Free-will and Atheism

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Perhaps I can dumb this down a lot for you.

My view: Religion, a little flawed. Atheism, a little flawed.

Your view: Religion completely flawed. Atheism, not flawed at all.

Does this sound about right?

You mean my one if/ statement?

Another person who can't read. Lovely.

You have clearly made this inference, several times, perhaps you are suffering from aphasia? Or is it just too hard to come up with a meaningful, non-intellectually repulsive reply for you?

Let me refresh your memory:



Here you say religion defines the outcome of positive or negative behavior, thus providing "accountability". These outcomes are heaven or damnation, obviously, where you will be held accountable for your conduct in the mortal world for all eternity. You say this yourself here:



You have free will to be good or evil under religion or non-religion. I would like it if you would please provide where religion has stopped evil throughout history due to its ability to generate "accountability"



You insult me when you say I and others without religion have no moral framework. I am a very kind and ethical person, and judging by your conduct, probably a better one than you are

Furthermore your arguments seem to be in direct opposition to your statement here:



Why can't you guys make up your minds? Is the obscurity deliberate in order to cover up a lack of argument?





No, you are just massively disingenuous, unaware of your own fallacies, even unaware what atheism actually is.



You have no valid arguments, that's why you resort to these petty insults. This user has taken the time to write very well thought out replies to you and you spit in his face. Where is your accountability, now, cw10? You don't seem like much of a nice guy. I guess it doesn't matter though, atheists are damned anyways, the big guy will probably give you a pat on the back for trolling them, amiright?

Last edited by Vigilans on 22 Feb 2012, 4:02 am, edited 2 times in total.

*Sigh*

I am trying to keep this slightly above the level of personal attacks. If you can't or won't address my actual point, why are you still posting on this topic? Last I checked, the Code of Conduct rather explicitly forbids personal attacks, and yet your posts through the thread have been so shot through with them I consider it astonishing that you've managed to get almost a thousand posts without being banned to date. Can we get back on topic now?

You started with a false assumption. I didn't make any if/then statements. Perhaps you can rephrase?

That's maybe an ultimate outcome? But that's a very limited and unknowledgeable view. There are outlines and examples for just about every circumstance and they all don't lead to the pearly gates or hells own kitchen. It can be a social circumstance where people just won't have anything to do with you. You set yourself up depending on attitude. With a changeable and mutable moral code what is considered normal at some point can actually be harmful.

This looks very much like the work of Sam Harris. I believe that there are two good reasons as to why it fails. The first is that unfortunately this is a pretty large naturalistic fallacy. It may be beneficial for human beings to survive and to prosper but imparts nothing moral.The term 'good' as in beneficial and 'good' when used in terms of morality are not the same concept. Your work, however, detailed proceeds from this dramatic equivocation between these two words. This is a pretty radical claim, a claim that you have just lumped in, as if it were obvious.

The second reason why I this fails entails only a comparison of the properties of the concepts. All it would take to show that your position has some serious flaws would be to contrast a moral value with a societal values that pursues the two goals you mentioned and see if a contradiction emerged. We can however imagine all sorts of claims that the the murder of a human being on the grounds of intellectual capability serves the whole's prosperity, you mentioned Nazi Germany but on the idea that morality is drawn from survival and prosperity, you probably do not have the tools in your arsenal to condemn this as wrong. I like that you mention that your position is not objective, only descriptive, but exploring the paradigm is useful all the same. The focus of my second point is however, that the propositions you are building from are not descriptive enough.

If: We are collections of particles bound by physical laws,

Then: there are universal truths.

That second one? It doesn't necessarily follow the first one. Your statement was made in a form that phrased it as a confirmed 'if/then' postulation, which is half of what this entire thread is debating. Now that I've explained the singular fraction of a sentence you objected to, would you mind actually addressing the point of the post, please?

To be fair, I wrote it at three in the morning EST. My intention was to label moral reasoning as a survival trait, not to equate survival with morality; that is to say, survival isn't moral. Morality is a tool used to aid survival. Obviously this is a personal opinion subject to (lovely, enlightening and bracing) debate.



Nazi Germany is always a tough thing to mention, but I brought them up because, while they were engaged in acts that are more-or-less considered universally reprehensible (certainly it's pretty impossible to justify exterminating that many human beings at once in the absence of a sanity-rending medical catastrophe of some variety) their society still did all of the things a society is supposed to do for its participants: that is to say, those people not under censure by its social contract were protected, defended, and advanced by the gestalt. The same can be said of, say, Mexican society, or Canadian society, or pretty much any society that does not currently exist in a state of anarchy or civil strife.

Obviously there are not currently any 'perfect' societies. Part of this, I feel, arises from competing paradigms, and is thus unavoidable to an extent - as long as humans do the human thing and disagree with each other, there will be conflict. Part of this, of course, is due to the fact that just because society is a survival trait doesn't necessarily mean it's a perfect one; like any adaptation, it falls apart in some situations. A chameleon's eyes don't do much for it underground, yes? Likewise, the morals created and supported by various paradigms fall apart in some situations. Like all evolution, the result is an ongoing optimization process. Unlike most forms of evolution, paradigms take forever to die, and can be very slow to change indeed even in the face of extreme contrary evidence (look at the classification of parasites, as illustrated in Carl Zimmer's Paradise Rex, for a small scale example).

/cross eyed

Okay, we're not a collection of atoms and the universe has no laws pertaining to it. Anything goes baby!

Another done to death topic. The whole 'morality' is nonsense.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp4080002 ... t=#4080002

No it's not. It's simple.

Ethics are what you do to satisfy others' opinion on what is right and wrong, morals are what you do to satisfy your own opinion of what is right and what is wrong.

I am a moral man.

The problem is what really mean by 'right' and 'wrong', as the link argued.

Yes, but at least you know with me.

The show Mork and Mindy was just plain wrong!

Star Trek was plain right!

Nothing productive came out of that thread anyway. The best one can do to make a case for morality being nonsense is play a deconstructive semantics game to make words meaningless. If I felt that was an intellectually honest approach, I could win every single argument in PPR. Better yet, I could ace all my college English comp classes by using random essay generators. There's no winning an argument against that level of (im)maturity. I've had two toddlers of my own, so I know how this game is played. The only conclusive statement you can make in that kind of situation is "Sit down. Shut up. Eat your peas." Once you get into an argument with a small child, you've already lost.

So much for the so called theology or thestic morality. Just come up with some nonsense and if your opponent doubt whether the subject makes sense, accuse him of word game or intellectual dishonesty or immaturity.


What is ironic is that 'morality' comes down to no more that these - opinons and commands - not rational arguments.