I’m afraid I won’t be doing much posting live from the Global Atheist Convention; I’m busy, I’m having fun, my dancecard is full, and whenever things slow down a little bit some new person comes up to say hello. But have no fear, I’ll put up some comments afterwards, and also, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has dispatched a crack team of ace believers to cover the convention and scowl primly at us all. You can get the fun-house mirror version of the conference from those weirdos…and much amusement. I find it very funny that, for instance, that they can complain about how the GAC is unfair in not representing religious believers, and comparing us unfavorably to the Parliament of World’s Religions meeting, all without noting that the PWR got buckets of money from the government here, while the GAC got doodly-squat. It’s silly to demand that we respectfully engage the clownish buffoons of religion, and at the same time insist that we must use our limited resources to give a pulpit to said buffoons.
They are also a bit snooty about the fact that the opening night was a festival of comedy. How dare atheists think that the appropriate way to cope with the follies of faith is by developing a sense of humor! But then, I find this guy hilarious: catch this juxtaposition.
The night finished with Catherine Deveney and “God is Bullshit. That’s the good news.” In your face, yes. And no surprise to those who read her columns in The Age. Her milder lines included, “The only person who takes the Pope seriously is Tony Abbott.” And: “If there is anybody out there who is not an atheist, don’t worry: it’s an intelligence test and you will be eventually.” I met Catherine at the bar before the program started and after chatting she agreed to ‘an interview’ on Sunday.
My thoughts so far? As a Christian I am appalled and ashamed of the crimes, victimisation and discrimination committed in the name of Christ or by those who bear his name. To make light of them through humour is risky. And to stereotype religion in such a way is akin to taking Stalin or Pol Pot as your stereotype atheist.
I’m a little worried about Australian religion and politics now. Chris Mulherin apparently believes that making fun of the Pope and Tony Abbot is like making them the equivalent of Stalin and Pol Pot.
Nobody is making light of the horrors perpetrated in the name of religion — I do appreciate the fact that the first defensive reaction to criticism of religion is a sense of shame, at least — but the goofiness of religion is a wonderful target for humor. To whine that making a joke about one of their poorly regarded pious politicians is stereotyping them as evil tyrants suggests that their guilt and embarrassment is even deeper than I suspected.
Don’t expect much favorable coverage from this lot (and by the way, it’s also hypocritical to complain about the lack of religious apologists on the stage when the ABC blog doesn’t include even a token atheist). They’ve got an agenda that is going to be disappointed, and I predict they will continue to complain in their oblivious fashion. They’re out there in the audience, watching, hoping, and maybe even praying that someone will say something nice about their superstitions; their definition of a good convention is one that reassures them that we don’t think their bliss-ninny belief system is an unsalvageable stew of raw sewage spiced with smug ignorance.
That despite all the terrible things we know about religion – the oppression of women, the paedophilia, the social control, the violence and cruelty perpetuated in the name of one faith or another – there’s a niggling truth that millions of good, decent, hard-working people around the world are sustained, guided, and comforted by their beliefs. Instead of merely bagging religion, maybe we should be trying to understand why this is? In other words, can you have a new awakening without fully knowing what you’re waking from?
Oh, yeah, there’s that guilt again. Aside from the violence and oppression and child-rape and cruelty, how can we possibly consider taking away the baby’s dummy? That’s a fairly common argument for religion, you know — it’s the old “opiate of the masses” defense. It’s not much of a defense. When you’re amidst a group of people who have seen how swaddling minds in ignorance leads to nightmares of stupidity, it’s no defense at all.
We know that millions of good people cherish their delusions. We don’t care; that a lie makes people feel good doesn’t make it a truth. We also understand religion far better than a group of people immersed in it, making a living from propping it up, and desperate to deny that they’re wasting their lives worshipping a phantasm.
I imagine the ABC team sitting out there in the sea of the happy godless, busily taking notes, hoping for some little morsel of acknowledgment that maybe they aren’t idiots and fools for believing in a magic man in the sky who will reward their intellectual blindness with fluffy comfy chairs in a celestial paradise, or at least won’t set their immortal souls on fire for eternity. They aren’t going to get that validation. Which means we already know everything they’re going to say about the conference.
Don’t laugh at the opposition. Proper treatment of the opposition involves forcing schoolchildren to learn your tripe, and the good clean fun of a heretic/apostate burning.
Damn atheists laughing at religion.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
I’m fine with godly people being sustained by their religion. When you try to force me to swallow your BS is when I’m going to get angry at you.
When education is under attack by religion…
When love is under attack by religion…
When rights and responsibilities is under attack by religion…
When I’m demeaned because of religion…
That is when I will speak out. Keep your religion where it belongs, out of science, government, and education, and we’ll be fine with it.
Found out a bit more about Mr. Mulherin.
What a wackadoodle.
“… there’s a niggling truth that millions of good, decent, hard-working people around the world are sustained, guided, and comforted by their beliefs. Instead of merely bagging religion, maybe we should be trying to understand why this is?”
Not mentioning the obvious fact that you could replace “beliefs” with “heroin” and it would still make about as much sense, it turns out,the answers have started to roll in over the last few years. Maybe these guys want to take a look at the 2004 book Sacred and Secular, or Greg Paul’s research published in the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology tying societal success to lack of religion?
They pose the questions but I’m not sure they really want to know the answers.
Wow… just… wow.
Why does it never occur to these god-bothering assholes that the first part, the bad stuff, is enabled by religion, and is an almost involuntary byproduct of religion… whereas the the second part, the “good, decent, hard-working” part doesn’t require religion, of any kind, at all.
It’s repeated here often but here again the Steven Weinberg quote is perfectly apt: “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”
“there’s a niggling truth that millions of good, decent, hard-working people around the world are sustained, guided, and comforted by their beliefs. Instead of merely bagging religion, maybe we should be trying to understand why this is?”
What? That religious faith sustains those who can only take Reality if they have a chaser to go with it? That the Real World is so unknowable and unfathomable that “millions of good, decent, hard-working people” have to retreat to superstition in order to cope?
My dictionary, as well as defining liar, also has examples: preachers, reverends, bishops, popes, ayatollahs, imams, rabbis, witch doctors, creationists, IDers etc..
It appears that the examples are not complete – a subset of journalists needs to be added.
Respect is earned, not given. These intellectually bankrupt individuals do not have the tools to earn respect.
Sniff… sniff… those atheists are MEAN and picking on me! *sniffsniff*
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. –George Bernard Shaw
I disagree that believers are necessarily happier, but even granting that GBS nailed it.
Not an entirely wronge-headed idea. But it is a bit like suggesting the crack addict consider the positive effects of getting high and get to understand why crack makes them feel the way they do, rather than just quit.
You know, I don’t know of anybody who’s raped, killed, or mutilated genitalia in the name of Santa or the Tooth Fairy, yet we’re all perfectly willing to steal those little emotional crutches from kids when they get old enough. So it seems that being the mental equivalent of a security blanket isn’t sufficient for a belief to merit protection from mean ol’ atheists.
Tell you what: why don’t you tell us why so many people who’ve been indoctrinated in this warm bath of love-love-love that is the general picture of the Apologist’s Religion still manage oppress, fuck children, demand social control and perpetuate violence and cruelty, and then we’ll talk, mmm’kay?
Just not appalled enough to actually ask why those things happen in the name of your religion, it seems, yet we’re the ones you accuse trying to “have a new awakening without fully knowing what [we’re] waking from”. Try not to brain us with the beams in your eyes while you reach for the motes in ours. (Quick quiz for apologists: where in the bible does Jesus say that? Answer: who cares, as long as you feel your faith sustains you, right?)
I don’t what part of me is offended more by this cowardice among religious apologists: the atheist or the former Catholic who actually took the doctrine serious enough to consider its implications, rather than being satisfied with how it made me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
Fuck their apologetics. (Note to readers of the Intersection: this is not, I repeat, not an endorsement of or call for anyone to have non-consensual intercourse with abstract ideas, so please put down that form letter to SEED Media.)
“Well, besides the oppression of women, the paedophilia, the social control, the violence and cruelty, the homophobia, the institutional child abuse, the numbing groupthink, the racism, the justification for slavery, the cultural genocide, the gigantic waste of human intellectual potential through the ages, the propping up of the worst in the status quo, and the warm feeling of belonging to something larger than ourselves, what has religion ever done for us?”
The BBC are reporting that “participants will be urged to avoid missionary zeal.” Is that true, or has the BBC’s Religious Affairs Correspondent just asked one of his fatheist mates about it?
In my case, the latter, in as much as all the images that continue to disturb me were fully formed in my Catholic days. Then again, as a Catholic, I so wanted my religion to be reconciled with my conscience, I kept holding out hope that it would all make sense in the end, and engaged in my fair share of ridiculous apologetics. Then I finally accepted that the two could not co-exist, and fortunately for me, religion was the weaker of the two. It always weighs on me to think that some people – say Kurt Wise – go the other way.
Someone should tell Gary Bryson that we use humor to make the talks longer. If there were no humor, the talks would be very short. Like, “Things that have no measurable influence on reality, but are instead human constructs, don’t really exist.” or to quote him “All the terrible things we know about religion – the oppression of women, the paedophilia, the social control, the violence and cruelty.”
Secondly, how can you not make fun of religion? Aliens trapped in volcanos? A man being swallowed by a fish? A black stone is a piece of heaven? 1 (God the Father)+1 (Jesus) +1 (Holy Spirit) = 1?
A Sasquatch Easter and Christmas and Shnoah’s ark.
Just trying a little word substitution.
Seems to be just as meaningful.
You atheists are just being mean bringing up all the immorality done in the name of gawd. You should let all the “millions of good, decent, hard-working people” continue to be complacent about the evil done by people like Pope Benedict, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Rev. Pat Robertson.
…and presumably so did Father Costello.
The “millions are sustained by religion” argument makes the unacknowledged assumption that these people must have their cherished beliefs, even if false, because they cannot be sustained by anything else. In attempting to find excuses for coddling religion, Gary Bryson is – presumably inadvertently – calling his millions of co-believers to stupid and craven to face reality. Not that we could expect much else; he’s only assuming that they’re all at the same low level he is himself.
Me too, MrFire, me too. I couldn’t do it as a Catholic, so I became a generic faitheist with an Abrahamic-and-Buddhist-flavoured pantheism. Eventually I got tired of doing all the mental contortions to reconcile the existence of any meaningful god with the reality of the universe, and I dropped the whole idea.
There’s only so far you can go as an honest apologist before you realise that as long as you’re dreaming, you’d like a pony.*
*With apologies–ha! I kill me!–to Bill Watterson.
Sorry, “too stupid.” Typo, not ignorance of homophones.
I love the smell of shitty logic in the afternoon.
Stalin and Pol Pot didn’t commit their atrocities “in the name of” atheism, so find another example, m’kay?
(Although, is it wrong of me to notice, at least they’re acknowledging that Stalin and Pol Pot are not representative of atheism? That’s a sign of progress, right?)
I’m sustained, guided and comforted by the occasional night of binge-drinking, but still I’d be a criminal if I got behind the wheel of a car while under the influence.
On a more serious note, I can acknowledge that religion has a comforting effect on its adherents. I’m willing to discuss how religion fills a need that secular society doesn’t address, at least not yet, or not very well. But maybe all those millions of decent people wouldn’t need to be sustained, guided and comforted so much if we didn’t have religion to cause so many problems in the world.
FTFY. I don’t think women who get lashed 100 times for being raped find Islam particularly comforting. The only people that find comfort in religion are those who feel particularly advantaged or special because of it. That they ignore (or simply don’t care about) those who are disenfranchised and persecuted because of it is the only way to find comfort in it.
I couldn’t as Catholic nor more general Evangelical, so I spent a short stint as Calvinist. Yahweh could make sense if you accept that his ways are completely different than ours and not comprehensible to our squishy human brains. Eventually I gave that up due to parsimony.
Shorter ABC whine:
Also:
Yeah, maybe so….but many, many atheists are former faithiests, so what about them, eh? Not even considered.
My former religion (RCC) was not comforting, mostly it was scary and guilting. I was glad to leave.
I’m not even willing to grant them this ‘sustaining faith’ bit without some more evidence. I mean, if that’s the all-inportant component of religion, then how come the world isn’t solely composed of us mean, bitter atheists, and UU members? Is it sustaining to deny homosexuals the right to live their lives free of bigotry? Does excising a young girl’s clitorus help Grandma get over the loss of a loved one? How does preventing a pregnant teenager from having a safe abortion in a clinic help somebody face the day in an seemingly uncaring world? Will beheading an infidel give all our lives meaning?
I want them to show us this hot cocoa religion that does all of the good without any of the bad. More importantly, join it. Then maybe they’ll have a point.
Religion only deserves ridicule….and as we travel at the speed of the information age, it becomes easier to do so….
Religion sucks at filling needs….It would be interesting to know exactly what percentage of these tax related incentive dollars goes towards overhead and what goes towards actually filling needs….My guess is well over 80% goes towards the con men….
Good grief! Religion (particularly Christianity) is NOTHING if not “in your face” (and radio/TV preachers are NOTHING if not abjectly ridiculing of we atheists) — but let us suggest, an a conference of our own, that THEY are the, um, misguided folks, and POW, straight to the moon!
It should be pointed out that (as far as I am aware) the ABC, Australia’s national public broadcaster, has a well funded religious department, but no permanent science department, as it was disbanded some years ago.
Says it all, really.
Oppression, sexual abuse, molestation, shameless control, violence, cruelty…oh, and let’s not forget death, and we should keep it around because of a niggling
truthdoubt? No, I don’t think so.For a good many of those millions of good, decent, hard-working people, it’s more a matter of ingrained thinking than any great, deep faith. Besides, a whole lot of things sustain, guide and comfort humans; I’d say an invisible god is pretty low down on the list.
I’d be at the convention, except I’d have to take my children with me because the family members I rely on to look after them when I need to go to other conventions are quite keen on religion and would not wish to facilitate my participation in such godlessness. *sigh*
I was surprised to read that the ABC had set a bunch of religious types to cover the atheist convention, because they are so often decried, by my religious kin, for being irreligious heathen rabble rousers and inadequately respectful of the woo-woo.
On following the link, I found that the offending articles are hosted in the dedicated “Religion” section of the ABC site. The writers are all religious because they are the ABC’s standard set of religious opinion providers.
This brings up the familiar problem that atheism, rather than being recognised as an absence of religion, is commonly mistaken for a type of religion. Whoever sent the religious writers to cover the atheist convention clearly fails to grasp that doing so makes as much sense as sending a bunch of butchers to cover a vegan conference.
The best thing about this so far is the real crazy christian people in the street handing out Comfort screeds, I can’t get over that, see how it goes today, can we have some picketing too??
The ABC Religion mob is a disappointment given the rest of the coverage from them so far, including Dawkins interview with Jon Faine, which were very fair.
As to making fun of Tony Abbott, one of the presenters last night said something like, “Im tired having the same old debates, we need more mocking”, and whatelse are you meant to say to a politician who wants to tell young people to save their virginity until marriage?
In 2010?
I often listen to christian broadcasting on Sirius Sat Radio…it is so political…they spend a lot of their donations helping the needs of the unborn….and of course pointing out how Obama has wreck this country in only 13 months
I’m sympathetic to those who say “don’t judge all religious people by the acts of the crazies or fundamentalists. Religion has some benefits!”
There are some very good people who are better people, or who feel they are better people, as a result of their participation in church.
Yes, a bunch of well-meaning people getting together every Sunday to bond through shared ritual, to redistribute wealth, and to commune with transcendence is very nice. It’s extremely rewarding to many people. And the added social interaction is actually quite good for people – we’re social animals. We benefit from social contact and ritual.
BUT….
YOU CAN DO ALL THOSE THINGS WITHOUT INVENTING AN IMAGINARY GOD!
You don’t need God to make you a generous person or to do good works – look at Kiwanis, look at Doctors without Borders, look at hundreds of non-religious charities.
You don’t need God to bond through shared ritual. Look at the audience at a rock concert or a football game. Look at the old guys that always gather at the local diner to swap fishing stories.
You don’t need God to commune with transcendence. Try meditation, or marathon running. Or, try REALLY thinking about how long a billion years is, or how far away Rho Cassiopeia is. Those concepts will open your mind a LOT more than some 2000-year-old campfire stories.
Yes, some people use religion as a structure for achieving other benefits. But the atheist response is: you an achieve all those benefits without manufacturing and prepetuating a lie.
well the perpetuating lie wants to continue…look at whats happening in Texas with k thru 12 Text Books
Why do they expect us to be nice and respectful when their beliefs stand in almost direct opposition to niceness and respectability?
“Yes, I support hiding pedophiles to prevent them from being brought to justice, but you shouldn’t poke fun at me for it.”
“Sure, I’m involved in an organization that encourages brutality against women, but why do you think that means you can disrespect me?”
“So I think gays deserve to be marginalized and shamed for being who they are. That doesn’t mean you should be mean to me.”
Fuck you, religious people. Respect is earned.
F I Y A
yeah stupid religion…you cannot create the photon without creating nuclear fusion first….and heaven?…give me a break…
Repeat it often and loudly.
Oh, look at my beautiful chains! They’re covered in velvet, and they’re made of gold, and they’re inscribed with the most beautiful heartwarming inscriptions. I think of the chains I could have had and I’m so thankful that my chains don’t chafe my wrist, and that I can scratch my nose!
I don’t know when rationality in the world will reach critical mass, but it can’t happen soon enough.
Well said Kome! *applauds*
I liked this quote from Catherine Deveney:
“If there is anybody out there who is not an atheist, don’t worry: it’s an intelligence test and you will be eventually.”
If only this were true. Regardless of what anybody believes or feels or thinks, we live in a godless world. It’s not just that the emperor has no clothes: there is no emperor. Only some of us humans have figured this out. Those who haven’t figured this out are ceding unearned and unwarranted respect and power to anyone claiming to speak or act in the name of a god or gods. It’s oppression in the name of shit that someone made up by people who have in effect set themselves up as gods. And that’s a damn shame.
Saying that it is dissapointing that they didn’t invite the worlds religions (who get lots of public subsidies anyway) to a non-govt-supported event is unfair is more like saying that it is sad that a Democratic Party convention didn’t invite Republican Party delegates to provide debate and balance.
PS: Heya Rorschach, I hope you are having fun down there. Well… maybe not literally “down there” even if you are.. um… ok, I shut up now.
how dare you blasphemer….you just wanna be stoned
The problem with this defense is that, quite often, the need to be sustained, guided, and comforted is because of some calamity casually or directly caused by religious beliefs and practices.
For instance, the anguish a mother feels over the loss of a son killed in Iraq, is ameliorated somewhat by her faith, but her son’s death might never have occurred were it not for sectarian religious violence. The beneficial effect she derives from her faith is therefore negated by the fact that it was, at its core, religious faith that led to her son’s death.
Those baptist child kidnappers who went to Haiti are another example. They credit god with getting them out of the Haitian hoosgow, but were it not for their crazy religious beliefs, they never would have gotten into trouble.
Bottom line, religion often creates the very problems it claims to solve.
“swaddling minds in ignorance leads to nightmares of stupidity”
I like that, think I’m going to put it on my facebook page (with proper credit of course).
Good stuff, have fun. Hope your back is doing well.
“Religion” is sustaining in many ways, but I’d venture to assert none of them are unique to religion, and that the only partially unique feature – “faith” – is the one that is the basis for most of the enormous harm religions cause.
Most (and by “most” I mean “everyone seriously religious that I’ve ever met, apart from some odd Buddhists and wacky Wiccans, even my very fine relatives and friends”) people’s belief is simply 2nd-hand ignorance, or even simply name-brand loyalty. “Faith” only comes into play when the “believer” needs an excuse to do what they would normally consider “wrong” or a psychological crutch for a time of stress. So it is indeed VERY much like a sort of drug abuse.
Also, I believe describing the meeting as a “sea” is a bit too grand. Would that it were fitting. It sounds like more of a really big “pond”. But it’s being steadily fed by the swollen streams of reason no longer able to be dammed by the religious engineers of the world.
Bottom line, religion often creates the very problems it claims to solve.
Agreed….that pesky devil
I’m glad that the ABC has put religious reporters on this story. My observation of Australians (I’m an ex-pat Canadian) is that they’re reluctant to discuss their religiosity*. While that makes for a pleasant environment it also makes it hard to get a true picture of the beliefs that dominate this society. A good example of this is Tony Burke, the federal minister for agriculture. On the ABC program Q&A where he appeared with Richard Dawkins he ducked and dived to avoid showing his religiosity. Or he did until finally Dawkins offended him. So bring on the religious ranters and the atheist ones, the more strident the better. We need to shake things up, and quickly, to see where we truly stand, because as soon as this conference is over I’m afraid it’ll all go back to the tacit norm.
*Keep in mind this is one person’s limited observation. Maybe Wowbagger, Cath or one of the other regular Aussie posters could confirm or deny this. That is as soon as they tear themselves away from the fun and frolics of the convention.
“There’s a niggling truth that millions of good, decent, hard-working people around the world are sustained, guided, and comforted by their beliefs.”
What about the millions of good, decent, hard-working people around the world who don’t believe? Or the millions who are evil, corrupt, sit-on-their-asses-all-day-writing-this-crap who do?
Crypticly brushing us non-beleivers as inherently lazy (along with being bad and indecent) is like the anti-AGW nutters who think climate scientists are bunch of New Age tree hugging socialists. Nothing could be further from the truth.
PZ’s remarks don’t fairly represent the reporting at his link; sure, the first reporter said what PZ quoted about comedy being out of place; but the second blogger LIKED the comedy. “They”, the ABC bloggers, don’t have a unified view of the events, but most of their remarks are thoughtful.
By the way, PZ’s name puts in a brief appearance there (well, his tweets are quoted, anyway:
” ‘ABC broadcaster has shown up at the blogger breakfast. Weird. Had to scramble to hide the roast babies. // LOL ‘
That was this morning’s tweet from PZ Myers, one of the presenters at the Convention. Must be the world he occupies – you’ll find more of the same at his blog.”
I think “ecological niche” would have been more accurate than “world”, but the ABC bloggers aren’t biologists after all.
Most of the posts in this thread exemplify the worry the ABC bloggers bring up over and over: why debate rather than conversation? I get that this blog is a safe place for people to blow off steam, and generally follow up watercooler type news about atheism. But I think the link blog remarks are more interesting than PZ’s snark. I would, though, of course.
What I find interesting about this is that it may seem like progress, but I don’t think so. May be disagreeing with alysonmiers, #21, but maybe not. :) It’s at best a continued failure to understand that atheism was not the cause of that stereotyped behavior, in the way that xianity is definitely the cause in their case. Deus lo vult, eh?
Progress would be the believer understanding that it’s not ‘akin,’ not a justified comparison, in the first place. But we won’t be seeing that anytime soon, even if the bible would seem to warn against the fallacious tu quoque, as Brownian cites in #10.
rudy:
No, I don’t think so. Perhaps your reading comprehension isn’t great, or you have one some heavily coloured specs. The worry the ABC bloggers have is that people are being shown to be perfectly okay without religious belief. At best, they are bleating the accomodationist drum, which they think says “can’t we all get along” when in reality it says “oh, you mean people, trying to take away a wondrous comfort from the majority! Stop doing that right now!”
Any conversation of religion, religious thought and action by an atheist is framed to be a debate by those defending religion. They have their ingrained beliefs at stake, and if they don’t stick their fingers in their ears, singing LaLaLa or framing the accomodationist shtick, they risk listening to reason, which could very well lead to doubt.
@cag #7 what do you have against witch doctors? All they do is practice sympathetic magic in the same manner as psychologists in the modern world
I remember a distant past (two years, heh) when I as a agnostic swedish christian watched Richard Dawkins “The Virus of Faith”. When he battered the moderates for betraying faith and reason equal I reacted like these people do: “can’t we accept that a little religion doesn’t hurt please? Pretty please?”
After a while I realized he was right of course and abandoned the last verges of faith for reason. Perhaps there will be a day when these people see it the same way.
For me, the kicker wasn’t that religion is evil. It was that religion is irrelevant. Something evil can be purged and what little of value salvaged, but something irrelevant can only be abandoned.
I don’t need God to to feel at place in the universe or to give life meaning or even as a last hay straw for death. There are other things, real things, out there that does that for me know. And I an better of for it.
please refrain from using the word evil….it is a religious word…it conjures the demons of the unknown….stupid religion…leave the unknown alone….
Charlie, it only seems religious because the religious co-opted morality.
it is sad that a Democratic Party convention didn’t invite Republican Party delegates to provide debate and balance.
I think you just wrote a segment for Fox “news”.
rudy #49
Because all too often the conversation goes as follows:
You atheists are going to hell because you hate god. I know god exists, he told me so. I’m right and I know I’m right because god told me I’m right. You’re immoral because you don’t accept god. You really do believe in god, you’re just mad at him so you pretend he doesn’t exist. Oh, and did I mention you’re going to hell?
Immoral bunch of new atheists!
Gathering in congregations and listening to one another and making jokes about them damn theists!!
Seriously what a bunch of morons. I mean if we went and burned down churches fine of course but indeed if we gather and discuss then we’re no better than the fundamentalists! Get a grip of yourself you theistic morons!
John
I like to think that some that use the word evil really mean unacceptable behavior….while others use it to conjure spookiness….
Kevin- well, last night Sue Ann Post and Catherine Devey were pretty much all “kick them in the nuts”, but they were the comedy warm up for the con. Phil Adams this
morning was a bit more accomodating, but I think his angle was more about not wasting them as resources to enact social change. Baby with the bathwater, but still was all for getting in their faces over the big issues.
Max Wallace was talking about how a film should be made to follow the money and encourage public action to remove religious tax-breaks. No mention made there of moderation that I picked up really.
God bless you my son.. you are doing the Lord’s will bringing heathenism to the masses of upside down Aussies and promoting good dental care and why is my comment box so messed up?
Fair Speed and a good wind on the trip to a new beginning.
Rudy, I have to say I am amazed at how unfair you are.
People of faith have their churches, synagogues and mosques.
And we have a web forum here. Do you think it is too much? Will they invite us for a debate at the time of the Sunday mass?
That said, thank you for admitting your bias. Not everyone would.
I don’t think nonUSAians fully comprehend how serious our fundie death cult moron problem is. Or how polarized the USA is on religious grounds.
Their silly War on Science
Taking over school boards to push creationism and fundie xianity.
