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Religion vs Atheism Book 2


Stubby

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To be fair, I don't think the Torah forbids non-Jews to follow those cleanliness rules. It's just that doing it won't do them any metaphysical good because they are not God's chosen people. I don't know why God didn't choose them, but I suspect it might have something to do with their tribal ancestors telling the disembodied voice urging them to go kill their son as a sign of obedience to go fuck itself.

I wasn't talking about the cleanliness rules, mate. ;)

Tywin et al said:

The Torah is basically a guide on how not to die in the way way back times.

Given how frequently women, kids and those that aren't the same tribe or share the same beliefs get casually bumped off or violated, it can hardly be said to be a guide on "how not to die".

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I don't really mean to preach. And I don't mean to argue, really. I can't prove anything to you if you want to have a materialist paradigm.

Arguing gets me down, Why am I arguing with anyone here at all? I like and respect TP and OAR. And I'm not the best with words. What I am trying to talk about is that the difference between the brain and the mind, between objective, measurable events and the subjective experience of ourselves as people living in a world. One of the philosophical approaches to this apparent difference is dualism.

Even if you believe you are nothing more than a nervous system, having patterns of neural activity (whatever this is supposed to really explain) you in ordinary consciousness experience yourself as a character, a person, and talk and act as if you are one. You presumably treat yourself, and treat others, differently than pieces of meat, or calculating machines. I mean if your children ask you what love is, do you really show them MRI pictures and talk about brain states? Maybe you do, but that hopefully isn't all you do, because that isn't all love is to us. Subjective experience matters to us just as much as the measurable objective reality, despite one of these things being "really real" and the other former "just" chemicals in the brain. If ideas aren't real, then by all means... abandon all the ideas you have! If thoughts aren't real, by all means stop having them - why not? Shouldn't you be committed to truth and to reality, isn't that your duty as scientists and humans? Why tell your kids stories of any sort, when no characters are real? Why present them with art and music and Shakespeare -- just so they can make more money? (Ha!) Just so they can enjoy things more deeply? Well, why should their enjoyment of life matter, if their enjoyment itself is just dopamine or other neurotransmitter activity happening in a brain? Because you are biologically programmed to love your children, a slave to neural states thanks to the meat? If so, why not break the bonds of your biology? I am only saying that you love your children NOT because you are a kind of helpless, stupid meat machine with basic programming that your behavior just happens to follow the same way computers process information. A computer does not have a "self." You do. This can be explained dualistically in a number of ways; "spirit" vs "matter" for example, but I don't think it's necessary to be mystical. No one has to believe in a nominal God. And I am not talking about a God of the Gaps argument - I am not saying that "God" "explains," scientifically, the gap between brain and mind, or the physical and mental spheres, or the domains of objective and subjective reality. I am saying that there is, in actuality, no gap at all. We are indeed our bodies, our meat machines. But we are also so much more. We are indeed the physical data of our memories. But we are also what it is like to experience those memories. What it is like to be ourselves does not reduce. Instead of a gap between our true and false selves, our own person and the external world, we are all part of the same thing - reality, if you will.

So ultimately I am merely talking about a nondualist philosophy of mind, which I find more aesthetically satisfying than "there's the real world, but then there's also that stupid shit that happens in your dumb brain." What you experience subjectively as a human matters and the dismissive nature of some dualist arguments is off-putting. I don't want to argue though.

I accept subjective reality and objective (insofar as we can determine) as different things. I just don't think they have different causes. Yes, love like all emotions can be reduced to chemical reaction in the brain. Which makes it real. And that's pretty much the end of it for me. Sure it's not real in the same way as gravity is, because people experience it differently, but objectively it does exist. And sure it's caused by our biological programming as influenced by evolution. Why is that a problem? Why does that make things less to you?

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I accept subjective reality and objective (insofar as we can determine) as different things. I just don't think they have different causes. Yes, love like all emotions can be reduced to chemical reaction in the brain. Which makes it real. And that's pretty much the end of it for me. Sure it's not real in the same way as gravity is, because people experience it differently, but objectively it does exist. And sure it's caused by our biological programming as influenced by evolution. Why is that a problem? Why does that make things less to you?

