TheGreatYosh
Banned
Wearing that corny ass tie.
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Richard Dawkins on JRE
- Thread starter The Scrivener
- Start date
C
Contica
Unconfirmed Member
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to jump to the conclusion that I believe in multiple dimensions and universes. Where have I said anything of the sort? I'm not an atheist, I'm agnostic, because the way I see it there is just no way of knowing. There could be a god, but I haven't seen anything to suggest there is. There could be multiple dimensions, but I'm not a physicist so I don't feel qualified to say.
For the first part of your post, it seems to me you're just drawing arbitrary lines in the sand for where you think the divide between the fantastical and the realistic should go.
There is no ad-hominem, there is just my opinion, and religion's failure to convince me otherwise. You say I have no proof, show me yours.
Turning water into wine and throwing lightning are maybe different, but both are magic, both are impossible, they're just different levels of magic. How is one more realistic than the other? But you pick weak examples. You're taking the smaller workings of Jesus and comparing them to that of the gods. In norse mythology Jesus would have more in common with a volve than with the actual gods. How is Tor throwing his hammer and less believable than your god making it rain frogs, and turning an entire river into blood, or creating a flood. A flood which is physically impossible since that water would have had to go somewhere after the water levels went back to normal.
I'm curious as to why you find polytheism unbelievable. God might be the only god, but he supposedly had a son from virgin birth, and there were angels and demons just as powerful as any of the gods in Valhall or Mount Olympus.
Dawkins is pretty great.
His God delusion book is exceptionally well argued and few people would be able to read it without their world view being seriously challenged (unless they were already atheists). He has converted countless people away from religion, and that's a huge accomplishment, testament to the fact that if one has a sufficient level of working neurons capable of firing together, logic and reason will prevail.
I am an atheist. It's not a choice, nor is it a belief system. If you have a practical world view based on facts and a scientific approach, it becomes extremely difficult or impossible to convince oneself that a god exists. Certainly not any god existing in written books, given the number of inconsistences and "metaphors" required for it to make any sense at all. It's no surprise that among the most educated (PhD scientists), the proportion of atheists is higher than in the general population.
Also agnosticism is a copout. If you are agnostic about god then you must be agnostic about santa clause, unicorns and anything else that can be made up.
His God delusion book is exceptionally well argued and few people would be able to read it without their world view being seriously challenged (unless they were already atheists). He has converted countless people away from religion, and that's a huge accomplishment, testament to the fact that if one has a sufficient level of working neurons capable of firing together, logic and reason will prevail.
I am an atheist. It's not a choice, nor is it a belief system. If you have a practical world view based on facts and a scientific approach, it becomes extremely difficult or impossible to convince oneself that a god exists. Certainly not any god existing in written books, given the number of inconsistences and "metaphors" required for it to make any sense at all. It's no surprise that among the most educated (PhD scientists), the proportion of atheists is higher than in the general population.
Also agnosticism is a copout. If you are agnostic about god then you must be agnostic about santa clause, unicorns and anything else that can be made up.
womfalcs3
Banned
I agree that saying you're agnostic is a cop out. Take a stance; either you believe your god exists or not. Even if you say that you believe in a god but not 100% sure it exists, or vice versa.
That being said...
I feel atheism is just a euphemism for arrogance. We don't know anything in the universe. What we do, and it's a lot to us, is negligible. Physicists right now are confused by the concept of time... such a rudimentary thing to its creator.
That being said...
I feel atheism is just a euphemism for arrogance. We don't know anything in the universe. What we do, and it's a lot to us, is negligible. Physicists right now are confused by the concept of time... such a rudimentary thing to its creator.
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Jon Neu
Banned
womfalcs3
Banned
I'm abdicating arrogance to its creator, whoever that is. He is and has the right to be arrogant, as one of his attributes (also merciful, etc.).
I'm a mere mortal who gets sick by bacteria and viruses I can't even see.
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Jon Neu
Banned
womfalcs3
Banned
"He" is an asexual entity. Don't constrain your thoughts to worldly things. You're proving my point.
C
Contica
Unconfirmed Member
How is being agnostic a cop out? It's like you're asking me to take a stand, which is better, Pepsi or Cola, but you're not actually letting me taste either. You're just saying "pick!" It's ludicrous.
You're not proving anything, and your claim would be disputed by many religious people who interpret the texts differently than you do.
