(April 3, 2019 at 6:16 pm)Belaqua Wrote: The Pure Lackists deny this, say they are atheists for no reason at all, and in some cases claim that their minds are the same as when they were infants.

Would you name someone here that you think would agree with that characterization of themselves, please?

Ohhhh, that’s what he means! I’m slow to the party. 😂

(April 3, 2019 at 9:38 pm)Belaqua Wrote: I said that people here use it as a standard to make judgments, and that, therefore, they believe in something.

Would you point out somewhere here, please, who would agree that they claim not to have any beliefs at all? I've occasionally run into persons on other forums who think theists taint the word 'believe' so much as to make it practically unfit for use, but in this context, 'think' means the same thing as 'believe'.

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(April 3, 2019 at 11:34 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: I was raised surrounded by religion. All kinds of religion. Religion coming out the demonhole. Just never believed any of it. I would have, and did, tell them that I just didn't believe any of it. I used to use the occassion to tell them about what other religions thought along the same line of questioning, especially novel shit. That's how I learned that no one has as little patience for religion as the religious.

In retrospect, I should have been an anthropologist. So I did the next best thing and married one, lol. Atheism is an irreducible fact of who I've always been, but it was my curiosity about mythology and how it circumscribes a culture that made me a gnostic atheist.

Not trying to start anything, but that really sounds like one of your reasons for not believing was contradictory theistic claims. Not finding such claims believable isn't 'no reason', IMHO, though you may have been too young to articulate why you found them unbelievable at the time.

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(April 4, 2019 at 8:28 am)Belaqua Wrote: It's frustrating when someone says "Christians believe X," and I know for a fact that Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Nicholas of Cusa, Jacob Boehme, and William Blake all didn't believe that. I have been told straight out that when someone says "Christian," they only want to talk about the dumb ones.

Right Wing Christian Fundamentalists aren't just low-hanging fruit. They're a threat to civil society and democratic governance, because they believe in a God that gives them marching orders. A conception of God that that's so abstract that it doesn't give commands or revelations is usually held by people that don't think the founders intended an officially Christian nation or that freedom of religion only applies to the different Christian denominations. Someone who isn't using or abusing their scriptures to further their political agenda isn't much of a problem for me. The only reason to argue with them is for the mental exercise, I don't care if what someone means by God is 'the ground of all being', I care if they want to force women to complete dangerous pregnancies.

(April 5, 2019 at 10:01 am)Mister Agenda Wrote:

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Not trying to start anything, but that really sounds like one of your reasons for not believing was contradictory theistic claims. Not finding such claims believable isn't 'no reason', IMHO, though you may have been too young to articulate why you found them unbelievable at the time.

LOL, no worries, man.

Being raised with religious plurality tends to have the effect of normalizing the notion that many religions can be true.  Which is a position I still hold today.  I think that all religions express true things.  The existence of gods simply isn't among them.  

I'm sure that there's some underlying cause for why I'm not nor have ever been the believing type, but a cause isn't a reason, and if you can't articulate a reason or even identify a reason..you probably don't have one.  

It may be that I'm not genetically disposed to those sorts of perceptions or ideas.  It may be that I didn't receive some fundamental behavioral modification that others did as children, it may be that I just didn't give it any thought, pure accident...etc etc etc.  It just wasn't any sort of thorough or conscious rational process.  I didn't reason my way into it, as many here describe in their later life falling away from faith.

As I've commented before...I was into curious george at the time, not logic.

(April 4, 2019 at 2:36 pm)Acrobat Wrote: Sorry man, I don't know the person above me, or care for some stranger on the internet, as to whether they believe in God. As far as I see it the typical internet atheists isn't looking for a reason to believe, he's looking for reasons to not believe, to affirm his unbelief, and not seeking to disavow it.

Everyone should be looking for reasons not to believe claims and affirm their unbelief. Everyone should only believe claims that stand up to scrutiny. You can believe anything at all if you reject critical examination as the proper tool for evaluating claims. You seem to already know this at a fundamental level, given your propensity for claiming the virtues of 'sophisticated theology' while remaining very reluctant to actually present what it is you find so convincing about it.

(April 5, 2019 at 9:56 am)Gae Bolga Wrote:   Your morality may be based on aesthetics, the attractiveness or unattractiveness of an idea...in which case it's a subjective morality. 

This is silly. I’m a biological being, and my morality as it functions and operates, or in the real world, and not just some convoluted thought in my head, is shared in common with every other human being. If you imagine your moral perceptions operate differently than other human being like myself, your beliefs are just rubbish, complete nonsense. It’s more a product of wishing your moral perceptions to operate differently, than how they actually operate. There’s no real correlation between moral reasoning, the sort you built you built your silly moral philosophical view on, and proactive moral behavior.

