(November 21, 2012 at 4:11 am)Vincenzo "Vinny" G. Wrote:(November 21, 2012 at 3:45 am)whateverist Wrote: You are so obtuse. I'm an atheist and I find human life pretty special. Not for any reason but because I discover that I have even more empathy for fellow humans than I do for most other animals, and I really like other animals. There is no justificatory reason for it, it is simply a brute fact about what matters to me. Do you think we consciously decide what matters to us? If so you must really believe in some pretty radically free will.
There is no religious basis for this regard I have for human life and there is no reason to deny what matters to one viscerally for purely intellectual considerations. One needs no God to make sense of our very common very high regard for human life.
I bet a lot of people think you ARE special, amigo.
But if your comprehensive abilities didn't depart so sharply from the standard deviation, you would know that it is not what "you find". It's what "it is rational to find".
There are people out there who say they find square circles, and teapots orbiting around Jupiter as well. Don't you wish to be more rational than those?
Is there anything rational about fears and desires? What motivates is what motivates. You can't figure that out from scratch. Whatever premises you may choose to begin with in attempting to reason your way to a set of values, there must at the foundational level be desires which are served. What is rational is always in the service of some valuation which itself is not rational. It isn't rational to think otherwise.
