Rick's comments
(member since Jan 03, 2008)
Rick's comments from the Atheists and Skeptics group.
(showing 1-20 of 112)
It's difficult to believe that a real inerrantist would or could have come up with "... its infinite circle of self-validation is completely inconsistent with evolution." :)
The creationists have already claimed that Darwinius masillae was created on the sixth day."Despite the headlines, Ida gives no support to primate (or human) evolution."
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles...
The Dude abides. I don't know about you but I take comfort in that. It's good knowin' he's out there, the Dude, takin' it easy for all us sinners.
Sophia,"Most of you people say that we as humans are basically animals..."
We are animals, yes. Homo sapiens is the species with the most highly developed brain, and the most sophisticated thoughts and emotions.
"We obviously have a sense of what we should do (morality) but we don't do it (sin)."
Sin is a specifically religious concept, vaguely defined as something or other at odds with God (ask five theists to define "sin" and you might get five or more different answers). Since I don't believe in a god that judges human behavior, the idea of sin is meaningless to me, except as a poetic synonym for "crime" or "misbehavior."
"Many people think that morality is just our animal instinct."
No one who's given any reasoned thought to the issue thinks that. Morality is rooted in our instincts, but human behavior and human society have grown far beyond their instinctual roots. We're guided by our minds and by the traditions and laws that we have collectively created.
"If someone is calling out for help who is in danger we respond with two instincts: 1. to help the person (herd-instinct) 2. to stay away from danger (self-preservation instinct...but there is also a third thing which tells us which instinct we ought to follow."
The third thing isn't another instinct, it's our intelligence. Our intellect enables us to choose between conflicting impulses, or to override them altogether.
More to the point, in referring to what you call "herd instinct," you're admitting that animals can behave altruistically, that animals can effectively possess a primitive ethic. Once you acknowledge that, it should be easy for you to see that humans have inherited this instinctive, altruistic behavior from our animal ancestors, and that this instinctive sociability has evolved into our modern sense of right and wrong.
Thanks for the heads up, Jill.There are also two new Jesus groups with open memberships. It looks like Nathan's already found them so it'll be amusing to see how long they remain open.
http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/1090...
http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/1011...
Hi Sophia,I'm a little late joining this discussion so I hope you won't mind if I go back to the original questions for a moment.
God or ultimate reality
I suspect that when you ask about "ultimate reality," what you're really asking is whether or not we believe in the Christian afterlife. My answer: it doesn't exist. Is there some other version of an afterlife? Maybe. But there's no reason to think that there is, apart from wishful thinking. Einstein said it well: "Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts."
As for God, if such an entity does exist, any similarity that it may bear to the fictional character of that name (that is, the "God" that appears in the Bible or in any other mythological works) is entirely coincidental. However, I disagree with the idea, expressed by others in this thread, that God is unknowable. The particular God created by Christian theology is unknowable but that's merely one version among an infinity of possible Gods; one that was designed specifically for ineffability. It seems to me that a self-aware God could choose to make itself known, whereas a non-self-aware God would be as available for study as would any other natural phenomenon, if not to us then at least to our more advanced descendants.
The nature of humanity. Who are we?
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, we're hairless apes who are so amazingly primitive that some of us still think that building their world-views on the silly mythologies of bronze-age ignoramuses is a pretty neat idea.
Salvation, liberation, or the nature of spirituality?
Christian salvation only has meaning, such as it is, within the context of Christian mythology. Since I don't believe in Original Sin nor damnation nor God's judgment, then salvation, in the Christian sense of the term, is completely meaningless. I assume that by "liberation" you really mean sinful freedom from God's righteous laws. Since I'm quite certain that your particular God doesn't exist, liberation to me is simply another word for freedom. Spirituality to me is the contemplation of, and emotional reaction to, what Christopher Hitchens calls "the transcendent and the numinous;" it has nothing to do with the supernatural, and generally has nothing to do with religion.
The identity of Jesus Christ?
I agree with what's already been written here, particularly with Dan's post.
Why do you believe a-d?
Satan bribed me with punch and pie. He convinced me that if I pretended to hate something that I didn't even believe in in the first place that I could avoid thinking about the impending Judgment that I didn't believe in either, plus have unlimited abortions. So I figured, hey, seventy years of debauchery and denial plus an open-ended option to murder unborn babies, in exchange for an eternity roasting like a pig on a spit? Sweet deal, sign me up! Also, did I mention there was punch and pie?
