[QUOTE=cosmosdan]
I regret how quickly I resorted to sarcasm. My rephrasing of your posts was sincere. That’s what I was hearing. I understand your reasons for dismissing the 90/10 point even though I don’t agree. My point all along was that those like yourself who assume as obvious fact that faith has had an evil effect on society aren’t really considering the data either. You were offering lengthy thoughts that contained mere opinion rather than data. I tried to express that in the post you linked when I said
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I accept your regret as an apology; however I will note that your rephrasing of my posts consistently failed to capture even the gist of my points. Clearly I’m failing to communicate. While some of this is probably your bias filtering my posts, odds are good that I’m not making myself clear. Normally this would be a problem solved by explaining myself in further detail, with longer and more wordy posts, but that honestly doesn’t seem to be helping in that case. Hmm, what to do…
I also will note that there is no data, or if anybody here has some, they’re playing it close to the vest. Even you have provided no evidence that “The fact is without any serious question and requiring little imagination, faith based charitable work such as the ones I mentioned and more, involve hundreds of thousands of people over generations affecting millions of lives, and even tens of millions.”
The absence of hard data on all sides validates arguments about the levels of support and validation that faith provides to acts of varying morality, as well as arguments about the direct effect faith has on people, absent actual knowledge of the specific frequency of real-world occurences. If you had hard data that only 5000 were ever killed or enslaved in the name of faith, and that 150 trillion significant charitable acts had been unambiguously done due to faith in the same amount of time, then I would be left with only the options of equating one death to 30 million charitable acts, bringing in other negative effects of faith to help tip the balance, or conceding. But such data has not been forthcoming, so speculative arguments are admissible.
An analogy: I don’t have statistical data that most people who are hit by cars going over 30mph suffer injuries, either. I would argue that to be the case though, due to the probable effects of a fast-moving car on the human body. Would you reject that conclusion due to lack of clear statistics of actual collisions?
[QUOTE=cosmosdan]
If I said 90% of the worlds population was black what would the chances be that most of the babies born would be black?
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Extremely good, because we know that a couple both being black strongly suggests that their children will be black (plus a little bit of statistics indicating that in a 90% black population you would expect around 81% of couples to be both-black, or more than that if people tend to seek out same-color mates or are not evenly distributed, which seems to be the case).
However there’s no indication that if a person is religious, they are likely to be more moral or ‘positive-value’ contributors than atheists, and you’d need to know or assume that sort of relationship between religion and positive value before you could draw any conclusion at all. Which is to say, the statistic-less 90-10 argument assumes its conclusion.
That you present this analogy of faith->value with black parents->black babies implies a powerful bias, where you are as certain of the positive value of faith as you are of the power of genetics. Which probably explains why you see the 90-10 thing as a compelling argument, and why you subconsciously edit the arguments out of my posts before comprehending them.
(Scary, really. Mark it down as another negative consequence of faith.)
[QUOTE=cosmosdan]
I don’t think what people might do under different circumstances is at all relevant to the discussion. Perhaps thats part of the confusion. I’ve been speaking specifically of the impact of faith from our earliest recorded history to date. What has actually happened. Does that help clarify?
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Well, the value of faith is the effect it had. It is necessary to consider what would have happened absent faith to even recognize the impact faith had. There is no other way to even assess it.
But you missed the point of my argument (again). My point is, that in the real world, we don’t know that a person who donated did it because of faith! Even if he gave to a church organization; even if he donated while sitting in church, you can’t conclude that faith even had a hand in their decision to donate! There are a myriad of other possible reasons, peer pressure being a likely one. (You don’t want to be the only person not donating, after all.) The person also might be naturally generous, and donating because of that! They might gain self-esteem by donating, and do so because they know it’ll make them feel good. They might know that they’ll feel greedy or selfish if they don’t donate, and do so to avoid those feelings. You can quite easily have entirely non-faith reasons for donating, in which case it would be an error to give faith credit for it.
Yes, there are some people who donate because of some faith belief. But there are some, probably a lot (based on my interactions with religious people) who do so entirely for other reasons. Which is why I don’t think “hundreds of thousands of people over generations” counts for as many pro-faith votes as you think it does.
Unless you have some evidence that most people who donate actually do do it because of faith?
[QUOTE=cosmosdan]
This is a false dichotomy. No one wouldn’t have to assume anything about atheism’s morals to examine the effect of faith. Furthermore I haven’t implied any such thing. By all means, please show me specifically where I have and lets see if it’s me or just your false assumption.
