hundred years before it was eventually “proven.” (The proof is so complex, people are still debating that it may never be completely verified.) And there are going to be any number of things we can state and accept, but never prove.
[/QUOTE]
But isn’t there a distinct difference between “unproven” and “without evidence”? Was there no evidence for Fermat’s last theorem?
[QUOTE=Czarcasm]
But isn’t there a distinct difference between “unproven” and “without evidence”? Was there no evidence for Fermat’s last theorem?
[/QUOTE]
Nothing is ever fully ‘proven’ in science. It’s hypotheses all the way down.
[QUOTE=tagos]
Nothing is ever fully ‘proven’ in science. It’s hypotheses all the way down.
[/QUOTE]
Which, of course, is not the same as “blind faith”.
[QUOTE=begbert2]
This would work much better if there weren’t theist Marxists out there, counterexampling you in advance.
Also, why should I care what you think Marxism is?
[/QUOTE]
Hogwash. A relative handful of cranks who think they can reconcile their religion with Marxism count for nothing. And who cares what you think? About anything?
[QUOTE=Crocodiles And Boulevards]
Can we have a show of hands? Atheists who are also implicitly communists?
I can’t believe that this argument is even being made. ITR is essentially arguing:
All atheists are communists.
All communists are atheists.
Atheists = Communists.
This is ludicrous. I’m atheist, and I don’t find communism logical or attractive at all.
[/QUOTE]
No, he is NOT arguing that all atheists are communists. Nobody on this thread said that or anything like it.
This sort of foolishness is why I generally prefer to stay out of religious discussions. It always seems to devolve into nonsense like this.
[QUOTE=Czarcasm]
But isn’t there a distinct difference between “unproven” and “without evidence”? Was there no evidence for Fermat’s last theorem?
[/QUOTE]
This theorem is one of the best for this example, since:
The only evidence to start with was that Fermat wrote in the margin of a mathematics book he read a short detail of the theorem, and, “I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition that this margin is too narrow to contain.”
The further evidence was that the other times he did this, people eventually were able to prove them. (That’s why this was the last.)
The “evidence” was faith in Fermat’s ability.
I’d have to go into a fair bit of math to explain further.
[QUOTE=ch4rl3s]
This theorem is one of the best for this example, since:
The only evidence to start with was that Fermat wrote in the margin of a mathematics book he read a short detail of the theorem, and, “I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition that this margin is too narrow to contain.”
The further evidence was that the other times he did this, people eventually were able to prove them. (That’s why this was the last.)
The “evidence” was faith in Fermat’s ability.
I’d have to go into a fair bit of math to explain further.
[/QUOTE]
Whether Fermat had a valid proof is a different question from whether the theorem is true.
Now that Andrew Wiles has presented his proof, I don’t know of any mathematician who disputes the latter.
There are some very good reasons for doubting the former, though we’ll almost certainly never know for sure.
[QUOTE=ch4rl3s]
The “evidence” was faith in Fermat’s ability.
[/QUOTE]
No, there was no faith in Fermat’s ability - no one on Earth actually believed that Fermat had a proof. Everyone, AFAIK, thought he was mistaken.
The “evidence” that the theorem was true (pre-Wiles) was that a solution had been searched for extensively and none was found. The FLT said that there were no solutions, and we had a pretty good data set that indicated there probably were no solutions.
And this is a good way to highlight the difference between mathematics and science - until Wiles, there was no mathematical proof of FLT. But if you use the methods of science, the evidence indicated that “no solutions” answer was probably true, so it was tentatively accepted. All things in science we think are true are tentatively accepted, subject to revision if new evidence comes in. The concept of “proof” does not apply in science.
Back to the OP, I’m going to show that charity causes atrocities, using the same logical argument that atheism causes atrocities. Here it is:
Christianity -> charity
Christianity -> atrocities (crusades)
Therefore, charity causes atrocities just like atheism, a result of communism, does.
[QUOTE=ch4rl3s]
This theorem is one of the best for this example, since:
The only evidence to start with was that Fermat wrote in the margin of a mathematics book he read a short detail of the theorem, and, “I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition that this margin is too narrow to contain.”
The further evidence was that the other times he did this, people eventually were able to prove them. (That’s why this was the last.)
The “evidence” was faith in Fermat’s ability.
I’d have to go into a fair bit of math to explain further.
[/QUOTE]
I’d say that the evidence was the lack of a counterexample after hundreds of years of looking for one. This is a great example of the difference between math and science. It was clearly recognized as a conjecture until the proof was done. In science, since there are no proofs, everything is a conjecture, more or less strong depending on the level of evidence and the number of times the conjectures have not been falsified.
The conjecture that there is no (Western) god is pretty strong, since there have been no proven counter-examples since history has been regularized.
[QUOTE=LonesomePolecat]
No, he is NOT arguing that all atheists are communists. Nobody on this thread said that or anything like it.
This sort of foolishness is why I generally prefer to stay out of religious discussions. It always seems to devolve into nonsense like this.
[/QUOTE]
As opposed to the foolishness of this sort:
Is anyone who isn’t in lock-step with the OP is a fool, or am I reading your last sentence incorrectly?
I would think you might want to stay out of any discussions with an attitude like that. Too many fools.
[QUOTE=CurtC]
Back to the OP, I’m going to show that charity causes atrocities, using the same logical argument that atheism causes atrocities. Here it is:
Christianity -> charity
Christianity -> atrocities (crusades)
Therefore, charity causes atrocities just like atheism, a result of communism, does.
[/QUOTE]
:nitpick:
The ‘->’ symbol is an if…then conditional sign. What you’ve said was:
If you are Christian then you are charitable.
Where there is Christianity there are atrocities.
Your two statements have proved nothing.
I think that’s CurtC’s point. He’s trying to show that what the OP thought was a logical argument, was not in fact so.
(ETA: no comment on whether or not his characterisation of the OP’s argument is correct, this thread already exceeds the limits of my attention… ooh, shiny!)
[QUOTE=Nancarrow]
I think that’s CurtC’s point. He’s trying to show that what the OP thought was a logical argument, was not in fact so.
[/QUOTE]
His argument would have been much stronger if he had made a logically flawless argument that produces a ridiculous conclusion. Instead he simply illustrated he doesn’t understand symbolic logic.
[QUOTE=Sitnam]
His argument would have been much stronger if he had made a logically flawless argument that produces a ridiculous conclusion. Instead he simply illustrated he doesn’t understand symbolic logic.
[/QUOTE]
If the position of the OP that he was parodying had been a logically flawless argument, then so would his parody have been. It wasn’t, so his parody wasn’t. That’s how parody works.
He didn’t demonstrate he doesn’t understand logic. You merely demonstrated that you didn’t understand him.