He knew that he was going to die and be raised from the dead and he did.
And since Sybill Trelawney's prophecy came true, Harry Potter must be a real wizard.
Tell me then what you think the main message of the Bible is...
The primary message of the Bible is that the highest virtue -- indeed the only virtue, the virtue to which all others are mere corollary -- is absolute obedience to God's whim.
Adam and Eve's "crime" wasn't fruit consumption, it was disobedience. That the particulars of the "crime" were so trivial is the measure of the importance that the Bible places on obedience. Consider also the patriarch of the three "great" religions; all three consider Abraham to have been a great man, yet what was this great man's greatest achievement? His willingness to butcher his son at God's command. The message is clear: decency, love, compassion, loyalty, justice; all take a back seat to mindless, blind obedience.
Melissa:"You’ve managed to include two logical fallcies (ad hominem and straw man) in the one short sentence."
Wrong on two counts. First of all, an insult does not, in itself, constitute an ad hominem. A statement is ad hominem only when an insult is proffered in lieu of an argument. When an insult is made in addition to an argument, that is not an ad hominem, it's simply an argument plus an insult. Had I said, "you're puerile therefore your position is incorrect," and left it at that, that would have been an ad hominem. Had you understood my post, you would have seen that I explained clearly why your reasoning in this matter is childish. Second of all, there was no strawman; had you understood my post you would have seen that I was addressing your claim directly.
"I originally wrote “if you believe in free will”..."
Whether or not I believe in it is irrelevant to the fact that your original statement was incorrect. Whether or not I believe in it does not in any way make my rebuttal a strawman.
"I gather that you agree with my point that if you believe in free will the laws of physics can’t be deterministic."
Wrong again. As is par for the course for you, you've ignored the points that you don't understand.
"As to being lazy and dishonest I haven’t yet resorted to using the phrase “typical atheist tactics” or responded to a point without doing the most basic fact check (Hitchens comments about Martin Luther King)."
But you do resort to ignoring or dismissing points that you fail to understand; for example, as you just did with rgb's posts with this lazy and dishonest (and ludicrous) evasion: "If you have a point to make, make it, if it’s strong enough it should be able to stand up to scrutiny without the distraction of a whole heap of irrelevant material."
As for my comment regarding Dr. King, I freely admit that it was poorly phrased; I should have either asked who it was that had made the claim about him, or appended my remark with "...as far as I know." But so what? It's revealing that you dwell on a trivial misstatement while ignoring so many more significant points. And incidentally, accusing someone of utilizing "typical atheist tactics" wouldn't (necessarily) be lazy or dishonest, it would be complimentary.
Melissa:"Regarding your question about free will, if the laws of physics are truly deterministic of everything in the universe then there can be no free will because our thoughts are just the products of the laws working."
This is theistic reasoning at its most infantile: if you need a thing to be true in order to feel good, then that need constitutes proof that the thing is true. Even, or perhaps especially, if it requires special dispensation from the rules of logic and physics.
That we subjectively feel free does not prove that we objectively are free. That your particular interpretation of your particular mythology may require us to be free doesn't prove it either. It may indeed be the case that our thoughts are the ineluctable products of a deterministic Universe, and that our experience of free will is nothing more than a delusion. Or perhaps it will turn out that we do have free will, in accordance with some natural mechanisms which we have yet to discover. Perhaps it comes down to how we define "free will," and to what degree of freedom we're willing to settle while still calling ourselves "free." Perhaps the question is fundamentally unanswerable. That we don't yet have a complete understanding of the mind does not entitle you to fill in the gaps of our knowledge with magic. That reality may be unappealing to you does not entitle you to invoke a magical get-out-of-determinism-free card. And invoking magic is precisely what you're doing when you make the claim that free will is, solely because you wish for it to be that way, not subject to natural law.
"I'm not trying to ignore anyone's points. If you could point out the points I haven't dealt with that would be great."
You evade any question or rebuttal for which you aren't aware of a prepackaged apologetic. If you're really interested in answering the points you've ignored, do your own homework.
"If you find prople [sic:] often say you misunderstand them you might need to consider that you need to read and think about what is written more carefully and you might not also have neough [sic:] background information to make sense of what they are saying."
