Atheism and morality

[paulpablo]

I don't believe that all sensations of god are hallucinations, I think some are, but others could just be feeling of ecstasy or other types of feelings of intense well being coupled with indoctrination that a god exists. So someone could have a sense of right or wrong based on emotional feelings and they wouldn't be hallucinations.

Beliefs and sensations are different. Sensations often give rise to beliefs, but not always. For instance, my visual sense informs me that a pencil bends when placed in a glass of water. But I do not believe it does. So one can sense that something is a certain way without necessarily believing it to be.

If someone has the belief in a god that belief is false if no god exists.

If someone has a sensation that gives them the impression a god exists then that sensation is a hallucination if no god exists. That's just what a hallucination is. A hallucination is a sense report that gives one the impression that something is there, that isn't there.

But the sensation might not mean anything on its own.

Its more like

Happy sensation= wow i feel good today
happy sensation+ indoctrination in religion = wow i feel god today, all around me.

The happy sensation isn't causing the hallucination.

Just as if science discovered that pencils actually do bend when they enter water, your scientific knowledge that pencils don't bend when they enter water wouldn't be said to have caused you to have previously been hallucinating, you just had been educated in knowledge that made you believe something was happening that wasn't.

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I do not understand your question. I am arguing that morality is composed of the instructions and favourings of an agent. But not just any old agent. An agent who has sufficient power over our interests to be able to confer reasons for compliance with her instructions whatever our interests. And an agent like that is what we would commonly refer to as a 'god'. So morality - all of it - is composed of the instructions and favourings of a god.

But then as I have said before, not everyone has the same morality, some people in the past have had explicit instructions from god and felt a moral obligation to sacrifice humans, kill prostitutes and so on, other people's morals instruct them to help the prostitutes and to not kill any human, so surely if you are right then this would make the existence of one god impossible it would have to be the existence of more than one god.