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Religion vs Atheism Book 2


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 Erik,

Equally problematic is the fact that you never really know what God's morality is.  If you go with your pastor, it's what your pastor says, not what God says.  If you go from a book, it's what the publisher says, not what God says.  If you go from what you feel inside after asking God about in deep and persistent prayer for weeks, then you're still just going from what you feel, like most of us.

Sure, if we can ever identify the word of God, as such, then there's still big problems of either God's weakness or his arbitrariness.  He's either relatively weak, because he's subject to a bigger universal law of what's good that he is powerless to change -- or else he's arbitrary, because he isn't.  Yet, we'll never really get to that point of objectively identifying what his word is anyway, I think.

Why would he neccesarily be?

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I'd like to discuss morality for a while.

For an atheist, ethics is a complicated subject. You think long and hard about the basis of ethics, should we go with utilitarianism or absolute moral obligations, is it always wrong to kill, stuff like that. In the end you end up with a more or less consistent morality.

For a religious person, it boils down to a simple appeal to auhority: what did God/Jesus/Mohammad/Buddah say?

Except it doesn't, really. Because you still have to cherry-pick your bible quotes in order to not come off as a raging maniac. Some of the Old Testament stuff is really not ethically justifiable.

Which leads me to the next question: can a God really have moral authority over us? If God does something that is really awful, is he still by definition right in doing it? I just don't buy that idea. In the end, isn't God's morality as arbitrary as ours?

Well, I would agree. People tend to oversimplify this and the modern age has brought a lot of literal views on religion. Even for a religious people, ethics is not something that comes easy. The way I see holy texts is that they just give us more or less some guidelines. Of course, one can cherry pick Bible quotes and justify pretty much everything, but then again, it should be noted that Bible (and I remember this from The DaVinci Code), wasn't faxed to us by God. It is a human creation. That said, cherry picking Bible is just an attempt to get the religious cover-up for one's moral failings. Which is why often see religious fanatics doing so.

The way I see it is that I try to live according to the highest moral standards of Christianity. My entire life I am trying to do the right thing and I believe that I will be judged accordingly. One of the highest moral authorities throughout my life has been the late Patriarch of Serbian Orthodox Church, Pavle, who has told numerous time that we are free to do the right and the wrong but that it should be our duty as Christians to do the right thing. According to him, it all depends on us and our choice who are we going to be. And that is basically how I see it. 

I'll definitely say more later. But my rejection of the creation argument is rooted in this: It doesn't make sense to have the entire human race descended from one man and one woman. That's my big issue here. My race factors in without a doubt. But simple logistics is my big issue.

Kyoshi, the way I have always seen it is that it represented the allegorical way of saying that we, the humans, are all the same. I see it as the message of equality and brotherhood. For me Adam and Eve are not Caucasians and somehow, Bible claims that African Americans and other races came from that. I see them as racially-blind, to teach us how we all to this world the same way. That is perhaps one of the reasons why I have always been so horrified for people using Christianity as the cover-up for racism. 

Scot, Tywin, 

I accept that. I just have a problem with having to accept it as absolutely truth, the way Daemrion puts it. It's when it's treated as history, accurate history, that I start to have a problem.

Well, I think you will find many believers who don't take some Biblical events as historical, especially things like Adam and Eve, or Noah's arc. 

 

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Well, I think you will find many believers who don't take some Biblical events as historical, especially things like Adam and Eve, or Noah's arc. 

 

The number is varying, I guess, but according to this you could find some 30+ million of Young Earth Creationists in the US. Which is, frankly, scary.

Numbers for Norway aren't available, but I do know quite a few people in a few conservative organizations, and it strikes me as being an outlier position here, even within those organizations.

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The number is varying, I guess, but according to this you could find some 30+ million of Young Earth Creationists in the US. Which is, frankly, scary.

I blame education for this :) No, sincerely, this is why religious studies in early age can sometimes be counter-productive. The teachers are trying to oversimplify something that is very complex and thus they use literal terms and present some things as they actually happened. 

Getting that notion wrong is indeed scary, I agree.

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Risto,

As, I presume, someone who didn't learn English as their first language welcome to the perials of English homophones.

It is "Ark" not "Arc".  An "Ark" is a large vessel for preserving things.  An "Arc" is a curved line.

