Gilder
Deity
The correct definition of those who are "not sure" is actually 'confused'...
Actually, we call them "bi-curious."
Question to athiests who say...
- Thread starter Lotus49
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Actually, we call them "bi-curious."
DJ Bonebraker
a.k.a Laura
No it is not, I was only pointing out that, while some atheists are moral, they are going far above and beyond what their religion calls for.
If there are no laws besides Physics and Natural selection, then anything else is just made up for people's convenience... If I find such restrictions inconvenient, and have the power to defy those made-up restrictions, then, according to Physics and Natural Selection, I have every right to kill all who oppose me and re-structure the made-up laws to suit my own convenience. If there is no set universal moral laws, then anything goes. If there IS some universal set of moral laws, then where does it come from? The only source I can think of is God.
@Perfection: You missed my main point: Everyone has their own failings, and considering the number of times you've been banned, you have little room to be arrogant or claim any great deal of maturity (your calling me immature is quite the case of the pot calling the kettle black), but you're filled with the spirit of Pride, which is the original sin, so you think you're better than everyone else....
Which is a logical fallacy there, since just basing Human Worth off nothing more than IQ or the ability to debate according to standard convention is, at best, just plain stupid, and at worst, the kind of thing that leads to prejudice, Jim Crow laws, Apartheid, and "ethnic cleansing." Remember: Having a high IQ is meaningless if you don't use it for anything.
Anyways, your biggest logical error is assuming that humans are rational... According to most social psychologists (yeah, the stupid redneck bible-thumper has taken two college-level social psych courses... oh noes!!!!11111shiftone), it would be best to describe humans as RATIONALIZING creatures, and every observation we make is tempered by experience, emotions, etc, therefore, there is no such thing as a truly objective observer....
...Which you have proven to me by refusing to accept my challenge. If you were really, honestly looking for the Truth, then you'd have taken the challenge (as I said, I've studied up on just about every religion in the world, including atheism, and still came up with my conclusions), however, I'm suspecting you want to avoid any cognitive dissonance that may result from finding that there are any flaws in your belief system.
Also, here's a simple way to disprove Christianity: Find the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and prove He didn't rise from the dead. I know of one investigative reporter who tried just that for a book he was writing that he was going to entitle "The Case Against Christ," but the further he dug, and the more he found out, he ended up converting to Christianity, and has published the book as The Case For Christ, and I'd reccomend that to anyone.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Well, you can if you want.. but you'll of course be arrested and thrown in a pound-me-in-the-ass prison
Perfection
The Great Head.
Atheism isn't religion. It's a philosophical stance regarding the existance of God(s). There is immense variation of religion and nonreligion among atheists. There are Buddhist atheists, Taoist atheists, and nonreligious atheists.
A socially constructed moral system clearly doesn't allow "anything goes", if you find the moral system inconvenenient and choose to disobey its restrictions you cannot simply change the moral system because the people around are likely going to reject your changes. You cannot suddenly make the murder of innocents right by saying you think it's okay because society will clearly still think otherwise.
Besides, even if we accept divine command as the source of morality people can still choose to disregard it.
Part of this also stems from the natural morality in people. People naturally have some moral sense in them.
Lastly, it's not as if divine command as the source of morality doesn't have it's own problems.
Euthyphro's dilemma is a classic one:
"Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is commanded by God?"
If we accept the former, then God is not the source of morality and we are left asking where morality really comes from whereas if we say that moraltiy is simply what God commands then God could make something like murdering the innocent moral.
That doesn't follow. I certainly am mature, I just like doing things here that the mods don't care for me to do.
It would be a logically fallacy if I said I had more worth as a human then you just because of my IQ, but I didn't. In fact I haven't ever brought up the fact that I am worth more then you.
So? How does that nullify any of my arguments?
I'm welcome to find flaws in my belief system, and actively seek them out on many occasions but frankly your defense of your religious philosophy is too weak for me to trust your opinions on the best sources literature regarding philosophy.