Yes, this. I really have to say I hate this attitude. You have your own subjective experience and then there's the physical explanation, why let one detract from the other? You'll notice that given the available facts it's only people who crave for an explanation beyond the physical that interpret them in such bleak, insipid terms "just fleshy robots" etc. When truly there is nothing about the physical understanding that necessarily detracts from the wondrous experience of existence, or even the appreciation of the numinous (as Hitchens would put it). In fact fuck it, I'll dig up that quote. 

The human species – mammalian primates though undoubtedly (s)he is, and made out of the dust of exploded suns - does have the need for the transcendent, the numinous, even the ecstatic. I wouldn’t trust anyone who hadn’t had this. This has to do with landscape, light, music, love and an awareness of the transience of all things, and the melancholy that invests all this. So it isn’t just gaping happily at the sunset while listening to music, and doing that while knowing that it can’t last very long. But there is no need for the supernatural in this at all. There is no dimension of the supernatural of which this gives one a share. 

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TM: it doesn't satisfy what I know of reality because I do not see how love can be reduced to chemicals in the brain, or in fact any lower level components whatsoever - it is something that, like consciousness, like a lot of different phenomena, seems to be more than the sum of its parts. An emergent phenomena. To say that it's all just reducible to parts seems, to me, to ignore the complexities of subjective experience and their reality. To say that something like love is real because it is (somehow) reducible to chemicals in the brain is to say that ultimately love is thoroughly... unromantic. There's a lack of nuance and art, or so this philosophy seems (I know this isn't actually how it is for materialists... you love, you enjoy art and music the same as anyone, and you admit these things are real) to me. There is something missing, some crucial component that is not a mysterious particle or undetected object,  - something ephemeral, ineffable, and also (IMO!) pretty wonderful and profoundly life-altering, when one finds it. What we call it doesn't matter, the same way you don't really need to know what a genre of music is to appreciate it upon hearing it. I call it God, but this word has such hugely heavy social and historical connotations that it's problematic and I still am uncertain it's wise to use that word as a result. Anyway, it just seems I have a different philosophy - I don't think objective and subjective reality are different things, I think they are part of the one reality, and the ultimate nature of this unified reality is the great mystery of our existence.

Anyway I'm exhausted from work and really do not mean to be argumentative. I can't prove anything with words, it's merely an interesting discussion to have.

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I don't see how your response here addresses what I said. 

Organized religions claim that they know what the divine being wants them to do in this life, whether it be to do charitable work, to not receive blood transfusion, or to pray only in private. Therefore, the will of the divine being that they worship must be knowable to them to some extent. It is self-contradictory, therefore, to claim that humans cannot know the will of God. At best, one would have to establish what parts of God's will are knowable, and why that is different from the other parts of God's will, which is declared to be unknowable. If we know that God does not want us to murder people, which seems like a good rule, then we need a reconciliation of the events where God murders people. There are any number of explanations/apologetics to be had, but "God's will is unknowable" is singularly ... weird.

Knowable to some extent, yes... but not enough to fully understand all of God's actions. Most moral laws have built-in exceptions. To use your example, the prohibition on murder is not a blanket prohibition on killing even for humans -- most societies allow killing in war and executions.

I am not asking for consistency across multiple strands of the faith. I am saying that "God's will is unknowable," without a lot of qualifications and a lot of reconciliation, is a lacking response for any religion that claims to know the way we ought to lead our life according to divine wishes. I know that for most of the more developed religions, there are scholarship within it to wrestle with the contradictions in their doctrines and history. And that's a good thing, because most of them do have contradictions. As an outsider observing, there are answers that are much better than "we cannot understand God's will" to some of these questions.

Again, your contradiction stems from thinking of understanding as absolute rather than a matter of degree. Religion provides vague guidelines on morality and ethics which does imply some understanding of God, but it is not nearly enough to understand all of God's actions (which is what you appear to be asking for).

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Sensitivity to initial conditions is a known thing.  It occurs with complex aka non-linear systems.  If you want learn more James Glick wrote a great book.  It can be difficult to predict how such complex systems will react to stimuli as it moves through the environment, but it still doesn't amount to dualism.  Occams razor alone would determine that there is no need for dualism.  Everything to describe the system is right there.  You have the interactions of the meat with itself (the system) and the interaction of the meat with external stimuli (the vriable input).

