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[The Artist Formerly Known As Yoji]

Seconded. I thought this would be a decent thread, but now I have to go back to aborting puppies and defecating on the Cross, as is my wont.

[Friday]

I decided a long time ago to be agnostic because seriously.

One should not have the arrogance to declare that God does not exist.
          o Umberto Eco, quoted in "Belief or Nonbelief? : A Confrontation By Umberto Eco and Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini" in The Los Angeles Times (18 March 2000)

[Royal☭]

I sure do hate having to assume that something might or might not exist in the complete lack of evidence so I'll just hedge my bets.  Atheism need not be borne out of arrogance to simply dismiss the idea of a god, merely just that the logical leap in unnecessary.  And I find Paco's frequent cop-out answer to a lack of evidence as "God is mysterious and unknowable" to be both deeply unsatisfying and an argument that is only convincing if you already assume it to be true in the first place.

[Friday]

It never ceases to amaze me how people think Agnosticism is "hedging your bets". It's just admitting that I don't know either way.

Atheism need not be borne out of arrogance

but often is

[Royal☭]

Don't be hating.

Just consider, where did the idea or initial belief in a god even come from in the first place?  Was it external or internal?

[Kashan]

Agnosticism doesn't even disallow for belief, it just disallows for knowledge.

[Friday]

Just consider, where did the idea or initial belief in a god even come from in the first place?  Was it external or internal?

The fact that religion is taught externally does not invalidate the possibility of truth.

[Brentai]

Why is it that people always mock me for taking the center argument, God-exists-but-isn't-exactly-what-you-think-it-is?

Most people seem to stop at finding no evidence of there actually being bipedal blue sentients with large razorlike protrusions down their backs and concluding that hedgehogs do not exist or that there is no reason to believe in them.

[Pacobird]

I sure do hate having to assume that something might or might not exist in the complete lack of evidence so I'll just hedge my bets.  Atheism need not be borne out of arrogance to simply dismiss the idea of a god, merely just that the logical leap in unnecessary.  And I find Paco's frequent cop-out answer to a lack of evidence as "God is mysterious and unknowable" to be both deeply unsatisfying and an argument that is only convincing if you already assume it to be true in the first place.

If you believe that faith in God is based purely on making a decision on whether or not it actually exists, it's no wonder you think my answers are cop-outs.

[McDohl]

Part of the Lutheran church, and presumably, many other denominations of faith, is the fellowship of like-minded individuals that are willing to do everything they can for their brothers and sisters in Christ.  People give everything that they can, even if it is just prayer, to help their fellow man.  I believe that this is a significant contributing factor to the current strength of religions.

[Pacobird]

Part of the Lutheran church, and presumably, many other denominations of faith, is the fellowship of like-minded individuals that are willing to do everything they can for their brothers and sisters in Christ.  People give everything that they can, even if it is just prayer, to help their fellow man.  I believe that this is a significant contributing factor to the current strength of religions.

Pay attention to this.  Religion is man's pursuit of something larger than himself.  "God" is an arbitrary title.

[Royal☭]

Prayer is the absolute least you can give someone.  Maybe even worse than nothing, because it helps assuage any feelings of guilt that you might do something tangible.  Or is also negated by the people who kill doctors because they perform abortions.

If someone is going to be a good person, they don't need a religion to do it.  Likewise with bad.

[Pacobird]

Perhaps prayer is actually for the benefit of the person praying.  It's almost as if religion is designed to help people deal with loss!

[Transportation]

So you think the answers to theological questions can be found within the physical world?

If so, where and how would we set about gathering evidence for an answer?  If not, how are you not a hammer seeing only nails?

That dichotomy is bullshit of the highest order. The old testament talks about God creating the universe and warehouses with hailstones. These are bold physical assertions. Greek polytheism is an even more blatant example.

Any discussion of the existence of God that does not begin with the statement that God is fundamentally unknowable is not worth seriously entertaining.

Of course, otherwise it would end after "prove it."

PS: there exist rational and internally consistent theistic belief systems

That's nice? I saw reincarnation and "spiritual union", which are experiences and thus empirically testable. However, the details are so vague that any experiment is impossible and explains nothing. It fails a simple falsification and should not be seriously included in how a person thinks the world works.

And now I get to defend Sora. Joy.

