Free-will and Atheism

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If you assert following Secular Humanism is believing in something, that something can change incrementally, leading to the possibility of believing in anything because Secular Humanism has no absolute ethic. If the goal post can move in any direction, what good is it? This is my argument, several times have I mentioned it in different forms. I'll send this post to you by email so you can have a copy to look over at your leisure. This is my opinion and I'm not the only one who has it. Disagreement is fine.

Christianity has no absolute ethic either.

You can't even argue using the Bible only whether abortion is right or wrong.

the goalpost of morality has shifted for the church and their believers as well through the ages.

Sure you made a set of imperatives that can be said to be reasonable. However that is not the kind of 'morality' theist like AngelRho or CW10 is talking about. Just see the third post above this



They think of morality as some absolute property of the action itself, something independent of individuals and society and unchanging over time. That is the kind of woo 'morality' I am debunking.

If they admit their 'morality' is just another set of imperatives, then there may be some common denominators.

Ah...this is awkward.

I was cracking a Chuck Norris joke. It's possible you aren't familiar with them, though it surprises me given how ubiquitous they've become. It's a deliberate, tall-tale like exaggeration. Others include such gems as, "Chuck Norris once gave a horse an uppercut. Its descendants are now known as giraffes," and, my personal favorite, "Chuck Norris does not breathe - he holds air hostage."

This explained, I resume lurking!

It was a joke about me spending too much time online! And I was blaming you! Nevermind my own freewill, it's your fault kitty didn't get petted!

Last edited by shrox on 23 Feb 2012, 11:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

Much of the premise of the Bible is avoiding such problems in the first place. Proverbs comes to mind. But we always fail miserably.

Oh! A trick question. You've successfully proven that I am not omniscient.
However, I hold that I am still a deity, just not an all-knowing one.

And I'm left with the vague sense you're coming on to me. Which would be quite flattering, but unlikely to lead anywhere.

Oh, you've got some signals crossed there! I want breasts!

I know what your argument is, unfortunately reality seems to disagree with you. Are you ever going to get around to providing where throughout history, the "static" nature of religious morals, anywhere in the world (here's your first mistake: religious morals are not static! As easily observable throughout history) has resulted in this moral fortitude that you keep asserting, or are you just going to keep wasting time with your little straw man about how people who don't believe in religion "believe in nothing"?

Here's a question for the "atheists".

What do you think we might eventually evolve into? Will we always be temporal? Will one day some lucky human be the first to quicken into some type of being that is self sustaining, maybe made of light or energy or plasma or whatever the medium might be? (In this given scenario the rest of humanity follows within some amount of time.)

Given that any standards must come from a source, that the source of those morals would have to be better than any other possible source for morals and furthermore would have to be verifiable and known in every detail in order to satisfy the former two requirements. If the source is not better than any other source, then that means that it is either equal to other sources, in which case reason must decide which one is the most satisfactory source. If it is in fact lesser than other sources, then one must eliminate it.

Jesus as a source of morals hinges on him literally being the divine spirit incarnate and I don't think that such a claim is true until I see evidence in favor of it. Even if I give you the resurrection, the virgin birth and the rest of the miracles, Jesus is not proven to be the literal divine spirit incarnate. We know of other resurrections, Lazarus, every saint in Jerusalem. Parthenogenesis may be possible amongst humans given a genetic mutation or there may be another natural explanation to the virgin birth (such as a penis). The healing was widely reported in the Bible by several different people so it no more proves that Jesus is the literal divine incarnate than other people with reported healing abilities. So, even with the miracles and the stories, it doesn't prove that Jesus was divine.

What is a moral act? To me a nice definition would be "An act that maximizes human well-being and minimizes human suffering", there are of course debates on what constitutes morality, but the purpose of morals is to guide our interactions with the world. Now we have 2 parts, a moral act is an act which maximizes human well-being and minimizes human suffering within the contexts of the individual's interactions with its surroundings.

Can we measure human well-being and human suffering? Yes, we can measure them through objective means and interpret that data using reason.

Immanuel Kant is much superior to Jesus when it comes to morals, because Kant was able to formulate his "golden rule" so that a rapist can't be argued to be a masochist with a rape fantasy acting in accordance with it.

Immanuel Kant is famous for quite a few works, but the greatest one to me, is the categorical imperative, which in one formulation is summed up as "So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as the universal law (of all rational beings)" meaning that if you do it in that context, everybody does it in that context.

So, given that the outcome of actions can be measured by scientific means, the instructions given by philosophy there is no need for a static standard. Morality isn't a static concept, it needs to evolve with society. 200 years ago it wasn't considered immoral to own slaves, today it is, because our morality evolved.

Of course, we can accept the premise that Jesus sets the ultimate moral standard but by the precedence created by such an unfounded argument, Muslims can say that Muhammad is, heck, Aztec descendants can say that some Sun god is and that human sacrifice is a moral act.

Furthermore, isn't Christianity the poster-boy for moral-relativism? It was immoral for a woman to wear mens clothes according to Thomas of Aquinas, it was immoral to belong to another religion, it was not immoral to hold slaves, it was immoral to be a witch, to claim that the sun didn't revolve around the Earth, it was not immoral to be antisemitic (in fact both the Lutheran and the Catholic Church preached antisemitism as official doctrine until after WW2), it was immoral to get a divorce, not immoral to beat your wife and kids, not immoral to kill people as long as they belonged to a different faith than you.

So I guess what I'm saying is, if the morals of the Bible change at the drop of a hat, then what kind of standards is that?

I don't know if we're up for any sort of radical transformation unless we're talking about some type of catalyst that spreads like an epidemic. It seems like it takes isolation and hundreds of thousands of years for environmental specialization or even microevolution to really go too far. At present it seems like we're doing more to bend the environment to us. If we end up getting so good with our own genetics that we decide to chimera ourselves though, that's a whole other direction and none of the conventional rules would apply for that kind of change.

One does not need to be an atheist to answer this question (or support scientific method) but anyway:



We are not Pokemon so it doesn't really work that way



Light has no mass. Your mind is the product of your brain, without a brain you don't exist. Your brain is made of matter (therefore has mass). "Energy" is a frequently misused term especially in the context of spirituality and astrology since it usually refers in that case to an invisible driving force.

Interestingly enough there are theories about life existing within stars made out of plasma. But if they were to exist they would have evolved in that environment.

I didn't say morals of the bible, I said Jesus as a standard of morals.

Pretty much what I believe too.

Do you think that intelligent life, even "organized energy" must have a container of some sort? Anywhere from a single cell (using some DNA like scheme for thought and memory) to just an intact brain-like organ? Can you replicate that "organized energy" in a device? I can't envision an energy only creature in our universe.