The Folly of Atheism, part 2

It is not the beliefs of others that give atheists anything. It is their own beliefs that do this.

 

It is not my beliefs that give atheists anything. But hearing this point of view is quite telling. Atheists seem to be fixated more on other people than anything. Hmmm, interesting. It seems they are more upset that other people believe in God than they are certain there is no God. It is as if atheists are constantly trying to convince themselves they are right.

You mentioned you have your family and that makes you happy. That means your happiness is dependent on others. Interesting. Perhaps everything about you is dependent on others. Could it be you do not believe in God because others do believe in God?

 

..and another empty reply, dependent only on ad hominem fallacy.

So you are claiming that 'abiogenesis is settled science!', it seems. But you have no evidence of this, just your hopeful belief that 'progress!', and 'any day now!', you will have the evidence you need. That is not evidence. That is wishful thinking. And your continued reliance on ad hom, instead of facts, only confirms my points, & exposes you as a fallacious debater.

You made no rational rebuttal to my points, just fallacies, straw men, & false accusations. ..probably time for me to ignore you, again. If this is all you have, combined with unrestrained insults & false accusations, there is really no 'discussion' taking place. I make a point, you ridicule & distort it. That is not a valid way to 'debate' anything.

It does illustrate the OP, though.. it shows you have no reason or critical thinking skills, only fallacies & folly.

..ah, you're right. I almost forgot. 'Straw man', is another favorite fallacy of the New Internet Atheist. ..probably due to their leftist indoctrination, which drives into the leftist bots the only tools necessary for 'debate' with 'the Evil Enemy!': Fallacy & Folly.

Kinda sad, though. ..to witness the death of empiricism in real time is a tragic commentary on the direction of the Brave New Progresso world we live in.

 

Beliefs are fine. But for them to be logically valid, they must follow the assumptions they are based on.

Here are the assumptions, for the naturalistic world view:

1. Life & the universe happened spontaneously, with no intelligent purpose or design.
2. There is no God..no spaghetti monster, or sky fairies. The universe was not a plan of some Higher Power.
3. Life is a cosmic accident. It just 'happened' one time, for no reason, & with no deeper purpose.
4. Morality is a human construct. There is nobody there, to make it Absolute. Natural Law is a fantasy.
5. 'Meaning' is a meaningless concept, in the naturalistic world view. You live. You die. There is no 'meaning'. Any declared or presumed 'meaning' is an individual construct, with no objective basis.
6. Terms like 'Hope, Purpose, Heaven, Hell, Morality, Destiny, etc', are empty platitudes. Those can only have a basis in a theistic belief system. Atheism has no use for these terms, other than for sappy sentimentalism.

If life is ONLY a brief interlude between birth & death, with no eternal significance, what possible 'meaning' can be ascribed to it? That is an irrational conclusion, based on nothing. 'Hope, Meaning, Destiny' are theistic concepts requiring a Higher Power, who makes moral judgments about the lives of human beings. Atheism has no such concepts. You have life, death, & no possible purpose for any of it.

I do not understand why this is so hard for some atheists to accept. That is the rational conclusion of this belief system. To try to compete with a theistic worldview, & pretend, 'We have hope, too! We believe in Morality! We have deep meaning & purpose for our lives!' are just empty platitudes. That is not the historical, naturalistic view. Existentialism is a central part of atheism, & the emptiness of life, or its absurdity, must be embraced, if one is to follow the logical conclusions of this world view.

Sartre's quote reflects the cold, hard reality of naturalism. Once you get past any concept of eternal existence, there is only the here & now, & you lose the illusions that sentimental theistic beliefs present. So why keep them? They are not part of the naturalistic world view, so why pretend to have these imaginary constructs? Face life for what it is, not what you delude yourself into believing. If it is cold, hard, & impersonal, why pretend it is warm & fuzzy, with loving angels to protect you, & a Fatherly God to soothe your fears? If you don't 'need' those concepts, why pretend you have them, too?

