If God is so merciful, then why did Jesus have to be sacrificed?

[Immanuel Can]

... I wasn't thinking of the pessimistic Theists, rather the Atheist as a pessimist, especially the ones who want to denounce religion as mistaken and wrong and find fault with it.

Why should an Atheist care?

So what if "deluded" people want to believe in things -- any things?

Is not the story, as the Atheists tell it, that we are here by random chance, the late product of material causes and nothing more, and racing toward oblivion? During that little time when we are alive, what privileges one belief over another? Whether it makes us happy, whether it helps us survive, whether it's true or not, whether other people want to believe it or not...even whether or not one regards it as "scientific"...what, in the Atheist view of things, makes any of these "better" than something else? And what makes it a privileged basis for criticizing other people?

Having no moral categories, Atheism has nothing to tell us about the situation of people believing things. If it's neither "good" if Atheism is true, nor "bad" if it's not, why is even Atheism itself due any special status as a belief?

Atheism is just insane. It can't keep faith even with itself. It premises value-judgments about the most important things in life on the fairy's wing of its imaginary epistemic and moral 'privilege,' a 'privilege' which Atheism itself (to be consistent) has already claimed to cut to pieces, and thus must admit is really nothing at all.

[attofishpi]

... I wasn't thinking of the pessimistic Theists, rather the Atheist as a pessimist, especially the ones who want to denounce religion as mistaken and wrong and find fault with it.

Why should an Atheist care?

I think the world would be mighty dull if it weren't for all the culture and architecture that theism has brought us.

[Immanuel Can]

I think the world would be mighty dull if it weren't for all the culture and architecture that theism has brought us.

Or how about the sciences? For Atheism is surely badly anti-scientific.

Why do I say so? Because it would tell us that our cognitive faculties are evolved to produce survival, not to lead us to truth.

In fact, Atheistic Evolutionism would say that if something is a delusion but is useful in terms of survival-of-the-fittest (such as, say, an unsupportable and irrational belief in group solidarity, which may advantage us or the collective) then Atheist Evolution has to say that our cognitive faculties prefer that above truth.

But if our cognitive faculties are not keyed to truth, but merely to survival (and perhaps only collective survival, not individual well-being), then why should we believe them? They are more likely to lead us to delusions or even death than to truth. And if we cannot believe our cognitive faculties, then where is science? Why should we trust the pronouncements of our scientific minds, when they're only geared to (our own, or maybe only to other people's) survival, not to truth?

Thus Atheism destroys confidence in science.

[thedoc]

Is not the story, as the Atheists tell it, that we are here by random chance, the late product of material causes and nothing more,

You must be listening to a different group of Atheists than I am, the Atheists I am familiar with have a good grasp of evolution and evolution is not random, that is just a creationist misinterpretation of evolution.

[thedoc]

Or how about the sciences? For Atheism is surely badly anti-scientific.
Thus Atheism destroys confidence in science.

Again another Creationist misinterpretation of science. Atheists that I am familiar with know science and it's benefits as well as it's limits. Atheism is not anti-science but is very much pro science, Atheists are only anti religion and anti-God.

[Immanuel Can]

Again another Creationist misinterpretation of science. Atheists that I am familiar with know science and it's benefits as well as it's limits. Atheism is not anti-science but is very much pro science, Atheists are only anti religion and anti-God.

You need to read more carefully. I didn't say Atheists are against science. I said Atheism is.

The difference is important. Many Atheists are nicer, better and smarter people than Atheism will teach them to be. That is a credit to them personally. But that is no stroke in favour of Atheism, for it only happens to the extent that they are willing to abandon the straight logic of Atheism itself. For the same reason, many Atheists continue to practice morality. It's not because their Atheism will warrant it, but because they are personally much nicer than Atheism will warrant them in being.

A key difference.

People who happen to regard themselves as Atheists can be very good. Atheism, if they decide to practice what it preaches, will make them wicked. Likewise, many Atheists have a high regard for science; but they don't get that from their Atheism. Atheism would teach them that they have absolutely no reason to trust the pronouncements of their own minds, or the findings of any science...as I said.

[Harbal]

Again another Creationist misinterpretation of science. Atheists that I am familiar with know science and it's benefits as well as it's limits. Atheism is not anti-science but is very much pro science, Atheists are only anti religion and anti-God.

You need to read more carefully. I didn't say Atheists are against science. I said Atheism is.

The difference is important. Many Atheists are nicer, better and smarter people than Atheism will teach them to be. That is a credit to them personally. But that is no stroke in favour of Atheism, for it only happens to the extent that they are willing to abandon the straight logic of Atheism itself. For the same reason, many Atheists continue to practice morality. It's not because their Atheism will warrant it, but because they are personally much nicer than Atheism will warrant them in being.

