Don’t you think that a bit of an over simplification? I mean, maybe your average Joe (who hardly ever actually reads his Bible) might say that but not all Christians are so incased in a little cocoon with such a limited vocabulary. There are a few who can actually hold an intelligent conversation.
Reformed faith blog: I’d agree that it is an oversimplification, but at the same time I have not met a single Christian who has been able to come even remotely close to justifying their faith. Their arguments have literally always revolved around:
1) arguments from ignorance;
2) arguments from authority (e.g., the Bible says it; the Church says it; or billions of people have believed it so it is probably a good idea)
3) cherry-picking, hindsight informed interpretations of scripture;
4) the assumption that *this* universe and humans are special (e.g., the probability of all of this occurring without intentionality is so low that there must have been a designer, which is like saying that if one wins the lottery the lottery must have been fixed for them to win because the odds of it were so low)
5) arguments from personal experience—which can be made of people of irreconcileably different faiths, secular meditators, and many drug users.
6) misunderstandings of science;
7) botched logical processing and/or evidence interpretation;
No argument that I have ever heard made by an apologist of any faith has ever escaped these pitfalls.
To those who come from the more analytic realms of responding to daily life circular reasoning and “because I said so” logic is VERY hard to deal with. From my experience though I’ve been starting to ponder if these people just use religion as training wheels before learning how to think for themselves. In a way they need the religions as a “cookie template” on how to live before they get discontent and evaluate a more optimal way to live for themselves. I myself was born and raised Catholic but seeing the many logical gaps and inconsistencies within the religion I converted into rationalization and then optimalism (which failed) and now the search for truth. So far the new age movement has fit very well in matching what I observe about the world regarding how it works and success in creating what you want.
I’d really HATE to make judgements and I know I am wrong to say this from judging myself but I hear too many stories about “stupid” people and “sheep mentality”. I think my mistake is thinking that the rational approach is the only right one. There are many people I know who are just experientialists - they dont’ evaluate anything - they don’t think- they just experience. They turn out fine in the end and learn as many or more lessons than I do as a analytical.
For many people it seems like the concept of authority is more important than the validity of the authority itself. I write a bit about this in first part of my blog
regarding how the level of authority needed matches the mentality of the person receiving the authority. I guess overall I am just thinking that as people start finding out that the beliefs they’ve held in great steed don’t get them what they want is the moment when these people start thinking for themselves .
If God does not exist how do you justify right from wrong. If the Bible is just a Book you’re not interested in devoting your life to, why do you devote your life to it?
Truthseeker: I myself am a regular meditator. The experiential approach can educate one on their own mind, but it is hardly a way to understand the real world.
Hunkabread: Pointing to the problem of determining an objective morality does not make God real anymore than does pointing to the universe and saying “how did this get here? God must have done it”. It’s an argument from ignorance. That is not an argument for God, it is just question begging.
I devote much of my time to arguing down religion because it is having a profound impact on our society.
Actually I think the downfall to our society is such thinking. Believe in ME and I will succeed. Sounds a bit selfish. As for Moral standing you don’t meditate and decide Murder is wrong. You don’t meditate and determine Sexual Immorality is wrong. There is a foundation to the truth you already have in your mind. If you believe that you laid that foundation, you should write the final chapters to the foundation that was written long before you were conceived. Continue to find paths that fit you and you’ll see the truth, we all live to die, how important death is to you will only produce the belief you follow. MEISM
Good point. The sibbling one I’m a bit more iffy on. If they’re both consenting and they’re both young (so it’s not like an 18 year old brother is in anyway manipulating a far younger sister), it may not be a problem. The father-daughter one I would most likely stand against in that the father is most likely using his daughter’s trust and his authority to make this happen and in so doing, could greatly be disrupting the father-daughter relationship.
A big thing, I think, is ability to make an informed decision. Actually, by this idea, I might need to rethink the being okay with sibblings thing. Even if both are conceivably below the age of informed consent (so neither is necessarily taking advantage), would we allow the same for, say, double suicides of 9 year old sibblings?
