Philosophy Now Forum

Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Mon Nov 16, 2020 12:37 pm I think you are believing that politicians require to believe in your God and that if they don't (as the atheists don't), then you think they are somehow inadequate to lead because you presume a lack of religion leads to definite corruption at least somewhere.

Then I am pleased to put your anxiety on that score to rest.

My contention would not be that politicians require to believe in God. It would merely be that if they do not, they would not be able to justify rationally the laws that they might make. All their policies and pronouncements would become merely arbitrary -- impossible for them to explain in terms of the way the world really is. So they could still make as many laws as they wished, of course; but none would only longer be grounded in explicable rightness, none could only longer be provided justification.

What I hear you believe is that even IF there were no God, that the Athiest would still be wrong in your eyes.

Quite the opposite is true. If there were no God, of course the Atheist would be right. He would be right by definition, in fact. But there would be no further justification available to him after that fact. He could no longer explain why it mattered whether one believed the right thing or a wrong thing, so long as the wrong thing was serviceable to some human end.

...one who bases their leadership purely on real people...

One cannot "base" things on people. One can choose to respond to popularity, of course, if one chooses to; but popularity is not a "base" for anything, in the sense that human beings are all contingent, transient and changeable, as are all their communities. They are far too wobbly a "base" for anything objectively right to be built on, therefore.

How can you assume that IF THERE WERE NO GOD (that possibly you are wrong), that we'd crumble in to chaos?

I do not assume this. Nietzsche does, and you can see it in his famous "Tale of the Madman." But Nietzsche was that rarest of all beasts, a truly courageous Atheist who wanted to push his own beliefs to their logical and inevitable conclusions. Personally, I find that most people who declare themselves Atheists do not want to do that at all. Rather, they prefer to "taxicab" their beliefs -- meaning that they claim Atheism only so long as it serves their personal preferences and takes them to places they want it to go; but as soon as the logical consequences of Atheism begin to become unpleasant (which they inevitably do, as Nietzsche said) they leap out and run away without "paying the fare," so to speak.

So you will find that many Atheists continue to celebrate things like human rights, conventional morality, and claims of ultimate human teleology, even though their Atheism will warrant none of these things as even existing. And personally, I'm very thankful that so many Atheists are inconsistent. For as Nietzsche rightly said, the world run by the logical consequences of Atheism would certainly be more cruel than any we have seen so far.

I already treat government AS the place we assign 'moral' rules.

How? On what basis do we know which rules ought to be assigned to government?

We set up any organization or meeting place with the intent to negotiate between DIFFERENT people and ideas, or between competing demands we have in common.

That's not a very good solution. Most philosophers today acknowledge the fact of what they call "incommensurable moral pluralism," which is an egghead way of saying that different groups of people want things so different from one another that often a compromise or middle point is just impossible or immoral.

For example, what's the midpoint between the claims, "The life of a woman is worth half that of a man," and the claim "Women are equal to men"? Different people groups take those views: how do we negotiate that? Or what is the midpoint between infanticide and infanticide being immoral? Can you half-kill a baby?

The upshot is that there are winners and losers in the "multicultural" game. And middle points are not always available to be had. Somewhere along the line, somebody needs to be able to say something like, "I know you think X, but not-X is really right."' And how does one arrive at that?

That is just the first example of a 'moral' WE create that does not have to be something that Nature itself is bound to obey.

You're really just valourizing the majority there.

Because you're suggesting that the "we" can bind, you're actually inadvertently praising the power of more people to suppress the desires of fewer people. You're suggesting that larger numbers can legitimately use their power to oppress minorities. But I suspect that's not what you meant to imply. Still, that's what it is.

If Nature is God's domain or inclusive of it,

I do not recall having suggested any such thing, actually.

Your only out here is to prove that your specific God exists and disdains our FREE CHOICE to do evil by assuring NO CHOICE exists to cause evil.

Quite the opposite, Scott. I'm no determinist. Again, I've said nothing to suggest I ever was.

