How much pain can atheists withstand ?

[Thumpalumpacus]

Punishing us for exercising the human nature your myth alleges he built into us.

Next?

Did your human nature force you to be an atheist ? no.

Didn't your god allegedly make me? How is it I came out as an unintended mistake?

Either your god meant to make me an atheist, which means he is not perfectly just for dooming me to hell for being his own creation; or your god didn't make me, in which case I not only owe him no allegiance but that you must admit he didn't create everything, or that he made me but his manufacture was flawed, meaning that your god is not perfect.

Which queen is it you wish to sacrifice? You cannot have an omnipotent and perfectly merciful god if you surrender any of these components.

Maybe you don't believe in an omnipotent god, but that also prompts the question of what exactly you mean when you refer to "god". You should probably define your own beliefs about this god-thingy you're so sexed-up on.

[The Grand Nudger]

They're not unrelated lol. The vast majority of religions are centered around some concept of God. If we don't agree on this concept, there is no discussion, at all. But it's understandable that you would disagree as an atheist, you want to get your religious opponent into messy discussions and a have a lot of religious content to attack, so that you can come out winning. 

This is common sense : I can't have a discussion with someone about the contents of a holy book, if they don't believe it's ... holy.

Yikes.  You know it's bad when even the religious think that talking about the contents of their religion is a "win" for atheism. Any rate, I see you've been busy asking questions. I actually do find that my human nature made me an atheist. Really nothing more complicated to it. Whether a god made me this way, or I just happen to be this way...the fact remains. Is there supposed to be more?

[The Valkyrie]

My definition of evil:  Deliberately causing pain and suffering to a sentient being.

Nothing more to discuss.

I would amend that slightly to, ‘Deliberately causing needless pain and suffering to a sentient being.’ For example, jabbing a child with a sharp metal object is evil if it’s done for shits and giggles. Jabbing that same child with a sharp metal object in the process of administering a tetanus vaccine, not so much.

Boru

I'm not evil!

[purplepurpose]

End of Athesim. You said that Jesus was a simple human. Would you consider him to be a prophet who had divine revelation from God? Can you give more detailed comments on your view of Jesus?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I would amend that slightly to, ‘Deliberately causing needless pain and suffering to a sentient being.’ For example, jabbing a child with a sharp metal object is evil if it’s done for shits and giggles. Jabbing that same child with a sharp metal object in the process of administering a tetanus vaccine, not so much.

Boru

I'm not evil!

Please don't destroy my illusions.

Boru

[Astreja]

My definition of evil:  Deliberately causing pain and suffering to a sentient being.

I would amend that slightly to, ‘Deliberately causing needless pain and suffering to a sentient being.’ For example, jabbing a child with a sharp metal object is evil if it’s done for shits and giggles. Jabbing that same child with a sharp metal object in the process of administering a tetanus vaccine, not so much.

Boru

Good point; I concur that sometimes pain is unavoidable when trying to help someone.

Causing pain for shits and giggles is definitely the style of the Biblical god, though.

[The End of Atheism]

My definition of evil:  Deliberately causing pain and suffering to a sentient being.

So, deliberately causing pain and suffering to the Nazis is evil ? What kind of definition is that ? 

Let's get real and avoid any skirmishing about definitions : as Sodding Boru rightly pointed out, there are instances where the appearance of evil (such as perforating a child's skin with needles) is merely an appearance. You need all the facts at hand to make an overall moral assessment of any given situation.

But being the ignorant humans that we are, we really never have all the facts at hand, and even if we did, we don't have the cognitive resources to process all the aspects of real-world scenarios, that's why we imagine simplified models and make assumptions. We get on with our lives by applying simple rules of thumb and general guidelines to distinguish what's wrong/immoral (in a very narrow and down to earth sense) from what's not.

With this in mind, it's laughable, almost pitiful, to try and take the higher moral ground with regards to an all-knowing being. Evil in its objective sense is unknowable unless one accepts a whole collection of metaphysical assertions -that an ultimate moral authority exists, that revelation from this authority is possible,that one particular revelation is genuine and authoritative-, only then one can truly say that such and such instance is truly evil, and they will still have to qualify, as most purported revelations consider God the only judge of whether something is evil or not.

Long story short, there is no possible discussion in the first place, and at any rate, certainly not with an atheist or an agnostic. As they don't accept the very existence of this being, so any talk about good and evil is a distraction, it's red herring to try and avoid the hard questions. More importantly, atheists really should try to avoid using the word "evil" altogether, as it's ill-defined in their worldview.

Probably you shouldn't forget the bigger picture. When you consider things as big and sophisticated as the Solar System, is it acceptable to you if we say: nah, unimpressive, all this is just rearrangement of matter. You want us to seriously believe that something this huge kept rearranging itselff in ad hoc ways for billions of years, and that life forms as complicated as human beings came out of this mess ?

Give me one good reason why not. Kindly save us your ignorance and read up on chaos theory, emergent behaviour, and self-correcting systems first.

If you think you can avoid these hard questions by rattling off a few titles from pop sci magazines, you're sorely mistaken. Everything you mentioned depends on pre-existing conditions, or initial conditions, without which no life form can ever arise even in a gazillion centuries.

