The difference between ethical atheism and nihlism is that ethical atheists have more faith

[Annik]

You are repeating the main point of the post. Exactly, what makes people more important than dolphins? Or ants, for that matter? Why should human civilization exist at all, why not be a primitivist? Why not believe that one race is superior to another, or create a nationalistic morality?

Nothing makes us better. Seriously. We're all just collections of atoms facing a completely indifferent universe.

The most important question in the world is how to be a good person. You are not really getting to the bottom of the issue. Nothing that you have written scratches the surface of the debates surrounding moral skepticism. Because you have a nicer sounding name for moral skepticism, called existentialism, does not answer the question. What makes people more important than dolphins. Or in another way: How do you know that Jewish people aren't inferior to whites? Why shouldn't one group enslave another group?

What is a 'good person'?


You get your morals from the culture you're raised in. The morals in the US are going to be very different than the morals in China (for instance, individualism vs "for the greater good").

[jstrodel]

Your god is a murderous fuck. Anyone who professes belief in such a horrid being should be denied the right to vote.

Now what, asshole?

You ignored all the points in my post and did exactly what I call dishonest atheism: You avoid actually defending the ethics of why murder is wrong, but you criticize the Bible in an absolutist way.

You did not even respond the question of political participation being intrinsically linked to moral reasoning.

I am not going to insult you, you aren't an honest person, and there is no reason to debate you.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

So in other words there are moral imperatives that result from not believing in any moral imperitives?

If there are no moral imperatives, the only ground for actions is pure cynicism.

It is even more egregious cynicism to suggest there is some sort of paradox there, as you are doing.

If you are a nihilist, you cannot be a moral person. You would argue, as someone that is incapable of being a moral person, I have no duty to be a moral person.

No, as a person who is amoral, what you are free to do is to live in complete cynicism. If you participate in the political processes and speak as if there are moral absolutes, you are a liar, plain and simple. Of course you do not have duties to avoid lying, but the linguistic categories of cynicism and deceit still apply to you.

But this gets back to my original point: there is really no duty attached to any of this, for the nihilist. But the nihilist will separate himself from the rest of the world, which does not function according to this pattern, and will be hated, as is appropriate.

I do not need moral absolutes to be a participant in the political process. I can use the politic process to follow my own arbitrary preferences.

[Angrboda]

Ethical atheism requires faith. The language of physics, chemistry and biology cannot describe the moral worth of people. It cannot create a political philosophy, or tell people how to live the good life. Of course morality is related to biology, physics and chemistry, but none of these things ground atheist ethics in any kind of remotely rigorous way.

The reality, in the end, that the ethical, responsible atheist is just an atheist than happens to have more faith than the nihilist....

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The process of assigning values to human life is not a rigorous process. Someone might argue "people can feel pain, and I don't want to feel pain, and pain can be measured physiologically or sentience understood scientifically". This may be true, but there is no reason to associate pain with morality, unless people are designed to associate these things.

The honest atheist might as well go the whole way and either become a Deist and accept some sort of teleological universe that justifies the moral language that constantly refers to this universe, or become a nihilist and strip his vocabulary of all teleological concepts.

What the honest atheist cannot do is tell a Christian that he is corrupted epistemologically by his faith and then proceed to deny that God exists and talk about human rights. He must either choose to ground his ethical concepts in teleology and ethics that he cannot completely percieve that seem reasonable as a Deist or Christian or stop using ethical concepts at all.

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[jstrodel]

I don't see what theists could have against arbitrary morality. That is after all what all morality is, especially religious morality. The only difference is that secular morality is based on man's experiences and reason, and religious morality is supposedly based on what god says.

Secular morality: Murder is wrong because it deprives the victim of their right to live, and has demonstrable negative effects on the people the victim is close to.

Religious morality: God tells us that murder is wrong, and so therefore it is.

Nothing that you said even remotely addresses the very serious questions raised by the post. Where does the victims "right to live" come from? To be an honest atheist means to reflect on the nature of these concepts. Is your knowledge that there is right to live stronger than your belief in absolute, unguided atheistic evolution as the means by which life was created? I do not think you can have both.

Why do people have a right to live more than ameobas? You may say "because people feel pain". But there are a million other considerations. What it is about people that makes them special?

Religious morality and secular morality are totally different. Religious morality says that people are created with a certain nature, and to disagree with that nature is to rebel against God. Things are not only prohibited because God forbids them, they are prohibited because that prohibition is part of the divine order of the universe that is established.

Secular morality simply invents categories, although usually those categories are related to Judeo-Christian values and past precedent, and are worth taking seriously, even if you are nihilist. But practically, there is no reason to accept those categories and believe they have more authority than some other category that you invent.