Why would God (as Nature) give us 'free will' to go against his non-free preference to favor only those doing 'what he demands? Why would it penalize the very evil for which it created for us to HAVE free choice at all?

This is actually a very sensible question, Scott. I'm glad you raised it.

Why would God allow us free choice, and then penalize us for making the wrong choice?

Are you a father, Scott? Have you ever allowed your child to make a choice you knew was a bad one, but allowed it because you knew there was some value in allowing your child to make the decision anyway? I think a lot of parents have done just that. One of the things that a good parent understands, and values, is that in order to be individuals -- to have their own identities and wills -- children must be allowed a certain measure of freedom. And freedom means not just the right to make the approved choice, but even the freedom to choose badly. Absent the real possibility of a bad choice, there will be no sense in which you can say your child learned to make the right choice, or that he/she ever made a personal choice at all.

And children who grow up smothered by the control of their parents never really do become individuals, have their own wills and identity. They remain slaves of their parents' controlling influence. They never learn to choose the good, because there was never any latitude for them to choose anything else.

Could free choice actually be such a great good that it exceeds even the value of preventing all evil? It's an intriguing thought. How do you see that?

They are people-based because that is all we CAN deal with.

But nothing can be "based on" people, because people are temporal, contingent, local, personal beings. Not one of them has any universality. So in order to "base things on people" you're going to have to put some people in charge of the others -- but you will never be able to say why the power-group you put at the top is the right one, the legitimate one, because no reasons for that actually exist.

So Atheism is going to issue in tyranny, every time. It can't do anything else.

Now you are moving into the realm of the 'next' world

No, I'm speaking of what really happens in THIS world...what has happened, in fact, in every declared Atheist regime in history.

Your concern against the atheist is odd though.

Given Atheism's bloody past, I hardly think there's anything "odd" about mistrusting it at all.

Given any animal's bloody past, even if there were no god, would the poor behavior of the animal, if it is assumed 'bad' to you, prove that God exists?

"Animal"? You mean "human animal"? Would poor human behaviour, prove that God exists?

Actually, yes. That will shock you, but it's true. If there is no God, then there is no objective category "evil." (You even suggest this in your wording, so I assume you realize it.) So if "evil" is a real category, and really exists, and if you suppose that it can be used or called-upon to form an objectively valid accusation against God, then you also have to be assuming that God must exist.

Shocking thought, no?

While the tendency of one who is not religious may lead one to feel nihilistic, those who admit of having no religion are still being ACCOUNTABLE to the people in that they have no means to back out of their responsibility.

Yes? You think so?

Let's think again. On what legitimate basis are they being "accountable"? What gives this group you call "the people" the right to demand "accountability" from individuals? And why do you exclude "religious people" from "the people," as you call them? After all, agnostics are not more than 4% of the world's population, and avowed Atheists not more than another 4% (CIA). That means you are claiming that 92% of the people are not "the people" of whom you speak.

So what gives that 8% the right to demand of the other 92% that it should be "accountable" to them?

If everyone jumped off a bridge, does this mean it is a 'good' thing to do?

No, that wasn't my point. Unlike your suggestion, I'm not in favour of the majority of "the people" being permitted, without further justification, to dictate to the minority. So I wasn't pointing to the fact that Theists are a majority (though they are). What I was pointing to is the rather shocking fact that you're not even talking about the majority.

That's a stunner, isn't it? I mean, since Atheists and agnostics are only 8% of the world's population, then to say that their suppositions should be used to shape the whole rule of law is to say that 8% should be allowed to dictate to 92%. I want to understand, then, if that is your position: because very clearly, you're no longer talking about the majority ruling, but about a vast minority.

Personally, I reject majority rule as a principle, except in modus vivendi arrangements. It can never be established that the majority is always right, is always legitimate, is always deserving of getting its way. It's merely a provisional arrangement in democracies, because no better metric can presently be located. But I think it's an unstable arrangement.

No amount of people can assure what is true about God's existence either, without God actually existing independent of our opinions.