Trying to overthrow the secular democracy.
Starting wars for no particular reason.
Trying to bring about a New Dark Age.
Sponsoring xian terrorists who occasionally assassinate someone
The fundies are 20-30% of the population. This would be 60 to 90 million rabid twisted xian Dominionist cultists. They have their own political party, the Theothuglicans and their own media such as Faux News.
According to them everyone else is going to hell. Everyone else has no morality because it all comes from their god. They hate everyone including other xians. They support domestic terrorists. They want to rule, not pray.
Either they are going to disappear as people catch on that the Dark Ages were called Dark for a good reason or they are going to destroy us.
Australians and Europeans might think that won’t effect them much. Think again. The USA has half the world’s nuclear weapons and the deeply, sincerely wished for Apocalypse is 2,000 years overdue.
Rudy,
Because there is no conversation to be had.
Religion brings nothing to the table.
Seriously, name one thing that religion has to offer that atheist don’t already have.
＠’Tis Himself, OM，
“Because all too often the conversation goes as follows:…”
Yes, I know that atheists get that a lot; I got that myself back in my college days, when I was an atheist, I’m 67% more theistic now :), and when I was more accessible to door-to-door evangelising . If I got out more, I would get grief still, from the same people (who aren’t noticeably more tolerant of Quakers, liberal Christians, UUs, Wiccans, etc.) But it seems unfortunate to let bigots dictate terms for everyone else.
I just saw a pickup truck that had the entire back end plastered with anti-abortion bumperstickers (in southern Missouri, USA). I was imagining a conversation with the driver, trying to find a way to get across to a fundamentalist Christian just why and how I disagree with him about abortion. I feel, right now, that it would be a hell of a struggle, as the Christian side of the issue is pretty much a bumpersticker level of non-thought, and they can get as loud as they want, while those who disagree with them mostly keep quiet. And, the anti-abortion side is very much politicized religion, even though most folks in that camp either/or don’t realize it and don’t care if it is.
So yay for the atheists, for speaking up and out. Be proud!
@Insightful Ape,
I’m sorry, you are right; I’ve said two opposite things: that Pharyngula was like a water cooler (or a church, in your terms), but implying that there was something wrong with the vituperation (rather than conversation?) about religion here.
Pharyngula *is* a water cooler, largely (by self selection) for atheists, and not a place for that idealized conversation. I wasn’t fair to point to it as an example of what the ABC bloggers were complaining about.
Scientology, a religion of sorts, has taken a beating in Oz in the last several months. Perhaps the other religions are concerned about overspillage into their zone.
Check out http://www.exscn.net for the complete rundown.
Senator Xenophon for the win!
What exactly do you mean by “bigots”,
rudy?
Let me ask the question differently. Why are the words “radical” and “fundamentalist” so synonymous that atheism is some times called “new fundamentalism” as a way of showing it is too radical, even though we don’t have infallible texts?
Could it be that the bible and koran themselves are full of threats, from cover to cover, against anyone who dares to dissent? Or as Sam Harris says, “god is not a moderate”?
You call them bigots. But maybe they are simply more consistent in their philosophy and their faith than you are.
@Menyambal #66 you should be able to talk rationally as both pro and anti abortion folks pretty much have the same idea that abortion should be allowed with the 9th month as the agreed upon target date.
The only difference in the two positions is a matter of timing.
FossilFishy @ #47,
I am only presenting “anecdata” – my view and experience is that there is a continuum of religiosity in Australia, with the majority being not very religious at all, and not overt in talking about it. The main ones who are loud about their religion tend to be the fundies, who are outliers. Those who attend a church more often than just “Christmas and Easter” (or “C and E”, rather than “C of E”, as the joke goes) would probably be more open about talking about religion, but there is little evangelising, or pushing their religious views on others – unless they’re politicians like Abbott or Rudd.
My A2¢ – regards, Philip (aka Pope Maledict)
Menyambal #66: On my way to Australia I stopped in Colorado Springs for a couple of weeks. I saw a pick-up there that had a bunch of conservative/religious bumper stickers on the back. One said “Abortion: what part of thou shalt not kill don’t you understand?” Less than a meter away was one that said “Give war a chance.” I sat on the curb for 20 minutes waiting for the driver. I really wanted ask them “War: what part thou shalt not kill don’t you understand.” Unfortunately they didn’t show.
The cognitive dissonance that religious folks display continues to astound me.
@Insightful Ape,
As far as “they” are concerned, you’re right:
I think I’m not consistent with their philosophy and faith; I am somewhat more consistent with my own, (which doesn’t have infallible texts; I am a Quaker).
Saying someone is immoral because they don’t believe in (a) god is a form of hatred, since the speaker doesn’t actually care whether it is true or not. That is why it’s bigotry. The other part, about going to hell; well, that isn’t so obviously bigotry，I admit.
@Malcolm,
Name one thing atheists have that non-atheists don’t already have. Atheists have at least one less thing (possibly many more!)
Seriously, we are having a conversation here. Sometimes (most of the time) people don’t know where a conversation’s gonna go.
Fossilfishy
My observation of Australians (I’m an ex-pat Canadian) is that they’re reluctant to discuss their religiosity
I would agree. I have friends who I know are very religious and they have never mentioned it to me (luckily). I don’t seem to have daily runs in with the religious that some do elsewhere. I met for the first time an American woman recently who managed to mention god 3 or 4 times (not ‘god im sick of the rain’, but ‘gods plan for me’* stick finger down throat*)in our 15 min conversation, which I found very offputting. I was gobsmacked that she would bring up god with someone she didn’t know, and she seemed to assume I believed in god too! I couldn’t deal with casual religiosity all the time -I’d become an Aussie PZ pretty quickly.
I was horrified at how stupid our pollies appeared on QANDA, but i did enjoy Dawkins run rings around them. I knew that family first twit would make my skin crawl but i was hoping (in vain) for better from the others.
Respect religion no. Respect the religious maybe. It depends on if they exhibit behavior consistent with advanced rabies. Those can be very dangerous.
Rational thought
@Rev. BigDumbChimp,
Oh, snap.
No, you doing delusional rambling, and we are refuting you.
I guess the idea is that we should bring back the old crime of Lèse majesté, with God instead of the King.
I vote ‘no.’
Rudy,
Let me say first that if I ever were to have a religion, I would become a Quaker. In fact, one of my favorite people in the whole history is a Quaker, William Penn. I’ll even add that if all religious people were Quakers, I probably would join them, though I couldn’t bring myself to believe the supranatural part.
That said, I think you better watch what you are saying: “whoever doesn’t follow me will be cast in the fire like a withered branch”. Quote from Jesus.
Really?
And I was being serious.
You’re right. Atheists lack (1) superstition, (2) a list of arcane, meaningless rules designed by the clergy to keep the faithful in line, and (3) a book full of contradictory nonsense. There are other things we lack as well, but this list will do for a start.
Why do all you theists claim “oh yeah, I used to be a atheist but I found Jebus”? Do you assholes think we actually believe this bullshit? I’d be willing to wager large amounts of money that you weren’t an atheist. You were, at best, a vague deist looking for an appealing religion.
For many, ethics:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/fyi.php#comment-981847
One less unevidenced, unethical imaginary belief. Not exactly a loss.
Indeed. We don’t have an imaginary psychotic sky dad. Life’s much better when it’s reality based.
@’Tis Himself, OM #83
you sure? What a poor library you must have
I don’t like Deveny’s style of humour, personally. Didn’t like her work before she was out as an atheist. Still don’t.
She spends way too much time bad-mouthing the person she used to be, by attacking people that she used to be (i.e. bogans). Too much projected self-loathing, too little nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
“Pierced anal egg roll” isn’t really funny. But it’s not really an inducement to animus either.
All the same I don’t see the problem with any of the Abbott lines, and I don’t loathe Abbott (I loathe his policies though). How can a joke specific to one individual be reinforcing a stereotype? It’s definitionaly impossible.
If anything, her joke that Abbott is the only one who takes the Pope seriously implies diversity of belief amongst Catholics, not homogeneity. That’s the opposite of a stereotype.
Sue Ann Post is gold. Much better than Deveny (IMHO).
*waits for Pascal to make an appearance
You’re right, broboxley. In my person library I have three Bibles, a Book of Mormon, a Koran, and the Aranyakas & Upanishats. However, I don’t use any of these books as a basis for personal belief.
Rev. BDC:
Wanna wager?
*ducks and runs*
@Caine, Fleur du mal,
> We don’t have an imaginary psychotic sky dad.
We don’t either! See, atheists and (some) theists have so much in common to talk about!
Aren’t you making the assumption that all religions are branches of patriarchy? Kali would like to have a word with you.
@rudy #91 I thought kali would rather lend a hand
Or an imaginary psychotic sky mom, sky kids, or sky gang, unlike every fucking theist who ever lived. Look up the word theism in a dictionary.
No, I’m not making any assumptions. I’m well aware of different religions, gods, etc. There is zero evidence for any of them, including yours.
Uh huh. Might as well have a word with Tiamat. They don’t exist.
#73
No, see, actually that’s the DEFINITION of bigotry. Y’know, implying that someone deserves punishment or is not as good as you due to arbitrary characteristics. The “You’re going to HELLLLLLL” shit is pretty much as bigoted as an idea can possibly be.
This is an example of rational theism from a facebook posting today:
You’re welcome.
IaMoL, eesh, what a garbled load of shit. I really could have lived without wasting brain cells on that. I better go find a beer now.
Caine,
I read it too. I’ll join you in hoisting a beer or three to recover from that silliness.
Ready for the shocking twist? It wasn’t the stupidest thing said in that thread. A dear friend thought What the Bleeep Do We Know? was a good movie.
I know…
IaMol, ouch. That had to hurt.
‘Tis, oh good. The beer is helping.
‘Tis Himself, OM,
You are simply wrong about me. I am not sure how to prove it to you, though. I didn’t mean to come across as “I once was lost, now I’m saved”. I was trying to say “that happened to me too, so I know what you mean”. That’s not the same.
My beliefs actually haven’t changed that much in lots of important ways; I used to think superstition was immoral, and I still do. I was pro-choice, antihomophobic, antiwar before, still am.
If I showed familiarity with the skeptical culture, would that help? In college I read Kai Nielsen (an atheist philsopher’s) essays in various collections (I think he had one in a Prometheus’ Books anthology). One of my favorite books (still is) “Anomalistic Psychology”, the book on LEA Publishers about scientific explanations for Jesus on toast, UFO’s, deja vu, stuff like that. More recently I read Batchelors’s “Buddhism without Beliefs” and recommended it to friends. [I still get a lot out of Buddhist books (though not the Dalai Lama’s. Talk about writing the same book over and over).]
I don’t bet (it’s against my religion, happily), and you’ve got a sort of an “out” in your last sentence (Vague Deist; that should be a denomination for sure), but is there anything I could tell you that would convince you?
Isn’t this the negative of Christians telling people they aren’t *really* atheists? I mean, you can admit that my, umm, “faith journey” (wince)
is at least possible, even if you can’t know if it’s true in my case. But I should be resigned to this kind of misunderstanding; I guess I shouldn’t bring it up just for this reason.
@Shplane, I don’t think being an atheist counts as an “arbitrary” characteristic. That being said, I’m ok with the whole passage in question being called bigoted (which I implied the first time it came up).
My beliefs actually haven’t changed that much in lots of important ways; I used to think superstition was immoral, and I still do.
Sorry, there is a huge gap here. I do not see superstitions as being immoral. I find them silly and potentially harmful. But not immoral. And from my point of view, I have a hard time telling if you dislike a superstition because it is against your religion (superstition) or if it just useless.
Although somewhat tangential to the ongoing discussions, I am wondering why spirituality and faith is so ubiquitous? From my understanding, there has been no civilization in the history of the world that has not believed in a higher power. This observation could lead one to conclude that faith is a “natural behavior”. Since science often observes/studies nature, behavior etc and claim this to establish scientific truth, how would we argue against the statement that the persistence of this belief “proves” its existence? I am asking this as a result of a debate I have recently had with a group of young earth creationists that I am trying to convince otherwise. I was hoping for a forum of discussion but again apologize for the tangential nature of the comment/question.
Boy, I hope they brought a sufficient supply of pearls to the conference. It seems that they’ll be clutching them quite a bit.
cdmissinglink46:
You could start by reading this:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/religion_adaptation_or_by-prod.php
and comment again for discussion.
:)
Maybe if those bastards weren’t so damn happy despite reality they wouldn’t ALLOW the nasty shit to happen.
cdmissinglink46, you can always post in the current incarnation of the endless thread, nothing is off topic there.
Gods, creation myths, etc., were created because most of the world and its workings seemed unknowable. Humans in general have a hard time taking in the scope of the world, let alone the universe without some sort of buffer. It wasn’t long before some people realized the inherent power and ability to control others in religious belief.
@Caine, Fleur du mal, I was talking about the sky “dad” part. Yes, we are educated people and I know you know about other gods/godesses/myths. It was a joke.
Others: yes, I know what theism means. I like Imaginary Psychotic Sky God though, it would be a good band name. Very Lovecraftian.
Perhaps the faithful/believers feel confortable living in a sea of ignorant bliss b/c that way they don’t have to be responsible for their actions. And, therefore if they do something stupid they can just attribute it to the invisible deity or even to satan.
Rudy:
Let’s define atheism:
Let’s narrow that a bit further:(from Wiki)
add to this:
and
and finally:
What evidence can you cite that would overturn this reasoning – to go from atheism to theism?
Janine, Mistress Of Foul Mouth Abuse, OM,
Well, superstitions are lies about the world, often to manipulate other people (or fool yourself). Some of them are relatively harmless, like many things in this world there are shades of gray. But they are still lies.
That’s what I would have said before, and I still think that, but I’d enrich it with the perspective that some of it is idolatry (talismins as little gods) and some of it represents hatred of the world (belief in demons, etc.) Since God made the world good, ignoring it and replacing it with a pale copy for your own selfish reasons is immoral. Anyway, I’m rambling, but that’s the basic idea.
It seems that almost every person who comes to proselytize at us “used to be an atheist.” Maybe (and that’s maybe) you were a genuine atheist, but the probability is low. But it’s not zero. There is a slim, faint, marginal, outside chance that perhaps for a fleeting moment you could possibly have had an atheistic thought or two. And I might win the lottery tomorrow even though I never buy lottery tickets.
As I pointed out in post #89 I have various sets of scriptures. I also have books on theology, Biblical criticism, apologetics, and other religious topics. I’ve read all these books. They haven’t made me into any sort of theist. I’ve also read all five volumes of Das Kapital but somehow avoided being a Marxist.
Just because you’ve read some books doesn’t mean you embrace the concepts given in the books. I know from personal experience that reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion does not necessarily turn one into an anti-semite.
Sorry, your imaginary deity didn’t make the world. Keep the lies coming.
@IaMoL, thanks for taking the time to make a list. I’m way overstaying my bedtime, my son has an SAT
tomorrow so I should logout, but I promise to get back to them.
A short answer though is that my theism is more of aesthetic and emotional position; philosophical theology doesn’t speak to me, but people’s personal narratives, and poetry, do. To me, the only way out of the Social Lie is (some) religion. More tomorrow though.
Oh fuck, a presuppositionalist and he’s gonna go there.
Dude. An idiot once wrote on this blog that atheists just make themselves God. My reply was that I don’t believe in leprechauns either; by his stupid reasoning I am my own leprechaun – hence -IaMoL. You’re rambling all right.
@Insightful Ape
Well, the historic Jesus liked to talk like that. I think what you get of this sentence depends on what you think “follow” means. Or how metaphorical the fire is.
What historical jesus? You have proven nothing, except you like to tell tall tales. Evidence is lacking for you inane claims.
off topic, fun pole.
http://twtpoll.com/r/v0wqoc
Believing that is a superstition. Your god didn’t create anything, your god doesn’t intervene in the working of the world or anything on it. God doesn’t exist. As you believe in god, please present actual evidence for the existence of said creature.
I can say, over and over, that invisible unicorns roam my property and keep my grass neatly trimmed. That doesn’t make it so.
Well, superstitions are lies about the world, often to manipulate other people (or fool yourself).
Once more, there is a huge gap between you and me. I would not say that a superstition is a lie about the world. It is a misunderstanding that the person has. It becomes a lie by one of two ways.
First, if it can be shown that the superstition can be shown to be worthless and the person insists on believing it anyways.
Second, when a class of people manipulate a group that shares a common superstition to achieve a desired goal.
In order to have a lie about a given thing, a truth must be known about that thing. If a truth is not known, a superstition is not a lie, it is a mistaken belief.
In order to hold your position, one must have an all powerful being that has given the truth to it’s creation. And I do not accept the concept of reveled knowledge.
Oh, same old same old crap. Provide evidence. Please. Just once, I’d like to see fucking evidence.
You mean the historical Jesus that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence of? The one where supposed quotes were written down decades after his supposed execution? You mean the Gospels written by Mathew, Mark, Luke & John?
jenbphillips: thanks for the link. I am certainly not qualified to do a quick read and do a credible critique. However, a few things come to mind. Religion is seen as an “adaptation for cooperation”. It would seem as if religion could have stopped at a fraternity level or boy scout level commitment but certainly I can see it progressing. However, I suppose the argument against the cooperative evolutionary force is that there are many individuals/civilizations who had no need for this simply based upon there position of power and wealth. It would seem that there are many situations in which that argument would not hold water. The other hypothesis stated in that link was that religion served as an understanding of “moral intuitions”. that seems to fall right in line with the fundamentalist argument that without a God we would not have a moral intuition to begin with.
Just a few quick thoughts but thanks again for the link. wish me luck in the next debate.
There is no historical Jesus. You have biblical scholars debating how likely their version of Jesus said any given quote in the bible.
So, a guy who repeatedly refers to President Obama as a “venomous vermin Marxist thug” sends me another letter to the editor (which will not be published) in which he endorses the “public hanging” of Obama for “TREASON!!” He also requests that I be “publicly hung for TREASON!!” because I won’t run his letter to the editor. I’m violating his freedom of speech, he says.
Then he closes his letter with “Never forget, America, The Hand of God rules this world and The Hand of God is moved by prayer, namely our dialy prayers for the wellbeing and future of our America!”
And my wife wonders why I seceded from Da Church …
Sorry IaMoL, I repeated your point. I should have refreshed my page before I responded.
Mediajackal, remind him that every threat to the President is taken seriously by the Secret Service, and they will be interested in his letter.
Wait a second… these people are bent out of shape because a bunch of atheists aren’t paying homage to their viewpoint? If the faithful can really be called that then why the fuck are they so insecure?
Fun job you have there, mediajackal. Keep fighting the good fight.
I’m violating his freedom of speech, he says.
5 bucks sez if asked, he will claim the ACLU is “unamerican”.
Hurin:
Now there’s a question which never gets a good answer from the faithful types.
And what does the A stand for? The lunacy of some folks is amazing. Lights on, very dim, but nobody home…
Nerd of Redhead, I have already contacted the Secret Service; this isn’t the first time he’s made such threats. I knew he was a Lost Cause when I called to inform him his letter wasn’t running and that I’d called the feds, got his voice mail, and the message began, “I can do all things through Christ who is in me.”
My boss enjoys it when I poke people with sharp sticks, but she’s afraid that I’ll send this joker over the edge. To which I replied, “Edge? Hell, the guy’s not even in this solar system.”
And, Caine, Fleur du mal, I don’t think there can be any “fucking evidence” because that would sorta destroy the whole point of Christianity.
@IaMoL, I was talking about why superstition is bad (to me). I don’t know why this made you mad. What is a “presuppositionalist”?
@Nerd, you mean to say “a falsehood”, not a lie. It would be a lie if I didn’t believe it. In any case I hope you find the world a good place, made for you or not.
@’Tis Himself, OM, yes, I know, it’s tough to prove something like that over the internet. And I know that it’s a trope that some Christians like when they evangelize (I used to be just like you!) And having the books doesn’t prove it,. But I hope it is a little convincing. Oh, add Albert Ellis’ “Guide to Rational living” (I gave friends copies of that one) and Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things (terrific observations of the natural world and a real skeptic. I’m just trying to to convince *you*. I was entirely an atheist from the age of 16 (ex-RCC, natch) for decades until very recent years (changing due to trying to think through my pacifism, partly due to actual convincement by some writers, like Rene Girard，and by the math writer Martin Gardner in his autobiography, and most importantly, attending Quaker meeting. I just discovered that I liked the religious perspective better.
I’m really, really OK with people being atheists.Some Quakers are atheists (or “non-theist”, as our jargon goes. Quakers have jargon for all occasions, I think it comes from being small; I just realized my use of “convincement” is Quaker jargon.)
True enough. Still, I find myself asking. Bad habit.
This I can personally attest to.
IaMoL; Janine, Mistress Of Foul Mouth Abuse:
being a newbie to this blog (and all blogs for that matter), I am somewhat unsure as to the “etiquette” (I am not even sure I spelled that write). I had posted something earlier about a debate I was having with a group of fundamentalists etc and in the process of reviewing and responding to that post, I saw your posts. I would certainly look for feedback from others but I had thought any attack on the “historical” Jesus could be dismissed quite quickly. Obviously his claims to being deity can be debated but I had thought even secularists had certainly acknowledged the historical jesus based upon writings and other “non-christian” accounts. I certainly am willing to be corrected on this but am not sure if attacking the credibility of the historical Jesus is wise.
Personal belief =/= fact. You can be as delusional as you want. But if you expect us to believe you, you need evidence. And your delusional belief does not qualify as evidence. An eternally burning bush would qualify as evidence. Get it?
Janine, I don’t think there is such a big gap. We probably agree on most examples of what would count as superstition. If it is just a mistaken belief, I don’t necessarily think it’s superstition, but if someone doesn’t want to know or find it if it’s true, I think that is superstition
The God stuff just adds “color” to the black and white of the ethical picture. It doesn’t change what you and I would agree is superstiton.
Imaginary deities add nothing but confusion. They are irrelevant to everything, like claiming invisible gold dragon in the garage. No need to invoke them. They serve no purpose,
The next time the Shriners have a convention, I expect Margaret Coffey to object that Star Trek fans weren’t invited or included. Anything else would be blatantly hypocritical.
Cdmissinglink46, there is no contemporary accounts of Jesus. The earliest writings about his life comes from decades after his supposed existence. And of the four gospels, three are, in essence rewrites. And there were other gospels from that time but were not make part of the bible because those gospel put forth a different form of christian belief. (What became the Catholic Church was not the only strand of early christianity.)
The bible is a work that came from the oral traditions from several different societies, translated numerous times and edited for creed and political tastes. Every time there is a new version of the bible, it is just that, reedited and directed at a given audience.
OK. You’re wrong.
Cdmissinglink46 @ 139:
It’s not unwise at all. There is no solid evidence for the historicity of Jesus. It has been widely discussed and researched; the discussions continue. The bible cannot be taken as a reliable source at all, let alone evidence.
What does any of this even mean? Please describe in as much detail as possible three of your religious beliefs and the evidence that has convinced you to hold them. Since you find superstition (belief without evidence) immoral, this should be easy – you’ve had practice, right?
Janine, I don’t think there is such a big gap. We probably agree on most examples of what would count as superstition. If it is just a mistaken belief, I don’t necessarily think it’s superstition, but if someone doesn’t want to know or find it if it’s true, I think that is superstition
There is a huge gap. I reject all superstitions because they require a supernatural cause. And I see no reason to accept a supernatural cause. And I will go further, I am sure that there are many things that I believe to be correct are, in truth, mistaken because my fellow humans have yet to know the truth of the matter.
You think most superstitions are a lie because they contradict the truth as you believe to be reveled by your big sky daddy.
You belief system is as far away from me as any given fundamentalist.
And stop saying that you were an atheist. If you were, you would understand why many of us are objecting to your statement. You would also understand my earlier objection of your defining a superstition as a lie about the world.
Janine:
If Rudy bothers to respond, he/she’ll get all distracted, ’cause he/she doesn’t believe in a big sky daddy, and those sort of idiotic details seem to matter when describing the superstitious nonsense Rudy believes in. (I already got that when I mentioned atheists don’t believe in Psychotic Sky Dad.)
The hysterical…errmm, historical Jesus fails as a hypotheses, all claims of the supernatural aside. What observations would this conjecture (the existence of Jesus) predict, and which would it exclude? What little we can deduce must come from what little was written about that character…but it is too little. Even taking the Gospels as an attempt at a historical account (which they scarcely are) doesn’t provide a coherent enough basis to make those deductions. To suppose that there was a historical Jesus* is as vacuous as supposing that god exists.
*i.e. a man named Yeshua from the region of Galilee may have said and done some of the things that are attributed to him…see? Kind of vacuous.
Caine, rudy made me just a little cranky when he tried to tell me that we really are not that far apart. Never mind the fact that I pointed out that I have a different way of defining superstition and that I reject the concept of knowledge reveled by god. That is what you need if a superstition is a lie about the world.
I figure that rudy will not like my crack about his warm and fuzzy belief being as far from my beliefs and a harsh and judgmental fundamentalist. Rudy needs to realize that just because he is more liberal that his beliefs are any less ridiculous than a snake kisser.
cdmissinglink46:
Hold water? Powerful, wealthy people (and civilizations) have used religion and/or superstition as a means of controlling the poor and powerless for thousands of years. Conversely, the powerless, poor, and oppressed have used religious identity as a bonding, community-building tool. It’s been dead useful as an engine of cultural evolution–but that doesn’t make any of it ‘true’ in the supernatural sense.
But if religion evolved as a byproduct of an evolutionarily advantageous tendency to care about and protect other members of ones community, invoking god as an explanation is as superfluous here as it is in any evolutionary event. Non-human primates and other intelligent mammals exhibit well-documented behaviors that could be described as ‘moral’–compassion, empathy, altruism, etc. The simplest explanation that these are evolved traits that confer a survival advantage for social animals.
Janine:
Agreed. Personally, I can’t get past the nonsense of “if I believe it, it isn’t a lie” and the “I’m not superstitious, superstition is wrong!” Oy.
To those whining about believers not being invited to our party I say:
“If a
child of gay parentsbeliever comes to ourschoolconvention, and weteach that gay marriage is against the will of Godtalk about how there is no God, then thechildthinking-like-a-child believer will think that we are sayingtheir parents are badtheir beliefs are really silly. We don’t want to put anychildfragile believer in that tough position.”Rudy,
What is the difference between a superstition and a religious belief?
