The Root of all Evil : The God Delusion
POSTED BY: Calhoun
UPDATED: Thursday, December 17, 2015 06:12
VIEWED: 49573
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Quote:Okay. Since both those sites are blatantly biased against religion, maybe one of these days you’ll consider the other side of the discussion. History actually sees the doctrine of atheism as professed by Marxism/Leninism as playing a very large, albeit sporadic, roll in Stalin’s purges.
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
Here's a couple things I found when I Googled "Stalin atheist"
http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/hitlerstalin.html
http://www.atheistalliance.org/library/nelson-atheism_communism.php
Despite the valid arguments made on both those sites I'm willing to admit that atheism played a small part in Stalin's purges, but the vast majority of the dead were killed for purely political reasons.
In any event, like I said earlier I don’t buy any of it. What Stalin did in the name of atheism was as politically driven as what bin Laden does in the name of Islam. I just think we should apply our scorn fairly and honestly. When a government that espouses a policy of a particular theistic philosophy kills or oppresses any people who don’t support that philosophy many secularists insist that it is result of the theistic belief, but when a government that espouses a policy of a particular atheistic philosophy kills or oppresses any people who don’t support that philosophy those same secularists then insist that it can’t be the cause of this atheistic belief. I would argue that it is not the theistic belief or the atheistic belief that is truly responsible, but the desire to label one belief as dangerous and the other not, simply for the degree of personal sympathy one shares with the belief. Attempting to broadly paint religion (or any belief) as something that should be feared (and therefore potentially exterminated) is far more likely to be the cause of violence then any particular belief itself.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:I was under the impression it was anti-theist, which isn't entirely the same thing?
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Atheism was the official doctrine of the Soviet Union.
Quote:So it must be Atheist because he killed theists? You may have a point, but I thought the reason he went after the churches was for much the same reason Henry the 8th did.
He nearly destroyed the Russian Orthodox Church and he is responsible for the largest Jewish purge since Hitler. And he was no better to Moslems. How is that not killing in the name of atheism?
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.
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Forgive me if I'm incorrectly perceiving the situation, but has this seriously degraded into a point system? Crusades are -5 for Christians, Tokugawa -3 for Buddhists, Stalin -4 for Atheists...
I can recognize that some people are just trying to defend their point of view by bringing up someone equally as bad from the other side, but to anyone saying that one side is any worse than another, you're just plain wrong. The point was hit within the first couple of replies on this thread, PEOPLE are the problem. I've seen war on two separate continents now, and the killing over drugs, money and power is just as bad as the killing over religion. Anyone who says otherwise is probably someone who hasn't personally experienced both (or probably either) side of it, as I'm guessing most college professors who spatter around this type of BS fall in to that category.
I'm sorry, this might be slightly off topic, but why do we allow people who've never personally experienced war or genocide to teach about it? I am disgusted by some of the things that colleges, these centers of education and "higher learning", are teaching people when the teachers are just as ignorant as the students.
[IMG]
Place my body on a ship and burn it on the sea,
Let my spirit rise, Valkyries carry me.
Take me to Valhalla where my brothers wait for me.
Fires burn into the sky, my spirit will never die.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Causal:
See? And this is why I don't like RWE discussions. My point with Hitler: religion wasn't the cause of the Holocaust. That's all.I just plain disagree with you, that's all.
call me uniformed, but He was killing JEWS. JEWISH PEOPLE. Followers of THE JEWISH RELIGION.
How is that not religiously motivated? Regardles of his own religion (and the way i understand it it was a mishmash of any stray bits of theory that could be bent to his purpose - i.e religious teachings, scientific practices and even wafts of the occult, which i suppose is another religion)
But anyway, not having read the book, just going on what has been described here, it seems that for an Oxford man his views are remarkably closed, intolerent and simplistic.
No one seems to realise that humans are the root of all evil and religion (and i'm referring here to the organised doctrines, not personal faith) is nothing more than a costruct designed to control (other people, the masses, whatever) and promote an agenda. Its politics,in one way.
Where it get dangerous is most people buy into the religion and turn off their own capacity for thought, others warp and stretch it even further to make it justify what they want to do (i.e terrorists and fundamentalists) and others use it as a get out clause ('its not my fault! the devil made me do it!' 'this insurance does not cover you for Acts of God - basically anything we decide we don't want to pay for') but the same thing can be said of any idea, secular or otherwise.
So this guy seems to have got onto an interesting path and just stopped when it suited him - which is just darned lazy if you ask me.
But i agree that religion shouldn't be taught in schools, or rather, it should be taught, but only as an option - if you get what i mean. It along with scientific theories and even history should be presented as 'this is what some people think'. Which isa thank fully what happened in my school, but i still strongly object to my neice having to sing hymns in assembly, and say morning prayer - it has no place in her life until she's learned enough to make up her own mind.
Actually what worries me more is this craze - ney, hysteria over 'healthy eating'. Its another example of being dictated to and disengaging brain before acting. They have banned, wholesale, certain types of food, giving way to a 'blackmarket' of junk food and more worryingly, an out of school surge in consumption, they ram the concept down the childrens throats day in day out - i'd liken it to brainwashing and they deamonise habits and sensitize the children to the 'wrong' and 'bad' i wouldn't be at all surprised if the victimisation of fat kids had increased exponentially - which is just creating a larger group of f***ed up adults needing therapy and drugs for depressive illnesses - and in all this, not a single thing has been done to highlight the dangers of stigmatising eating habits - anorexia, bullemia, which are all on the increas.
don't beleive me? my neice - a child of healthy habits, balanced eating and perfect growth patterns - has taken to reading the backs of packets, asking about calory content, fat, salt, sugar, she will hold up everything on her plate and ask if it is 'healthy'.
She's barely six years old.
Now if that isn't catching them while they're young i don't know what is - yet virtually the whole country has bought into this belief, and to argue against the rough shod handling is socially unacceptable.
Interesting parallels.
Ok, enough of my illiterate and ill educated rambling.
Isn't sanity really a one trick pony, anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking! But when you're good and crazy...ooh hoo hoo hoo... the skys the limit!
http://www.myspace.com/seryndippyt
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Man, I wake up to go and grab a bite to eat and I find y'all are still here goin' at it?
Hope you are havin' fun...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"This is why we lost, you know. Superior numbers." "Thanks for the re-enactment, sir."
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Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:Quote:Okay. Since both those sites are blatantly biased against religion, maybe one of these days you’ll consider the other side of the discussion.
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
Here's a couple things I found when I Googled "Stalin atheist"
http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/hitlerstalin.html
http://www.atheistalliance.org/library/nelson-atheism_communism.php
Despite the valid arguments made on both those sites I'm willing to admit that atheism played a small part in Stalin's purges, but the vast majority of the dead were killed for purely political reasons.
I find this interesting, on one of the old evolution threads someone said that since the wiki entry on evolution was apparently written by someone who accepted evolution that it wasn't valid. A bias does not prevent someone from making a factual argument, and have you considered the possible bias of your sources? Much of the anti-communist rhetoric espoused (especially during the 50's) specifically targeted their lack of religion as a reason to resist them.
Also, the fact that atheism is defended by atheists shouldn't come as any surprise, most theists would be perfectly happy to let atheism be portrayed as the impetus behind mass murder regardless of truth simply to advance their agenda.
I would also ask you to notice that I did not dismiss your argument, given the link you gave I'm ready to accept that atheism played a small part in the purges. However, given that there was also perfectly plausible non-theistic reasons to kill the theists, combined with the fact that most of the people were killed over policy disagreements and not anything to do with religion I'm simply not prepared to say "Stalin's purges were caused by atheism" because there isn't nearly enough evidence to back that up.
Quote:
History actually sees the doctrine of atheism as professed by Marxism/Leninism as playing a very large, albeit sporadic, roll in Stalin’s purges.
Was this history written by people who were biased against atheism?
Quote:
What Stalin did in the name of atheism was as politically driven as what bin Laden does in the name of Islam.
Stipulating for a moment that Stalin was largely motivated by Atheism, I'll agree to this. However one of the things I'd like to point out is that the people who carried out Stalin's purges weren't drawn to him because of Atheism, they were drawn to him because of the promises that the Communists made about the utopian society that would be brought about by Communism, Atheism was most likely a tertiary point for most of them, something they were willing to accept in order to reap the benefits of Communism. Bin Laden on the other hand plays directly to peoples religion, he is motivated by the foreign policy decisions of the U.S. but to gain popular support he makes it a Islam vs. the Zionist conspiracy issue. The people did not flock to Stalin because of Atheism, but a large part of the reason why they flock to (and are willing to die for) Bin Laden is because he makes it a religious issue.
Quote:
When a government that espouses a policy of a particular theistic philosophy kills or oppresses any people who don’t support that philosophy many secularists insist that it is result of the theistic belief, but when a government that espouses a policy of a particular atheistic philosophy kills or oppresses any people who don’t support that philosophy those same secularists then insist that it can’t be the cause of this atheistic belief.
Atheists overstate the effect of religion on violence, I'll buy that, but at the theists overstate the effect of atheism on violence and understate the effects of religion on violence. How many Muslims have you heard say that Islam is a religion of peace?
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Quote:
Originally posted by ChrisMoorhead:
Place my body on a ship and burn it on the sea,
Let my spirit rise, Valkyries carry me.
Take me to Valhalla where my brothers wait for me.
Fires burn into the sky, my spirit will never die.
I realize this probably isn't the response you wanted for your post, but Manowar is awesome.
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Quote:
Originally posted by seryn:
call me uniformed, but - He was killing JEWS. JEWISH PEOPLE. Followers of THE JEWISH RELIGION.
How is that not religiously motivated?
Good question. Yep, Hitler killed Jews. Jewish people. Followers of the Jewish religion. But lest we forget, the Holocaust also targetted Gypsies, Poles and other Slavs, political dissidents, people with mental or physical disabilities, homosexuals, and others deemed unfit for society.
The basic confusion is this: 1) Hitler killed Jews. 2) Judaism is a religion. 3) Therefore, the reason Hitler killed the Jews was because of religion. But saying Hitler killed Jews "because of religion" is ambiguous. Whose religion? Did he kill them because of their religion? Or because of his? Let's take these by turn.
Did Hitler Kill the Jews Because of Their Religion?
Short answer: no. Hitler didn't have a beef with Judaism as such. That is, he wasn't mad because of some feature or features of the Jewish religion. Hitler hated Jews not because of their religion but because he considered them a danger to Germany.
Hitler thought that Germans were descendents of the Aryan race, a race of "supermen" who legitimately had the duty to exert their rule. The identity of Germany as an Aryan nation was threatened by the Jews. As Hitler saw it (and remember that Fascism is a form of hypernationalism), the Jews were a nation unto themselves, but a nation with no homeland. So the Jews brought a second nation into whatever country they lived in. For Hitler, the Jews weren't truly Germans. They didn't belong. As a nation unto themselves, the thinking went, the Jews represented a threat to the German nation because they had no loyalty to the fatherland, but only to themselves. So the Jews (the thinking goes) would worm their way into businesses and take over solely for the good of themselves, not the German nation. It's critical to note that the Nazis thought the Jews were a threat to the German nation not because of the their religion, but because they were a separate nation unto themselves.
In addition, Nazi scientists, using eugenic theories, classified Jews as subhuman. That really let the hate flow, because if the German/Aryan nation was a nation of supermen, and the Jews were subhuman, then there was a danger of polluting German blood through intermarriage. (Note that I don't buy any of this--I think it's as nutty as the next guy.) Incidentally, the "homeless nation" thing is why they persecuted the gypsies. And the subhuman thing is why the persecuted the slavs. And the interbreeding thing is why they persecuted the mentally and physically handicapped. The Holocaust wasn't a project intended to wipe out Jews, but intended to eliminate threats to the "Aryan" nation.
Did Hitler Kill the Jews Because of His Religion?
Again, short answer: no. There is anecdotal evidence that Hitler deployed religious terminology in his propaganda (as previously noted by other posters). But I think that the concensus of historians is that Hitler's religion was not the determining factor in the Holocaust. That is, Hitler saw his project not as a religious project of eliminating another religion, but as a nationalistic project to protect Germany. In the aftermath of the first World War, Germans couldn't understand why they'd lost. After all, no battles had been fought on German soil. No German territory had been taken. And German forces hadn't been decisively defeated. How could the invincible German war machine have lost? The answer, according to some, was that the Jews had conspired to bring Germany down. After all, they had no loyalty to the country. The Jews must have benefitted from it somehow. (Again, I don't buy any of this; it's just what the anti-Semites thought.) And then in the aftermath of the war, Germany's economy went to hell. Inflation and unemployment were completely out of control. And the Treaty of Versailles was humiliating (among other things, Germany had to ta
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Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
[BAtheists overstate the effect of religion on violence, I'll buy that, but at the theists overstate the effect of atheism on violence and understate the effects of religion on violence. How many Muslims have you heard say that Islam is a religion of peace?
Now we're getting somewhere! I see your side ("theists overstate the effect of atheism on violence") and I think you're seeing some of mine ("atheists overstate the effect of religion on violence").
Incidentally, I think bin Ladin makes a good case study. How many of us really think that his primary motivation is religious? If we do, do we think that he really understands his own faith? If we don't, what might his real motivations be?
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Quote:I’ve not really provided any sources. The Wikipedia source I posted was as per your specific response. Wikipedia is not always reliable. It’s a good place to start an investigation of a topic, but not the best place to end it. And yes, I’m a little bit dismissive of what the atheistalliance has to say on the topic. I would consider them to be even less reliable then the Wikipedia site. But I am happy that you’re willing to accept the roll that atheism has played in Communism. I’m not trying to be dismissive of your argument, but as far as bias in this thread, I don’t see many people trying to argue that atheism is the cause of the world’s violence. What I see are people trying to argue the theism is the cause of world’s violence while they attempt to insulate atheism, and as I’ve already point out that is not an internally consistent argument.
