Atheism

[Hashi Lebwohl]

This is what the future holds: unlimited human potential, with no need for myths, because we'll be the gods.

hrm...

We--humanity in general--are not ready to be gods. Or, rather, we are just as petty and spiteful and vindictive as most of the gods of the ancient religions were...except we would have the power to back up and enforce our pettiness and childish irrationality on/against each other.

Now....on the other hand....it is possible that unlocking that potential and/or freeing ourselves of some of our limitations via The Singularity might change our collective psychology, presuming we can get over our fear of becoming That Which Is Not Human.

wow....this is bleeding into the Close and the Loresraat. *shrug*

I'll make you a deal--let me be the first to upload/digitize my mind into a computer then give me access to a fully non-organic physical form, allowing me to transcend hunger, thirst, aging, pain, disease, etc. and I'll tell you how it "feels".

[Avatar]

Avatar,

And who's louder about their disbelief? Someone who quietly holds such or Dawkins and (before he passed) Hitchens?

Oh, there are loud atheists too. Haven't figured out that they're wasting time and energy. But I'd have to guess that the loud theists outnumber them.

--A

[aliantha]

Avatar,

And who's louder about their disbelief? Someone who quietly holds such or Dawkins and (before he passed) Hitchens?

Oh, there are loud atheists too. Haven't figured out that they're wasting time and energy. But I'd have to guess that the loud theists outnumber them.

--A

Which is why the loud atheists are so loud.

This is also straying perhaps too close to Close territory. But I have to say that find it fascinating to watch folks go at it, as if monotheism and unbelief are the only choices.

[Zarathustra]

This is what the future holds: unlimited human potential, with no need for myths, because we'll be the gods.

hrm...

We--humanity in general--are not ready to be gods. Or, rather, we are just as petty and spiteful and vindictive as most of the gods of the ancient religions were...except we would have the power to back up and enforce our pettiness and childish irrationality on/against each other.

All the more reason to give up irrationality! Our godlike power will come whether we're ready or not. But progress isn't the problem, lack of it is. People will kill each other with whatever technology they have available, as we've done for our entire existence. Religion never stopped them, in fact it was often the cause.

But that's just another problem to be solved, right? And you solve problems by finding their explanation. What makes us truly human--different from all other life we know of--is our creativity, our ability to create new knowledge and thus find new explanations. Therefore, if you don't respect people's freedom of thought, the ability to choose something other than dogma, how can you respect them as humans? Well, you don't. That's why we've currently got an Islamic Jihad problem. That is a culture on the extreme end of not supporting criticism nor encouraging error correction.

That's the explanation for the problem. We're not ready to become gods because we still believe in God. That needs to change before we destroy ourselves.

It's no coincidence that humanity's unprecedented progress--its only example of sustained growth--happened in areas where this religious deathgrip on human thought had loosened to some extent. Our progress is only possible through a type of thinking that is the antithesis of religious belief.

You're so sure that you're right that you discount any other possibility, and you do it with mildly offensive codewords like "superstition". Sorry dude, you know I've got nothing but respect for you, but when the topic turns to religion, you're like the anti-Rus.

The only thing I'm sure about is that belief in something that transcends the world, beyond any possible explanation, is irrational and superstition. What else could it be? That's not to say that I'm sure god doesn't exist, but that if He exists it doesn't change the fact that our belief in Him is necessarily irrational and superstitious.

If you want to believe in such things, I think you have every right ... and I can't prove you wrong. But you have to at least acknowledge what you're believing in, and accept that it's beyond reason or explanation.

I'm also sure of one more thing: beliefs which can't be challenged, corrected, and discarded allow for no possibility of progress or greater knowledge.

I'm not saying I'm right about the specific facts about the world, but I am saying I'm right about how to figure them out. There's only one way.

I am the anti-Rus. I'm the exact opposite of him!

[Cail]

The only thing I'm sure about is that belief in something that transcends the world, beyond any possible explanation, is irrational and superstition. What else could it be? That's not to say that I'm sure god doesn't exist, but that if He exists it doesn't change the fact that our belief in Him is necessarily irrational and superstitious.

Well, I guess if you say so. But if that's the tack you're going to take, don't be surprised when people write you off as a snarky know-it-all. When the discussion begins with, "belief in Him is necessarily irrational and superstitious", it's not going to go anywhere productive.

If you want to believe in such things, I think you have every right ... and I can't prove you wrong. But you have to at least acknowledge what you're believing in, and accept that it's beyond reason or explanation.

No I don't. I don't need to adhere to the arbitrary restrictions and definitions you place on my beliefs.

I'm also sure of one more thing: beliefs which can't be challenged, corrected, and discarded allow for no possibility of progress or greater knowledge.

And this is just flat-out horseshit.