Both are irrational.
And you seem to have missed the point I was trying to make earlier, so I’ll try to simplify it for you. What exactly does atheism get out of a conversation with religion?
Seriously.
You came here berating us for not engaging in this ‘conversation’, so go on, give us an incentive.
Somebody further up was talking about faith. I think that “faith” is another word for “prejudice” or “I just wanna” or “get the fuck away from me”. It is simply the lack of thought or reason or understanding, kinda like atheism is the lack of belief…there is a spectrum of insightfulness, and faith is at one end, science at the other.
Anyhow, that ol’ blind pigheadedness has become the center of the Christian religion–faith in God, belief in Jesus, (by the way, why does no one ever express confidence in the Holy Spirit?) is the whole blessed point, because that it what the fruitloops are best at. Blind, stinking obliviousness trumps all, and is what their god most cherishes. According to them.
Here’s an illustration of sorts:
A few years back, when e-mail was first getting popular, a lot of people spent a lot of time forwarding e-mails around. (The sport may still be as popular, but I am out of the loop, thank Jesus.) They didn’t add any content to the e-mail, or ever originate any, but by God they forwarded the fuck out of it. Stupid jokes, inspiring stories, bogus warnings and other dreck that was very like the sort of crap found in a Sunday school newsletter (which is sorta my point).
One of the very popular e-mails purported to be from Bill Gates, offering to reward people for forwarding e-mails so he could track them with some “tracking software” he needed to test. The software never existed, and the letter was not from Bill Gates, of course, but consider what those folks believed.
Wooo….Bill Frakking Gates, the inventor of computers and probably the internet, too, personally thought e-mail forwarding was just the neatest thing ever, and he, personally, was telling them so, and encouraging them, rewarding them, and depending on their help to accomplish his purpose. He even made an e-mail for them to forward, and needed people to forward more e-mails, because forwarding e-mail was great and they should help him make more money….
You get the idea. The lamest, laziest assholes on the internet thought it was invented just for them and their deranged hobby, and that their shameful weakness was the greatest possible good in the eyes of the most powerful human being.
Similarly, religion has evolved to where it now glorifies being an idiot. And humanity has evolved to be more faithful, and individuals learn to be less logical.
And us snarky writers think that this blog is the best thing in town.
Thank you and good night.
Hey, no dissin’ the clownfish, squidface.
Oops … I must be going stupid – I keep seeing “clownfish” where there is only “clownish”. The really sad thing is I hadn’t even had any grog … where’s jesus when you need him?
@Kevin #2: You left out “keep out of the reach of children”. It’s dangerous shit; kids shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near it.
@ rudy
Re:Books you’ve read.
Social Lie
Lies masquerading as BELIEF
god adding color
The Earth was made good
“faith journey”
One word sums up your current state nicely………GULLIBLE.
Nova
Menyambal @ 156
Your analogy and the exposition thereof are chock full of Win.
A belief in a mythical Billgates. People passing on His message because other people said he said to pass it on, and because it would be good for them and right to do for Him. The fact that the message originated with someone who simply wanted to exert a little control over people’s actions and the environment.
Sweet.
Saw you today at the conference Paul and was enthralled by your speech, thanks so much for that and for having time afterward to meet and chat to us! you’re a legend, keep at it as will us Aussie atheists! we could never have too many intellectual people like you fighting the good fight!
Pete
PS. Margaret Coffey of the ABC has written a reply to this blog – http://blogs.radionational.net.au/atheistconvention/
The Faith Eater, thanks.
Looks like Coffey has a point. In the about, the entry for Gary Bryson has “He is a secular humanist, with a particular interest in philosophy, the history of ideas, and religious belief in all its forms.”
As to why it arose in the first place, others in this thread have suggested answers to that.
As to why it continues to exist, the reason (as many have pointed out) is indoctrination. To paraphrase someone (Richard Dawkins?), a baby does not have religion. It knows nothing of Thor, Muhammad, some bloke in Galilee, or The Great Green Snot. It is raised in a household and community which says all good things are due to The Great Green Snot, and bad things happen if you blow your nose. Therefore, The Great Green Snot is true and wonderful and historically accurate and there’s lots of evidence for it.
So that is what you
teachindoctrinate your children. And the cycle continues…It’s a shame. at some point in time many people stop learning for themselves and uncritically rely on what they’re told by authority.
For example:
Homeopathy Mustwork, because the Prestigious Doctor Benveniste says so.
Odd how I can calmly critique Dr Benveniste and nobody wrings their hands and clutches their pearls in a fit of the vapors, but when I critique the ultimate argumentum ad verecundiam, I’m being mean-spirited and ugly, even– especially if I make a joke about it or (Baal help me)laugh at them.
To be fair to the ABC, Craig Reucassel and Julian Morrow are also employed by the ABC, and they are presenters at the convention.
I’ve been a bad boy. The ABC responded with a pompous blog post saying how authoritive they were. I let them have a few choice words. Especially about the dickhead who signs off each blog post with a statement that he has degrees in philosophy, engineering and theology was an irrational twat. They really pissed me off. They’re justifying child rape, subjugation of half the world’s population, etc, because not all religious are bad. Arseholes.
That post didn’t make it. But this was my next comment, which won’t make it.:
P.S. I forgot to give you the pleasure of feeling self-righteous. I’ll do that now. Fuck off immoral twats!
its been a crappy week for atheist:
1) jesus freaks in texas approved christian proselytizing in text books k thru 12….there is even some language disparaging the idea of separating church and state
2) Newdow looses decision by the supreme jesus court to keep their christian god on money and in the classroom….
yeah… were going back to the dark ages
Interestingly, out of the eleven posts in ABC’s blog so far, exactly one of them was written by Gary Bryson. Eight were written by Coffey and two by Chris Mulherin. There’s a note on Mulherin’s first post: “Chris Mulherin has degrees in Engineering, Philosophy and Theology and is currently writing a doctorate on scientific and religious knowledge. He is an Anglican minister and lives in Melbourne.”
Yep, the atheist outlook is strongly represented on ABC’s blog. </sarcasm>
Tis Himself I commented on Mulherin’s doctoral studies. Scientific (I can use a computer, yeah!) and religious (brain fart!) knowledge. I think that’s why my comment was rejected. Can’t be sure, maybe it was the fact that I wasn’t religious?
@Janine, Mistress Of Foul Mouth Abuse, OM,
I had to get to sleep, but this morning I have a little time to post.
Janine, you are right that you think I’m missing the biggest superstition of all – God – and so we are *not* close about that. I’ll give you that.
But I was quite serious about how I feel about superstition (ghosts, demons, good luck, bad luck, Deepak Chopra etc.) I think you said that superstitions are just a misunderstanding about the world, and that they become lies under some circumstances. I only count them as superstitions after they become lies (used to control groups etc.) Is this a fair summary? (Deepak Chopra seems a tricky case here for me, though, as I would be required to know his real motivations, under my definition, but you wouldn’t). I also think superstitions are about fearing the world, and living in a world of mere appearance. (Money is a superstition, in a sort of vague way; that idea is from Milton). That’s probably not at all close to your views.
Janine, I kept saying that I used to be an atheist (a point I brought up in the context of knowing what it was to get shit from evangelists) *only* because one of the posters angrily denied it could be true.
But don’t call me a liar; do you know more somehow about my past than I do? If you want to say that I’m stupid to change from that belief, that’s OK, (some friends of mine agree with you).
And I *don’t* mind your dissing my warm and fuzzy liberal religious beliefs.
@Malcom, actually I came here complaining that PZ misrepresented the articles in his post. Later on I did complain about the tone of the followup posts, but apologized when the unfairness of that was pointed out (by you, I think).
My answer to your “what do we get out of that conversation” (kind of vague, I admit, and maybe a little too tongue-in-cheek) was that you can’t say where a conversation will go; that’s often why you have them. Sorting out misunderstandings maybe?
One more concrete reason might be to convince the more conservative sort of Christians to be more tolerant of atheists. That, I guess, is something non-atheists would get *from* atheists, not vice versa, but it would have benefits for the atheist community. You know, a political reason. If you are asking why *you* need to talk to non-atheists about religion, I don’t know you well enough to say.
cdmissinglink46@105:
People’s propensity toward religion can easily be explained in terms of cognitive biases—the way we have evolved to think about various things, and the way societies evolve to use those beliefs to justify social arrangements.
Have a look at these two postings in an earlier Pharyngula thread; the first (#89) explains “spiritual experiences” and the second (more important) one (#138) explains religion more generally:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/genosprituality_srsly.php#comment-2131713
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/genosprituality_srsly.php#comment-2132349
I highly recommend Pascal Boyer’s book Religion Explained. (He’s a cognitive anthropologist.)
Here’s a big hunk of comment #138:
—
Pascal Boyer (in Religion Explained), Scott Atran (title escapes me), and Dan Dennett (Breaking the Spell) make an excellent case that religion is (mostly) a spandrel—a predictable side-effect of things that are selected for, in the usual way, for other reasons.
We have a lot of cognitive biases, and social phenomena that amplify those biases, such that there are certain things we’re predictably prone to believing, whether they’re true or not.
In particular, we’re a little bit paranoid, in many ways and at many levels of cognition, because usually—in any individual case—a slight risk of seeing something that isn’t there is preferable to a slight risk of not seeing something that is there.
(A non-tiger mistaken for a tiger is usually no big deal. You check it out, realize you were wrong, and continue about your business. A tiger that’s not recognized as a tiger—or even noticed as a mysterious object to check out—might be a very big deal indeed.)
The vast majority of these somewhat-paranoid errors happen at a relatively low level, and get ruled out as information gets processes at higher semantic levels, without ever making it to consciousness.
(Basically, modules at each level correlate data from multiple sources, to disambiguate things and usually select the right answer to pass on up. For example, your retina and the first layer of your optical cortex make lots of mistakes in interpreting rod and cone firing patterns as likely local bits of edges in a larger image, but most of those mistakes don’t make it up more than a level or two or three, rarely make you detect an image boundary that isn’t there, and almost never make you see an object such as a tiger that isn’t there at all.)
One universal form of paranoia, at a very high semantic level, is the tendency to attribute agency to things a little too often—that is, to wrongly guess that they were consequences of an agent (such as a person or other animal) that was trying to do something.
So, for example, if a rock falls next to you, it might just be a rock that happened to be dislodged by a bush blowing in the wind, tumbled down an adjacent hill, bounced off another rock, and happened to land next to you. (No biggie.)
Or it might be that somebody has the high ground and is throwing rocks at you, trying to harm you. (Biggie.)
As usual, a little paranoia pays off on average—it’s better to have a false positive, and check it out, than a false negative, when it comes to detecting agency.
(Dennett would say you have a “Hyperactive Agency Detection Device”.)
That paranoia about agents is built on top of a more fundamental tendency to carve the world into agent-things and not-agent-things. We’ve evolved different mental capacities for reasoning about regular physical objects (like rocks and trees and water) than for thinking about things with minds and goals (like tigers and people). You generally interpret their observable behavior in very different ways, and use very different rules for reasoning about them.
We also have specialized evolved abilities for dealing with certain kinds of smart, social agents—e.g., assumptions that something smart like a human paying attention to you and making complicated noises is trying to communicate something from its mind to yours.
We’re a little paranoid about that, too, as we should be.
If you have that sort of ubiquitous slight paranoia at all levels, including mental and social levels, on top of the basic category-mistake brainfarts I talked about in comment #89, it starts to look religion-like.
Your brain tends to make interesting mistakes for basic first-order reasons, and it tends to make paranoid mistakes, including interpreting plain first-order mistakes in a paranoid way at a higher level.
Add to that that a few of those mistakes will escape social sanity checking, and be amplified by social agreement. (We’re prone to groupthink in several ways, for usually good heuristic evolutionary reasons.)
So now we have:
1) a tendency to interpret random events as patterned, seeing causation where it isn’t, in lieu of information to the contrary
2) a tendency to see causal events as intentional,
thinking somebody did it on purpose, in lieu of information to the contrary,
3) a tendency to sense invisible people where they aren’t
4) a tendency to perceive our minds as distinct things from out bodies (because we have fundamentally different evolved ways of reasoning about them).
5) a tendency toward social amplification of these things, in lieu of any sanity checks
And you’re off!—now you have dualistic souls and invisible people, and group amplification of that idea into a consensus, with no way of you or your society knowing you’ve gone a little nuts.
Basically you have a confluence of several failure modes of several heuristics at several levels of a very complex and intrinsically fallible heuristic guessing system.
Which, if you’re a computer scientist, is just not surprising at all.
We know that what the brain is doing is basically a vast amount of heuristic computation—i.e, guesswork all the time, mostly at very low and very error-prone levels, with higher-level guesswork disambiguating ambiguities from mixed good and bad lower-level guesswork.
Any heuristic (guessing) system is intrinsically prone to failure when faced with really oddball inputs—combinations of unusual things that tweak the failure modes of several heuristics (i.e., rules of thumb).
That is absolutely to be expected, and if Boyer and Atran are right, that is what religion mainly is—the combined failure mode of several basic heuristics failing simultaneously, with no cross-check.
here’s Fixed Noise on the topic of the Texas Textbook Showdown, careful, you may feel less intelligent after viewing..
this bullshit will be up for public view for 30 days before a final vote….if you live in texas, please review, there’s plenty to ridicule….
one more note: if approved there will be a picture of Newt Gingrich, leader of “The Moral Majority” in the eleventh grade social studies book teaching the kiddies about how we can only be moral by reading the bible…
My comment (in reply to a blatant plug for a YEC seminar tomorrow, which had been posted on the ABC Radio National blog in one of the comments sections) is still yet to appear, six hours later. They mustn’t like my alias. Not happy.
ye cursèd Pope Maledict DCLXVI
@Caine, Fleur du mal,
I can’t find the context of “If I believe it, it’s not a lie”; but you say I said it, so I’ll go with that.
A lie has to do with intention; I if tell a falsehood *knowing* it’s false, it’s a lie. If I believe a falsehood, my repeating it is not a lie (though it may still be ethically questionable on other grounds, say if I should know better but choose to ignore that information. Is that what you have in mind?)
Obviously you aren’t concerned with bigger truths. Like whether your imaginary deity really exists. Belief =/= fact or truth.
Rudy #171
You really push my buttons, Rudy. However I’ll be nice this time and not give an economics lecture. You couldn’t have known I’m an economist.
I don’t deny the possibility you might have been an atheist. I merely expressed doubt because past experience has shown that many Christian proselytizers brag “I used to be an atheist but then I SAW THE LIGHT AND FOUND JEBUS!” Apparently your particular brand of Jebusism is a bit more mushy than that of the usual run of missionaries but you’ve made it obvious you’re preaching to the heathen.
About 17 months ago I gave a short lecture on money.
Money is a matter of functions four,
A medium, a measure, a standard, a store.
1) millions of good, decent, hard-working people around the world are sustained, guided, and comforted by their beliefs.
And millions of people believe that the earth is 6000 years old–that’s doing fuck all for anyone.
2) my repeating it is not a lie
You know, in a court of law, ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking the law; ergo, ignorance of the truth is no excuse for asserting something that has no basis in truth.
Provide some evidence for your imaginary friend. Until then, any assertion of its existence is a lie.
@’Tis Himself, OM #178
please expand it may be a learning experience
@ people wondering how religion got started.
I kind of suspect the old Saturday Night Live skit was correct
“well at first we worshiped Bob because he was bigger than all of us. Then one day Bob got struck by lightning…”
@’Tis Himself
Yes please expand, I’m terribly interested! :) And I’m terribly lazy to read it up myself :x
broboxley
Credit money is a financial claim against another person or organization. Examples are IOUs, money market certificates, bonds, or any financial paperwork which can be cashed in but are not immediately redeemable. That seems simple enough, now the explanation gets complicated.
Banknotes which are not backed by specie, whether or not they are legal tender (i.e. fiat money), are credit money, inasmuch as they are simply promissory notes issued by a certain bank, or system of banks. For instance, Scotland technically recognizes no legal tender, and thus functions on private banknote credit money, which is represented by promissory Pound Sterling notes. These notes are issued by three major Scottish banks. However these banks must hold deposits with the Bank of England to cover the notes they issue. Also Bank of England notes are not legal tender outside of England and Wales, however they are universally accepted in the rest of the UK, and legally are obligations of the Bank.
To explain supply money I’d have to go into fractional-reserve banking, demand deposits and currency circulation.
Fil @ #27
I don’t really know the particulars you’re talking about here but it must be said that the ABC is pretty much the only source of good regular science journalism in the country. There’s a lot of it and it’s high grade stuff. The ABC web site has a very large science section regularly debunking health myths and snake oil. There’s four or five in depth science programmes on radio I can think of, off the top of my head (Robyn Williams and Dr Karl being the most prominent figures). They have the only science oriented programme on free to air and carry most of the serious scientific and nature documentaries.
They are also, one of the few places that covers theology. The other stations don’t go beyond kids shows and televised mass and so on (and probably not much any more. I haven’t checked of late). It’s a real area of discussion whatever one thinks of it (ABC’s religion/spirituality show ‘Compass’ has done specials on prominent atheists and the rise of atheism in the past with no religious skew that I could discern). As alluded to in the blog reply, it’s part of the ABCs brief to represent as much of Australian society and culture as possible. Indeed, the ABCs coverage and attendance to tiny special interest areas attracts more complaint for being a waste of resources than praise. I think all their little radio shows and blogs on every obscure thing is brilliant though.
This fest has brought out a lot of religious types who feel the need to counterpoint this apparent challenge and it’s interesting to watch. Some prominent people and Australia in general have been seeming a little more religious than previously thought of late. But if you’re and American used to fighting the good fight, trust me, there’s nothing to worry about compared to what goes on States side. The ABC in particular is the least of your worries.
Dammit that “says it all” was supposed to be in the blockquote.
Sorry ’bout that.
@’Tis Himself, OM,
Yes, I understand the reason you doubted what I said, though calling me an asshole wasn’t exactly “merely expressing doubt”. And I think my original context was clear enough. Some posters here think that being a (real?) atheist once should vaccinate against believing nonsense later; I guess I am a grim counter-example.
I’m not sure why I am coming across as preaching to the heathen to you. I haven’t told anyone here that they should share my beliefs, or that they would be better off if they did. If I got preachy, I apologize. People did challenge me to defend,or at least explain, my ideas though.
I didn’t mean to push your economist button. My knowledge of eco. is largely limited to reading Samuelson in college and reading Veblen. I’m ignorant about economics.
I’ll save your money link and read it later when I get a chance. The preface to the Barnes and Noble edition of “Paradise Lost” has a good discussion of Milton’s problem with money, and his money problems (bad credit).
I see rudy is much more interested in talking about his spiritual journey and philosophical minutiae than any credible evidence that shifted his position from atheism to religion.
It seems that the skeptics here understand that repeating someone else’s lie may be just be a case of being misled, gullible, ignorant, or uninterested in pursuing truth. It seems the skeptics here understand that a person may have been an atheist and moved to faith, although it is not yet demonstrated that said atheist’s ‘spiritual journey’ was anything based on science or reason or rational thought.
Please keep in mind, rudy, that the ex-atheist line is an old one, and please just skip to the credible evidence for your god-concept. Or if you have none, have the integrity to admit this failure in reason and let’s get on with our lives.
Around here calling someone an asshole is a sign of mild irritation. Many of the regulars use mild obscenities to express minor annoyance or frustration.
I won’t discuss your further atheism further. We’ve both given our views on the subject.
OM, #177
To be charitable, I suppose that could be due to the different shades of meaning of the word “atheist”.
If someone was an athiest in the simplest sense of “lacking a belief in god”, without actually having thought deeply (or at all) about why there isn’t a god, and without understanding or knowing about the physical/biological/psychological/etc explanations for things that are commonly used as “evidence” for the existance of god, then IMO it is entierly plausible for someone to convert to theism, if e.g. they experienced something that they didn’t know of the non-god explanation for, or listend to a piece of appologetics without recognising the logical fallacies in it.
Of course, a “hard” atheist, who recognised that all traditional concepts of gods and creation don’t match reality, that the remaining ones are too vague to be meaningful or falsifiable, that science has provided plausible or confirmed explanations of almost everything traditionally attributed to gods and will probably eventually do the same to the rest while the god hypothesis has not provided an adequate explanation for anything, and that most if not all appologetics is meaningless drivle wrapped around a core of logical fallacies (or vice versa), is very unlikely to convert to theism.
If someone claimed to have converted from “hard” atheism I’d be rather suspicious (although some people do odd things); however, I wouldn’t be surprised if a great many theists were at one time “soft” atheists (or “soft” adherents to another form of theism).
That said, I’m English and so have generally been able to avoid exposure to “liars for jebus”, so have not had cause to assume such claims are lies. If I’d had the experiences many other Pharyngulites have had, maybe I wouldn’t be so charitable.
‘Tis Himself,
Enjoyed the money treatise. It’s not exactly economics, but I think that any discussion of money is incomplete if we don’t also consider money as perhaps the ultimate secondary reinforcer.
One of my favorite stories in this regard was told to me by someone in a human sexuality class. As part of the class, they had various “guest lecturers”. One was a guy who had worked as a male “escort” for wealthy women. He said he got out of the business when he realized that he couldn’t, um, perform unless his girlfriend paid him. That’s the classic example of the ultimate secondary reinforcer overpowering the ultimate primary reinforcer.
Another story about money: my wife and I honeymooned in Brazil during the time when they converted to the Real. When we arrived, the rate of inflation was 35% a month. There were people who worked full time walking around the store raising prices of goods on the shelf. Brazilians had gotten so used to living this way that they planned their day around the inflation rate. In Rio, if the Cariocas found a 10 Cruzeiro note in their pocket, they’d toss it over their shoulder as trash. My wife found a 10 centavo piece in the street from 3 devaluations ago, and we figured it was worth about 0.1 billionths of a dollar!
When they made the transition to the Real system, they just lopped 3 zeros off all the bill denominations–1000 cruzeiros was now worth 1 Cruzeiro Real or one Real. In conjunction with some real fiscal reforms, the change in psychology was astounding. People gained confidence overnight, and Brazil’s economy has been fairly stable for ~17 years.
GravityIsJustATheory #189
Your differentiation between soft and hard atheism is a reasonable point of view. Given that, it’s entirely possible Rudy was a soft atheist at some earlier point of his life.
BTW, OM stands for “Order of Molly” and is a Pharyngula honor (or honour, if you prefer). It’s explained in the Commenters section. My nom du blog is ‘Tis Himself. I’m usually referred to by others as ‘Tis.
The CHASER team reporting would have been just hilarious!
Few in Australia would be better able to really convey the mood and the spirit of the convention in a meaningful manner.
Sending two godfuckers – yak! You are lowering the bar ABC-people!
a_ray_in_dilbert_space #190
Hyperinflation is an interesting phenomenon, at least if you’re studying it as an unaffected outsider. It can be downright scary to be part of a hyperinflationary economy.
The classic example is the post-World War I German hyperinflation. At one point it was cheaper to burn low denomination Reichsmark bills than use them to buy firewood. The end to the hyperinflation was brought about by a master economist, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, and his associates.
What? Not “much posting live from the Global Atheist Convention”? What am I going to do without new content on Pharyngula for a whole heathen convention?!
From the ABC Religion blog:
This is an interesting question here, and what’s interesting about it, is that it’s being asked by the same group of people who want apparently atheists to focus on their similarities and commonalities with theists. If we ask why intelligent people believe in God even though there is no God, we atheists are going to get right into the area where the religious really don’t want us to go: analyzing their beliefs for truth.
Instead, they would prefer that atheists play the game where we set the truth question aside, and simply look at how well religion works in people’s lives: it “works” well for some people, and it doesn’t “work” well for other people, and let’s leave the moderates alone. Religion is “working” okay for them, okay? It’s inspiring things that make sense without the religion. Thus, it’s not a problem.
But it is.
When people of faith want to have a dialogue with atheists, they don’t want it to be a debate about whether or not God exists. They want to keep it in the territory of behavior. And since there is a lot of territory there in common, they think this is a great place to find common cause. But I think it’s a bait-and-switch which works to their advantage, not our own. Linking faith to behavior instead of to the supernatural fact claims simply hands over morality and meaning and community to theists, as the crucial, defining characteristics of religion.
If we’re not against morality and meaning and community, then why be against religion? Why not just go after the extremists? They’re the problem.
The so-called New Atheists are not going to buy into that argument any more. The problem isn’t with people misusing faith. It’s with the attitude and epistemology of faith itself. The nice people who manage to “work” faith in a nice framework simply aren’t a relevant rebuttal to this.
@’Tis Himself, OM #183 you are apparently a real economist so if we start flinging feces at each other in a future thread regarding econ, I will remember this.
thanx
Okay Rudy, I’ll bite. What contemporary “non-christian” accounts of Jesus in his lifetime?
rudy #186 wrote:
Keep in mind that there are at least two competing variations of atheism, even on this blog:
1.) Accomodationism Atheism: “I don’t care what the religious believe, as long as they don’t try to force it on me by either trying to convert me, or trying to get their views into science or politics. Religious beliefs should be kept a private matter. The only reason we don’t leave religion alone is that it won’t leave us alone. When it does, then fine. We’ll leave you alone if you play nice.”
2.) New atheism: “If you believe in God, I want you to lay out, clearly and explicitly, what you believe and why you believe it, so that we can approach the damn thing like a hypothesis. If we don’t, the religious will continue to get away with blurring their religion up with morals and meaning, being nice to atheists to their face (if we’re lucky), and then denigrating us privately in ways which prevent defense. Religious beliefs should be dragged out into the open light of day, kicking and screaming, and made to account for themselves in the same way we demand of scientific, political, and social beliefs. We’re not leaving you alone, even when you play nice.”
@Sastra #195
It isn’t all that interesting a question – the one about why there are “serious, rational thinking believers.” Intelligent people are simply better at rationalizing their irrational beliefs so that, superficially, they seem cogent and logically defensible when they are not. They can defend their wishful thinking and circular reasoning better than your average un(der)educated person.
It’s similar to why otherwise smart people don’t wear a seat belt, or continue to smoke, or stay in a dysfunctional relationship (and a relationship with an imaginary being is probably one of the most dysfunctional kind).
Is this that “sophisticated theology” we all keep hearing about from the moderates? Where is Karen Armstrong now?
Religion, ur doin it rong!!!