What I’m trying to say really is that I don’t see incest as being automatically wrong. That’s not to say that I have any interest in it. However, if two relatives are sufficiently mature to make an informed decision on the matter, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be able to do it. If they have protected sex they can prevent against deliberately increasing the odds of having a mentally or physically challenged child—though, if concerns over the normality of the child were the issue then we should also call it immoral for women beyond 35 to have kids as they are way more likely than younger women to have kids with down syndrome and other dysfunctional traits.
We’re probably gonna agree on somethings here and disagree on others, and we may believe what we believe for different reasons. I really am just trying to respect the autonomy and wishes of both people and society and to come to conclusions based on reasoned analysis stemming from this basis. However, given that I have not thought particularly estensively on this matter, you will very possibly give individual and social points of views that I hadn’t considered.
The truth is most want to destroy something that holds them to something. Contracts for instance, the minute we see we can’t uphold our end of the bargain we try our best to find loopholes in the contract so we may be reprieved of our instant decision. The Bible is similar, even though it has been pulled, tugged and ripped apart, no one has been able to say it is false. But since we’re human and think on our own we will try to confuse the truth with intelligence. I ask any naysayer this, grab a hunk of clay and bring it to life. Now that it’s living, wait for it to die. Now that it’s dead what is it. Just a hunk of clay. What made it live? When we die why are we no longer able to do anything? Because life was taken from us. Remember we live to die. The Bible’s main truth is to Love One Another. I agree “Religion” is destroying this society, if more people read and understood the Truth instead of manipulating it to conform with their belief we’d have a much happier and safe place. But again the Bible points out numerous times that there will be division amongst men, it’s what side of the fence your own that makes the difference.
It is also the case that no one has ever disproved Zeus, Thor, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Nor will anyone ever disprove that invisible martians living 40 feet below the surface of Stockholm invented and control human cognition. I bring up these absurd examples not to be offensive, but to just emphasize that there are an infinite array of things that we could never disprove, but that doesn’t justify believing in them.
I can definitely value the love one another advice. I like it a lot.
Lastly, couldn’t your statement “if more people read and understood the Truth (of the Bible) instead of manipulating it to conform with their belief we’d have a much happier and safe place”, be turned around and aimed back at you? Obviously, there are other people in the world who have a different interpretation of the Bible than you who think that there’s is the correct one.
Do this for me. Open the Bible, Pray to God first, and then read. When you have completed the whole thing, you tell me. Is it really an interpretation? May your walk from now on be that of an Intelligent one.
Do this for me. Open a book of Greek Mythology, Pray to the gods, and then read. When you have completed the whole thing, you tell me. Is it really an interpretation? May your walk from now on be that of an Intelligent one.
It seems pretty silly when someone says it about a God (or Gods) that *you* don’t believe in, doesn’t it?
The idea that theism is the only, the best, or even a good base for morality is a ridiculous one. Firstly, the bible is a mess of contradictions, where people are regularly ordered by god, directly, to do all manner of horrible or ridiculous things - bashing in the skulls of babies, murdering people who dare to build churches on top of hills, and exiling those who eat shellfish.
By contrast, there are any number of ways to arrive at morality through either rationalism or existentialism - the projects of Kant, Mill, and Aristotle on the rationalist side, and the simple fact that certain acts are intrinsically repellent by their very nature on the existentialist side. While it is perfectly possible for an atheist to argue that there is no morality, I fail to see how this is any worse than theists who embrace their ‘morality from above’ and then act in a completely contrary manner their entire lives.
I’m willing to bet (and I’m not a gambling man) that if you counted the per capita number of murders a year committed by atheists, and compared it to the number of murders per capita by theists, you would end up on with the theists leading by easily ten times.