You are exactly right about that. But also, even if every person in the world were to disbelieve in God, that would not result in God not objectively existing. His existence, either way, is an independent fact. Agreed.

But given we cannot literally force God to come down here and take over the throne,

"Force"? No, of course not. But you are too impatient. For now, all we have is human political arrangements, which are all temporary and fallible. But that does not tell us anything about the future.

If the reality is nihilistic, then so be it.

Well, if it is, then nobody is legitimately "accountable" to anyone or anything.

Then you are suggesting that you would see no option BUT to BE deceptive given it would be all that is left to compete with, correct?

No, I'm simply pointing out that if you ask an Atheist WHY anybody should be accountable to anyone else, his answers will all be thin and dusty, or else, if he's smarter, just silence. For Atheism does not imply that anybody has any duty to "account" to anyone else at all.

The athiest would be an idiot to admit themselves openly AS an "athiest" IF they recognized your belief was correct.

Well, Atheism is not a rationally defensible belief. Even Dawkins has openly admitted that, and prefers to label himself a "strong agnostic," so as to avoid that obvious trap. Atheism is a private wish, not a set of public evidences.

We have to face it and then CREATE our own rules of ideal conduct.

Who is "we"?

Humans in general in a world that lacks any 'god'.

Then you're back to this: that you want the 4% who decisively disbelieve in God (Atheists) to create all the rules for everybody else. Is that what you are intending?

Note that IF there is a 'god', the one thing that you COULD take advantage of this process is by proving the we can create the very properties of what we think some real God could be.

IF there were a God (let us continue to speak hypothetically here) then "taking advantage" would be the last thing it was safe to do.

I think I've made an excellent argument here that you cannot deny.

I am not trying to defeat any 'goodness' in you.

The thought never entered my mind.

If a God exists that set us free to behave AND he chose it in such a way that you CAN doubt his existence, perhaps this 'God' would be welcoming of our intent to TRY in light of no hope!

What if God had not left you in the dark about this, but had actually spoken? What if God had already revealed what would be pleasing to Him, and what would not be? What if He had already pointed us to the good we should choose, but left us the option to choose otherwise, so that we would have freedom, choice, personality, identity and soul?

These are interesting questions to ask, are they not?

[quote="Immanuel Can" post_id=480188 time=1605537271 user_id=9431]
All their policies and pronouncements would become merely arbitrary -- [quote]

That's precisely wrong. Religion is a set of ideas that can be interpreted in all sorts of ways without apology because there is no authoritative source and all verification comes from one's own feelings about the so-called-holy text, or ones personal delusion/revelation. It is inherently the LEAST possible form of evidence to say "because god told me". Nothing could be more arbitrary than religion. And then you've got the problem of righteous indignation to worry about.

Advocate wrote: ↑Mon Nov 16, 2020 4:50 pm Nothing could be more arbitrary than religion.

That depends. If God has not spoken, then it's worse than arbitrary; it's actually just guess-making, because no human being has any special epistemic privilege in that regard. With no information, any guess is as likely to be right as any another....which is to say, far more likely to be false than true.

If God has spoken, things are very, very different.

[quote="Immanuel Can" post_id=480203 time=1605545443 user_id=9431]
[quote=Advocate post_id=480197 time=1605541842 user_id=15238]
Nothing could be more arbitrary than religion.
[/quote]
That depends. If God has not spoken, then it's worse than arbitrary; it's actually just guess-making, because no human being has any special epistemic privilege in that regard. With no information, any guess is as likely to be right as any another....which is to say, far more likely to be false than true.

If God has spoken, things are very, very different.
[/quote]

God is precisely the sort of thing that cannot be verified in an external, material, consensus reality sort of way. "If god has spoken.." is indistinguishable from pure fiction.

Incidentally, it's World Philosophy Day according to someone or other.

Advocate wrote: ↑Mon Nov 16, 2020 6:05 pm God is precisely the sort of thing that cannot be verified in an external, material,

Actually, He can. But do go on...

... consensus reality sort of way.