You are absolutely correct about sensitivity to initial conditions, but I would be really careful about applying Occam's Razor to natural law. It works well in philosophy and we do use it all of the time in science for lack of anything better, but there it often leads to spectacularly wretched failures (especially when you're after phenomena in which you do not understand several things at once rather than a single property). The universe just isn't simple.

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Yes, this. I really have to say I hate this attitude. You have your own subjective experience and then there's the physical explanation, why let one detract from the other? You'll notice that given the available facts it's only people who crave for an explanation beyond the physical that interpret them in such bleak, insipid terms "just fleshy robots" etc. When truly there is nothing about the physical understanding that necessarily detracts from the wondrous experience of existence, or even the appreciation of the numinous (as Hitchens would put it). In fact fuck it, I'll dig up that quote. 

The human species – mammalian primates though undoubtedly (s)he is, and made out of the dust of exploded suns - does have the need for the transcendent, the numinous, even the ecstatic. I wouldn’t trust anyone who hadn’t had this. This has to do with landscape, light, music, love and an awareness of the transience of all things, and the melancholy that invests all this. So it isn’t just gaping happily at the sunset while listening to music, and doing that while knowing that it can’t last very long. But there is no need for the supernatural in this at all. There is no dimension of the supernatural of which this gives one a share. 

I'll play Devil's Advocate because...why not? 

It seems to me that it's not strange to consider connecting with something greater in a metaphysical sense superior to triggering whatever mechanism in your brain makes you feel transcendent emotion. 

It could be argued that the people who find the reductionist view distressing do so because they don't just value the experience of transcendence, but what they feel the experience entails

 

From a materialist perspective...what does the experience mean? People feel all sorts of sensations. If they're all the brain mucking about why would it matter, on a deeper level?

 

Don't you end up with an experience that feels like Enlightenment but, is ultimately meaningless? 

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It could be argued that the people who find the reductionist view distressing do so because they don't just value the experience of transcendence, but what they feel the experience entails

From a materialist perspective...what does the experience mean? People feel all sorts of sensations. If they're all the brain mucking about why would it matter, on a deeper level?

Don't you end up with an experience that feels like Enlightenment but, is ultimately meaningless? 

I mean...I would say isn't everything 'ultimately meaningless' outside of the meaning you attach to stuff? Why does it have to mean anything in an ultimate sense? These are after all subjective experiences . Why does there need to be a deeper level? I honestly can't empathise with that position - with the idea of feeling the transcendent, the numinous the ecstatic (to quote Hitch) and somehow being uncomfortable with the fact that I can't tie this to an ultimate meaning or know that this fleeting moment of ecstasy doesn't actually mean anything on a deeper level.

If I can give a crude analogy; when you are gorging on a delicious pizza are you bothered by the fact that in 10 minutes the sensation is completely gone? It didn't ultimately make any difference whether you were sated by a delicious pizza or a bland pile of bland, it only mattered in the moment and the moment is perpetually disappearing, giving way to a new moment until it's all gone and you're dead and none of it really meant anything, certainly not the fucking pizza. But why let any of that get in the way of you enjoying that pizza? I hope you see what I'm trying to say. 

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You are absolutely correct about sensitivity to initial conditions, but I would be really careful about applying Occam's Razor to natural law. It works well in philosophy and we do use it all of the time in science for lack of anything better, but there it often leads to spectacularly wretched failures (especially when you're after phenomena in which you do not understand several things at once rather than a single property). The universe just isn't simple.

What exactly do you mean by "natural law"? This is not a facetious question.  There are several definitions of the term and I want to make sure of how you are using it before I respond.

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What exactly do you mean by "natural law"? This is not a facetious question.  There are several definitions of the term and I want to make sure of how you are using it before I respond.

I mean the laws of nature as we currently understand them -- physics, chemistry, biology and the knowledge of the applied disciplines derived from them. It is also called science, but that word appears to mean very different things to different people in this thread so I wanted to avoid it.