The argument that God doesn't exist if you can't provide tangible evidence assumes that God is not only knowable, but fully perceivable and quantifiable by human understanding. If you really think that then maybe you would feel better railing against the simps 2500 years ago, all grovelling before Mt. Olympus and shit.

Bonus points for assuming I believe in God just because I don't casually dismiss religion as a whole, though.  You're really striking a blow for Reason on this one.

How are these unreasonable assumptions? It's easily dismissible with the simple fact the human brain is Turing machine and can process any algorithm i.e. the ability to know everything.

Just because theologians can put more words on paper than ever before doesn't make them better than Egyptian priests. Just because they constrain the debate to their terms to declare victory over those childish materialists doesn't mean I have to.

If you think understanding religions on their terms is neat, fine. But that has nothing to do with the existence of anything and I don't see why I need to play along.

at any rate, the original point of this is that atheism is belief as much as theism, because you are drawing conclusions about the unknowable via human understanding that is not equipped to deal with it.

Oh that is just ridiculous. If "lack of a belief" is a belief somehow, than I have an infinite number of beliefs at this very moment about every conceivable thing in the universe that I have not encountered and thought "oh, that's true."

This is typical agnostic hair-splitting that only applies to God and nothing else. The miracles in the Bible clearly contradict modern science and there is no way of getting around that. But Western culture has been constantly diluting the entire concept of God in a desperate race to not look stupid. Constantly molding so he has enough space to be relevant and also unfalsifiable.

"God made man from clay? Don't be silly, he just guided evolution! It's all in the Bible if you interpret in an absurdly vague manner that makes it say anything you want." Other examples are easily found. The "modern" Christian God only exists among more liberal circles anyway, conservatives are much more specific about what their version does and as such look dumb repeatedly, as opposed to just a few times.

Atheism is not a belief system as things can't be absences (i.e. words mean things), but I suppose the way modern atheists arrives at the conclusion is typically based on the scientific method, empiricism, falsification, etc. These are beliefs.

Anyway, Absolute certainty is impossible but a 50% for heads on a coin toss is not the same as 0.0000000000000...01% chance of God/unicorns/whatever fiction humanity events next exists. This is probably the key difference between an honest atheist and agnostic, one says "good enough" and the other is philosophically required to put the existence of God on the same level as a coin toss and act accordingly.

EDIT: SO MANY OF THEM

[Pacobird]

So you think the answers to theological questions can be found within the physical world?

If so, where and how would we set about gathering evidence for an answer?  If not, how are you not a hammer seeing only nails?

That dichotomy is bullshit of the highest order. The old testament talks about God creating the universe and warehouses with hailstones. These are bold physical assertions. Greek polytheism is an even more blatant example.

Any discussion of the existence of God that does not begin with the statement that God is fundamentally unknowable is not worth seriously entertaining.

Of course, otherwise it would end after "prove it."

PS: there exist rational and internally consistent theistic belief systems

That's nice? I saw reincarnation and "spiritual union", which are experiences and thus empirically testable. However, the details are so vague that any experiment is impossible and explains nothing. It fails a simple falsification and should not be seriously included in how a person thinks the world works.

And now I get to defend Sora. Joy.

The argument that God doesn't exist if you can't provide tangible evidence assumes that God is not only knowable, but fully perceivable and quantifiable by human understanding. If you really think that then maybe you would feel better railing against the simps 2500 years ago, all grovelling before Mt. Olympus and shit.

Bonus points for assuming I believe in God just because I don't casually dismiss religion as a whole, though.  You're really striking a blow for Reason on this one.

How are these unreasonable assumptions? It's easily dismissible with the simple fact the human brain is Turing machine and can process any algorithm i.e. the ability to know everything.

Just because theologians can put more words on paper than ever before doesn't make them better than Egyptian priests. Just because they constrain the debate to their terms to declare victory over those childish materialists doesn't mean I have to.

If you think understanding religions on their terms is neat, fine. But that has nothing to do with the existence of anything and I don't see why I need to play along.

at any rate, the original point of this is that atheism is belief as much as theism, because you are drawing conclusions about the unknowable via human understanding that is not equipped to deal with it.

Oh that is just ridiculous. If "lack of a belief" is a belief somehow, than I have an infinite number of beliefs at this very moment about every conceivable thing in the universe that I have not encountered and thought "oh, that's true."

This is typical agnostic hair-splitting that only applies to God and nothing else. The miracles in the Bible clearly contradict modern science and there is no way of getting around that. But Western culture has been constantly diluting the entire concept of God in a desperate race to not look stupid. Constantly molding so he has enough space to be relevant and also unfalsifiable.