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
I find this interesting, on one of the old evolution threads someone said that since the wiki entry on evolution was apparently written by someone who accepted evolution that it wasn't valid. A bias does not prevent someone from making a factual argument, and have you considered the possible bias of your sources? Much of the anti-communist rhetoric espoused (especially during the 50's) specifically targeted their lack of religion as a reason to resist them.
Quote:I don’t know but given the degree of contempt the academic community seems to have for religion, I’d doubt it.
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
Was this history written by people who were biased against atheism?
Quote:I doubt this too. It is not Islam that makes a man strap a bomb to his chest and kill innocent women and children. It is something else, and I don’t think it is religion that bin Laden inspires in people. He’s not even a religious leader.
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
Stipulating for a moment that Stalin was largely motivated by Atheism, I'll agree to this. However one of the things I'd like to point out is that the people who carried out Stalin's purges weren't drawn to him because of Atheism, they were drawn to him because of the promises that the Communists made about the utopian society that would be brought about by Communism, Atheism was most likely a tertiary point for most of them, something they were willing to accept in order to reap the benefits of Communism. Bin Laden on the other hand plays directly to peoples religion, he is motivated by the foreign policy decisions of the U.S. but to gain popular support he makes it a Islam vs. the Zionist conspiracy issue. The people did not flock to Stalin because of Atheism, but a large part of the reason why they flock to (and are willing to die for) Bin Laden is because he makes it a religious issue.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:I guess that depends on how you look at it, but as far as I’m concerned it is the same thing. I don’t know how many people in Stalinist Russia didn’t believe in the existence of any god or just hated everyone who did, but what I do know is that it was the particular way that belief was applied that was the problem, not the belief itself. Was it the same kind of atheism that a normal healthy fair-minded person espouses? Probably not. But then if we are going to draw a distinction between atheism and anti-theism with regards to Stalinism, then we should make the same provision for the theistic side, which we don’t do. We label both the religion espoused by the bin Laden’s of the world the same way we label the religion espoused by normal healthy fair-minded people, but they are not the same thing. Instead of trying to insulate atheism or some brand of theism because we sympathize with it, we should either just admit that any philosophy, including atheism, can and has been used by someone as an excuse to kill in the process of grabbing or consolidating power, or perhaps a better way of looking at it, is to realize that regardless of what beliefs are espoused, these kinds of things are always political in nature, not religious (either atheistically religious or theistically religious).
Originally posted by citizen:
I was under the impression it was anti-theist, which isn't entirely the same thing?
Quote:Marxism and Leninism espoused the belief that atheism was the supreme belief and the Soviet government, except when it had other more pressing issues (like the Nazi Blitz rolling over the Ukraine), consistently advocated the targeting of non-atheist entities and the suppression and elimination of theistic beliefs. Now that they didn’t manage to accomplish all of that or that sometimes other things were more important, doesn’t mean that’s not what they were trying to do. Henry the 8th’s reasons for doing what he did were far less ideological, I think. And Stalin’s particular views were probably a lot more like Hitler’s in that all he really wanted was ultimate power; the ideology was just a means to that end.
Originally posted by citizen:
So it must be Atheist because he killed theists? You may have a point, but I thought the reason he went after the churches was for much the same reason Henry the 8th did.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
How many Muslims have you heard say that Islam is a religion of peace?
Plenty.
I've also heard plenty of folks say that Christianity is a religion of peace. And several others have remarked that so is their religion. And many atheists and agnostics claim to be people of peace.
I'm not clear on your point; are you trying to definitely state that Islam is -not- a religion of peace? If so, are you will to grant that neither is Chrisitanity?
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Quote:
Originally posted by Causal:Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
[BAtheists overstate the effect of religion on violence, I'll buy that, but at the theists overstate the effect of atheism on violence and understate the effects of religion on violence. How many Muslims have you heard say that Islam is a religion of peace?
Now we're getting somewhere! I see your side ("theists overstate the effect of atheism on violence") and I think you're seeing some of mine ("atheists overstate the effect of religion on violence").
IMO the potential for abuse and violence from religion is much higher then for atheism. Many of the things that atheists (and theists of other religions) blame theists for (Inquisition, Crusades, jihads etc.) are not entirely the fault of theism, however some of the fault lies with theism if not for starting them but for allowing them to happen as religion can convince people to adopt positions that are entirely irrational.
However the potential for abuse exists in atheism when it is dogmatic, the same as any other dogma. The difference is that atheism is usually much less dogmatic then theism, it's harder to justify something based on a lack of belief then based off of a belief, particularly when the belief has usually been firmly entrenched since childhood while the unbelief usually stems from later examination of a topic.
Quote:
Incidentally, I think bin Ladin makes a good case study. How many of us really think that his primary motivation is religious?
A slightly better question would be was it his ORIGINAL primary motivation, the answer to that is known to be no, his original problem was with the U.S. putting soldiers in Saudi Arabia and then exacerbated by not taking them away after Desert Storm was over. As for his motivations now I can't say, I'm pretty sure that his secondary motivation was religious and that may have taken the place of his primary motivation (though I dont think that's the case).
Quote:
If we do, do we think that he really understands his own faith?
Sure, some Muslims will tell you that Islam is a religion of peace, the same as most Christians, however both the Koran and the Bible are full of justifications for murder, oppression, war, hate, and intolerance, it's all a matter of which parts you put the emphasis on, Bin laden would use the parts of the Koran glorifying war to justify it and he would be right.
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Quote:
Originally posted by leadb:Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
How many Muslims have you heard say that Islam is a religion of peace?
Plenty.
I've also heard plenty of folks say that Christianity is a religion of peace. And several others have remarked that so is their religion. And many atheists and agnostics claim to be people of peace.
I'm not clear on your point; are you trying to definitely state that Islam is -not- a religion of peace? If so, are you will to grant that neither is Chrisitanity?
You're asking the wrong person, I'm an atheist. My point was that some Muslims say that there's is a religion of peace while others are perfectly happy to use Islam as justification for murder and rightfully so given some of the passages I've seen from the Koran. Christianity is much the same with some parts espousing peace love and understanding while others demand the death of certain groups of people. Like I said i my last post, it's all a matter of where you put the emphasis.
EDIT: And that I suppose is one of my major problems, religion can easily be used to justify murder, with atheism it isn't so easy since there's no holy book decrying non-believers
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I think I read/heard that 10% of Americans believe Elvis is still alive. I have found no shortage of delusion nor stupidity on this planet. Been lied to all my life. What makes you think, people have been telling you the truth. How dependent is that? Give up your personal power, cause you don't want to deal.
Talk to god, "You are great, I am nothing, now can I have a hotdog?"
Who's the picked on christian up there. Suck it up, martyr. As far as I am concerned, all religion is poison for the weak and feeble. But you can share the planet with me. Seems like that is more generousity than most religious pikers show us non believers.
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Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
You're asking the wrong person, I'm an atheist. My point was that some Muslims say that there's is a religion of peace while others are perfectly happy to use Islam as justification for murder and rightfully so given some of the passages I've seen from the Koran. Christianity is much the same with some parts espousing peace love and understanding while others demand the death of certain groups of people. Like I said i my last post, it's all a matter of where you put the emphasis.
Had I been clear that was your initial intent, I would not have commented. Thanks for clarifying.
Quote:
EDIT: And that I suppose is one of my major problems, religion can easily be used to justify murder, with atheism it isn't so easy since there's no holy book decrying non-believers
Or it can be easily used to justify peaceful co-existance; which gets back to my original post... The violence is about the pursuit of power.
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Quote:
Originally posted by leadb:
Had I been clear that was your initial intent, I would not have commented. Thanks for clarifying.
Apologies for not being clear.
Quote:
Or it can be easily used to justify peaceful co-existance
So can Secular Humanism, even pure science can give us a reason to be nice to each other*, religion isn't necessary to get people to play nice.
Quote:
which gets back to my original post... The violence is about the pursuit of power.
Sometimes certainly, I'll even agree with most times, but sometimes violence is just about anger and hate (I suppose you can turn that around and call it power but it's not the most accurate description IMO) and religion gives one more thing that people feel VERY strongly about to be angry and hateful over and can be used to promote anger and hate in other areas (persecution of homosexuals and "witches" for instance).
*Humans are not physically exceptional in any particular way thus our success as a species is not due to physical prowess, the only things we have going for us over other animals are intelligence and teamwork, thus from an evolutionary standpoint it makes sense for us to leverage intelligence and teamwork to ensure the survival of our species since that's what brought us success before. This would mean that it is in our best interests to strive for intelligence and work together and treat each other fairly since fair treatment reinforces teamwork.
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What I don't get is why the discussion focusses on religion being the root of all evil, when it's clear that if there were a God, he'd be the root of all evil, since he created everything in the first place.
Which leads to the question: why do people insist on worshipping the root of all evil?
Just a thought.
Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.
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Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:Quote:Yes and in an Atheist family the parents would let their children stay out all night having sex and taking drugs.
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Josef Stalin had millions of people killed because they were not perceived to believe or support Stalin’s brand of atheist communism. How is that any different then bin Laden having people killed for not supporting his brand of Islam? If we are going to use this kind of language then we should endeavor to apply it fairly. Stalin had millions killed in an effort to export his brand of atheist communism. If bin Laden murdered in the name of theism, then Stalin murdered in the name of atheism.
If Stalin's purges were Atheist, then Iraq is a Christian Crusade, after all George Bush is a Christain, and God did tell him to do it.
Actually, all though I don't think Iraq is a Christian Crusade, such a position would be much stronger than saying Stalin was killing for Atheism.
You trying to portray Stalin's purges as an Atheistic version of the obviously theistic terrorism of Al Qaeda is little more than word play, it's intellectually dishonest, frankly.
Religion is square centre in Bin Landen's thinking, belief in the non-existence of god wasn't even a side issue to the purges. The fact that you construct a sentence in such away as to shoe horn Atheism in, then throw away the communism aspect in order to put Atheism front, and centre changes that, not at all.
Gotta side with Cit here man. That's some extrodinary word play. You're almost convincing that any battle, whether religiously motivated, or motivated by the absolute non-existance and disbelief of religion are all religious battles. No wonder you Dawkinites are doing such a bang up job destroying religion in the West. We need to get a bunch of you in Iraq and the rest of the middle east pronto so we can get them to put down the Queran and pick up the remote and popcorn and their cell phones and text their choices in for the next winner of Afganian Idol......
I know I'll sleep better at night knowing that they'd be less likely to suicide bomb the mall tomorrow just because their pick didn't win Idol than because their God told them to.
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Quote:I don't accept that Atheism is a type of Theism. "Stalin was Atheist" is not an equivalent statement to "Al Qaeda is a religion based organisation". If Stalin was a Christian would that mean the purges were Christian? I don't think so, I don't see how the beliefs of the head man automatically make his actions based entirely on those beliefs.
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
I guess that depends on how you look at it, but as far as I’m concerned it is the same thing. I don’t know how many people in Stalinist Russia didn’t believe in the existence of any god or just hated everyone who did, but what I do know is that it was the particular way that belief was applied that was the problem, not the belief itself.
Believe it or not, but my basis for saying something is motivated by religion is not based on solely on the beliefs of the people running the show. If someone says "Lets kill people because God says so" I'd say that was religiously motivated, but saying "Let's go kill people" does not therefore mean that it is Atheist, simply because there is no Theistic element. If, however, the statement was "Let's kill people because there is no God" the situation would be different.
Quote:I already make a distinction between Theism and anti-Atheism. But that's not the distinction you are asking for, I don't think the distinction you are asking for is equivalent. You seem to be saying that Fundamentalism is to Theism, what Anti-Theism is to Atheism, and I don't see that at all.
But then if we are going to draw a distinction between atheism and anti-theism with regards to Stalinism, then we should make the same provision for the theistic side, which we don’t do.
Quote:I don't think we do Finn, at least most people don't. Though I have, at times, been one of the few people on this site who doesn't want to say "all Muslims are Terrorists". But necessarily a given fundamentalism is a subset of a given Theism, but I don't accept that Anti-Theism is a subset of Atheism.
We label both the religion espoused by the bin Laden’s of the world the same way we label the religion espoused by normal healthy fair-minded people, but they are not the same thing.
Quote:I thought that's what Henry VIII wanted? He got rid of the old Catholicism and replaced it with a brand of Christianity that had him at the Head, under God.
Henry the 8th’s reasons for doing what he did were far less ideological, I think. And Stalin’s particular views were probably a lot more like Hitler’s in that all he really wanted was ultimate power; the ideology was just a means to that end.
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Quote:What if it's "Let's kill people because they believe in God". That would be a theistic motivation, wouldn't it?
Originally posted by citizen:
If, however, the statement was "Let's kill people because there is no God" the situation would be different.
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Quote:I think that's more difficult. It is motivated by the victims religion, but you can't say they're religion is at fault, any more than you can say a Theist killing an Atheist is automatically a killing motivated by Atheism. It would be not unlike saying the Woman who got raped brought it on herself by wearing a short skirt.
Originally posted by Khyron:
What if it's "Let's kill people because they believe in God". That would be a theistic motivation, wouldn't it?
It is anti-theists, either a specific theism, or all theisms, but it is not necessarily Atheist, which is one reason why I think you can't say Anti-Theism is to Atheism what Fundamentalism is to Theism.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Khyron:
What I don't get is why the discussion focusses on religion being the root of all evil, when it's clear that if there were a God, he'd be the root of all evil, since he created everything in the first place.
Which leads to the question: why do people insist on worshipping the root of all evil?
This, of course, takes us in a completely different direction than the rest of the thread. This is the argument against God from evil, or the so-called "Problem of Evil." In a nutshell, there are two versions of it: the logical problem and the evidentiary problem. The logical problem holds that it is not just mistaken but positively irrational to believe in God, because the attributes commonly predicated of him are such that they are incompatible with the existence of evil in the world. The logical problem, though at one time it had quite a following, is not argued with much frequency any more, due to the efforts of Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga's works God and Other Minds and The Nature of Necessity (and summarized in God, Freedom, and Evil) set forth a solution to the logical problem of evil that is accepted by most philosopers (theistic and atheistic alike) as having solved the problem. Hence most philosophers do not take this strategy in arguing against God. (By the by, I wrote a paper on the Plantinga's free will defense; it's on my blog: http://calebkeller.blogspot.com/2007/05/plantinga-and-problem-of-evil.
html).