I'm not saying I'm right about the specific facts about the world, but I am saying I'm right about how to figure them out. There's only one way.

I am the anti-Rus. I'm the exact opposite of him!

No, you're just as devoted to your dogma and dismissive of other people's beliefs as he was.

[Ananda]

The only thing I'm sure about is that belief in something that transcends the world, beyond any possible explanation, is irrational and superstition. What else could it be? That's not to say that I'm sure god doesn't exist, but that if He exists it doesn't change the fact that our belief in Him is necessarily irrational and superstitious.

Well, I guess if you say so. But if that's the tack you're going to take, don't be surprised when people write you off as a snarky know-it-all. When the discussion begins with, "belief in Him is necessarily irrational and superstitious", it's not going to go anywhere productive.

But, Cail, isn't faith the opposite of logic? Faith is belief for no other reason than you just, well, believe. All people have 'experiences' they can point to and say, if they so choose, 'this supports and proves my faith', but it is only that way if you choose to interpret your experiences that way and conclude that your experiences were religious in some way and not just the human mind making sense of the senseless and providing a framework with the things you can understand. We just don't know what any feeling we have truly means or if it means anything at all in my opinion. Drawing further conclusion is just us projecting and is not rational or logical, but faith.

The hindu faith refers to the singularity godhead (not the pantheon of 1001 gods which are just aspects of the whole) as That Which Is or just That. They say it that way because to say more about it puts our own projections on it.

[Cail]

But, Cail, isn't faith the opposite of logic?

No.

One can have and apply both. They're not mutually exclusive.

[Ananda]

But, Cail, isn't faith the opposite of logic?

No.

One can have and apply both. They're not mutually exclusive.

Can you display the logic for having faith? I am curious how that looks outside of just how it makes you feel. Not trying to be bitchy about it, just wondering how you see it.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

I'm not saying I'm right about the specific facts about the world, but I am saying I'm right about how to figure them out. There's only one way.

Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.

Part of our irrationality is because of how our brains are wired, I suspect. Digitizing our minds would remove this limitation but with everything else we will both simultaneously lose and gain we will have to find a new word with which to refer to ourselves. We won't be "human" anymore; that word will refer to what we used to be.

You are correct, though, when you state that the relative lack of widespread war has given us a really prolonged time during which we have made some significant scientific advancements. We have learned more from 1914 until now than we did from the period 14 to 1914.

Believing in something which cannot be explained or proven or disproven doesn't necessarily hurt anyone. However, to follow your advice means we need to quit telling our children that the Easter Bunny will bring them an egg or that Santa will bring them a present if they are good. Sure, they'll figure it out soon enough on their own but why put them through that in the first place?

I like Ananda's line of reasoning--if we try to explain That/God/Them then we start to put our own perceptions and limitations on it. In Conrad's terms we begin to confuse the Symbol with the Message (or the other way around).

[Cail]

But, Cail, isn't faith the opposite of logic?

No.

One can have and apply both. They're not mutually exclusive.

Can you display the logic for having faith? I am curious how that looks outside of just how it makes you feel. Not trying to be bitchy about it, just wondering how you see it.

Not sure that I need to. To me, it is illogical to assume that there's nothing greater than us. To me, it requires a much larger leap of faith to believe that all of this happened by random accident than it does to believe that a power greater than us put things into motion.

My faith in God does not preclude belief in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other field of science, and in the 30-some thousand times I've posted on this forum I've never once based an argument on, "because God".

[Cybrweez]

Logic is a human made invention. Therefore, like everything, we can't really know what's logical. Sorry everyone.

Or rather, what's logical for you may not be for someone else. This is the world others have made, I'm just living in it.

[SoulBiter]

You are correct, though, when you state that the relative lack of widespread war has given us a really prolonged time during which we have made some significant scientific advancements. We have learned more from 1914 until now than we did from the period 14 to 1914.

I don't think there has been any lack of widespread war in that time line. Below are just a few of the wars that have been fought during that period and many of those went on for years.

Two World Wars,
Spanish American war
Mexican Revolution
Korea
Vietnam
China Civil war
Spanish Civil war
Greek Civil war
Russian Civil war
Mau Mau uprising
Algerian war
Turkish war

[Zarathustra]

Cail, I'm not insulting your beliefs when I say that the concept of god is irrational and superstitious. It's merely the meaning of the concept. If there is no possible explanation for where God came from, then it's irrational. Things that are inexplicable in principle are so because they defy reason. And since there can also never be any objective proof, such belief is also superstition. That's what you call things that people believe without explanation or evidence. The same goes for any other supernatural being, whether it's fairies or leprechauns. Why would yours be exempt? If you can give me a reason, you wouldn't have to waste time on insulting characterizations of me. You could make me look silly by proving me wrong, instead.