You just lack the self-awareness, to recognize that we function as biological beings, and not robots or calculators.

Quote:You could, if you weren't such a complete tool, accept that I can see ugliness where you see beauty, even if we both see that thing as good, lol.

I see ugliness exactly where you see ugly. Such as its ugly to kill people, even when done for good reasons. But I don’t conflate the means with the ends. I agree the means can be ugly. Killing someone to protect the family I love might be ugly. But the wellbeing of my family is something I’m drawn, attracted to preserve, is precious.

You just fail to acknowledge that beauty, aesthetic aspects of what I’m speaking of are in regards to moral ends. and the ultimate moral goals, we’re attempting to serve, in which we might use a variety of means ugly and pretty to preserve.

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(April 5, 2019 at 10:38 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: Everyone should be looking for reasons not to believe claims and affirm their unbelief.

You'd have to fight against your biological makeup for that. Our brains are setup to rewards us for affirming the beliefs we hold. The reward centers of both atheist and theists brains light up when affirming these positions. Particularly since such beliefs are connected our conceptions of self, and our identify.

I can tell just from observation, everyone here holds there particular beliefs and views quite strongly. Is far more inclined to fight tooth and nail, even when hanging on a thread to preserve their beliefs, then looking to no longer believe them.

Quote:Everyone should only believe claims that stand up to scrutiny. You can believe anything at all if you reject critical examination as the proper tool for evaluating claims. You seem to already know this at a fundamental level, given your propensity for claiming the virtues of 'sophisticated theology' while remaining very reluctant to actually present what it is you find so convincing about it.

I'm not reluctant to say why I'm convinced of theism, and if I expressed a variety of reasons for that. I'm just not inclined to try and convince strangers on the internet to believe as I do, because that's a fools errand. It's also a lot more interesting to hear atheists suggest why I ought not to believe as I do, or draw the conclusions I do, then just repeating how they're not convinced of it themselves.

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(April 5, 2019 at 10:01 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: Right Wing Christian Fundamentalists aren't just low-hanging fruit. They're a threat to civil society and democratic governance, s 'the ground of all being', I care if they want to force women to complete dangerous pregnancies.

You're living in a bygone era dude. Christian Fundamentalism as a political force, died with the election of Trump. It's non-religious, secular right wing influences that seem to be on the rise everywhere. That and folks on the far left, and the politics of resentment that fuels them.

Pretty much all the prominent atheist figures have abandoned the fight against religion, and more obsessed about the culture wars, feminism, pc culture, etc...

You need to get with the times.

(April 5, 2019 at 3:27 am)Acrobat Wrote:

(April 4, 2019 at 10:48 pm)Thoreauvian Wrote: I personally think my assertion is a matter of logic. The more accurate our perceptions, the better adapted we are to realities.

No, it's just atheistic woo, clinging to religious sentiments about truth.

" The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions — mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never."

It's a scientific fact that our perceptions have literal blind spots and are in many ways easily fooled; and that's before even getting into bias. Fortunately we have devised a method to compensate for the limits of our perceptions, (magicians make their living from knowing a lot about those limits) the same method we use to outline those limits, basic observation, trial, and error at first; later, science. The best the argument you've outlined proves is that we perceive reality well enough not to be routinely killed by it before we finish raising our offspring; but that's 'not nuthin'.

(April 5, 2019 at 11:27 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: It's a scientific fact that our perceptions have literal blind spots and are in many ways easily fooled; and that's before even getting into bias. Fortunately we have devised a method to compensate for the limits of our perceptions, (magicians make their living from knowing a lot about those limits) the same method we use to outline those limits, basic observation, trial, and error at first; later, science. The best the argument you've outlined proves is that we perceive reality well enough not to be routinely killed by it before we finish raising our offspring; but that's 'not nuthin'.

Atheists believe this. In reality there's no real evidence, no studies etc.. that support the conclusion that science actually overcomes peoples strongly held biases. In fact we live in our world were such biases, even among smart people, create conflicting interpretations of the same data, and what the evidence actually means, or is capable of showing. The only thing being smarter seems to do, is just makes our interpretations that much more elaborate.

The problem is the atheists tend to imagine that things absent in certain observations, where there's hardly any real bias for one conclusion over the other, eliminates biases in conclusions where the observers/scientist do have strong biases.

There's no evidence that supposed method you refer to, actually compensates for the cognitive biases here.