A key difference.

People who happen to regard themselves as Atheists can be very good. Atheism, if they decide to practice what it preaches, will make them wicked. Likewise, many Atheists have a high regard for science; but they don't get that from their Atheism. Atheism would teach them that they have absolutely no reason to trust the pronouncements of their own minds, or the findings of any science...as I said.

I think you're even starting to embarrass thedoc now.

[Greta]

Or how about the sciences? For Atheism is surely badly anti-scientific.

Why do I say so? Because it would tell us that our cognitive faculties are evolved to produce survival, not to lead us to truth.

I'm not even an atheist but I can clearly see that atheism is only about rejecting implausible religious claims. The only connection atheism has with science is that, over more recent centuries, societies found out may things that refuted mythological claims, eg. heliocentric orbits.

No one knows how much metaphorical truth the myths contain but atheism mostly speaks of the unrealistic physical truth claims of Abrahamic mythology. Virgin births, resurrections, walking on water, assembling all species on a boat, people living for 900 years, a universe created in six days, a loving, interventionist deity presiding over this veritable litany of agonies and atrocities, etc. Atheists don't believe any of that.

It is true that our cognitive faculties are evolved to produce survival rather than truth. To understand this, all one need do is look at the air around you - does that give you a good handle on the gases, magnetic fields, radio waves, gravitational fields, floating microbes, microtoxins, neutrinos and dark matter present or has non-essential information been filtered out by your senses and sensory lobes to allow you to focus on the important stuff of survival?

What is unscientific is the claim that gods don't exist. A scientific response would be that, based on current information, the probabilities are against the existence of gods as posited.

[Immanuel Can]

It is true that our cognitive faculties are evolved to produce survival rather than truth.

If that is so, then ask yourself this: "Why should you trust them?"

You see, if they are not keyed to truth, then there's no way for you to suppose they will tell you the truth. They might help you survive -- but if Dawkins is right, they won't even necessarily deliver you that. Instead, they'll help the "selfish gene"pool, the larger mass of human beings survive; but your personal survival will always be optional. What your brain tells you may well lead to your death, if it served the "selfish" interests of the gene pool that you should die.

If so, what our cognitive faculties are telling us could neither be supposed to be the truth, nor could it be trusted to be helping us individually survive. All we could safely say is that it provided both fact and delusions that were Evolutionarily "useful" to the larger gene pool. But we couldn't ever trust what our brains told us, whether we used our own perceptions and intuitions, formal reason, or empirical science.

That's anti-scientific.

[Dubious]

Correct! “ALL morality is a constraint on behavior”, precisely the point others and myself are trying to make which subsumes ALL societies; whether theistically motivated or not they depend upon those constraints being active.

However, there are two different types of constraint: legitimized and unlegitimzed. Theism has the former, and secularism only the latter.

This statement merely amounts to declaring your position which is already well-known. Something being either this or that is not an argument.

Please give me an example of how theism “explains in an authoritative and rational way” why, for example, killing is wrong!

The word is "murder," and it's very easy to show, actually.

Well that was on-surface simple! Why not show it if it’s so easy?

So when god in the OT commands the Israelites to kill without mercy it’s ONLY killing because god commanded it but if the same were to happen without god’s command, it must be murder. How convenient using any slight difference between killing and murder and leveraging that into a major policy shift between morals sacred and secular

Your only objection so far to Theistic morality is merely presumptive: that is, because you presume there is no God, you (in a way that would then be quite right) presume that there is no more warrant for Theistic morality than for secular. However, to presume in this way is to presume the very conclusion you would need in order to make your own case. You haven't proved it, you've just presumed it and then said, "Because it's so, therefore I'm right."

I presume, though judge is a better word, based on what nature, history and logic tells me; as such, I cannot say, "because it's so, therefore I'm right." I can only go so far as the probability of it being right takes me. This necessitates a modicum of critical thinking which mere acceptance of scripture does not sanction.

You, on the other hand, have no other option but to say “I’m right” since your proof comes from the bible which you accept as the bona fide word of God; being so accepted at face value it follows there exists no other alternative for a believer such as yourself to be right even if you interpretation may differ vastly from other theists.

Unlike you, I haven’t programmed myself to receiving input from any single source. In countless posts you speak of “proof” (as if that were even possible!) in challenging others believing you already have it every time you put hand on the bible! Yet within this universe – only a trifle more important than the bible - truth is more likely to reside within a field of probabilities than anything scriptured on papyrus or goat skin two and three thousand years ago. Atheism does not require or even desire the kind of certainties theists lay claim to, truth being nothing more than a probability quotient. Your quote, in effect, which you applied to me properly applies to you.

