Atheism , religion , ID etc
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Chris Losinger wrote:
do you have an link to the official Atheist Moral Framework ? i want to verify things for myself - i'd hate to learn i've been believing the wrong things all this time.
But you just claimed that atheists are capable of a moral having framework. Are you now saying that there isn't one? If so, why is that?
Chris Losinger wrote:
the source is within us all.
If that were the case, then there would be no murders, no stealing, no adultery, etc... so clearly that is not the case.
Chris Losinger wrote:
i don't believe people are morally hollow. i believe that there is knowledge of a set of fundamental "rights" and "wrongs" within all of us. i don't think we need irrational beliefs to recognize or to make use of that knowledge.
Those moral values are not innate. They are taught to us at a young age by our family and society. Society in turn derived its moral code from a long history of religion. As evidence, I'll point to the Korowai tribe in Papua New Guinea which indoctrinated cannibalism as part of its moral code. They existed independent from all other cultures and did not have the influence of a larger society to basically enforce the concept that cannibalism is wrong. So its quite clear that morality is not innate.
Chris Losinger wrote:
but then, as you'd expect from human institutions, individual religions claim in their own name that what is fundamental to all of us, and then tell the big lie that non-believers don't share those same core values (in effect, making them in-human, as i see). and then they encourage followers to give in to that base a-moral tendency we all share: to persecute non-believers.
Some religions do persecute those who do not participate, but (with the exception of Islam, of course) that's very rare. Christians tend to try to convert you to Christianity rather than make any attempt to persecute. There's nothing wrong with that. After all, I interpret the fact that you're arguing for atheism as an attempt to convert me.
Chris Losinger wrote:
you just said moral relativism arose in the 20th century.
I was referring to the current state of moral affairs initially. There are many aspects of our society that are currentlt considered acceptable that would have been
espeir wrote:
They had no moral authority and descended into a pretty F'd up way of life.
Let's have some quotes from polytheistic Romans on the subject of morality, lets see how many you agree with, or indeed recognise as part of your own. "He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has." "Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one's desires, but by the removal of desire." "If you would not fail of what you seek, or incur what you shun, desire nothing that belongs to others; shun nothing that lies beyond your own control; otherwise you must necessarily be disappointed in what you seek, and incur what you shun." "If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you were bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, but satisfied to live now according to nature, speaking heroic truth in every word which you utter, you will live happy. And there is no man able to prevent this." "The soul should know whither it is going and whence it came, what is good for it and what is evil, what it seeks and what it avoids, and what is that Reason which distinguishes between the desirable and the undesirable, and thereby tames the madness of our desires and calms the violence of our fears." Ok, you probably wont like the last one :P Ryan
"Michael Moore and Mel Gibson are the same person, except for a few sit-ups. Moore thought his cheesy political blooper reel was going to tell people how to vote. Mel thought that his little gay SM movie about his imaginary friend was going to help him get to heaven." - Penn Jillette
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US vs. USSR
In the larger scope of things: While the USSR (as a short-term political failure) may have officially preached "atheism", the individual societies enveloped under Soviet control were all established with strong religious under-pinnings and continue their religious roots today. "If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done." - Peter Ustinov
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espeir wrote:
That's what happened to Rome.
You are kidding right? You do realise that the "moral core" of pagan roman society was stoisism and civic duty, which was disrupted by their adoption of Christianity. Personaly, I think it was an improvement in many ways. But the fact remains that it wasn't toga parties and buggery that caused the empire to fall, there were many factors, including the introduction of Christianity into public life. "As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear, without surprise or scandal, that the introduction, or at least the abuse, of Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of the military spirit were buried in the cloister; a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity. Faith, zeal, curiosity, and the more earthly passions of malice and ambition kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody, and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country. Yet party-spirit, however pernicious or absurd, is a principle of union as well as of dissension. The bishops, from eighteen hundred pulpits, inculcated the duty of passive obedience to a lawful and orthodox sovereign; their frequent assemblies, and perpetual correspondence, maintained the communion of distant churches: and the benevolent temper of the gospel was strengthened, though confined, by the spiritual alliance of the Catholics. The sacred indolence of the monks was devoutly embraced by a servile and effeminate age; but, if superstition had not afforded a decent retreat, the same vices would have tempted the unworthy Romans to desert, from baser motives, the standard of the republic. Religious precepts are easily obeyed, which indulge and sanctify the natural inclinations of their votaries; but the pure and genuine influence of Christianity may be traced in its beneficial, though imperfect, effect
I didn't claim that immorality caused Rome to fall. It contributed to their demise (but I agree that the introduction of Christianity and battles with the north were the primary factors). I claimed that the lack of a centralized moral authority caused their morality to fall. Their morality was derived from the state because their polytheistic "religion" did not have a centralized moral authority. As I stated is the case with secular moral codes (I referenced atheism earlier, but it implements secular morality), decentralized moral authority will deteriorate overall morality. I believe this will be an accelerated process in the US because we're in the information age, making the broadcast of moral relativism quicker.