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TM: it doesn't satisfy what I know of reality because I do not see how love can be reduced to chemicals in the brain, or in fact any lower level components whatsoever - it is something that, like consciousness, like a lot of different phenomena, seems to be more than the sum of its parts. An emergent phenomena. To say that it's all just reducible to parts seems, to me, to ignore the complexities of subjective experience and their reality. To say that something like love is real because it is (somehow) reducible to chemicals in the brain is to say that ultimately love is thoroughly... unromantic. There's a lack of nuance and art, or so this philosophy seems (I know this isn't actually how it is for materialists... you love, you enjoy art and music the same as anyone, and you admit these things are real) to me. There is something missing, some crucial component that is not a mysterious particle or undetected object,  - something ephemeral, ineffable, and also (IMO!) pretty wonderful and profoundly life-altering, when one finds it. What we call it doesn't matter, the same way you don't really need to know what a genre of music is to appreciate it upon hearing it. I call it God, but this word has such hugely heavy social and historical connotations that it's problematic and I still am uncertain it's wise to use that word as a result. Anyway, it just seems I have a different philosophy - I don't think objective and subjective reality are different things, I think they are part of the one reality, and the ultimate nature of this unified reality is the great mystery of our existence.

Anyway I'm exhausted from work and really do not mean to be argumentative. I can't prove anything with words, it's merely an interesting discussion to have.

WF,

You are not alone in your distaste for pure materialist "Philosophy of the Mind" and to be frank I dislike the materialist pure neuroscience version of the mind for the same reasons you do.  It reduces the beauty and mystery of our lives and emotions to something... less than the sum of its parts.  

The magisty and wonder of the bonds of love that join our lives one to the other, that are the warp and weft of human society, are just chemical reactions nothing to get excited about.  There is more and I believe there will always be more.  

Eventually, I think Dr. Penrose will he shown to be correct.  That our minds are quantum insturments that take advantage of the weirdness and mystery of quantum mechanics (the bizarre and unexplained non-local phenomenons of quantum entanglement for example) to create the miracle that is consciousness.  Because I do believe that consciousness is exactly that, a miracle, that each and every one of us experience each day.

:)

GotB,

I mean...I would say isn't everything 'ultimately meaningless' outside of the meaning you attach to stuff? Why does it have to mean anything in an ultimate sense? These are after all subjective experiences . Why does there need to be a deeper level? I honestly can't empathise with that position - with the idea of feeling the transcendent, the numinous the ecstatic (to quote Hitch) and somehow being uncomfortable with the fact that I can't tie this to an ultimate meaning or know that this fleeting moment of ecstasy doesn't actually mean anything on a deeper level.

You do realize that you are offering the same argument the Sophists made in opposition to Socrates 2500 years ago, right? "Man is the measure of all things".  Your beliefs move man and our meat bodies to the center of the Universe.

 
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I mean...I would say isn't everything 'ultimately meaningless' outside of the meaning you attach to stuff? Why does it have to mean anything in an ultimate sense? These are after all subjective experiences . Why does there need to be a deeper level? I honestly can't empathise with that position - with the idea of feeling the transcendent, the numinous the ecstatic (to quote Hitch) and somehow being uncomfortable with the fact that I can't tie this to an ultimate meaning or know that this fleeting moment of ecstasy doesn't actually mean anything on a deeper level.

If I can give a crude analogy; when you are gorging on a delicious pizza are you bothered by the fact that in 10 minutes the sensation is completely gone? It didn't ultimately make any difference whether you were sated by a delicious pizza or a bland pile of bland, it only mattered in the moment and the moment is perpetually disappearing, giving way to a new moment until it's all gone and you're dead and none of it really meant anything, certainly not the fucking pizza. But why let any of that get in the way of you enjoying that pizza? I hope you see what I'm trying to say. 

Because the nature of transcendent experience for many people is that it's not supposed to be like pizza, meaningless. 

Pizza is actually a crude analogy. People do not talk or think about transcendent experiences the way they talk about pizza. We generally start off from the perspective that pizza is fun but already meaningless or meaning less. A lot of people simply do not view whatever transcendent experience  they have like that. They view it as not just the feeling of transcending but actually doing so. They view love as something that matters.

