(March 20, 2013 at 5:25 am)Esquilax Wrote: This is an odd question, and I hope you don't mean that you can't think of a reason for self sacrifice at all. That would say a lot of bad things about you. I'll answer anyway; an atheist would sacrifice themselves to save the lives of the other person, because they value life. There's no need for heaven beyond to reward them; the fact that they've helped another person is enough.
Yep. This is the point. The theist has a primary and overriding motivation for self-sacrifice: it scores points with god. It's certainly possible that without the reward of eternal life in heaven, the theist would still give his life on principle, since he may feel compelled to by his beliefs. Which means that if the atheist does sacrifice himself, he makes the decision of his own volition, not because it's expected of him by god.
Thus, not only is his sacrifice greater because it is done with the knowledge that it is his final conscious act, it's greater because it's his own decision to make and driven by an ability to put aside self-interest that was not imposed upon him.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