Slightly O/T (but then again, may be not…):
Bob O’Hara’s blog on Nature Network today
Kome #199 wrote:
When the question comes from a believer, though, they don’t generally expect or want the kind of answer atheists give — that they’re rationalizing the irrational.
When theists want us to ask “why would such intelligent people believe in God?” they really want us to respond with “hey, they’ve got a reasonable case. I’m going to have to think hard now about my own views.”
You know … an “open” dialogue. Quid pro quo.
Yes sirree!
IaMoL #117: And here I was wondering what happened to your old personage. (I either missed the disclosure or forgot.) Thanks for cluing me in.
IaMoL #117 wrote:
Oh, so that’s what it means.
I thought it might be a mangling of the popular IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), and you were saying I aM o’ Lawyer.
Glad to get that cleared up… ;)
Quite. Since when did people deny the historical evidence for The Great Green Snot presented in the documentary film, Ghostbusters?
Characterization of Pol Pot as an atheist is pretty sketchy. Yes, he ordered the murder of Buddhist monks. But he himself spent a year as a Buddhist monk. He stated that heaven demanded this and that, and there’s no real reason to think he was speaking metaphorically.
It really makes more sense to look at the Khmer Rouge as a radical Ascetic sect. We don’t call the Mendicants “atheists” just because they want to tear down the big golden churches. It really doesn’t make a lot of sense to call the Khmer Rouge “atheists” either.
@ Kevin, comment #2:
“I’m fine with godly people being sustained by their religion. When you try to force me to swallow your BS is when I’m going to get angry at you.
When education is under attack by religion…
When love is under attack by religion…
When rights and responsibilities is under attack by religion…
When I’m demeaned because of religion…
That is when I will speak out. Keep your religion where it belongs, out of science, government, and education, and we’ll be fine with it.”
I agree. In Sweden, we have “detente” between faith and non-faith people these days. This is easiest for everybody, alas a few privately owned religious schools still tries to twist the curriculum, censoring certain things. This has caused the government to start working on stricter criteria for the quality of education for anyone who wants to operate a private school.
With this exception, things are pretty cool…If you want to know details about the Scandinavian countries, check out “Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment”.
‘Tis Himself #191
Thanks, and thanks for the correction as well.
“Since various cartoon controversies erupted after 9/11, European governments from Finland to the Netherlands have publicly upheld constitutional ideals of free speech and expression. But those same governments have also prosecuted people under new blasphemy laws intended both to extend legal protections to non-Christians and to calm religious tension in increasingly multicultural Europe.”
http://abcnews.go.com/International/european-artists-built-panic-rooms-response-al-qaeda/story?id=10081938
Y’know, for a guy who supposedly raised the dead,had an actual winged angel heralding his birth from a virgin, magically created food for hungry hordes, healed Lepers, made trees wither on command, created vintage vino out of mere H2O and came back to life just to levitate up to the skies, he wasn’t very well known outside his circle of buddies. So either this seemed pretty commonplace back then or his friends greatly exaggerated his accomplishments in the retelling of it all. Rudy?
ooohhhh Ruuuuuudeeeeeeeeeeee, where are all those contemporary accounts of this man who could perform physics defying miracles?
If Rudy is a Quaker, and has approvingly cited Martin Gardiners’ neener-neener fideism as a reason for belief, I suggest first finding out how ‘literally’ Rudy takes Christianity, before you argue historical Jesus. If Jesus was only mythical, it might not even matter. Myths can “point to deeper truths,” etc. etc.
But Sastra, Myths do point to deeper truths.
Well, if you count “People are gullible” as a deeper truth.
Also, Rudy isn’t the only one challenging us on the evidence for historical Jesus–cdmissinglink46 broached the subject as well.
Thank you to PZ for linking to the ABC blog. Those who are interested should keep reading as the posts are updated often. Margaret Coffey wrote a post in answer to PZ’s statement that the ABC “had dispatched a team of ace believers” to cover the convention. Her post is entitled “So the ABC team has a religious bias!” Here is a portion of it.
I am enjoying the commentary at the ABC blog. There will be coverage of the talk that PZ gives/gave at some point as well.
Sastra, you’re right. It’s just that at post #118, Rudy claimed a specific style of speach from the historical Jesus. and then later stated:
The only non-Gospel account I know of was recorded decades after Jesus of Nazareth was the figurehead for a newly rising cult. If there are valid accounts of a historical Jesus during his lifetime outside of NT references, I would love for Rudy to provide this information.
^speech
IaMoL next thing you know you will be telling me that davy didnt kill a bar when he was only 3
Not a lot of detailed historical records survive from that area during that era. Josephus was a historian not a news reporter.
Herod was a subjegated Ruler around then and very little is known about him either
It’s the intimation that somehow we all missed pertinent evidence is what chaps my ass – as if we’re the ones guilty of willful ignorance.
Indeed, and to be loftily informed, as I have on more than one occasion, that there is just as much–or more!–evidence for historical Jesus as there is for Julius Caesar, or Genghis Khan, e.g, produces a similar ass-chapping effect.
broboxley: You’re telling me that raising the motherfucking dead wouldn’t result in a major communal uproar? Could the fact that Herod did nothing of major merit influence his lack of historical noteworthiness? Yeah, a messianic miracle worker wouldn’t gather much notoriety, huh?
IaMoL,
Don’t let Rudy try to claim Josephus wrote about Jesus. There’s good reason to think that the passage in Antiquities of the Jews that mentions Jesus was a forgery written by a Christian apologist to provide historical evidence of Jesus’ existence. Historian Michael White argues against authenticity, noting that parallel sections of Josephus’s Jewish War do not mention Jesus, and some Christian writers as late as the Third Century, who quoted from the Antiquities, do not mention the passage.
No sirree!
As I previously commented in the “Stop using the lens of your preconceptions” thread, because women are made to feel so unwelcome in Pharyngula, I don’t comment here anymore. Ever.
I hate this blog. All the male commenters (whether I know if you’re male or not) and PZ are big disrespectful threatening meanies. So I’ve quit reading and commenting, and I’m currently ignoring this blog to comfort my fragile female ego with chocolate and a bubble bath.
No, absofrickinlutely nothing is known about Jesus from any source other than the conflicting accounts in the Bible. There is no “historical Jesus”.
True, very little accurate history is known for that area and era. Which doesn’t excuse getting no info at all. As has been said, Jesus’s birth was supposedly a major event with at least three international visitors. Jesus’s life was a rampaging miraclefest, once he got going. His death was attended by darkness, zombies and earthquakes. Some of that would have made the news, somewhere.
What is known of that part of the world at that time includes that the Romans never did or would do a crazy-ass census as described in the Gospels, and that there were dozens of messiahs trotting around working “miracles”. And that there were a dozen different gods who had similar histories to the alleged Jesus, including virgin births and rising from the dead.
The Gospel stories conflict, with each other and within each one. As historical documents, they fail.
History doesn’t show any evidence for Jesus. The Bible really doesn’t hold up, either. History does show that gods and messiahs were a drachma a dozen around there and then.
Present-day religionists show that they will copy material from any source, make stuff up and believe anything, even if they made it up themselves. The gospel stories of Jesus are exactly like the stuff we see being invented today, and passed around on the internet.
There is no reason for anyone to give the slightest credence to Jesus’s hypothetical existence. He most likely didn’t happen. Could of, maybe, but there’s really no reason to think so. A tribe of giant Smurfs could have invented ice cream and sold it in the Temple, but there’s no reason to think so.
Plus, on the rational side, there is no religious reason that Jesus’s existence should be in any doubt. If Jesus and God were real, Jesus should be the frakking pope, sitting on a gold throne in Jerusalem and working away every day, on the news every night. But no, the whole “faith” game is going on, with the folks who cannot think making their inability to think into the basis for their religion and the purpose of the universe.
As I have said elsewhere, we like what we are best at. And the faithful are best at blind prejudice and rationalizing. So they make that the center of their lives, with a god that there is no evidence for being the ideal.
And then rationalize until they honestly believe that there is evidence for an historical Jesus and for a living Jesus. They can’t remember what it is, or who it was, but they believe that it is there.
It ain’t there, Goober, so bugger off.
There isn’t a single contemporary account of Jesus. To the wider world, he was rather obscure.
One of the more notable of the miracles was the old Day of the Living Dead. After Jesus was killed, an army of zombies rose out of their tombs and wandered into Jerusalem. Apparently looking for a shopping mall to hang out in. Oddly enough, this zombie mob wasn’t mentioned by anyone except Matthew who wrote 50 years after Jesus died. I guess zombie plagues must have been so common back then that no one thought it was unusual.
@IaMoL #220 not really. Raising people from the dead is/was not that unusual. Since not breathing is very close to almost not breathing and mistakes are even made today. He wasnt the first or the last to be associated with raising the dead.
example
http://www.etpv.org/1998/hrd.html
not a new thing at all
google “raising the dead” a lot of it out there and back then would not have been such a big deal as every small town had a resident woo master
God rewards another soul for her faith by taking her into his arms.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,589180,00.html
Wife of Pentecostal minister locks self in room for weeks to fast and be with God. Husband never bothers to check, since she was in the Lord’s hands. Guess how that worked out?
broboxley, I can’t tell if you are for or against Jesus. If raising the dead wasn’t a big enough deal to make the news, why the heck did Jesus go around doing it?
It’s like me saying that I am the Messiah because I can post shit on the internet.
Your excuses for Jesus not being famous completely shoot down your reasons for believing in him.
Bastion of Sass, you’re going to confuse so many people. *grins*
Caine, neither pink or curly. ;p
“To make light of them through humour is risky.”
Really? Says who?
Yes, yes, I know. Jesus raised the dead because he was a nice guy. But still, how does that make him THE messiah, if everybody else was doing it, too?
@Menyambal #227 for or against? huh? how can one be against jesus and call themselves an atheist? I dont know whether you are one or not. Me I enjoy the enlightened commentary on this board but after 2k plus years of bleating about it I will postulate that joshua son of joseph was a real person at one time who like Joseph Smith inspired folks to yak about him after he was gone. Whether he was a/the diety he didnt match the required qualifications of the group he was representing for that particular job offering.
Not really. It is true there are some forged additions to Roman histories that indicate there was a Jesus. But those were forged by the Christians hundreds of years later and those references aren’t found in the earliest surviving copies of those histories.
Not that most Christians will admit it… Actually, most Christians in the apologetics ministry LIE about it. Constant, continuous lies. Here’s one:
Yeshua Hannotzri—Joshua (Jesus) of Nazareth. Faith net will give you a story about that…:
What Faith.net won’t tell you is that it was spelled Yeshu NOT Yeshua and the whole story they tell you was a concocted medeval tale:
So, it was a different tale, not related, and turned into a hell of a mish-mash. However, being wrong about a co-opted tale doesn’t stop the various apologetics ministries offering the tale as “secular proof” of Jesus even though they have lied about parts of the story and it’s clearly not proof and it has been brought to the attention of the industry, by hundreds (if not thousands) many times in the past.
Yet the various apologetics ministries reject the evidence of their errors and, thus, by willful action continue to LIE TO YOUR FACE and SAY THERE IS EVIDENCE while specifically cite that falsehood. And it goes on and on and on…
There is not one single, reliable piece of evidence for the existence of Jesus beyond the bible. But if we’re to accept “Holy Books” as proof of existence, then Thor exists, Ishtar exists, Odin exists, Vishnu exists, Raven exists as they all have the same level of credibility in written works…
If Jesus existed then Frodo existed. I read a book about Frodo and watched three separate movies about him. HAIL THE RINGBEARER!
Forgive me if somebody’s already mentioned this, but howevermuch Aussie atheists are dissin’ the faithful, the Texas SBOE is making up for it in spades!
[sigh]
Bill, it’s being discussed a bit over on The Thread. Come on over.
‘Tis:
And Gandalf, gandamnit! And that evil fucker Saruman, too!
Don’t forget Samwise, who helped Frodo, even bearing the ring for a bit…
Nerd:
Yes, of course. Can’t forget
Satan, er, Sauron either. I think the real gods are Ents.Caine, of course the villains must always be remembered. No good fantasy (or Bond movie) lacks a good villain or two.
My comment was don’t forget the sidekicks. Edmund Hillary didn’t make it to top of Everest by himself, Tenzing Norgay was there too, and may have done more work to get there. I guess that is because I am more the sidekick type of person.
I like to ask “I used to be an atheist” people such as Rudy, the following questions.
1. What were you before you were an atheist?
2. Was there public affirmation of your atheism while you were an atheist? (internet postings, etc. that revealed your atheism to others)
3. What made you change your mind?
and
4. Do you think some “afterlife” depends on what you believe in this life? (Are you afraid that if you don’t believe something bad will happen in the next life?)
Nerd, sidekicks are important. Hmmm, considering the
holy scripturesbooks (and the movies, natch), would Gollum be considered a sidekick after a certain point? Or do sidekicks have to be on the side of good at all times?FRODO LIVES!
anyone ever read a book called “a canticle for leibowitz”? it was the point I was aiming that. Odin Thor are written, were they true beings? I purport that a man did something memorable, it passed into legend then into myth and someone wrote down the myth and behold the god of thunder.
articulett, how can there be an afterlife? Modern neuroscience shows that personality, memory, instincts, & thinking are all brain activities. Without a functioning brain, what can be left to indulge in a supposed afterlife? Obviously, nothing that could be recognized as a person.
Actually, the ancient Hebrews had that sort of concept of a ‘soul’ – as being nothing more than a sort of minimal spirit that abides in darkness.
I’ll have to think on that one. It’s been years since I read the holy trilogy plus one, so it will take some time to dredge up memories. My first take on the subject is that villains like Gollum always have a separate agenda from the Hero(ine), whereas the sidekick doesn’t. Not sure if that means much in the long run, if fantasy prophecy is involved.
vanharris, articulett wasn’t positing an afterlife – the questions was directed toward Rudy the Quaker. A whole lot of people live their one and only life based on what they think will happen after they die. Load of nonsense, but try telling them that. You should see the “what’s the first thing I’m going to do in heaven” / “what job will you have in heaven?” / “what will be some of the things you do in heaven”
gamesthreads at Rapture Ready. For those folks, it’s heaven porn all the way.Nerd:
Hmmm. If we go the fantasy prophecy route, that would make Gollum equivalent to Judas, no?
Bastion of Sass @222, I second (or third?) your outrage. We women are so lace-doily delicate that we cannot weather the foul, masculine atmosphere at Pharnygula. Everyone should realize this by now, and cease and desist from postings that include intimations of
fuckingsexual intercourse and/or poop.We, the no-longer-wild women of Pharyngula simply must stop reading this muck. All of of us have long ago stopped posting. (I know I have!)
Our dimity convictions are soiled. The fetid conspiracy of male dominance is unbearable.
Where the fuck is Smoggy’s vibrating lingerie when we need it? I’m feeling a fit of hysteria coming on.
@243 – this is an old idea.
Rudyard Kipling even has a poem about the process.
Leslie Fish even set it to music (on Our Fathers of Old if you like filk music… and if there’s a poem about it, and it’s to music and all, it *must* be real!
Caine, i realized that. I was just making a comment, not criticizing articulett.
vanharris,
I don’t believe in souls or afterlives. It doesn’t make sense to me that any form of consciousness could exist without a material mind.
I just ask these things of those who “used to be atheists”, because the answers (or avoidance of the questions) helps me determine if they really were anyone I would consider to be a “former atheist”.
As you may be aware, many theists lie about this topic because they think it will make us curious about their faith. What else can they do when they have no evidence?
Okay, sorry, Vanharris!
Ha! I was wondering where Number One Wife (TM) had been.
Only if teh holy babble is fantasy fiction. Which definitely removes it from inerrancy. Somehow I picture the episode of House I’m trying to watch as having more truth to it, and better writing, than the babble, or most of fantasy writing. But then, Tolkien could have “borrowed” some old tales from the babble, like any good author…
Nerd:
It is. Bad fantasy fiction, mind.
Tolkien was a devout Catholic, a lot of that comes through in the books.
broboxley:
Most deities/spirits are just reifications of concepts or attributes that would be likely to rule over each aspect of life (hunting, sex/love, protection, weather, crops, etc) – no hyperbolically mythologized version of a once real person needed. Heracles may have been based on a living being. Zeus? Janus? The Minotaur? I seriously doubt it. Not all myths are organic in that way, sometimes the abstraction/construct is just given a name and a form after the fact.
Polytheism came first and then monotheism was borne out of monolotry or henotheism and just rolling all these specialist gods/goddesses into a single general practitioner with a sidekick and claiming all other gods as inventions.
So I just finished this little exchange on whether Jesus should be considered a philosopher:
http://www.frontline-apologetics.com/commentary_Carrier.html
Interesting. (Carrier leaves aside in this discussion the question of existence, though I believe he leans clearly toward the mythical end.)
Ah, I had a feeling something was slightly amiss, but couldn’t quite place it (my early indoctrination was Methodist)…
It’s been a long time since I’ve read the books too; perhaps I should dust them off. As I recall, the catholic rhetoric got strongest with the Return of the King.
broboxley #243
You’ve got to be kidding me. A Canticle for Leibowitz, first published in 1960, has never been out of print since then. It won a Hugo for Best Novel and was #1 of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SWFA) list of best science fiction novels of the 20th Century. No, it’s not some obscure book.
I’m waiting until I retire to reread the series. Which is only a double handful or less of years away…
sorry Tis, I work in IT and I have gotten a ton of blank stares when I mention that book. Anyway I was using that premise to illustrate the new testament
broboxley, did you know that Homer didn’t really write the Iliad and the Odyssey? Yeah, it was actually another blind Greek guy with the same name.
Which is to say that arguing that there may have been a person in Palestine that was the basis for the Jesus myth is a pointless exercise. The biblical Jesus is who we are talking about. Even if there was a man named Yeshi who decided to quit carpentering and just sucker people out of their money, it doesn’t matter, any more than if we find a statue of Pontius Pilate….hell, Jerusalem exists, and so does Bethlehem, but so frikkin’ what?
Even in the Bible, it is fairly clear that many of the stories are made up. They may be set in real places, based on real people, or even based on real incidents, but that doesn’t make them real.
Case in point: The story of young David is divided into two halves. Each part makes a good story by itself, but they make no sense put together. There is a sentence that obviously is inserted to connect the two, something like “the kid went home, then came back”. And Saul suddenly doesn’t recognize the kid who had been featured prominently in his life in the first half of the story.
I want to say to religious people something that once came out of an interaction with my pre-teen daughter. “Nobody understands me!” “That’s because you don’t make any sense.”
The Skeptic’s Annotated has a nice page on biblical contradictions: http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/by_name.html
broboxley #243
I spent much of my adult life managing a used book store. A Canticle for Leibowitz was always on our “buy all” list. It was also a book that every couple of years ended up on a reading list for some university course or other.
@Menyambal #263
think we are talking past each other. If its based on real incidents why is it not real? Or are you making the argument that the conclusions made by the religious are incorrect?
Personally Monty Pythons “life of Brian” is probably fairly accurate in regards to the folks in that time period. With the Maccabees insurrection not far in the future there was bound to be itinerant mendicants on every corner.
broboxley, have you ever read the Richard Sharpe series by Bernard Cornwell? Or the Flashman books by George MacDonald Frazer? They are all damned fine books, and I highly recommend them. The history in them is very accurate, but the books are still fiction. Richard Sharpe was not a real person.
Jesus was not a real person.
broboxley:
Wow, you must get a lot out of conspiracy theories, not to mention spy thrillers! ;)
Yeah, it’s all real.
<backs away slowly>
@John Morales #268 like a lot of people say Truth is stranger than fiction
@Menyambal 267 I am very familiar with Flashman. I have used him as a historical reference many times until wikipedia put up a listing :-)
FFS, what is it you don’t get? I could write a story called Broboxley: The story of a Manga Addict and say it was based on a real incident. Now, for that story, I could actually use several people or incidents as a basis for my story; that wouldn’t mean that you, Broboxely are a Manga addict or that anything else in the story was actually true. Geez. People have been making shit up for as long as there have been people.
also I have noted that a few people in this thread are wondering how atheist an ex atheist can be. I actually know one of them
http://www.mikevitale.com:8080/gaming/post/show.iwt?postid=25987 I suspect more than a few here know him as well
Or the Flashman books by George MacDonald Frazer?
heh, Buffybot has had me read ALL the Flashman books over the last few months, as well as Pyrates.
oh, she’s also a Biggles fan.
storytime has been fun reading for the last year.
:)
If its based on real incidents why is it not real?
here sre 3 real events:
Lincoln’s assassination
JFK’s assassination
The assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan,
If I say that the reason Reagan was the only one to survive was that the same group that was historically responsible/behind the assassination of the other two used Reagan to throw people off of their scent.
does that make my conspiracy theory real? after all, I used real events in constructing it.
Frankly, I can’t even imagine someone seriously NOT thinking your line of reasoning bizarre.
I suppose you think Dan Brown is non-fiction too?
FRODO LIVES!
Don’t wear the ring, Frodo!
Typical Ichthyic, bizarre Kiwi-induced Frodophernalia.
bizarre Kiwi-induced Frodophernalia.
It was The Flight of the Concords that taught me that Kiwi is good and OZ is evil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoF_fa9TMDk
@Ichthyic and others, parse the following
1.If its based on real incidents why is it not real?
2. Are you making the argument that the conclusions made by the religious are incorrect?
pick one of the above and apply it
Jebus is a myth without better evidence. End of story.
1. It’s not real because it involves the supernatural. We have no evidence that anything supernatural EVER happened or could happen. We have tons of evidence that people misperceive and make shit up.
2. Religious people are incorrect because they believe in some invisible undetectable conscious beings but not others– even though there is no way to tell such beings from each other or from myth or imagination.
It’s not the fact that there was a guy named “Jesus” that is interesting… it’s the idea that he was “divine”– god incarnate.
You claim to know something about this divine being, and yet your divine truth conflicts with Scientology’s divine truth, Hindu divine truth, Mormon divine truth, etc. You give US no reason to treat you imaginations about “the truth” any more seriously than youd treat those beliefs.
All woo become offended when we treat their woo the way they treat all that “other woo”. They’re offended because they think their woo is true. But they never give a rational person any reason for thinking so.
pick one of the above and apply it
neither make sense,
so,
no.
Crispy Christ onna stick, how many times do you need it answered and explained? If someone uses an event/place/person as an inspiration, it doesn’t make a story true. If someone just makes up a story out of whole cloth, it’s not true. There is no evidence for the biblical Jesus. Full stop.
It’s not an argument; it’s a fact.
sounds like a shameless plug for Hector Avalos would not be unwarranted:
http://www.thoughttheater.com/2008/07/hector_avalos_how_archaeology_killed_biblical_hist.php
Good plug, Ichthyic. Although I don’t hold out hope that would get through to Mr. If its based on real incidents why is it not real?. At this point, I’m down to three thoughts:
1. Broboxely is a parrot with a learning disorder.
2. Broboxely is an incredibly gullible fool
3. Broboxely is a troll.
@articulett #279 thank you for a coherent answer.
I know no more than the next human about the bible. It has been around a long time and the King James is so far removed from a decent translation of the original greek and the translation of the old testament is execrable.
supernatural is what you get when you cannot rationally explain the events witnessed because the science is not advanced enough to explain what happened
I also have no revelation about jesus being a divine being. If you take what is claimed he stood for leaving out the woo he was an ordinary rebbi who was against Hellenization of judaism as practiced during the time period.
of course, thats why people shouldnt discuss their woo in public or proselytize. It annoys people.
Having spent some time asking questions of leading Iranian Mullahs concerning certain fatwa’s that dont make sense from a western view they are always very kind in answering questions. Their world is enclosed within their faith. As explained within a closed logic paradigm all of what we see as unimaginable is perfectly correct within their context. Especially the apostate and infidel rulings.
There is a lot of woo out there, it behooves one to understand where they are coming and how it affects the greater society and therefor you individually.
I am not trying to “convince” anyone here to be anything but what they are, I enjoy the science and some of the other attributes but always like to jump in to ask questions to clarify positions taken. Some of the blind ones will take me a while to understand.
D. all of the above.
:D – I’ll go with D.
Broboxely, so your opinion is that Jesus was an ordinary rabbi guy who lived in the 1st century? What, if anything, do you think about him IS true and why? What is the most interesting thing about this person you are convinced existed?
How do you imagine people back then perceived a schizophrenic? A magician? A charismatic conman?
I just think there is nothing we can KNOW about any Jesus person because we cannot determine whether such a person actually existed. As far as I can tell, there is no more evidence for Jesus than there are for the Mormon gold plates (which, apparently, some people claimed to have seen.) I don’t believe in magic beings any more than I believe in magic gold plates. And I have no interest in finding out what the gold plate viewers might have actually seen if anything.
@articulett #287 I have no idea whether he was a real person
back the a magician,schizophrenic would be worshiped. I think in the case of Christianity Paul saw a bidness opportunity and took it. I wouldnt blame the jesus guy.
on your last paragraph there is no evidence that can be provided for either.
If you dont believe in magic then its obvious you couldnt believe in magic beings.
I define magic/woo as effects that cant currently be explained by what we know. Current example, string theory dimensions
you are probably familiar with the former here is example of the latter.
http://home.comcast.net/~williaoxley/drlpaper.pdf
broboxley,
A very poor definition, because you apparently exclude astrology, homeopathy, NDEs, free energy and innumerable other forms of woo thereby.
What actual effects are currently unexplainable, pray tell?
@john morales #289
wtf how does “currently be explained” affect your list? your list contains woo that has no explanation now or in the future.
broboxley, you have to keep in mind that Jesus is a god—this is a god you are talking about. Why can’t we let him be the god he is and not try to make him out to be a human by stripping away his godliness and leaving the human aspects? What does that get you other than a dumbed down atheistic version of Christianity? If it isn’t a god, it isn’t Jesus, and as we all know that gods are pure fiction despite the many convergences the god myths have with reality.
@aratina cage #291 I do not define jesus as a god. Your supposition that if he isnt a god he isnt jesus. Thats fine. He may be the 2k old version of brer rabbit
Please strike the “as” from the last sentence in #291.
What I am trying to say is that it is a little too convenient for Christians to be able to deflect atheist criticism of their god by pulling out the question of the historical Jesus, don’t you think. It’s another one of their “respect my authority” gambits. I’d rather not give them any ground on this matter. Let’s keep the focus: they worship a fucking deity, not a person. Jesus is not their hero, he is their god.