What on earth has "consensus" got to do with the truth?

"If god has spoken.." is indistinguishable from pure fiction.

To you, it's indistinguishable? Perhaps. I'm not convinced it really is, even to you.

However, I personally would suggest that the Almighty is quite capable of making Himself and His wishes known. After all, ordinary humans do it routinely...it can hardly even be difficult for God.

And He has.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Nov 16, 2020 3:34 pm

Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Mon Nov 16, 2020 12:37 pm I think you are believing that politicians require to believe in your God and that if they don't (as the atheists don't), then you think they are somehow inadequate to lead because you presume a lack of religion leads to definite corruption at least somewhere.

Then I am pleased to put your anxiety on that score to rest.

My contention would not be that politicians require to believe in God. It would merely be that if they do not, they would not be able to justify rationally the laws that they might make. All their policies and pronouncements would become merely arbitrary -- impossible for them to explain in terms of the way the world really is. So they could still make as many laws as they wished, of course; but none would only longer be grounded in explicable rightness, none could only longer be provided justification.

"Rational" comes from "ratio" which means comparing one finite reality (whole and determined) to another of the same. When the Pythagoreans recognized that actual real numbers were more than simply able to be expressed by ratios of whole numbers, they interpreted this in the way one would recognize that reality itself was contradictory and flawed and that the process of logical anaylysis was doomed.

To you, for presuming that the reality of the atheist as lacking 'rationality' as per your EXPECTATION that the comparison of whole absolute MORAL truths exist, leaves you to falsely assume the end of ANY further consideration of 'moral' conduct if Nature itself doesn't support it...in the same mental conflict that the Pythagoreans discovered 'irrational' numbers as requiring to be added to complete the real numbers. If it is a FACT that what is 'real' requires accepting morality as 'irrational', it doesn't mean that we require giving up on ANY futher investment to the systems we set up to deal with 'morality'. That YOU cannot accept what you personally perceive as 'irrational', doesn't mean that what you assumed is still unable to advance any meaning beyond your strict unacceptance.

Note we now recognize that what was labeled, "irrational" for numbers was kept by its term, even though we now recognize that there is nothing intrinsically 'irrational' in a logical sense about accepting the reality of these as existing. We just kept the term to describe those 'ratios' that cannot be expressible with only two whole numbers. Rather, we EXTENDED this 'rationally' by including the infinite possible set of ratios being added together.

Furthermore, that too become conflicted when discovering 'imaginary' numbers as part of functional system that has effective utility. Instead of referring to this new larger set of numbers as 'real', they chose to call the whole, "complex numbers" as meaning the set of "Reals" PLUS the "Imaginery" numbers.

The point here is that regardless of your distaste of the FACT that reality lacks 'morality', doesn't mean we IGNORE those people who still believe in utlizing the process of creating rules of conduct artificially. The construct of any civilization is itself ARTIFICIAL! So be it. If you think that we are to just dismiss the artificial processes of civilization for them being 'artificial', then you have no reason to even defend ANY system you think should still be run by ONLY those who remain deluded into thinking there IS a 'fixed' set of absolute morals.

That is, to carry your argument forward fairly requires NO GOVERNMENT such that we reduce to a world that acts as the very animals we WERE in nature prior to civilization. In other words, IF you think the athiest has no right to rule for NOT PRETENDING the governors who are religious as justified, then why have ANY system at all, for the same concern about demanding that society accept the ARBITRARY rule of those who PRETEND they don't rule 'arbitrarily'?

What I hear you believe is that even IF there were no God, that the Athiest would still be wrong in your eyes.

Quite the opposite is true. If there were no God, of course the Atheist would be right. He would be right by definition, in fact. But there would be no further justification available to him after that fact. He could no longer explain why it mattered whether one believed the right thing or a wrong thing, so long as the wrong thing was serviceable to some human end.

