Religion

[lumpenprol]

I've said this in multiple threads now, but I hope this time is looked back in absolute embarrassment quite soon. I look to places like Europe with hope when it comes to an embrace of secularism that is balanced with respect, not endorsement, of religious beliefs. That's the kind of society I want for my children. Fingers crossed it will go in that direction here in the States.

Unfortunately I'm not sure Europe is all that respectful, see for ref. French banning of head scarves.

[skotosa]

Dawkins gets a lot of flack these days but someone has to get the ball rolling in contemporary society.. He's stated that publicly and understands that most people's opinions of him are increasingly negative. He is, however, merely espousing a middle ground or Neutral position (we don't know so let's keep all arguments on the table for scientific study) as a replacement to the extreme position of major religions (we know and don't need to prove anything). It's funny by the way that he gets so much negative press for a neutral position. He argues, just like the rest of the so-called "four horsemen" and myself and smetty here that though believing in fairy tales can sometimes bring small groups of people together and help us sleep at night but it stunts our race. it allows for all the things that I said in my previous post which brings far more negatives and than positives for us, and for succeeding generations. And it goes back to that bertrand russell vid. in that catholic wedding thread where he argues that purposeful belief (you could insert "faith" easily) in things that are not true will not lead to good.

 

that's a big argument but I don't think it's a tough one to back up.... even Pinker's history of the decline of violence (in his book The Better Angels of our Nature) gives a great insight as to the violence that christianity has promoted and enforced over the last couple thousand years is a strong argument for the elimination of Gods that are violent as fuck at least (partially why I'm not as opposed to eastern religions)

 

Mostly I'm just against ignorance. I refuse to believe that we are better off believing in "feelings" and in having "faith". To me that's (at least) intellectual laziness and just like parents of lazy kids we ought to kick people in the ass and get them off the couch and participating in real life.

 

Could you imagine if instead of regular sunday school (which is a fucking atrocity that I would also argue borders on child abuse) children around the world got lessons in virtue ethics, in actual history, and were taught contemporary theories like evolution and maybe even some experimental physics lessons on how the world may have come about for fun?

 

So, for dragging us kicking and screaming into a world like this I will support Dawkins and harris, and dennett,and hitchens, and whoever else comes along and is brave enough to attack the religious right.

 

 

Dang, had a reply all typed up and the back button deleted it. Basically I question how many people Dawkins et al have actually converted, I think his snide "holier than thou" (heh) attitude has closed eyes and ears before they had the chance to be opened. When you watch these videos of him and his pals, you see they are only speaking (even pandering) to the already converted. People don't change their minds because you defeat them with logic, you need to lay our your beliefs plainly, with respect to the opposing viewpoint. "Get more flies with honey than vinegar" and all that.

 

Personally if I wanted to open the eyes of someone I considered narrow-minded, I'd show them Sagan's "Cosmos" or something like that. Give them something positive first, expose them to the wonder of the universe, and the rest would probably come naturally. Or not. But I still maintain beating people over the head with "your God doesn't exist" doesn't open a dialogue or help matters.

 

Isn't it naive to assume that if you essentially say their belief system is flawed in anyway regardless of the niceties you use to dress it up, that it would help change their mind?

Isn't it naive to assume that if you essentially say their belief system is flawed in anyway regardless of the niceties you use to dress it up, that it wouldn't help change their mind?

[Guest RadarJammer]

I think that repetitive synchronicity is the #1 cause for *legitimate* and *honest* religious and spiritual conclusions (like you know it instead of just think it or regurgitate it). For some people it crosses the line at some point from being a silly coincidence to being something that their minds can't handle unless they wrap it up with a neat little bow of some kind and how can you blame or argue with them?

 

In that case one might say that god is a: auto-adjusting-feedbacking-algorithm-of-some-kind and be happy that it wasn't ghost tits and spontaneous cumbustion.

[joshuatxuk]

I've said this in multiple threads now, but I hope this time is looked back in absolute embarrassment quite soon. I look to places like Europe with hope when it comes to an embrace of secularism that is balanced with respect, not endorsement, of religious beliefs. That's the kind of society I want for my children. Fingers crossed it will go in that direction here in the States.

Unfortunately I'm not sure Europe is all that respectful, see for ref. French banning of head scarves.

 

Good point. I'm afraid I kept my mind very much on the state of Christianity in most of Europe. It still seems that anti-Islamic laws and sentiments are still grounded in an argument for secularism to a degree in Europe, even if it's driven by nationalist sentiments. I believe it's far less the case in the U.S., where conservatives usually fuse concerns of Islam with a concern about "protecting" Christianity. Also, I'm always stricken by how blunt and visceral the public discussion is in much of Europe regarding religion and immigration, it seems less affected by superficial attempts at political correctness made in the American media.

