How much pain can atheists withstand ?

[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