You’ll have to explain this one to me. How is Jesus not a god without revising the Bible?
Pharyngula, I propose a new term in honor of broboxley … “obtuseness troll”.
Some time ago in India, at the city of Seringapatam, somebody killed the Tipu Sultan and somebody stole his jewels. That really did frickin’ happen. That was a real incident.
Nobody knows who did it. But I read a book that very breathlessly describes how Richard Sharpe shot and robbed him. That wasn’t real.
Actual incident, fictional story about it. Real, or not real?
The Bible writhes with fiction based on fact. Stories designed to explain, whitewash, glorify or claim. God supposedly authorized the brutal invasion of Canaan–real invasion, fictional attributes.
The religious folks don’t seem to grasp that–they are religious, after all–any better than broboxley does. And yes, they go leaping to wrong conclusions.
There are things that science cannot currently explain, and scientists are eagerly investigating them. There are other things that science can show do not happen, can show can not happen, and whose proponents scoff at science–those things are woo.
Saying that science cannot yet explain woo is giving woo ‘way too much credit, and science too little. Magic doesn’t happen. You don’t need a scientist to investigate woo, you need a psychiatrist.
broboxley,
WTF wtf?
The woo exists and is explained; there are no effects in that list that are unexplained.
Remember what you wrote? “I define magic/woo as effects that cant currently be explained by what we know.”
My question is perfectly clear and apposite: what actual effects are currently unexplainable?
Care to name but one, such that it fits your definition of ‘woo’?
Wait… so, disease was supernatural until we understood microorganisms?
Or do you mean it was considered supernatural?
I don’t want to seem like I’m splitting hairs here, but that’s a terribly important distinction, and I want to make sure we all know where we stand on this.
To take one example, we don’t fully understand all of the processes behind the occurrence of cancer. Our science is sufficiently advanced for us to explain parts of it, but not all. Does that mean that cancer is semi-supernatural?
Would you be comfortable relying on an oncologist who referred to it that way?
What is unexplainable is why so many people are willing to take “God dit it” as an explanation for the unexplainable.
Yes, Broboxely, it’s starting to sound like a “woo” of the gaps argument.
What exactly do you believe about Jesus and why?
And give us examples of what you consider woo.
Broboxely,
What was your main point in posting on this thread?
It was nice to meet you at the Atheist Convention with Kylie Sturgess who up until then had been just a Facebook Friend. Keep up your good work PZ and I will keep track of you, my blog will be finished I hope tomorrow as I am buggered.
The four gospels do not actually assert that Jesus is [a] God. Early Christianity is a confused mess of different ideas about exactly what Jesus’ relationship with God was supposed to be, and the various councils that ended up defining all that — including the idea of the Trinity — were basically the result of the most powerful faction asserting its own doctrine over all competitors.
Look up Christology if you have an interest in researching the details of the various ideas.
======
Actually, modern archaeology does not support that there even was an invasion of Canaan.
http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/otarch.html
The stories of invasion may have been confabulated to explain real ruins that resulted from many temporally distinct battles, and/or to justify then-current military adventures.
broboxley # 292:
See: Unitarianism.
See also #302 re: Christology.
ooohhhh Ruuuuuudeeeeeeeeeeee
Some things based on real incidents are real.
Some things aren’t.
For example, you can’t conclude from the fact that the Civil War was real and Atlanta really was burned that Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler were real people, Tara was a real place, and the events in Gone With The Wind really happened.
You also can’t conclude that since many historical people and events show up in Dr. Who, The Doctor is real, and really uses the Tardis to zoom around through space and time.
You seem to be assuming that historical fiction isn’t fiction. Big mistake.
Thank you Owlmirror, will do.
Mind you, I might have misspoke in my comment. I’m aware that the question of Jesus being wholly human, wholly divine or some combination has been subject of much debate, and I suspect an atrocity or two. I probably should have phrased is as Jesus being supernatural, what with the miracles and all. Still, it’s nice to have a starting point to look into it as I suspect that broboxley is indeed a troll and won’t shed any real light on the issue.
Yeah. The fact is, we really know very little indeed about the life of Jesus. We only have the four pseudonymous Gospel accounts and a few very fleeting references in other texts. Assuming that he even existed as a historical figure (which we can’t be certain of), we don’t know how much his life and “teachings” have been modified and distorted over time. We do know that a lot of the supernatural tales were imported from various other cults and mythologies of the era, but we don’t know how much of the apparently plausible stuff – the parables and so on – have any basis in what Jesus might actually have said, if he existed.
This is what makes Lewis’ “trilemma” a transparently poor argument; I will never quite understand why he (apparently seriously) advanced it as an argument, since he certainly wasn’t stupid. We don’t have to choose between “Lord, liar or lunatic” – indeed, we can’t choose between those options – because we have almost literally no idea what Jesus actually did or said. We don’t know what proportion of the Gospels (which, of course, contradict one another as well as external fact) is pure fiction, what proportion is embellished, and what proportion is true. We have absolutely zero evidence that Jesus ever claimed to be divine. We simply don’t know who he was, what he taught, or what claims he made.
Edward Gibbon called it the “war of the single iota” – homoousious (of one substance) versus homoiousious< ?i> (of like substance).
Half my post at #309 seems to have been cut off. That’s what comes of trying to be witty when ill. :-(
Herod was a subjegated Ruler around then and very little is known about him either – broboxley
Simply not true. A fairly detailed chronology of his reign is known, inclucing details of his relations with the Romans and his habit of executing members of his family; and his tomb has recently been discovered.
All except broboxley,
I discovered the first time he appeared (sorry, can’t remember the thread) that broboxley is a very confused person. Appears to mean well, but has addled his brain quite considerably at some point. Trying to make sense of what he says is a frustrating waste of time.
@anri #297 yes, was considered supernatural until explained by science
@articulett #300 casual dismissal of an uncertain conclusion is annoying.
@Fossil Fishy@303 1. no
@Menyambal #295 thank you, how do I add the honorarium OT to broboxley?
Just out of curiosity, just how many atheists were represented at the PWR?
The gospels were just historical fiction literary forms. We have little or no idea what jesus said and little information that he even existed.
The difference between then and now is the gospel writers knew they were writing fiction while today the fundies pretend the divergent and various accounts are real.
We know of around 60 gospels. It’s been 2,000 years, probably there were more. They all differ by a lot. The four in the bible were chosen on theological grounds by the group that invented Xianity. The rest were destroyed as well as they could.
Gospels are still being written. The last one that caught on is The Book of Mormon.
If anyone actually studies the NT, it is impossible to come to any conclusion except that it is largely or wholly a literary effort.
Broboxley,
In your cryptic list in #313, are you telling me your main reason for posting on this topic is to tell us that “casual dismissal of an uncertain conclusion is annoying”? Or are you saying that you are annoyed that I’ve dismissed you because you have uncertain conclusions?
I can’t even really tell what your conclusions are or what you’re trying to say and others seem to be having the same problem. Maybe you just really aren’t making any sense to the audience you are hoping to reach. I can’t even find the main point of your posts. Are you posting to clarify? Scold? Vent? Preach? Share? Discuss? And what does your posts have to do with PZ’s OP?
And who do you think Jesus was? (What did he REALLY do and why do you think so?)
What is “woo” to you? (Is astrology woo? “The Secret”? Belief in demons? Rain dances? Faith Healing? The notion that Jesus was a god?)
@articulett #316 as the magic man once said read me in my posts.
as to what is woo, anything that requires belief over substance
I have already addressed jesus several times in this thread.
@’Tis Himself, OM,
sorry i had to go out of town — this thread is probly done – and my kids are using all the good computers now that i’m back — so i’m using this tiny netbook grrrr…
i think i would have counted as hard, but we’ll leave it that.
but i didn’t post the post about whether jesus was historical, that was someone else. one of my posts used the phrase historic jesus in passing, only saying ape’s bible quote was correct, and other posters ran with it. iammol, you are also making this mistake.
@sastra,.
yeah, i can see the two types, but i wasn’t bothered by the challenges, it’s just that being accused of being preachy touches a nerve. too close to the truth, no doubt…
@tytalus, some of your questions about my bio (exRCC etc) are in my posts; people are probably sick and tired of my very mundane bio. so i won’t any more unless you ask me to.
@articulett, sorry, missed you out too. again, if you are actually interested in answers to your 1 to 4, though they are not interesting or unique, believe me, let me know.
@articulett, damn, i meant my ANSWERS aren’t inrteresting…youre questions are fine. arggghhhh.
Rudy will await your foundation.
I have already addressed jesus several times in this thread. – broboxley
But AFAIK, he hasn’t answered!
rudy,
I’m still puzzled, as I’m sure many others are, as to what point you are trying to make by posting here. So far, it seems to be just “Hi, I used to be an atheist, now I’m a theist, I don’t have any rational argument for theism, but I’m a nice guy, really I am.” Why should anyone be interested, any more than if you’d come to believe in leprechauns or werewolves?
Rudy:
I was never angry or peeved or whatever. I was simply kicking back for the purpose of clarification what was thrown out into the blog.I’ve checked back over the thread and I have yet to see where I misquoted or misrepresented what you wrote.
Rudy, please articulate 1) why you are posting here, and 2) what you wish to accomplish. Then you to need to ask yourself number 3) am I really accomplishing what I want to?
hey knockgoats,
well you can look at my first post to see why i posted at first. otherwise, people either objected to something i said (mostly, a parenthetical about my college days that kind of steamrolled, i didn’t expect that, looking back i would have left it out) or people asked me questions. much of my verbiage was a (possibly futile) attempt to prove that i wasn’t a liar about that.
but i think that’s not what you mean is it? you’re not saying so much, why are you here? as, why are posting here if you aren’t going to do better than that, defending your views rationally?
well, i guess i was more worked up by the accusation of dishonesty, and kind of ignored other posters. um, my ego. that’s my fault.
well i could start by saying i think it’s rational to have working principles, like axioms for math, that you use to organize your life around. that doesn’t mean a god has to be one of your axioms, only that it’s not automatically irrational just for lack of evidence. some axioms would be, for example 0=1, because they have stupid results.
so, someone might be trying out different axioms, say the fourfold truths of buddhism, and like what happens when they work out the results. peace, etc. god is more like that. leprauchans aren’t like that because the don’t lead anywhere interesting (tho i guess nature spirits as such could, as in wicca or shinto). there’s not really a way to comvince someone the should use your axioms and not some other but by showing them, in some way, what it can do; sort of like the idea of democracy, maybe.
this sounds a little like a pragmatic idea but i don’t think it is, exactly. it’s more like what happens in science when one research program works out or fizzles out.
Raven,
thanks for posting that list – its always a surprise to the religious to see how much got left out of the NT. As far as the religious writing program goes, if there was an actual person as the basis of all this ridiculous contradictory blather, he was probably a rather inspirational one nonetheless, but it is also salutary to see how much documentation there is about him from non-partisan sources: e.g. the Roman historians of the day.
Suetonius: Lives of the Caesars, Claudius 25 (Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit.) and Nero 16: (… afflicti suppliciis Christiani, genus hominum superstitionis novae ac maleficae)
Tacitus: Nero, the Burning of Rome: (… quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Chrestianos appellabat. auctor nominis eius Christus Tibero imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat; … )
Pliny the Younger: Letters to Trajan, X.96-97 (Actum quem debuisti, mi Secunde, in excutiendis causis eorum qui Christiani ad te delati fuerant secutus es. Neque enim in universum aliquid quod quasi certam formam habeat constitui potest. Conquirendi non sunt; si deferantur et arguantur, puniendi sunt, ita tamen ut qui negaverit se Christianum esse idque re ipsa manifestum fecerit, id est supplicando dis nostris, quamvis suspectus in praeteritum, veniam ex paenitentia impetret. Sine auctore vero propositi libelli in nullo crimine locum habere debent. Nam et pessimi exempli nec nostri saeculi est.)
In terms of non-religious sources that’s pretty much everything from the first entire century afterwards, until you get to later historians such as Cassius Dio, Thallus, Lucian etc who are much further temporally removed from the events. Which is not very much evidence for the “historical Jebus”.
(Yes, I’m not including Josephus in that list, but of his two references to Jesus, it is worth considering that the main one is very possibly a forgery inserted by a later source (ooh, controversy!), and he’s not excluded from being partisan in one way or the other.)
iamol, post 197 and 215, you quote another poster as me. your post 117 i just didn’t understand what you meant, but i thought i’d pissed you off somehow. being a presppositionalist sounds bad, but i still don’t know what it is.
rudy,
well i could start by saying i think it’s rational to have working principles, like axioms for math, that you use to organize your life around.
Why do you think that? Are these principles you place beyond the possibility of abandoning? What do you mean by “an axiom”? In mathematics, an axiom is something you can adopt or not according to circumstances – for example, in some circumstances it is useful to adopt Euclid’s parallel postulate, in others, one of the alternatives to it. An axiom is not something you organize your life around.
Anyhow “god” is nothing like an axiom, any more than “leprechaun” or “werewolf” is: “god” is either a supernatural being, or nothing. “God exists” might be an axiom; but since there’s no more reason to believe it is true than that “leprechauns exist” is, and since belief in God leads people to all sorts of horrible actions, it is simply foolish to adopt it.
You are not expressing yourself clearly, and I strongly suspect that is because you are not thinking clearly. If you thought no more clearly than this when you were an atheist, I’m not surprised you fell into woo.
^ Oops @ #326. My first sentence implies I’m one of the religious whom are oft surprised by the multiplicity of gospels. I’m not; I was hamfistedly trying to pass comment on the inherent selectivity of the NT and how most Christian denominations steadfastly ignore and downplay all of the other writings (which would not help their cause, by showing how arbitrary the choice of the four canonical gospels was).
Simple, you try to define what you want as a philosophical conclusion into your premises. If you want to prove a deity, you try to define your premises such that the deity is essentially proven if the premises are accepted, then write a tonne of BS to hide what you did. But surprise, surprise, you prove your deity in the end. Dishonest philosophy.
nerd, well i’m learning a lot reading here, anyway. and finding out just how bad i am at expressing ideas that seem clear in my head, and maybe finding that some of them touch people’s nerves, that’s good for me, anyway.
from our past posts i imagine you’d alsolike me to get more concrete like knockgoats, instead of just breezy metaphor. i will see what i can do, i’m better at impressionistic stuff. do you have a reaction to my answer to knockgoats?
Rudy, the reason people are asking you why you are here is an attempt to figure out what the fuck your point is, if indeed you have one. Basically, all you did was post to say “Hi, I’m a Quaker and I think religious thought is better!” Yeah, well, and?
Now all you’re doing is posting muddled, woo-ish crap like this:
You don’t seem to be following what anyone else says and you don’t seem to have a particular point or topic you wish to discuss. For the record, I’m here to hang out with other rational-minded people, talk talk talk and learn. Any of the regulars here have a perfect right to ask you why you’re here – I for one, have no interest in you simply maundering on with muddled thoughts of little substance.
nerd, yes, they may have to be abandoned, people do it all the time. i mean, people abandon “god exists’ all the time. no, axioms arent’ a perfect metaphor for this, though i did wqnt the idea of something basic that you derive your behavior or thinking from, the way “don’t torment frogs” might derive from “causing unnecessary suffering is wrong”.
I have to finish this later this evening, i just called to supper. and maybe i won’t hav4e to use thiw damn netbook… :)
leprauchans aren’t like that because the don’t lead anywhere interesting – rudy
They do if you want to get rich: don’t you know that if you catch a leprechaun, he’s obliged to give you his pot of gold – although he’ll trick you out of it if he can, he can’t just refuse. So if I take as an axiom “leprechauns exist”, it would make sense for me to invest time and energy in trying to catch one to fund a comfortable retirement. Why would this be irrational? Obviously, because there is absolutely no reason to believe leprechauns exist. Similarly if I take as an axiom “werewolves exist”, I should avoid going out at night when the moon is full. Why would this be irrational? Obviously, because there is absolutely no reason to believe werewolves exist. So an “axiom” you organise your life by doesn’t have to be self-contradictory for it to be irrational to accept it. If the axiom is the existence of something which we have no reason to believe exists, like God, it’s irrational to organise your life around it.
i did wqnt the idea of something basic that you derive your behavior or thinking from, the way “don’t torment frogs” might derive from “causing unnecessary suffering is wrong”. – rudy
That’s not the way morality works in practice: rather, we start with the specific, and generalise and systematise later, if at all. The latter has some value – it can sometimes show us that we are being inconsistent because of unacknowledged prejudices – but trying to come up with some small set of “axioms” from which you can deduce what you should do in all circumstances is a hopeless exercise: reality is constantly confronting us with fresh moral questions, particularly in an era of rapid technical change.
Rudy, as far as I am concerned you are still incoherent. Try to be precise. State your axioms clearly, enumerate if necessary then the evidence to back up your axioms. For example, if you have an axiom that states god exists, you must provide the conclusive physical evidence for your deity at this point (and we, not you, are the judge if it is conclusive). This is where most xians and deists fail.
You need to beware though, that there is no evidence that your deity exists, no evidence that the babble is anything other than myth/fiction, and no evidence that human morals cannot easily be derived from evolutionary theory without a need for imaginary deities.
Nerd:
I’ll use this moment as an opportunity to plug Moral Minds The Nature of Right and Wrong by Marc D. Hauser to those who haven’t read it.
A link to the book Caine recommended. (And no, I haven’t read it.)
Ah, thanks Nerd! I knew I forgot something. Trying to do too many things at once. Moral Minds is a good read and things are set out concisely.
Caine,
I think Hauser has interesting things to say, but I’ve found him really difficult to read, and sometimes confused. For example, he recounts a case where a jury convicted a killer of a double murder, one victim being an 8-month fetus. He says:
“This appears to be a classic case of moving from a consciously explicated principle – abortion is the murder of a person – to a carefully reasoned judgement – murdering a person is forbidden.” That’s nonsense – that murder is forbidden isn’t the conclusion of an argument there – and in fact, the concept “murder” already includes the concept of being forbidden! On other occasions I simply disagree with moral judgements he sees as unproblematic – e.g. that brother-sister incest is always wrong.
Knockgoats, it did take me quite a while to get all the way through the book; like you, I took issue with his points of view more than once. Overall though, I did think it was a good read. It made me think about a lot of things I had never actively considered before, and I always consider that a plus.
In the end, I do think that while a majority of societies tend to agree on certain moral judgements, the question of morals/morality will continue to be a thorny one for us humans.
Are there other books on the subject you consider worth reading?
At least this isn’t the netbook, though I’m going to have to get off of this one too in a minute, as soon as it’s needed for homework again…
knockgoats, there’s a good case for morals deriving from our emotional responses… I think there are experiments (I think the general area is called neuroethics, though I might be thinking of neuroeconomics; there’s a survey article in Brain and Behavioral Sciences but I don’t know how to link to it) that show that emotional responses trump moral calculations in people’s judgement of ethical dilemmas.
In any case I can’t argue that we don’t work from specifics to generalities, but of course mathematicians get their axioms that way too…
No, we can’t find a rule that covers every case. I don’t know what Wittgenstein says in the case of morals, but this is sort of his territory isn’t it? I think that the idea of a “rule of thumb” or “perspective” might be a better word for what I want than “axiom”.
Some axioms can cover a lot of territory though, like the Fourfold Truths, or Richard Rorty’s “suffering is wrong”. For some people “god exists” entails “I’ll be judged after I die for what I do now” and perhaps this has some effect on their ethical decisions.
In other cultures, people might take “honor” or “shame” (other people will what I’m doing is shameful) as an ethical organizing principle in this sense. I don’t doubt these two have some biological underpinnings (sexual rivalry, say, and health taboos), but people use the complicated, cultural notions of honor and shame, not the direct biological stuff.
The technical change does throw up new challenges, esp. in bioethics. But I am reminded of a question I once heard Daniel Berrigan asked after a lecture. He was asked whether he thought people should become vegetarians. He answered that he thought it would be OK, but first we should stop being cannibals. We are worried about the ethics of in vitro fertilization etc., and people should think about those things. In the meantime we are spending scarce resources on the military and letting people starve. Anyway, sorry, just had to get that off my chest.
Anyway, I didn’t necessarily have in mind just a moral calculus, I was thinking the whole gamut of how we choose our goals, what we think is important to spend money on, etc. Some people with different “axioms” are going to come to the same conclusions, of course. This is why most theists and atheists are reasonably nice people. Going back to Euclid here, who Nerd brought up, there are plenty of theorems that just follow from the nonparallel postulates.
As to showing why “god exists” is a better axiom than “leprauchans exists” (or whether ” X exists” should be an axiom AT ALL, rather than something that requires evidence, which I think is what Nerd wants), that would be in my response to Nerd (coming up next).
Rudy, I just used the three sentence rule (if I can’t figure out where you are going in three sentences, it is nonsense), and you failed. Avoid the equivocation. Take a stand in sentence one, and two, and in sentence three present the evidence, or links to the evidence. Otherwise, don’t post. If you post over three paragraphs, you are equivocating too much. Keep it brief and concise…
Caine,
Did I say that you, or anyone else, couldn’t ask me why I was here?
I was trying to figure out whether Nerd was asking me for my personal motivation, or whether he was just speaking to the content (ie that what I’d said so far was crap). I think I’ve figured that out (though whether I can satisfy him is a pretty remote possibility. I’m trying, though).
If you think what I’m writing is worthless, you can either not read it, or be a little more specific in your criticism than “woo woo”.
[As far as the whole thread, if that’s what you’re talking about
‘ “Basically, all you did was post to say “Hi, I’m a Quaker and I think religious thought is better!” ‘
is a pretty bizarre reading of the way the posts went.]
I think axiom is being misused here. An axiom is something we can’t prove but assume to be true. Euclidean geometry is based on ten axioms. Non-Euclidean geometry substitutes different axioms for one or more of Euclid’s.
Nerd, would it rational to believe in leprauchans if you saw the pot of gold, and all the other stuff, without being able to spot the leprachan? I’m not saying that you’d be able to rule out other explanations (pixies, say, or UFOs), only asking whether (at least tenative) belief in leperchauns would be rational?
If the head of the Troll Market sent Rudy as a chew toy, I suggest PZ send a strongly worded letter to the Troll Board. This tasteless quality is unexceptable.
Patricia, agreed. The muddled is just too messy with this one.
Rudy, I’ll get ahead of you and say there is no physical evidence for either a deity or leprechauns. Trying to equate the two shows your lack of precision. I am a scientist, and physical evidence will cause me to change my mind. Do you have the equivalent of an eternally burning bush, something that can be examined by scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained) origin? Or do you have the usual philosophical nonsense, that isn’t worth the electrons used to post it? In the latter case, go away. We’ve heard it all before…
tis himself,
Calling them “axioms” gets at the “unprovable” part, and also gets at deducing other things from them (life decisions, ethics, etc.)
I’m not sure what’s wrong with the “assume to be true” part. Isn’t that what people are doing when they use “(some) deities exist”?
I’m thinking of axioms as producing research programs, and choosing what to do based on how productive or rich or aesthetically pleasing the research program looks (people in math doing this when looking for a career, say. This kind of shades into fashions, but that’s like religion too.)
We’ve heard it all before…
Now where’s Janine with that music link?
‘pick up your clothes my love and close the door…’
*smirk*
Axiom is indeed being misused, because the propositions that are being taken for granted as “religious axioms” are much flimsier and ill-defined than would be palatable to a mathematician. One other point of similarity between mathematics and religion is also worth noting – in mathematics, theorems are required to be argued logically to establish the proposition, which might come to an end with an elegant summa followed by “QED” or “w5” (which was what we wanted). There is usually nothing wrong with saying that you wanted to establish a certain outcome at the outset, because the logic is all there laid out in the proof, and usually it is either all obviously sound or not (and while there are propositions in mathematics that are undecidable, these are less of a nuisance to the general practice of most mathematicians than you would think), because if there is a weak link in the argument it will be discovered (which may require the proof to be reworked).
The equivalent practice in religion is to apply logic to nebulous or badly-defined “axioms” to reach ridiculous conclusions (which proves nothing more than GIGO, garbage in, garbage out, and is evidenced by a huge amount of theological writing), or by using far inferior chains of logic uncritically to get the Conclusion You Want™: obtaining the “which was what we wanted” as though no other alternative was possible is dishonest and frequently the argument used is circular. The first of these approaches might be the more mathematical, but it’s nothing more substantial than a castle founded on sand.
<Darth Vader voice The Muddle is strong in this one. </Darth Vader voice
Rudy, leave the terms like axiom alone, which in mathematics is precise defined. Tighten your logic at all points. As ‘Tis said, the Muddle is strong in you. I suspect you really don’t know what you want to say. So you need to focus on one item, say the existence of your deity, and ignore all other topics. State what you believe, and the evidence (preferably physical evidence) of why you believe it. Then we will tear it apart…
Ah, Nerd, I had thought to settle in with some finely fruited sangria, fresh olive and cheese bread, with dipping oil – but I just don’t think Rudy is up to it.
Nerd, I guess we’ve gotten to this point before and got stuck, so I guess we’re done, at least until I suddenly come across a burning bush and can FedEx it to you.
Knockgoats, you said,
“So if I take as an axiom “leprechauns exist”, it would make sense for me to invest time and energy in trying to catch one to fund a comfortable retirement. Why would this be irrational? Obviously, because there is absolutely no reason to believe leprechauns exist.”
I think the “absolutely no reason” doesn’t get at the irrationality, as people can reasonably differ as to how much reason you need.
Someone
could claim, for example, that the existence of beauty was evidence for gods. Think of John Stuart Mill, and his life-changing discovery of poetry (in his twenties, I think?) Another person might have a similar experience and claim it as a reason to believe in a god. Or to be blunt, what about mystics?
I tend to look at things like “religion stopped the slave trade”. (Others look at “religion started the Inquisition”. Yeah, there’s that.)
I want to push a little harder on the idea of an axiom: mathematicians don’t think of axioms as true, in the same sense as “leprauchans (don’t) exist”. They show consistency (a kind of benefit you noted), they might be more useful in physics than some other set of axioms (there are all kinds of other geometries that no one has found much use for, at least not yet). If there weren’t many examples anywhere else in math of hyperbolic geometry, for example, no one would be studying them much, no matter how consistent the axioms were.)
I a math person, so I tend to think of things through these spectacles (and what do you expect from someone who believes in imaginary numbers anyway?) Nerd sees things through the perspective of a (physical?) scientist.