:)

Perils, Scot. :-p

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I blame education for this :) No, sincerely, this is why religious studies in early age can sometimes be counter-productive. The teachers are trying to oversimplify something that is very complex and thus they use literal terms and present some things as they actually happened. 

Getting that notion wrong is indeed scary, I agree.

Uhhh no. I guarantee the vast majority of YECs are YECs because they have been explicitly indoctrinated into believing the Bible account of creation is accurate and that scientific account of the universe and evolution of life is false. When people who have been brought up properly encounter basic facts about reality they don't deny them because of some happy little accident due to oversimplification. 

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Risto,

As, I presume, someone who didn't learn English as their first language welcome to the perils of English homophones.

It is "Ark" not "Arc".  An "Ark" is a large vessel for preserving things.  An "Arc" is a curved line.

:)

[thank you TP]

LOL... Thanks... I sometimes miss some things... The other one I will never get is motive/motif :)

 

Uhhh no. I guarantee the vast majority of YECs are YECs because they have been explicitly indoctrinated into believing the Bible account of creation is accurate and that scientific account of the universe and evolution of life is false. When people who have been brought up properly encounter basic facts about reality they don't deny them because of some happy little accident due to oversimplification. 

IIRC, at some point during 2000s, there was a movement of forbidding Darwin in the schools in my country. The entire thing was laughable and at the end, we somehow got Darwinian theory on biology classes and creationism on classes of religion (it is optional course, along with civil studies). 

As I have said, perhaps it is the fact that I have never been taught that way. I grew up in religious household, and it was basically "yes, the God created the Earth" but we never made a science of it. That is perhaps my problems with creationism. They have scientific approach in something that inherently isn't scientific.

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Uhhh no. I guarantee the vast majority of YECs are YECs because they have been explicitly indoctrinated into believing the Bible account of creation is accurate and that scientific account of the universe and evolution of life is false. When people who have been brought up properly encounter basic facts about reality they don't deny them because of some happy little accident due to oversimplification. 

I can't speak to whether it's a 'vast majority' or not, but there was a video during the rounds on youtube a few years ago. I'm at work atm and youtube is blocked so I can't look it up, but it is very disturbing.

There was some religious guy taking a bunch of grade school kids through a natural history museum somewhere.  they were looking at a mounted dinosaur fossil.  The scene went something like this:

Indoctrinator: This is the bones of an animal. God put these bones in the ground when he created the earth to test our faith. People will try and tell you that they are natural things made millions of years ago.  What do we say to such people, class?

Class: Were you there?

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In general, it is not easy to contradict scriptural depictions with science, because religious people have the trump card called "it's God, so He can do anything." Descriptions of impossible events are not seen as counter-evidence of truthfulness of accounts, but rather, they are accepted as canonical proof of divinity.

Sort of. It is true that an entity capable of creating the universe is also capable of making its history look different from what it truly is in such a way that the subterfuge is difficult or even impossible to determine from the inside of the universe. However, most religions assume that God is above such trickery (although, rationally considering the nature of human society, there are obvious reasons why a creator or creators would want the in-universe evidence to be ambiguous).

That said, it is fun to speculate about what it would take to trick us. We've explored the solar system pretty extensively, but for everything outside of that we rely on incoming light. It wouldn't take a God to create the pattern of light that we see -- any Kardashev Type 2 (i.e. capable of manipulation on stellar scales) entity could manage it. I suppose such a entity could also capture any machines we send to explore other planets and feed them input along the lines of what we expect to see. Evolution, geology and the like wouldn't even take a Type 2 -- we can probably do a decent job of forging fossils today if we really wanted to.

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It occurs to me that it's not really Religion vs Atheism, so much as it is about Organized Religion vs Secularism, or Religions vs Anti-Religions,

It is fun to philosophize, and religious philosophy is certainly no less fun. The multitude of thoughts and ideas people have about God, the afterlife, morality, the universe, the real, the self, meaning and purpose, etc - are so numerous they are astounding. Everyone has some sort of beliefs or opinions or experiences in these areas of thought. Everyone has their own view. Materialist, spiritualist, monotheistic, polytheistic, atheistic, nondualistic.... so far so good. To each their own.