Ah, hypocrisy. What was that you wrote earlier? "Before implying that someone is ignorant or delibearately [sic:] deluding themselves [sic:] it might pay to take a good look at yoursel[f:] ... Just one of countless statements in this discussion formed by making incorrect assumptions ... If you had actually bothered to read my post you would have known ..." that I said that you were employing an aversion tactic that's typical of Christian debaters on the Web. Specifically by those Christian debaters who are lazy and dishonest. A tactic which I've seen used against others (as well as myself), and a tactic you're continuing to use even now.
"At this stage it might not be in your best interests to hurry him along."
I wasn't implying that your god should hurry, I was suggesting that the entire myth of Christian salvation is absurd tripe. And I'll add that your implied threat of damnation is amusing, as is your delusional belief that it might carry any weight with a non-Christian. How worried are you about being damned by Allah, or about getting reincarnated as a cockroach, or about spending eternity in Tartarus?
I couldn't agree more with these two statements:"Sure, on a case-by-case, individual, short-term basis, moderates are more palatable, but they're also more resilient. They shape and mold and remake their religious beliefs with the shifting wind; they never find fault with religious doctrine, they just reinterpret it as need be."
"They pave the road for religious extremists by suggesting that irrational thought is okay and that faith should be respected."
It's also a bit annoying that they almost always seem to feel that atheism is a response only to fundamentalism, that we're somehow completely unaware of the oh so sophisticated and intellectually fulfilling realm of modern theology.
No problem. :)And for those craving yet more Doogie goodness, I recommend the excellent 2001 version of Sweeney Todd, with NPH, George Hearn and Patti LuPone.
By the way David, I think that you inadvertently left the sample URL in your link; you've got to replace the "www.goodreads.com" with your new URL, and "my link text" with the words that you want to dress up, like so
{a href="http://www.drhorrible.com"}Dr. Horrible{/a}
With angle brackets, that would come out as Dr. Horrible.
"I recommend "Fighting Words" by Robin Morgan if anyone wants to read up on the founding fathers and their personal beliefs."I'd also recommend Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers on this subject.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism also looks interesting.
Melissa,"I’m sorry that I’m obviously not being clear in what I’m saying, you seem to keep misunderstanding me."
Typical theist debating tactic: claim "you just don't understand," don't bother to rephrase what you claim was unclear, don't even bother to point out what it was that was allegedly misunderstood.
It's also amusing that you ignore most of what everyone writes, yet you complained that we failed to answer one of your questions (which I see many other posts have addressed since the last time I was here.)
"Please go back and read what I actually wrote."
My question was framed correctly but I'll rephrase it anyway:
There's no reason to believe that free will "exists outside of the laws of nature." Why do you assume that it does?
"Christian thought has been subverted by both Platonism and rampant individualism. Jesus came so that the whole creation could be made perfect. Our hope is not in a disembodied soul going to heaven but the return of Jesus and the renewal of all creation..."
If God wants to renew creation, why doesn't he just do it? Are you suggesting that individual souls are insignificant cogs in the great creation machine? If so, why did your God bother giving us free will? Free will is of no use to a cog; wouldn't it have been more sensible to have not given it to us in the first place (particularly since any exercise of it, no matter how absurdly small, utterly ruins the entire plan)? And how is it that one soul was able to singlehandedly ruin all creation? And how is it that this renewal depends on each individual soul cultivating a magical relationship with God?
Melissa:"Is the child who protests a parents punishment right when they conclude the parent doesn’t love them or is the punishment actually proof that the parent loves them?"
Terrible analogy on two counts.
First, a parent punishes a child as part of a process of teaching her to become an independent and productive adult, because it's beyond a parent's abilities (and wishes) to protect and provide for his child throughout the child's life. Since god is omnipotent, she's perfectly capable of protecting and providing for all of her children throughout all eternity. According to Christian mythology, it was in fact god's plan to do exactly that until Eve ate the forbidden fruit, and it will be her plan to do that again after we're all in heaven. God's punishment therefore makes absolutely no sense, most especially for those who will be punished for all eternity.
Second, a loving parent's punishments are proportional to his child's infraction. If a child failed to do his chores and his parent punished him by torturing him for all eternity then I would call that disproportionate, and yes, I would say that that parent did not love that child. I would say in fact that that parent was an evil, hateful, sadistic monster.
"If you believe in free will you already acknowledge that there is at least one thing that exists outside the laws of nature."
There's no reason to believe that free will is incompatible with physical law. What's the evidence for your ridiculous claim?