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Chris Losinger wrote:
do you have an link to the official Atheist Moral Framework ? i want to verify things for myself - i'd hate to learn i've been believing the wrong things all this time.
But you just claimed that atheists are capable of a moral having framework. Are you now saying that there isn't one? If so, why is that?
Chris Losinger wrote:
the source is within us all.
If that were the case, then there would be no murders, no stealing, no adultery, etc... so clearly that is not the case.
Chris Losinger wrote:
i don't believe people are morally hollow. i believe that there is knowledge of a set of fundamental "rights" and "wrongs" within all of us. i don't think we need irrational beliefs to recognize or to make use of that knowledge.
Those moral values are not innate. They are taught to us at a young age by our family and society. Society in turn derived its moral code from a long history of religion. As evidence, I'll point to the Korowai tribe in Papua New Guinea which indoctrinated cannibalism as part of its moral code. They existed independent from all other cultures and did not have the influence of a larger society to basically enforce the concept that cannibalism is wrong. So its quite clear that morality is not innate.
Chris Losinger wrote:
but then, as you'd expect from human institutions, individual religions claim in their own name that what is fundamental to all of us, and then tell the big lie that non-believers don't share those same core values (in effect, making them in-human, as i see). and then they encourage followers to give in to that base a-moral tendency we all share: to persecute non-believers.
Some religions do persecute those who do not participate, but (with the exception of Islam, of course) that's very rare. Christians tend to try to convert you to Christianity rather than make any attempt to persecute. There's nothing wrong with that. After all, I interpret the fact that you're arguing for atheism as an attempt to convert me.
Chris Losinger wrote:
you just said moral relativism arose in the 20th century.
I was referring to the current state of moral affairs initially. There are many aspects of our society that are currentlt considered acceptable that would have been
espeir wrote:
But you just claimed that atheists are capable of a moral having framework. Are you now saying that there isn't one? If so, why is that?
i claimed that? where? i certainly don't think that. i have a perfectly fine framework - i just didn't get it from any religion and i don't need to have it maintained or bolstered or whatever by some ghost.
espeir wrote:
If that were the case, then there would be no murders, no stealing, no adultery, etc... so clearly that is not the case.
err... if religion was the solution to that stuff, no religious person would ever commit a crime. i never said people are good at choosing right from wrong in all circumstances. people decide what they want more: to be good, or to feel good. they often choose the latter. they always have, they always will.
espeir wrote:
After all, I interpret the fact that you're arguing for atheism as an attempt to convert me.
in my opinion, a mind that is unencumbered by superstition and dogma is a healthy mind. things are clearer when you don't have to worry about that stuff.
espeir wrote:
. Society in turn derived its moral code from a long history of religion. As evidence, I'll point to the Korowai tribe in Papua New Guinea which indoctrinated cannibalism as part of its moral code.
they use it as a punishment. we don't eat people for punishment, true. instead, we electrocute people, break their necks, blow them into fine red mist with bombs, incinerate them with napalm, perforate them with guns, poison them, torture them to death. we take pictures of this, put it on CD-Rs and give it to our friends. up until very recently, public executions were a huge crowd pleaser in this country. you could buy souveniers. we killed, at a minimum, 100,000 people in one shot in Hiroshima. most of those people were civilians. tens of thousands were children. we spend millions of dollars to create movies that show endless scenes of people being killed or abused in hundreds of different ways, and people pay to see it, and we call it "entertainment". we smile and laugh at it. we write songs, stories and poems about killing each other, about killing people for the absolutely stupidest of reasons (for love, sex, money, power, politics, religion, fear) our culture is rife with cel
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Roger J wrote:
now Id like to know what other atheists or determinists think sustain those rules?
the "rules" are the laws of physics. they exist independently of life, evolution or any '-theism'. we know about them because a universe that relies on them exists. if that's seems circular it's only because you've hit the very rock-bottom foundation of the universe: there's simply nothing more fundamental: they are what determines everything. without them, there is nothing. in a sense, they are the universe. they don't need sustaining. Cleek | Image Toolkits | Thumbnail maker
got bored, huh? glad to see you back. Mike "We ain't stuck on stupid." badass Lt. General Russel Honore **"Remember - live bunnies are a great source of nourishment"**silly-assed cartoon A vegan is someone who never heard a carrot cry!
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andy brummer wrote:
Just because evolution produces something adapted to a specific niche, from an earlier form, it doesn't mean the later form is superior.
I never said it was superior. Only that those societies which were religious out competed any that were not. I think it is clear obvious that the underlieing laws of the universe clearly prefer religious observers... ;) "You get that which you tolerate" -- modified at 12:26 Friday 7th April, 2006
Stan Shannon wrote:
I think it is clear obvious that the underlieing laws of the universe clearly prefer religious observers...