Just because we haven't falsified every bible story doesn't mean we should accept it to be true. Also, listing off instances where people converted from one side to the other doesn't help much because ther'es clearly people on both sides. The atheist editor of Skeptic Magazine, Micheal Shermer, was once a fundamentalist Christain.
At last we agree - yes, I'm an atheist.I dont know, what are ya? An atheist who doesn't know if God exists?
But then you say:
No I don't. So how can I be an atheist who doesn't know if God exists?
I agree - it's not "someone who doesn't believe in God".
Is it untenable to not believe in invisible dancing bananas?
Fundie! That position is untenable. How can you claim to know that?
If I said "Agnostics claim that we can never know about God, which is an untenable statement of faith", it would be fair to question the definition - just like you did above, in fact.
What you do mean by "deny"? This still has two meanings, "To declare untrue" and "To refuse to believe; reject". According to you, only the first of these counts as atheism...
i have a quick challenge for you as well. read a book called The Bible Unearthed that gives a convincing argument about the origin of the old testemant, backed by solid archaeological evidence. A lot of the myths of the bible made a lot of sense after reading this book. Check it out!
and here's a question as well: can you explain to me why Christianity borrows from many pagan myths that existed BEFORE the time of christ? virgin birth? check. dying and resurrected in 3 days? check. son of a god? check. salvation to all? check. you say you took a comparative religion class right? so then you should know about all of this. you should know about: Mithras, Dionysus, Attis, Osiris. you would also know that easter and christmas were pagan holidays that became christian so they could win over more converts.
anyway, i think i linked you to these before. here is a short rebuttal of lee strobe's the case for christ. he likes to claim he was a strong atheist before converting but that's doubtful. most bible scholars or historians end up becoming agnostic or atheist as a result of honest scholarly pursuit, just like many who attend seminary. when forced to confront the truth about the origins of the bible and the mistranslations and additions and alterations, many lose faith.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/strobel.html
and while i'm at it, here is a chapter by chapter rebuttal of another popular book, evidence that demands a verdict:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/jury/
and finally, lately theres been a book supposedly written by antony flew called "there is a god: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind". he is a former atheist, and the book about his conversion experience. but it's been exposed that the book was not written by flew at all, but ghost written by a fundie. flew pretty much became agnostic, not christian. he has been exploited in his old age by fundies with an agenda. i didn't know if you were gonna bring up antony flew, so i'm just gonna pre empt you:
http://www.secweb.org/index.aspx?action=viewAsset&id=369
Natural selection tends to select for members of a species who work together, as opposed to those who eat everything they see.
Gogf
Indescribable
Atheism is not a religion, although you are right that "not believing in God" does not "call for someone to be moral" in a dogmatic and commanding way like Christianity does.
Whoa there. Those are two gigantic and unjustified leaps in logic. First of all, "physics and natural selection" says nothing about morality. They describe what happens, not whether it is just or what it justifies. Secondly, just because you are not forbidden to do something by some omnipotent entity does not mean that it is just and moral to do it.
The reason you have this belief is that you're not especially well-versed on the philosophical issue here. The divine command theory of morality is completely vacuous, so God isn't even a possible source of morality. I think natural selection explains it rather nicely, though.
DJ Bonebraker
a.k.a Laura
Well, since its as ultimately provable as religion, and requires an equal amount of faith, it should be classed as thus (after all, every atheist I met is a devout follower fo the Almighty Dollar). Perhaps it may be better to class it as an anti-religion, although that would be innacurate, due to the fact that Buddhism, fundamentally, is atheistic (they don't believe in any kind of god, but they do believe in a stream of human consciousness).
Then what is the standard of your morals or justice? In some cultures, you're supposed to love your neighbor, and in others you eat them. In the absence of some divine law, both are equally valid.
I understand it perfectly, after all, Hitler and Josef Stalin used this quite to their advantage... The only failing they had in their methodology would be that they didn't read Peter's Evil Overlord List, and they both made key mistakes. All natural selection explains is why plants and animals are the way they are.