"Maybe your definition of fundamental is different to mine."
I gave you a list of beliefs on which Christians don't agree.
"I think if you asked Christians about Jesus there would be good consensus."
And you'd be wrong again.
"I agree I do have a preference for Christianity against other worldviews but not because I’m afraid of death, but because it provides answers to 'the problem of evil'."
No, it doesn't. Christians have been wrestling with theodicy for two thousand years and the best you've come up with is "it's just god's will." This is no answer at all. The atheistic worldview, in contrast, answers the question of evil simply and completely.
"I would suggest the supporting evidence for the statement that Martin Luther King was not a Christian would be pretty weak."
No one ever said that King was not a Christian. What was said was that King was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, a non-Christian. The evidence for this is that King said so.
Melissa:"Did you even consider that Dawkins might be wrong? "
Apparently you're implying that something I said was based solely on faith in Dawkins' authority. This is a groundless accusation, and rather hypocritical coming from someone who repeatedly cites the assertions of theologians as if any theologian has any insight or knowledge about god or spirituality or reality that the rest of us do not. Also, I notice that you've got nothing to say in response to my rebuttals of your claims against Dawkins; I take this as a concession that you were wrong on both counts.
"These findings only discount Christianity if we believe as they say that morality is dependent on religion."
The naturalistic explanation for morality is not offered by Dawkins (or anyone else as far as I know) as any sort of disproof of Christian belief; it's offered only as an answer to the common theistic claim that without a god there's no basis for morality. The existence of innate conscience is consistent with both the Christian worldview and the atheistic worldview; the point here is that conscience does not prove the existence of a theistic god, as Christians so frequently, and so incorrectly, claim. It's true that conscience doesn't disprove the existence of a theistic god, but -- and here's the thing -- we don't claim that it does.
"So what is Christianity? N.T. Wright..."
"Of the different denominations all share..."
What point are you trying to make here? Are you suggesting that Christians all agree on the essentials? If so, I'd like to point out a few things that you don't all agree on, that would appear to be rather fundamental to your belief system(s):
Whether or not Jesus is god or merely god's "only begotten son,"
The nature, and even the existence, of hell,
Whether a sentence to hell is eternal or temporary,
What one must do to gain admittance to heaven,
Who gets to go to heaven, who gets sentenced to hell,
The nature of god's omnipotence (is he bound by logic or natural law),
The definitions and origins of sin and evil.
"You don’t say what the recent inventions are or what you class as recent..."
In fact I specifically pointed to the notion that your god exists outside of space and time; this could have come about no earlier than the twentieth century, after Special Relativity. Earlier and obviously poetic references to god being, for example "timeless," don't count, since no one who made such remarks before the twentieth century could possibly have intended them in the modern sense. Had such remarks been divinely inspired, they certainly could have been far more specific, even if they would have been cryptic at the time.
More generally though, my point was that when Dawkins describes god as "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving, control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully," he is accurately describing the primitive, bronze age, tribal deity about which we can all read for ourselves in the Old Testament. The somewhat kinder -- but still bloodthirsty -- god of the New Testament is a relatively new invention compared to the earlier version. The more abstract god that Medieval and Enlightenment philosophers, and modern theologians, attempt to equate with the tribal deity of the Old Testament, is a series of revisions that serve not to give us greater knowledge of god, but rather to make god less obviously absurd and more annoyingly inaccessible to reason.
"...but it seems to me that you are suggesting that we have changed our faith to combat the ideas of atheists or make it congruent with science?"
I'm saying that you've been changing your beliefs over and over again through the centuries in a never ending retreat from science, and in a desperate attempt to keep up with the secularly-created ethical advances of society.
"Do you believe that “real” Christians must believe that the story of genesis is an historical and scientific account of creation[?:]"
No, I believe that every Christian arbitrarily picks and chooses, from the buffet that is Christian belief, whatever particular set of beliefs makes her comfortable (including whether or not to believe that there is such a thing as a "real" Christian).
Melissa,"He then concludes that we believe that the only standard of good is found in the scriptures which is not correct at all. The bible teaches that every person has a conscience which tells them right from wrong. So before organised religion there was still conscience and hence morality."
Strawman. Dawkins clearly acknowledges that Christians do not get their morality solely from the Bible; in fact his point is that the Bible is a terrible source of morality, and that civilized Christians cherry-pick their Biblical lessons using the secular moral criteria of the societies in which they live.