Jon Neu
Banned
The most appropriate comparison would be you to taste Cola and then taste the magical Pepsi Cola someone claims makes you inmortal, ageless and also grows your dick 5 inches if you pray for the Pepsi Cola God, the God that created the universe.
And then you decide that you can't say if that is true or not despite not a single person ever becoming inmortal, ageless and having their dick grow 5 inches in all human history. Basically ignoring all the evidence against it and the absolute lack of any single evidence supporting those ridiculous claims for the sake of holding a neutral position and to try to appear more elevated when in reality you are just turning your brain off.
C
Contica
Unconfirmed Member
You're right, that's much better.
womfalcs3
Banned
Make inferences or don't. Don't say I won't make inferences and tell people "agnostic". Say you're a theist or an atheist, but you're not sure either way.
Believe in something.
As to sex, sexuality is an evolutionary trait. No reason sex would exist outside the universe. God exists beyond the logic we're confined to.
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C
Contica
Unconfirmed Member
Why?
womfalcs3
Banned
There was a wise quote.... "if you don't believe in something, you'll fall for anything". Even if you believe in no God. At least form an opinion.
See you make a lot of assumptions, like there being a creator. Atheists for the most part leave room for the possibility of anything. If one day there is proof god exists, atheists will be like "oh ok makes sense". They don't shape their world views based on faith alone, they need hard proof. But atheists are willing to take a stance and say "most likely there is no abrahamic god". Agnosticism is more of a 50/50 split.
The argument that we are mere mortals and the world is complex therefore there must be a creator and a god is itself arrogant. It's even more arrogant to go around brainwashing children with it. If you're a mere mortal then sit down and be quiet, and don't make things up you don't have evidence for. Let the people who are actively looking for the evidence do the thinking if you are not willing to (I'm not using "you" as you here, more of a general case for any religious person).
C
Contica
Unconfirmed Member
Of course I have opinions. I have plenty of opinions. But I seek knowledge, not faith. Faith is nothing. It's smoke and mirrors and it's a hollow excuse to fill in gaps. To me, faith is the cop out. It's a convenient way to fill in the gaps you don't know.
The Scrivener
Member
Wow, Edward Snowden is on JRE, 3 hours too. Shit!
E-Cat
Member
Sidestepping the obvious contradiction that others have already pointed out; we still don't know a lot about the Universe. But we do know more than we did in the 1800s, say.
Consequently, if you are at all educated in basic biology, you know that we have a natural explanation for the existence of things which appear designed - the process of non-random survival of randomly varying replicators, i.e., evolution through the mechanism of natural selection.
Therefore, whereas to invoke a creator God would have been a somewhat tenable position to fill in the gaps in our knowledge before Darwin, it no longer is.
Why don't you believe that we are living in a simulation created by a post-Technological Singularity civilization?
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womfalcs3
Banned
Sadly, I fear factual knowledge of the existence of a god will always elude us in this life (maybe there is an afterlife where we'd know). So whatever we believe: theism (any god) or atheism, we'll only have faith. For atheists, they believe (faith) there is no god.
Just like factual knowledge of unicorns, leprachauns and the flying spagetti monster will always elude us, do you believe in those as well? There is a huge difference between a belief in something based on blind faith, and a belief in something based on reproducible and widely corroborated evidence, equating the two would be like equating taking random guesses at what 2+2 is vs. actually counting and ending up with 4.
womfalcs3
Banned
There are no historical records inferring the existence of unicorns.. or leprachauns... or Zeus... etc..
There are, however, historical records showing that
-several messengers, like Mohammad and Jesus, were real figures,
-the body of Ramses II, the pharaoh who went after Moses and drowned in the sea, was preserved (as scripture said it would be 1,000s of years ago)
-how Arabs and Jews branched off from Abraham's sons (Isaac and Ismail),
-scripture says time is relative... time can fluctuate,
etc. etc.
How/when do you think the wars over the area now called Israel started? It started over unicorns?
You can ponder life, and surmise it was no accident. Even evolution was designed as such.
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Ornlu
Banned
This thread got filled with a plethora of shitposts overnight; wow. Not a whole lot worth engaging with, if that's how it's gonna go.
This post had an interesting nugget, though:
This statement I think would be extremely interesting to debate. It cuts to the heart of the religious/atheist split, in my opinion. It comes down to what you believe regarding this question: Are human beings born inherently good/perfect, and religion and flawed ideas turn us into evil/imperfect creatures? Or, are we born inherently flawed/evil, and religion and looking for something higher than yourself is how we become good/perfect creatures?
