Chuchulainn vs. the Wishful Thinkers, err, Atheists

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Your first answer has nothing to do with the question it follows, and the question is important. Is the bit in bold correct?

I ask because throughout human history, people being called subhuman was usually followed by persecution. Are you calling me and a whole lot of other people subhuman when you call us demons? If that is what you mean, what do you hope to achieve?

Your answer was relevant to the next bit:

You should have an easier time to see the flaw in your argument if I apply it to you. For the purpose of the argument, I will convert to Pastafarianism. I say that the Pastafarian God, the flying Spaghetti Monster, commands you to eat. If you eat, willingly, you do the bidding of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You have been Touched by His Noodly Appendage.


For anything you do, I can find someone mythical or real who would want you to do that. By your own argument, you would be the willing servant of a lot of people you have never talked to or even heard of and of mythical entities whose existence you dispute.

Willingly serving someone means you agree to do what that person tells you, or what someone who you recognize as the representative of that person tells you. To do that, I would have to believe that person exists. I can't willingly serve Satan if I am sure Satan doesn't exist. Same as you can't willingly serve the Flying Spaghetti Monster by having something to eat. The "A = B" part of your argument is wrong.

We can formally rescue your argument if we redefine "being a willing servant" as doing what that person wants, whether you know what that person wants or not. It would be a weird definition of "willing servant", but let's see what it means. Apply the same argument to yourself: criminally minded hackers like to find computers with security vulnerabilities. Are you sure you have discovered and fixed all vulnerabilities in your computer? If not, and if a hacker uses your computer to send spam or attack other machines, without your knowledge, by your argument you would be a willing servant of that hacker. Would you accept responsibility for whatever that hacker does?

I am sure I can find something that you do and that Satan would want his followers to do if he existed. Arguing that some people are subhuman looks like a promising candidate to me. Do you argue this? If not, what do you mean when you call people demons?


I don't accept your first premise, and without it, your conclusion doesn't follow.

I think it is logically incoherent to simultaneously believe in all the following three things, unless you have a really weird definition of "just":
A) A just God who
B) condemns you to eternal torment unless you follow a specific faith but
C) does not offer a reliable and rational way to identify that faith, thus condemning people for being unlucky at gambling.

I invite you to contribute to my thread on this topic (click here for a link), where I explain the problem in greater detail. If points B and C are true, then the god you believe in is not just, and if He exists, most or all of us will go to hell without me trying to assist. I had hoped people with views like yours would argue their case in that thread, but none did.

I am interested in how far you are willing to take this. The monks who risked and too often lost their lives in the recent protests against the Burmese government were Buddhist monks. They did not believe in the Christian God, or any other (Buddhism is a religion without gods). They had not accepted Jesus as the Lord and Saviour. Would you say they went straight to hell, or that they will inevitably go to hell on Judgment Day?

In your reply to Angelus_Mortis you wrote: It has. In this case it was the Buddhist faith. If you divide up everything into either your faith or satanic, then you must judge those Burmese Buddhist monks to be willing servants of Satan. The same goes for the Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns who are tortured and killed by the Chinese government. Is that what you believe? If you do, why do you think Satan would tempt people into a life of meditation, asceticism, theological debate, and repression by one of the worst governments on Earth? Never mind, I can see why Satan, if he existed, would get a kick out of people being condemned to eternal torment despite living more virtuously than the average Christian.


Let's take that one by one:

I thought Jesus said something like "Give to God what is God's and give to Caesar what is Caesar's" which sounds to me more like politics and religion should be kept separate. Why do you say God and country go together, and is that intended to apply generally? To Burma?


That is the Chinese government's justification for the Tiananmen Square massacre. It is also the Burmese government's justification for violently suppressing the protests. Of course, they define "serving one's country" as obeying the government. Governments usually do. If you don't want to argue for uncritical obedience, you have to state more clearly what "serving one's country" means.


If that is intended as the condition which must be true before you apply the other two rules, it makes a bit more sense. But you still haven't really told me what you think patriotism or serving your country means. If your God fearing country is engaged in an unjust war, what is your patriotic duty? If your God fearing country is engaged in a just but futile war, and extending it will only cost more lives for no benefit, what is your patriotic duty? If your God fearing country is engaged in a war it will definitely lose, and extending it will only cost more lives for no benefit, what is your patriotic duty? If you are a citizen of a state at war with a God fearing state, what is your patriotic duty?

I guess you are an American patriot, because respecting the flag is a very American trait. If you were born and raised in China and considered China your home, would you be a Chinese or American patriot?

Well, sure, and the rest of us too.



I disagree. Emotions *feel* quite strong, and have dramatic effects on our lives, both good and bad; it would be irrational to disregard the real-world effects of irrational causes, emotion included.



...except for the religions that specifically condone mind-altering chemicals as part of their sacraments. Rastafarianism condones marijuana, Christianity condones wine, and the Native American Church condones peyote.



Philosophy is ok in academic environments. In the real world, it tends to be mown down by the first passing shark (metaphorical or otherwise) that it encounters.



I disagree; I think that morality is very rational. We should do what is best for ourselves and others; this idea is based on the survival of our own DNA (both our own copies, and the identical copies that exist in other members of our own species), because the DNA that evolved mechanisms to protect itself is the DNA that is still around.



I disagree. I think that even ultimate justice has very rational underlying principles.



?



I would say, rather, that ought only exists when one has a need in mind.



I would say that such a society needs justice far more than one in which everyone cooperates and works for the common good.



The humans which had values which benefited their survival (cooperation; love; appreciation of beauty; enjoyment of physical comforts; etc) survived, found reason not to kill themselves despite hard times, had children and raised them healthily; humans without those traits found little reason to survive and raise healthy children, and their genes died out. In fact, the DNA molecules do 'care,' in the sense that they tend to present the phenotype of people who value certian things.



Since when is love metaphysical? It's a combination of oxytocin and serotonin, and who knows what-all else.



?
physics deals with empirical reality and can be tested in the real world; metaphysics deals with philosophy and ideas, and cannot be tested. I disagree that they are the same thing.



true; we cannot, for instance, really know to what degere the world actually is as we percieve it. However, I argue that this is the reason that we need to go as deeply down to our original, basic, fundamental assumptions as possible, to 'real-world' origins that we can all agree on, such as '2 + 2 = 4.'



Because logic allows one to go further down to the basic assumptions than faith does, and the pursuit has allowed us to enact miracles that faith never has. Spaceflight, antibiotics, vaccines, heart surgery, IV fluids, passenger trains, TV, radio, recorded music, indoor lighting - all of these things were wrought by logic, not by faith.



*smile*
I don't accept that premise. If anything, the founders of western civilization built it in spite of their faith, not because of it.



science comes closer to the 'truth' than any other framework. The proof is 'in the pudding;' science has allowed us to achieve what religion only dreamed of.