Now some people want to make stuff. They want to write books about these thoughts and positions and ideas or whatever. Draw symbols, paint them on walls, build a place to pray or meditate or just chill out in. We could call this religion of the benign formation of religion. Prayer beads. Special clothing. Rituals. It's a little strange maybe, but so long as no harm is done, it's cool with everybody.

It starts to get weird, however, when the cult-like things happen.When whole families get involved. When children are born into a certain belief or practice or social norm and it's not about them arriving at some philosophical viewpoint throughout their life, it's about them being a recipient of a teaching. And if what is being taught is that women are lesser people, and must have their genitals mutilated, or their tempting skin covered always, or have forced intercourse whenever their husbands or fathers want, or that nonbelievers are evil and must be converted or killed, or that apostates must be killed, then yeah, that's a fucking problem.

I think a lot of people who are against religion are against it because of that. The problem, you see, is not merely the philosophical claim that a deity exists (or doesn't exist), or that the universe is an illusion, or that we will be reborn eternally, or that there are evil spirits, or that Sunday (or Saturday) is the day we go to church, or that we pray ritualistically at this time and place and wearing this type of garment and making this kind of sound. Those things aren't the problem with religion. If I want to do these things I should be allowed to! I don't, as it happens ... my own religious practice is pretty much a shambles ...but there's nothing wrong with any of these ideas from a practical standpoint. They may seem silly, but everything about everyone can seem silly to anyone.

So if I (I am not an atheist) were to tell you (who are hypothetically an atheist) that I believe there is a God, you might think I'm a bit silly and that might be true. However, there are people you despise who are violent and terrible and fighting wars and committing atrocities, who also believe there is a God, and you find it hard not to lump my silly belief in with their abhorrent actions (and therefore beliefs). It is not important, however, that I believe in God, because when I say that I am only making a claim about my own philosophical position, and it is not important whether, for example, a suicide bomber happens to believe in God. Clearly the philosophical particulars of the terrorist or violent extremist are not the issue - their actions are. And their actions come from religious organizations. That is to say, cults, or cells, or gangs, or movements, or uprisings, or jihads. Groups of individuals oriented toward certain activities.

Obviously it gets bad when those activities include assault, sexual assault, murder, torture, coercion, abuse, war. In these high aggression, mostly male groups, people reinforce each other's delusions and justify their activities by whatever means necessary; often religious texts themselves, or these days a youtube video.  In failed states, states with high instability or frequent warfare, this is common. Now then, do you think the problem with all this - rape gangs, warlordism, ISIS, abortion terrorism - is the particulars of religious philosophy? Is the problem that a religion has made the claim that there is a God?

No. That is not the problem.  Anyone can make the claim that there is a God. I can and will, for example. God is defined as All That Is, the sum total of reality which is conscious of itself, via the mechanism of human consciousness and to a lesser extent other life. We are the eyes through which God experiences the physical universe, which is to say, Creation aka God. In stating this, did I support terrorism? Did I offend anyone on the "atheist" side of the "religion vs atheism" debate? No and no, hopefully.

Because the particulars of thoughts that violent people committing atrocities don't matter; what is pertinent is their upbringing and environment, in which they were indoctrinated and recruited and inducted. We are not really talking about Syrian refugee families who go to Mosque and believe in God. We are talking about young men raised by other young men in a cult of violence living the thug life, so to speak. ISIS and Al Qaeda and their sort recruit and grow the same way that American gangs do, only more so. Imagine if American gang land was actually lawless, with a fractured, barely functioning government and power struggles between corporate and military factions. Would it matter that many of the violent, anarchic, nihilistic groups that would arise be white Christians? Or black Christians? Atheist? Muslim? Hindu? Buddhist? Atheist? Dualist? Nondualist? Idealist? Realist?

Of course not! The only thing that matters here is the formation of these groups, this growing of a crop of calamity. This clustering of humans into gangs, into cults, into criminal organizations, into warbands, and the ability and environment in which this occurs. We can learn a valuable lesson from all this. Look at the Syrian civil war. Look at ISIS rising out of that. Look at the war on drugs. Look at gangs rising out of that. Look at the rising of militia groups or vigilantism or mob justice. These things are symptoms of an unstable society. The degree to which a state has them is the degree to which a state is unstable or corrupt or  war-torn. The solution is not going to look like "banning religion" nor certainly like "imposing religion" or even "discouraging religion" in these cases. The solution is impose law and order. Triage. Reduce the state of emergency. Assert control. Conduct business. Otherwise the cults will seize control and duke it out.