You're telling me that evolution had 4 billion years of "practice". You forgot to mention that before that we had a .. um .. a universe around. An entire universe governed by elegant laws (whose discovery, by the way, was only done by the smartest elements of our species) is the framework within which the evolutionary process took place. This framework is the equivalent of the oven in the analogy above. You need a smart cook to set the right intial conditions for the oven, that will yield, some billions of years later, human beings. The theist sees this is as more evidence of the superbly skillful master agent that set out all this. The atheist, on the other hand, will be happy to posit an infinite regress of ovens in the past, that kept screwing around until a "good" oven arised. This scenario certainly takes a bigger leap of faith than the theistic scenario: the theist posits an elegant and plausible solution: a personal agent intended to bring about human beings so he did all this. The atheistic scenario is manifestly convoluted. All the principles of reasoning favor the theistic scenario: use Occam's razor, the principle of sufficient reason, etc, whatever you want.

[The End of Atheism]

Addendum : one might ask the legitimate question of why a deity would use evolution as means to create human beings. One can easily think of many reasons for that, it's to show for example, that we're not that important (because other life forms resemble us in many aspects, a humbling realization), that the lives we have are precious (it took 4 billion years for our species to arise, and our lifespan is scarily short) and thus can't be wasted in pursuing earthly possessions, that the divine agent is superbly skillful as evidenced by creating a self-correcting process and not needing to intervene repeatedly, that the divine agent is infinitely resourceful, etc, etc.

[The End of Atheism]

Addendum 2 : strictly speaking, an infinite regress of universes (the convoluted atheistic solution) and the theistic God aren't mutually exclusive. God may be the agent bringing about and sustaining these universes since forever. So the atheist has the additional hard task of proving that these two explanations are competing.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

My definition of evil:  Deliberately causing pain and suffering to a sentient being.

So, deliberately causing pain and suffering to the Nazis is evil ? What kind of definition is that ? 

Let's get real and avoid any skirmishing about definitions : as Sodding Boru rightly pointed out, there are instances where the appearance of evil (such as perforating a child's skin with needles) is merely an appearance. You need all the facts at hand to make an overall moral assessment of any given situation.

But being the ignorant humans that we are, we really never have all the facts at hand, and even if we did, we don't have the cognitive resources to process all the aspects of real-world scenarios, that's why we imagine simplified models and make assumptions. We get on with our lives by applying simple rules of thumb and general guidelines to distinguish what's wrong/immoral (in a very narrow and down to earth sense) from what's not.

With this in mind, it's laughable, almost pitiful, to try and take the higher moral ground with regards to an all-knowing being. Evil in its objective sense is unknowable unless one accepts a whole collection of metaphysical assertions -that an ultimate moral authority exists, that revelation from this authority is possible,that one particular revelation is genuine and authoritative-, only then one can truly say that such and such instance is truly evil, and they will still have to qualify, as most purported revelations consider God the only judge of whether something is evil or not.

Long story short, there is no possible discussion in the first place, and at any rate, certainly not with an atheist or an agnostic. As they don't accept the very existence of this being, so any talk about good and evil is a distraction, it's red herring to try and avoid the hard questions. More importantly, atheists really should try to avoid using the word "evil" altogether, as it's ill-defined in their worldview.

Give me one good reason why not. Kindly save us your ignorance and read up on chaos theory, emergent behaviour, and self-correcting systems first.

If you think you can avoid these hard questions by rattling off a few titles from pop sci magazines, you're sorely mistaken. Everything you mentioned depends on pre-existing conditions, or initial conditions, without which no life form can ever arise even in a gazillion centuries.

You're telling me that evolution had 4 billion years of "practice". You forgot to mention that before that we had a .. um .. a universe around. An entire universe governed by elegant laws (whose discovery, by the way, was only done by the smartest elements of our species) is the framework within which the evolutionary process took place. This framework is the equivalent of the oven in the analogy above. You need a smart cook to set the right intial conditions for the oven, that will yield, some billions of years later, human beings. The theist sees this is as more evidence of the superbly skillful master agent that set out all this. The atheist, on the other hand, will be happy to posit an infinite regress of ovens in the past, that kept screwing around until a "good" oven arised. This scenario certainly takes a bigger leap of faith than the theistic scenario: the theist posits an elegant and plausible solution: a personal agent intended to bring about human beings so he did all this. The atheistic scenario is manifestly convoluted. All the principles of reasoning favor the theistic scenario: use Occam's razor, the principle of sufficient reason, etc, whatever you want.

More nonsense. Evil acts are determinable whether or not a supreme moral authority exists. In fact, it is much easier (as well as more accurate) to determine if a a particular act is evil if we proceed from the assumption that such an authority does not exist. From a humanistic perspective, evil is local, personal, and identifiable. Humanists aren’t generally concerned with ultimate, over-arching evil - were perfectly comfortable with point to a child who needlessly starved to death and saying, ‘This is evil.’

The onus is on those people - like yourself - who insist that all moral authority originates with an ineffable, incomprehensible, unknowable Being to point to the starved child and explain why it may or may not be evil. It’s simply no good to say that we can’t understand God - that’s the excuse YOU people invented to get out of addressing evil acts (almost as revolting an idea as karma).

You may now move on to your next discredited argument.

Boru