Got my 5 for that one. :laugh:
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espeir wrote:
They had no moral authority and descended into a pretty F'd up way of life.
Let's have some quotes from polytheistic Romans on the subject of morality, lets see how many you agree with, or indeed recognise as part of your own. "He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has." "Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one's desires, but by the removal of desire." "If you would not fail of what you seek, or incur what you shun, desire nothing that belongs to others; shun nothing that lies beyond your own control; otherwise you must necessarily be disappointed in what you seek, and incur what you shun." "If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you were bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, but satisfied to live now according to nature, speaking heroic truth in every word which you utter, you will live happy. And there is no man able to prevent this." "The soul should know whither it is going and whence it came, what is good for it and what is evil, what it seeks and what it avoids, and what is that Reason which distinguishes between the desirable and the undesirable, and thereby tames the madness of our desires and calms the violence of our fears." Ok, you probably wont like the last one :P Ryan
"Michael Moore and Mel Gibson are the same person, except for a few sit-ups. Moore thought his cheesy political blooper reel was going to tell people how to vote. Mel thought that his little gay SM movie about his imaginary friend was going to help him get to heaven." - Penn Jillette
I like the last one! :-D However, the Stoics defined Roman morality early on and lost influence later on because, as I said, there was not a central moral authority. I recognize at least a couple of the quotes above from Epictetus who died 150 years before Constantine was born.
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espeir wrote:
That's what happened to Rome.
You are kidding right? You do realise that the "moral core" of pagan roman society was stoisism and civic duty, which was disrupted by their adoption of Christianity. Personaly, I think it was an improvement in many ways. But the fact remains that it wasn't toga parties and buggery that caused the empire to fall, there were many factors, including the introduction of Christianity into public life. "As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear, without surprise or scandal, that the introduction, or at least the abuse, of Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of the military spirit were buried in the cloister; a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity. Faith, zeal, curiosity, and the more earthly passions of malice and ambition kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody, and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country. Yet party-spirit, however pernicious or absurd, is a principle of union as well as of dissension. The bishops, from eighteen hundred pulpits, inculcated the duty of passive obedience to a lawful and orthodox sovereign; their frequent assemblies, and perpetual correspondence, maintained the communion of distant churches: and the benevolent temper of the gospel was strengthened, though confined, by the spiritual alliance of the Catholics. The sacred indolence of the monks was devoutly embraced by a servile and effeminate age; but, if superstition had not afforded a decent retreat, the same vices would have tempted the unworthy Romans to desert, from baser motives, the standard of the republic. Religious precepts are easily obeyed, which indulge and sanctify the natural inclinations of their votaries; but the pure and genuine influence of Christianity may be traced in its beneficial, though imperfect, effect
Ryan Roberts wrote:
"Michael Moore and Mel Gibson are the same person, except for a few sit-ups. Moore thought his cheesy political blooper reel was going to tell people how to vote. Mel thought that his little gay SM movie about his imaginary friend was going to help him get to heaven." - Penn Jillette
Most of the time that guy gets on my nerves, but he can come up with some good zingers.
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Chris Losinger wrote:
all of this assumes those values are variable. but what if they aren't ? they aren't here and now, so why assume they are anywhere else?
Because there isn't any natural or apparent reason for them to be what they are. The correct answer is wait until we know more, suspend your disbelief for now. However, it is phenominally unlikely that there would be 4 forces one tuned exactly to produce nuclei, one tuned exactly to produce mater over anti-matter, one tuned exactly to attach electrons to the nuclei, and one exactly weak enough to produce the large scale structure of the universe. It's definitely an odd universe that we live in. All this comes from trying to find dependencies between the various parameters to satisfy our sense of intellectual closure. A theory with zero to a few parameters like General Relativity is more satisfing then dealing with the number of arbitrary parameters that we have now.
If evidence reaches a conclusion then it makes sense. If it doesn't, it's just lame to go on TRYING to prove a theory that you made up when all the evidence points the other way. That's how crazy is made. -espeir
andy brummer wrote:
Because there isn't any natural or apparent reason for them to be what they are
why do you need a reason ? at some point, things just are - even if we don't understand why.
andy brummer wrote:
A theory with zero to a few parameters like General Relativity is more satisfing then dealing with the number of arbitrary parameters that we have now.
true. we'll figure it out, eventually. Cleek | Image Toolkits | Thumbnail maker
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espeir wrote:
But you just claimed that atheists are capable of a moral having framework. Are you now saying that there isn't one? If so, why is that?
i claimed that? where? i certainly don't think that. i have a perfectly fine framework - i just didn't get it from any religion and i don't need to have it maintained or bolstered or whatever by some ghost.
espeir wrote:
If that were the case, then there would be no murders, no stealing, no adultery, etc... so clearly that is not the case.