That is what most secularists (like myself) are against: religious-based or religious-like organizations gaining control and political power. There is no democracy there, no law and order, just an elaborate strongman game in an anarchic dystopia. Regardless of what their actual beliefs are, they're playing (as it were) the game of thrones, and that shit needs to stop. But that's going to take a lot more work than I can do,that's for sure. The UN or NATO ought to impose rule of law and take care of that whole economy thing while they're at it. Until that happens philosophical debate isn't of much use. There's only one philosophy in the wasteland.

Ideally, everyone finds their own spiritual path. But we as humans don't tend to work like that. We are social creatures and create social hierarchical organizations naturally. So there is religion, as a cultural phenomenon, and a mundane one. I am not anti-religion or pro-religion. I think people should be able to do what they want to do. I am not anti-atheist. This is all just words, after all.

 

 

 

 

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 Rorschach,

If one is not subject to another's law, then one is subject to oneself alone, which is the definition of arbitrary.

Why is it relevant that arbitrariness logically follows from omnipotence? If God is arbitrary, so what?

We criticize instances of arbitrariness because we are subject to laws, and we have a non-arbitrary frame of reference. This doesn't apply to an omnipotent God. 

To be clear, I'm an atheist, I just don't see why "he's either weak or arbitrary" is a problematic statement for theists. They can just say that he isn't weak, and he is arbitrary, and I don't see how that's in conflict in any significant way with the idea of an omnipotent God. I mean, it might not be intuitive, but we're not exactly dealing with empirically grounded concepts, here. 

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 Rorschach,

If one is not subject to another's law, then one is subject to oneself alone, which is the definition of arbitrary.

It may be one definition, but not one I've ever heard.

General Christian thought on the matter holds that God as creator is, among other things, unchanging. Which, to me, suggests that arbitrary he isn't.

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That is what most secularists (like myself) are against: religious-based or religious-like organizations gaining control and political power. There is no democracy there, no law and order, just an elaborate strongman game in an anarchic dystopia. Regardless of what their actual beliefs are, they're playing (as it were) the game of thrones, and that shit needs to stop. But that's going to take a lot more work than I can do,that's for sure. The UN or NATO ought to impose rule of law and take care of that whole economy thing while they're at it. Until that happens philosophical debate isn't of much use. There's only one philosophy in the wasteland.

Because secular organizations are inherently democratic, lawful and represent angels and unicorns. As someone who has been on the other end of receiving NATO's laws and care, I can tell that I don't want any human being to experience that great justice NATO offered to my country. Enough to say is that 16 years after their illegal, unilateral decision to bomb independent country for reason they all know, against all the international law, the "country" they created is the most fertile land for ISIS soldiers in Europe. So, good job...

And while we are on that, why not let Chinese spread righteousness all over the world? Or Putin and his merry gang? Or heck, Assad? Why does it have to be NATO? The interesting thing about the secular view on the religion is that it possesses certain blind spot to see that sometimes behind the cover of religious desires, there is always far more simpler, mundane and yes, secular reason. The fact we so easily discard many terrorist organizations as just religious fanatics while their motivation is much more complex than we are ready to admit is one of the reasons we are where we are. 

And when we are to that, secular people also play game of thrones. And they are prepared to do atrocities to obtain the goals.

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Because secular organizations are inherently democratic, lawful and represent angels and unicorns. As someone who has been on the other end of receiving NATO's laws and care, I can tell that I don't want any human being to experience that great justice NATO offered to my country. Enough to say is that 16 years after their illegal, unilateral decision to bomb independent country for reason they all know, against all the international law, the "country" they created is the most fertile land for ISIS soldiers in Europe. So, good job...

And while we are on that, why not let Chinese spread righteousness all over the world? Or Putin and his merry gang? Or heck, Assad? Why does it have to be NATO? The interesting thing about the secular view on the religion is that it possesses certain blind spot to see that sometimes behind the cover of religious desires, there is always far more simpler, mundane and yes, secular reason. The fact we so easily discard many terrorist organizations as just religious fanatics while their motivation is much more complex than we are ready to admit is one of the reasons we are where we are. 