To me, the answer to that question is clear; however, I can assume there would be a definite split in how religious and atheist people would answer.
This post had an interesting nugget, though:
This statement I think would be extremely interesting to debate. It cuts to the heart of the religious/atheist split, in my opinion. It comes down to what you believe regarding this question: Are human beings born inherently good/perfect, and religion and flawed ideas turn us into evil/imperfect creatures? Or, are we born inherently flawed/evil, and religion and looking for something higher than yourself is how we become good/perfect creatures?
To me, the answer to that question is clear; however, I can assume there would be a definite split in how religious and atheist people would answer.
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Tesseract
Banned
agnosticism is the only honest position, nobody knows what the fuck happens when you die except that life here (insofar as we experience it) ends
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E-Cat
Member
I don't deal with terms like "perfect" or "imperfect", they seem to me to exemplify religious, 'Platonic ideal' type of thinking that is foreign to me.
Human beings are a part of nature; and nature is inherently neither 'good' nor 'evil'. It is conscious beings imposing their moral code upon the world that makes things good or evil, relatively speaking. However, what is considered moral has changed over the centuries (btw, this applies whether we're talking about a religious or a secular society, putting into question the "timeless truths" preached by religious scholars).
In fact, Dawkins touches on this very point on JRE, where he discusses how people like Abraham Lincoln and T. H. Huxley were deemed progressive for their time; but if transported to today, would be found to hold some very questionable positions on black people, etc. In other words, morality is a constantly evolving thing.
It is not my position that religion necessarily makes people evil. In fact, it may cause some people to behave in very charitable ways, if only to curry favor with the Big Man in the Sky. Indeed, most of the religious folks I know are generally very pleasant people.
But, there is, of course, a dark side to religion that someone put well (paraphrasing): "If there were no religions in the world, then good people would go on doing good things and bad people would go on doing bad things. It is only religion that has the power to make otherwise good people commit evil deeds." Blind faith in authority is a dangerous thing.
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C
Contica
Unconfirmed Member
Ornlu
Banned
Do these two paragraphs not directly contradict one another? I don't mean to be a stickler; I'm just not following the logic.
Paragraph 1: We are mammals who cannot be good or evil, morality is subjective.
Paragraph 2: If there was no religion, good people would be good, and bad people would be bad. Only religion can turn good people bad.
The religious argument would be that we are inherently born as flawed creatures. Without something greater than ourselves, we will remain so. That makes sense to me, and always has.
Maybe I can rephrase the imperfect/perfect part of the question. As an atheist, if there is indeed no God, or Creator of any kind, and we are nothing but mammals that have reached some state of random sentience and self-awareness...then how can one even determine what is right and wrong? Isn't anything we wish to do just "in our nature", and thus perfectly acceptable? Would not any form of societal standards, taboos, and stigmas just be a form of religious nonsense meant to keep us from our natural state? What exactly should we live by? What should we aspire to?
E-Cat
Member
Your point actually made me think, kudos!
Ok, I will give you that you do not need religion to misperceive the evil as the good. People can have differing opinions on what kind of evil is warranted to justify a 'greater good', for example. But having religion or other mental delusions certainly helps.
Just to give you an example: Let's say that you are an otherwise perfectly normal, run-of-the-mill moral kind of person. You volunteer at the soup kitchen every Sunday and help the old lady living next door carry out her garbage. But then one night, hunched in prayer, you start hearing voices in your head that you perceive as coming from God; and they are telling you, in no uncertain terms, to strap on a grenade belt and blow yourself up in the public square, or otherwise all those people will go to Hell. Being the good, moral person that you are, you would ordinarily find such a proposition appalling. But you are, after all, hearing the VOICE OF GOD in your head! Just like Abraham when God ordered him to murder his son, who are you to question the divine purpose of the Almighty Creator of the Universe? "God works in mysterious ways", you think to yourself as you wipe a tear off the corner of your eye, then proceed to slaughter dozens of innocent people. Because you are a good, self-sacrificing person.
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E-Cat
Member
There is no contradiction. 'Good' and 'bad' here mean what is deemed good or bad by the relative moral standards of society. We can put a moral value judgement on human actions without it requiring the existence of a God. Sometimes, individuals may disagree with that consensus, and when enough of them do, that is how the collective morality of society shifts over time.
I think people are born as creatures of infinite potential. How they turn out is a mix of nature and nurture.