[chim]

A monk once asked Ummon, "What is the Buddha?" Ummon answered thus: "A dried shit-stick!"

 

I think I found an interpretative basis for this koan. I'll try to sum it up (tried to write a longer post this morning)

• God is the supreme being.

• In french you have to words for "being". être, substantive form of the verb être (to be). Linked to être vivant ("living being"). Now in some philosophical circles, the english being could be translated as "étant", which is the substantive form of the gerundive of the verb "être". This is like "being" vs "is-being".

• I'm saying not this is absolute, but there is clearly a parallel to draw between (être, étant) and(Descartes's God, Spinoza's God). On one hand God is a separate object, almost a living being itself, on the other hand it is everywhere, behind the facts that make Nature what it is. Either creator, or creativeness. Because of the opportunities french language offers to its speakers, and the way it evolved along with culture in general, the possibility of the parallel i've just drawn was structurally predetermined. (the parallel is not predetermined, the possibility of it is).

 

As a consequence, what is God ? God is a dried-shit stick ! It's a word meant to manipulate a substance formed by ourselves. (The true shit, that is, the shit before being considered as shit, ie, anything you eat and poop, stays in God's realm).

 

 

It is very dangerous to do any thinking while confronting a koan. The point of Zen is that it is impossible to find Buddha-nature, because it is impossible to seek. What you find will only be words and concepts, not the real thing. You are already Buddha and everything is Buddha-nature, so doing anything to "see" or "find" Buddha-nature is an impossible paradox, like trying to swallow your own mouth. And you should absolutely not think of Zen or Buddha. The master will counter spiritual inquiries with the inanely mundane and vice versa, because they are one and the same.

 

So, one can only do whatever they were already doing, but through Zen practices you may allow yourself such a level of genuine spontaneity and presence of the moment that your Original Face is the breakfast you had this morning and Buddha is whichever way the wind is blowing today... or a dried shit-stick.

[azatoth]

If you meet the Buddha, kill him.

[gmanyo]

I really want to start a koan writing thread. I wrote a few on my friend's wall on Facebook. We were trying to do one a day, but it got really difficult after a few days.

 

 

There was a young student, Suiwo, who was attempting to balance rocks atop one another by a lake as an act of zen, but no matter how much time he spent balancing, he could not get them to stack. He got so angry that he threw the rocks into the lake.

 

"Master Hakuin," said Suiwo, "I have spent hours stacking these rocks, but no matter what I do, I can't get them to stand upon one another!"

 

"Suiwo," replied Hakuin, "how could you possibly get the rocks to stand if you have not even tried?"

 

 

 

One day, a group of students approached master Hoshin and asked, "Master, what must one do to become a Buddha?" But Hoshin was silent.

The the very next day the group approached Hoshin again and asked, "Master, what must one do to become a Buddha?" But again, Hoshin was silent.

On the third day the students, angry at Hoshin's silence, approached him and said, "Master, tell us now how to become a Buddha, or we will kill you!" to which Hoshin responded:

"What must one do to become a Buddha?"

 

The students were silent.

 

 

I find koans really funny for some reason. They work really well as postmodern jokes.

[baph]

How about let those who believe, believe. And those who don't believe, let them be.

 

Respect peoples' opinions and beliefs.

 

Meanwhile, try getting contraceptives in the US in two years.

[lumpenprol]

psh, try having sex after 2012 with no penis

[ZoeB]

Id love to see an atheist make a cogent argument on why there is no god, without reference to any religion whatsoever.

 

Didn't Epicurus do this a while back? As in, like, 300BC ish?

[azatoth]

Id love to see an atheist make a cogent argument on why there is no god, without reference to any religion whatsoever.

 

Didn't Epicurus do this a while back? As in, like, 300BC ish?

 

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

 

Then why call him God?

[SR4]

Id love to see an atheist make a cogent argument on why there is no god, without reference to any religion whatsoever.

 

Didn't Epicurus do this a while back? As in, like, 300BC ish?

 

Yes, but even then, any argument that POSITS there is no God derives from a Gnostic perspective, the same irrational mindset that theists use, so these arguments are always sorta shaky.

 

However its perfectly rational to say based upon the lack of evidence, there is probably not a God, therefore justifying lack of belief.

[Hoodie]

Id love to see an atheist make a cogent argument on why there is no god, without reference to any religion whatsoever.

 

Didn't Epicurus do this a while back? As in, like, 300BC ish?

 

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

 

Then why call him God?

 

i don't think it's fair to apply concepts like willingness and benevolence to an infinite being.

[ZoeB]

Yes, but even then, any argument that POSITS there is no God derives from a Gnostic perspective, the same irrational mindset that theists use, so these arguments are always sorta shaky.

 

However its perfectly rational to say based upon the lack of evidence, there is probably not a God, therefore justifying lack of belief.