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Ethical atheism requires faith. The language of physics, chemistry and biology cannot describe the moral worth of people. It cannot create a political philosophy, or tell people how to live the good life. Of course morality is related to biology, physics and chemistry, but none of these things ground atheist ethics in any kind of remotely rigorous way.

The reality, in the end, that the ethical, responsible atheist is just an atheist than happens to have more faith than the nihilist....

---

The process of assigning values to human life is not a rigorous process. Someone might argue "people can feel pain, and I don't want to feel pain, and pain can be measured physiologically or sentience understood scientifically". This may be true, but there is no reason to associate pain with morality, unless people are designed to associate these things.

The honest atheist might as well go the whole way and either become a Deist and accept some sort of teleological universe that justifies the moral language that constantly refers to this universe, or become a nihilist and strip his vocabulary of all teleological concepts.

What the honest atheist cannot do is tell a Christian that he is corrupted epistemologically by his faith and then proceed to deny that God exists and talk about human rights. He must either choose to ground his ethical concepts in teleology and ethics that he cannot completely percieve that seem reasonable as a Deist or Christian or stop using ethical concepts at all.

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Why are you so closed minded?

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If there are no moral imperatives, the only ground for actions is pure cynicism.

It is even more egregious cynicism to suggest there is some sort of paradox there, as you are doing.

If you are a nihilist, you cannot be a moral person. You would argue, as someone that is incapable of being a moral person, I have no duty to be a moral person.

No, as a person who is amoral, what you are free to do is to live in complete cynicism. If you participate in the political processes and speak as if there are moral absolutes, you are a liar, plain and simple. Of course you do not have duties to avoid lying, but the linguistic categories of cynicism and deceit still apply to you.

But this gets back to my original point: there is really no duty attached to any of this, for the nihilist. But the nihilist will separate himself from the rest of the world, which does not function according to this pattern, and will be hated, as is appropriate.

I do not need moral absolutes to be a participant in the political process. I can use the politic process to follow my own arbitrary preferences.

That is exactly what I was talking about in the previous post, and that would make you cynical and a bad person.

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You are repeating the main point of the post. Exactly, what makes people more important than dolphins? Or ants, for that matter? Why should human civilization exist at all, why not be a primitivist? Why not believe that one race is superior to another, or create a nationalistic morality?

Nothing makes us better. Seriously. We're all just collections of atoms facing a completely indifferent universe.e

Labeling your position existentialism instead of nihilism does nothing to counter the nihilistic tendencies it would create in people that hear what you believe. How do you educate children? How do you teach them the difference from right and wrong when there is no reason to obey it?

The most important question in the world is how to be a good person. You are not really getting to the bottom of the issue. Nothing that you have written scratches the surface of the debates surrounding moral skepticism. Because you have a nicer sounding name for moral skepticism, called existentialism, does not answer the question. What makes people more important than dolphins. Or in another way: How do you know that Jewish people aren't inferior to whites? Why shouldn't one group enslave another group?

What is a 'good person'?

A good person is a person that lives in a way that is consistent with how people are created to live.

You get your morals from the culture you're raised in. The morals in the US are going to be very different than the morals in China (for instance, individualism vs "for the greater good").

That is true that you get your morals from the culture you are from, but that does nothing to deal with the problem of cultural relativism. What if you have a choice to either fight in the Chinese military or the American military. How do you know which country to serve? Should you follow Hitler because you were born in Germany.

Nothing that you have written comes close to dealing with the problem of moral skepticism.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

"Bad person"?! According to what? The bible?

[LastPoet]

And people still ask atheists why they are so angry? Fuck me, I'm going home.

[jstrodel]

"Bad person"?! According to what? The bible?

I think you can have a knowledge of ethics that it is wrong to direct your will without any wisdom guiding it. It is similar to the concept of rationality. Epistemology and ethics are closely intertwined.

To be a Christian really means that your will is always directed towards wisdom. I believe that there could be alternative ways of understanding God, that could also be directed towards wisdom, or towards human nature and the glory of God represented in nature.

So I think that the sort of nihilistic ethics would be condemned in pretty much every single religion and philosophy ever developed. People are created to direct their wills towards what is good, and it is possible to know what is good. Is the knowledge of what is good less important than knowing the details of esoteric scientific theories, if they can even be understood at all?

Human biology and culture reveals that it is wrong to be foolish and direct the will only the pleasures or arbitrarily. Nihilism is a way of saying that foolishness is acceptable because there is no such thing as wisdom. As hinted at before, this also destroys the foundations of atheist epistemology, at least epistemology understood in a sense in which there are duties to accept the fruits of epistemology.

So nihilism really is incompatible with the aggressive scientism that dominates atheist discourse. Christianity is actually close in many ways to the rationality of science. Christianity demands that the will be filled with epistemologically responsible concepts at all times. This is what nihilism denies.

