Religious moderates enable religious extremists

[Esquilax]

And I have told you what you as an atheist without a belief in God arguing against the general existence of God as you are right now will have to believe. You are a materialist/naturalist. If you don't understand what you believe or it's implications then I'll tell you.

That one's going in the Hall of Shame.

You believe in material naturalist philosophy. If you don't then why are you attempting to argue against the existence of God or a purpose giving higher power?

I'm not arguing against the notion in general, I'm arguing against you, because your arguments for it are shit, and you deserve to be told better, either in the- now completely unfounded, I realize- hope that you might improve your debate tactics, or so that your ignorance can't infect others.

No but I can claim God has a relationship with humanity same as you can claim that all we're in relationship with is a bunch of chemical reactions in the brain making us do all this stuff. It's not like you can prove what you believe you will just assert it as fact because that's what you think.

Considering that the only evidence we have is for the existence of the chemicals within our bodies and the physical processes that make it happen, I'd say we have plenty of justification for the idea that we're chemical reactions in a bag of water. You're making the claim of something additional, and you offer nothing to support it, and therefore you should be offered no belief.

Lets say the side God favored won out. Morality is real you know not something we make up ourselves, it's real because it's from God not chemical reactions in the brain.

Morality is real because of the tangible benefits of having it, and the moment you can demonstrate that god favored anything, let alone abolitionism, that's the moment I'll believe it.

Until then, what do we know of god? Oh right: "Slaves, obey your masters..."

The Anglican Church doesn't really have a problem with it we have gay clergy. If they marry they have to remain celibate though.

So your unequal treatment has diminished, but not dissolved. You must be so proud, being only minor bigots, now. How long did it take you guys to get there, a couple thousand years?

The view for many Christians, though not myself, is that homosexuality is a sin against God but a lot of things we do would be anyway. It does depend somewhat on the Church/denomination in question some are more progressive/liberal than others.

I will offer you a sincere congratulations for slipping out of the worst bigotries of your religion, in that case. It's good to hear.

You believe that we're just organic machines produced by a natural non-directed processes without any greater purpose beyond DNA replication. If you're arguing against the existence of God, a creator or a greater purpose in life then that's what you're left with. It's just factually what you believe if this is what you're here.

I'm arguing against an external purpose handed down from on high, but that doesn't mean we can't determine an inner purpose of our own. It doesn't mean life is meaningless, and it doesn't mean that morality doesn't exist. Why do I have to correct you on these things so hard?

You give humans and God the credit. Else we don't really get any credit all we're just controlled by our genes/instincts or whatever. How are we supposed to get credit for following our program and conditioning we have no choice but to slavishly follow?

Compatibilism: we might be the product of instincts and brain chemistry, but since from our own perspectives our actions are still the product of choices, it makes no real difference to our experience of the world.

Proof no, evidence from science to back up a reasoned argument for an intelligent designer/creator yes most certainly.

Can we not go through the fine-tuned rigmarole again? You won't listen to anyone else, anyway.

There isn't any "proof" to accept this is called faith for a reason. You use the Bible, the scriptures, Christs resurrection and the inner experience of the Holy Spirit through prayer and meditation as evidence to support your faith.

So how do you separate that belief from the belief of the crazy homeless man who thinks Spiderman is real through Spiderman comics, the guy in the Spiderman suit in movies, and the inner witness of the holy webslinger?

True for you.

... Yes. Of course, it should be true to you that I don't believe in a god too, but that's a confusing topic...

You can believe in God just as easily.

Only once it's justifiable.

Philosophical material naturalism.

Nope.

An issue with far and wide ranging implications on a number of issues.

Only for one working under the assumption that a god is real. For the atheist, there aren't any implications at all; right or wrong, I'm still here, and so is everyone else.

Atheism no but material naturalism is the belief that the physical world is all there is to exist and we are unintentional byproducts of the process, consciousness is a creation of matter and morality the creation of the human mind. Physical laws are and without intentional design and exist as they are by themselves. Without material naturalism as a philosophy atheism becomes pointless to the extent that you may as well believe in God.