These definitions aren't arbitrary. You'd apply them just as quickly to other people's beliefs in supernatural entities, wouldn't you? Zeus? Apollo? Vampires? Everyone can recognize superstition and irrationality in other people's beliefs, and those terms aren't arbitrary then. So why does it suddenly become "arbitrary" when used exactly the same way for your preferred supernatural entity? In terms of evidence and explicability, vampires are more likely and reasonable than God! At least we could attempt to explain it in principle, if it occurred, since it's just a human with a few properties that seem magical. You can't do that for an infinite being beyond the physical universe.

I'm also sure of one more thing: beliefs which can't be challenged, corrected, and discarded allow for no possibility of progress or greater knowledge.

And this is just flat-out horseshit.

I'm genuinely puzzled by this one. All I'm saying is that dogma impedes the production of new knowledge. That's controversial?

No, you're just as devoted to your dogma and dismissive of other people's beliefs as he was.

I don't have a dogma, I have a methodology. I'm not dismissive (see "flat-out horseshit" above for an example of that), I'm merely confident of my reasoning.

I don't understand the desire to describe atheism as a dogma. Is it a dogma to think fairies etc. aren't real? Is that dismissive? No, it's rational. You're just as much an atheist as I am for every other god ever invented ... except one. Our attitudes for Zeus, Apollo, and all the others are identical. Does that make you a snarky know-it-all, too, when it comes to all those other gods? We have the same attitude and position for those gods. The only difference is that I go one step more than you and apply it to one more name on the list of gods. But that one step makes me dogmatic and dismissive? No. It just makes me consistent. I treat all gods equally. You, on the other hand, make one exception ... an exception that, as far as I can tell, is arbitrary (unless you can specify the difference between your god and the rest on the list).

Logic is a human made invention. Therefore, like everything, we can't really know what's logical. Sorry everyone.

Or rather, what's logical for you may not be for someone else.

But you're attempting to use logic in making your point! [e.g. "therefore"] It does not follow that just because something is a human invention we therefore can't really know that category of somethings. Hammers are human inventions. Does that mean we can't know what hammers are? It seems like the things we invent would be some of the most knowable things out there [ignoring Godel for the moment].

I'm not talking about logic. I'm talking about "reasonable" and "rational" in the sense of things we can explain, things that are explicable. For example, "Zeus carries the sun under the world in his chariot every night" is a bad--irrational--explanation of sunrises. "The earth is a planet that revolves on its own axis" is a rational explanation. We could go into the details about what makes these examples rational/irrational, but hopefully we all see the difference immediately.

Beliefs which make it more likely to accept explanations of the "chariot-of-the-gods" type hurt humanity by removing them a step from reality. Denying the difference between explanations which bring us closer to reality and those that move us away from reality, end up moving us away from reality. There are many more ways to be ignorant than to be knowledgeable, since good explanations are hard to discover and hard to vary. Denying the difference will usually lead to only more ignorance.

[Cail]

Zar, you're intelligent enough to understand that you come across like a petulant child when you refer to others' deeply-held beliefs as "irrational" and "superstitious".

You can play semantic games all you like, but the fact remains that your dogma is that you're right, and you're smarter/more reasonable/more logical than anyone who disagrees with you.

I have a deeply-held belief in God, yet I also have a deeply-held belief in evolution. So yeah, your comment about my dogma is horseshit.

Notice though that throughout this thread (and the others we've had on this topic) I haven't challenged your beliefs once. I haven't belittled them, I haven't called them foolish, and I haven't called them wrong. You have taken it upon yourself to spread the Word to all the unbelieving heathens here.

You might as well be knocking on doors and passing out copies of The Watchtower.

[lucimay]

omg

best. conversation. ever!!!!!!

[Zarathustra]

To me, it is illogical to assume that there's nothing greater than us. To me, it requires a much larger leap of faith to believe that all of this happened by random accident than it does to believe that a power greater than us put things into motion.

My faith in God does not preclude belief in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other field of science, and in the 30-some thousand times I've posted on this forum I've never once based an argument on, "because God".

I agree: it is illogical (or unreasonable) to assume that there's nothing greater than us. So does that mean it's also unreasonable to assume there is nothing greater than God? Why would it ever be logical to stop and say, "That's the greatest thing that can possibly be"? We already know from mathematical studies of infinity that there are higher orders of infinity. So something (say, god) can be infinite, and yet there can still be things that are higher order levels of infinity (say, another god, and another, and so on).

It's not a leap of faith to assume all this happened by accident. We see things happening by accident all the time, even complex things. We never see things happening by magical or supernatural intervention. It doesn't take faith to believe in a Big Bang. Things explode all the time.

