are you an atheist?

Pray: to ask that the laws of the universe be nullified on behalf of a single petitioner, admittedly unworthy. - A. Bierce

I am often reverent toward creation in an entirely human, irrational way yet I cannot conceive of praying without humility, without reverence and I cannot conceive of a God whom I wouldn't think a made-in-man's image of an imaginary but powerful friend who makes sense of the senseless and helps a bro out of jam every now and then when stuff gets squirrely.

i used to be a pretty religious catholic when i was a kid (pursued it on my own, family didn't care much about religion), but lost the faith in teen years after thinkin bout shit. i wish i could go back to those days, it was nice to have a friend in jesus. but can't unring rung bell etc. etc.

a made-in-man's image of an imaginary but powerful friend who makes sense of the senseless and helps a bro out of jam every now and then when stuff gets squirrely.

yeah, I wouldn't pray to this dude either.

My best answer off-the-cuff for Haldane would be that the agency that is required for the possibility of anything's having moral significance is not an existant god, but the idea of transcendence, of which an existant god is a sufficient instance, but not a necesssary one.

Yet, Judaism (and by extension, Xtianity) has in its very creation myths an anthropocentric vision of mankind as being about as close to the divine as anything in God's creation. It doesn't strike you as self-serving tribal cheerleaderism?

this is my fave prayer of rosh hashana service

All mankind will pass before You like a flock of sheep. Like a shepherd pasturing his flock, making sheep pass under his staff, so shall You cause to pass, count, calculate, and consider the soul of all the living; and You shall apportion the destinies of all Your creatures and inscribe their verdict.

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by upheaval, who by plague, who by strangling, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted. But Repentance, Prayer, and Charity avert the severe Decree!

you know. just chillin with my bro, God.

do you need a transcendent dimension in order to have morality? there are computer simulations of environments where morality spontaneously evolves as a game theoretic optimum.

Maoism and Stalinism aren't religions/cults IMHO, but the worship of the Kim family in NK is.

Or, Aimless, if we aimed lower, we could say that not to be a dick is its own reward, regardless of the au-delà.

I think a lot of what gets blamed on religion could just as easily be blamed on governments, and in fact, should. It's easy to forget that 'separation of church & state' is in practice more or less a new concept, and that back in the day church and state WERE basically one and the same.

I have been struggling for years with Philip's point, both because 'morality' is usually such a narrowly anthropocentric concept that doesn't take into account ecological balance (or insufficiently) and because the very real insight that religion is based on is that often the sin of the parent is visited on the child, the virtuous man does undergo vicissitudes and senseless humiliations, the crafty and the vile often do prevail, etc...

Afaics, a spontaneous morality based in pure pragmatism, in Haldane's terms, would not be morally significant, but indistinguishable from amoral behavior, because it shares the exact same grounds. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that, in my view.

Mordy, what I like about that part of the Rosh Hashanah service is how it's 90% fatalistic garnished with "repent, pray and be charitable" and maybe the bullet with your name on it will miss.

I agree, except with the "maybe" part. It's pretty deterministic. If you repent, pray and are charitable then the severe decree will be averted.

Of course it doesn't always work out that way. What can you do?

Perhaps the great utility of religion is that, unlike, utilitarianism it effectively damps down the endless discussion over when it's cool to leave grandma out in the snow at night. Some religions feel this way and some that way but it least we get marginally less butthurt when there's a common, more-or-less agreed upon protocol.

Of course it doesn't always work out that way. What can you do?

^^^Judaism in a nutshell

in a way i feel that's right -- you can't get people to do things in a coordinated fashion without a religious mandate -- or at least it's really fucken hard. so insofar that any mass activity is evil, you can't do it without religion.

I don't really agree w this at all, unless you are using a very loose term for religion that would include societal pressures and state/tribal power grabs. People do things as a group all the time without a religious mandate. Look at fashion, look at discrimination, etc.

I have little intention of negotiating with God over averting my ultimate fate. I shall continue to try, imperfectly, to be kind and considerate to my fellow Terrans, regardless of His decrees. It is the pathetic meaning I make for myself.

i just went to a city council meeting so that might be coloring my opinion a bit, but i felt like more things could have gotten done if one of the dudes took out a staff and shot lightning out of it at the beginning.

Adam, I read a somewhat shallow book once that claimed that the dietary rules of most religions were based on long-term goals that individuals couldn't be expected to see. You are an abomination if you eat pork, 'cause then you might raise swine and then, in a Hebrew setting might poison the well or water table. If teh Hindus eat the cattle that give us the manure we use to cook with and there's a famine and you decide to eat all the cattle, what the fcuk are we going to do a generation down the line? Easier to have broad fear-of-God injunctions than negotiate with peasants about the finer points of animal husbandry.

I thought Philip was talking about Folsom Street fair there for a second.

I have little intention of negotiating with God over averting my ultimate fate

Yeah see this makes 0 sense unless God is the white guy in a beard in a cartoon. God as an external authority figure is BS and anyone using that in order to control others is full of BS. That is not real religion, it's fear-based politics.

i would say religion is to a large extent politics and also, fashion in particular goes down along religious lines.

the more you secularize politics, the less group cohesion, hence the need for a lightning staff.

pn making category hash

Lightning staff has been replaced by having a huge bank account.

It's kind of interesting to see the communication and coordination strategies OWS are evolving to cope with a lack of a unifying force, but ultimately borgs need queens.

Just say their name three times and they'll appear

Haldane presents a sophisticated argument that the existence of God is the condition for the possibility of anything's having moral significance, and Hitchens doesn't have a decent response to it.