I personally don't think there's any reason to think they'll get what they want, but it's not an odd feeling, to want experience to mean something, to want the universe to thrum when someone violates the community you feel. 

 

Some greater or objective backing for our beliefs would be nice, just become some are resigned to not having it doesn't make it less seductive for the rest. I think Bakker captures the disconnect between the two groups when talking about Dennett and free will:

So with regard to the will, he recommends (in Freedom Evolves) that we trade our incoherent traditional understanding in for a revised, scientifically informed understanding of free will as ‘behavioural versatility.’ Since, for Dennett, this is all ‘free will’ has ever been, redefinition along these lines is imminently reasonable. I remember once quipping in a graduate seminar that what Dennett was saying amounted to telling you, at your Grandma Mildred’s funeral, “Don’t worry. Just call rename your dog, Mildred.” After the laughter faded, one of the other students, I forget who, was quick to reply, “That only sounds bad if your dog wasn’t your Grandma Mildred all along.”

 

 

Well...people don't want dog-Mildred.

 

 

GotB,

 

You do realize that you are offering the same argument the Sophists made in opposition to Socrates 2500 years ago, right? "Man is the measure of all things".  Your beliefs move man and our meat bodies to the center of the Universe.

 

Guilty by association?

 

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Castel,

Not "guilt" but it is literally "sophistry" as it is what the "Sophists" argued.

I don't think that Gears is as committed to the relativism of Protagoras (as little as I understand it), simply because he doesn't think transcendent experience needs some objective backing. 

 

But, if you're just talking about what the Sophists said and not using the term as we modern people understand it...what's the point? It seems clear that the value judgment in the term is supposed to matter here, and not just what a sophist "literally" said. Otherwise your post might as well have been empty. You're letting the connection you've drawn make the argument for you.

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Knowable to some extent, yes... but not enough to fully understand all of God's actions.

How... convenient. No wonder some people like being religious.

 

 

Most moral laws have built-in exceptions. To use your example, the prohibition on murder is not a blanket prohibition on killing even for humans -- most societies allow killing in war and executions.

You're hand-waving the difficult parts away. Yes, we allow exceptions, but do you think the Jewish faith will cite the Talmud as moral authority to eliminate 99.9999% of all living things? No? How about displacing an entire city-state just because it happens to sit on a piece of land that they want? The Bible (particularly the OT) is full of examples of things that humans are told not to do. Was Lot's daughter punished after she drugged her father so she can have sex with him, because she thought the destruction of Sodom and Gamorrah was the end of the world and they needed to re-populate mankind?

 

Again, your contradiction stems from thinking of understanding as absolute rather than a matter of degree. Religion provides vague guidelines on morality and ethics which does imply some understanding of God, but it is not nearly enough to understand all of God's actions (which is what you appear to be asking for).

So the new Pope is now saying Catholic faith is just a set of "vague guidelines on morality and ethics"? I am guessing not. It is not I who insist that religions make definite and specific edicts on how we ought to behave, justifying it with divine inspiration. It is the religions that do that. I am taking their words for it. I'd bet that most religious people do NOT think that their chosen religion is a set of "vague guidelines on morality and ethics," either. So you're downplaying the inherent conflict by dissembling about the claims that religions tend to make. With the exceptions of religions like universalists, most religions make it clear that they, and often, they alone, offer the path to eternal salvation. It is in this context that the claim of "Oh, we cannot know the will of God" is particularly egregious, and where my critique aims at.

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Because the nature of transcendent experience for many people is that it's not supposed to be like pizza, meaningless. 

Pizza is actually a crude analogy. People do not talk or think about transcendent experiences the way they talk about pizza. We generally start off from the perspective that pizza is fun but already meaningless or meaning less. A lot of people simply do not view whatever transcendent experience  they have like that. They view it as not just the feeling of transcending but actually doing so. They view love as something that matters.

I personally don't think there's any reason to think they'll get what they want, but it's not an odd feeling, to want experience to mean something, to want the universe to thrum when someone violates the community you feel. 

Some greater or objective backing for our beliefs would be nice, just become some are resigned to not having it doesn't make it less seductive for the rest. I think Bakker captures the disconnect between the two groups when talking about Dennett and free will:

Well...people don't want dog-Mildred.