If, however, we leave open the possibility that God exists, and take that possibility seriously, then it is not hard to legitimize anything He commands or intends as the information we need on morality. If a Supreme Being said "Do X," or if "X" conforms to His character, then "X" is moral. QED.

If we leave open the possibility that Gods exists then why presume, as you invariably do, that it has to be the god of the bible? To you god exists in no other form than Jesus in the NT and his bad-tempered old man in the OT! Spontaneously from there you derive theistic morality as the only one that’s valid. If this ain’t Faulty Tower logic I don’t know what is!

Secular morality has no problem and sees no contradiction in condemning the likes of Hitler...

Indeed. BUT at the same time, it denies there can be any real moral basis for preferring to do that, and in fact, makes it impossible to say why one cannot wholeheartedly approve of Hitler and help him pile up the corpses. Secularism has no view on what you MUST do about Hitler.

It has no moral information at all.

If secular morality which so vehemently condemned Hitler had no real moral basis or “moral information” for doing so then explain what else would have caused the outrage to be so universal. If not based on moral motives, what was it?

Your argument, as I see it, amounts to this – no matter how ethical one may be if you don’t believe in god as expounded in the bible, you aren’t truly human or somewhat divested of humanity since you’re not conscious of that which guides you; in essence morality perceived instinctually as prerequisite to all forms of cooperation and not by the superior mandate of a divine lawgiver whose authority you are required to consciously accept and obey. In other words the ‘statute laws’ of an assumed god preempting the commonsense laws of reason. That which tells us what to do is superior than discovering it for ourselves.

Since god supposedly created all humans, what separates so completely one group from the other? Assuming both to be equally ethical what makes the theist superior to the atheist and how do you define a “real moral basis” critical in separating the two?

I’m only asking because your statement on Hitler vis-a-vis morality sounds thoroughly paradoxical to me even though it’s logical to you. To make it at least seem coherent requires an explanation of what a “real moral basis” consists of, what makes it “real” in opposition to the simulacrum of one you identify the secular variety to be??

This requires explanation not simply proclamation...unless you were never serious about theism and only playing word games!

[Greta]

It is true that our cognitive faculties are evolved to produce survival rather than truth.

If that is so, then ask yourself this: "Why should you trust them?"

I trust them more than I trust the myths of men who share my sensory limitations.

It's all relative. You seem to be caught up in absolutes and dismiss relativities as nothing. In truth, relativities appear to be everything for all life. This "absolute truth", if existent, is not something you can hope to know. It would be akin to teaching a cockroach QM equations - insufficient equipment.

[thedoc]

I think the world would be mighty dull if it weren't for all the culture and architecture that theism has brought us.

Or how about the sciences? For Atheism is surely badly anti-scientific.

Why do I say so? Because it would tell us that our cognitive faculties are evolved to produce survival, not to lead us to truth.

In fact, Atheistic Evolutionism would say that if something is a delusion but is useful in terms of survival-of-the-fittest (such as, say, an unsupportable and irrational belief in group solidarity, which may advantage us or the collective) then Atheist Evolution has to say that our cognitive faculties prefer that above truth.

But if our cognitive faculties are not keyed to truth, but merely to survival (and perhaps only collective survival, not individual well-being), then why should we believe them? They are more likely to lead us to delusions or even death than to truth. And if we cannot believe our cognitive faculties, then where is science? Why should we trust the pronouncements of our scientific minds, when they're only geared to (our own, or maybe only to other people's) survival, not to truth?

Thus Atheism destroys confidence in science.

Science is survival, if atheism promotes survival then it promotes science, arguments against it are false.

[thedoc]

It is true that our cognitive faculties are evolved to produce survival rather than truth.

If that is so, then ask yourself this: "Why should you trust them?"

I trust them more than I trust the myths of men who share my sensory limitations.

It's all relative. You seem to be caught up in absolutes and dismiss relativities as nothing. In truth, relativities appear to be everything for all life. This "absolute truth", if existent, is not something you can hope to know. It would be akin to teaching a cockroach QM equations - insufficient equipment.

Survival is truth, in the real world, not in the world of idealistic philosophers.

[Dalek Prime]

Funny how God and his disciples' writings have only reached this dustspeck outpost of the universe. But if anyone knows of copies in distant galaxies, please correct me...

[thedoc]

Funny how God and his disciples' writings have only reached this dustspeck outpost of the universe. But if anyone knows of copies in distant galaxies, please correct me...

And how do you know this, do you have some information about what other intelligent species in the universe may have heard? Until you know something, you should say nothing.