Wrong. In logic, we cannot 'prove' the axioms we use to postulate a system or inference. Furthermore, within a logical system, we cannot prove the literal FIRST premises as literally being real. Rather, we use our senses, as we use 'science', to INDUCE an assumption about reality that is PRACTICAL. In the same way, government is a type of logical system in which we CAN postulate a set of constitutional axioms, even if not real beyond our practical use of them, and try to make laws that don't contradict them. When and where we find them, we try to alter them to be in sync OR, where we cannot, we test new axioms (as laws) to see if these work for our practice.

Unlike regular formal logic, however, no government CAN be purely correct at any time because we have created the system intentionally as an ARTIFICIAL construct. Some will also be bad systems. But what is more dangerous to them all is if you HAVE a system with leaders dictating FIXED rules as though NOT ARTIFICIAL, ...ie, 'religious'....because these and ONLY these rulers tend to rule ARBITRARILY with certainty. While the realist who CAN rule 'arbitrarily' as well, they are only accountable to the people for NOT being able to lean of some arbitrary postulate about 'fixed' moral laws that the religious nut asserts beyond the system that PEOPLE have accepted as government.

...one who bases their leadership purely on real people...

One cannot "base" things on people. One can choose to respond to popularity, of course, if one chooses to; but popularity is not a "base" for anything, in the sense that human beings are all contingent, transient and changeable, as are all their communities. They are far too wobbly a "base" for anything objectively right to be built on, therefore.

What? If you are correct, how do you rectify basing rule on things beyond this other than the fact that nature itself assures zero compassion for humanity. You are assuming 'nature' as trivial illusion to something you believe is more real but grant those who assert these illusions as justified to rule simply for not being ABLE to DISPROVE them as 'delusional'. ???

[Note I chose to use CAPS above for general unspecific emphasis rather than having to add the html tags all the time. It slows my typing down to concern myself with these. Interpret them as non-emotive emphasis (since I'm not yelling.)]

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Nov 16, 2020 5:50 pm

Advocate wrote: ↑Mon Nov 16, 2020 4:50 pm Nothing could be more arbitrary than religion.

That depends. If God has not spoken, then it's worse than arbitrary; it's actually just guess-making, because no human being has any special epistemic privilege in that regard. With no information, any guess is as likely to be right as any another....which is to say, far more likely to be false than true.

If God has spoken, things are very, very different.

Are you and your religious associates maybe a little too gullible?

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Nov 16, 2020 3:34 pm

How can you assume that IF THERE WERE NO GOD (that possibly you are wrong), that we'd crumble in to chaos?

I do not assume this. Nietzsche does, and you can see it in his famous "Tale of the Madman." But Nietzsche was that rarest of all beasts, a truly courageous Atheist who wanted to push his own beliefs to their logical and inevitable conclusions. Personally, I find that most people who declare themselves Atheists do not want to do that at all. Rather, they prefer to "taxicab" their beliefs -- meaning that they claim Atheism only so long as it serves their personal preferences and takes them to places they want it to go; but as soon as the logical consequences of Atheism begin to become unpleasant (which they inevitably do, as Nietzsche said) they leap out and run away without "paying the fare," so to speak.

So you will find that many Atheists continue to celebrate things like human rights, conventional morality, and claims of ultimate human teleology, even though their Atheism will warrant none of these things as even existing. And personally, I'm very thankful that so many Atheists are inconsistent. For as Nietzsche rightly said, the world run by the logical consequences of Atheism would certainly be more cruel than any we have seen so far.

Nietzche asserted that IF there were no god, we'd have a reason to CREATE it. But this 'creation' is what I interpret as "government". It is the place we convene as humans to negotiate rules of conduct by CREATING laws and changing them as we find may be more optimized. This can ONLY be a dictatorship if one asserts a strict set of permanent rules because there would be no further use for 'governments' to make laws if they are already set. The error by many -- like the Nazis -- was that they further assumed that it was IMPOSSIBLE to rule without a 'divine' command by the masses because they recognized that those, like yourself, would feel compelled to disobey any system that LACKS it.