err... if religion was the solution to that stuff, no religious person would ever commit a crime. i never said people are good at choosing right from wrong in all circumstances. people decide what they want more: to be good, or to feel good. they often choose the latter. they always have, they always will.
espeir wrote:
After all, I interpret the fact that you're arguing for atheism as an attempt to convert me.
in my opinion, a mind that is unencumbered by superstition and dogma is a healthy mind. things are clearer when you don't have to worry about that stuff.
espeir wrote:
. Society in turn derived its moral code from a long history of religion. As evidence, I'll point to the Korowai tribe in Papua New Guinea which indoctrinated cannibalism as part of its moral code.
they use it as a punishment. we don't eat people for punishment, true. instead, we electrocute people, break their necks, blow them into fine red mist with bombs, incinerate them with napalm, perforate them with guns, poison them, torture them to death. we take pictures of this, put it on CD-Rs and give it to our friends. up until very recently, public executions were a huge crowd pleaser in this country. you could buy souveniers. we killed, at a minimum, 100,000 people in one shot in Hiroshima. most of those people were civilians. tens of thousands were children. we spend millions of dollars to create movies that show endless scenes of people being killed or abused in hundreds of different ways, and people pay to see it, and we call it "entertainment". we smile and laugh at it. we write songs, stories and poems about killing each other, about killing people for the absolutely stupidest of reasons (for love, sex, money, power, politics, religion, fear) our culture is rife with cel
Chris Losinger wrote:
i claimed that? where? i certainly don't think that. i have a perfectly fine framework - i just didn't get it from any religion and i don't need to have it maintained or bolstered or whatever by some ghost.
Earlier you defended the idea that Atheists can have a moral framework. However, you personally having a moral framework is not useful. For morality to be effective, it needs to be derived from a higher authority so that society agrees on what is moral and what is not. Otherwise, your neighbor could determine that murder is moral and whack you.
Chris Losinger wrote:
err... if religion was the solution to that stuff, no religious person would ever commit a crime. i never said people are good at choosing right from wrong in all circumstances. people decide what they want more: to be good, or to feel good. they often choose the latter. they always have, they always will.
That's not the case. Religion, recognizing a higher authority, compels people to condemn immorality. So if someone does commit a crime, moral sensibilities prompt society to punish that crime. I'm not saying the same is not true of secular morality, but secular morality is self-defined morality which results in moral relativism which results in immorality.
Chris Losinger wrote:
they use it as a punishment. we don't eat people for punishment, true. instead, we electrocute people, break their necks, blow them into fine red mist with bombs, incinerate them with napalm, perforate them with guns, poison them, torture them to death. we take pictures of this, put it on CD-Rs and give it to our friends. up until very recently, public executions were a huge crowd pleaser in this country. you could buy souveniers.
Every society has some concept of justice and punishment (which should be distinguished from war). However, your example only supports my claim that morality is not innate. If you believe that capital punishment is immoral because it kills a murderer and I believe that it is moral because justice is served, then we disagree at a very fundamental level. That demonstrates that morality does not come from within. It comes from the repsective surroundings we grew up in.
Chris Losinger wrote:
we killed, at a minimum, 100,000 people in one shot in Hiroshima. most of those people were civilians. tens of t
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Ok, Im gonna give this religious stuff a shot here :P Im a true beleiver of evolution, evolution is proved every day when you use genetic algorithms to fine tune systems , or when bacterias become resistent versus some medicines.. so in my mind I "know" evolution works. but in order for evolution to work , you need an environment where things can evolve under fixed or slowly changing rules , prefferably fixed rules. eg a simulated evolution can only work if you provide some sort of rules in which something can evolve. and the same goes for our universe , we know we have certain natural laws etc , which makes things act a certain way.. which in turn allows evolution.. so far so good. now Id like to know what other atheists or determinists think sustain those rules? (in our universe) can a rule exist w/o anything sustaining it? where did such rules come from? why doesnt the law of gravity suddenly start acting different, whats stopping it from doing so? if those rules didnt exist , everything would be truly random and no evolution would work. (just a thought in the spirit of atheism vs ID vs whatever :-) ) //Roger
I've been watching this conversation develop in the SB and I have noticed several points being thrown around that the theory of evolution is a proven fact. To believe so is a just a leap of faith as big as a belief in God (or any other deity). Darwin’s tests of evolution proved several things but generally not what most people think. For instance, one large experiment dealt with pigeons. Darwin bred these pigeons so that offspring (the mutants) would have different features than its parents. However, after thousands of tests Darwin was still not able to produce a new ‘species’ of bird. Ok, his test was too controlled so he let the all of the mutants back in with the originals and the offspring of this breeding over several generations came back with the result that all of the birds looked like the originals. Some of you might be thinking “Change happens over long periods of time with generations upon generations of changes making a new species.” To answer this point, Darwin also tested with fruit flies, a simpler organism with a lot more generations in a given time than pigeons. Unfortunately for Darwin, he may have been able to breed fruit flies with bigger or smaller wings, different colors, etc. However, after all of these tests the new flies were still the same species of fruit fly. He also reintroduced these to the control sample of flies and all of the flies eventually became just like the original. Point Proven: If a mutant of a species appears on the scene, it (and its mutation) will be bred out of the scene. Secondly, intermingling of species is not going to cause evolutionary change. If breeding between horses and donkeys will bear mules and lions and tigers will bear ligers (All Napoleon Dynamite jokes aside). Inter-species in most cases will not occur and if it does the offspring are sterile and cannot pass its genes to another generation. Point Proven: Changes that happen because of inter-specie mixing (if they occur) will not be passed on to future generations because of sterility. There are more points I could bring up but this post is long enough. I am not trying to prove that a supernatural power does exist. The point of this post was to try to point out that believing in evolution is a leap of faith and is not proven by undeniable evidence. Brett A. Whittington Application Developer
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Alvaro Mendez wrote:
Religious leaders.