Perfection said:
Well, then I owe you an apology... Seems I misinterpreted some of your earlier posts, so I'm sorry.
Perfection said:
That's a classic straw-man argument... That would be the same as me saying, "Since you're arguments have largely been nothing but smoke and mirror tactics (which is a feat in itself considering the appearant absence of smoke and the lack of mirrors), then I don't trust your opinions regarding the best books on atheism."
Just because I may be lacking talent in one area does not mean I lack the ability to recognize talent in that area... As a matter of fact that's one thing I'm well-recognized for locally.... If people need something done, they ask me, because even if I can't do it for them, I know who can.
Going back a bit about empirical data, all I have to say is that many atheist theories come off to me as smoke and mirror tactics... I.e. the big bang has a few flaws, so someone invents something called "dark matter" to explain them away. Can you hand me a fist-full of dark matter? Can I go to the local general store and buy a sack of it? Is there even some kind of test equipment I could buy through Mouser or Jameco that can detect and measure dark matter? If not, then I'd have to trust it on faith that it exists. I have heard the voice of God and witnessed real-life miracles, and due to the fact that giving delusional/insane people loaded guns is not generally a good idea, I've been subjected to a full battery of psycho-analytical tests both to join the Navy and periodically during my enlistment, and I can therefore, with good authority, say I'm completely sane. In addition, Quantum theory states about two paralell lines crossing eventually... Well, I could dis-prove that easily enough, provided I could get a hyper-drive capable ship and enough wire... I bet that I could set the two wires at exactly 1" apart (and I'll even use the ISO-9000 certified callipers from work to verify that), using spacers every 12" to make sure they don't tangle, and I could be on the other end of the universe and those wires would still be 1" apart.... The phasing in and out of existence I can believe.... I've known some Horologists who consider making a quantum clock to be the "holy grail" of horology (For those of you who don't know, Horology is the technical term for clock-making), due to the fact that such a clock would be 100% accurate, however to be able to measure the smallest unit of time in the universe would probably require the device measuring it to be outside of it, and until we get hyperspace technology, that would be impossible.
But I digress....
My main beef with the atheist philosophy can best be summed up by Steve Turner's Creed:
Steve Turner said:
Finally, here's my list of reading (and Fishjie: I've seen the Bible Unearthed, and feel that it only proves God exists... There is just too much unrelated stuff happening at the same time, and the timing of events is too perfect for all that to have occurred by accident):
Mere Christianity
The Screwtape Letters
A Pilgrim's Regress
-all by C.S. Lewis
Can Man Live Without God?
The True Face of Atheism (which is where I first found Turner's Creed)
The Master Weaver
-all by Ravi Zacharias
Finally, I probably should have remembered this before jumping in:
Unknown said:
Thus, I'll stop wasting my time here, and get back to what's really important: Helping out my fellow man, or as St. Francis d'Asisi once said, "Let us go out into the village today and preach the Gospel. If necessary, we'll use words."
Edit: and I do believe I may have inadvertantly enacted Godwynn's Law, so I guess this topic is officially dead now.
wait how can you have read bible unearthed and say that the old testemant god exists?
the book dismantles all the myths in the OT.
there was no abraham. there was no exodus. there was no invasion of canaan. david's kingdom was tiny. hezekiah was never rescued from god by the assyrian invasion. and so on. the entire OT is filled with 700 bce anacrhonisms. etc etc
the book plainly states that the entire OT is false, and backs it with evidence and you think the book proves god? are you serious?
here's my recommended reading for you: the actual bible itself. if you've already read it (i have multiple times) then lets go ahead and discuss it.
and i'm waiting for an answer about pagan virgin birth three day ressurection myths predating jesus.
the book dismantles all the myths in the OT.
there was no abraham. there was no exodus. there was no invasion of canaan. david's kingdom was tiny. hezekiah was never rescued from god by the assyrian invasion. and so on. the entire OT is filled with 700 bce anacrhonisms. etc etc
the book plainly states that the entire OT is false, and backs it with evidence and you think the book proves god? are you serious?
here's my recommended reading for you: the actual bible itself. if you've already read it (i have multiple times) then lets go ahead and discuss it.
and i'm waiting for an answer about pagan virgin birth three day ressurection myths predating jesus.