Typically, your objection is answered as follows: if humans have freedom of will, then they and they alone are responsible for their choices. And if that's the case, you can have humans doing evil things that God isn't the cause of.
Interested to hear what you think.
Oh, and a P.S. to those who think that all thinking about God is illogical thinking: I'd challenge you to pick up a copy of God, Freedom and Evil and see what it looks like for someone to use logic to think about God.
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Quote:My point was a bit different from the standard "problem of evil" argument, though. I wasn't really saying it's irrational to believe in God because there's evil in the world, I was saying it's irrational to worship him because there's evil in the world. For argument's sake, let's assume God exists. He created evil in the world (or rather, a person's capacity to do evil), so does the good he created really make up for it? People worship him because of the good he's done and ignore the evil he enables and allows, which is sort of like thinking a mafia boss or a warlord is a saint since he gives money to charity or tells his henchmen to help build an orphanage.
Originally posted by Causal:
This is the argument against God from evil, or the so-called "Problem of Evil." In a nutshell, there are two versions of it: the logical problem and the evidentiary problem. The logical problem holds that it is not just mistaken but positively irrational to believe in God, because the attributes commonly predicated of him are such that they are incompatible with the existence of evil in the world.
Quote:I agree with that statement in itself, but it's part of the contradiction that I mentioned above: Evil is attributed to people and, presumably, good attributed to God. It seems like very selective reasoning, it's like he can't lose and people can keep worshipping him because they attribute him with only good intentions, but the argument forgets that God allows freedom of will to include doing evil things. If God had the option of allowing evil by giving people unlimited free will, or suppressing evil by allowing only limited free will that doesn't allow for actions that are evil, why would he not go for the latter? Is unlimited free will, which in most cases is restricted by upbringing and society anyway, really more important to him than the lack of evil?
If humans have freedom of will, then they and they alone are responsible for their choices. And if that's the case, you can have humans doing evil things that God isn't the cause of.
I haven't had a look at your paper yet since I'm still pressed for time (exams...), but I look forward to reading it.
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Quote:Are you actually accusing me of being a “Dawkinite?” It seems like you’ve bought hook line and sinker into Citizen’s word play.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Gotta side with Cit here man. That's some extrodinary word play. You're almost convincing that any battle, whether religiously motivated, or motivated by the absolute non-existance and disbelief of religion are all religious battles. No wonder you Dawkinites are doing such a bang up job destroying religion in the West.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:Quote:
Or it can be easily used to justify peaceful co-existance
So can Secular Humanism, even pure science can give us a reason to be nice to each other*, religion isn't necessary to get people to play nice.
I do think that you're right that there are forces other than religion that can be used as a source of motivation or inspiration for peaceful co-existence. But that doesn't mean that it's wrong to say that religion can't or shouldn't (and I realize you're not arguing that, but some might). I think that it's the case that if you look at the most egregious abuses of Christianity, you'll find that they occur in the period after Theodosius established Christianity as the official (and only legal) religion of the Roman Empire. Prior to that period, Christians had been a persecuted minority--obviously not in any position to perpetrate large-scale abuses of the type we've been discussing this far. Galen, the Roman physician, took up the subject of the Christian faith (which was steadily moving throughout the empire) in the middle of the second century. Although he criticized the Christians for not being able to present a philosophical defense of their beliefs, "Galen was impressed that Christians were able to lead men and women to a life of virtue in the same fashion as the leading philosophical schools of the day. Through Christian practice, Christian morality, the early Chrstian movement made its first bid for acceptance within the Greco-Roman world." [ 1 ] Wilken asserts that in the world of second century Rome, Christians, while they were reviled for going against the grain of traditional Roman religion, were also living decent lives, and it was the quality of those lives that legitimized the Christian religion to their contemporaries.
By the time of the "Great Persecution" in 303 CE, Ralph Martin Novak notes that, "The tetrarchs found it difficult to enforce wide-spread compliance with the measures directed against the Christians because many local officials only half-heartedly carried out their instructions. This lack of zeal among the local officials may lie in the facy that by this time the Christians were a known quantity: people who, even if they were prone to a rather embarrassingly strident monotheism, were nonetheless respectable in their personal and ethical conduct and performed many works of charity." [ 2 ] Novak, then, thinks that the reason the Great Persecution wasn't more devastating to the Christian church was that while the Christians did certainly have strange beliefs, they were also benefitting their communities.
Contrast this to the situation after Constantine's legalization of Christianity: "Constantine appears to have believed that Christianity could be made to serve as a source of unity and strength for Rome's empire." [ 3 ] He embarked on this project enthusiastically, even exerting his control over church councils in order to enforce his "one church, one empire, one emperor" doctrine. By the time of Theodosius, Christianity had been incorporated fully into the apparatus of the Roman Empire and vice versa, such that teasing them apart would have been impossible. And this interweaving of the Church and the structures of State power persisted for another thousand-plus years. It was during that time that the "religious" violence took place. To be fair, a thing like the Spanish Inquisition ("Fear, surprise, and a fanatical devotion to the Pope!!") does certainly seem to be fully and wholly religiously motivated. But if we were to look at other instances of "religious" violence, I suspect that we'd see that in many cases, such violence was a bid for power couched in religious terms, more so than it was legitimately religious violence.
I guess my main thesis here is that while, yes, there have been and continue to be instances of purely religious violence, much of the violence carried out in religion's name is not religiously motivated, but rather motivated by a desire for power. I mourn the fact that my f
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Quote:First of all Stalin and Al Qaeda are not equivalent because one is an organization and one is man. But the atheism in Stalin’s purges, among other religious purges in the Soviet Union, had to do with the ideology of the Soviet Union, not with Stalin’s atheism.
Originally posted by citizen:
I don't accept that Atheism is a type of Theism. "Stalin was Atheist" is not an equivalent statement to "Al Qaeda is a religion based organisation". If Stalin was a Christian would that mean the purges were Christian? I don't think so, I don't see how the beliefs of the head man automatically make his actions based entirely on those beliefs.
Quote:“Let’s kill people because they believe in god.”
Originally posted by citizen:
If, however, the statement was "Let's kill people because there is no God" the situation would be different.
Quote:You’re arguing my point. In other words, you're not willing to make the same provisions for the theistic side that you are for the atheistic side. Your claim requires that the religious justification used by Al Qaeda is just a subset of the religious opinions held by the majority of peace-loving religious people, but then the brand of atheism espoused by the Soviet Union in its religious purges was something different from peace-loving atheist. And until we are willing to apply this language fairly, I don’t think it should be used, because it is not internal consistent and it will just become a justification to hate religion in general.
Originally posted by citizen:
I don't think we do Finn, at least most people don't. Though I have, at times, been one of the few people on this site who doesn't want to say "all Muslims are Terrorists". But necessarily a given fundamentalism is a subset of a given Theism, but I don't accept that Anti-Theism is a subset of Atheism.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Hey Fredgiblet:
At the risk of being to tangential, I appreciated your comment and wanted to respond.
Anyways, it sounds like you are using the Miller experiment to justify the possibility of a naturalistic origin of life. However, the Miller experiment does not even apply to the question. Why? Because 1) It presupposes an early atmosphere of methane, hydrogen and ammonia. The current understanding is that the early environment was mainly water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen which do not interact to form the building blocks of life. Therefore, the Miller experiment makes no contribution to a naturalistic explanation of the origin of life -- it doesn't even apply.
The second flaw in using the Miller experiment as justification is that it was built with a "trap", to separate out more complicated molecules. Nature, however, does not have a trap to deliberately separate the more complicated molecules. In real life, even presupposing that the early atmosphere they used was correct, these molecules would have interacted with anything else in the "soup", generally forming long chain hydrocarbons -- not amino acids and nucleotides.
One more side note: as far as I know, the Miller experiment never demonstrated that it even formed the 4 basic nucleotides of DNA and all 20 essential amino acids. And the amino acids it did form were a mixture of right and left handed versions (modern organisms only use left handed versions in the construction of proteins). It gets even more complicated, but I think you get the idea that producing and organizing these building blocks into something life-promoting defied the odds...
As far as your point about needing some kind of precursor cell that is simpler than any of the one-celled organisms we have today, the problem is, the simplest organism we can conceive of that meets criteria for being alive (um, I guess that would mean having the ability to replicate, repair itself, move, grow, eat, and excrete) is still incredibly complex and still beyond anything we can create in a lab. I think it takes some degree of faith to believe that this could have formed naturally.
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Quote:I assume you are missing the point on purpose.
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
First of all Stalin and Al Qaeda are not equivalent because one is an organization and one is man. But the atheism in Stalin’s purges, among other religious purges in the Soviet Union, had to do with the ideology of the Soviet Union, not with the Stalin’s atheism.
Quote:I've already addressed that.
"people because they believe in god.”
Quote:You saying it doesn't make it true. You seem unwilling to accept that Atheism isn't a form of Theism.
You’re arguing my point. In other words, you're not willing to make the same provisions for the theistic side that you are for the atheistic side.
Quote:Someone can be anti-Theist without being Atheist, but you can't be a religious fundamentalist without being a Theists, therefore it is entirely incorrect to say Anti-Theism is to Atheist what fundamentalism is too theism. Saying “No it isn't” because you are unwilling to make the same provisions for the Atheist side that you do for the Theistic side, is not an argument
You claim that the religious justification used by Al Qaeda is just a subset of the religious opinions held by the majority of peace-loving religious people, but then you claim that the brand of atheism espoused by the Soviet Union in its religious purges was something different from peace-loving atheist.
.Quote:Saying that a Fundamentalist Muslim Fanatic has to be a Muslim isn't internally consistent? You're going to have to explain that one.
And until we are willing to apply this language fairly, I don’t think it should be used, because it is not internal consistent and it will just become a justification to hate religion in general.
Quote:It is not I who is using 'word play', it is you. Secondly it's obvious Jack wasn't talking to you, he's trying to insult, and straw man the arguments of, everyone on the side of the debate he doesn't agree with, and he agrees with your side.
Are you actually accusing me of being a “Dawkinite?” It seems like you’ve bought hook line and sinker into Citizen’s word play.
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Hey Citizen,
My point in mentioning that some people here tend to focus on religion as being evil/negative was to say that much good has been done in the name of religion, yet they don't take that into account.
Also, I was a bit surprised to see that in the span of a few keystrokes, you were able to weigh all the good ever done throughout time by religiously motivated groups versus all the good ever done by non-religiously motivated groups and deduce that they "canceled out". Wow, I knew firefly fans were intelligent, but this borders on omniscience...
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I said I suspect they cancel out. The fact that you think we should weigh ONLY the good done by religion borders on dishonest argument, the rest borders on insult.
Why do you think it's important to weigh the good done by Theists but not Atheists?
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Quote:Of course you do.
Originally posted by citizen:
I assume you are missing the point on purpose.
Quote:It looks to me like you dodged it.
Originally posted by citizen:
I've already addressed that.
Quote:It doesn’t make any difference whether I accept that or not, people killed in the Soviet Union’s religious purges are as dead as those killed by Al Qaeda.
Originally posted by citizen:
You saying it doesn't make it true. You seem unwilling to accept that Atheism isn't a form of Theism.
The communist ideology of the Soviet Union was atheist. But you want to re-define that as something else in order to insulate atheism from the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union. That would be fine, except that you are not willing to make the same provision for Al Qaeda, and until you do, this use of religion as the root of violence is not internally consistent. You’re use of language automatically implies that religious beliefs are inherently violent, but the a lack of religious belief is not, when in fact Communism and Fascism demonstrate conclusive that the lack of religion and even atheism can be used as tools to justify murder.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:Quote:
Or it can be easily used to justify peaceful co-existance
So can Secular Humanism, even pure science can give us a reason to be nice to each other*, religion isn't necessary to get people to play nice.Quote:
which gets back to my original post... The violence is about the pursuit of power.
Sometimes certainly, I'll even agree with most times, but sometimes violence is just about anger and hate (I suppose you can turn that around and call it power but it's not the most accurate description IMO) and religion gives one more thing that people feel VERY strongly about to be angry and hateful over and can be used to promote anger and hate in other areas (persecution of homosexuals and "witches" for instance).
So, your logic follows, that since people feel VERY strongly about religion, ipso facto religion is
An equivalent argument for the "other side" would be to find some avowed 'human secularist', point out any faults, and declare it devoid of truth, and a thing to be stomped out.
So, to be very clear, I will state:
Secular Humanism can be easily used to justify peaceful co-existance.
We agree on that point. However, arguing that religion is the root of all evil (remember the original premise of this discussion) does -not- lead to peaceful co-existance; it tends to lead to hate, war, death and destruction. My position is better stated as such:
Belief in God (god, goddess, gods, etc), and hence religion of some variety, is not intrinsicly evil; it is often a force for good. Thus, religion is -not- the root of -all- evil.
To further stipulate, I will maintain that some people lack the intellectual capacity to be a "good human secularist"; if you 'liberate' them from the 'controls' of religion, you can end up with a Stalin. Of course, Stalin was not a proponent of 'Human Secularism' (to the best of my knowledge); we was a communist and an atheist. And, clearly in agreement with my original post, a 'power grabber', and used what structures were available to him to gain the power he wished. Is this "-1" for the atheist team? I think not. No more than I would blame Christians in general for the many misdeeds of George W. But Stalin is proof positive we should not go clammering off following the lead of an athiest blindly (which I will acknowledge a 'Human secularist' would tend not to given the 'test beliefs' convictions they uphold).
So remember, 'test beliefs', very important. I may not quite qualify for 'human secularist', but I'm a big one for 'test beliefs'. I'm also fond of 'check your assumptions.'