Anyone who defends nihilism is defending that it is ok to be a bad person. I think it is safe to call them a bad person.

[Question Mark]

I don't see what theists could have against arbitrary morality. That is after all what all morality is, especially religious morality. The only difference is that secular morality is based on man's experiences and reason, and religious morality is supposedly based on what god says.

Secular morality: Murder is wrong because it deprives the victim of their right to live, and has demonstrable negative effects on the people the victim is close to.

Religious morality: God tells us that murder is wrong, and so therefore it is.

Nothing that you said even remotely addresses the very serious questions raised by the post. Where does the victims "right to live" come from? To be an honest atheist means to reflect on the nature of these concepts. Is your knowledge that there is right to live stronger than your belief in absolute, unguided atheistic evolution as the means by which life was created? I do not think you can have both.

Let's not bandy about divinding concepts of "honest" atheists and the like, or shall we start calling christians "honest" christians, and "reasonable" christians and the like. Christians and atheists will do fine I think.

What I said here addresses the overarching problem of these questions. Secular morality looks at the effects certain actions have upon other people, by individuals and groups.
The right to live stands, in this context, on the fact that as atheists, we believe that there is nothing after we stop living, therefore removing one's right to life removes each and every other right they have as well. And it's irreversible. Once they're dead, there's no returning their rights to them.
We ascribe rights to people because we ourselves want them, and feel bad when they're taken away, and the best way to not have them taken from us is to make sure no one else feels like they're getting their taken away.

Why do people have a right to live more than ameobas? You may say "because people feel pain". But there are a million other considerations. What it is about people that makes them special?

We're biased towards our own kind. Is that so unusual in the human race? We show preference for individuals we share sympathies with all the time. We have little in relation to amoebas, so we don't consider them as important.

Religious morality and secular morality are totally different. Religious morality says that people are created with a certain nature, and to disagree with that nature is to rebel against God. Things are not only prohibited because God forbids them, they are prohibited because that prohibition is part of the divine order of the universe that is established.

You're missing out the fact that according to your theology, god made that divine order, so it is still just him saying something and it being so. There's no reason behind it, it's just god's arbitrary say-so

Secular morality simply invents categories, although usually those categories are related to Judeo-Christian values and past precedent, and are worth taking seriously, even if you are nihilist. But practically, there is no reason to accept those categories and believe they have more authority than some other category that you invent

Believe it or not, the religious categories were arbitrarily created too, by the people who wrote the holy books. The only difference is that secular morality updates itself, where as religious morality has an annoying habit of staying constantly the same whilst the rest of society has moved on.

As I said before, secular morality is created, yes, I acknowledge that, it's not always just been here. but it's a testament to humanity in my opinion that we have taken the time to actually give ourselves morals, to stand up and say that murder is wrong, that stealing hurts others.
To invent a god and make it the reason we have morality instead of our own compassion and empathy is in many ways lazy and cowardly.

[Whateverist]

If naturalism is true e.g. there is no God and the material universe, more or less, is all that exists, the naturalist is faced with two possible stances:

1. Deny the existence of the reality of any morality at all - a human being is no more valuable than an amoeba
2. Ascribe some sort of arbitrary value to human beings

I believe that choice two, which is what the vast majority of atheists choose to do is epistemologically very similar to religious faith. In religious faith, people recognize a moral, teleological order of life in which value is ascribed to human beings as a consequence of them being created. In atheism, the value is simply ascribed to human life. The atheist might object that the value is not an objective fact, but only what is consider to be objective, but that completely denies the way that atheists use moral language (see, the language of liberalism).

I can't decide if you have your head in the clouds or up your ass. But in this you are on the same level with plenty of atheists. You insist on placing morality under the domain of reason, but that is not where morality comes from. No one responds to morally reprehensible behavior involving cruelty to others in a purely intellectual way. "Gee, don't they realize that their actions, if adopted by everyone, could one day result in harm to me or mine?" That isn't the way it works. It is empathy for others which makes us recoil against cruelty, and empathy operates at the level of feeling, not rationality.

There is no need to justify an assignment of value to people objectively, for either theists or atheists, if you recognize that empathy and not rationality is the basis of morality. One need not have a reasonable justification for rejecting cruelty in order to avoid what one finds unpleasant. In the same way I need not have an objective basis for rejecting store-bought mayonnaise in order to leave it off my sandwiches. In both cases I avoid what I don't like and pursue what I do. That isn't to say that rationality doesn't come into play to sort out conflicts in our empathy or tastes or preferences or desires generally. Of course it does. That in fact is the proper use of rationality, to serve feeling and come up with strategic goals for maximizing that which one is drawn to and avoid that which one is repulsed by. One just needs to keep rationality in its place.