If there was conscience and morality before the Bible, as you admit, then why do we need the Bible at all? If we all have a God-given sense of right and wrong then why don't we all agree, all the time, on what constitutes right and wrong? Why can't Christians agree even amongst themselves on the meaning of right and wrong?
"Dawkins then addresses the question of where morality or conscience comes from, from a Darwinian perspective and his conclusion is that it is a misfiring or Darwinian mistake."
Another strawman. Dawkins might have said that some forms of altruism could be construed as "mistakes" from the "perspective" of selfish genes (e.g. adoption), but morality itself, from an evolutionary perspective, is no mistake; it's an adaptation, a means of creating cooperative behaviors that are ultimately beneficial to those genes.
"I guess I find it hard to understand why we should continue to be bound by a morality that is just a product of a misfire."
Morality isn't a "misfire;" it's a product of evolution, the same as, for example, our eyes. Do you find it difficult to continue to use your eyes just because they're the end product of natural, unguided processes? In any case, we're not bound by morality as it was created by evolution; we have the freedom to use our minds to create better moral systems. That's what moral philosophies and justice systems are for.
"Dawkins also considers that religions or why people are susceptible to a belief in God are a product of a similar misfiring..."
Dawkins offers a number of nuanced explanations for the religious experience, some of which involve the diversion of otherwise-useful traits towards religious conditioning. He talks for example about the need for children to be extremely receptive to new information, which as a side-effect makes them extremely susceptible to the kinds of indoctrination that all religions impose on their youngest members. Labeling that as "misfiring" doesn't make it any less true.
"... maybe I'm crazy ... I'm sure many probably think so..."
"I realise a lot of you out there will be probably on the floor with laughter right now..."
Do you actually expect to be "persecuted" in some sense for simply expressing your beliefs to a group of nonbelievers, or is this some sort of rhetorical device? Could this sense of persecution be some form of shield that you use to insulate yourself from arguments that might challenge your beliefs?
"This statement plainly neglects to take into account the first few centuries of Christianity when the Christians were persecuted for their faith and were in no position to spread the gospel by war or imperialism."
The fact that Christians didn't use war and imperialism at a time when, as you say, they were in no position to do so, is hardly a point in their favor.
"Take for instance this statement that we claim to know everything, obviously I can’t even begin to know everything that “man” as a whole knows, let alone what man doesn’t yet know."
Of course you don't claim to know literally everything. But Christians do claim (or have claimed at various times) to know the age, origin and purpose of the Earth, the Universe and all life; to know what happens to us after we die; and to know the thoughts and will of God. That may not be quite everything but...
"He holds up a flawed and in no way biblical view of God and then ridicules it."
On the contrary, the version of God that Dawkins ridicules is very much the Biblical one, and the one that most believers worship, both today and historically. The spiffy new God of intellectuals and theologians is a relatively recent invention that bears little resemblance to the wrathful, jealous, fig-tree-cursing God of the Bible. Dawkins makes a point of distinguishing the Biblical God-of-the-masses from the non-Biblical God-of-the-philosophers that the apologists unwrap for the debates.
"He states that he has no problem accepting that there are things in the universe that his human mind cannot comprehend but then insists on a god that is defined in earthly terms that is understandable and explainable."
The problem here is that Christians want to have their God and eat him too (literally, in the case of Catholics). When theists want to impose their beliefs on the rest of us, God and his motives are perfectly comprehensible; you have no trouble understanding exactly what he wants. When it comes time to debate God, then he becomes completely incomprehensible, and quite conveniently out of reach of logic.
"If in fact there was a creator God that created the complexity that we see, a God that exists outside of time and space that is a concept that is hard to comprehend by the human mind."
It was the human minds of Einstein and Minkowski who came up with the concept of spacetime in the first place; that idea came from neither the Bible nor from anyone's "personal relationship" with God.
The Christians who make remarks such as, "he wouldn't have dared criticize Islam," implying that curbing freedom of speech through fear is a good thing, certainly have fatwah envy. (No one quoted in Duntay's link in particular said that, but I've heard for example Bill Donohue, the head of the "Catholic League," make asinine remarks along those lines.)
Perhaps the answer might be found in ye olde pirate encyclopedia. Of course, it's more what you'd call guidelines than actual information...
It's also rather telling that they have no qualms about writing a brand new "quotation" and then attributing those words to God.