Okay. Continuing with the crudeness, who gives a fuck what people want? What people want should not impact their view of reality. Again, I can't empathise with this position, I've never experienced something like this and thought to myself 'hmm I want this to have some ultimate meaning, oh I know I'll just change my view of reality until I've gotten what I want'. My point is that reality doesn't have to limit your experience of love etc. The fact that love doesn't matter at a "deeper level" doesn't necessarily mean love doesn't matter to you. I can't say that this bleak interpretation of material reality is wrong, I can say that it is not necessary. 

On a sidenote, I'm pretty familiar with Dennett's view of free will and I don't see how one would get from that to dog-Mildred...

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You're hand-waving the difficult parts away. Yes, we allow exceptions, but do you think the Jewish faith will cite the Talmud as moral authority to eliminate 99.9999% of all living things? No? How about displacing an entire city-state just because it happens to sit on a piece of land that they want? The Bible (particularly the OT) is full of examples of things that humans are told not to do. Was Lot's daughter punished after she drugged her father so she can have sex with him, because she thought the destruction of Sodom and Gamorrah was the end of the world and they needed to re-populate mankind?

Those stories pose what in modern philosophy are called thought experiments and provide an answer. If 99.9%+ of creation had been hopelessly corrupted, would it be OK to start over keeping only the good? The answer is yes, but only once (it's better to arrange creation such that this is not necessary -- hence the Rainbow Covenant). The same thing with Lot's daughters (there were two of them) -- what they did is bad, but there are extenuating circumstances.

So the new Pope is now saying Catholic faith is just a set of "vague guidelines on morality and ethics"? I am guessing not. It is not I who insist that religions make definite and specific edicts on how we ought to behave, justifying it with divine inspiration. It is the religions that do that. I am taking their words for it. I'd bet that most religious people do NOT think that their chosen religion is a set of "vague guidelines on morality and ethics," either. So you're downplaying the inherent conflict by dissembling about the claims that religions tend to make. With the exceptions of religions like universalists, most religions make it clear that they, and often, they alone, offer the path to eternal salvation. It is in this context that the claim of "Oh, we cannot know the will of God" is particularly egregious, and where my critique aims at.

As I said, the teachings of organized religion in general and the Abrahamic faiths in particular are a mix of things that probably served a purpose once, but not anymore, things which are useful to the clergy, things that are useful to the believers independently of whether the religion is true or not and possibly a touch of the divine. Your criticism is perfectly valid and also quite old -- it dates at least back to the Enlightenment and it's been at least that long since the claims in question were taken seriously. Yes, the Catholic church theoretically still claims to be the one true church (i.e. merely being Christian is not enough) and the Eastern Orthodox and various smaller churches return the favor... but that falls firmly into the "served a purpose once, but not anymore" category and most people who have studied the Enlightenment know it (even most of the clergy).

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Okay. Continuing with the crudeness, who gives a fuck what people want? What people want should not impact their view of reality. Again, I can't empathise with this position, I've never experienced something like this and thought to myself 'hmm I want this to have some ultimate meaning, oh I know I'll just change my view of reality until I've gotten what I want'. My point is that reality doesn't have to limit your experience of love etc. The fact that love doesn't matter at a "deeper level" doesn't necessarily mean love doesn't matter to you. I can't say that this bleak interpretation of material reality is wrong, I can say that it is not necessary. 

On a sidenote, I'm pretty familiar with Dennett's view of free will and I don't see how one would get from that to dog-Mildred...

But you're not just arguing about what's true or not (not that this debate has been settled) you're arguing about why people would or should feel a certain way. Specifically; why they shouldn't feel that love or morality are devalued by certain philosophical positions.

You cannot just stand from up above it and snipe the problem away by appealing to "reality" (again,whatever that is) , you have to wade into the muck of value judgments, since you are making one yourself. 

 

 

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The burden of wading into the muck of value judgements should extend to the believers who use the crux positions that gods and devils make people behave in certain ways. There are values being upheld when we take personal responsibility for actions. Prisons are full of people who believe they are attoned through a mythical figure. A typical atheist probably thinks that forgiveness needs to be earned from his victim. I dont always get that sense from the born again types.

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