I cannot speak for others, but for my own moral compass, one general principle I follow is "try to minimize suffering in the world". How I "justify" this view that minimizing suffering is a "good thing", I cannot argue logically. It is an axiomatic belief that I have; but once you make that initial leap of faith, then the rest pretty much falls neatly into place.
Obviously, there is a balance that must be achieved with minimizing general suffering vs my own self-interests and self-preservation. But, as soon as you realize that other people are sentient beings much like yourself, it becomes easy to put yourself in their shoes and wish no harm on them. You could argue that from our cave-dwelling tribe days, there's a form of reciprocal altruism relic in our genes ("you scratch my back, I scratch yours"); that is, we may not be a complete moral tabula rasa when we are born, but are preprogrammed with some basic behavioral primitives. I do not have enough knowledge to expand on this, however.
In any case, I am just happy to live in a time when we have, for whatever reason, evolved towards a more (by my standards) egalitarian, just society. It didn't have to be this way. And it could come crumbling down any minute.
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SurprisedPikachu
Member
You know I'm tired when I read JRE and think "Java Runtime Environment?"... 
#Phonepunk#
Banned
Dawkins is exhibit A on how someone can be "so smart" yet a huge idiot at the same time
Show me evidence that supports god and the supernatural. I have no doubt figures and other charlatans existed in history that had cult followings. Do you also believe in Mormonism? They have their own "documentation", how about Scientology?
You can't produce a single shred of evidence that god exists or that he ever existed. Instead you have a big book of fiction that you live your life by. I guess some people would like to find meaning in life, other people would just like meaning handed to them in a book (or on the lap of an overly friendly priest).
Ornlu
Banned
That's certainly an opinion.
strange headache
Banned
Funny you mention that because thought I stumbled into a weird episode of South Park:
You see, this is what I'm talking about. Smugness combined with a disturbing lack of awareness creates an urge in me to shitpost all over your "eLoQuEnT" argument. Just admit that you lost to MHK and move on with your life.
Also, here's how I imagine you to look like when you were writing your eloquently smug posts in this thread
Maté, athée.
My goodness, you really are the religious conservative equivalent to far-left idiocy. Wojaks and "muh fedora" are to the religious right what "orange man bad" is to the militant left, both are hollow and scripted NPC answers devoid of meaning and substance that are nothing but a poor substitute for well founded arguments.
Would you try heroin only because it is offered to you? Of course not, because you're well aware of the nefarious consequences even without trying it.
I'd say Dawkins is well aware of the negative side-effects of drugs, hence why he stays clear of them on principle. Trying hallucinogens only because a famous youtube interviewer is offering them to you would actually be the dumb thing to do. If people want to take drugs, that's their prerogative, but don't ever present it as the smart thing to do.
Faith is by definition irrational because your belief in god cannot be proven by rational and/or scientific means. Religion has shown throughout history, that their dogmatic worldview is incompatible with scientific progress and empirical facts. Your choice to believe in a higher being is merely an emotional decision, not a rational one because the existence of a god cannot be proven through reason.
Believing in god is not any different than believing in dragons, fairies and unicorns. God his a human invention, a complex idea derived from other impressions, just like other mythological beings.
Extremism is the logical conclusion of religious faith.
The only reason why we've stopped burning non-believers at the stake is because of scientific progress and a continued secularization of modern society.
Christian faith places humans on top of creation. From the bible, genesis 1:
According to your faith, mankind is destined to rule over nature, meaning to exploit it as they see fit. Tell me, how is that a humble image of the self? It is not, because according to your faith mankind is as the very center of creation as everything exists solely to serve man. Which is also the very same reason why your religion has burned non-believers at the stake, who dared take some of that overbearing importance away from humanity through scientific inquiry.
You can still be humble while being agnostic/atheist or is the immense vastness of space and your planet's general unimportance in the greater cosmic scheme of things not enough to instill a sense of humility? It is the theory of evolution, not of creationism that has shown mankind that they are not ruler over nature, but part of it. IF anything, your faith, not atheism, is the one thing that instills hubris into people's minds.
Being reasonable doesn't help much either as evidenced by this very thread.
He speaks on St. Thomas Aquinas "five ways" without really understanding it.
Aquinas vs. Dawkins: The 5 Five Proofs of God's Existence
Thomas Aquinas` famous five proofs for the existence of God are among the most heavily debated and woefully misunderstood philosophical concepts in our modern age. In recent decades, they have formed a consistent basis for countless non-sequiturs and straw-man arguments against Christianitywww.catholic365.com
You don't need Dawkins to refute middle-age scholastic arguments about god. Many other philosophers have done the same, such as Russell, Hume or Kant. Have they misunderstood Aquinas bunk argumentation, which is nothing but a sad plagiarism of Aristotle's immovable mover, too?