Who?
Alvaro Mendez wrote:
And how did morality make it into religious books in the first place?
Certainly not through common sense. Otherwise, what would be the purpose behind writing them down? When was the last time you saw a guidebook telling you how to practice common sense?
espeir wrote:
Who?
Religious leaders. I think you misunderstood me. When I said they "claim to know the supreme being", I didn't mean "know" as in know him personally, like I know my sister. I meant "know about him", like we know the president. Listen to religious leaders speak. They claim to know what God is, what he's done, why he's done it, and that he continues doing it, in mysterious ways of course. :-)
espeir wrote:
Certainly not through common sense.
You seemed to have missed my point. It was people who wrote morality into religious books. And they did it based on their ideas of what morality should be. Some are based on common sense (like not killing or stealing), others aren't (like no sex before marriage or covering your legs if you're a Jewish woman).
espeir wrote:
Otherwise, what would be the purpose behind writing them down?
For the sake of completeness, and in case anyone lacks common sense. [edit]Perhaps also because writing things down tends to give them more weight and makes the message easier to retransmit.[/edit] Common sense dictates that if I use the dishes in the kitchen where I work, that I should clean them up afterwards. Still, there's a note posted over the sink telling people to do so. Have you heard the expression, "Common sense is not that common"? Alvaro
The bible was written when people were even more stupid than they are today. Can you imagine that? - David Cross -- modified at 14:02 Friday 7th April, 2006
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I've been watching this conversation develop in the SB and I have noticed several points being thrown around that the theory of evolution is a proven fact. To believe so is a just a leap of faith as big as a belief in God (or any other deity). Darwin’s tests of evolution proved several things but generally not what most people think. For instance, one large experiment dealt with pigeons. Darwin bred these pigeons so that offspring (the mutants) would have different features than its parents. However, after thousands of tests Darwin was still not able to produce a new ‘species’ of bird. Ok, his test was too controlled so he let the all of the mutants back in with the originals and the offspring of this breeding over several generations came back with the result that all of the birds looked like the originals. Some of you might be thinking “Change happens over long periods of time with generations upon generations of changes making a new species.” To answer this point, Darwin also tested with fruit flies, a simpler organism with a lot more generations in a given time than pigeons. Unfortunately for Darwin, he may have been able to breed fruit flies with bigger or smaller wings, different colors, etc. However, after all of these tests the new flies were still the same species of fruit fly. He also reintroduced these to the control sample of flies and all of the flies eventually became just like the original. Point Proven: If a mutant of a species appears on the scene, it (and its mutation) will be bred out of the scene. Secondly, intermingling of species is not going to cause evolutionary change. If breeding between horses and donkeys will bear mules and lions and tigers will bear ligers (All Napoleon Dynamite jokes aside). Inter-species in most cases will not occur and if it does the offspring are sterile and cannot pass its genes to another generation. Point Proven: Changes that happen because of inter-specie mixing (if they occur) will not be passed on to future generations because of sterility. There are more points I could bring up but this post is long enough. I am not trying to prove that a supernatural power does exist. The point of this post was to try to point out that believing in evolution is a leap of faith and is not proven by undeniable evidence. Brett A. Whittington Application Developer
bwhittington wrote:
The point of this post was to try to point out that believing in evolution is a leap of faith and is not proven by undeniable evidence.
