Atheists; what do you base your morals on?

[jstrodel]

I'd wager that the things that aren't part of that "most" that modern science has right are precisely those parts that conflict with your faith, and that this is where the problem (real or imagined) resides in much the same way as your problem with humanism appears to be more accurately a problem with secularism. Or, to put it another way, when any given thing opts out of a particular fairy tale you begin to smear that thing from any angle you perceive as available, drawing guilt by association and creating a web of dissimilar or only mildly related concepts which- to your mind- become indistinguishable from each other and synonymous with "the enemy"........

But I could be wrong.

I am unsure of whether evolutionary theory is the best explanation because of religious reasons, and I am unsure because I don't know if it will be the way that people understand biology in 1000 years. A lot of things that people thought was certain 1000 years ago aren't certain.

I don't think that the Bible teaches that evolution is necessary incompatible, I read a study that said 48% of seminary presidents accepted evolutionary theory. I don't really know. It is definately a controversial issue in the Christian church. There are problems with theistic belief, honestly, I really couldn't say whether the problems are serious or not. It really is tough to understand exactly what Genesis intends to me, if it is allegorical, etc. Augustine had non-literal approaches to Genesis, so it is not as if theology was invented very recently to accommodate evolutionary theory (though some theologians have chosen to turn their craft into something like a used car dealership). There does seem to be some very good evidence for evolutionary theory (such the finches in the gallapogos islands and the genetic evidence and the fossil record, etc).

I think it probably is true, but I could be wrong.

I am not someone who is trying to get creationism into the schools and I am not a Young Earth Creationist.

Rhythm, as for your other commens about the feeling of words dominating the mind more than the logic, this is something that I have struggled with and feel that I have some victory over, although to have complete victory means to have a direct experience of language in which the signifier becomes the signified. Words are symbols.

But you know, Rhythm, atheists do this too. Atheists treat concepts such as "rationality" and "evidence" as if they are non-culturally defined concepts. They speak about them in shallow black and white concepts terms. They are symbols used to express very complicated concepts.

There is another kind of black and white distortion that happens when people process information. It happens when people get so focused on trying to be "nuanced" and "intellectual" and avoiding "propaganda" that they actually give these symbols a greater weight than they actually have. When they do it, they feel like they are seeing through propaganda or something like that but when you see others do it, it is apparent that they don't view the world in a nuanced way, they view it like a showy coffee table magazine, eager to prove its sophistication.

I see a common example of this in people refusal to accept the categories of the French revolution, of left and right, in identifying social movements based on their funding. People think they are "avoiding propaganda" and "seeing through the lies" because they avoid left-right dichtomization, but actually they blur the economic-cultural makeup that defines modernity.

You know the reason that you see most of the things you do is because someone paid the person to say that, right? That is where most of your knowledge comes from, through the economic system.

I care about the left and the right because money is what drives people more than anything else, on the left, you have all these nice sounding words but at the end of the day, you know what it is all about right? They want, to quote Dave Barry, "To move money around from some people to other people".

That is a good way to study philosophy, to study who gains, to study why they gain, and how the movement fits into broader social and economic issues. Culture is deeply related to economics and the economics of left and right define modernity.

That is why I am a conservative. I used to be a leftist and I still think like a leftist. I am a conservative who is suspicious of nationalism and anyone claim to power. I am a conservative who sees the benefits of capitalism. I do not consider myself to be a capitalist, only see the economic system as one manifestation of provision.

And I am a conservative because I believe that liberals, with all their nice words, at the end of the day really just want money for their pet programs, and the way that they define what is most important is that they just make it up. One cares about this, another cares about that. They just make it up.

If you want to read a book about what conservatism is about, I would suggest Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind. I used to own a whole lot of books by people like Paul Krugman and Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky and people like that. Honestly, I just like the conservatives more. They seem more honest.

Liberals always seem like they have something to sell.