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Quote:It's a more polite way of saying, "you dodged it".
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Of course you do.
Quote:Actually, no I didn't, evidently you didn't like the answer.
It looks to me like you dodged it.
Quote:And the people who are dead in Iraq are still dead, what difference does that make?
It doesn’t make any difference whether I accept that or not, people killed in the Soviet Union’s religious purges are as dead as those killed by Al Qaeda.
Quote:I've been very clear on my reasoning, you in turn, accuse me of this and that, and make replies that amount to "Yes it is" and "Because I say so". If your position is so much stronger, and more internally consistent than my own, I'm at a loss to explain why you are unable to make your case without personal attacks.
The communist ideology of the Soviet Union was atheist. But you want to re-define that as something else in order to insulate atheism from the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union.
Quote:If your position was as undeniable as you seem to think you would not need these Straw man arguments.
That would be fine, except that you are not willing to make the same provision for Al Qaeda, and until you do, this use of religion as the root of violence is not internally consistent.
Quote:If you say so, but you're use of language implies that Atheism is solely responsible for all violence, and Religion is sometimes blamed.
You’re use of language automatically implies that religious beliefs are inherently violent, but the a lack of religious belief is not, when in fact Communism and Fascism demonstrate conclusive that the lack of religion and even atheism can be used as tools to justify murder.
You cannot be a, for sake of argument, Muslim fanatic, without being a Muslim. You're position is apparently, that you can, that is not consistent, internally or otherwise. Your position is further that you can't be anti-theist without being Atheist, which is not the case. For a start one could be anti-Theism and be Agnostic. You have continued to fail to make your case, because frankly I don't see personal attacks, and “yes it is” as a valid substitute for reasoning.
I'm ready to listen as soon as you are ready to speak.
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Quote:This much I know is not true.
Originally posted by citizen:
I'm ready to listen as soon as you are ready to speak.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:I have asked for your reasoning, and in responce you insult me. It's clear you aren't interested in anyone elses opinion, you are interested in shouting at people until they agree with you.
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
This much I know is not true.
I rather suspect that you don't even know what my position is.
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Quote:When you put it like that, it seems very irrational, but I’m not quite sure that is what is intended. The idea that God created evil (as well as good) is seen much more rationally, when it is understood as God creating free will. Most Western liberal democracies exalt the ideas of “free speech,” “right to privacy,” and “personal freedoms.” But by doing so, are we also exalting the evils that are practiced because of these freedoms? So is it then irrational to support liberal democracies? There are those who believe that the good provided by these freedoms does not outweigh the evil that men practice with them. I’m not one of them; I tend to view these freedoms as a good thing.
Originally posted by Khyron:
My point was a bit different from the standard "problem of evil" argument, though. I wasn't really saying it's irrational to believe in God because there's evil in the world, I was saying it's irrational to worship him because there's evil in the world. For argument's sake, let's assume God exists. He created evil in the world (or rather, a person's capacity to do evil), so does the good he created really make up for it? People worship him because of the good he's done and ignore the evil he enables and allows, which is sort of like thinking a mafia boss or a warlord is a saint since he gives money to charity or tells his henchmen to help build an orphanage.
The alternative is that god created man to be a slave to him, and there are those who believe that is precisely why god created man. That actually seems fairly irrational to me. But this is actually an attitude that we tend to associate with evil, not good. The enslavement of man has never been views as preferable, even by those who’ve practiced slavery.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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But I'm not talking about social liberties, I'm talking about freedom of will. One values social liberties because one knows there is such a thing as, for example, freedom of speech and one would like to have it because it'd probably improve one's quality of life in some way. However, having a limited freedom of will would be different because we wouldn't know that it is limited in the first place. We wouldn't be able to think "Hey, I wonder why rape never crossed my mind before" because a limited freedom of will wouldn't allow us to consider rape. If God were to limit our freedom of will to not consider evil thoughts, we wouldn't know we were lacking any sort of freedom and we wouldn't have evil thoughts.
And if evil is the price to pay for unlimited freedom of will (which, as I said, in most cases gets constrained by upbringing and society anyway), is it worth it?
Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.
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Quote:I guess for the most part he did do that. Maybe it just occurred to him that having one species on the planet who could think more broadly about the world seemed like a good thing at the time. God could have created humans as simpletons, much as most animals, I suppose. The life of ignorant bliss my cat leads does sometimes seem preferable, but as a scientist, I can’t say that I would truly prefer the inability to grasp the beauty and wonder of the universe. Do we not praise our ability to be free-thinkers? I don’t really understand how this comes back to God. God granted us the ability to be free-thinkers; that sounds like a gift to me. How we chose to use it is now up to us, not God.
Originally posted by Khyron:
If God were to limit our freedom of will to not consider evil thoughts, we wouldn't know we were lacking any sort of freedom and we wouldn't have evil thoughts.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Curtailing freedom of will by eliminating evil is hardly like making humans simpletons, and it wouldn't limit our capacity to be free-thinkers except when it comes to evil thoughts. You'd still have most of the things you cherish.
"Maybe it just occurred to him that having one species on the planet who could think more broadly about the world seemed like a good thing at the time."
By hypothesis, God is omniscient and he should've seen bad things were going to happen, and it's not like evil is something modern, it was part of society from the dawn of civilisation.
"God granted us the ability to be free-thinkers; that sounds like a gift to me."
Too much of a good thing can spoil it, though.
Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.
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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
The alternative is that god created man to be a slave to him, and there are those who believe that is precisely why god created man. That actually seems fairly irrational to me. But this is actually an attitude that we tend to associate with evil, not good. The enslavement of man has never been views as preferable, even by those who’ve practiced slavery.
But isn't that still the case, humans being a slave to God's will?
After all, we have "free will" but if we actually exercise it and choose to do evil, we go to hell.
That sort of "You're free to do what you want, but if you don't do as I say, you'll be punished" attitude seems more like a mockery of free will.
That's not to say I'm endorsing evil. Just saying, it's creating free will with the condition of not really exercising it by threat of punishment. How is that not slavery?
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Originally posted by leadb:
So, your logic follows, that since people feel VERY strongly about religion, ipso facto religion isinaccurate'bad' and thus should be stomped out? (I'm sure the stomping in your case would be limited strictly to non-violent, caring methods.) [ edit to remove 'inaccurate' and substitute 'bad' ]
No. My logic is that the good that comes from religion can come from other sources that do not have to potential (or at least have reduced potential) for abuse. I did not state that religion itself is bad, merely that it (like many other things) can have evil effects. If you can achieve the same (or better) results with something that has less negative side-effects why shouldn't you? I would not shed a tear at the death of religion, but I would not advocate a systematic purge of religion either. I do believe that organized religion should be "stomped out" since the potential for abuse is very high and the benefit of organized religion over personal religion is small. However, religion itself is not something I feel strongly about either way (except when I see another story about an abortion clinic being bombed or the Phelps clan picketing another funeral).
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So, to be very clear, I will state:
Secular Humanism can be easily used to justify peaceful co-existance.
We agree on that point. However, arguing that religion is the root of all evil (remember the original premise of this discussion) does -not- lead to peaceful co-existance; it tends to lead to hate, war, death and destruction. My position is better stated as such:
Belief in God (god, goddess, gods, etc), and hence religion of some variety, is not intrinsicly evil; it is often a force for good. Thus, religion is -not- the root of -all- evil.
Agreed, I don't believe I ever said I agreed with Dawkins, in fact I may have posted (and I know I considered posting) a response saying that I think he does more harm then good (at least lately, he used to be pretty kick-ass but then he got religious about his atheism). My position, more clearly stated, is that religion is not necessary and is more harmful and less beneficial then some of the alternatives. However, I am all for allowing people to harm themselves, I just don't want it to affect me.
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To further stipulate, I will maintain that some people lack the intellectual capacity to be a "good human secularist"; if you 'liberate' them from the 'controls' of religion, you can end up with a Stalin.
Agreed...to a much lesser point. Psychopaths exist, this cannot be denied, but religion doesn't necessarily make them any better and in some cases religion can have a hand in creating them (Ed Gein anyone?).
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But Stalin is proof positive we should not go clammering off following the lead of an athiest blindly (which I will acknowledge a 'Human secularist' would tend not to given the 'test beliefs' convictions they uphold).
Right, but that's just it, there is no power structure in atheism, there are no prophets there is no reason to follow someone because they are atheist. People didn't follow Stalin because he was an atheist, they followed him because he promised them things they wanted. On the other hand many religions stress obedience to the leaders of the religion giving over control of their lives to someone else.
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Quote:No, we’d have to become even more then just simpletons. Even animals kill each other. In order to accomplish what you are suggesting it seems to me that humans would have to be devolved down to some sort of inert amoeba. I don’t think that it makes much sense to say that we would be free thinkers if we were told what we could and couldn’t think.
Originally posted by Khyron:
Curtailing freedom of will by eliminating evil is hardly like making humans simpletons, and it wouldn't limit our capacity to be free-thinkers except when it comes to evil thoughts. You'd still have most of the things you cherish.
Quote:I don’t know how omniscient god is. Certainly more then me probably, but in any event, the choice of evil was left up to us. If we choose to be evil, I can’t see that as God’s fault.
Originally posted by Khyron:
By hypothesis, God is omniscient and he should've seen bad things were going to happen, and it's not like evil is something modern, it was part of society from the dawn of civilisation.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:It sounds to me that you’re complaining about Newton’s Third Law. The ability to be sentient and free thinking is not the same thing as the ability to operate without consequences.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
That's not to say I'm endorsing evil. Just saying, it's creating free will with the condition of not really exercising it by threat of punishment. How is that not slavery?
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:Quote:It sounds to me that you’re complaining about Newton’s Third Law. The ability to be sentient and free thinking is not the same thing as the ability to operate without consequences.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
That's not to say I'm endorsing evil. Just saying, it's creating free will with the condition of not really exercising it by threat of punishment. How is that not slavery?
But it's God who made the consequences.
What is the point of free will if the only option that doesn't draw bad consequences is obeying God's will in the first place?
It seems like mindgames at best.
All over the Old Testament God gets pissed off when people don't worship him and don't obey his laws. He killed all but a handful in the story of the great flood for that exact reason.
He created people, apparently, just to worship him. Slaves, whether they theoretically have a choice or not, because in the end they all get judged and only the "good" ones don't go to hell. Hell is a pretty damn big God-made consequence.
And even if you count that people lived in paradise and ignorance when they were first created, he still gave them a just mockery of free will. Obey my one rule or be thrown out of paradise to suffer and die. What's the point of that? The temptation to make a choice that's not the Correct One is already sin.
Slaves and toys to a bored, vain deity, that's all I ever took away from that. Which is why Jesus, to me, is a wonderful philosopher with an amazing message but I just can't connect him to an actual God.
God, to me, is not a judging entity or loving father figure, but rather the indifferent order of the universe. Indifference I can deal with, but not the pretense of caring.
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Originally posted by Malachite:
Hey Fredgiblet:
Anyways, it sounds like you are using the Miller experiment to justify the possibility of a naturalistic origin of life. However, the Miller experiment does not even apply to the question. Why? Because 1) It presupposes an early atmosphere of methane, hydrogen and ammonia. The current understanding is that the early environment was mainly water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen which do not interact to form the building blocks of life. Therefore, the Miller experiment makes no contribution to a naturalistic explanation of the origin of life -- it doesn't even apply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment
Everything that I've seen shows that the current understanding is that a reducing atmosphere is likely, if you can show me links to sources that say otherwise I'll consider them. Additionally the entire atmosphere doesn't need to be reducing it could have had a reducing pocket (a cave perhaps) that just reduces the number of experiments being run at any given time.
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The second flaw in using the Miller experiment as justification is that it was built with a "trap", to separate out more complicated molecules.
The main purpose of the experiment was to show that complex organic chemicals could form, to show that they need to able to see the results, they could have done the experiment without the trap but that would have made the experiment more difficult for no reason.
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Nature, however, does not have a trap to deliberately separate the more complicated molecules. In real life, even presupposing that the early atmosphere they used was correct, these molecules would have interacted with anything else in the "soup", generally forming long chain hydrocarbons -- not amino acids and nucleotides.
I'll get back to this at the end.
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One more side note: as far as I know, the Miller experiment never demonstrated that it even formed the 4 basic nucleotides of DNA and all 20 essential amino acids.
The assumption of need for the 4 nucleotides can be stipulated, but the earliest self-replicators would not necessarily have needed all 22 amino acids. Also the Miller experiment was just the first there were others done later including at least one that created all 4 nucleotides.
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And the amino acids it did form were a mixture of right and left handed versions (modern organisms only use left handed versions in the construction of proteins).
So? It isn't written in stone anywhere that we had to have these particular building blocks, it's entirely possible that we could have ended up with a mixture of handedness or exclusively right-handed acids. It is possible that right-handed acids are somehow less fit then left-handed acids and thus that replicators that used left-handed acids outcompeted the right-handers. Also I've heard that this might be evidence for panspermia as the polarization of radiation might have forced a handedness in the acids developed in space.
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It gets even more complicated, but I think you get the idea that producing and organizing these building blocks into something life-promoting defied the odds...
I'll get to this at the end.
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As far as your point about needing some kind of precursor cell that is simpler than any of the one-celled organisms we have today, the problem is, the simplest organism we can conceive of that meets criteria for being alive (um, I guess that would mean having the ability to replicate, repair itself, move, grow, eat, and excrete) is still incredibly complex and still beyond anything we can create in a lab. I think it takes some degree of faith to believe that this could have formed naturally.