Undeniable evidence? Maybe not, but that's why evolution is considered a scientific theory not a natural law such as gravity. At the same time, science can produce boat-loads of real evidence that supports the theory of evolution. While religion cannot produce a shred of real evidence that supports the existance of any god. "If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done." - Peter Ustinov
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I agree with you. But even more than that, we live in a univese of emergent properties. Properties, which did not exist before, appear to emerge quite effortlessly from the underlieing rules of the universe as it conforms to the processes which we currently describe as 'evolution'. For example, the properties of life and consciousness have emerged from the underlieing mechanisms of the universe. Was such emergence accidental? Or inevitable? Do the underlieing mechanisms merely allow for or do they mandate the emergency of such properties. We live in a universe which we can directly confirm has the potential to generate consciousness. In fact, it is the one property of the universe with which we are the most intimately familiar. What separates the potential from the fact? Was the universe ever not conscious? Is the universe anything more (as some scientists are beginning to ask) than a vast quantum computer. Why would a universe posses such bizarre capabilities? Obvoiusly the the necessary answer to that question is not 'because God willed it so'. But it is difficult to avoid a conclusion that something was 'built into' the emergent potential of the universe for some reason. "You get that which you tolerate" -- modified at 8:51 Friday 7th April, 2006
Stan Shannon wrote:
But it is difficult to avoid a conclusion that something was 'built into' the emergent potential of the universe for some reason.
Why does there need to be a reason? Who is to say that there are not other universes whose initial conditions do not lead to life? Who is to say that this universe does not contain other life forms with a completely different concept of "morality"? Who is to say that our concept of morality is even a "correct" one? (I would argue that it is only "correct" for us to the extent that it enhances the likelyhood of the survival of our species, and that that is in fact the fundamental source of that concept - that which is clearly immoral is that which, applied universally, has a negative impact on the chances of our survival. Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power Eric Hoffer All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Edmund Burke
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espeir wrote:
Who?
Religious leaders. I think you misunderstood me. When I said they "claim to know the supreme being", I didn't mean "know" as in know him personally, like I know my sister. I meant "know about him", like we know the president. Listen to religious leaders speak. They claim to know what God is, what he's done, why he's done it, and that he continues doing it, in mysterious ways of course. :-)
espeir wrote:
Certainly not through common sense.
You seemed to have missed my point. It was people who wrote morality into religious books. And they did it based on their ideas of what morality should be. Some are based on common sense (like not killing or stealing), others aren't (like no sex before marriage or covering your legs if you're a Jewish woman).
espeir wrote:
Otherwise, what would be the purpose behind writing them down?
For the sake of completeness, and in case anyone lacks common sense. [edit]Perhaps also because writing things down tends to give them more weight and makes the message easier to retransmit.[/edit] Common sense dictates that if I use the dishes in the kitchen where I work, that I should clean them up afterwards. Still, there's a note posted over the sink telling people to do so. Have you heard the expression, "Common sense is not that common"? Alvaro
The bible was written when people were even more stupid than they are today. Can you imagine that? - David Cross -- modified at 14:02 Friday 7th April, 2006
Alvaro Mendez wrote:
ke I know my sister
Dude...That's sick!
Alvaro Mendez wrote:
I think you misunderstood me. When I said they "claim to know the supreme being", I didn't mean "know" as in know him personally, like I know my sister. I meant "know about him", like we know the president.
If you personally believe any religious texts then this is true because religious leaders spend their lives learning the inticacies of those texts.
Alvaro Mendez wrote:
You seemed to have missed my point. It was people who wrote morality into religious books. And they did it based on their ideas of what morality should be. Some are based on common sense (like not killing or stealing), others aren't (like no sex before marriage or covering your legs if you're a Jewish woman).
Then it's not common sense. Common sense is...common, in that it's self-evident to everyone. Even an atheist should recognize the importance of centralized moral authority. You claim that religious leaders defined morality long ago through their own opinions of what it should be. Even via your belief, that implies that there are competing moral theories. One of the many problems with atheism is that it does not recognize a moral authority. That's a big problem.
Alvaro Mendez wrote:
Common sense dictates that if I use the dishes in the kitchen where I work, that I should clean them up afterwards. Still, there's a note posted over the sink telling people to do so. Have you heard the expression, "Common sense is not that common"?
That's not common sense. That's common courtesy. Common sense is something that is clearly self-evident...like if nobody cleans the dishes and people leave them in the sink, then they will pile up and be dirty. A common moral code could say that evyerone cleans their own dishes. Moral discord could result in everyone thinking that managers should clean the dishes since they do the least work while managers think only workers do the dishes since they're the workers...resulting in no dishes being done.