 

I can go with,

Short
precious
fleeting
value
rare

or other terms that ascribe some kind of subjective value to one's life. But 'meaning?' That implies a significance of some sort.. either a deeper purpose, or some lofty goal to achieve, set by some invisible Standard. And these terms can only have significance subjectively. There is no objective 'purpose' for life, in the naturalistic world view. It is only what you make it. To quote a famous atheist again,

Well, now you are speculating about the thought processes of an eternal, infinite, all powerful, omniscient Being. That is a bit above our pay scale, since we are trapped in temporal, & physical mortality. Our limitations do not allow us to relate to such a being. We can only speculate, abstractly, about such a Being.

But 'creating God in our image', has been a popular practice among human beings, for millennia. Whether any of it is accurate or not, remains to be seen.

 

Projecting your own shortcomings again?



It is theists that are obsessed with atheists and the hard factual evidence for that is provided by the OP who comes up with these bizarre threads. You had better sort him out first or you just going to have to learn to live with your own hypocrisy.

Providing for my family does make me happy as does sharing our love for one another.

My sincere condolences that your "happiness" is entirely dependent upon your imaginary "friend" that doesn't actually exist!

 

Irony piled upon irony with side orders of irony followed by a heaping pile of irony for desert!

 

I would not say anyone is obsessed with atheists. Who could ignore so much hate and vitriol coming from atheists? It is as if they exist only to ridicule people who believe different from them. Other than hate and intolerance, what does atheism have to offer? Hopelessness and an empty existence. No wonder atheism is not a popular world view.

 

Americans tend, on this subject, to live in the early Nineteenth Century, and historical re-enactment tends to hoover up all sorts of floating emotions.

 

Facts and theists are like oil and water!

1.1 billion people worldwide are not religious and atheism/none religious is the fastest growing segment in the USA.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/06/the_odd_body_religion/

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160422-atheism-agnostic-secular-nones-rising-religion/

When it comes to popularity it is christianity that is losing ground!

 

I see you had to add agnostics and just plain nonbelivers in with atheists to fudge the numbers. Whatever makes you feel better.

But "facts and logic" are things atheists like to try and lay claim to. Interesting. It is as if atheists have a secret fantasy about people becoming Vulcans like Spock. Must be why those Dawkins crowds are mostly male nerds who cannot get laid. "Facts and logic" are more comfortable than emotions, aren't they?

Unfortunately for atheists, humans are not Vulcans. While they may fantasize about being Mr Spock, it will never happen.

What is logical are results. For many years now religion has been the choice of the majority. You can seperate your stats by religion then lump all the nonbelivers into a group to try and make it look favorable but atheism is not a popular world view.

 

Your abject denial of reality does not alter reality one iota!

Christianity is steadily losing ground in this nation and atheism/non religious is the popular alternative.

 

I can't see what can be the need to give oneself labels and fight other labelled people. All this stuff is unknowable, gods seem less and less likely, but why waste all your time denying them - if they don't exist, why do they matter? It seems to me we'd be better employed getting clear what ancient 'believers' actually meant in terms of what we should do: people weren't idiots - they just spoke, so to speak, a different language, in which idealistic or decent ideas were 'the voice of God' . Most of us think in voices.

 

Have you ever been in a community which placed great importance on something which you don't? For example if you're not into sports, much like I am not, you might know how sports very much do matter during The Big Game Time of Year.

Politically speaking, a whole lot of people vote based on their identities. I don't know what the situation is in your neck of the world, but in the U.S. religion is still a big source of identity. A lot of people will only vote Christian, and politicians know this, and so of course most politicians are Christian. Or at least claim to be -- the bar can get pretty low, as Trump demonstrated. Sometimes you can get away with simply claiming Christendom and mangling a 'favorite' Bible quotation. It's a feedback loop with political and therefore day-to-day consequences.

That said, I've come to the conclusion that debating religion is rarely if ever a solution to this sort of identity politics.

Agreed that people were never idiots, any more than we are today, and that anthropology is an interesting and valuable field to study. But in what way do most of us "think in voices?"

 

I do want to make an argument that most of this can amount to lack of choice if your born to a religious family and wider community odds are high since its what your exposed to from young childhood your going to follow that religion or at least a sect of it. If the nation is highly religious say Saudi Arabia and it permeates the government then it is dangerous to be anything else. To be non-religious you must be born into it, it must be poorly religious or the person must work their way out of it.