The only necessary ability out of the ones you listed is the ability to replicate, the rest are tertiary, though one you didn't list, heritable variation, is necessary for life to have developed after abiogenesis. Once self replication with heritable variation has developed everything else c
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Quote:
Originally posted by Khyron:
y point was a bit different from the standard "problem of evil" argument, though. I wasn't really saying it's irrational to believe in God because there's evil in the world, I was saying it's irrational to worship him because there's evil in the world. For argument's sake, let's assume God exists. He created evil in the world (or rather, a person's capacity to do evil), so does the good he created really make up for it? People worship him because of the good he's done and ignore the evil he enables and allows, which is sort of like thinking a mafia boss or a warlord is a saint since he gives money to charity or tells his henchmen to help build an orphanage.
Well, the reason I bring up the logical problem of evil is that "atheologians" (to use Plantinga's term) want to argue these sorts of questions to establish God's non-existence. They boil down to objections of the sort: "But surely God could have done better!" From there, atheist will say that the fact that he could have done different, but didn't means either he's not the three-omnis God (as traditionally conceived) or that he doesn't exist.
I see what you mean by the distinction between it being irrational to believe there is such a being and it being irrational to worship such a being. That said, your argument seems to turn around your assertion that "he created the evil in the world (or, rather a person's capacity to do evil)." In the first place, we're going to have to tease these apart. Which is it? Did he create the evil? Or did he create the human capacity for evil? It could be argued that you can conflate these two (such that to create the capacity is sufficient for having been the cause of the evil. But the typical view of human freedom is such that a person is alone responsible for the decisions they make (when it comes to moral culpability). Being that I accept a more libertarian view of human freedom I have to insist that God's being the cause of freedom on the will is not sufficient for his being the cause of evil.
The next interesting bit of your argument (and at this juncture I'm grateful that we both seem to know the philosophical application of the word "argument") is this: "does the good he created really make up for it?" Well, that's the real trick, eh? There are some philosophers whose entire theodicy is based on the belief that all evil will work out for the best in the end (even if we don't know how). This is a pretty difficult view to attack, because no matter what objection is raised, the answer will always be, "I don't know how, but it will work out for the best in the end." But this is hardly a thoroughgoing philosophical defense. Plantinga's proposal is that it might be possible that God could not have created a world with moral good but no moral evil. Now, because he was defending against the logical problem of evil, all he had to establish is that that is possibly the case--not that it is the case. But consider the nature of moral goods. Suppose Smith happens upon Jones, who's fallen into a lake and can't swim. Smith is in a position to save Jones. If Smith dives into the lake and saves Jones, I take that act to be a moral good. But the reason I think that that was a morally good act is because Smith could have done otherwise. Just as morally evil acts seem to involve free choice, morally good acts also involve free choice. But if Smith had no choice in the matter, if he was forced in some way to do what he did, I would hardly say that what he did was morally good. The upshot is that it might turn out that you can't have any moral good unless moral evil is also a live option.
In addition, I'm a little confused on how we might go about measuring evils and goods and comparing the two. It does seem like there's an awful lot of evil in the world. But there's also a lot of good two. I'm not sure we're going to be able to find an objective way to measure and compare, so there's some element of subjectivity inher
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Quote:Yes they do, almost always in order to survive or for related reasons. That's not evil. In most cases a person killing somebody for his survival isn't evil either. A murderer, though, doesn't kill for his own survival, and his actions would be evil.
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
No, we’d have to become even more then just simpletons. Even animals kill each other.
Quote:No it doesn't, unless you think free-thinking people who don't have evil thoughts are inert amoeba.
In order to accomplish what you are suggesting it seems to me that humans would have to be devolved down to some sort of inert amoeba.
Quote:No, but he gave us the choice and so he has to share the responsibility. If a parent gives a child a gun to play with and it kills someone, is it the child's fault or the parent's fault?
If we choose to be evil, I can’t see that as God’s fault.
Before that analogy gets taken out of context, note that I don't think people who do evil things are innocent, as the child would arguably be in such a situation; the analogy was supposed to highlight the aspect of responsibility of the parent-figure, not the innocence or lack thereof of the child-figure.
Causal, I'll get to your post later, an interesting read though (as always).
Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.
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Quote:That wouldn’t seem to solve your problem though. There are just as many consequences to disobeying the laws of the Universe. We are as much slaves to the laws of the universe as to god.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
God, to me, is not a judging entity or living father figure, but rather the indifferent order of the universe. Indifference I can deal with, but not the pretense of caring.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:
Originally posted by Malachite:
[BAlso, I was a bit surprised to see that in the span of a few keystrokes, you were able to weigh all the good ever done throughout time by religiously motivated groups versus all the good ever done by non-religiously motivated groups and deduce that they "canceled out". Wow, I knew firefly fans were intelligent, but this borders on omniscience...
Amazing how that works, eh? I just want to know how you would even go about making such a calculation. By what measure could we empirically determine the ammount of good and the amount of evil such that we could compare them? And then by what measure could we determine what outweighs what? I think that it's going to turn out that there is no way to figure this out, and so any "evaluation" will turn out to be little more than mere opinion.
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Quote:You mean if I go kill someone because he crossed into my territory or because I wanted to eat him. Or maybe I just thought he looked good to eat, so I just maimed him and left him to die. Or maybe I take control of the country and kill all the children who aren’t born from my sperm. You wouldn’t consider those actions to be evil or at least wrong?
Originally posted by Khyron:
Yes they do, almost always in order to survive or for related reasons. That's not evil. In most cases a person killing somebody for his survival isn't evil either. A murderer, though, doesn't kill for his own survival, and his actions would be evil.
Quote:God didn’t give man a gun to play with. Man created the gun and how to use it and chooses to use it.
Originally posted by Khyron:
No, but he gave us the choice and so he has to share the responsibility. If a parent gives a child a gun to play with and it kills someone, is it the child's fault or the parent's fault?
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
I do believe that organized religion should be "stomped out" since the potential for abuse is very high and the benefit of organized religion over personal religion is small.
I've often heard that people oppose "organized" religion. You'll have to explain what this means, and what the difference between that and "personal" religion is.
Also, people can use steak knives to do tremendous evil (cf. with the guy in Japan who killed school kids with one). The mere fact that something might produce bad side effects can't mean that it should be banned. Because then everything would be banned!
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Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:Quote:
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
God, to me, is not a judging entity or living father figure, but rather the indifferent order of the universe. Indifference I can deal with, but not the pretense of caring.
That wouldn’t seem to solve your problem though. There are just as many consequences to disobeying the laws of the Universe. We are as much slaves to the laws of the universe as to god.
But the universe doesn't assume some moral high-ground, nor does it threaten us with inescapable hell after we die.
Order of the universe, as already in the word, is a set of rules (as in direct consequences to certain actions). It doesn't pretend a benevolence to its basic structure.
If we can stand the consequences of our bad choices, we can make them. We don't go to the hot place even though we have no regrets. That's free will to me.
There is nothing to worship, nothing that demands being praised for no reason other than supposedly existing and having made us. (What's to be grateful for in something we had no say in??) None of that self-agrandizing vanity and greed.
Just facts. That's the difference.
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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:Quote:That wouldn’t seem to solve your problem though. There are just as many consequences to disobeying the laws of the Universe. We are as much slaves to the laws of the universe as to god.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
God, to me, is not a judging entity or living father figure, but rather the indifferent order of the universe. Indifference I can deal with, but not the pretense of caring.
Finn, I've always wanted to disobey a law of the universe, can you explain to me how it's possible?
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Quote:It also doesn’t provide use with a heaven after we die or the ability to distinction good from bad. This is just rhetoric.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
But the universe doesn't assume some moral high-ground, nor does it threaten us with inescapable hell after we die.
Quote:So what? The consequence for making the “wrong” choice is still there. The universe always has moral high-ground. If you don’t believe me, convince yourself you can fly and then jump off a building. See if the universe doesn’t smack you with a dose of its own self-righteous moral high ground.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
Order of the universe, as already in the word, is a set of rules (as in direct consequences to certain actions). It doesn't pretend a benevolence to its basic structure.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:You could try to fly. Gravity is likely to take some serious issue with that.
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
Finn, I've always wanted to disobey a law of the universe, can you explain to me how it's possible?
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:If you or some other civilised human did any of that then sure it's evil. But applied to animals in a natural environmental setting there's a reason for that sort of behaviour.
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
You mean if I go kill someone because he crossed into my territory or because I wanted to eat him. Or maybe I just thought he looked good to eat, so I just maimed him and left him to die. Or maybe I take control of the country and kill all the children who aren’t born from my sperm. You wouldn’t consider those actions to be evil or at least wrong?
You're making a mistake by looking at nature and seeing evil, even if you only do it for the sake of argument. There is no evil in nature, the concept of evil only arose once humans became civilised enough to identify behaviour that is detrimental to the overall well-being of a society, and should only be applied in that context. Outside of civilised society there is no evil, and any claims of seeing evil in nature is a case of a person looking at it with 'civilised bias'.
Quote:I think you either completely missed the point of the analogy or you're saying that humans created free will (which, assuming the existence of God, would have been created by him).
God didn’t give man a gun to play with. Man created the gun and how to use it and chooses to use it.
Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Causal:Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
I do believe that organized religion should be "stomped out" since the potential for abuse is very high and the benefit of organized religion over personal religion is small.
I've often heard that people oppose "organized" religion. You'll have to explain what this means, and what the difference between that and "personal" religion is.
Organized religion is when there is a structure (say the Catholic Church) that takes a conceptual religion and forces it's interpretations on it's followers and demands their obedience. Personal religion is when you take a conceptual religion and have everyone make what they will of it. I don't dislike the idea of religion so much as the power structure that forms which enforces specific beliefs and compels people (through force of arms, social pressure or some other means) to follow those specific beliefs.
Now of course you can make the argument that people can choose to be part of a organized religion or not, and this is somewhat true, but the organized religions push the concept that you MUST be part of the organization to be a good member of said religion, and most times people are indoctrinated from childhood to believe that the organized religious structure is the way things are supposed to be. When someone is indoctrinated in a belief from the time they can comprehend speech it's much less of a choice.
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Also, people can use steak knives to do tremendous evil (cf. with the guy in Japan who killed school kids with one). The mere fact that something might produce bad side effects can't mean that it should be banned. Because then everything would be banned!
Right. But here's my point, are there alternatives to steak knives that are less dangerous but do the exact same job at least as well if not better? I think that we have potential alternatives to religion (and I know we have alternatives to organized religions) that are at least as good without the potential for abuse.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:Quote:It also doesn’t provide use with a heaven after we die or the ability to distinction good from bad. This is just rhetoric.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
But the universe doesn't assume some moral high-ground, nor does it threaten us with inescapable hell after we die.
It's not. Heaven and hell being absent factors, all we have to consider are the direct consequences of our actions in the here and now.
Good and bad are disctinctions we have drawn from those consequences, those being suffering or pleasure. Our ability to empathize is an integral part to that structure, as well, as it connects the pleasure and suffering of others to our own.
Basic building blocks. No outwardly imposed moral structure that would necessitate an outwardly imposed heaven or hell.
Quote:Quote:So what? The consequence for making the “wrong” choice is still there. The universe always has moral high-ground. If you don’t believe me, convince yourself you can fly and then jump off a building. See if the universe doesn’t smack you with a dose of its own self-righteous moral high ground.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
Order of the universe, as already in the word, is a set of rules (as in direct consequences to certain actions). It doesn't pretend a benevolence to its basic structure.
I'm not talking about physical laws. (Those aren't moral, either, btw. They're also indifferent.) I'm talking about human interaction, society, our attitude towards ourselves.
A lot more grey area there, without taking away the concept of consequences.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:Quote:You could try to fly. Gravity is likely to take some serious issue with that.
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
Finn, I've always wanted to disobey a law of the universe, can you explain to me how it's possible?
Right, it's not possible. You are saying that rules that cannot be broken are equivalent to rules that can.
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Quote:No I don’t see evil in nature, but I wonder if you can see the implication of your own words. Human beings, as opposed to animals, have the sentient ability to distinguish activity that is detrimental and create a society that seeks to be free of those hardships, if they choose to.
Originally posted by Khyron:
If you or some other civilised human did any of that then sure it's evil. But applied to animals in a natural environmental setting there's a reason for that sort of behaviour.
You're making a mistake by looking at nature and seeing evil, even if you only do it for the sake of argument. There is no evil in nature, the concept of evil only arose once humans became civilised enough to identify behaviour that is detrimental to the overall well-being of a society, and should only be applied in that context. Outside of civilised society there is no evil, and any claims of seeing evil in nature is a case of a paerson looking at it with 'civilised bias'.
Quote:I got the point, but god didn’t give man a gun, he gave man sentient ability and free thought. How man chooses to use that is not god’s fault.
Originally posted by Khyron:
I think you either completely missed the point of the analogy or you're saying that humans created free will (which, assuming the existence of God, would have been created by him).
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:No, I'm saying there are consequences to the actions you take, regardless of whether you blame them on god or not.
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
Right, it's not possible. You are saying that rules that cannot be broken are equivalent to rules that can.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:So then you admit that we are a slave to the physical laws of the universe.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
I'm not talking about physical laws. (Those aren't moral, either, btw. They're also indifferent.) I'm talking about human interaction, society, our attitude towards ourselves.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:Quote:So then you admit that we are a slave to the physical laws of the universe.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
I'm not talking about physical laws. (Those aren't moral, either, btw. They're also indifferent.) I'm talking about human interaction, society, our attitude towards ourselves.
I never said I wasn't. I'm confused as to what this has to do with my point?
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Quote:You’re initial criticism was that people are necessarily a slave to god regardless of their free will. I simply pointed out that we are every bit as much a slave to the universe regardless of our free will.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
I never said I wasn't. I'm confused as to what this has to do with my point?
Quote:If you can stand the consequences of you bad choices, you can make them. This applies as much to religion as to the universe. Accept that in religion, you can choose not to believe in that particular religion. Good luck choosing not to believe gravity.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
Order of the universe, as already in the word, is a set of rules (as in direct consequences to certain actions). It doesn't pretend a benevolence to its basic structure.