[Probably there’s an impedance mismatch here between me and the folks on the forum anyway, just as I have trouble talking to people with New Age type beliefs. I’ll keep reading though. Maybe someone could suggest a better forum if you know of one, though; I don’t want to keep irritating everyone.]
Caine, I can’t control the way I think of these things. But I can control (with effort) how much I listen to others here; I really am not putting in enough effort at that. I’ll keep working at it.
Patricia, Rudy is troll lite, but if you wish a tasty snack and libation, go for it. I just finished dinner (pork roast, potatoes and gravy, corn, green beans, and fresh store bought tomatoes), and will have a piece of blueberry pie (store bought) shortly. Then I need to get to bed earlier than normal (never mind the time change is making it much earlier).
Ah, haw, ha, ha, haw!
You’d better read your Holy Babble again bucko, sweet baby Jezus loves teh slavery.
Imagine if a bank went around telling their clients that their accounts had money in them when they actually had nothing, and their claim for doing so was that it “gave their clients comfort.” That would be morally wrong, wouldn’t it?
Nerd – No thanks, I’m on a strict troll diet these days. Complete fat heads aren’t worth biting.
Yeah, the time change is hard to deal with. I just locked up the Patrol, they are purring away in darkened bliss. (Laying far fewer eggs, but happy)
Rudy, you said you were an atheist,
When and for how long? What were you before that? Did you publicly acknowledge your atheism? WHAT MADE you switch?
Is THAT too much to ask? You want us to believe you were an atheist… and, if you WERE really an atheist, I’m sure we’d all like to know what EVIDENCE made you change your mind. Certainly you mention that for a reason, right?
Oh, and don’t confuse our ire at your inability to make a coherent point with us being “touchy” because you’ve hit “close to home” on something. If that’s what you need to tell yourself to feel better about the reaction you got, then tell yourself– and keep it out of your incoherent posts. To “hit close to home” you have to actually make a point. You haven’t. You’re free associating even though you have been provided questions for honing your communication.
I believe you scolded us in your first post for not engaging in dialogue, and yet you hardly seem to be a model of a person who is good at dialogue. Maybe we don’t engage in dialogue with theists because of the tendency to miss every point we make and, instead, hear something else coupled with their inability to make their own coherent points. I suspect this comes from having to convince yourself that some ancient crappy text is a “good book” inspired by the creator of the universe (–and if “faith is good”, those who lack it must be bad.)
In essence, you theists are experts at lying to themselves through bullshit-speak and then crying foul when those “snarky” “strident” atheists call them on it!
Oh, and I am one who doesn’t believe you were an atheist because you completely avoided my questions the first time I asked. But I’m open to being convinced otherwise. Why were you an atheist exactly? (I’m an atheist due to the lack of evidence for any invisible beings.)
I suspect you are a theist because you are afraid bad things will happen if you aren’t. Maybe that’s a truth that is making you “touchy” and hitting “a little too close to home”.
Rudy:
Rudy, it’s really not all that hard to think about a couple of specific things and provide answers.
What you are doing here is simply stream of consciousness which is why people are irritated. You have been asked some simple questions, all that is required are simple answers, as in:
1. I believe in ________ (short form, not endless maundering)
2. I think _________ is evidence for my belief in ________.
Hah! Nerd, you only *prefer* physical evidence. Now you’re stuck with me again! (Well, at least until I have to go to sleep, pretty soon. Damn daylight savings.)
Well, I am a little bit of a loss coming from a religious culture where people don’t actually care strongly about beliefs (and that culture is probably what attracts people like me). I had a long conversation about this with a non-theist co-religionist: our shared culture only cares that you find your particular beliefs move you to compassionate action.
So, the “productive research program” metaphor is all I’ve got, I’m afraid. Otherwise it’s down to just the stuff I said before (aesthetics, finding theist culture (literature, prayer, etc.) more productive for myself, etc.) That is the same way a mathematician might have to convince someone else that they should pay attention to their work (“look at how I can generalise linear independence! what’s it good for? well, it helps me with my problem here…”) and there’s no fact of the matter as to whether they are right or not, outside working out the program and seeing what happens (“Semi-sub-riemannian widgets? Isn’t that those sort of useless things old Prof. McDoogal was into?”) In other words, the framework for how I think of things (axioms, research program) and what I actually think (god, justified by subjective results and aesthetic satisfaction).
So that’s pretty much the whole thing. Not what people want, I know. Tear into it. If I can de-muddle it at all afterwards, I’ll be surprised, but I’ll try to be a better reader than I’ve been up to this point.
articulett, applause from the peanut gallery. :)
Rudy:
*headdesk* No. No, religion bolstered the slave trade. The bible condones slavery, and was often used to justify the trade.
Well, a productive scientific research program produces hard evidence. You produce hot air. Guess what? You need a more scientific approach. Start with reading the Pentateuch straight through, no jumps in reading. You will find a rather disturbing deity there. Look at the capriciousness, slavery, incest, genocide, and rapine of conquered virgins that is there. It is the start of many a conversion to atheism. Yahweh is not worthy of worship. Been there, done that. Which is why believers have a hard time using the babble for anything around here. We know what it really says, and it isn’t what they think it says…
*headdesk* No. No, religion bolstered the slave trade. The bible condones slavery, and was often used to justify the trade.
I think it is fair to say that there were people on both sides of the conflict that used the bible to justify their positions. But I also think that it shows how muddled the thinking is when a religious text is used as a moral authority. Thought the bible never condemned the keeping of servants, (Say, what was that parable of the three servants?), enough people were able to find bits and scraps from that work to try to back up why slavery was wrong.
If that is the big sky daddy’s word on the topic of human bondage, it is quite muddled.
Nerd, generally Quakers would not subscribe to either Biblical inerrancy or consistency, and instead like a lot of middle-of-the-road Christian denominations simply cherry-pick the good bits (i.e. they are not fundies to whom divine inspiration of the whole book, chapter and verse, is a sine qua non), so an invocation to read the Babble probably isn’t going to achieve the desired result.
One thing that is noticeable about Quakers is that individual congregations do vary dramatically in what they do or don’t believe, since there isn’t a Quaker “creed” in the same way that the Catholics have the Nicene Creed, or some Anglicans used to treat the “39 Articles”. So rudy really ought to come clean and actually state some of his personal beliefs that justify making sweeping statements such as “God made the world good”, which otherwise is not much of an argument at all…
articulett,
I didn’t know you were online, so I couldn’t really answer your question from earlier. The person who started the whole “prove you were an atheist” wanted to stop, so that’s the reason I didn’t go back to that.
And no, I didn’t mean at all mean that I was hitting “close to home”, I meant that I was learning what it was about my way of talking that irritates people, i.e. I’m learning how to express myself better. I read that post again and see why you read it the wrong way though (and it’s a good example of what I’m doing wrong too.)
OK, I’ll try to make it short (ok, that’s not gonna happen) but I’m afraid it’s pretty dull:
Well, as I said, I was brought up RCC. Lost it at 16 after reading Betrand Russell (and discovering the Village Voice at the library and reading intelligent people who took for granted that religion was foolish.) I also really liked (this shows my age, I’m afraid) Albert Ellis’ books, and
books like General Semantics (it’s crap, but I was 16).
I was never really out to my family, but my friends all knew my views, at least by college. I was sort of the Wally Shawn of my crowd (if anyone remembers My Dinner With Andre). You know, “The fortune cookie doesn’t know anything!!” UFOs drove me nuts. Anyway, read lots of scifi until middle of college or so. (Actually started that stuff at about 12, when a coworker of my dad’s gave me a huge box of old F&SF issues; can’t imagine why that didn’t push me out of the RCC sooner.)
Can’t provide you with much internet data though; much of my life was preinternet, and besides, math and politics were my main interests. I did keep up an interest in philosophy though and did some grad courses in Cog Psy (J J Gibson and Neisser were the main focus then). I was a pretty regular reader of The Skeptical Inquirer, at one point; I don’t remember when that was exactly though.)
I was always a pacifist (repelled by the Vietnam war) and so checked well after college into Quakerism. I was mainly interested in the pacifism and not at all the religious stuff (a very common thing then and now, on the US east coast, not elsewhere so much). Sort of lost that interest when I started grad school, but went back later.
I started off really with the religious stuff later when a (nonreligious) friend asked me if I didn’t really think that there was something underneath it all? (We were being very philosophical over dinner). I realized that I did.
I had started going to Quaker Meeting again anyway (because of a housemate’s influence) so I started adding religious books to the mix of stuff I read.
There wasn’t any one thing really, and I was reading at least as much lit crit type stuff (as bad a rep as this stuff has here, you can’t accuse it of being religious). Anyway, I found that I liked thinking of my life as a story, and that I liked the metaphors for that I was finding in religious books (Ann Lamott, people like her) and poetry and so forth.
Just as I had a tendency to think “score one for the team” when I discovered in my twenties that some famous person I liked was a skeptic (Ralph Vaughn Williams, the great composer of hymn tunes was a cheerful agnostic yeah!), a somewhat childish habit I outgrew; so a couple of decades later I started cheering a bit when I found some writer I liked was religious (John Ashbery is a gay Christian, hurray! Martin Gardner says theism is OK, yeah!). So I sort of drifted into it. (Maybe 6, 7 years ago?)
Thinking through the way I had justified pacifism to myself for years (getting outside the big Game that is war, instead of taking sides), I started thinking that I could look at life as a whole that way. This gets hard to express. God just fills a spot in my way of thinking.
Was I out to my friends as an atheist all those years? Oh, yeah, of course. I mean I hardly had any friends I respected who weren’t atheists (a few, but not many). Actually it’s been the “lapsing” that’s been hard to explain to people, especially to friends I haven’t seen for a long time (it seems to be ok I’ve found to say I’m into spirituality.) And it is embarassing. As much as I seem to want to drone on about it here to strangers, I really *don’t* like talking to friends about it, unless they are people I met just in that connection.
Craine,
I believe in God. The beauty of things is my evidence, though I don’t expect this to make any else change their minds; it certainly wouldn’t have impressed me before. Beliefs aren’t very important anyway, there’s no difference to me whether someone says God made the world good, or just the world IS good.
Janine, Sarah Ruden, the classicist who translated the currently hot version of the Aeneid, wrote a book on Paul and why he didn’t call for freeing slaves. She isn’t entirely comfortable with his position either, but she points out that freed slaves were usually not much better off in Roman society, and that he might have thought a better strategy was to get master and slave to view each others as human beings.
For what it’s worth, slavery did decrease in Europe over the Christian years; I might be wrong but the big slavery boom later was driven by colonialism and capitalism. The Enlightenment didn’t seem to help any with that.
Nerd, yeah, the Bible has grim stuff. A friend gave me Crumb’s Genesis comic. Grim AND weird. Though I think things get worse later, like Judges (not sure if that’s in the Pentateuch).
Job is interesting though. It would make a great movie.
@Pope Maledict DCLXVI,
Yeah, Quakers are all over the map. There are quite lively nontheist Quaker groups, and Wiccans. I think doesn’t make them a middle of the road group though, unfortunately. More at the fringe.
A lot of Quakers, esp. in the third world and the American Midwest, are traditional Christians, though.
I didn’t say “god made the world good” as part of an argument, only as one of the reasons I don’t believe in ghosts, demons, etc. It’s an axiom maybe, and the deduction is, God didn’t fill the world with bogeymen. Of course, I also think God doesn’t torture people after death. Not sure what axiom I’m deriving that from but it’s not a mainstream Christian belief. There was an intersting movement in rural churches in the US called Universalism that threw out taht belief in hell; they merged later into UUs.
Rudy,
you’ve been meandering again. Perhaps you should state some clear beliefs that we can discuss at the start of a post, before you get caught rambling again?
One of the dangers of a religious upbringing is that you unconsciously imbibe a large number of implausible ideas as wishful thinking. For a specific example, the belief of the continued life of the soul after the death of the body is a meme common to a number of religions, and likewise the fear of death instilled by many of those same religions has the effect of making the belief continue to be an attractive one, even when the religious underpinning has been removed from it.
For example, I was never able to stomach the Anglican dogma when I was a boy, and in my upbringing was exposed to the various Christian ideas of hell, heaven, and eternal life or damnation after death, and like most children I found the idea of death horrifying when I first came to understand what it meant. So while I never accepted the Christian faith except as a social pretence, for a while in my youth I flirted with a sort of scientific Deism, which I had half-rationalised or justified to myself as possibly allowing some means of escape from the certainty of death permanently erasing my consciousness at some time in the (hopefully not too soon) future. This sort of God belief I thought (mistakenly) would fit in with agnosticism and would match the empirical reality of things. But that’s all it was, a twisted form of wishful thinking to avoid facing the reality of death. Likewise for a number of other things that we might wish to be true, but for which there is no evidence.
It is pernicious that religion plays on fear and wishful thinking in these sorts of ways, but it would not be so successful at working on the human psyche if it didn’t use these means of coercion, by appealing to the desire for one’s wishes and emotions to be granted over the overwhelming weight of rational, and rather dispassionate evidence. For example, against the special pleading and wishful thinking that a “soul” (whatever that is) might survive death, or be re-incarnated in another body, there is the rather simple evidence that no one that’s actually been dead (temporary near-death experiences aside, which for various reasons can’t be trusted as accurate testimony) has been back years later to say what it’s like.
So to get back to simple beliefs that we could discuss here, do you for example, believe there is a part of you that isn’t just your body, and that it might survive your death? Would your willingness to perhaps answer a similar question about your personal God as “I don’t know” be wishful thinking, or wilful ignorance?
Rudy,
in case it isn‘t obvious, I didn’t write all of my previous comment directly in the 60 seconds or so after your immediate previous post #371 – I’m largely replying to #368 where you still hadn’t gotten to grips with answering the question of what your beliefs are, which is where some people (perhaps more used to fundie trolls) are finding you evasive.
Pope Maledict, sorry, I have to go to bed (have to drive kids to school at 6:30). So I won’t be able to read your follow up til tomorrow.
But yes, most of the time I think part of me will survive the body. I have a kind of Spinoza-ish view that we’re only seeing part of what’s going on with us; on the analogy of a painting have its material properties and also its artistic properties. The other part of the time I’m convinced by the Buddhist no-self analysis but think God will somehow preserve the best parts of me, even though not a self the way I think of now.
I don’t worry about it much though, I’m sure I’ll be cool with whatever God has in mind.
I don’t quite follow your last question though.
Pope Maledict, process theology is a little like what your personal deism gives, God remembers as sort of the collected culmination of everything novel created as “actual occasions” (events).
I’m going to have to go out to a rehearsal shortly, so I won’t have time to reply to your last several. However, I’ll give you a pencil-sketch summary of the general theme: in an amazing universe with 100 billion galaxies, each containing a similar number in the billions of stars, and an epic timescale of billions of years, it would seem fairly unlikely that humanity is the main attraction, and the rest of the cosmos is just so much window dressing.
Thanks for the reply Rudy,
At least, I believe that you were an atheist. I still don’t quite understand what made you change your mind except that you like thinking of your life as a story. I don’t really know what you believe and it doesn’t really matter to me. But I am interested in why you posted. Are you annoyed with PZ and us for goofing on religious people. Most religious people are glad to goof on religions that aren’t theirs.
A dialogue with any believer of any supernatural claim is unlikely to work if that believer has a vested interest in keeping that belief. How likely do you think you are to have a discussion about Scientology beliefs with a Scientologist? And suppose it gave you pleasure to make fun of Scientology beliefs? Wouldn’t you seek a place where Scientologists were unlikely to be?
I was raised Catholic and I find indulging in irreverence fun and even healing in ways. I make fun of my former beliefs as readily (and maybe more readily) then I make fun of other “woo”. I don’t think “belief” is something worth respecting, and I feel like I wasted a lot of years trying to believe something that doesn’t really even make sense because I was afraid bad things would happen if I “lost faith”.
If there were no god, would YOU want to know? –Or would you prefer believing that there was? If your god were real, why would it matter if we didn’t believe and made fun of someone who did?
Before what?
How do you get from “some[?] things are beautiful” to “God exists”?
What, exactly, do you think the word “good” means in either of those phrases?
You wrote that you like SF… Have you read this story? The author wrote that he was sort-of inspired by Job.
Hell is the Absence of God
Yes, thanks Owlmirror, I did see that story; it was in the slipstream anthology “feeling strange”, I think.
And “before” just means “before I started being a theist”.
And it isn’t a particularly logical jump from “things are beautiful” to “god exists”; I mean, i think things are beautiful regardless. My own framework for theism is sort of orthogonal to the way people want me to argue here; I was attempting to match the pattern Caine asked for in 362 but it doesn’t fit very well, I guess. “Things are beautiful” is more like supporting evidence, or something. I didn’t get my perspective by tripping over evidence, any more than I left the RCC for lack of evidence.
articulett, well, if you look at my first post, it was just that I thought PZ wasn’t fair to the ABC folks (who didn’t *all* say what he complained about), and I thought the “conversation vs. debate” thing was interesting. I said something (not well thought out) about that. All the other stuff in the thread sort was sort of reacting to people. There was sort of runaway feedback.
I guess “being annoyed with goofing on religious people” must have been behind my first post’s unfortunate remark about “this thread shows what the ABC people mean about conversation vs. debate”. I was rightly called down for that, and I apologised. But I only posted in the first place because I thought PZ’s summary of the linked ABC piece was incorrect, not because I thought he shouldn’t make fun of the religious.
Thanks for sharing some of your religious history with me, it sounds like you had a painful time. I had a hard time recovering from the RCC too. I try not to think about it, which is another way of dealing with it, probably not as effective as yours. Thanks for your explanation of the ridicule on Pharyn., I didn’t really think of it that way before. I esp. relate to the Scientology comparison.
Yeah, if there were no god, I’d like to know. I probably wouldn’t have to rearrange my mental furniture TOO much, as I’d have all my earlier habits to fall back on. As far as why the ridicule bothers me, it’s just the broadbrush ridicule really; I think “hey, we’re not all like that”. But if I dont’ want to read it, well, I know what to do.
@Pope Maledict DCLXVI,
Well, I can’t agree with the argument from tinyness. If you go by powers of ten in both space and time, people are kind of in the middle of the scale (there’s a chart in Penrose and Hawking, I can’t remember the name of the book, but there are just two, I think, and it’s the easier one). So God might think logarithmically, I mean, why not?
Monty Python’s “Meaning of Life” has a sketch that mocks the tinyness (that can’t be the word I’m looking for) idea. I think Eric Idle steps out of a refrigerator to convince a woman to donate her organs or something, with a talk about small our concerns are in the universe. Pretty disturbing movie, at least the second half, kind of nightmarish.
Owlmirror, oops I ignored something you asked. What does good mean there? Pretty much the everyday use of the word; in the God setting, it’s against religions that fill the world with demons and ghosts, and instead emphasises that it is our home, and we are not separate from it. In the nonGod setting, I’m thinking of the scene in Philip Pullman’s third Dark Materials book where the ghostly purgatory(?) people are freed to be real again just for a moment; a wonderfully poetic image. Again, this is our home, enjoy the stay, etc. It’s not just bad religion that tries to undermine that, there’s all the commercial culture telling us to hate real bodies for example.
Yawn, I still can’t figure out what is Rudy’s point, or why he is posting, other than he is a pointless meanderer, where it appears the process is more important than the results. Guess what Rudy, I don’t buy that. Wooist meanderers drive rational folks to distraction, but we will not follow.
@Pope Maledict DCLXVI, you say
“but it would not be so successful at working on the human psyche if it didn’t use these means of coercion, by appealing to the desire for one’s wishes and emotions to be granted over the overwhelming weight of rational, and rather dispassionate evidence.”
I do think that’s behind a lot of it, and all those sad shows on television in the US with psychics. The coercion part is the worst part there of it there. A story again: Diane Keaton made a documentary movie called “Heaven”; she just interviews people, all religious I think, about the afterlife, and asked what happens to people who don’t believe. One of the white males was all fire and brimstone; an African American woman by contrast said, in effect, that the unbelievers would be in for a wonderful surprise.
The former Christian was coercive; the latter, I don’t think so.
But yeah, wishing to live forever; that is the appeal. That might be something people can outgrow, and still be religious, and maybe even believe in an afterlife still, without the craving for it. [Guilt is one of the tools of organized religion too, but guilt can be useful to some degree if it’s under our control.]
This is a stretch: but maybe we can compare the motivation of doing science based on building tools (not bad, except weapons), but eventually finding that finding the truth and beauty of the universe and nature is a better reason to do it?
I don’t want to ignore the big kahuna here: there is no evidence for the afterlife. Zero. Zilch. I don’t expect there to ever be any. Suppose we were in some sort of big computer simulation (the Matrix, if you want the evil version, or Kevin Kelley’s “Nerd Theology” (see http://www.kk.org) happy version). You wouldn’t expect to see any evidence that you were in a simulation, or that you’d get backed up or re-booted into an improved version later. :) I base my personal feeling about this on the idea that nothing gets wasted (this is the main theme of process theology), and that we’re in some way in the second scenario. I hope I’m right, but I’m not sure I’m right. I don’t have any right to use that belief to tell other people what to do.
I could rant about how some people act like the world is just something they can throw away like a Coke can, since the next world is the important one (are they going to pollute that one too??) I read that younger evangelicals are less like this, I really hope so. But the way the Glob. Warm. debate is going is discouraging.
Beauty therefore god. Flipside. Parasites causing painful death therefore devil. Fit that in your fuzzy theology.
I will be honest here, just about no matter you answer it, I will find it tedious.
Ah, enough meandering. Rudy –> Killfile.
…no matter how you answer…
Well Nerd, I did say *we* were done before. I’m here because other people were talking to me.
Bye Janine, thanks for the point about slavery and servants. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more persuasive, or interesting, to you.
Wow, I think that this is the first time I’ve ever seen an argument from not really thinking like that and instead just nattering on and on about vague things and occasionally throwing in a metaphor that has no meaning and..oh look, a puppy, therefore God.
Granted… but why do you ignore the bad, there? Where does that leave those who suffer the extremes of bad? Are they simply forgotten by God?
In a godless universe, good and bad both result from the contingencies of a mindless universe; there is no overarching intent. But if there is a God, whence then evil?
@Malcolm, you’re right… I have said I couldn’t make pattern matching Caine’s requested 1, 2 format work. The nattering aspect is my fault though of course, but that was mostly in other posts – you were thinking of 369, weren’t you? That’s only 4 lines long. My real problem there was not putting … profit! at the end.
Trying to steer between logical argument (obviously not my strong suit) and metaphor filled verbosity (my umm, “strength”), let me take another run at it. (metaphorical, but only six lines:)
Think of Darwin’s tangled bank. While not a proof (certainly not to Darwin) of God’s existence, the grandeur Darwin felt there could be a sign of God, the pot of gold as it were; if it can be grand, even with all the pain and struggle there, it can be sacred too.
Did you see a frozen waterfall or something???
Sheesh.
@Owlmirror,
Most of the theodicy I’ve seen seems glib, even though it comes from better and smarter people than I am. So I’m not too hopeful about my attempt, but here goes.
As far as the world being good as such, avalanches and earthquakes and germs cause us suffering (more in proportion to our not helping our neighbors deal with them), but they aren’t evil in themselves. When I said the world is good, that’s as much a statement about God’s intent in making it, not a certificate of its safety. It’s definitely not safe. It’s more like saying that it’s got a good purpose, or good possibilities.
No one would raise an eyebrow if I said cephalopods were good things, but they probably cause suffering to their prey. Also see my tangled bank response to Malcolm.
stevieinthecity etc.,
What?
stevie, is it about leprechauns you be asking then? i just used pot of gold because leprechauns kept coming up earlier in thread. I don’t know the frozen waterfall thing but I’m assuming the pot of gold is what caught your eye, and that it’s about that.
leprechauns are good too, but watch out, they’re tricky.
Rudy, the frozen waterfall comment is reference to Francis Collins “amazing” conversion to a goddidit type.
Hell, I would, and I’m a cephalopod. What does it mean to say a cephalopod is a good thing? As a dish? To some, certainly. Is the world a good dish? Are cephalopods morally good? By whose standards? Does the question even make sense? Not to me; nor does it make any more sense to speak of the world as good or bad, absent a definitive standard of good or bad. Having several standards of good or bad (which we do) makes the question as useless as having no such standards.
Of the goodness of cephalopods
You might think you’d find favorable odds
But a meaningless query
Just makes us grow weary
It’s as hopeless as looking for gods!
Google Francis Collins and frozen waterfall.
Cuttlefish, bravo! Rudy’s assumption simply doesn’t take individual personalities into account. One should never generalize about the cephalopods.
I see that Caine beat me. I had to make sure I had the right scientist.
Caine, Fleur du mal@341,
I’ll persevere with Hauser then – I still have my place marked. I’d recommend Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-disciplinary Persepctives, edited by Leonard D. Katz (2000) – particularly the chapter by Christopher Boehm, and Foundations of Human Sociality edited by Joseph Heinrich, Robert Boyd and others (2004).
Janine:
I think Rudy doesn’t spend enough time in reality, he seems to not know about almost everything. Read, Rudy, Read!
Knockgoats, thank you! I will go look those up right now.
If I’m going to be able to hold my head up here, I’ll read those books… Even if I have to use powerful interlibrary loan mojo…
…and even though I spend too much time in the library anyway. Most people think reality is *outside*…
Rudy
rudy #390 wrote:
Sorry if I’m entering late here, and may have missed things back in the comments — but how are you defining “God?”
Question time. Consider a completely secular, naturalized version of “God” (or ‘spirituality’) — there is no overarching Plan, there is no disembodied Mind creating and controlling everything, there is no moral structure built into the cosmos itself, there is no fundamental mind-like element to existence — and yet human beings have evolved to experience their own empathy, and love, and beauty, and wisdom. Individuals often choose to pursue these things which they value, in order to enhance their own lives, and the lives of others. That is “God.”
Got that? Okay.
Now, take away the word “God,” as unnecessary and confusing — but keep the rest.
Here’s the question: What’s been lost? What part is wrong?
there’s no difference to me whether someone says God made the world good, or just the world IS good. – Rudy
The world isn’t good, and saying it is, is just sloppy sentimentality, and actually very offensive. From the human point of view, or that of any other sentient being, it contains both good and bad; for many, it contains practically nothing but bad. WTF is good about the guinea worm? Huntingdon’s disease? rabies?