Gogf
Indescribable
This is a false statement.
This is also a false statement.
No it shouldn't. That's like saying that 2+2=5 is a "religion" because it is as provable as religion.
This doesn't advance your argument at all, and I don't really think we should be at all surprised that atheists (or anyone, for that matter) don't enjoy having absolutely no money. People tend to, you know, like to eat.
Atheism is the rejection of belief in God. That is no more a religion than the rejection of math is a "mathematical system."
What makes you think that?
Hate to break it to ya, but humans are animals.
If a scientific theory is found to have some flaws, they usually make attempts to save it by adding new entities, and making new assumptions called 'ad-hoc hypothesis'. There is nothing wrong with that as long as these hypotheses themselves satisfy scientific criteria, and in fact if they are properly done, it may lead to new discoveries.
Examples:
1) Discovery of the planet Neptune. There were some irregularities in the orbit of Uranus, that could not be explained within Newtonian Mechanics. In order to save it from falsification, John Couch Adams in England and Urbain Le Verrier in France proposed an eighth planet, and even predicted its approximate location. The planet was successfully discovered shortly after.
2) Discovery of the 'neutrino' elementary particle. After the beta-decay (it's when a nucleus emits a beta-particle, electron or positron) has been shown to violate laws of conservation, Wolfgang Pauli proposed a hypothesis of a new hard-to-detect elementary particle in order to save conservation laws from falsification. It happened in 1930. Neutrinos were experimentally detected in 1956 in the famous neutrino experiment.
As for the dark matter hypothesis, it predicts some large masses of invisible matter, that cannot be seen directly, nevertheless it must affect the motion of galaxies, the same way Neptune affects the motion of Uranus. In other words, the dark matter hypothesis is a valid scientific hypothesis, and in fact there is some observational evidence in its favor, although not conclusive.
Perfection
The Great Head.
Well, I disagree that "provability" (as in the ability to make a formal logical proof based on extremely obvious truths) implies faith. Consider the following: I recently placed a soda in the refridgerator. Now I can't prove that my soda is in there at this very second, but you certainly wouldn't say it's faith for me to assume it is there would you? I in fact have a good reason for beleiving that my soda is there. Likewise I'd say I have good reasons not to belive in God and thus my atheism is not based upon faith.
I'm not.
Well, consider the following question? Is "theism" a religion? You certainly wouldn't say so because theists can be a member of many different religions (or even not a member of a religion at all), the same can be said about atheism, which is why atheism should not be called a religion!
In fact not, because those that exemplify superior moral character (don't kill folks etc.) are more aligned with our natural understanding of morality (which is in pretty much all humans thanks to natural selection) this gives us a determiner of which moral system is superior.
No you're not well versed, I'm not well versed on it either, but versed enough to know that you don't understand the views of morality under non-divine command theory.
No it isn't. A straw man is where one misrepresents an opponents position to make it appear weaker then it is. This is not what it is.
When I read a book, a big part of determines weather I agree with it (or parts of it) is the soundness of its argumentation. The ability to make sound arguments and the ability to see sound arguments are strongly correlated and since I need a very good reason to take a nontrivial amount of my time to read books (which I don't particularly enjoy doing) and money to purchase them I first need to ensure that the person reccomending the book is someone I can trust to make good reccomendations.
I'm going to DL some porn then I'll get to your silly notions of physics and science.
Had some time on my hand. Contributing a little about Buddhism view of morality since it is one of the points of contention.
We know our heart, lungs, liver, kidney, etc are independent living organs. That is why it is possible to transplant them although there are complex and difficult medical operations.
our cells are also independently alive. But yet, all these organs function together to support us, and entire living entity.