 

Oh yes, you can only say it's unlikely that there's a god, but by this point, given how much we now know, it's really, really unlikely, which is about as close to false as you really need on a practical level. If there is a god, she's running out of places to hide and things to claim credit for. :)

[SR4]

Id love to see an atheist make a cogent argument on why there is no god, without reference to any religion whatsoever.

 

Didn't Epicurus do this a while back? As in, like, 300BC ish?

 

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

 

Then why call him God?

 

i don't think it's fair to apply concepts like willingness and benevolence to an infinite being.

 

What is your proof to suggest this is true?

 

also chassis, either you have not read any of the responses me or others have put in this thread explaining what atheism means, or you are being dishonest.

 

 

lemme ask you a question, do you have a lack of belief in unicorns? prove it.

[gmanyo]

I don't think a God is necessarily benevolent. He might be a jackass. I thought that argument was against gods of certain religions.

[chim]

I don't think a God is necessarily benevolent. He might be a jackass. I thought that argument was against gods of certain religions.

 

"For anyone who holds that 'God made the world', the question, Why did He permit the existence in it of any evil, or of that Evil One in whom all evil is personified, is altogether meaningless; one might as well enquire why He did not make a world without dimensions or one without temporal succession."

[gmanyo]

I don't think a God is necessarily benevolent. He might be a jackass. I thought that argument was against gods of certain religions.

 

"For anyone who holds that 'God made the world', the question, Why did He permit the existence in it of any evil, or of that Evil One in whom all evil is personified, is altogether meaningless; one might as well enquire why He did not make a world without dimensions or one without temporal succession."

 

He could just be a dick. Also, as many people have stated, "God" is a pretty big term. There are also pretty good arguments for the existence of evil and what it has to do with free will, but that's a different point.

[ZoeB]

can anyone tell me what Einstein's discovery has actually done in the world to make it better?

 

Ah, a request for an invocation of the old Teflon argument. Which discovery are you referring to? He discovered a whole bunch of things. Off the top of my head, his discoveries lead directly to the invention of nuclear power plants (if you can figure out where to store all the waste, that's at least a vast improvement on coal and oil) and lasers. Lasers are useful for working out how far away the moon is, storing data, printing things, cutting materials, restoring eyesight, removing unwanted hair, remotely powering aircraft, pointing at things, and confusing cats. You could probably use them to beam power from a satellite with solar cells to a planet, but I'm not sure about that one... You can also use them to kill people. Knowledge and technology aren't inherently good or bad. It all depends on how you use them. Also, if it wasn't for particle physicists, we wouldn't have MRI scanners, or for that matter, the World-Wide Web. Pretty much every invention we have only exists because of the level of knowledge we have to build it upon, and that in turn largely exists due to science.

[SR4]

can anyone tell me what Einstein's discovery has actually done in the world to make it better?

 

Ah, a request for an invocation of the old Teflon argument. Which discovery are you referring to? He discovered a whole bunch of things. Off the top of my head, his discoveries lead directly to the invention of nuclear power plants (if you can figure out where to store all the waste, that's at least a vast improvement on coal and oil) and lasers. Lasers are useful for working out how far away the moon is, storing data, printing things, cutting materials, restoring eyesight, removing unwanted hair, remotely powering aircraft, pointing at things, and confusing cats. You could probably use them to beam power from a satellite with solar cells to a planet, but I'm not sure about that one... You can also use them to kill people. Knowledge and technology aren't inherently good or bad. It all depends on how you use them. Also, if it wasn't for particle physicists, we wouldn't have MRI scanners, or for that matter, the World-Wide Web. Pretty much every invention we have only exists because of the level of knowledge we have to build it upon, and that in turn largely exists due to science.

 

and science is a collective body of shared human experience connected through logical inquiry.

 

 

great post!

[gmanyo]

Knowledge and technology aren't inherently good or bad.

 

Nothing is inherently good or bad. But I see your point.

[encey]

[...] you say that the moral law is "good independently of our inclination to follow it." i think the same must be true of god. the only difference is that god never fails to follow it because, as you say, god has no contrary inclinations.

 

in the case of god, these two issues might be harder to separate precisely for the reason that god is really not free to choose what law to will (if we assume that god is necessarily omnibenevolent). but that, i think, is a way of conceding the euthyphro point; god couldn't will another law because no other law is (or could be) morally correct (even if god were to will another law).

 

[...] the law is not really up to god; that the necessity of god's perfection forces god to will one law, and not another, because the facts about morality are one way and not another.