If we can stand the consequences of our bad choices, we can make them. We don't go to the hot place even though we have no regrets. That's free will to me.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:Erm... yes? I'm sorry, actually I don't understand the question (or statement). If you're arguing that the thing that makes people civilised is the thing that makes them evil, then I disagree. But I'm not sure if that's what you're saying, so I'll leave it at that.
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
No I don’t see evil in nature, but I wonder if you can see the implication of your own words. Human beings, as opposed to animals, have the sentient ability to distinguish activity that is detrimental and create a society that seeks to be free of those hardships, if they choose to.
Quote:Well, that was the point of the analogy in the first place. I'm saying he shares responsibility, and that he is at fault.
I got the point, but god didn’t give man a gun, he gave man sentient ability and free thought. How man chooses to use that is not god’s fault.
God -> free will -> evil.
Irresponsible parent -> gun to child -> oops.
Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.
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We're talking ethical and moral choices. The kind that actually involve the concept of free will.
Bringing physical laws into this is just lazy!
Not to mention: to the Jewish/Christian/Muslim God it matters a lot whether you believe in them or not. So counting the possibility of their existence, it's not really a choice unless you want to suffer in hell for all eternity.
If we're arguing the merits or downsides to God's masterplan, it's kind of silly to say "Well, but you have the choice not to believe!", since the basis of arguing about that masterplan is its validity in terms of God actually existing. Or people actually believing it. And within that context, not believing is not a neutral choice, as you imply.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Khyron:
Well, that was the point of the analogy in the first place. I'm saying he shares responsibility, and that he is at fault.
God -> free will -> evil.
I'm not sure you're going to be able to use a hypothetical syllogism argument here. If we have libertarian freedom (if, that is, we and we alone are responsible for our own decisions), then your argument by hypothetical syllogism won't work. If a human and a human allow is responsible for the way he uses his freedom, God can't be held accountable for the way the human chooses to use that freedom. And if that's the case, then God neither shares responsibility nor is responsible for evil. At most, he is at fault (maybe) for having created free will. And then we're back to the question of whether human freedom is worth the evil that comes along with it (or, for Plantinga, whether it would even be possible to have human freedom without also having evil).
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Quote:I don’t profess to know what makes people evil, what I do know is that free will allows us to choose, whether that choice is to be civilized or to be evil.
Originally posted by Khyron:
Erm... yes? I'm sorry, actually I don't understand the question (or statement). If you're arguing that the thing that makes people civilised is the thing that makes them evil, then I disagree. But I'm not sure if that's what you're saying, so I'll leave it at that.
Edited to clarify:
My point is that the ability to see what choices lead to evil, allows us to avoid those choices and instead construct a society freer from those hardship then we would otherwise be.
Quote:Is the school that teaches a child science at fault if that child learns how to constructs a nuclear device, does so (setting aside for the moment how he acquired the materials) and detonates it Time Square?
Originally posted by Khyron:
]Well, that was the point of the analogy in the first place. I'm saying he shares responsibility, and that he is at fault.
God -> free will -> evil.
Irresponsible parent -> gun to child -> oops.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:Then I would say that before your point can be made, you’ll first have to define God’s masterplan, because we can’t discuss the merits or downsides to it, if we don’t know what it is.
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
If we're arguing the merits or downsides to God's masterplan, it's kind of silly to say "Well, but you have the choice not to believe!", since the basis of arguing about that masterplan is its validity in terms of God actually existing. Or people actually believing it. And within that context, not believing is not a neutral choice, as you imply.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
No. My logic is that the good that comes from religion can come from other sources that do not have to potential (or at least have reduced potential) for abuse. I did not state that religion itself is bad, merely that it (like many other things) can have evil effects. If you can achieve the same (or better) results with something that has less negative side-effects why shouldn't you?
Keeping in mind that I don't disagree with you from a personal perspective; the only "hole" in the logic is that you justify fundamentally denying the existance of god on the basis that religion can be abused. From a "logical" perspective, this doesn't hold up; god exists or doesn't. That religion can be abused does not mean god does not exist. If god exists, it is rational to practice religion. In any case, I'm not attempting to convince you god exists; I'm not clear on the matter myself.
Quote:We are pretty much on the same page here.
I would not shed a tear at the death of religion, but I would not advocate a systematic purge of religion either.
Quote:It's hard for me to accept this; I don't believe it is possible to have a free society and prevent folks from organizing on this basis. I do not advocate perpetuation of organized religion; in the US for instance I could easily be convinced to treat churches like any other for-profit entity. If that caused some to "go out of business," no lost sleep here. HOWEVER, to avoid state sponsorship of the suppression of religion, I'd be opposed to "higher" taxes being charged to a church than any other similar business.
I do believe that organized religion should be "stomped out" since the potential for abuse is very high and the benefit of organized religion over personal religion is small.
Quote:
However, religion itself is not something I feel strongly about either way (except when I see another story about an abortion clinic being bombed
I'm pretty strongly against abortion. Having said that, I believe anyone who bombs a clinic should be treated like any other terrorist threat.
Quote:I like that, religious about his atheism. Agreed about his current work; not familar with his earlier works.
Agreed, I don't believe I ever said I agreed with Dawkins, in fact I may have posted (and I know I considered posting) a response saying that I think he does more harm then good (at least lately, he used to be pretty kick-ass but then he got religious about his atheism).
Quote:The only qualifier to this I would add is that some of the non-religious alternatives are worse than the better of the religious ones; however, I suspect we are mostly in agreement here.
My position, more clearly stated, is that religion is not necessary and is more harmful and less beneficial then some of the alternatives. However, I am all for allowing people to harm themselves, I just don't want it to affect me.
Quote:Quote:
To further stipulate, I will maintain that some people lack the intellectual capacity to be a "good human secularist"; if you 'liberate' them from the 'controls' of religion, you can end up with a Stalin.
Agreed...to a much lesser point. Psychopaths exist, this cannot be denied, but religion doesn't necessarily make them any better and in some cases religion can have a hand in creating them (Ed Gein anyone?).
I'm not clear that religion is necessarily a good 'control' for a psychopath either. I'm talking about subtler positions. Keep in mind that should one reject god, a person may not necessarily choose 'secular humanism' or other decent non-theistic approach to life.
Quote:Quote:
But Stalin is proof positive we should not go clammering off following the lead of an athiest blindly (which I will acknowledge a 'Human secularist' would tend not to given the 'test beliefs' convictions they uphold).
Right, but that's just it, there is no power structure in atheism, there are no prophets there is no reason to follow someone becauNOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Exactly my point. By creating humans with unbounded free will, he allows evil to flourish. If he's omniscient, he should've seen this design flaw, and if he's omnipotent, he can fix it, and if he's clever about it, humans won't even be able to tell that their free will has limits.
Originally posted by Causal:
At most, he is at fault (maybe) for having created free will.
Quote:An interesting question indeed, I say definitely 'no' since if our free will is constrained to exclude evil, we wouldn't know that we're less free in the first place. But I look forward to reading up on Platinga and continue discussing this (and your other points) next week.
And then we're back to the question of whether human freedom is worth the evil that comes along with it (or, for Plantinga, whether it would even be possible to have human freedom without also having evil).
Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.
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Quote:No, that would be because of free will.
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Is the school that teaches a child science at fault if that child learns how to constructs a nuclear device, does so (setting aside for the moment how he acquired the materials) and detonates it Time Square?
But I'm done for today, see you tomorrow.
Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.
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Quote:But knowing that science can be used to construct nuclear bombs, the school must certainly be at fault for teaching children science.
Originally posted by Khyron:
No, that would be because of free will.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:
Originally posted by leadb:
Keeping in mind that I don't disagree with you from a personal perspective; the only "hole" in the logic is that you justify fundamentally denying the existance of god on the basis that religion can be abused. From a "logical" perspective, this doesn't hold up; god exists or doesn't. That religion can be abused does not mean god does not exist. If god exists, it is rational to practice religion. In any case, I'm not attempting to convince you god exists; I'm not clear on the matter myself.
How about another alternative then? How about rewriting the holy book of a current religion? Take the Bible strip out the justifications for violence and discrimination, clear up the language to make it unambiguous, add in some disclaimers stating that not everything in the Bible is meant to be taken as literal truth, some of it is metaphorical and strip out the parts that imply blind obedience and BAM! you've got a religion that has an enormously reduced potential for abuse.
Quote:Quote:It's hard for me to accept this; I don't believe it is possible to have a free society and prevent folks from organizing on this basis.
I do believe that organized religion should be "stomped out" since the potential for abuse is very high and the benefit of organized religion over personal religion is small.
Agreed, I think the only way to do this would be to convince people that they don't NEED a church leader to tell them what to believe, and that it's a much better idea to come up with their own beliefs rather then bow to the pressure of church.
Quote:
If that caused some to "go out of business," no lost sleep here.
Exactly, if you want to have a giant church in the middle of downtown you should have to pay for it, plain and simple.
Quote:
HOWEVER, to avoid state sponsorship of the suppression of religion, I'd be opposed to "higher" taxes being charged to a church than any other similar business.
Of course.
Quote:Quote:I like that, religious about his atheism. Agreed about his current work; not familar with his earlier works.
Agreed, I don't believe I ever said I agreed with Dawkins, in fact I may have posted (and I know I considered posting) a response saying that I think he does more harm then good (at least lately, he used to be pretty kick-ass but then he got religious about his atheism).
He used to (and probably still does) write pop science about evolution, he is a very good pop science writer and can explain parts of evolution that are misinterpreted or confusing quite well. I knew years ago that he was a big advocate of atheism and I agree with him when he says that atheists get a bad rap and aren't treated quite as well as theists. But I don't think that attacking religion is going to help anything and it will only turn people off of his older books that they should be reading.
Quote:Quote:The only qualifier to this I would add is that some of the non-religious alternatives are worse than the better of the religious ones; however, I suspect we are mostly in agreement here.
My position, more clearly stated, is that religion is not necessary and is more harmful and less beneficial then some of the alternatives. However, I am all for allowing people to harm themselves, I just don't want it to affect me.
Certainly, there are bad choices everywhere.
Quote:
I'm not clear that religion is necessarily a good 'control' for a psychopath either. I'm talking about subtler positions. Keep in mind that should one reject god, a person may not necessarily choose 'secular humanism' or other decent non-theistic approach to life.
I'll stipulate if you agree that even people who believe in god may choose lifestyles or goals that are detrimental to society.
Quote:
[/quote[
Right, but that's just it, there is no power structure in atheism, there are no prophets there is no reason to follow someone because they are atheist. People didn't follow Stalin because he wasNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
How about another alternative then? How about rewriting the holy book of a current religion? Take the Bible strip out the justifications for violence and discrimination, clear up the language to make it unambiguous, add in some disclaimers stating that not everything in the Bible is meant to be taken as literal truth, some of it is metaphorical and strip out the parts that imply blind obedience and BAM! you've got a religion that has an enormously reduced potential for abuse.
I had almost suggested this myself; however, I'm not sufficiently involved in anything you would recognize as an organized religion to allow for my participation in the same. No beef from me on this; however, you gotta sell this to the folks with the 'control' of the 'books'.
Quote:Quote:
I'm not clear that religion is necessarily a good 'control' for a psychopath either. I'm talking about subtler positions. Keep in mind that should one reject god, a person may not necessarily choose 'secular humanism' or other decent non-theistic approach to life.
I'll stipulate if you agree that even people who believe in god may choose lifestyles or goals that are detrimental to society.
:-) Absolutely.
fred "Right, but that's just it, there is no power structure in atheism, there are no prophets there is no reason to follow someone because they are atheist. People didn't follow Stalin because he was an atheist, they followed him because he promised them things they wanted. On the other hand many religions stress obedience to the leaders of the religion giving over control of their lives to someone else."
lead "That's a tough one. The Soviet Union actively discriminated against religions; there was clearly profit in being an atheist. One did not rise high in -anything- if one was overtly religious."
fred "Sure...but. There is a clear advantage to being an atheist IF you already are following him. Once again, atheism is not the reason people followed him, they became atheists because they followed him. Though doubtless some of the more militant atheists probably supported him BECAUSE he was an atheist I'd bet they were in the minority by a wide margin."
At the begining, yes. I suppose my point is he (well, participated in with the other communists of the time) -created- what was effectively an organization which, via reward and punishment by the government/economic system, steared people to atheism. One could claim to be a "communist" but religious and be "outside" this structure (of course, Soviets defined 'communism' such it required you to be atheistic, but I am fairly confident that not all "communist" countries required this; thus it is diffult for me to separate the two here). Additionally, this gave atheists (and of course, hypocrits and those willing to subvert the system from within by pretending to be atheists) a 'power structure' to use. Of course, these people also had to be communists (or again, pretend for whatever reason). So we have here an example of a power structure available to communistic atheists. This power structure was -not- available to those known to be religiously inclined, "communist" or not.
leadb "Being a strong advocate of the -seperation- of Church and State, I think the Soviets went a bit too far the other way. It's not clear to me that atheism was not the 'state religion' of the Soviet Union to the extent that is 'possible'."
fred "I think the wiki entry on religion in Russia made it pretty clear."
So... perhaps you do agree with my above observation, and I'm somewhat guilty of beating the equine corpse. Or perhaps you will say the communists established the above not -because- they were atheists, but instead because they wanted to preserve the 'power' for the 'communists' (though this -particular- 'brand' of communism also required you to be atheistic). Which might draw back to the conclusion 'atheists may make poor choices too' above.
leadb"Regarding stressing "obedience to the leaders", you can't pos
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Quote:
Originally posted by Khyron:Quote:Exactly my point. By creating humans with unbounded free will, he allows evil to flourish. If he's omniscient, he should've seen this design flaw, and if he's omnipotent, he can fix it, and if he's clever about it, humans won't even be able to tell that their free will has limits.
Originally posted by Causal:
At most, he is at fault (maybe) for having created free will.
See? This is why I brought up the logical problem of evil! Your arguments come directly out of that playbook. You should read J.L. Mackie--he's the guy who gave the logical problem its classic formulation.