Yes, but no scientific discovery and invention has been derived from the belief that god exists, which is the main point of contention here. Your religious beliefs have managed to contribute absolutely nothing at all to scientific progress.
The simple fact that your religion has managed to come up with exactly zero proof for the existence of god despite its centuries of theological research is enough to irrefutably show that you are merely lying to yourselves.
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E-Cat
Member
Actually, let me flip the question back on you:
As (presumably) a Christian who considers the Bible to be the word of God and the source of our morality, how do you justify all the vile things and nonsensical orders littered throughout? Or, do you pick and choose which parts to follow ('moral') and which parts to disregard ('immoral')? If so, by what criteria do you do the picking and choosing if the Bible is the sole authority on`what is moral?
GAMETA
Banned
You are deflecting from the point. The point is:
He acts as religious about his beliefs as any other religious person.
It's this certainty of being absolutely right that I find funny from a guy like him and other atheists... it's arrogance.
You can say whatever you want about religious institutions, I'll agree with most of the criticism, but jumping from that to "God is absolutely no doubt bullshit I am 100% sure fuck you religious cucks" is acting the same as religious people, just on the other side of the spectrum.
Like I said before, whatever happened to the "we don't know"...
Xaero Gravity
NEXT LEVEL lame™
E-Cat
Member
He does not. You would know this if you had read The God Delusion:
Spectrum of theistic probability - Wikipedia
strange headache
Banned
How am I deflecting? You were the one criticizing him for not taking drugs apparently.
No, he acts reasonable and scientific about it. If there is no proof, it is unreasonable to assume otherwise. Do you seriously expect people to take for granted something which is not proven?
Are pink flying elephants with mounted laser turrets real or not? You'd never say "we don't know" to that question.
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Xaero Gravity
NEXT LEVEL lame™
GAMETA
Banned
If science can entertain the idea of the Simulation Hypothesis, I don't see how a higher being, divine or not, is completely out of the question..
The simulation itself requires a higher being, so why all this fuckery?
I really don't understand why God is such a taboo.
Have you read the God delusion? Do you have a source where he ever mentions the word agnostic I'm relation to himself?
FYI saying one can't be sure that god absolutely doesn't exist can still mean you're 95 or 99 percent sure, and that does not make one an agnostic. I'm 99 percent sure unicorns don't exist, maybe I'm a weak/agnostic a-unicornist
Have you read the God delusion? Do you have a source where he ever mentions the word agnostic I'm relation to himself?
FYI saying one can't be sure that god absolutely doesn't exist can still mean you're 95 or 99 percent sure, and that does not make one an agnostic. I'm 99 percent sure unicorns don't exist, maybe I'm a weak/agnostic a-unicornist
Yes, I've read it. See the wikipedia link
E-Cat
posted above for citations.
E-Cat
Member
It is much, much less preposterous to suggest that an advanced civilization created our Universe rather than a God. Why? Because that advanced civilization itself, if located in Base Reality and not itself a part of yet another simulation, would have evolved late into the Universe as a part of a slow, gradual process of evolution.
God, an infinitely complex being borne out of nothing as a prime mover, is a completely different proposition with no respectable scientific hypothesis behind it.
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Ornlu
Banned
Sure, fair enough.
There's a few questions there, so I'll answer in order.
1. I don't believe in Omniscience or Predestination. I don't believe that God is perfect, and I don't believe that our lives follow a pre-determined path. I'd be willing to expand why I believe what I do, if you want. If you have examples of vile and nonsensical orders from the Bible in particular, I could answer my thoughts to that as well.
2. Well, by being humans, we fail constantly, even when we try our best. Are you asking if there are things I fail at following, then I would have to say of course. I can't think of anything I intentionally do that goes against God.
3. I can't think of anything that is applicable to me (Not an Israelite) that I pick and choose from. There's modern interpretations that I don't agree with at all, and live my life accordingly.
GAMETA
Banned
I can certainly draw one, model it in 3D, animate it, code it and specify behavior rules for it in an application. I can make it fly, sink, shoot, change color, do a barrel roll. And I can do it because I have the reference to understand what a pink flying elephants with mounted laser turrets would be like.
So yes, it can exist because we can create it. Just like God. Or mathematics. Just like us in a simulation...
So yeah, we don't know.
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