You assume this of the athiest when it is the insistent belief of the religious to demonstrate that they WOULD NOT BE NICE to each other if it were not for Nature to force them to comply, as though anarchy is all that would be true. You presume that your 'illusion' of fixed universal morality is dictated (arbitrarily) by some being that no one can hold accountable. If God says, "everyone who jumps off the bridge" is good, then this has to be a rule of conduct that IS 'good' arbitrarily of its reasoning why.

How can you argue AGAINST the dictator who thinks they are this God, or believe this God favors their imposed rule simply because they succeed (being 'proof' of Nature as 'God' representation of 'good', granting you the reality)?

How? On what basis do we know which rules ought to be assigned to government?

We set up any organization or meeting place with the intent to negotiate between DIFFERENT people and ideas, or between competing demands we have in common.

That's not a very good solution. Most philosophers today acknowledge the fact of what they call "incommensurable moral pluralism," which is an egghead way of saying that different groups of people want things so different from one another that often a compromise or middle point is just impossible or immoral.

For example, what's the midpoint between the claims, "The life of a woman is worth half that of a man," and the claim "Women are equal to men"? Different people groups take those views: how do we negotiate that? Or what is the midpoint between infanticide and infanticide being immoral? Can you half-kill a baby?

The upshot is that there are winners and losers in the "multicultural" game. And middle points are not always available to be had. Somewhere along the line, somebody needs to be able to say something like, "I know you think X, but not-X is really right."' And how does one arrive at that?

We had a problem when the Europeans came to North America because we were relatively advanced in the idea of claiming land properties as 'right' to declare as one's "own" (and thus our concept of "ownership"). The North Americans were still in a Pyramid building era whereby the concepts of declaring land as 'ownable' was in its relative infancy. As such, when the new people declared land ownership because no one there had direct forrmal means to assert, they had conflict because the interpetation of 'ownership' was FLUID to the Natives. That is, they assumed temporal 'ownership' where one happened to be because tribal life still required wandering to find food.

The point here is that the Natives nor the Europeans were more nor less 'correct' because Nature could care less what occurred. Nature, if anything, is cruel and favors 'behaviors' we think today ought to be enforced against. We go against Nature's default. Although both the default and what we opt to force change upon is still 'natural', the default of nature to be without concern either has to be treated as 'good' to us OR we permit the concept of formulating a system against that norm and call it 'good'. "Goodness" lacks any meaning outside of ourselves. As such, the only way to address this is by finding ways that appeal at best to ALL the people or to MOST of them. Certainly if you CAN overrule this by force, even one person may potentially BE the definition of what is 'good' because they'd be in command to do so. In this sense, it would be 'natural' for those in such default power to be able to command that they should KEEP their position because they, and they alone, know God correctly and it sides with them (because the reality proves it to be.)

I don't know how you cannot see the danger of this thinking to MORE people universally than to have ONE who you assume could be perfectly 'good' to you? Regardless of whether ANY risk exists of the atheist that you presume is so evil, only those who intrinsically have power AND assert that God is of their 'ownership' of correct behavior, especially where others follow with their faith in that person, does society risk MORE people's freedom than a system agreed to be set up strictly OF people regardless of whether some god exists or not.

All our ideas of what 'good' and 'bad' are only an illusion by evolution that EACH person's biology assigns due to their early environmental experience. You CAN learn to intrinsically assign a 'good' feeling that is 'not-good' to another. This contradiction of nature is itself why evolution occurs at all. That is, we would not exist if we all AGREED to the same identical conception of 'good' and would be indifferent to being unalive becuase nature would lack any meaning to 'non-good' things.

That is just the first example of a 'moral' WE create that does not have to be something that Nature itself is bound to obey.

You're really just valourizing the majority there.

Because you're suggesting that the "we" can bind, you're actually inadvertently praising the power of more people to suppress the desires of fewer people. You're suggesting that larger numbers can legitimately use their power to oppress minorities. But I suspect that's not what you meant to imply. Still, that's what it is.