So is it a choice if your born into it, have a poor education so you don't get the flaws in religion and if you do opt to believing in no-religion then you can go to prison, be flogged or die then would you admit it to anyone?

 

1. agreed
2. agreed
3. life is a logical result of the universe's energy matter conversion processes.
4. agreed a human construct as successful survival tactic
5. agreed
6. No, hope and purpose and morality are not empty platitudes. Humanity has all kinds of uses for those "terms" and many many more to define and enrich both our species and individual experiences.

The purpose is to survive, thrive in the universe within which we find ourselves. To acquire the fundamental knowledge and understanding of very nature of ourselves and our physical existence. The ironic result should that understanding become complete we would have come full circle and become our own gods.

I don't pretend to have hope. I have hope about a lot of things including the future of my family and my species. I don't have any illusion that the "me" in "I" will survive the end of my physical body.

Theists want to have hope for themselves, their ego cannot allow them to consider the inconceivable notion that death is the end of them.

Again you continue with this fallacious correlation that not believing in god is somehow equivalent to believing life is meaningless and empty. Wheras, I find it sad that some people need an imagined and never seen supreme third party to bestow meaning upon their lives.

Individual life is what you make of it. Each individual must co-exist within the community, hence certain rules of behavior (morals). You want to attribute your god's religious revelation to the formation and enformcement of those rules, where as I attribute it to the result of another highly sucessful survival strategy.

Yes life is cold and hard and cruel. Its also warm and soft and tender. Its terrifying and hilarious. Its awe inspiring and crushingly depressing. You are correct, I don't need warm and fuzzys from loving angels and a fatherly god to relish the meaning in my life which includes lots of love, respect, laughter which helps balance the hate, the pain and the loss. It may be a precarious balance at times, but damn I'm having fun and will continue to attempt to suck out as much flavor as I can.

 

You mean according to your phony stats. Why not throw in people with brown eyes to further bump up the atheist numbers.

 

There are many "naturalistic" people who find meaning in life. Jean-Paul Sartre isn’t the president of a club where everyone has to agree with him.

And why can’t we speculate about the thought process of an eternal being? As long as we don’t become dogmatic and judgemental, we can think whatever we want about stuff. Of course we aren’t going to get it right - there’s no way to test it to know if we are right. That doesn’t mean we can’t do it.

I quoted Sagan in the post you are quoting. He found meaning. He viewed the universe as a result of natural processes. Even Sartre is just saying that meaning is not a priori. He’s not saying we can’t find a meaning, just that it isn’t innate. I would argue that part of our brain does search for meaning in things and does tend to search for a meaning. So from a more Kant-oriented perspective our mind is biologically pre-disposed to search for meaning. That is part of the human survival advantage. We see tracks in the sand and realize that means an animal we are hunting has been here and since the track is worn out it has been a few hours etc. We have the limited ability to judge cause and effect. Unfortunately sometimes that tendency goes awry and we misjudge the causes of effects.

Take away everything humans learn from each other and focus just on our ability to reason. A fundamental feature of our mind is that we will search for the cause of effects.

 

That is a useless definition of the word "belief". You are suggesting that absolutely everything in our experience is a belief. Yes, I believe i just touched my keyboard. The word becomes useless baggage. And thus it doesn't warrant a post in a thread.

I hold to be true that i have seen no evidence of the supernatural.

In science, a fact is a recorded observation. For example, a reading on a specific thermometer at a specific time and place would be a fact. There is no way to create a fact using logic. If logic is involved, it is not a fact.

And, it takes more than evidence to create a theory - unless you just mean the social definition of theory, which requires nothing at all.

 

Yep.

 

It is a precise definition of belief.

 

Math is sort of a language. "There are two rocks" is how we express that there are two rocks but the physical reality of those rocks does not depend on our description.

 

So the way you figure it, agnostics, who have no belief in God, believe there is no God. Have I got that right?

So the way you figure it, knowledge is an illusion. Right?

 

However, the math equation doesn't depemd on there being 2 of anything. It is a resulf of the definition of the system we all expect each other to use.

 

Math is how we can understand and define our surroundings. It has been a useful tool to mankind.