Nerd of Redhead, OM #365
Nerd, rapine isn’t rape.
Sastra, I could live with that picture, I sort of addressed belief vs. behavior in some of my other posts. I’m a little worried about the word “enhanced”, as I can’t see quite where the norms are coming from in your picture, from the empathy mabye?
@Knockgoats, I hate sloppy sentimentality, even when I do it, but see post 392, I think I answered that question there.
‘Tis Himself@405,
Isn’t it interesting, though, that “rapine” and “rape” are clearly cognates, and “rapine” means “forcible seizure of another’s property”!
Rudy #392
All Things Dull And Ugly
Knockgoats:
Word. I’m reminded of the David Attenborough interview:
Knockgoats #408
I’ve been bemused by the similarity.
BTW, remember it’s pillage then burn.
Only going by a standard that rejects God from having anything to do with their existing, which is to say, an atheistic perspective. Yet they do exist, and if God exists, and made the world, God is responsible for those things as well.
How can you judge the intent of a thing without taking into account everything that the made thing does as having been part of the intent?
How can you distinguish your assessment from special pleading?
I can’t see quite where the norms are coming from in your picture, from the empathy mabye? –
rudy
Are you asking a causal or a justificatory question here, or have you, as I suspect, failed to distinguish the two? If you are asking why people have the norms they do, that’s a question for science (and individual biography). If you’re asking what justifies having the norms they do, the answer can only be given in terms of the effects of adopting that norm. If, say, I adopt the norm that it is wrong to cause unnecessary suffering, I cannot logically oblige a psychopath to accept it, nor would I be able to if there were a God. The justification for adopting that norm is simply that others are likely to be better off if I do. Adopting such a norm does not require holding a belief that there is a god, or that “the world is good”, or that people have “natural rights”, or any other implausible belief – so why do so?
Point conceded. But they were carried off like plunder. *note to self, don’t try to get too flowery with the language*
@owlmirror,
A thought experiment here might be to imagine a world where you could reboot every time something bad happened (like a videogame) and everything felt good all the time. It wouldn’t be a real world.
This is sort of the point, of Philip Pullman’s scene I mentioned; the ghosts in limbo or whatever it was called aren’t suffering, but they aren’t in the real world. Of course, Pullman isn’t remotely making a theistic point, god knows, but there is a kind of theodicy in that scene.
sorry, gotta run to supper and kid stuff…
rudy #406 wrote:
What do you mean by “live with it?” Have I described your own view, or are you saying that this viewpoint can ‘get along’ with your own, because behavior matters more than belief? I’m trying to understand what, specifically, you mean by “God.”
I’ve already pegged you as a religious humanist. I’m now trying to figure out if we have a genuine disagreement on the existence of God, or if you’re just playing around with vocabulary (or both, and doing the latter when someone is ‘looking.’)
I’m being vague on purpose. The norms are coming from shared norms of humanity in general; most people would prefer lives filled as much as possible with love, beauty, happiness, and wisdom, over the opposite. This really doesn’t point to anything outside of humanity, or require going out of nature.
rudy #415 wrote:
There are several problems with this theodicy. One is that it works only for relatively minor problems. For genuine tragedy and broken lives, it ends up being flip.
It’s one thing to decide to try to make the best of a bad situation, and get what good you can from it. But there’s something frightening about pretending that the bad situations are being given to you on purpose, so that you can show character and gumption and make something beautiful. “If you don’t have the contrast, you won’t appreciate the good” can get scary.
I remember reading something written by the father of a little boy who had been kidnapped, tortured, and beheaded. His outrage over the crime had provoked him into forming a support network of and for parents in similar situations. He said that people sometimes asked him if the wonderful good this organization had done might have “needed” his son’s death, so that, on balance, it was all for the best. His response was a horrified “no.” If he could bring his son back — or just saved him from one moment of pain — he would give up all the benefits of his helpful organization.
The implications behind the scenario computer game, is that this father should have said ‘yes.’ Otherwise, it just wouldn’t be “real.” Beat your wife; she’ll appreciate the times when you don’t, all the more.
Another problem with your thought experiment, is that “being with God” is supposed to be unending bliss, not unlike your video game. If it’s not — and heaven or whatever is just an extended form of human life on earth — then I think you’re losing the transcendent importance of God.
That’s one counter-example, but it goes too far in another direction, and doesn’t really address the nature of the evils in this world — the indifference of natural disasters and diseases; the excesses of the cruelty of human beings.
Why not, anyway? I think I see why, but I want to see how you articulate it.
Uh-oh, there’s a bit of an avalanche to deal with here, electron-wise. I’ll try to pick up a snowball , but I might not get to it all tonight.
First, the easy item, ‘Tis, Ryle or Ayer or somebody like that said that aesthetics should study the dainty and dumpy. Thanks for that funny link.
other posters on theodicy:
The standard distinction is natural vs. human evils. The World is Good idea is threatened rather more by the natural evil than by the human evil. But I think people get more upset by the human evil; and God, while maybe not getting off free here, at least has a defense. Is God responsible for the evil people do, just because God created a world in which human evil can happen?
I’ll have to move on to the natural evil tomorrow, I’m not thinking clearly enough right now.
@Sastra, thanks for your posts, I have some thoughts almost ready but I’ll have to get to them tomorrow.
Beat your wife; she’ll appreciate the times when you don’t, all the more.
Now there’s a fun OOC quote for the in-tard-sect!
“Pharyngulites approve of wifebeating!”
;)
I’m not thinking clearly enough
…still.
I’m not sure this distinction is real, though. Are humans really so distinct from the rest of the natural world that evil done by humans simply must be put into a different class?
I think it can be argued that yes, assuming that such an entity as God exists, he-she-it is responsible, even if indirectly or partially. Responsibility derives from knowledge of what is going on, and what the consequences of what is going on will be, and one’s ability to alter the outcome.
Since God, by most theological definitions, has all knowledge and all power, God must have all responsibility.
Even if it’s argued that God is not all-powerful or all-knowing, God still has responsibility for what is known and actionable and yet refrains from acting on.
One of the examples I usually offer to believers in this sort of discussion is that of religion-based war, and religion-based capital punishment. Even if God interfered in no other way in human actions, when people claimed that God wanted some war or some massacre or death-penalty for some crime, God could speak up and tell everyone involved that no, he didn’t (or that yes, he did — which would emphasize to everyone that God really was pissed off at those misdeeds, and encourage people to never do whatever it was again, and allow them to know that that religious law really did have divine approval).
Rudy @390,
I wasn’t referring to any particular comment, but to your entire style of argument.
I have yet to see you write anything that I would consider even vaguely coherent.
Your tangled bank comment is just more blather. What on Earth does;
even mean?
Why do you need to insert god?
Why can’t grandeur just be grandeur?
you’re begging the question. it isn’t “real” because it’s a videogame, not because people are able to avoid the bad experiences in it. But the fact that people LOVE videogames, and sometimes spend their entire lives in them *coughworldofwarcrackcough* speaks pretty loudly for the fact that people wouldn’t mind too much to live in a world like that.
Sorry for the gap; a good night’s sleep and some time to think while driving helped (probably not enough to satisfy icthyic; lazy abuse doesn’t advance the argument, icthyic).
@owlmirror at 412,
“Yet they do exist, and if God exists, and made the world, God is responsible for those things as well.”
Well, in these kinds of discussions, disease, earthquakes, etc. seem to be standard, but what about gravity? Slipping off a cliff while mountain climbing is a natural evil, and mountain climbers or hikers have to take precautions, but a proposal to bulldoze down the mountains (something that’s happening in Appalachia, but I digress) would appal mountain climbers.
@knockgoats at 413 (I think), actually it was causal; I had in mind finding an evolutionary story for the origin of morals, to fill out Sastra’s picture. I was going to justification next though, you are one step ahead. Your general description of how to justify norms is close to how I would do it; it seems related to the “research program” picture of religion I sketched before. I think “others are likely to be better off” runs the risk of being circular, though. Why should you care? The psychopath here is not typical; caring only for one’s family, or tribe, is the common case. Or think of slaveholding cultures.
@Sastra,
No, you haven’t described my view, it’s the second thing, it gets along with mine. I wouldn’t mind if my kids had this view, for example (though
I’m happy with whatever they think; my younger son seems to be creating a philosophy out of reincarnation and ideas out of the Japanese anime he watches — though if either of them got interested in the military, it would be a tough test for me).
We do have a genuine disagreement I think, that would show up more at the level of practice; saying grace before meals, weekly prayer, going to Meeting, the different books we choose to read. I mean, if God (or gods) didn’t exist, some of these things (not Meeting) would be a waste of my time. The disagreement would probably also show up in how we decided some ethical issues, but I can’t see immediately what they would be; we probably have pretty similar cultural backgrounds and assumptions. Maybe they’ll turn up if the discussion develops further. Is this the kind of disagreement you mean? If I am infested with religious memes :) and you’re not, that’s probably more than a matter of words.
“I’m being vague on purpose. The norms are coming from shared norms of humanity in general; most people would prefer lives filled as much as possible with love, beauty, happiness, and wisdom, over the opposite.”
Well, wealthy ancient Romans would have agreed with this, though living in a culture where quite horrible abuse of slaves. Most of us would like as much of these things as possible for ourselves and our loved ones. The wisdom part might tell us that we’ll get more of these things if we also provide other people with them, but this wisdom is hard won. You have to be able to stand outside your own culture to see it, to stop playing the social game as it were.
Does this require belief in God? Well, we’re back to beliefs. I think it helps me, and I think God, or something outside us, guides us to gradually make the “right” choices. But all the research into human evolution, etc. is part of that guidance, it’s not like God is popping in with the answer without our doing our homework.
Sastra at 417,
Thanks Sastra, that was very moving.
I had to think about this one more than any of the other posts. Here, I think that belief in notions, doesn’t really help.
I think in stories, so there is the rabbi (an actual rabbi, but I can’t think of his name; it was in the collection Essential Judaism), who asked by one of his students how God could make good come of atheism. He told a story of religious people passing a person starving, and praying that God would provide. An atheist stopped, and thought “There is no God to help him; these other people are not helping him; there is only myself”, and fed the man.
Theodicy never comes up in Quaker apologetics, at least I haven’t seen it yet, which is why I’m struggling here, but I think the general feeling is, “You can talk about God all you want, but what are you *doing?*”.
The father in the story did more than I could; I would have fallen apart.
@Malcolm, I was saying that someone else might take the struggle there in the tangled bank and see it as holy, or sacred, or a sign of God’s creativity.
Grandeur can just be grandeur, but if that’s all you get out of it, it seems uncomfortably close to the “aesthetic” view of life criticized by Kierkegaard.
Of course, I’m being a little sloppy, as it wasn’t the tangled bank itself that Darwin was talking about, but the whole evolutionary picture.
@owlmirror,
The videogame world is unsatisfactory, because the consequences aren’t real, or the ones that feel real are actually in the outside world (showing off your Second Life creations to real people, or beating real people in a game.)
How is it possible that the very silliness of that argument itself doesn’t leave you realizing that the most parsimonious explanation for any and all of those things… disease, earthquakes, AND gravity, has nothing whatsoever to do with a supernatural creator? You can’t simply pick out the good things and give credit to some god for their existence and simply hand-wavingly dismiss everything else with irrational comparisons. It’s silly and should lead you to realize that it’s silly with the application of just a little bit of rational thought.
It’s the same frustrating rationale I see used when talking about miracles and cures at places like Lourdes. Hundreds of thousands of people go… of them only a select few ever “claim” to be cured (I doubt these claims, obviously, and there’s never been any scientific evidence backing them up). But it never occurs to anyone that if these cures are true, how random, capricious, and evil a being god would have to be.
You say this, but then you follow with:
How is that not circular? (In other words, why is that the common case, if not for reasons relating to “others are likely to be better off”, among others?).
And how much of Roman morals and value systems were derived from their religious belief systems? Can you say for sure? I know you were making this argument separate of religion and as a direct response to the point of a human desire for “love, beauty, happiness, and wisdom, over the opposite”. But if one is made to feel that happiness is only possible through adherence to religious doctrine, might one actually feel happy by owning slaves, if slavery is a tenet of that religion? It’s a dangerous argument you make, and one that opens religion up to scrutiny for distorting how “wisdom and happiness” have been defined over the centuries. And that’s part of the argument.
How do you not see the problem in putting these two statements back to back. You say that in order to gain wisdom one must “stand outside your own culture to see it”, yet you then, without even realizing it, dive directly into a completely culturally driven concept (god, religion, christianity) to derive your wisdom. You’ve directly contradicted yourself. You’re not looking to “step outside your own culture” to derive your wisdom, you are wrapping yourself entirely in it.
Bollocks. Once again… where’s the evidence for this? Considering that we can demonstrate quite well an evolutionary path for the development of morals and ethics, why is it the more parsimonious explanation to you that there must be some “invisible hand” guiding you and your choices? And considering the amount of evil done with the same guidance, how does this not appear to you, as a rational person, a contradiction you simply can’t ignore? There’s a much simpler explanation that doesn’t require magic.
@Jadehawk
(people should be relieved to see me finally catching on to quoting legibly).
People seem to want heaven to be like that too.
I’d rather avoid the horrible story that was in the news, not wanting to tear up again, but I would point out the Japanese guy marrying his Nintendo wife.
People want to avoid bad marriages but the risk of a bad marriage, or relationship, or even friendship, is so far part of what makes it real friendship, etc. As long as you are dealing with other people that are your equals, you are taking a chance that things won’t work.
Maybe we’ll find a way to make the risk negligible (Google Dating?) but I think then humans will find additional, even more fulfilling activities that will have at least new emotional risks.
I could use an iPhone app that told me what the next, best thing to do in my life was, though! There was a story about a pocket computer like that in the Year’s Best SF (2000 or 2001).
Unless of course that someone else could be shown the evidence that it’s not… how, and why… which dovetails nicely into what you say at the end of this comment:
Ask yourself if Darwin would contemplate the “tangled bank” in the same way were he alive today, with access to the knowledge and evidence we have that makes up the ToE… I think you’d find he would quickly and summarily dismiss any and all notion of the involvement of any supernatural force or being.
@Celtic Evolution, you say
I don’t think you understand the point I was making, if you think I was dismissing the bad things. I agree with you about Lourdes, by the way.
Well, it’s the common case, by observation or history. It’s probably the common case, for evolutionary reasons. It’s not the much more general norm “others [all others] are likely to be better off” that I think Sastra meant.
Celtic Evolution,
I think he did at the time also, though I don’t have the whole quote at hand.
He abandoned his wife’s (liberal) faith after the death of one of his children, (before the time he wrote that, I think).
That’s possible… I have been trying to keep up with the thread, but I read perhaps too quickly over the last hundred comments or so. I’ll go back and re-read… sorry if I mis-represented your point. I tried to quite the part that was confusing to me for that reason… I’m not sure then of the point you were making.
Quite… but I guess my point is that if he (or maybe more aptly, the “someone else” you reference) knew today what we know, I feel he’d be less likely to even pose the question. To one who is knowledgeable of the evidence for evolution and the mechanisms behind it, at this point, the question need not be even asked. The answer is simply that obvious.
Celtic Evolution,
People are taking me to task for saying God made the world good, and pointed to all the bad stuff. That leads to the argument from parsimony (that you used too): if there’s no god, there’s no problem to explain there; there’s just good stuff and bad stuff. [This all got a little muddled in with what I said about beauty pointing to God; that got conflated with a different statement I made about the world being good. I think.]
Then, I have to explain either why the bad stuff is really good somehow (only thinking of the “naturally” bad stuff, not the human evil, though someone objected to that distinction), or why God would put bad stuff all over if God’s so good and all.
I first took something of a perspectival approach, first lightly with cephalopods
then, with earthquakes in mind, the analogy of something that kills considerably fewer people, ie slipping off mountains and falling. I think my thought there is something like “if God tried to subtract out all the dangerous things, all the good stuff would go, too”.
That is no solace, I know. I said at some point that theodicy seems glib. And again, theodicy just never seems to come up in my (not very mainstream) Quaker religion.
I don’t think that’s because we’re being evasive or we all fear being trapped into a difficult debate on Pharyngula, but because we (the theists among us, anyway) don’t have the mainstream Judeo-Christian view of god that is behind some of the objections here.
I think “God made the world with good possibilities” was the closest I got to a better formulation.
Celtic,
This is an effective point. I don’t think though, that you have imagine stepping completely outside, just far enough outside to see what’s wrong. After all, we are used to reading social critics (say, Veblen) who suddenly give us a new way to look at things we take for granted.
As far as God guiding us, no, there’s no evidence for that. That’s a mystical take on the process; you either find that useful or not. I don’t agree that there’s an evolutionary explanation for morals, etc. though. It seems to me that centuries of religion, wars, books being written, sermons, cultural change, bar arguments, etc. would override a lot of that.
It’s like saying that our instinct for gossip produces math (Devlin wrote a book about that, I’m not sure if it’s any good). It’s interesting if it’s true, and tells you why people do it at all, but it doesn’t help you with any math problems, and someone could still look at the mighty edifice of mathematics and marvel at what God made possible (or what marvels people can do, it’s all good).
Well, it’s not only no solace, it’s also a critically incomplete explanation, as what you suggest would indicate a nearly 50/50 split of good and bad, offsetting… which I think is a fairly bad case to make, simply through observation of reality.
That was the point I was trying to make, I suppose, in response to your last example about cliffs and mountain climbers… the more you try assign these phenomena to something outside of reality and use supernatural explanation, the more silly the arguments become.
Well, the point of theodicy is apologetics… a means of attempting to answer obvious religious contradictions. That it never comes up in Quaker religion means that obvious contradictions simply need to be ignored, and for this to be the case curiosity need be necessarily suppressed. That is a direct limitation to the act of learning and discovery, and therefor, in my view, evil.
But clearly you must wonder why? Why the limitations? Why the suffering and the seeming alleviation of random suffering in a fairly capricious manner? Why the obvious imperfections? Why the need for a process as violent and time consuming as evolution? Why the existence of an entire universe nearly completely hostile to humanity if it was all created for us? The level of mental gymnastics one must go through to come up with explanation after explanation for things that frankly wouldn’t require explanation without the existence of a religion that tells us things should be otherwise, seems simply counter-intuitive to me, and again, defies parsimony.
At some point “god works in mysterious ways” just seems lazy… like giving up, doesn’t it?
Celtic,
Thanks, that was a very entertaining (and thoughtful) summary!
I have to run (mother in law coming); I’ll have to do my usual cogitating on the run.
“god works in mysterious ways” IS lazy. I don’t think that’s what my p.o.v. amounts too, but that’s one of the things I’ll be cogitating about.
That’s a fairly vague statement how far, and what defines that?… and frankly, can one do that objectively within such an all-encompassing cultural construct as religion? I’m not sure you can, especially if you already believe your morals and decision making process have been so completely shaped by your religious beliefs.
Well… you lump a few things in there that don’t belong together from a “morality” standpoint. “War”, itself, isn’t an issue of morality. War has many different causes. Competition for resources as a means of survival for a population was, early on, one of the most common reasons for “war”, and that’s hardly a morality issue. Other reasons for war might come out of positive morality… for example a slave population and its defenders warring against slave-holders. War is morally ambiguous at best, depending on the specific conflict, and is often an offshoot of religious compulsion.
And what do books have to do with morality? What’s the morality of a book explaining how a pipe-organ works?
Religion and sermons are the same thing… no religion, no sermons.
And in what way do bar arguments over-ride an evolutionary explanation for morals? You’ll have to explain that one.
WTF? How is it like that at all? We can demonstrate through observation of evidence, using studies like de Wall’s primate study (Google it if you’re not familiar) and many others than can point to a direct link between evolution and morality. It’s science, not conjecture.
Erm… I meant de Waal…
Hereis a NY Times write up on the study…
rudy #425 wrote:
That’s what I thought, so I’ll have to ask you again: what is your definition of God?
From what I can tell, you’re a humanist who also happens to believe in God. By this, I don’t mean that God isn’t important to you, even crucial. I mean that what really matters to you, is what God represents or symbolizes. You believe in God, because you believe in Good.
So you’re going to have to get specific. What do you think God itself, is supposed to be?
And why do you think this?
Yes, but those are trivial distinctions. Bottom line, the humanist God has morals and meanings which make sense. They stand on their own merit, and can be reasoned for or against without appeal to divine authority. This has the strange effect of making their foundation stronger, while weakening God.
The test question for religious humanism is this: “if it turns out that God does not exist, and has never existed — and you arrive at this conclusion — what would you then change about the way you live your life, and the things you care about?”
You’ve already given the answer, I think. You’re not going to start running around raping and murdering, nor will you jump off a cliff in disgust over a suddenly pointless world. The churchy-religion-y things would change, or at least morph themselves into secular versions (mindful thought as opposed to prayer, say, and appreciation as opposed to personal gratitude.)
That’s an identifying test — not a refutation of religious humanism. The refutation, I think, is going to lie in an increasing awareness that “God” doesn’t need to exist, in order to create, or explain, or support, or inspire, the things that God was supposed to create, explain, support, and inspire.
“God” and the entire pantheon of the divine, the holy, the sacred, is a narrative structure for dealing with the world. And, it doesn’t matter that it’s a narrative structure. We don’t have to reify abstractions, or insist that poetry be literal. The atheists are actually more comfortable with the idea of story, and abstractions.
By the way, I attended Quaker for a year myself (a very liberal Meeting in Downer’s Grove, IL.) The beliefs seemed similar to the Unitarian Universalists, with an emphasis on works over belief, but with more mysticism. I actually took a Bible Study there, and was disappointed and a little shocked that they didn’t seem to think the Bible stories were actually true — meaning, that they had happened. I’d grown up without religion, was “spiritual but not religious,” and thought that Christians would be a little bit more literal. The only other time I’d studied the Bible was with Jehovah’s Witnesses. They took the Bible as fact, yes — but their interpretation of the world seemed like fiction.
rudy, still blathering
That would just mean that they were ignorant and/or stupid.
You have still failed to provide any reason to believe in the existence of anything supernatural, let alone your god.
Yes, God would be responsible for every death involving gravity.
I don’t think there’s anything we could say that would make the social aspect of your religion less meaningful to you.
Your analogies are terrible, really. I haven’t been saying that God (or anyone else) needs to destroy every mountain — only that God is responsible for the harm that any given danger actually causes.
Rather than flattening mountains, what’s wrong with warning people that if they go up that particular mountain on that particular day, they will die (and if they go earlier or later, they won’t)?
Yet people acting out of deep ignorance (as well as indifference or greed or actual cruelty) cause great harm.
Is God not responsible for actions committed because the ones doing the actions did not know the consequences?
=======
I’m not sure you’re thinking through the analogy very well, but perhaps you haven’t articulated it very well. Are you suggesting a world with two layers, a real one and a virtual one, and the virtual one can be “rebooted”?
Or do you mean a single-layer world that acts like a videogame in that it can be rebooted?
What do you mean by “reboot”, anyway? Can any individual reset the world, or just reset themselves inside the world? And is it just a “physical reset” or a reset of mind as well as body; a complete or personal mindwipe?
=======
My thesis is not that it is necessary to subtract out all the dangerous things in the first place. But it is God’s responsibility to warn us of want the consequences of the dangers are.
=======
Why not?
You say that your background is mathematics. Are you really not aware of game-theory analyses of altruism and morality?
Given a set of agents, and a pool of resources that the agents require in order to survive and reproduce, a population of agents has a certain set of strategies that it can follow over time to maximize efficient use of those resources.
One good strategy that evolves in such game-theory simulations turns out to be coöperation. Why shouldn’t it be? What strategy do you think is actually to be expected, and why?
Fixed. Bah.
*standing ovation*
the world have a hell of a lot fewer good possibilities than bad, and virtually all of them aren’t necessary: pretty much everything from designing humans with more altruistic, less primitive brains to having a planet with all faults under the ocean and all coasts be raised coasts (Fjords for everyone!) is a possibility once you accept a powerful, supernatural creator, and you have to ask why it wasn’t done, why humans can think of better options themselves but god can’t (or won’t). The existence of death itself is only morally neutral if its not part of a design, but the result of mindless, thoughtless and directionless nature.
BTW Rudy. (if someone has not already answered this) A presuppositionalist is someone who uses a form of the argument from ignorance: no evidence, therefore God exists. They presuppose a deity even with no empirical evidence to back their claim other than anecdotes, culturally condoned religious indoctrination and faith.
And getting progressively worse… which is what tends to happen when your best attempt at apologetics fails… each subsequent attempt is likely to be a farther stretch than the last, a problem that rarely effects arguments based in reality.
Sastra,
You probably have given me the right diagnosis, though given my particular trajectory (the God stuff fading *in*) I’m not sure that your prognosis is correct.
It’s not that you’re wrong here, exactly. Being the kind of person who likes avant-garde anything, including avant-garde theology, I’ve run across plenty of theologians who could have written the first two sentences, verbatim. I mean, there was a whole “narrative theology” movement for a while. But I don’t see how it supports your previous paragraph that seems to say that God-centered narrative will fade away.
Science is a narrative structure too. That’s pretty much how our brain works.
I don’t notice a difference between atheists and theists in their comfort with stories. Few people here, though, have tried to convince me using stories (you, and one another poster, I think).
I do remember PZ doing a story.
@owlmirror,
No, I didn’t mean that. Sorry, that was sort of insider. “Meeting” means sitting around quietly in a group, waiting for inspiration to strike someone to speak. Non-theists at our weekly Meeting get something out of this, and I presume I would continue to do so. That’s what I meant.
Yes, I am aware of those (Axelrod etc.) I’m also aware that that as useful a tool as game theory claims to be, and often is, it hasn’t exactly taken over the social sciences; which isn’t to say it won’t, eventually. But I remember big claims for rational choice theory too. That being said, of course, I’m happy with the fact that cooperation turns out to be a stable strategy (under some circumstances).
But game theory isn’t normative, it’s a mechanism. Why should it make me *happy* that cooperation comes out OK? Michael Shermer’s column in Scientific American once did a game theory analysis of how to cheat customs agents without once asking whether it was right or wrong to cheat that way (and in fact without noticing that not cheating made the problem simpler). (my memory of this article is hazy, so if anyone remembers it and I am misrepresenting it, please let me know).