No, I too may not like what the 'majority' believes. But it is all that we can deal with that 'society' itself requires in order for stability as an effective civilization. The issue in reality is can be summed up in this:

How many people does it take to turn off light? ONE
But it takes MANY to create the infrastructure to set up the infrastructure that creates the system that permits one to turn on the light in the first place.

I know that there are dilemmas that exist that might make me an enemy against the majority. For instance, if I had to choose a world where all people hated me versus a world where I had only ONE lover, I'd selfishly choose the ONE if I had only these options exclusively. That truism still suggests that for 'civilization' to be successful, favor has to be granted to the majority, whether we as individuals share this view, or you'd end up in chaos.

If Nature is God's domain or inclusive of it,

I do not recall having suggested any such thing, actually.

I didn't take this from you. The origin of the "God" concept is at MINIMAL, "the source of all reality", of which "Nature" suffices without reference to evaluation. That is, an athiest interpretation of "Nature" lacks favor as human beings have. Thus, the religious interpretation is just an evolution of those believing that this 'source' has VALUE specically in favor of humanity, while the athiest LACKS this predisposed belief.

The religious presume they are SPECIAL particular beings apart from others as though their birth and life was necessary above those who LACK such supremacist beliefs. The athiest, as a human, is also not immune to being 'bad', as you seem to think they are implying. Rather, the atheist accepts that humans are both 'good' or 'bad' but that these evaluative judgements are superficial products of our independent existence, not some set of shared universal facts.

If it were the case that some intrinsic 'good' existed without 'evil', then why would ANY animal require eating any other? Why, even should any creature be able to eat a plant, giving that they are doing relative 'evil' that living being?

Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Thu Nov 19, 2020 8:13 am ...they interpreted this in the way one would recognize that reality itself was contradictory and flawed and that the process of logical anaylysis was doomed.

People who let go of rationality are making a mistake. Rationality, as you have pointed out, is a process, not a specific set of conclusions. Like mathematics, what one gets out of the far side of the equation depends entirely on what one puts in on the near side. So you're right to say that rationality allows us to compare different alleged worldviews; but you'd be wrong to jump from that observation to the conclusion that the world is irrational. The very fact that we can compare means we are using a common process.

The upshot is that the first question of knowledge is not "what does rationality say?" but rather, "what is real, what exists?" This determines the content on the left side of the equation, and accounts for differences on the right side of the equation. But the process in the equation, rationality, that's working just fine.

That's complicated, I realize. But it's also profoundly true. So the universe is a rational place, and rationality works because it is. We must not conclude from the mere observation that we are getting different conclusions that the process itself is different. It's not. All worldviews are testable by rationality. But ontology comes first.

To you, for presuming that the reality of the atheist as lacking 'rationality'

I heartily disagree. I never said, or implied, any such thing; and if you thought I said that, I'm glad to have the chance to explain.

No, the Atheist does not lack rationality: his ontology is where the fault lies. And it explains his untenable conclusions. Put another way, the Atheist tries to reckon without God. That's not merely a false ontology, but also has various very unsavoury effects on his conclusions, one of which (is he stays rational) is that there is no such thing as any justification for morality. (Here, I caution again: I am not saying the Atheist cannot be a good, conventionally-moral kind of person. What he is incapable of being is a person with a rational explanation for why he has to be that, and not something different from that. That is, he will remain unable to rationally justify his choice.)

If it is a FACT that what is 'real' requires accepting morality as 'irrational', it doesn't mean that we require giving up on ANY futher investment to the systems we set up to deal with 'morality'.

Of course not. You can invest in any irrational projects you wish. But what the Atheist cannot have is justification for doing so. His ontology, when plugged into the procedure of rationality, will lead him to the inevitable conclusion that morality is unjustifiable.

Just as Nietzsche said.

The point here is that regardless of your distaste of the FACT that reality lacks 'morality', doesn't mean we IGNORE those people who still believe in utlizing the process of creating rules of conduct artificially.

Now you get it.

