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Donating = Loving
Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
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Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
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I think you will find Scottish Law has an apt verdict that will apply to your argument: There is a verdict of "Not proven" which provides that the Procurator Fiscal (the Claimant) has failed to make the case but unlike "not guilty", provides for further evidence to be offered at a later date and the matter be revisited.
Re: MIck "Fact : Did you know that if the sun was 1 degree closer to the earth it would burn up and if 1 degree farther the earth would freeze."
Ya know, it is statements like that which sometimes make me feel better about the Scarecrow getting the brain. Because if I had one right now it would be aching so bad I would want to rip it out of my skull anyway.
I know what you mean, but sadly getting a brain is only half the battle, a person has to use it, properly, before it is of any use. Stupid claims and ideas no longer surprise me at my age, we all do this sometimes, what amazes me is the effort intelligent people take to try and believe something that is absurdly stupid, and which rests on claims that demonstrably erroneous and logically fallacious. Sadly if we start wanting to believe something and then look for evidence this is the result, whereas if we start by trying our best to only believe what can be demonstrated as true then we're likely to avoid such inane asinine utterances, well most of the time anyway.
The problem is that when I was a child I wasn't sent once a week to learn logic and philosophy. Every morning in school an hour wasn't devoted to developing my critical thinking abilities and those of my contemporaries. Sadly those occasions were used to try and indoctrinate a small child into the most bizarrely comically stupid beliefs, that also contained dogma and doctrine that was and is often pernicious. I vividly remember at the age of 12 being told by a 50+ year old priest to leave one of my confirmation classes for asking facetious questions. I had to look it up when I got home. I have to assume he had no compelling answer. It probably started the rot, as it were...
@Sheldon: "asking facetious questions"
I loved asking questions. What's adultery? What's a virgin? How did Adam and Eve stop their fig leaves from falling off? I never met a scripture teacher or Sunday school teacher who could give proper answers. The best they could attempt was "you'll understand when you're older." I never met a kid yet who was satisfied with that answer.
To: Algebe Re: "You'll understand when you're older."
Hell, I AM older now.... and I STILL don't understand! (I blame Scarecrow. He swiped the brain.)
Oh, however, I DID find out about the fig leaves and how they stayed on. They actually used hemp string to keep them tied on, but the strings were erased out of the pics with CGI to make the whole scene look more "mysterious". Just a little FYI trivia.
@Tin-man: "They actually used hemp string"
So they were growing hemp in the Garden of Eden? That may explain the religious delusions.
A few years ago I saw a bronze fig leaf in a museum. The Victorians were very prudish about nude statues, so they started attaching fig leaves to cover up the naughty bits. The fig leaf I saw had a big ring on the back to fit over the statue's cock. And when I went to the Vatican Museum last year, the guide told us that a lot of the cloth covering the anatomy of nude figures in Renaissance paintings had been added later. They didn't know the name of the painter and he was just known as the Panty Painter.
If god meant us to be naked, we'd be born naked, right?
To: Algebe
Hell, I was born in a three-piece tux, complete with paten leather wingtip shoes and a snazzy fedora. (My Mom always did bitch about that, by the way. Which probably explains my aversion to formal wear now.)
Anyway, if you think about it, considering some of the people I have seen over the years, I for one am THANKFUL we are required to wear clothes in public. *shudder*
I have just been watching a debate between William Lane Craig and Sam Harris on the objectivity of morality.
While I think that WLC is a brilliant debater and often far more organized in his attacks on his opponents (frequently making them look bad for reasons totally irrelevant to the debate itself), I think his arguments are overly simplistic and that they depend on unprovable premises.
In general, regarding the objectivity of morality, is it possible atheists are playing a theists game unnecessarily?
Theists say that morality is objective and in order for it to be objective there must be a perfectly moral source outside our subjective interpretations. Then atheists say that morality is objective because the highest well-being for conscious creatures is universal regardless of any universal standard (existing outside nature) of morality.
My question boils down to this: what if morality, like consciousness itself, is an emergent property of mental (psychological?) evolution? What if, in order to be moral people who feel good about ourselves and bad about people that kill indiscriminately, we don't need any objective standard outside nature at all?
What if instead, just as we use evolutionary biology to describe the truth of natural selection leading to the highest forms of biological life, we use that same selection theory to account for the development of the highest moral life?
In other words, why do we HAVE to make a case for objective morality as a thing in itself outside our natural inclinations? Isn't it, in fact, religious dogma that teaches us that we are all depraved and in need of an outside source of morality in the first place? If, instead, we follow science, then there is no reason to believe that the emergence of higher forms of morality aren't simple facts of natural selection and species preservation. And this does NOT demean them!
Though the theist tries to demoralize this position as "moral relativism," yet since we can all see that morality brings the highest good to everyone involved when considered on a purely rational basis, why do we have to play the games of the William Lane Craigs of the world?
What difference does it make if objective morality imposed from the outside of humanity doesn't exist? Does that make our species' own highest good any less an evolutionary imperative? Does it make it any less important or meaningful for any of us?
I say stop having the argument with theists that objective morality exists. The highest good of humanity clearly exists and can be logically defined. The rest is just the meaningless bits of the ongoing struggle by theists to prove the existence of a god we don't need.
Holy cow, Dark. You DO learn fast.
Thanks! I've been reading a ton and watching these debates and that just clicked in my brain.
Something was really pissing me off about Will Lane Craig (why the fuck does he have to have three names? It's so much longer to type.) and I finally realized what it was. He always hijacks control of the argument, defines it according to his own terms, and then beats his opponent over the head with the fact that they "haven't refuted his arguments."
And he does it so smoothly that he gets away with it. No one arguing on his terms can ever win.
If no gods exist then all morality is human in origin. If no gods exist then the historical pathway of moral struggle would resemble exactly what it does.
From beliefmap.org, as quoted by aperez241: "multiply the improbabilities of (a spatio-temporal world existing) x (of it being life-permitting) x (of life appearing in it) x (of life developing consciousness) x (and moral awaress). This leaves a lot out and yet already it seems far lower than 1%."
Then multiply the result by the number of galaxies in the known universe, the number of stars in each galaxy, the number of planets orbiting each star, the number of locations on each planet where chemical reactions can occur, and the number of years in the history of the universe. Then you'll likely get something far higher than 1%.
In fact, we know that life actually exists on at least one planet, so I'm pretty confident that the end result will be somewhere around 100%.
I get tired of all the probability arguments. From what I understand as a non-mathematician, if you calculated the probability that any event that actually happened would actually happen, it would be similarly astronomically low.
So while it looks like they are saying something profound, in practice it amounts to nothing more unlikely than anything else.
Should use the total number of galaxies in the whole universe, instead of just one tiny region.
"Nothing you can do that can't be done.... Nothing you can sing that can't be sung... Nothing you can say, but you can learn to play the game.... It's eeeeeeasy......
All you need is love (bah bah-bah bah-bah)
All you need is love (bah bah-bah bah-bah)
All you need is love... Love
Love is all you need..."
@aperez241 it simply is not true that the definition of "god" in Western philosophy is commonly agreed upon. In addition, the alleged existence of a standard of morality is not sufficient proof of god's existence. You essential say if morality exists, then god must exist. But this is only true if god exists and if morality exists.
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