What I meant by throwing “war” in that list was that the moral judgements we make are a jumble of previous moral argument and history. War provides the data for some of the moral argument, i.e. Clausewitz, or pacifism.
because animals that are happy to cooperate are more likely to do it. it’s basic evolution.
rudy #449 wrote:
Yes, I’ve also run across the High Theology arguments which sound very much like God-praising atheism. My point was that this sort of double-think is hard to maintain if you’re going to try to analyze what it is you believe, and why you believe it.
When I talked about atheists being more ‘comfortable’ with stories, I wasn’t referring to story-telling per se. I meant that we can accept that a myth isn’t literally true, but has a theme we can relate to.
In fact, we go even further. We can accept that a myth that is figuratively true, or symbolically true, or psychologically true, isn’t in some quasi-mode of real existence which doesn’t apply to stories that aren’t religious stories.
And I’m still interested in seeing your definition of God.
and:
???
You really do have problems getting ideas across, don’t you. Perhaps you should think on it a bit more rather than just muddling through and typing stream of conscious ambiguous/vague word salad that only you seem to be able to follow. I keep getting whiffs of disingenuousness or contrarianism, I can’t tell which – anyway, it’s starting to reek.
I think “others are likely to be better off” runs the risk of being circular, though. Why should you care? – rudy
No, it’s not circular: I should care, because people will be better off if I do. Where’s the circularity? Are you trying to say “Why will I be better off if I care?” Well, sometimes I will, and sometimes I won’t. So what? Other people will, and I care about them. That caring neither needs, nor can have, any justification: it’s one of my top-level goals (i.e., a goal that is not adopted in the service of some other goal), to benefit others. How would sticking a god in the picture make a difference? If you say “We should care, because God commands us to”, the obvious answer is “Why should we take any notice of God’s commands?”. Of course, if you then say “Because he’ll reward you if you do, and punish you if you don’t”, you’ve reduced morality to self-interest and you are, in fact, reasoning like a psychopath.
If you’re asking “Why do you care, then that’s a causal question, and it’s subject to scientific investigation (as well as questions about my personal biography). You give no grounds for your scepticism about an evolutionary explanation, and frankly, I doubt that you know much about it. I’ve published a long review article on the issue, and I can assure you that the problem is in deciding which of the many plausible evolutionary mechanisms that could have led to human altruism have in fact contributed to its evolution: kin selection, group selection, sexual selection, reciprocal altruism, handicap principle, reputational effects… (these are not all mutually exclusive). Altruism and cooperation are found in many social animals, and in some of our closest relatives, take forms quite like our own (there was a recent report of voluntary food-sharing among bonobos, for example).
Yes, I’ve read about Quaker Meeting.
Yes, I was agreeing with you. Isn’t what you describe a social aspect of your religion; something you do in the society of your fellow Friends?
=====
I didn’t offer it as something to please you, but to respond to your assertion of disagreement “that there’s an evolutionary explanation for morals”.
An argument offered about empirical facts is not necessarily going to make people happy (or unhappy), and I don’t understand why you think happiness or the lack thereof is relevant.
Do you have a substantive counterargument, or are you implicitly conceding that there can be an evolutionary explanation for morals?
I don’t think anyone who has ever claimed that any game theory that involved cooperation as a successful strategy has argued that no other strategy could be used, or would not come into play.
That does mean that cheating can happen in game theory simulations, and mirrors what we see in the real world.
Hm. Did I misparse the original question?
Jadehawk, while I probably am that sort of animal, there are plenty of people who are happy to take an individualist point of view.
@owlmirror, I thought you meant the coffee and cakes afterwards.
I had thought sure I had said that there *was* an evolutionary origin for morals, (that was superceded by … stuff), and looked for it, and there it was, in 436, saying … just the opposite. There was supposed to be a “dis” in there. Don’t disagree. As in, agree. Oops. Did I really do that?? You even quoted it later, and I didn’t blink. I think I’ve used the word “sorry” in this thread about enough times (no jokes please!)
I think I better call it a night. My mother in law is here for supper and the oven timer is going off in a minute and I’ve got to go be the social, cooperative animal, not the internet obsessed
otaku…
Sastra, if you really wanted me to go there, to the definition, I’m afraid you’d mostly get an screenful of the usual Inner Light jargon. For me to be really thoughtful about it would take not sitting in front of a computer screen, I think. Thanks though, your posts were comparatively gentle.
I will be back tomorrow, if anyone is still around this thread (that’s fair warning, I guess.)
rudy #457 wrote:
The trouble with the Inner Light jargon — and God-jargon in general I think — is that it’s not at all clear what we’re talking about, or thinking about, or believing in. The word salad is designed to express emotions about God — and about how awfully spiffy it is to contemplate God — but it’s hard to tell if anything is being described other than the believer. I understand that you can’t give a technical blueprint, but, given the significance of the concept, I would think you’d already have a general idea which doesn’t require a lot of hard work to come up with, or articulate.
The Westminster Catechism says that “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”
Richard Dawkins defined the “God hypothesis” as “:… there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it.”
Is this in the ballpark? Please don’t just waffle a lot of vague handwavings about God being the “symbol of mystery beyond mysteries” or “the sum of human values.” Is it a person? Is it a form of energy? Is it a form of energy which is also a person? If you can, explain it in a way that allows us to know what would count as God, and what wouldn’t.
And if you can’t do that, are you sure you really believe in it? Maybe you just believe in, believing in it.
Ah, but only comparatively gentle :)
uh… who cares what point of view they take? they’re still animals; we all are, whether we believe in it or not. what does that have to do with the evolved happy-feeling that accompanies cooperation and altruism?
oh, I think I see. you mean that some people supposedly prefer individualism to cooperation. you were trying to refute my point that all people have evolved to feel warm and fuzzy about cooperation and altruism, but you phrased it as if it was a choice. very confusing.
and in any case, it’s not true. at most, you have a handful of natural sociopaths who do not have the normal human wiring for this, and otherwise you can get societies that train people away from their altruistic, cooperative nature (but those societies are usually unhealthy societies with lots of mentally and physically ill people as a result of this retraining of natural behavior)
@Jadehawk, in 460, yes, that is what I mean. There is a (culturally determined) range of how much we cooperate, we compete between firms but are supposed to cooperate inside them, in capitalist economies, for example.
There was an article on sociopathy in Brain and Behavioral Sciences (I can’t provide a link, they went behind a paywall a while back and I read them through a library sub) that speculated that there is a “natural” rate of actual sociopaths in the society (brain wiring, whatever), but that social norms then determine how “contagious” their behavior is; it think it used a model based around the usual selfish/cooperative game model, but I can’t remember how the norms were worked. Norms would be communicated by the usual things like legal standards, TV, etc.
I agree entirely with the sentiment of your last sentence, which makes me think I should accept your premise more strongly.
I’d like to see how the BBS article logic works out in societies where cooperation is *supposed* to be valued, like North Korea, but the actual outcome is far from optimal for anyone there, except a few. But they are hard to study, for obvious reasons. Hopefully, someday they will escape from the trap they are in, and people can examine their story more closely.
[I didn’t *mean* to be confusing, but I get easily confused, as has been evident through the whole thread…]
Rudy, could you provide a citation, if not a link? That article sounds fascinating.
You know what they say about a belief in the Inner Light: it’s produced great art and some very beautiful music.
@Sastra,
That’s why practice is important. What you do really shows what you believe in.
I don’t want to waffle, I worried a bit after I got off the computer that I might have seemed that I was brushing off your question. It’s more that I didn’t think that I do it very spontaneously, without just parroting something I read somewhere.
I can’t really go with the Westminster Catechism,
but Dawkins,
… is ok but I’d leave out “deliberately designed”. Evolution didn’t aim at us, in particular. God would have been just as happy I’m sure with smart dinosaurs. At the risk of doing the parroting I was afraid of, I recently read the theologian Walter Kaufman’s book, “Jesus and Creativity”, and leaving out Jesus, I would say God is the source of creativity and novelty in the universe, the reason that every time we think we’ve figured out the mysteries (and that’s so much fun!) there are more mysteries, why math keeps getting more complicated but also more simple at the same time.
They should stick that in Westminster instead of “holiness”; who’d want an unholy God? H. P. Lovecraft? Sheesh.
But this kind of just the empty talk about God you worried about.
What do I really think about God? I’m nervous about doing even more self disclosure than I’ve already done here. (Deep breath, really:)
God is my conscience, who’s telling me what the right thing to do is, and who is telling me that I haven’t got it right, and who sometimes reassures me when it’s quiet, or at Meeting, and is the friend I don’t want to disappoint, even when no one else will notice.
I would like to know what took you to Meeting, just out of curiosity (lots of people show up and don’t stay) and what you drew you to the atheist community. (Were you already an atheist by conviction or temperament, and just looking for a sympathetic community, or were you convinced by reading or friends?)
Obligatory book recommendation: You might enjoy “The Religious Case Against Belief”, by James P. Carse (or you might just put it on the Higher Theology shelf) but he does try to make a case that religion is something to keep around, not just as poetry but for itself. I want to find his earlier book, Finite and Infinite Games, a sort of game theory theology.
Considering that this goes completely against every single piece of religious doctrine I’ve ever read or heard, and isn’t supported by any piece of supposedly divinely inspired writing ever produced, as far as I know… how could you know this?
You say, you’re sure… how are you sure?
@Brownian, I’ll look for it right now. Hopefully it’s from the issues *before* they started having to paywall them (budget and all), but I’ll get the reference anyway. Hang on.
Since when is evolution reified? Evolution aims… like a preditor? WTF?!!
@Brownian, it’s in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 18 , Issue 03 , Sep 1995 , pp 523-541
Here’s the abstract, which doesn’t describe the model very clearly but at least describes the goal. I’ll poke around and see if it’s available free online anywhere, I think it *is* from before when it used to open-source (the editor at the time was an early open-source advocate, I can’t remember his name):
and who sometimes reassures me when it’s quiet, or at Meeting, and is the friend I don’t want to disappoint, even when no one else will notice.
I’m curious.
have you ever stood at a meeting, moved actually by the spirit to say something?
If so, how did you KNOW this motivation to speak was of such a source?
BTW, a quaker taught the courses in Zen Buddhism I studied as an undergrad.
He said he VERY rarely spoke at any meeting.
are your meetings “chatty”?
@Celtic Evolution,
Well, you already know I don’t put much stock in doctrines or infallible texts, but I mean, why would you think the idea would upset the kind of religious person who reads SF? God might be happy with smart, slow-moving minerals.
As far as how I *know*, well, it’s just a hunch. But it does sort of follow from the axiom “God is good”; is She supposed to hate smart dinosaurs? I mean, look how interesting (and dangerous) they’d be to *us*.
@IaMoL,
Maybe God just ignores the universes that don’t produce smart dinosaurs or primates or …
Infinite universes, lots of time on God’s hands (or claws, whatever), big feature space to explore: just wait for evolution to produce something in Her image (just to stuff a doctrine in there for the more traditional; I don’t really take the image part literally).
In other words… you don’t know. It just feels good to think it true.
How does it follow that “god is good” in any way relating to dinosaurs? You do realize they are extinct, right? Why would god allow that?
Are you implying that the existence and subsequent mass extinction of dinosaurs was part of a plan to keep the two species apart? Seems unnecessary and abhorrent, frankly. If you’re not, then I’m not sure what your point is with that statement.
@Icthyic,
Yes, I do it maybe 2, 3 times a year maybe? I’m usually pretty shaky when I think I’m going to do it, I mean shaky, not because the Spirit has grabbed me or anything, but just from being self-conscious. I miss the whole thing out by waiting too long sometimes.
We are a small meeting (30 people on any particular Sunday, though more people come off and on), and not TOO chatty, but there are some people who say stuff pretty frequently. Maybe once a month, or a little less often, the whole hour is silent.
There are definitely some people who never say anything. I revved up a bit after attending for a few years but I think it’s been a few months since I’ve said anything.
This is the weakest of apologetics… and really, to say such a thing spits directly in the face of parsimony. replace “god” with any other supernatural being and it has as much weight… that is to say, none.
I’m beginning to understand Rudy.
Rudy: So this god sets things in motion and then only pays attention or blesses something with his presence when it becomes.. what… self consciously aware? Capable of reason and logic?
Everything else is ignored except humans or some beings with awareness similar to human cognizance?
And then what? A reward by the way of existing in perpetuity after the body dies because of believing in this god? or is there no afterlife in your ideology?
Even by a deity capable of creating a universe, our most intelligent human relatives would be comparatively bacteria like when regarding the breach in that gap. It’s the arrogance of a religious solipsist that assumes we’re more important to a deity because humans can contemplate existence and make token sacrifices.
At least you don’t think the universe is one elaborate stage set made by the Abrahamic god just for humans (I think).
If you take the deity concept out of existence and awareness, what changes besides the idea of magical intervention and the hellish concept of living on in a state devoid of contrasts and reaching the limit of what there is to know and experience?
@Celtic Evolution,
Well, we could be wiped out next week… I don’t think there’s a plan for that. Besides, the dinosaurs weren’t THAT smart yet :)
When I said “god is good” I meant She loves the results of her universe’s evolution. Yes, it’s all going to die, all of it near us anyway, sometime. No, I don’t know how She handles that afterwards.
God is nature? That’s it? Isis is God but is a unique being? If it doesn’t reproduce sexually, or has no genitals it is not sexed, so how can it be a He or a She?
@IaMoL,
Well, She probably blesses all of it. I don’t have strong feelings about it, but you know, it’s all pretty beautiful, look at the Hubble pix.
I speculated about the afterlife in an earlier post, but I don’t have strong beliefs about it. I think (and hope) that we’re in for a surprise. Being born in *this* universe was kind of a surprise…
Not, I don’t believe in the Abrahamic, stage set stuff at all.
I know atheists can have very different takes on what it all means… Schopenhauer had a pretty hellish take on what this world meant (not only was there no God, but we are all slaves to the Will; only art gives a way out (except music for some reason)).
Do you think it’s meaningful to ask “what it all means” at all, if only in human terms?
My younger son wants me to play Go, so I have to go offline for a while. I’ll be back later. I’ll try to be a better reader here and not go on about myself so much.
So, you’re one of those that believes that god set life in motion, evolution took over as god’s mechanism and god stepped back without intervention from that point… sort of like spinning the top and stepping aside?
But you also believe that god intervenes on your behalf (and others, I assume) to guide your choices… your morality, as it were.
Seems conveniently erratic and inconsistent, wouldn’t you say?
Rudy, you’re obviously a very nice person, and I mean that genuinely. But you would be embarrassed at the things you type if you took this approach to any topic other than the socially-approved delusion of god beliefs. Really. Your arguments are inconsistent, and frankly, silly. The only reason you can’t see that is you’re obviously deeply emotionally invested in your faith, and society’s approval of that stance insulates you from having to look candidly at what you’re actually saying.
Your posts look even more ridiculous when you sprinkle them with weird capitalization – “She”, etc., and Official QuakerSpeak – the Spirit, and “Meeting” without a preceding article. Do you understand how insular and parochial that makes you look? If you don’t care, that’s fine, but are even aware of it?
Well, She probably blesses all of it. I don’t have strong feelings about it, but you know, it’s all pretty beautiful, look at the Hubble pix. – rudy
Sentimental pap. How do you feel about the Guinea worm? If you think it and its effects on the human body are beautiful, I invite you to drink a glass of water full of Guinea worm larvae. If you’re not ready to do this, I suggest you STFU.
That’s just vague enough to be meaningless, rudy… Based on what evidence do you think this? And when does “just a feeling” stop being an acceptable answer?
What does this even mean? Surprise how? And to whom? As compared to what?
One word: subjective. You did know those Hubble pictures are enhanced, colorized and also photographed in wavelengths the human eye can’t normally see, right? Yes, colorful patterns are lovely. OpArt + LSD therefore God.
As an artist, the nature is beautiful=God argument is, pardon the pun , a grostesque distortion. It’s simply projection on our part. Obviously you know nothing about cognitive bias.
*snort… chuckle * snort*
Rudy is insinuating prior knowledge because he believes his “soul” existed before he was biologically conceived. *facepalm*
means little if you’re blind.
Chew on that a bit…
just another case of overlooking the obvious question:
Why do we find it beautiful?
Well, those who found it unbearably ugly have already died out. Natural selection.
Thanks for the citation, Rudy. I’ll see if I can get my organisation’s librarian to snag me a copy.
Not if the answer isn’t in human terms. It’s not unreasonable to ask yourself what meaning you’d like to imbue your own life with, but that’s a different question. That question doesn’t try to force the universe to sit up and beg before one’s desire to feel important. (And this isn’t an indictment of you or your beliefs, Rudy, we all engage in such hubris at some point or another.)
Personally, the only thing I can say about the meaning of life is that mine has no more or no less meaning than any other thing, living or not, and yet somehow that’s still wonderful to me. I’ll go about my life, doing my human things, while any given piece of schist (for instance) will go about its existence, doing schisty things, and we’re all part of the big dance started with the Big Bang and ending with however it ends. To expect a meaningful answer in ‘human terms’ is as ridiculous as asking for a meaningful answer in ‘schist terms’.
I like CE’s post at #484 but i’m sure Rudy will twist it into a philosophical argument based on metaphoric blindness. Bad, bad designer deity since over half of the population need some form of visual correction by the time they’re 35, besides all those people who are actually sightless.
‘Cuz Jeebus’
daddymommy maked it.Sounds something like Socrates’ daemon.
But…
Are you sure that your conscience has never made a mistake?
I recently read about the death of Socrates, and implicit in the context of the history of Athens that ultimately led to his trial and death is that Socrates, who had a strong personal commitment to acting as best that he could, made decisions whose long-term outcomes may very well have led to the war, civil war, tyranny, and mass-murder that troubled Athens and the rest of the Peloponnese during his lifetime, which is offered as the reason why the majority of the people of Athens voted him guilty.
There’s also the point that Socrates seems to have been the only one who heard the voice of his conscience that strongly — everyone else around him seems to have paid attention to their self-interest first, and to any sense of ethics only secondarily if at all.
Which brings me, as ever, back to theodicy:
Granted that Socrates the man could not know the future — why can’t a God, knowing the future, warn all of the ultimate consequences of their actions?
Why would this voice of conscience not be equally strong for all?
It’s also incredibly solipsistic, a form of self-admiring navel-gazing that allows religious people to pretend they’re thinking about Deep Things, when in reality, they’re thinking of nothing but themselves and how important they are.
√
@Josh, you are being a bit unfair. The MeetingSpeak is in there because people (Sastra, icthyic) asked me for details specifically. If I’d known the thread was THIS public (don’t these threads *ever* fizzle out?) I might have suggested we take it offthread somehow (I don’t know that works here.)
As far as looking silly, well, I have no defense. This is the sort of personal, poetic stuff that a better writer than me could pull off (though not on Pharyngula I bet!), but I’m just not used to writing out these kinds of intuitions. Some of the sillier things (She, lower case, minerals) is laziness or weak attempts at humor.
I lost the Go game, badly and quickly BTW. Even with a large handicap.
@icthyic, I didn’t answer your question about how you I know the source? Well, people talk about that a lot. Sometimes it’s because people tell me or another person afterwards that it meant a lot to them, othertimes it just feels right, and sometimes it’s just falls with a big thud, or you have the kind of feeling you get after you left the party and thought of what you SHOULD have said. So, no guarantee.
@IaMoL, you’re kind of literal-minded. And yeah, I know about colorization. Please insert planets and moons instead (please don’t tell me if those are all colorized: Mars is red, isn’t it? With pink skies?)
@Knockgoats, I’ll have to take your advice soon in any case. Thanks for giving me so much to think about. There’s not much solace in the world, and we have to do what we can to fix it up, no matter who broke it.
L’esprit de l’escalier
There’s not much solace in the world, and we have to do what we can to fix it up, no matter who broke it. – rudy
No-one “broke it”, idiot. It never was the pink fluffy paradise you like to imagine. Part of improving things is trying to see things as they are – intellectual honesty – something you evidently wouldn’t recognise if it bit you in the bum.
Honestly, after a few turns round the mulberry bush, your sort of soppiness becomes more annoying than creationism.
It’s also one of the most inconsistent bits of thinking ever thunk. Of all the perceptions and emotions available to humans, why is only beauty up for the “Therefore God” Oscar?
Here are some arguments for God that follow the X (where X is a thing I like) exists, therefore God. Why are these never proffered by theists?
“Last night I saw a spider devour a fly by liquifying its innards. The world is just so full of pain, there must be a God who created it.”
“Laughter is ubiquitous among humans, and even some other animals. Why would we even have it if God didn’t want us to appreciate His humour as the Greatest Comedian?”
“I just talked to Carla, and boy is she depressed. In fact, almost everyone I know is feeling that way lately. You know, I have a hard time believing an uncaring universe would somehow have randomly produced so much ennui among its inhabitants.”
“You know Dr. Iqbal? Converted to evangelical Christianity, just like that. He was working in the ER on Saturday when they brought in a teenager who’d been driving under the influence and hit a concrete berm. He flew through the windshield and crashed headlong into a wrought-iron fence. The kid was DOA, but the miraculous thing was that his head was cleaved neatly in three…”
Rudy #491-
Well, if you were responding to requests for specifics, I apologize for jumping on you.
My objections have nothing to do with how good a writer you are. You could be the world’s poet laureate, and your “intuitions” would still be as silly and ridiculous as they seem today, so long as you claim they have anything to do with reality. Just because you have an emotional attachment to the universe caring about you, that doesn’t mean the universe cares about you. Just because you fervently want to believe in a god, doesn’t mean, POOF! “she” exists. And if you’re merely slapping the god label on your own intuitions, you’re only confusing the issue and anthropomorphizing your own subjective feelings.
What I find sad – and yeah, really irritating – about all this is that you’re no different from most people of good will who have a modicum of reflectiveness about life. We all have concerns about what we ought to do, and what we ought not to do, vis-a-vis our fellow humans. We all wrestle with ethical questions. We all, to one degree or another, ponder the meaning of our actions and relationships.
But clear thinkers don’t make up stories about how those very human concerns somehow mean there’s a magic consciousness in the universe. That’s infantile. We are all here, we all have to live in the world, and we all make our own meaning. The only difference between the religious and atheists is that we don’t have a problem accepting that humans make their meaning and their own ethical way in the world. Why isn’t that enough for you?
I have to suspect that on some level, even if you won’t admit it publicly or even to yourself, you know you’re making up stories to comfort yourself. Rudy, you don’t need to. The universe is fascinating, rich, vexing, and full of wondrous (and shitty) experiences all on its own, without bedtime fairy tales. All the people you know and love really exist, and all your relationships with them are real. The worthwhile things in life – the triumphs and the challenges – don’t go away just because there isn’t a magic consciousness out there.
Giving credit for your own mind and your own reflections to some consciousness in the universe who bestowed it upon you does not elevate or ennoble people. It degrades them. We’re enough all on our own.
Fixed.
Josh OSG:
It’s definitely all that and more. In the case of Rudy and others like him, I doubt they get that far in their thinking. They settle on a vague, philosophical-type god that answers the need for warm fuzzies. They manufacture Rose-colored Glasses and call them God. RoseGod thinks the way they do (natch) and feels the way they do, but doesn’t interfere because that would upset the fuzzy wuzziness of it all.
I do sympathise with where Rudy is coming from. There was a time (during my very slow de-conversion) when I was very interested in joining either a Quaker or a Unitarian congregation, though I couldn’t find one that was convenient. I don’t believe in God any more, but I’ve always enjoyed parts of religious ritual and community – some of which I still miss, a little bit.
I am certain that I don’t believe in the classic Abrahamic God – and that, if he did exist and had all the attributes ascribed by orthodox Christian theology, he would be a monster who I would not want to worship. But I don’t blame people for wanting to believe in a vaguer, more liberal, more definable-so-as-to-be-compatible-with-reality conception of “God”.
Of course, there’s no evidence to suggest that such a being really exists. But I think we sometimes have to ask ourselves whether – given our short, and often miserable, lives on this earth – everyone is morally obliged only to believe things that they know to be true, and to discard all beliefs that don’t stand up to critical scrutiny. Perhaps sometimes it can be acceptable, even if not particularly admirable, for someone to hold to a belief because it makes their existence in this often depressing and pain-filled world a little more bearable, even if there’s no evidence to suggest that it represents objective truth. As long as it doesn’t harm anyone else, what’s the harm in some people holding a private, ultra-liberal belief in a very attenuated conception of “God”, attending “services” with other vaguely like-minded people? It may be an irrational thing to do on its face, but if it makes people happy, and it doesn’t do any harm, why bother calling them out on it?
As long as ultra-liberal Christians like Rudy accept scientific reality with regard to evolution and modern medicine; support equality for women, for gay and transgendered people and for other oppressed groups; and don’t hold any other beliefs or observe any other practices that actually harm people, why should we be in any way opposed to their beliefs? They believe in a kind of “God” that is no more objectionable than the Easter Bunny; and while we might laugh indulgently at someone who holds a private belief in the Easter Bunny (while supporting reason, science and decency in every other aspect of his or her life), we wouldn’t devote our time to systematically critiquing their ideas.
I don’t blame them for wanting to, initially. I blame them for clinging to it when more rational, less deluded, less dangerous, and just-as-fulfilling options for meaningful human community have been presented to them. No, I don’t buy that that clinging is merely because they have an emotional need that nothing else can fulfill. There’s a political motivation to the clinging, even if it’s not foremost in their consciousness: they want to take advantage of the privileged social position society places on those who wear a badge of belief. And that most definitely makes me their adversary on that battleground.
Walton, I can’t believe you just wrote that. Seriously. Seriously. Srsly.
And again Rudy, you entirely miss the point. You sound like a cross between a woo induced stoner and pie-eyed Sunday school teacher. I’m just trying to pin your constant waffling down.
You’ve thrown up several logical fallacies to us and no one has really pointed them out to you by name. You’re argument from beauty is a logical fallacy. You must prove why aesthetics would be evidence of god and not just a human psychological bias especially since many other fauna can see better than we can.
It’s not that I’m so rigidly literal, it’s that you’re all over the place with the critical thinking skills of an unmedicated AD/HD 12 year old. Your Mars refutation (Ignoratio Elenchi ) is simply a dodge, it has nothing to do with the Hubble example (especially since Mars looks like Post, Texas during a dust storm, i.e. it ain’t pretty in an asthetic sense, so there) .
Your attempts at self denigrating humor are also dodges. So you’re coming off as a quasi-charming stoner/pie-eyed Sunday school teacher who’s trying to sell me a junk car. Focus Bro, focus.