Well, I don't think that you quite picked up on what I meant when I said "at fault (maybe)." What I intended by that is that on a libertarian understanding of free will, your hypothetical syllogism breaks down such that God is not the cause of the evil in the world.
You are clearly right about this, though: God does allow evil to flourish in the world. Typically the advocate of the logical problem is going to maintain that this means that either 1) God is not omnipotent (he can't prevent the evil) or that 2) He isn't omnibonevolent. The advocate of the logical problem says that evil, omnipotence and omnibenevolence can't coexist. This, of course doesn't quite work, because those things are explicitly or implicitly contradictory (read my essay, or better yet, Plantinga's book for a better explication of that notion). And this is exactly what Plantinga has established.
If that tack won't work, we have to look at the other elements.
One is "design flaw." This presupposes that free will that results in evil is a flawed in some respect. But I would maintain that free will that can't result in evil isn't free will at all! Because the will is constrained in some significant way (namely, with respect to moral choices). Now suppose that God wanted to create a world with free creatures. As you say, if he's omniscient, he would have known that this would result in evil being brought into the world. But suppose, for the moment, for the sake of argument, that the having of free will outwieghs the moral evil that comes about as a result of that free will. If that is true (which we are assuming for the moment), then God was not wrong to create humans with free will even though he knew that that would mean the creation of evil. It seems to be at least be possible that this is the case. So the defender of atheism would have to show why that's not even possible.
The second objection you raised is that if God was omnibenevolent, he would have fixed this situation. But suppose that he couldn't? Most philosophers maintain that God, if he exists, is omnibenevolent, by which they mean that he can do anything that is logically possible. Creating a human man who is 15 feet tall is logically possible (because a man's height is not essential to his being) but creating a human man who is a cat is not logically possible (because being a human is essential to the nature of a man's being). Likewise, God couldn't create a triangle with four sides, because having three sides is what defines a thing as being a triangle. It could turn out that it's not possible to create a world with free creatures but with no moral evil. Certainly there are such possible worlds. But it might be the case that God couldn't have brought those into existence because doing so is logically impossible (for a more adequate explanation, check out my paper). I don't have time to get into why that might be, but it is at least possible that God couldn't have create a world with moral good but no moral evil.
I understand your objection, "Why couldn't God have constrained our wills such that we are free except in moral choices?" But I think that libertarian freedom of the will is essential to the nature of what it means to be human. God could certainly have made such creatures, but whatever they would have been, they wouldn't have been humans
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Quote:
Originally posted by leadb:
No beef from me on this; however, you gotta sell this to the folks with the 'control' of the 'books'.
Geh, just the thought makes my head hurt.
Quote:
At the begining, yes. I suppose my point is he (well, participated in with the other communists of the time) -created- what was effectively an organization which, via reward and punishment by the government/economic system, steared people to atheism.
Sure, but they are Communists who happen to be atheists pushing atheism, not atheists who happen to Communists pushing atheism...do you see the difference? My point is that atheism in itself does not indicate that you should follow the orders or beliefs of anyone else, where many religions stress the importance of obedience.
Quote:
(of course, Soviets defined 'communism' such it required you to be atheistic, but I am fairly confident that not all "communist" countries required this; thus it is diffult for me to separate the two here)
Basically the creators of Communism disliked religion, I don't think that atheism was stressed as a necessary part of Communism (though I may be wrong) but it was generally accepted that a true Communist should owe allegiance only to the state.
Quote:
Additionally, this gave atheists (and of course, hypocrits and those willing to subvert the system from within by pretending to be atheists) a 'power structure' to use.
Right, but again the atheism was incidental, the power structure was based off of Communism, it was much more important that you were a good Communist then a good atheist. If the Communists had decided to push Catholocism, Protestantism, Islam or Scientology the power structure would have been identical.
Quote:
So... perhaps you do agree with my above observation, and I'm somewhat guilty of beating the equine corpse. Or perhaps you will say the communists established the above not -because- they were atheists, but instead because they wanted to preserve the 'power' for the 'communists'
Right, the power structure was for Communists, they just happened to require that people be atheists too. It's certainly not a shining example of atheism but it's far from a push for power structure coming from atheism.
Quote:
We might have to simply disagree on this point, but I'll take one more refinement. I'm willing to maintain that for the most part those who stress this in organized religion do not do so because they are religious, but rather because they wish to exersize and preserve their power.
Sure, but many religions set the groundwork by insisting on unquestioning obedience making the believers easy to control. My contention is that atheism lacks a push for obedience and thus does not encourage the ability to gather that sort of power in the first place.
Quote:
I will concede that a religious leader is more likely to imbed this into the "formal crede", but this is not 'religion', this is 'manipulation of religion'. I concede this is not a 'provable' point, so this might simply be something we disagree on.
But what if unquestioning obedience IS part of the religion?
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Causal:
Wouldn't it be possible to create man with free will but a strong instinctual impulse towards good? Not necessarily eliminating evil but giving a much better result then we have now.
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Maybe. But I think that at least one of the reasons why we do such a lousy job at behaving ourselves morally is because we are imperfect in our ability to understand the moral law, its implications for our behavior and how it applies in given situation. It's obviously the case that God could have made humans with the capacity to perfectly understand the moral law, its implications, and its applicability. But again, I take imperfection to be part of what's essential to the nature of being human, so whatever else he might have created, if it could reason perfectly, it wouldn't have been human in the sense that I understand it.
Of course, I hope everybody realizes that I make no demand on anyone to accept what I say as true. The most I'm hoping for is an acknowledgement that I have solid reasons for believing what I do, and that we'll all be able to respect the dignity of the others by permitting them their own beliefs.
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Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
Sure, but many religions set the groundwork by insisting on unquestioning obedience making the believers easy to control. My contention is that atheism lacks a push for obedience and thus does not encourage the ability to gather that sort of power in the first place.
You say 'many', I'd say 'some'.
Atheism lacks such a push, I will grant. 'Religion' may or may not.
Quote:
But what if unquestioning obedience IS part of the religion?
Then I'd likely have a problem with -that- religion. I would also likely suspect that the establisher of the religion was not a true believer, but instead using religion for power (again, not always true; but I'm not sure it is material to our discussion either).
Re: Soviets: Did a bit of reading on communism at wiki (so you know it must be true ;-); and there is an entry for "religious communism". I'm personally satisfied that the Soviet establishment prior to it's demise qualified, in my humble opinion, as an "atheistic" power structure, primarily on the grounds that it actively blocked the participation of the religious and generally worked to the active suppression of religion. Were they indifferent to religion, then I would withdraw that opinion. I can see how you would believe otherwise.
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Causal:
Just curious, lets say I work thru the 'proof' that you reference; it establishs such a God is not logisticaly denied. However, it does not posit one exists? So we are back to the leap of faith?
I have the one advantage that I have no particular interest in disproving the existance of God; he's perfectly well able to take of his own existance.
[final comment deleted: off topic, and I really dont' want to take the thread there]
[Second edit to add:]
Causal "The most I'm hoping for is an acknowledgement that I have solid reasons for believing what I do, and that we'll all be able to respect the dignity of the others by permitting them their own beliefs."
Realizing this is likely not aimed at me in particular, but I'm happy to grant your 'solid reasons'. I'll go further to say I wish I shared the planet with more folks with similar reasoning and approach; despite not always reaching the same conclusions :-)
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Quote:
Originally posted by leadb:
Causal:
Just curious, lets say I work thru the 'proof' that you reference; it establish such a God is not logisticaly denied. However, it does not posit one exists? So we are back to the leap of faith?
Short answer: no. If Plantinga is right (and most theist and atheist philosophers alike agree that he is) then all he has established is that it is not logically impossible for God to exist. But that's all he's really going for. The logical problem of evil concludes that it is impossible for God to exist and for evil exist. Plantinga's Free Will Defense establishes that that's not the case. But as you say, that doesn't establish that God does exist, only that it's possible that he does. And that's all I want, because that means that I'm not illogical in believing that he does.
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Thanks. Yeh, I'll grant that. We be cool.
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Quote:
Originally posted by leadb:
Re: Soviets: Did a bit of reading on communism at wiki (so you know it must be true ;-); and there is an entry for "religious communism". I'm personally satisfied that the Soviet establishment prior to it's demise qualified, in my humble opinion, as an "atheistic" power structure, primarily on the grounds that it actively blocked the participation of the religious and generally worked to the active suppression of religion. Were they indifferent to religion, then I would withdraw that opinion. I can see how you would believe otherwise.
Minor disagreement, I'm good with agreeing to disagree at this point.
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Second double post ever... 
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Guess I wasn't done for today after all. But I'll done for today after this one.
Finn:
Schools don't teach the students how to construct nuclear bombs, and no student could construct one with the knowledge gained from the school environment.
Now let's say, hypothetically, that schools taught students everything about science, including how to build nuclear bombs. Then they (together with free will ) would bear responsibility if students started building nuclear bombs, and people would be calling for schools to stop teaching such things. The argument would be for schools to still teach the students science, preferably a lot of science, but not enough for them to be able to build nuclear bombs. Similar to my argument.
Causal:
Quote:An unfortunate use of conjunction on my part. My hypotheses are that there is a God who is omniscient and omnipotent (and all the other standard qualities except evidently omnibenevolence), but from the way I worded that sentence you're right in thinking that I was questioning his omniscience and omnipotence and in that case you were right to bring up the logical problem. I'll rephrase my sentence slightly:
Originally posted by Causal:Quote:See? This is why I brought up the logical problem of evil! Your arguments come directly out of that playbook. You should read J.L. Mackie--he's the guy who gave the logical problem its classic formulation.
Originally posted by Khyron:
Exactly my point. By creating humans with unbounded free will, he allows evil to flourish. If he's omniscient, he should've seen this design flaw, and if he's omnipotent, he can fix it, and if he's clever about it, humans won't even be able to tell that their free will has limits.
By creating humans with unbounded free will, he allows evil to flourish. Since he's omniscient, he should've seen this design flaw, and since he's omnipotent, he can fix it, and if he's clever about it, humans won't even be able to tell that their free will has limits.
Apologies for not being clear.
Basically, since he has the power to have initially prevented humanity's capacity for evil by limiting free will from the get-go, or limiting free will after seeing all the carnage that results from unlimited free will (which he already would have known about in the beginning due to omniscience), it follows that since humanity still has the capacity for evil, and exercises it freely, that this must be part of God's plan, and since God's plan goes against the well-being of humanity, why should humanity worship him? People can believe in him if they wish, but why the worship?
But Causal, you keep referring to Pantinga's arguments and I first want to read your essay and read up on Plantinga before responding to your posts properly, then I could give the detailed responses they deserve. I'll only be able to do that after my exams end on Wednesday though, so if it's alright with you I'd like to put this discussion on hold until then, and hopefully you won't have already moved on to some other discussions.
Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Khyron:
By creating humans with unbounded free will, he allows evil to flourish. Since he's omniscient, he should've seen this design flaw, and since he's omnipotent, he can fix it, and if he's clever about it, humans won't even be able to tell that their free will has limits.
Yeah, I thought I had responded to this one, but I guess I didn't do it clearly enough. Basically, this whole argument turns on the assumption that free will resulting in moral evil is flawed. But why assume this? Prima facie, it seems obvious, given our perspective. But suppose there's some overriding reason why God created humans with a type of will that result in moral evil. Suppose we can call units of evil "turps" (following Plantinga) and suppose we can call units of good "gorps." Suppose that by creating creatures with a will that did not result in moral evil, God would have created a world with 0 turps and 15 gorps. And suppose further that by creating creatures with a will that results in moral evil, God would have created a world with 50 turps but 1,000 gorps. Surely this latter is the better of the two worlds. For although there is some evil in it, there is far more good than evil, and for more good than there would have been in the alternate world. I guess I just don't buy that a will that results in some moral evil really is of necessity flawed in some way, because I can easily see how it might turn out that the world is better with the "flawed" will than without.
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Basically, since he has the power to have initially prevented humanity's capacity for evil by limiting free will from the get-go, or limiting free will after seeing all the carnage that results from unlimited free will (which he already would have known about in the beginning due to omniscience), it follows that since humanity still has the capacity for evil, and exercises it freely, that this must be part of God's plan, and since God's plan goes against the well-being of humanity, why should humanity worship him? People can believe in him if they wish, but why the worship?
Whoa, and we've just moved from philosophical to theological (which is an area where, like LeadB, I'm hesitant to go). I can say at least this: if God is perfect (and I think most religions take him to be) then above anything else, he is worthy of adulation. That's about all I've got philosophically on your question. I wouldn't mind discussing it in another format, but I fear that it would just be incendiary here. As with LeadB, we've seem to come to both an understanding and an impasse. And, as with LeadB, I feel that we're at a point where I could still have a jolly good time with you over a pint or two!
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Quote:I knew how to build a nuclear bomb by the end of High School. It’s not as hard as you think it is. And you don’t need to be taught “how” to build one, any student with a basic knowledge of first year college Physics, Chemistry and Calculus can figure it out. And this represents the basic “hard” science curricula taught to students in the United States. (The trick is the materials; which we actually do try to protect, so this isn’t the best analogy in application, but you don’t need a nuclear bomb to do evil.) It’s even easier to build a gun, and easier still to build a conventional explosive bomb. We don’t have to be omniscient to know that someone will use this knowledge for evil, and we don’t have to omnipotent to set up society so that our students never learn the tools that they can use to build bombs or guns. By teaching our children we allow evil to flourish. So we should stop teaching our children?
Originally posted by Khyron:
Schools don't teach the students how to construct nuclear bombs, and no student could construct one with the knowledge gained from the school environment.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:Quote:
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
If we're arguing the merits or downsides to God's masterplan, it's kind of silly to say "Well, but you have the choice not to believe!", since the basis of arguing about that masterplan is its validity in terms of God actually existing. Or people actually believing it. And within that context, not believing is not a neutral choice, as you imply.