Faith in god doesn't preclude biology, physics, etc., but it does contradict them. It's like saying belief in the tooth fairy doesn't preclude dentistry. Okay, humans are contradictory and they can believe in both. But that doesn't remove the contradiction that a) it's perfectly reasonable to trust in the power of dentistry, and b) completely unreasonable to believe in tooth fairies. If we teach children to not be able to tell the difference--for instance, by claiming that these two beliefs don't contradict each other--only diminishes our children's ability to tell science from pseudo-science, or reason from irrationality. It makes our kids stupid. Of course there's a difference. The only reason these concepts can be held simultaneously is because humans can be irrational! That's the whole point. You can't claim that an irrational position is rational merely because you can hold it. Claiming that faith (in supernatural) and reason aren't mutually exclusive is irrational. You combining them in a single world view doesn't prove they're consistent, or disprove their mutual exclusivity. You only demonstrate our human capacity for contradiction. No one is disputing that this capacity exists.

[Cail]

To me, it is illogical to assume that there's nothing greater than us. To me, it requires a much larger leap of faith to believe that all of this happened by random accident than it does to believe that a power greater than us put things into motion.

My faith in God does not preclude belief in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other field of science, and in the 30-some thousand times I've posted on this forum I've never once based an argument on, "because God".

I agree: it is illogical (or unreasonable) to assume that there's nothing greater than us. So does that mean it's also unreasonable to assume there is nothing greater than God? Why would it ever be logical to stop and say, "That's the greatest thing that can possibly be"? We already know from mathematical studies of infinity that there are higher orders of infinity. So something (say, god) can be infinite, and yet there can still be things that are higher order levels of infinity (say, another god, and another, and so on).

Where the hell did you get this? I've never said a word about that. Is it possible? Sure, I guess.

It's not a leap of faith to assume all this happened by accident. We see things happening by accident all the time, even complex things. We never see things happening by magical or supernatural intervention. It doesn't take faith to believe in a Big Bang. Things explode all the time.

Yes, things explode all the time, and the result of that explosion is dolphins, Boston Creme donuts, and Kim Kardashian. I don't know what I was thinking.......

Faith in god doesn't preclude biology, physics, etc., but it does contradict them. It's like saying belief in the tooth fairy doesn't preclude dentistry. Okay, humans are contradictory and they can believe in both. But that doesn't remove the contradiction that a) it's perfectly reasonable to trust in the power of dentistry, and b) completely unreasonable to believe in tooth fairies. If we teach children to not be able to tell the difference--for instance, by claiming that these two beliefs don't contradict each other--only diminishes our children's ability to tell science from pseudo-science, or reason from irrationality. It makes our kids stupid. Of course there's a difference. The only reason these concepts can be held simultaneously is because humans can be irrational! That's the whole point. You can't claim that an irrational position is rational merely because you can hold it. Claiming that faith (in supernatural) and reason aren't mutually exclusive is irrational. You combining them in a single world view doesn't prove they're consistent, or disprove their mutual exclusivity. You only demonstrate our human capacity for contradiction. No one is disputing that this capacity exists.

Well thank you for telling me what it's appropriate to think.

[SoulBiter]

If there is no possible explanation for where God came from, then it's irrational.

Where does Gravity come from? We know it exists, because we can see its effect, but where does it come from? Its been defined as a force, and one that keeps our solar system from just flinging itself off into the void of space. Einstein thought it might be a 4th dimensional bend in space/time. Now there is some faith for you, a believing in the possibility of something you cant prove. Currently, outside of theory, no one knows why there is 'gravity' and where that force comes from. Yet we all believe in it. Gravity, superstitious nonsense.... 4th dimension, more superstitious nonsense.

[Cail]

If there is no possible explanation for where God came from, then it's irrational.

Where does Gravity come from? We know it exists, because we can see its effect, but where does it come from? Its been defined as a force, and one that keeps our solar system from just flinging itself off into the void of space. Einstein thought it might be a 4th dimensional bend in space/time. Now there is some faith for you, a believing in the possibility of something you cant prove. Currently, outside of theory, no one knows why there is 'gravity' and where that force comes from. Yet we all believe in it. Gravity, superstitious nonsense.... 4th dimension, more superstitious nonsense.

[SoulBiter]

If there is no possible explanation for where God came from, then it's irrational.

Where does Gravity come from? We know it exists, because we can see its effect, but where does it come from? Its been defined as a force, and one that keeps our solar system from just flinging itself off into the void of space. Einstein thought it might be a 4th dimensional bend in space/time. Now there is some faith for you, a believing in the possibility of something you cant prove. Currently, outside of theory, no one knows why there is 'gravity' and where that force comes from. Yet we all believe in it. Gravity, superstitious nonsense.... 4th dimension, more superstitious nonsense.

Damnit... wish I had thought of that....