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I've been watching this conversation develop in the SB and I have noticed several points being thrown around that the theory of evolution is a proven fact. To believe so is a just a leap of faith as big as a belief in God (or any other deity). Darwin’s tests of evolution proved several things but generally not what most people think. For instance, one large experiment dealt with pigeons. Darwin bred these pigeons so that offspring (the mutants) would have different features than its parents. However, after thousands of tests Darwin was still not able to produce a new ‘species’ of bird. Ok, his test was too controlled so he let the all of the mutants back in with the originals and the offspring of this breeding over several generations came back with the result that all of the birds looked like the originals. Some of you might be thinking “Change happens over long periods of time with generations upon generations of changes making a new species.” To answer this point, Darwin also tested with fruit flies, a simpler organism with a lot more generations in a given time than pigeons. Unfortunately for Darwin, he may have been able to breed fruit flies with bigger or smaller wings, different colors, etc. However, after all of these tests the new flies were still the same species of fruit fly. He also reintroduced these to the control sample of flies and all of the flies eventually became just like the original. Point Proven: If a mutant of a species appears on the scene, it (and its mutation) will be bred out of the scene. Secondly, intermingling of species is not going to cause evolutionary change. If breeding between horses and donkeys will bear mules and lions and tigers will bear ligers (All Napoleon Dynamite jokes aside). Inter-species in most cases will not occur and if it does the offspring are sterile and cannot pass its genes to another generation. Point Proven: Changes that happen because of inter-specie mixing (if they occur) will not be passed on to future generations because of sterility. There are more points I could bring up but this post is long enough. I am not trying to prove that a supernatural power does exist. The point of this post was to try to point out that believing in evolution is a leap of faith and is not proven by undeniable evidence. Brett A. Whittington Application Developer
bwhittington wrote:
Point Proven: If a mutant of a species appears on the scene, it (and its mutation) will be bred out of the scene.
That's not proven at all. Mutations introduce new information for natural selection to work on. Over any short period of time, you are unlikely to produce a significantly different creature because mutation is adding differences slowly. Over a short period of time, all you are doing is redistributing the existing genetic alleles. The claim that mutations are "bred out of the scene" is true if the mutation is harmful. It's inaccurate to say that it's always eliminated. I know creationists like to point-out the problem of using sickle-cell anemia as an example of evolution, but I'm going to use it to make a very limited point. In general, sickle-cell anemia is harmful to humans; people with two copies of the allele will die. However, a person with a single copy of the sickle-cell anemia allele are more likely to survive malaria. More specifically, they are ten times less likely to die from malaria. In malaria-prone areas, the result is that a certain level of sickle-cell anemia genes in the population is benefitial. You end up with a balancing act: people with two copies of the sickle-cell anemia allele are going to die (usually between 20 and 40), people with zero copies of the sickle-cell anemia allele are more likely to be killed by malaria, but people with one copy of the gene are the most likely to survive. And, it's true that sickle-cell anemia is quite common in some malaria-prone areas (almost 10% of Africans have the sickle-cell anemia gene). Which brings me to my point: sickle-cell anemia is a mutation which was not "bred out of the scene" (as you say happens to all mutations). ----------------------------------------------------- Empires Of Steel[^]
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Chris Losinger wrote:
i claimed that? where? i certainly don't think that. i have a perfectly fine framework - i just didn't get it from any religion and i don't need to have it maintained or bolstered or whatever by some ghost.
Earlier you defended the idea that Atheists can have a moral framework. However, you personally having a moral framework is not useful. For morality to be effective, it needs to be derived from a higher authority so that society agrees on what is moral and what is not. Otherwise, your neighbor could determine that murder is moral and whack you.
Chris Losinger wrote:
err... if religion was the solution to that stuff, no religious person would ever commit a crime. i never said people are good at choosing right from wrong in all circumstances. people decide what they want more: to be good, or to feel good. they often choose the latter. they always have, they always will.
That's not the case. Religion, recognizing a higher authority, compels people to condemn immorality. So if someone does commit a crime, moral sensibilities prompt society to punish that crime. I'm not saying the same is not true of secular morality, but secular morality is self-defined morality which results in moral relativism which results in immorality.
Chris Losinger wrote:
they use it as a punishment. we don't eat people for punishment, true. instead, we electrocute people, break their necks, blow them into fine red mist with bombs, incinerate them with napalm, perforate them with guns, poison them, torture them to death. we take pictures of this, put it on CD-Rs and give it to our friends. up until very recently, public executions were a huge crowd pleaser in this country. you could buy souveniers.
Every society has some concept of justice and punishment (which should be distinguished from war). However, your example only supports my claim that morality is not innate. If you believe that capital punishment is immoral because it kills a murderer and I believe that it is moral because justice is served, then we disagree at a very fundamental level. That demonstrates that morality does not come from within. It comes from the repsective surroundings we grew up in.