That's not really true, though. Like I've said numerous times, I don't know if there's a god, and so I hold off on making declarative statements about the existence of one. It's what one should do, without evidence. It's the same reason I don't currently believe in aliens, but I also don't shut out the possibility; to do either of those based on our current level of information would be intellectually dishonest, as would doing either regarding god.

Anti-theism is the belief that religion is evil and the cause of human death and suffering. You have presented anti-theistic claims yourself, many atheists are anti-theists as well as naturalist materialists. Without all of this you wouldn't have anything much to say.

I'm presenting counter arguments to a level of argumentation from you that I find fallacious. Don't mistake conviction as some kind of admission that I believe the opposite of you; it just means you've got my dander up. If you'd actually take in any argument made against you, I wouldn't have to get so outspoken.

Atheism itself isn't a belief but you have to support it with various philosophies and assertions for it to carry any weight in opposition to faith. For the most part it is in opposition and reaction against faith and a belief in God or greater purpose.

My atheism isn't in opposition to religion, though it is in opposition to faith as a concept. I'm not outright hostile to your ideas, just your insistence that they're true based on the arguments you're making, which, as I've said before, I find to be shitty, being that they've been debunked already.

It doesn't actually say that anywhere in there it says things like this.

"If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you ... Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die." -- Dt.13:6-10"

How much of your bible have you actually read?

Any examples of you may want to find were purely about taking the land not about killing people of different religions. Not that I would defend everything they did or wrote but it was a different time and culture. This was before the coming of Christ as well much of the modern Western world is based on his New Testament teachings which are essentially pacifistic and universal not about tribal warfare in the bronze age.

"Slaves, obey your masters," was New Testament.

Evolution isn't about the survival of the fittest and the extinction of the weakest then? Because if it this they applied the principal in human life perfectly well.

I'm telling you, it's not: there are many, many creatures alive today that aren't the fittest, but manage to survive because whatever is in their immediate surroundings, it's not enough to kill them off. Selection pressures don't weed out weakness, they only weed out fatal weaknesses.

Take the Sloth, for instance: slow moving, kinda weird... how does it survive? There's nothing in its makeup that'll outright murder it, and no predators that can do the job either. Survival of the not-weak-enough.

It was a false man made ideology that had nothing to do with the true God. That's the danger of what can happen when human reason supplants Gods Law. Communism was another example of a human ideology gone disastrously wrong. The closer we cleave to the genuine God (through Christ ideally but other religions are fine as well) the better for all humanity that will be.

The genuine god, as filtered through a book written by humans, translated to other languages by humans, interpreted by humans, and presented to you at sermon by humans? Yeah...

I didn't say it did. Atheists like to use evolution as something to support their case when it doesn't really. It's part of the natural order God set in motion from the beginning of time.

We can use evolution to support our case against, say, literal creationism, and we can point to it as a natural mechanism for the diversity of life, though.

The Nazi's had their own ideas about evolution but it consisted of the Germans being the highest form of human life. We're equal as members of the same species but they applied the general idea of evolution to themselves as a false ideology and a pseudoscience.

So when I said they applied evolution correctly, I was right. If someone created a homicidal regime based on their own ideas of the subtext of Bugs Bunny cartoons, would that wascally wabbit be responsible?

You can call what the Nazi's practiced social Darwinism. The fittest (the Germans) proper and the weakest perish or are enslaved. Now if morality is purely a man made fabrication what would be wrong about adopting this model of society? It would in any objective sense be just as good as ours it would really just be a matter of differing opinion.

Yes, we would be wrong, because it would cause pain to the group, and thus knock on consequences for every one. Morality isn't a matter of opinion, because we have a reality around us that exists regardless of what we think of it.

We all know Hitler believed in God and divine provenance. Not a God that had anything to do with Christ or what he taught or any other genuine religion though just his own deluded fantasy.

How can you tell one from the other? The Old Testament is rife with supporting evidence for his actions.

