(June 9, 2015 at 12:59 am)robvalue Wrote: ...
I hear this weird argument a lot, "Why don't you want there to be an afterlife?" As if the existence of an afterlife depends on whether or not I believe in it, or claim knowledge about it, before it happens.
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I think a lot of our behavior and thinking is shaped by what we want to believe is true. That's how religion got me for so many years. I differ with Atheists pretty heavily on morality, so this isn't particularly relevant to anyone but me. But I always thought of "Humans have value" as a fact. And then I unpackage an idea like that, and I arrived at something like God.
To which you would reply, you don't need God to conclude humans have value! To which I reply, it doesn't matter, because Humans don't have value. And then you launch into your own (to me) apologetics about how we all have opposable thumbs, and i feel pain and you feel pain, and a bunch of other wonky kind of related stuff.
But what it comes down to, is we want to believe humans have value. That's a nice thought. That how we treat each other matters. And that's what a lot of beliefs stem from, right or wrong. It's the same idea. A comforting conclusion birthing a shaky rationale.
And it makes sense when you look at the timeline too. Because, for example,, we are taught murder is wrong. We are given a shallow explanation of why murder is wrong. And then much later, when we finally have the brain power to start thinking on our own, that's when we really try to figure out why we believe murder is wrong. Nobody is thinking "I wonder if murder is really wrong?" They already hooked us with a premise we'll never truly be able to look at objectively. It's fascinating stuff, I think.