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You mean “no one would have to assume”, right?
The stronger the correlation you draw between faith and charitable acts, the less generosity you attribute to atheists. This should be obvious; there’s only so many charitable acts done, after all. The fact is that theists almost certainly do many charitable acts for non-faith reasons too, there’s even less for atheists to do. If 90% of people are theists, then you would reasonably expect atheists to have done only 10% of *non-*faith-inspired charitable acts, and you seem quite confident that the vast majority of charitable acts are faith inspired. Which leaves the atheists a rather non-charitable lot indeed.
But depending on the minute, you don’t merely draw a strong correlation; sometimes your true feelings on the matter leak through:
[QUOTE=cosmosdan]
Each individual who goes to serve others in a soup kitchen or a low cost health care facility is operating on faith.
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Hence, no atheists ever assist in soup kitchens or low-cost health facilities. None, ever. Wow, they must be uncaring, selfish bastards, huh?
The fact is, your use of charitable acts as an argument for faith’s value relies on atheists not doing their share of charitable acts. If atheists pulled their weight, then being faithful would demonstrably be no impetus to do charitable acts, and no value would be there to find.
(Your periodic statements asserting that all contributors are doing so due to faith go above and beyond necessity, though. Though of course, given your total lack of stats, perhaps denial of reality is necessary to defend your position, lest people notice that we really can’t tell how much charity is faith-induced. Possibly very little, even.)
It’s my understanding that surveys have confirmed a prevalent bias among theists against atheist people; they think that faith is good, so persons without faith or who reject it must therefore be less good. Such a conclusion is inherent in the belief that religious faith induces good behavior. You can’t have one belief without the other, unless you’re into the whole ‘internal contradiction of beliefs’ thing as well.
(If you include non-religious faith as a significant element in your analysis, as Scylla did, then the target of your prejudice would shift to from atheists to rational people. (Which would be quite odd, in my opinion.) However your frequent reference to religion and churches (plus your infamous 90-10 example) pretty clearly state that you think of faith primarily in its role in religion. So your bias would be an anti-atheist one.)
[QUOTE=cosmosdan]
Here’s what appears to be bias to me. When I offer examples of the positive effects of faith you claim it’s probably not faith, or enough faith. You assert that people are motivated by other factors and those factors must be considered. I’ll grant you that. But here when offering your own examples you claim immunity from the same standard. It seems totally unfair and unreasonable to me, so the only conclusion I could come to was bias. It seems to be a double standard to me.
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It’s entirely possible (if not probable) that an entirely atheistic and non-faith-entertaining world would still have a respectable population of charitable works and recovering alcoholics. I have explained how this could work, by pointing out how many probable common motivations for generosity aren’t faith based.
However it’s not entirely possible that there would be have been institutionalized and popularly accepted slavery (notably in the american south) without the support of a widespread and well-recorded belief in the inferiority of black people. It’s not entirely possible that medieval knights and other pillagers would have begun a war with a country hundreds of miles away without the religious cause. (They would have instead done minor-scale local pillaging, like they usually did.) It’s not entirely possible that jews would have been imprisoned, tortured, and executed absent the belief in them being evil and/or inferior. (The war would probably still have happened, though.) It’s not even slightly possible that random people would have been burned as witches without the fervor of religion and superstition feuling and promoting the situation, regardless of which little girls had it in for who. And you’d have to be literally insane to think that the explicitly religious persecution known as the inquisition would have occurred had there not existed varying religions to persecute, nor the motivation of the instigating religion to inspire the actions in the first place.
You have to start with a bias the size of a buick to even pretend that faith didn’t directly cause these events. Sure, in some cases greed or hatred fueled the fire that faith had begun. (In one case, the witch trials, faith turned otherwise impotent (and I mean totally impotent) spite into a deadly force.) But we’re not assessing the effects of greed, hatred, or spite here. We’re assessing the effects of faith. And without faith, none of these events happen. Even in reduced quantities. Just, poof gone.
If you disagree, if you think that all these people merely pretended to be following the dictates of their religions as they understood them, and would have been able to carry the acts out even without the pretense of faith, then that’s a bizarrely outrageous claim for any of my examples. Please bring evidence, or drop these ridiculous attempts to equate my examples with yours.
) and the conclusion you’re trying to draw, and the inclusion or exclusion of such irrelevent pieces of evidence makes little difference to the result. So, large swathes of evidence this is beieved to be unrelated to the question is generally ignored in the hopes of finishing your analysis and making a decision sometime this century.
)