The reason for this is simple - normal, healthy human beings find murder repellent by its very nature. We have evolved to feel empathy for other human beings, and even for non-human things to some extent. It takes a very strong motivation to overcome that built in, biologically based morality. Religious faith is far more likely to provide that kind of imperative than rationalism, because they are infected by the disease of certainty, while the rationalist is blessed with that most (ahem) divine of mental states, doubt.
Beyond this, there are many arguments against a theistic base for morality. One example is a simple thought experiment. Were god to appear in the sky, surrounded by fire and angels and all that jazz, and announce today that raping six year olds was not only no longer a sin, but actually morally required, then if morality is simply and solely the word of god, this would by definition be true. Would you then run out and rape a six year old? If your answer is yes, then congratulations, you’re a shitty human being, but consistent in your beliefs. If the answer is no (or if it’s “but god wouldn’t ever do that”,) then clearly you do not believe that the word of god is the foundation of morality - at best, god reveals laws which exist outside and above him, in which case there is no principled reason to believe that god is required at all.
I’ve heard of research showing that atheists are greatly underrepresented in the US prison systems, that many largely non-religious nations have very low crime rates, and that within the US crime rates are higher in states that are more religious (e.g., Texas) versus less religious states (e.g., New Jersey). This, of course doesn’t mean that religion causes crime, but it definitely stands against the claim that religion is necessary for good behaviour or that it can be expected to cause it.
January 31, 2008 at 10:16 pm
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February 1, 2008 at 1:40 am
Don’t you think that a bit of an over simplification? I mean, maybe your average Joe (who hardly ever actually reads his Bible) might say that but not all Christians are so incased in a little cocoon with such a limited vocabulary. There are a few who can actually hold an intelligent conversation.
February 1, 2008 at 4:10 am
Oh! To think it could be that simple!
February 1, 2008 at 10:18 am
Reformed faith blog: I’d agree that it is an oversimplification, but at the same time I have not met a single Christian who has been able to come even remotely close to justifying their faith. Their arguments have literally always revolved around:
1) arguments from ignorance;
2) arguments from authority (e.g., the Bible says it; the Church says it; or billions of people have believed it so it is probably a good idea)
3) cherry-picking, hindsight informed interpretations of scripture;
4) the assumption that *this* universe and humans are special (e.g., the probability of all of this occurring without intentionality is so low that there must have been a designer, which is like saying that if one wins the lottery the lottery must have been fixed for them to win because the odds of it were so low)
5) arguments from personal experience—which can be made of people of irreconcileably different faiths, secular meditators, and many drug users.
6) misunderstandings of science;
7) botched logical processing and/or evidence interpretation;
No argument that I have ever heard made by an apologist of any faith has ever escaped these pitfalls.
February 1, 2008 at 4:11 pm
To those who come from the more analytic realms of responding to daily life circular reasoning and “because I said so” logic is VERY hard to deal with. From my experience though I’ve been starting to ponder if these people just use religion as training wheels before learning how to think for themselves. In a way they need the religions as a “cookie template” on how to live before they get discontent and evaluate a more optimal way to live for themselves. I myself was born and raised Catholic but seeing the many logical gaps and inconsistencies within the religion I converted into rationalization and then optimalism (which failed) and now the search for truth. So far the new age movement has fit very well in matching what I observe about the world regarding how it works and success in creating what you want.
I’d really HATE to make judgements and I know I am wrong to say this from judging myself but I hear too many stories about “stupid” people and “sheep mentality”. I think my mistake is thinking that the rational approach is the only right one. There are many people I know who are just experientialists - they dont’ evaluate anything - they don’t think- they just experience. They turn out fine in the end and learn as many or more lessons than I do as a analytical.
For many people it seems like the concept of authority is more important than the validity of the authority itself. I write a bit about this in first part of my blog
http://truthseeker1234.wordpress.com/2007/12/12/spectrum-of-authority-the-killswitch/
regarding how the level of authority needed matches the mentality of the person receiving the authority. I guess overall I am just thinking that as people start finding out that the beliefs they’ve held in great steed don’t get them what they want is the moment when these people start thinking for themselves .