Then I would say that before your point can be made, you’ll first have to define God’s masterplan, because we can’t discuss the merits or downsides to it, if we don’t know what it is.
I find it interesting that you choose to respond to this bit and ignore everything else, such as the fact that your focus on physical laws is completely invalid to the question of free will.
Ignore the masterplan bit. I was merely making a point about the fact that your argument of "But with religion you can choose not to believe it!" was just as invalid, because within a particular religion, everything is irrelevant unless you believe it. In particular if that particular religion makes not believing a punishable problem of itself.
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Quote:No, it’s not. You claimed that a person is a slave to a religion regardless of free will, because there are consequences applied to the choices that person makes. But there are consequences applied to anyone’s choices as a fundamental rule of nature, regardless of religion. So therefore, we are a slave to nature. But then you claimed that we aren’t slaves to nature because we can choose to accept the consequences, but the same is true of a religion, so therefore we aren’t slaves to religion. Can you see how I might be a little confused with your argument? How do you reconcile this?
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
I find it interesting that you choose to respond to this bit and ignore everything else, such as the fact that your focus on physical laws is completely invalid to the question of free will.
Also to all:
This has been an extremely interesting discussion, and I’ve enjoyed it, but I have a commitment tonight so my participation must end here, until I have more time.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:Quote:
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
I find it interesting that you choose to respond to this bit and ignore everything else, such as the fact that your focus on physical laws is completely invalid to the question of free will.
No, it’s not. You claimed that a person is a slave to a religion regardless of free will, because there are consequences applied to the choices that person makes. But there are consequences applied to anyone’s choices as a fundamental rule of nature, regardless of religion. So therefore, we are a slave to nature. But then you claimed that we aren’t slaves to nature because we can choose to accept the consequences, but the same is true of a religion, so therefore we aren’t slaves to religion. Can you see how I might be a little confused with your argument? How do you reconcile this?
I never said that we aren't, in essence, slaves to the fact that there are consequences to actions.
I am merely saying that God expects us to love him for being a slaver and he could have well just left out the free will thing if he won't let people use it without bad consequences. It's a selfish child that says "Free will! But if you don't choose this one path, it's eternal damnation! [s]Mwahahaha.[/s]"
The mere universe, on the other hand, is neutral, without expectations. There is no hypocrisy of love, or vanity. It's not sentient. It's just a place with a set of rules.
Does anyone, when questioning free will, actually consider physical laws? They are not subject to will or choice. Why do you keep bringing them up? God doesn't attach moral judgment to physical laws and neither do we. It's the things that involve our conscious choices that we judge and that's what we refer to when talking about free will.
And I think that we are less limited in our exercise of free will without the visions of hell after death hanging overhead.
If you live a life without regret, and somehow it's in conflict with God's law, you go to hell. Without the factor of hell, you have just lived a life without regret. Seems freerer to me.
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First, I would like to reiterate that I do not go to church, I have not given myself to God and I don't regularly go around preaching because
a)nobody listens to anything I say anyhow, so I don't feel the need to preach religion.
b) I admit that I don't have a clue myself so to preach God's word would be very hypocritical of me.
I just get kind of pissed off when my youngest brother (who is living at a math and science academy his Junior and Senior year of highschool) says there is no god because that's what a majority of his "people" believe. He's got a Spagetti Monster T-Shirt and it's the wallpaper on his computer. He carrys around a Bible and quotes the most horriffic lines in it to people all the time. I agree with Cit that Atheism is not a religion, but when I see things like this I start thinking that it is becoming very religion-like.... especailly when you have atheists going door to door trying to preach atheism. I know it's a joke when they do it today, but who knows? Tomorrow there might be thousands of Atheists going door to door preaching why there is no God at all. Anyhow, I think 15 years old is way too young to be so adamant about anything let alone the existance or lacktherof of God, especially considering that science has never (and according to Cit, can never) prove that God doesn't exist.
I see how it would be easy for people to hate God. Life is tough. It doesn't matter who you are. Even if your rich and powerful, your yacht engine breaks down at the most inoppurtune time. Blame it on the rain, blame it on chance, blame it on God... it's just easy to do.
Now in the hypothetical circumstance that there is a God, he did not create the evil in the hearts of man, but he knew from the beginning when he gave us free will that not only were we capable of great evil inside of us, but it would ultimately be the end of his creation. This saddens God, but he realizes that it is better for the people to maintain their free will than to be mindless zombies always making the "right" choices and living in Utopia. What good is Utopia if you're incapable of recognizing how wonderful it is because there is no alternative? You can't have light without dark, you can't have good without evil, you can't enjoy pleasure if you've never felt pain.
This is what the American Government and I assume the UK Government and most of Europe is trying to do now. They're legislating morality everyday and trying to take away the human element of humanity. (Traffic cams, taxing the hell out of cigarettes and booze, marajuana illegality, "click it or ticket", etc., etc., etc....) To understand more what I'm trying to say, I recommend reading an old Sci-Fi book called "Jesus on Mars" by Phillip Jose Farmer. (I neglected to leave the Wikepidia link on the book because it really is good and it would be a shame to ruin it by reading a few paragraph blog about it. Feel free to Wiki it yourself though if you don't want to read it). Just so you know, it is a very anti-religious satirical book so I'm not trying to make anybody read the Bible here.
To say that God is evil because man is evil is not only not knowing the full story, but it is blatently ignoring it and doing whatever you can to avoid knowing it. It is nothnig more than wearing ignorance like a badge of honor. Personally, I wouldn't want to live in a world where everyone was good because to live in that world we would all have to be animals... mere pets. We would live purely via instinct and would never make any decisions for ourselves. This is my main problem with perscription drugs today, especially after reading "Brave New World" and watching movies like Equilibrium. "A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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Quote:
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
If you live a life without regret, and somehow it's in conflict with God's law, you go to hell. Without the factor of hell, you have just lived a life without regret. Seems freerer to me.
This is assuming that you are incapable of guilt and conscience free. Hannibal Lechter lived a life without regret.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I just get kind of pissed off when my youngest brother (who is living at a math and science academy his Junior and Senior year of highschool) says there is no god because that's what a majority of his "people" believe.
Question: Would you be pissed off if he believed in god because that what his people believe? If no, doesn't that seem hypocritical?
Quote:
but when I see things like this I start thinking that it is becoming very religion-like
I see it too, and being an atheist it's kind of annoying.
Quote:
especailly when you have atheists going door to door trying to preach atheism. I know it's a joke when they do it today, but who knows? Tomorrow there might be thousands of Atheists going door to door preaching why there is no God at all.
Question again: Do you have a problem with theists going door-to-door preaching religion? If no doesn't that seem hypocritical?
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Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
Question: Would you be pissed off if he believed in god because that what his people believe? If no, doesn't that seem hypocritical?
No, I would not be pissed off about it because it's not with snarky or bad intent if he believed in God because of his "people". I don't believe that a majority of Atheists are anything like how he is acting. Neither do I believe that most people who buy into a particular religion are anything like how he's acting. He's acting like a little asshole about it, quoting shitty lines out of the Bible that he barely understands, and that's what really pisses me off. That Spaghetti Monster thing is like a damn Nike Symbol on his chest and it seems almost like he's doing it because that's what the smart kids do to be cool. He'll realize one day, like I did, that you don't know everything when you're 15, no matter how much you think you do. It wasn't that long ago for me that my world was turned upside down and I relized that the more I knew, the more questions I had. At the end of the day, I really don't know shit.
Quote:
Me: but when I see things like this I start thinking that it is becoming very religion-like
Quote:
You: I see it too, and being an atheist it's kind of annoying.
Heh.... yeah. It's kind of like being a big fan of a band when they're underground and then they have this huge hit and are the big thing all summer and then you look like you're trendy for wearing the same band shirt you've had for the last five years.
Quote:
Question again: Do you have a problem with theists going door-to-door preaching religion? If no doesn't that seem hypocritical?
I've actually had this discussion with my brother before. No I don't have a problem with people of a particular faith preaching door to door. I have turned them away before. The Johova's Witnesses frequent my apartment complex and I've had to turn them away multiple times before. No biggie. There's a difference when Atheists do it, though and that's because they do it out of spite, not love or caring. Now I'm not trying to say that Athiests are uncaring or incapable of love at all, nor am I trying to imply that religious folk are in any way more caring or loving, but what would be the real reason for an Atheist to go door to door other than to piss people off? A true believer certainly isn't going to convert because a non believer is speaking to them. They do it with big smirks like my brother's and they're trying to get under religious folk's skin.
I get a vibe off of you that you're an Atheiest who doesn't feel the need to proclaim to the world that you are and try to convert others. I'm thinking you just don't care. There's no God, and that's the end of it. It's not some cool little club you belong to. I don't understand how somebody could ever come right out and say with conviction that there is no God, but that's freedom, aint' it?
I don't know.... it just seems to me that if Atheists start banding together and start forming groups and communities, it's completely besides the point. Did you see that South Park where Cartman went into the future to get the Nintendo WII? There was no religion in the future, but the different sects of scientific atheists were fighting and killing each other in the name of Science. This all just seems vaguley familiar to me.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I get a vibe off of you that you're an Atheiest who doesn't feel the need to proclaim to the world that you are and try to convert others.
Yes. If the issue comes up I will present my views and correct others when they are factually wrong, but as far as I'm concerned the only time I care about someone else's religion is when it affects me.
Quote:
I'm thinking you just don't care. There's no God, and that's the end of it. It's not some cool little club you belong to.
Meh, not really. If you want to get technical about labels I'm a Strong Agnostic-Apatheist combo, meaning I don't believe there is a god but I don't deny the possibility that I'm wrong, but in the end I don't care anyway. If you want to get specific about my actual beliefs then I'd tack on that I think that if there is a god then we don't have the slightest clue as to it's true nature or intentions, we aren't special to it and all the religions we've made up were exactly that, made up. It's just a hell of a lot easier to simply say "I'm an atheist" rather then try to explain my actual beliefs when the next sentence from the person I'm talking to is going to be the same thing either way "You don't really mean it though right?".
Quote:
I don't understand how somebody could ever come right out and say with conviction that there is no God, but that's freedom, aint' it?
I see no evidence that there is a god, I see no reason why we need a god. The absence of need means that there doesn't have to be a god, and the absence of evidence indicates that there is not a god.
To me the existence of the gods of our religions raises more questions then it answers, and the existence of a god that hasn't seen fit to give us "divinely inspired" rules to follow is simply irrelevant to everyday life anyway.
Quote:
I don't know.... it just seems to me that if Atheists start banding together and start forming groups and communities, it's completely besides the point.
I can see where you are coming from. The thing is though that churches serve as social hangouts as well as religious buildings, so atheists that form groups like that are trying to recreate the social aspect that they don't necessarily get otherwise.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Me: but when I see things like this I start thinking that it is becoming very religion-likeQuote:
You: I see it too, and being an atheist it's kind of annoying.
Heh.... yeah. It's kind of like being a big fan of a band when they're underground and then they have this huge hit and are the big thing all summer and then you look like you're trendy for wearing the same band shirt you've had for the last five years.
Not so much really, it just seems like we're selling out, stooping to a lower level by proselytizing like theists. I understand why people are doing it though, particularly Dawkins, he's been part of the evolution "debate" for a long time and he sees a constant stream of people who have been misinformed, underinformed or outright lied to in the name of religion regarding evolution. At the same time he's annoyed because atheists get treated differently from everyone else, atheism is not a religion but it is a religious choice and the choice of atheism gets much less respect then the other choices. If I told people I was a Buddhist almost no one would comment on it, but if I tell them I'm an atheist they usually say "You don't really mean it though right?" and "How can you possibly not believe there's not a god?" and my favorite "Well you must just not have heard the Word then, because if you had you'd never doubt". Part of Dawkin's goals in his crusade that he's on now is to get people to respect atheism whether they agree with it or not, though I think that goal has fallen by the wayside.
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I'm pretty much in agreement or can at the very least sympathize with everything you've said here.
My only thing is about athiest forming groups to recreate the social aspect they don't get otherwise. I just dont' get it. If there isn't a God, and that's what they believe, fine. There's plenty of things that people, no matter what they believe or choose not to believe, can get together and do. Things where religion would most likely not come up. I rarely get into religion with anyone in the "real world" except for my Grandma, who's an old school Episcopalian who's always trying to get me to church and my little brother and his damn Spaghetti monster. I can't even recall anytime where I was out with friends ever that religion ever came up, although there may have been a forgotten night or two where we were all stoned out of our minds and the subject came up. The truth is, 98% of the time, no matter what you're doing, religion is a subject that will never come up. I just find it almost comical that Atheists would even want to get together simply because a disbelief in God is the only common ground they share from the start. I'm an un-confirmed Catholic and I've known plenty of Catholics that I think are assholes that I'd never want to share a room with. I guess I'd have to be of the Atheist mindset to really understand.
About your second post though. I should apologize for calling Athiests idiots (or whatever terms I used), although I still think that the closemindedness that 100% disbelief embodies is completely flawed. That was more me ranting about my brother than anything else and it is unfair of me. I know you know what I'm saying.... being that in actuality you wouldn't even classify yourself as an Athiest but simply do because it's easier than telling everyone the 3 paragraphs that follow when you tell them what you really think. "A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
About your second post though. I should apologize for calling Athiests idiots (or whatever terms I used)
Stupid, bullheaded and close-minded.
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although I still think that the closemindedness that 100% disbelief embodies is completely flawed
But have you asked the question "how many atheists who will tell me flat out that there is no god, would admit to being wrong if they were proven wrong?". I think you are attributing too much dogmatism to atheists, and I think that most atheists would actually fall under the Strong Agnostic subgroup if they bothered to investigate the different subgroups.
Quote:
I know you know what I'm saying.... being that in actuality you wouldn't even classify yourself as an Athiest
Actually I think that the Strong Agnostic subgroup fits better under the Atheist group then the Agnostic group, perhaps renamed as "Weak Atheist"? So by my own (obviously superior
) classification system I would fall under Atheism.
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