Do you wish there's a god?

[Belacqua]

The problem is that beauty does not equal truth.  

Well, Plato and the more Platonic Christians have interesting ideas about how truth and beauty are related. It requires us to think of beauty as something more than prettiness. But again, these are ideas I find it wonderful to hold in the mind and not necessarily argue that they are true in the way that a science textbook is supposed to be true.

I have read a lot of art history and appreciate the talents of great painters, even though I simultaneously acknowledge they also acted as religious propagandists.

Van Eyck, Brueghel, Rembrandt, and some others, made some of the most profound and wonderful objects ever created by human beings. They did so entirely through the structure of their religion. To do it, they had to be amazingly integrated people, with the heart, the mind, the eye, the hand, the will, the daily routine, all working together and not, as with most of us, at odds or neurotically. This alone is a model for how human beings could be. This is more than a talent for making things look good, and to call such works "propaganda" is, let's say... a bit reductive. 

Have you never learned something important from fiction? Again, Dante, Goethe's Faust, Blake's poetry. There are true and important things there. It takes years of work (enormously pleasurable hard work) to open oneself up to these things. We give up easy pleasures because the difficult pleasures are so much more rewarding -- Eros pulls upwards.

[LadyForCamus]

Are you claiming that people can’t simply lack belief in something?

With all due respect: Jesus Fucking Christ. I have been over this a thousand times.

Maybe you are multi-tasking or otherwise distracted? I've attempted to answer your questions, and you turn around and accuse me of ignoring them. Then you try to address me on something I've never mentioned. 

I was grateful that yesterday you didn't use mockery when you didn't understand me, as you sometimes do.

But let's just stop, since we apparently approach things so differently that I'm not getting through.

With all due respect, I don't seem to have a problem understanding anyone else on this forum besides you, so maybe you're the problem. I have no fucking clue what this "lackism" is that you're going on about. To be fair to you, I haven't read back into past pages, so if I'm coming into the middle of an ongoing discussion on the subject, that's my fault. But seriously. I do not understand what your issue is with the reasons atheists have for being atheistic, considering you are one.  I don't think the word means what you think it means, as it pertains to your particular position.

[Belacqua]

I do not understand

I think we'll have to leave it there.

[Acrobat]

The real world is complex enough that we should employ doubt and uncertainty to address it effectively.  That is a truth better represented in atheistic perspectives than in theistic perspectives.  Since truth is relative, it is also continually changing.  So you have to be on your toes and pay attention.

I tend to agree uncertainty and doubt are for more representative of atheism than theism. Atheists and unbelievers are more likely to believe nothing, and believers are likely to believe something. In fact some atheists go as far as believing that nothing is true, that it's all just subjective. I tend to believe what's most likely to be the case, while atheists seem more prone to believe in things which they can be close to near absolute certainty about. I tend to lack of belief only when I have no basis to assume one way or the other, like your marital status, i don't lack a belief regarding your gender, I think based on variety of factors that you're male. I could be wrong, but I'm not afraid of being wrong, to the point where i refrain from holding this view.

I do not believe that lies are more utilitarian than truths, to individuals or societies.

That's a pretty strong faith you got there. That no lie has ever been more useful than the truth, nor will it ever be. Not to mention pretty profound statement about the nature of reality. That a fulfilling existence is dependent on a true recognition of it. It sounds a bit too religious.

I agree with Gae Bolga that you are equivocating the word "good" as you apply it between moral and aesthetic judgments, so your last question is faulty IMO.

I'm not equivocating, but i think there might be some difference in where we're placing good in our moral perspective. I'm with Kant here, 'beauty is the symbol of morality'. But I'll put it more simply, morality is ultimately derived on the basis of values, and moral values are aesthetic in nature.

The reason I'm faithful to my wife, want to do right by my kids, my family etc... is on the basis of love for them. It's that sort of beauty of love, that motivates my moral behavior, and actions, my perceptions of right and wrong, Its on the beauty of values like human dignity, of brotherhood, community, friendship, empathy, kindness, generosity, mercy, that we seek to serve these things.

Once you extrapolate the true values for whatever moral statement you can throw out, it's not that hard to see the aesthetic aspect of them.

[The Grand Nudger]

You're not talking to people who don't believe that this or that thing is beautiful, or that we're incapable of learning from fiction, Bel.  You're talking to people who don't believe in gods.

---

The reason I'm faithful to my wife, want to do right by my kids, my family etc... is on the basis of love for them. It's that sort of beauty of love, that motivates my moral behavior, and actions, my perceptions of right and wrong, Its on the beauty of values like human dignity, of brotherhood, community, friendship, empathy, kindness, generosity, mercy, that we seek to serve these things.