February 1, 2008 at 4:25 pm
If God does not exist how do you justify right from wrong. If the Bible is just a Book you’re not interested in devoting your life to, why do you devote your life to it?
February 1, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Truthseeker: I myself am a regular meditator. The experiential approach can educate one on their own mind, but it is hardly a way to understand the real world.
Hunkabread: Pointing to the problem of determining an objective morality does not make God real anymore than does pointing to the universe and saying “how did this get here? God must have done it”. It’s an argument from ignorance. That is not an argument for God, it is just question begging.
I devote much of my time to arguing down religion because it is having a profound impact on our society.
February 1, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Actually I think the downfall to our society is such thinking. Believe in ME and I will succeed. Sounds a bit selfish. As for Moral standing you don’t meditate and decide Murder is wrong. You don’t meditate and determine Sexual Immorality is wrong. There is a foundation to the truth you already have in your mind. If you believe that you laid that foundation, you should write the final chapters to the foundation that was written long before you were conceived. Continue to find paths that fit you and you’ll see the truth, we all live to die, how important death is to you will only produce the belief you follow. MEISM
February 1, 2008 at 5:17 pm
What is sexual immorality? Whatever religious conservatives find to be icky? Whatever some 2000 year book says is “unclean”?
February 1, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Whatever a 10 year old boy does to his 9 year old sister?
February 1, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Or maybe a 34 year old father does to his 12 year old step son?
February 1, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Good point. The sibbling one I’m a bit more iffy on. If they’re both consenting and they’re both young (so it’s not like an 18 year old brother is in anyway manipulating a far younger sister), it may not be a problem. The father-daughter one I would most likely stand against in that the father is most likely using his daughter’s trust and his authority to make this happen and in so doing, could greatly be disrupting the father-daughter relationship.
A big thing, I think, is ability to make an informed decision. Actually, by this idea, I might need to rethink the being okay with sibblings thing. Even if both are conceivably below the age of informed consent (so neither is necessarily taking advantage), would we allow the same for, say, double suicides of 9 year old sibblings?
What I’m trying to say really is that I don’t see incest as being automatically wrong. That’s not to say that I have any interest in it. However, if two relatives are sufficiently mature to make an informed decision on the matter, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be able to do it. If they have protected sex they can prevent against deliberately increasing the odds of having a mentally or physically challenged child—though, if concerns over the normality of the child were the issue then we should also call it immoral for women beyond 35 to have kids as they are way more likely than younger women to have kids with down syndrome and other dysfunctional traits.
We’re probably gonna agree on somethings here and disagree on others, and we may believe what we believe for different reasons. I really am just trying to respect the autonomy and wishes of both people and society and to come to conclusions based on reasoned analysis stemming from this basis. However, given that I have not thought particularly estensively on this matter, you will very possibly give individual and social points of views that I hadn’t considered.
February 1, 2008 at 6:05 pm
The truth is most want to destroy something that holds them to something. Contracts for instance, the minute we see we can’t uphold our end of the bargain we try our best to find loopholes in the contract so we may be reprieved of our instant decision. The Bible is similar, even though it has been pulled, tugged and ripped apart, no one has been able to say it is false. But since we’re human and think on our own we will try to confuse the truth with intelligence. I ask any naysayer this, grab a hunk of clay and bring it to life. Now that it’s living, wait for it to die. Now that it’s dead what is it. Just a hunk of clay. What made it live? When we die why are we no longer able to do anything? Because life was taken from us. Remember we live to die. The Bible’s main truth is to Love One Another. I agree “Religion” is destroying this society, if more people read and understood the Truth instead of manipulating it to conform with their belief we’d have a much happier and safe place. But again the Bible points out numerous times that there will be division amongst men, it’s what side of the fence your own that makes the difference.