(April 5, 2019 at 10:50 am)Acrobat Wrote:

(April 5, 2019 at 9:56 am)Gae Bolga Wrote:   Your morality may be based on aesthetics, the attractiveness or unattractiveness of an idea...in which case it's a subjective morality. 

This is silly. I’m a biological being, and my morality as it functions and operates, or in the real world, and not just some convoluted thought in my head, is shared in common with every other human being. If you imagine your moral perceptions operate differently than other human being like myself, your beliefs are just rubbish, complete nonsense. It’s more a product of wishing your moral perceptions to operate differently, than how they actually operate. There’s no real correlation between moral reasoning, the sort you built you built your silly moral philosophical view on, and proactive moral behavior.

You just lack the self-awareness, to recognize that we function as biological beings, and not robots or calculators.

I accept that you view morality through the lens of what you find aesthetically pleasing.  I specifically laid out both that and how I'm human just like you and that subjectivity is just as much a part of who I am as it is who you are. 

I just don;t elevate that to the status of my moral framework.

Quote:There’s no real correlation between moral reasoning, the sort you built you built your silly moral philosophical view on, and proactive moral behavior.

...aaaaand now we've abandoned yet another failed set of assertions and galloped away at full speed.  My moral proactive behavior is very much connected to my moral reasoning.  Yours may not be, and if that's the case, I'll accept this new claim you make about yourself and your own morality as well. You're simply confirming descriptive moral subjectivity, which I already accept to be true.

Quote:I see ugliness exactly where you see ugly. Such as its ugly to kill people, even when done for good reasons. But I don’t conflate the means with the ends. I agree the means can be ugly. Killing someone to protect the family I love might be ugly. But the wellbeing of my family is something I’m drawn, attracted to preserve, is precious.

It's highly unlikely that you and I have uniformly equivalent aesthetic tastes, but if you want to agree with me that the good can be ugly, then so be it it?  The final moral value of some ugly act may affect it's moral status..but it won't make me see that thing as an end or a means as any less ugly or any more beautiful than I do. Here again you run into the wall of an irreducible fact of my perception, which differs from your own, and which no argument you offer has the force to alter.

Irreducible facts like these, combined with my own moral conclusions, by the way, are often why no amount of sophisticated theology can rescue this or that religion, as I've commented on before. If we look at christianity, for example. I object to vicarious redemption on moral grounds, but I also find it aesthetically repulsive. It's unlikely that a person could convince me that my moral conclusion is in error, but even if they could, that wouldn't make it any less repulsive. The dual effect of these two distinct things makes my ever becoming a christian, even if I believed in a god (yet another improbable hypothetical), a practical impossibility.

Quote:You just fail to acknowledge that beauty, aesthetic aspects of what I’m speaking of are  in regards to moral ends. and the ultimate moral goals, we’re attempting to serve, in which we might use a variety of means ugly and pretty to preserve.

You should probably limit those bits of moral and aesthetic subjectivity to yourself.  They would be facts about you, after all.

(April 5, 2019 at 10:50 am)Acrobat Wrote: You're living in a bygone era dude. Christian Fundamentalism as a political force, died with the election of Trump. It's non-religious, secular right wing influences that seem to be on the rise everywhere. That and folks on the far left, and the politics of resentment that fuels them.

Pretty much all the prominent atheist figures have abandoned the fight against religion, and more obsessed about the culture wars, feminism, pc culture, etc...

You need to get with the times.

I'm in the 'times' when Right Wing Christian Fundamentalists are at their peak of power, and getting harmful legislation passed at an unprecedented rate. You seem to already be dwelling in a future where that's no longer the case. I live in South Carolina, dwelling in the future isn't a realistic option for me.

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(April 5, 2019 at 10:50 am)Acrobat Wrote: I'm not reluctant to say why I'm convinced of theism, and if I expressed a variety of reasons for that. I'm just not inclined to try and convince strangers on the internet to believe as I do, because that's a fools errand.

Would you elaborate please, on the difference between 'reluctant' and 'not inclined'?

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(April 5, 2019 at 10:50 am)Acrobat Wrote:

(April 5, 2019 at 10:38 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: Everyone should be looking for reasons not to believe claims and affirm their unbelief.

You'd have to fight against your biological makeup for that. Our brains are setup to rewards us for affirming the beliefs we hold. The reward centers of both atheist and theists brains light up when affirming these positions. Particularly since such beliefs are connected our conceptions of self, and our identify.

My biological makeup is whey subjecting claims to scrutiny regardless of who is making them doesn't come naturally. It's not a reason not to try my best to evaluate claims based on sound reasoning anyway.