Once you extrapolate the true values for whatever moral statement you can throw out, it's not that hard to see the aesthetic aspect of them.

Then you are basing your moral compulsions on a subjective state.  That's an easy morality.  Doing what you find beautiful, avoiding what you find ugly.  I'd wager that a person doesn't even need moral agency at all to accomplish that.  

Where realism, and realist compulsion is useful and comes into play..is when every option available is ugly...downright repulsive.  When you find yourself doing something other than chasing whatever it is you may find beautiful. Or when the bad thing is completely seductive.

We've already agreed that moral values can coincide with aesthetic values, they just aren't content equivalent. That's what makes it an equivocation, regardless of how you might find pretty things more compelling than ugly ones. Most of us do, even though we don't find the same things pretty, or ugly. Your compulsion to beauty can backfire...morally, and, case in point.... in this thread.

-as can your repulsion towards the ugly. You may find yourself morally condemning some person on account of nothing more than your taste in aesthetics. You may find yourself mired in incogency on account of your own distaste.

[Belacqua]

To me the whole subject -- theology, the arts that are related to it, and the insight it gives into people -- is a source of great beauty. It didn't occur to me that I had to choose a side and fight until I started looking at sites like this one. But one thing I have learned -- choosing a side tends to close the mind. It would make me sad to shut out the source of so much greatness.

I tend to agree with you. It was novelists and writers who I credit my theism too, more so than some bland theologian, or some weird or over wrought theology. And I think it was Dosteovky who said "beauty will save the world", and I agree, if anything will save the world, it's beauty.

In my view a great novel, a great work of art, is capable of revealing the nature of reality and life, far better than any work of science. I used to think that people who shared such sentiments were primarily on my side of the fence, so it's surprising and nice to encounter an unbeliever with similar affinities. I'm curious as to see why the lack of belief, what keeps you from believing. Why someone like myself believes, and you don't, when we're not all that different it seems.

Yet another article on how the humanities are dying: 

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/04/02...s-history/

Something is shutting down. The plants and the animals are disappearing, and so is the fact that people valued beauty, the aesthetic, the wonderful. 

People want to be robots. If they can't understand what Dostoevsky meant, something important is just gone.

---

Facts have utility.

Some do. 

Do you see that this sentiment is an ideological cornerstone of the Protestant/Capitalist/Scientific worldview which has made the modern world? 

see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. 

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5...44B9CE1546

[The Grand Nudger]

Maybe some people want to be robots....?  I don't know any.

[LadyForCamus]

I do not understand

I think we'll have to leave it there.

Thanks. Glad we cleared this up. 👍

[Alan V]

Van Eyck, Brueghel, Rembrandt, and some others, made some of the most profound and wonderful objects ever created by human beings. They did so entirely through the structure of their religion. To do it, they had to be amazingly integrated people, with the heart, the mind, the eye, the hand, the will, the daily routine, all working together and not, as with most of us, at odds or neurotically. This alone is a model for how human beings could be. This is more than a talent for making things look good, and to call such works "propaganda" is, let's say... a bit reductive. 

Have you never learned something important from fiction? Again, Dante, Goethe's Faust, Blake's poetry. There are true and important things there. It takes years of work (enormously pleasurable hard work) to open oneself up to these things. We give up easy pleasures because the difficult pleasures are so much more rewarding -- Eros pulls upwards.

Lipstick on a pig is still on a pig.

I enjoy fiction, but that is a different word game than telling the truth more directly. It's not lying per se, and I think that's where we cut some slack for the mythologists and storytellers. So it's really rather difficult to say in hindsight how seriously religious people really took their ideas historically. I just know that the effects have been to promote propaganda in many cases.

I am a talented individual who has largely spent his life avoiding painting exactly because I would rather communicate something true than simply show off my talents promoting questionable assumptions, including consumerism of art. Nature is already filled with beauty unsullied by all the self-display of artists.

---

I do not believe that lies are more utilitarian than truths, to individuals or societies.

That's a pretty strong faith you got there. That no lie has ever been more useful than the truth, nor will it ever be. Not to mention pretty profound statement about the nature of reality. That a fulfilling existence is dependent on a true recognition of it. It sounds a bit too religious.

I personally think my assertion is a matter of logic. The more accurate our perceptions, the better adapted we are to realities.

The problem with lies is that the advantages are short-term. They have long-term disadvantages which typically outweigh any short-term gains.

But don't worry about humans becoming too accurate. There is always a struggle with our more opportunistic and short-sighted tendencies.

[Acrobat]

I personally think my assertion is a matter of logic.  The more accurate our perceptions, the better adapted we are to realities.

No, it's just atheistic woo, clinging to religious sentiments about truth.

" The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions — mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never."

https://evolutionnews.org/2016/05/evolution_may_o/

"Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you."