February 1, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Hunkabread:
It is also the case that no one has ever disproved Zeus, Thor, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Nor will anyone ever disprove that invisible martians living 40 feet below the surface of Stockholm invented and control human cognition. I bring up these absurd examples not to be offensive, but to just emphasize that there are an infinite array of things that we could never disprove, but that doesn’t justify believing in them.
I can definitely value the love one another advice. I like it a lot.
Lastly, couldn’t your statement “if more people read and understood the Truth (of the Bible) instead of manipulating it to conform with their belief we’d have a much happier and safe place”, be turned around and aimed back at you? Obviously, there are other people in the world who have a different interpretation of the Bible than you who think that there’s is the correct one.
February 1, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Do this for me. Open the Bible, Pray to God first, and then read. When you have completed the whole thing, you tell me. Is it really an interpretation? May your walk from now on be that of an Intelligent one.
February 1, 2008 at 6:37 pm
It’s like the contract…..we’re quick to sign it. What’s in it, I don’t care I got what I want. Its what lies in the contract that binds.
February 1, 2008 at 6:38 pm
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Do this for me. Open a book of Greek Mythology, Pray to the gods, and then read. When you have completed the whole thing, you tell me. Is it really an interpretation? May your walk from now on be that of an Intelligent one.
It seems pretty silly when someone says it about a God (or Gods) that *you* don’t believe in, doesn’t it?
February 1, 2008 at 7:16 pm
not really, but I will tell you this………I have and I really enjoy them. Enjoy.
February 2, 2008 at 2:06 pm
The idea that theism is the only, the best, or even a good base for morality is a ridiculous one. Firstly, the bible is a mess of contradictions, where people are regularly ordered by god, directly, to do all manner of horrible or ridiculous things - bashing in the skulls of babies, murdering people who dare to build churches on top of hills, and exiling those who eat shellfish.
By contrast, there are any number of ways to arrive at morality through either rationalism or existentialism - the projects of Kant, Mill, and Aristotle on the rationalist side, and the simple fact that certain acts are intrinsically repellent by their very nature on the existentialist side. While it is perfectly possible for an atheist to argue that there is no morality, I fail to see how this is any worse than theists who embrace their ‘morality from above’ and then act in a completely contrary manner their entire lives.
I’m willing to bet (and I’m not a gambling man) that if you counted the per capita number of murders a year committed by atheists, and compared it to the number of murders per capita by theists, you would end up on with the theists leading by easily ten times.
The reason for this is simple - normal, healthy human beings find murder repellent by its very nature. We have evolved to feel empathy for other human beings, and even for non-human things to some extent. It takes a very strong motivation to overcome that built in, biologically based morality. Religious faith is far more likely to provide that kind of imperative than rationalism, because they are infected by the disease of certainty, while the rationalist is blessed with that most (ahem) divine of mental states, doubt.
Beyond this, there are many arguments against a theistic base for morality. One example is a simple thought experiment. Were god to appear in the sky, surrounded by fire and angels and all that jazz, and announce today that raping six year olds was not only no longer a sin, but actually morally required, then if morality is simply and solely the word of god, this would by definition be true. Would you then run out and rape a six year old? If your answer is yes, then congratulations, you’re a shitty human being, but consistent in your beliefs. If the answer is no (or if it’s “but god wouldn’t ever do that”,) then clearly you do not believe that the word of god is the foundation of morality - at best, god reveals laws which exist outside and above him, in which case there is no principled reason to believe that god is required at all.
February 2, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Stoobs:
I’ve heard of research showing that atheists are greatly underrepresented in the US prison systems, that many largely non-religious nations have very low crime rates, and that within the US crime rates are higher in states that are more religious (e.g., Texas) versus less religious states (e.g., New Jersey). This, of course doesn’t mean that religion causes crime, but it definitely stands against the claim that religion is necessary for good behaviour or that it can be expected to cause it.
February 3, 2008 at 6:37 pm
It’s both tragic and a relief to know the same bullshit is repeated all over the world. Islam, Christianity, Judaism all the same.