False. Man made. Ideologies.

Seriously, how do you know which is which?

Assertions supported by evidence, examples and reasoning. Your main argument seems to be "God doesn't exist because I don't want to believe God exists" there isn't a great deal there beyond that.

Actually, my main argument is that nobody has presented sufficient evidence to justify belief in a god. Despite your thoughts to the contrary, you haven't either.

Our intelligence is a reflection of Gods intelligence and God created the universe with these intelligence's in mind from the beginning. That's why the universe had to be as utterly fine tuned as it actually is. So essentially we can agree I'm just going to provide a little extra context so it will make greater sense of our purpose.

Would you mind making a thread outlining your case for fine tuning so we can hash this out properly? I kind of feel bad, bringing it up in other people's threads.

I don't remember being a proven liar and you made plenty of assertions about what you yourself believe just stating it all as a fact.

Well, you keep telling me what I believe, and then when you're told I don't believe that, you keep telling me that I do. That's, you know, lying.

If you're an atheist and you don't believe in God, a purpose giver, higher power or creator then this is what you believe. If you eliminate everything else then what you're left with is what you're left with. The physical universe as it is and the mechanistic explanations as they are.

So, if I don't believe in a god, that automatically means I believe there are no gods? I can't just be holding out deciding on the ultimate purpose of the universe and its creator until there's more evidence?

If I show you a jar of gumballs and tell you I think there's an even number of them in there, and you don't immediately believe me on my word alone, does that mean you must think there are an odd number of gumballs?

What created the laws of physics?

I don't know.

See? That wasn't hard.

So it's a precisely ordered and balanced physical system of immense complexity then? We agree on this point. I would say there is a good reason why the universe has all the precise fine tuning and development you would say it was just the way it is because it was.

I would also say that the tide exists, even if there's no reason for the individual water molecules to be moving as they do. It's just small, cumulative effects.

So there is random variation but within a structured system with an outcome of structure and utterly complex life then?

Okay, new analogy: you're climbing a hill. Every step you take, you're getting higher, because the distance you covered in one step is now behind you, and there's something supporting you. You are the universe, and the hill is the timeline from the big bang until now; the variation isn't random because it doesn't happen in a contextless vacuum.

Or we are the apex of a physical process begun with the big bang as initiated and designed by the eternal God and to God we will eventually return. If you want to assert what you believe has happened and will happen in the future.

Seems weird to just stop at us, though. Kind of a random point to end evolution, especially considering the design flaws of the human body.

We know the fate of our universe and humanity in the physical sense. So you believe in a physical restoration and resurrection of humanity /life then? I like where you're going with this.

We don't know everything yet: it could even be possible that we discover the technology to travel to parallel universes, where we can use the resources there. All you're saying is that we know what will happen to the universe if we continue as we are now. A hundred years ago, such a prediction couldn't take into account the internet, for example; we're changing all the time.

Without God all your purposes are purposeless.

I don't think you really believe that. I think you can, like, enjoy a movie just because it's fun, without getting god involved.

You believe in God/a non-physical higher power, creator, designer purpose giver or Spirit then? Because if you do.

I don't have an opinion. What now?

*glances around conspiratorially*

I don't know if anyone has has ever told you this but atheists don't in fact believe in a God. *taps nose*

So I'm arguing against this position that God (or any equivalent of God by any other name) doesn't exist. That position is your own position.

Except that "I don't believe in a god," and "I believe gods don't exist," are two different claims.

With atheism you have to be defined by all the beliefs you reject.

And there's your trouble: I'm not rejecting anything, any more than you're rejecting that there's an even number of gumballs. You just don't know yet, is all.

You're only "good" because your brain which is purely just a computer injects pleasurable chemicals into your physical system then?

And because there's demonstrable benefits to me and the people I care about if I act in a moral way.

I'll make sure to read plenty of Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett books and ensure that I believe everything they have to say on the subject of God. If that's your idea of "an education".

I was more thinking you should go look at what mainstream science has to say about this idea of fine tuning.