Chris Losinger wrote:
we killed, at a minimum, 100,000 people in one shot in Hiroshima. most of those people were civilians. tens of t
espeir wrote:
For morality to be effective, it needs to be derived from a higher authority so that society agrees on what is moral and what is not. Otherwise, your neighbor could determine that murder is moral and whack you
nonsense. anyone who realizes other people are alive too knows murder is wrong. that people don't always care is a different matter - and one your religion hasn't, despite having 2000 years to work at it, fixed.
espeir wrote:
but secular morality is self-defined morality which results in moral relativism which results in immorality.
sheer nonsense. it would be hard to make so few words as that add up to a greater number of unsupported conclusions.
espeir wrote:
However, your example only supports my claim that morality is not innate.
the fact that they have the death penalty means that they have crimes that are severe enough to be worthy of death. sounds like morality to me. sounds like christian morality even. cannibalism as a punishment is simply the death penalty with an added insult to the survivors. big deal. once i'm dead you can have me stuffed and mounted on the roof of KFC for all i care. the fact that you're going to kill me is the only part that really matters. i'm sure there's a widely-ignored commandment about killing, somewhere.
espeir wrote:
That act also saved an estimated million more. Japanese morality was derived from an emperor.
go tell the innocent dead. go explain your justification. i'm sure they'll be very interested. six year olds have pretty good grasps of foreign policy (espcially the ghosts of six year olds!). maybe you can read them the part of the bible that justifies it - it'll be good for them to learn where your superior morality derives from.
espeir wrote:
No, you can attribute that to moral relativism. Compare movies today to movies 60 years ago when moral relativism had not yet taken hold.
you mean all those detective movies about murderers, the western gunfights, and WWII battle movies ? yeah... good stuff. those were the days: back when killing was only in black and white, as god intended it. well, thankfully there aren't more "atheists" like myself around, or we'd all go around thinking "no, maybe the lives of innocent children shoul
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andy brummer wrote:
Just because evolution produces something adapted to a specific niche, from an earlier form, it doesn't mean the later form is superior.
I never said it was superior. Only that those societies which were religious out competed any that were not. I think it is clear obvious that the underlieing laws of the universe clearly prefer religious observers... ;) "You get that which you tolerate" -- modified at 12:26 Friday 7th April, 2006
Stan Shannon wrote:
those societies which were religious out competed any that were not
Can you name any early society that did not have a mythology? North American Native Indians belive(d) in animal spirits, the Norse believed in a pantheon of gods, the Mayans believed in many gods. I can't think of any early societies that were agnostic or atheist. Lack of knowledge leads to superstition, superstition grows up to become religion.
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. ~Stephen Roberts
« eikonoklastes »
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In the larger scope of things: While the USSR (as a short-term political failure) may have officially preached "atheism", the individual societies enveloped under Soviet control were all established with strong religious under-pinnings and continue their religious roots today. "If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done." - Peter Ustinov
Correction. They have resumed today.
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I've been watching this conversation develop in the SB and I have noticed several points being thrown around that the theory of evolution is a proven fact. To believe so is a just a leap of faith as big as a belief in God (or any other deity). Darwin’s tests of evolution proved several things but generally not what most people think. For instance, one large experiment dealt with pigeons. Darwin bred these pigeons so that offspring (the mutants) would have different features than its parents. However, after thousands of tests Darwin was still not able to produce a new ‘species’ of bird. Ok, his test was too controlled so he let the all of the mutants back in with the originals and the offspring of this breeding over several generations came back with the result that all of the birds looked like the originals. Some of you might be thinking “Change happens over long periods of time with generations upon generations of changes making a new species.” To answer this point, Darwin also tested with fruit flies, a simpler organism with a lot more generations in a given time than pigeons. Unfortunately for Darwin, he may have been able to breed fruit flies with bigger or smaller wings, different colors, etc. However, after all of these tests the new flies were still the same species of fruit fly. He also reintroduced these to the control sample of flies and all of the flies eventually became just like the original. Point Proven: If a mutant of a species appears on the scene, it (and its mutation) will be bred out of the scene. Secondly, intermingling of species is not going to cause evolutionary change. If breeding between horses and donkeys will bear mules and lions and tigers will bear ligers (All Napoleon Dynamite jokes aside). Inter-species in most cases will not occur and if it does the offspring are sterile and cannot pass its genes to another generation. Point Proven: Changes that happen because of inter-specie mixing (if they occur) will not be passed on to future generations because of sterility. There are more points I could bring up but this post is long enough. I am not trying to prove that a supernatural power does exist. The point of this post was to try to point out that believing in evolution is a leap of faith and is not proven by undeniable evidence. Brett A. Whittington Application Developer
bwhittington wrote:
Point Proven: If a mutant of a species appears on the scene, it (and its mutation) will be bred out of the scene.
What does that have to do with evolutionary theory? Theoritically, a new species will not arise until random genetic drift over time between the two populations has rendered them incapable of interbreeding. The theory of evolution does not require that just because a species has been bred for different attributes doesn't mean it will automatically become a new species.
bwhittington wrote:
intermingling of species is not going to cause evolutionary change. If breeding between horses and donkeys will bear mules and lions and tigers will bear ligers (All Napoleon Dynamite jokes aside). Inter-species in most cases will not occur and if it does the offspring are sterile and cannot pass its genes to another generation.
I don't recall that ever being advanced as a mechanism for evolutionary change. "You get that which you tolerate"