Atheism means ALL the rules of conduct are artificial. They're just some temporary person's, or group of persons, idea of what they want you to do, and they are backed by power not by right. They are ultimately unjustifiable. But as an Atheist, one can still choose to follow unjustifiable rules forced upon him through power, or chosen purely arbitrarily by him.

That is, to carry your argument forward fairly requires NO GOVERNMENT

Not at all. But to be an Atheist means that no particular government, just like no morality, can be justifiable. It can exist, and it can bully people or delude them into compliance. It cannot explain to its citizens why -- rationally -- they owe it obedience to its rules.

In logic, we cannot 'prove' the axioms we use to postulate a system or inference.

That is correct! Now you understand my point. And that's why ontology must come first.

If your axioms are wrong, what you get out of rationalizing from them will end up wrong. But it will not be the process of rationalizing that's at fault, but rather your axioms are wrong.

...one who bases their leadership purely on real people...

One cannot "base" things on people. One can choose to respond to popularity, of course, if one chooses to; but popularity is not a "base" for anything, in the sense that human beings are all contingent, transient and changeable, as are all their communities. They are far too wobbly a "base" for anything objectively right to be built on, therefore.

What? If you are correct, how do you rectify basing rule on things beyond this other than the fact that nature itself assures zero compassion for humanity.

That's exactly what Dawkins says is true. He says nature "neither knows nor cares" about your compassion. He says we are all simply "dancing to our DNA." And he's right...if the Atheist axioms were right.

Thank God, they're not.

So Atheist morality and government are entirely without base. They exist, and they have influence over us, constrain our freedoms and make demands, just as legitimate morality would; but they do so only arbitrarily, only by dint of power as expressed through things like temporary social consensus and law enforcement, not by right or truth.

Belinda wrote: ↑Sun Nov 15, 2020 11:15 am
I think of myself as an atheist because my religion is so eccentric that only the Unitarian Universalists are somewhat similar. Most people would call me 'atheist' and I don't mind accepting that name as 'atheist' is not term of abuse.

They tend to believe in the supernatural and have yet to denounce Yahweh as an evil genocidal god who belongs in hell.

If I recall, they believe in a supernatural heaven and hell.

Do you hold any supernatural ideas, --- as real?

Regards
DL

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Nov 16, 2020 5:50 pm

Advocate wrote: ↑Mon Nov 16, 2020 4:50 pm Nothing could be more arbitrary than religion.

That depends. If God has not spoken, then it's worse than arbitrary; it's actually just guess-making, because no human being has any special epistemic privilege in that regard.

The only entities we know of who do have those privileges are humans.

All that is known (more like assumed), about all the gods, came out of people.

This can be proven, while some supernatural god can only remain speculative nonsense.

Regards
DL

Greatest I am wrote: ↑Fri Nov 20, 2020 10:57 pm All that is known (more like assumed), about all the gods, came out of people.

This can be proven...

Great!

What's your proof?

putting religion in it's proper place

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri Nov 20, 2020 11:31 pm putting religion in it's proper place

Don't forget there are pacifist religions and evil-laden religions.
The only active evil laden religion at present is Islam whereas most of the major religions are constituted by an overriding pacifist maxim.

I believe if not for religions with its crude morality modulating its believers [>6 billion] at present, you would have been killed or raped by now.

There are pros and cons with religions in a temporal context.
For the present, it is still an optimal net-pros for religions but the trend is the negativity is relatively increasing into the future to be a net-negative to humanity.

As such steps should be initiated and taken to gradually wean-off ALL religions [promote universal spirituality] toward the future, with Islam as the first priority.

Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Sat Nov 21, 2020 7:19 am

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri Nov 20, 2020 11:31 pm putting religion in it's proper place

Don't forget there are pacifist religions and evil-laden religions.

Pacific Buddhists are burning Myanmar Rohingya villages and raping their women, with the blessing of Aung San Suu Kyi

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-41566561

The only active evil laden religion at present is Islam whereas most of the major religions are constituted by an overriding pacifist maxim.

ROTFLMFHO
You are living in a dream world of your own belief.