 

I don't know enough about the concept of freedom to say anything smart, but I think this raises an interesting question about whether we have to think of God's willing the moral law (assuming he does) as being 'non-forced' by something like a God-independent fact about what is morally good (i.e., as being 'negatively free'), in order to understand God's willing it freely. I mean, Kant will concede that the necessity of our being practical reasoners 'forces us' to will according to the categorical imperative, but he will still describe this willing as 'positively free' insofar as its laws originate from our faculty of willing itself; and it was this (hypothetical) feature of God's willing that I was imagining as a way of responding to the Euthyphro question. That might just leave us back where we started in our discussion here, but it seems to me like your side's apprehension about this strategy stems from the view that divine command cannot determine what is moral unless the command is free in the negative sense. So I have been playing with the response, what if it's free in the positive sense? (Not that I really understand why Kant's 'positive' sense of freedom is a sense of freedom, exactly!)

 

when it comes to discovering the moral law, god doesn't play a role for kant, so even a kantian should admit that we have, through reason, an independent purchase on what is morally right and wrong.

 

This may be true. I was just drawing an analogy to what Kant says about human beings in order to defend a divine command theorist's view of morality as based upon God's willing, so I think this is a separate issue that gives reasons for your response, but reasons that don't speak directly to the view I am trying to construct here.

 

even ordinary religious believers make this distinction in practice i think. there is a reason that although many chritians profess to follow the 10 commandments, they do not observe the prohibition on wearing garments that mix wool and linen. the reason is that they independently judge that the really important thing, morally speaking, is captured by the commandments. more abstractly, the fact that there are differing interpretations of the bible indicates a reliance on our own ability to discern moral truths through reason.

 

so i don't think it is a simple case of question begging; i think there is good evidence that we have a capacity for moral judgment that is not just following divine commands, which in turn allows us to comprehend potentially counterfactual (or even counterpossible) scenarios where god wills the immoral.

 

This is an interesting issue that came up in a class I was TAing for freshman where we read Galileo's letter to the Duchess ... Christina? ... on people accusing him of heresy for contradicting the Bible's description of natural law with his heliocentric cosmology. His response was that there are differing interpretations of the Bible because God's word was expressed in purposefully oblique ways, in order to make it accessible to people of ordinary levels of understanding, and that where the Bible seems to contradict science, it's because the Bible has been misinterpreted. I think you could make a similar point, that our isolating certain commandments or injunctions as morally relevant is indeed a use of our interpretive imagination, but is not necessarily to be understood as a use of an independent grasp of moral truth; rather, it's our striving to more clearly grasp what God tells us is morally right.

 

encey: blah blah ...

the point you raise is an interesting one, but it addresses a different question, which is: what provides the best explanation for the nature of the world (including morality), god or a groundless moral law? here god is obviously a more complete explanation, but that is a new question that raises a whole host of difficult issues. it also concedes my point, namely that atheism with objective morality is not somehow inconsistent or inconceivable; rather, on this line, it is just less well supported by the evidence.

I agree, it's a different issue.

[Candiru]

Forcing ideas and concepts that only make sense within the human brain onto the Universe. The Sun WANTS us to live! This is the train of thought for most religions and the more we understand human consciousness, the less we will feel the need to anthropomorphize everything. God Of The Gaps.

[Hoodie]

Id love to see an atheist make a cogent argument on why there is no god, without reference to any religion whatsoever.

 

Didn't Epicurus do this a while back? As in, like, 300BC ish?

 

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

 

Then why call him God?

 

i don't think it's fair to apply concepts like willingness and benevolence to an infinite being.

 

What is your proof to suggest this is true?

 

an infinite being/thing/construct/god (assuming something like that exists) is everything. it has no choice in the matter, really, since that's the description of being infinite. an infinite being cannot be benevolent, because it is equal parts malicious. from another perspective, it cannot be benevolent because morality is a human concept. we can apply morality to god as much as we can apply it to an ant. they're entirely different levels of existence and pretty much incomprehensible to us. i know that sounds like that typical "god works in mysterious ways" trash, which is a piss poor argument. instead, i'm saying that god is neither benevolent, nor malicious, because it's actually both, making it neither.

 

and even so, calling something benevolent assumes it has free will, because you're assuming it will make "good" choices.

 

an infinite being has no free will (assuming that such a thing exists at all), because will implies the ability to make a choice. an infinite being has already made all possible choices. i'm not disagreeing that a god-thing would be omnipotent. instead, i think most people conceive omnipotence as being miracles and personal interventions. it seems to me that it'd be on a much larger, more deterministic scale--that is, god has made all possible choices by creating all possible universes.

 

of course, this is all assuming that such a being exists. i'm not saying it does. that doesn't mean we can't engage in hypothetical discussion. if anything, it shows that the abrahamic god is so, so totally unlike what an infinite being would really be. i think it's actually a good idea to assume a deist stance when trying to argue with the religious, because it makes them think in a context that isn't frightening (saying right out that you're an atheist makes most folks immediately bare their teeth).

[GORDO]

what a wanker.