Buddhism views the entire universe as a single living entity and each of our individual lives are like the independent "organs" or "cells". We seem to be separated from one another, yet mystically connected at the fundamental levels as we support the same "life".
Ultimately, my life and your life is the same life, but different manifestation. Our physical bodies are just vessels to observe this life.
Hence, causing harm to another person is like the cancers cells killing the healthy cells. if "the liver destory the kidney", the entire body fails.
Therefore we only have one main focus when it comes to morality: we will respect all lives as they are the fundamentally a phenomenon of the true entity of life which is inseparable from our own lives.
So even without the concept of a God, morality is upheld.
We know our heart, lungs, liver, kidney, etc are independent living organs. That is why it is possible to transplant them although there are complex and difficult medical operations.
our cells are also independently alive. But yet, all these organs function together to support us, and entire living entity.
Buddhism views the entire universe as a single living entity and each of our individual lives are like the independent "organs" or "cells". We seem to be separated from one another, yet mystically connected at the fundamental levels as we support the same "life".
Ultimately, my life and your life is the same life, but different manifestation. Our physical bodies are just vessels to observe this life.
Hence, causing harm to another person is like the cancers cells killing the healthy cells. if "the liver destory the kidney", the entire body fails.
Therefore we only have one main focus when it comes to morality: we will respect all lives as they are the fundamentally a phenomenon of the true entity of life which is inseparable from our own lives.
So even without the concept of a God, morality is upheld.
i really like your post xyan
i dont really consider Buddhism a religion, but more of a philosophy. is this a fair assessment?
I don't really see how you can consider a movement that is the traditional belief system of southeast Asia, with a huge monastic tradition simply a philosophy.
Perfection
The Great Head.
Wow, you're being rather silly here:
1. Big Bang is not an "atheist theory" any more so then any other scientific theory, in fact it was proposed by a Christian
2. Big Bang theory is not needed for most people's atheism. I know that my athiesm stems from things other then big bang theory and even if the origin of the unvierse was a complete mystery I'd still be comfortable in my atheism
3. Dark does have some pretty compelling experimental evidence (Bullet cluste observations) that lends it a large amount of credence.
No, you can just assume that the cosmologists are competant and it has a high probability of being true, and if not something else will come up.
Sane people can still be mistaken. I once stared at a blimp for 5 minutes thinking it was a UFO.
Well, the curvature of spacetime (which is relativity not quantum mechanics) has been proven by the orbit of mercury and is needed to be compensated for in GPS satelites to get pinpoint precision.
I can't, mostly because I know quantum mechanics and can see that they would violate the shrodinger equation.
Dude, hyperspace crap is impossible.
Imma get my drink on then get my debatin' on BBL.
i really like your post xyan
i dont really consider Buddhism a religion, but more of a philosophy. is this a fair assessment?
It really depend on how one define religion. Many people define religion as a belief in some or a God of some variations. If that is the case, then Buddhism is not a religion in that sense. We use terms like gods and goddess and deities, but they are merely functions.
For example, when I use the term "Goddess of Mercy", it will merely means that an act of mercy is rendered by someone somewhere. It doesn't mean an actual supernatural goddess. We Asians just have a special fondness for metaphoric expressions.
Personally, as well as many of my fellow Buddhists friends, we don't really care if we are classified as philosophy or religion. That classification is not important to me.
To me, philosophy is the set of thoughts. Religion is how we apply that system of thoughts to help us live a better life. That's why I still say I'm very religious.
Perfection
The Great Head.
Lastly and leastly (lengthwise at least)...
Oh wait, I don't and neither do any atheists I know!
Maybe you should like learn the philosophy before posting unjust insults.
Well, as they say, booty calls!
Yeah, that does seem scary! Why do I believe that?
Oh wait, I don't and neither do any atheists I know!
Maybe you should like learn the philosophy before posting unjust insults.
Nope you did it on purpose. The topic lives!
Well, as they say, booty calls!
Berzerker
Deity
the winter solstice scared the hell out of people, elaborate ceremonies were devised to ensure the Sun returned.
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