― jim, Monday, September 24, 2012 8:07 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for all the criticism atheists get for being smug, it strikes me as pretty fucking arrogant and dismissive to casually accuse all atheists of being essentially immoral. And it has the added bonus of not being any kind of proof of God's existence in the slightest.

Non-existent sky god = morality exists

No sky god = can't find a reason not to be a dick

Haldane's point is tautalogical, Either god does or doesn't exist. We still need to talk about morality and even if he could be proved to not exist what do you do then? Some ppl aren't very well disposed to being utter hellions.

also tautalogical if "Afaics, a spontaneous morality based in pure pragmatism, in Haldane's terms, would not be morally significant, but indistinguishable from amoral behavior, because it shares the exact same grounds" is true, since he's defining morality as stemming from belief in a god.

it's only tautological if you accept that morality is defined by being an extra-dimensional concept, but that's like saying what constitutes pizza is an extra-dimensional concept (which frankly I think you have a stronger argument for)

Where does free will come from if the world is deterministic? The invention of souls gives you a little wiggle room (the world is deterministic but souls exist in this extra-dimensional space so free will can slip in), but otherwise everything is determined, no? In which case any moral failing is just mechanistic - the killer can't be blamed for his neurology, etc. I'd be interested in hearing an answer on this point - or even pointed to a book or philosopher that discusses this issue.

the killer can't be blamed for his neurology, etc.

That assumes a universe wherein the important thing is blame. What if I don't blame particularly but I prevent him from further acts likely to harm and continue the chain of unhappiness?

Where does free will come from if the world is deterministic?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

Matt, I'm an atheist. I was providing that argument for consideration, not because I agree with it. Anyway, if I remember correctly, the point isn't that atheists are less moral than theists. It's an argument about what morality is in the first place, whether our moral practices track true moral facts about the world, or whether our practices such as they've evolved are just a collective game with no basis in reality. But I would have to watch again as I don't remember all of the details.

Compatibilism makes the question more complicated (by asserting various interpretations of what we mean by free will) but assuming the common definition (the freedom to act w/ choice as opposed to acting in accordance w/ preexisting material conditions) doesn't really handle the issue. If you don't believe in free will, that's cool too! But compatbilism here is more of a duck than an answer, no? xp

That assumes a universe wherein the important thing is blame. What if I don't blame particularly but I prevent him from further acts likely to harm and continue the chain of unhappiness?

So your answer is that there isn't free will. That's fine! I was asserting that to be so re atheism.

you can totally have macro-level free will in a deterministic universe the same way you can produce pseudo-random results from a deterministic process. that said, the christian thing to do is to forgive the killer.

I experience my actions as both free and falling along a moral continuum (doing the right thing v. doing the wrong thing). I don't think these intuitions about my will are compatible w/ atheism. Spitballing here but I expect atheism could allow me to experience actions as free, but not moral OR moral but not free (ie Michael's example of the killer being imprisoned for mechanistic purposes) - but not both moral and free.

Oh, boy, that book review o. nate linked to. "Evangelical Protestant believes theists are rubber, atheists are glue, and that the latter have something broken in their brains. Also, lots of special pleading! Film at 11."

I think the idea that atheists have something "broken in their brains" is too impose a materialist reading on Plantinga's decidedly non-materialist philosophy. He probably intends something more like divine revelation, which, in his infinite wisdom, God has not deigned to reveal to atheists. But I think my biggest problem with his argument is that it seems to deny something essential about religious faith. I prefer a Kierkegaardian leap of faith to Plantinga's spiritual decoder ring, distributed by God to a few lucky cereal boxes.

One nice point which I think atheists of the materialist persuasion are too quick to gloss over: if we believe that our brains were formed by a process of evolution - ie., by random genetic mutations that provided survival advantages on the African savanna - what makes us justified in thinking they are at all suitable to solving cosmological mysteries far removed from the situations they evolved under. The pioneers of the scientific revolution in Europe believed their brains were designed by God to reveal his mysteries, so they had some justification for their project. It's not clear that we still have that justification in a post-Darwin universe. Has science sawed off the limb it was sitting on, epistemically speaking?

atheists don't think they've solved "cosmological mysteries," we think that there is no evidence for God being the answer to those mysteries.

or are you saying we shouldn't bother with science at all cuz our brains aren't good enough?

I was kinda stunned at all the atheists that believe in free will back when we did the free will poll. it sorta breaks my brain.

But compatbilism here is more of a duck than an answer, no? xp

no idea. I just googled that stuff trying to figure out wtf you're talking about and found this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism#Free_will_and_determinism

I don't really get philosophy. Most of the philosophy and theology here seems to be needlessly overcomplicating things to me, so I'm sure my thinking on this stuff will seem dumb. What is morality and where do morals come from? They come from people who develop shared sets of beliefs over time through trial and error, usually as an attempt to benefit society. I don't understand how a theologian deals with the fact that morals are relative.

xp, why, Shakey? Atheism doesn't have to mean materialism OR determinism. Atheism and free will are not, so far as I can tell, incompatible on their faces without a lot of other assumptions built in.

If I were an atheist I think I'd have to be a determinist. As it is I believe almost entirely in determinism except I have this little religion thing in my back pocket.

"what makes us justified in thinking they are at all suitable to solving cosmological mysteries"

i think our brains are so demonstrably badly wired for solving global warming and vaccinating kids without fear of autism that cosmological mysteries are kind of in the "save the model kit for a rainy day" closet for now.

Strict determinism is a kind of deus ex machina. It removes the necessity to account for anything at all. Whatever happens, however it happens, it exists because it had to be precisely so from the first instant of time. Therefore determinism makes an OK ersatz diety. It certainly kills any requirement for making any kind of choice, or even asking further questions.