And when we are to that, secular people also play game of thrones. And they are prepared to do atrocities to obtain the goals.

Well no, secular organizations are not inherently superior to religious ones. When we're talking about strongman politics of civil wars, factions and terrorists and cults and gangs and warbands, one is just as terrible as the other. What is needed is actual law, security, and stability.

The real issue here is the human tendency to clump. This clumping together is akin to molecular affinity. Any time you get a couple humans together, they start forming groups. So, you get angry young males with no job or career options because the economy, uncertain sources of food every day, the authorities either absent or brutal and oppressive, war-torn neighborhoods, and constant random violence as a new cultural norm, what kind of groups will they form?

Maybe some nice meditation groups?

No, they are forming a kind of cult like mentality, becoming an extension of the team. Your buddies. Your brothers. Your comrades. Your fellow patriots. Your crew. Your family, even. Brotherhood of Christ. Brotherhood of the Prophet. Foot-soldiers. Personal responsibility, like identity itself, is swallowed up and consumed by the collective group monkey mind. It doesn't matter what the words are for these people, the words are just a flag to wave, a call to arms, a belief, a cause, a noise, a meaningless object. What is going on in is more animalistic: social insects behavior, but in humans. These groups of humans attacking other humans because reasons. Male humans form aggressive packs of hunters with warrior's mentalities. How to stop them?

Short term, violence to put down the packs of wild dogs which are ravaging the countryside. Long term, make the countryside such that it doesn't raise up people wild. Unfortunately these two solutions are contrary to each other. The violence of the country is what causes people to be "raised up wild." Once raised up wild they must be put down. Vicious circle.

So perhaps a more humane and wise strategy for dealing with the wild dog packs is required. Still strong, but not simply shooting anything with four legs and moving on, "Mission Accomplished!" style. There is not an easy solution here. Poverty, inequality, brutality, instability, it is all at play and must be addressed.

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It may be one definition, but not one I've ever heard.

General Christian thought on the matter holds that God as creator is, among other things, unchanging. Which, to me, suggests that arbitrary he isn't.

It's also supposed to be all powerful, but it can't be both all powerful and unchanging. Now it could be all powerful and choose not to change, but changing would still be possible and would still be arbitrary by every definition of arbitrary I know.

Though I would think even non-literalists would be able to see how ridiculous the idea that their god is unchanging, the god of the OT and NT are clearly different.

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I'd like to discuss morality for a while.

For an atheist, ethics is a complicated subject. You think long and hard about the basis of ethics, should we go with utilitarianism or absolute moral obligations, is it always wrong to kill, stuff like that. In the end you end up with a more or less consistent morality.

It is worse than that. Except for the rare breed of atheist that denies the existence of a God, but nevertheless believes that human beings have a soul (or in mind-body dualism or something equivalent), morality is meaningless. Without a soul, human beings are merely peculiar arrangements of matter and therefore must play by the same rules as all matter in the universe. At the scale relevant to us, nature is mostly deterministic, but even if there is some randomness involved (e.g. if the brain somehow relies on quantum phenomena), to describe human actions as moral or immoral makes no sense. It is no more or less moral for a particular human being to act in a particular way than it is for the moon to proceed in its orbit around Earth or for a cosmic muon to randomly interact with the RAM of your computing device and cause a bit to flip.

Of course, most atheists ignore this and proceed to craft moral and ethical systems as if the illusion of independence is real.

Which leads me to the next question: can a God really have moral authority over us? If God does something that is really awful, is he still by definition right in doing it? I just don't buy that idea. In the end, isn't God's morality as arbitrary as ours?

Presumably, God is much smarter than we are and thus knows what is best. Our main problem is that we do not understand the consequences of our actions and what we want is often not in tune with how the universe works. For example, consider adversity. The word itself is strictly negative and most moral systems will strive to minimize it for most people, but it is also a source of strength and of change. To use an extreme example, WWII was terrible and I don't know of a single moral system that would endorse anything of the sort... but look at how much new technology was developed in a few years. Or, for the other side of the coin, the current generation of American college students was brought up in one of the safest and most considerate society in history... and the result is that a substantial fraction of them now wants "safe spaces" from ideas (i.e. the system is set up such that it eventually destroys itself).

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