"God made man from clay? Don't be silly, he just guided evolution! It's all in the Bible if you interpret in an absurdly vague manner that makes it say anything you want." Other examples are easily found. The "modern" Christian God only exists among more liberal circles anyway, conservatives are much more specific about what their version does and as such look dumb repeatedly, as opposed to just a few times.

Atheism is not a belief system as things can't be absences (i.e. words mean things), but I suppose the way modern atheists arrives at the conclusion is typically based on the scientific method, empiricism, falsification, etc. These are beliefs.

Anyway, Absolute certainty is impossible but a 50% for heads on a coin toss is not the same as 0.0000000000000...01% chance of God/unicorns/whatever fiction humanity events next exists. This is probably the key difference between an honest atheist and agnostic, one says "good enough" and the other is philosophically required to put the existence of God on the same levels as a coin toss and act accordingly.

EDIT: SO MANY OF THEM

I don't have a whole lot of time to answer all of this, so the short version is that people do not follow religion because they want quantifiable evidence about whether or not God exists; they want their lives to be easier.  An atheist values that quantifiable, physical, observable evidence more than the spiritual comfort offered by religion, but this is not an objectively superior way to live unless you believe it to be so.

[Brentai]

this is not an objectively superior way to live unless you believe it to be so.

I... don't think it's objective in that case either?

[Pacobird]

Well, I was trying to be nice about it. :(  Rather, an atheist will naturally find religion unsatisfying if they place evidence above all else; I guess it would be better to say valuing evidence above connection to something larger than yourself is not necessarily the best way for everyone to live, and I strongly suspect it's not even the best way for many who think it is.

[Transportation]

Perhaps prayer is actually for the benefit of the person praying.  It's almost as if religion is designed to help people deal with loss!

Are you saying this from a sociological perspective or a policy one? That's certainly true, but we have community centers, councilors, welfare, and psychiatry for these things now, which do not have the side-effect of encouraging martyrdom or general irrationality.

Historically, that may be true now, but the whole afterlife thing was also taught along with how God causes the rain, snow, etc. That doesn't seem a big deal to us today because of SCIENCE but back then they were pretty serious about. Religion was a worldview, not a comfort zone.

I don't have a whole lot of time to answer all of this, so the short version is that people do not follow religion because they want quantifiable evidence about whether or not God exists; they want their lives to be easier.  An atheist values that quantifiable, physical, observable evidence more than the spiritual comfort offered by religion, but this is not an objectively superior way to live unless you believe it to be so.

Take your time. But that last bit is provable if both sides consider the reduction of suffering a worthy goal. While the existential despair over oblivion sucks, lots of dead people are worse in my opinion. Hell, since we're using atheist to mean "truth seeking/evidence favoring" then it should reduce violence in general. There was a distinct correlation between importance of religion and crime rates in countries, I'll dig it up.

EDIT:Times (UK) Not a graph, but close enough.

[Classic]

I feel like I should re-read Hume.

I thought most people became athiests/agnostic because it's impossible to, with intellectual honesty, claim that any "equally false" doctrine is intrinsically better than another. Of course, most people are willing to make certain commitments along with that confession of pluralism (e.g. I want to believe this, so I'll assume it; I need to believe this, otherwise I cannot progress, so...; I ought to believe this, because it eases my dealings, so...).


I guess I'm just confessing that I absolutely love mythology, philosophy, and theology, but only when I don't have to take any of it seriously. Because obviously, I take a great many things too seriously and don't have any desperate need for more tension headaches.



IN BEFORE SOME RETARD READS CORRELATION AS CAUSATION.

[Pacobird]

And now science has supplanted it as a worldview.  It's rather unseemly of us to pat ourselves on the back for having been fortunate enough to be born in the twentieth century, and it's not like it's some grand hypocrisy for religion to have distanced itself from questions people no longer need it to answer.  

And still, Plato.

At any rate, at the risk of going over to total apologism, I am talking about religion as a philosophical worldview, not as a wordly institution that, having had a lot of political power in the past, was exploited to further the ends of unseemly individuals with worse agendas.  If science had been the prevailing worldview around the time of the Crusades, I would bet my hat that it would have been used as a justification to get rid of all those idle, unruly knights sitting around in Western Europe, too.