Where do we learn right and wrong from if our parents do not teach us them?

And actually answer this, because I was raised by a horribly drunk schizo who raped my brain with murder conspiracies and hypothetical enjoy scenarios for most of my childhood, and it was not a situation in which I could learn normal life things from my family. Where do my morals come from if my parents are incapable of pbuming theirs on? If morals are innate do they not come from God?

I have far too much spare time, so I’m going to attempt to answer every question asked so far. Don’t know about Inertia (being an atheist immediately after being a creationist, it puts the whole thing under suspicion, maybe you’re really a deist or a taoist or an anomalous monist Log in to see images!)

But I’m definitely an atheist, so maybe I’ll have more luck.

Apologies for lack of names on the quotes, I just pasted them all into Notepad so I wouldn’t have to keep going back to the original page.

A man ****s his wife. His wife has a male reproductive organ. The man has a woman's genitals. Who’s the man in this relationship?

Men don’t have woman's genitalss. Wives don’t have male reproductive organes. You are calling these people by the wrong genders.

Why am I such a ****ty poster?

Because you are not like me. Try harder next time.

When you are put in a position of power which makes you delusional and erratic, do you call it a science complex?

I would call it mental sickness, or going power-mad. There’s no reason to bring science into this just because of being an atheist (not everything has to be about god or science).

If your house got hit by a tornado, would your insurance pay for it? How can an act of God happen to an Atheist?

“Act of God” is a very special kind of way to say “event beyond human control” and if I was the king of the insurance company I’d have them change the wording on that. As is, you could always try suing god, or if he’s unavailable just file against his earthly representatives.

If you’re playing a simulation-style game in God-mode, do you lose faith in yourself?

The concept of god is only laughable in the real world, being an atheist doesn’t mean we have to reject the possibility of playing a game where you have control over the in-game world.

Dear Mr. Atheist, how does evolution which is based on natural selection and survival of the fittest, explain the millions and millions of creatures we see?

If it’s survival of the fittest, shouldn’t the number of species decrease over time rather than increase?

I say, if evolution were true, we’d have male reproductive organroaches, sharks, blue-green algae, and maybe three or four other species which are considered by biologists to be “perfectly evolved”. All other species would have died out by now, if they even evolved in the first place.

The first serious one… the simple answer is that in a world full of creatures that are all of type X, there will be ways to survive other than being a type X, and evolving to exploit some other niche will mean you have no competitors (if all the Xs eat leaves, evolve to eat the nuts that Xs leave behind and you’re golden). That leaves a population of Xs doing their thing, and a new population doing a new thing. Rinse and repeat for billions of years and you’ll find that most viable niches (including eating the Xs) end up being filled.

if an athiest preaches in a forum, does anyone care?

Almost certainly not. Also you should learn to spell “atheist” before you try to insult one, it tends to make you look silly.

If there is no God then where does rain come from hmmmm?

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cycle

Once you’ve managed to read and comprehend that, you can take a look at the version on the proper Wikipedia. But don’t take it too fast, wouldn’t want to overload your brain.

Where do we learn right and wrong from if our parents do not teach us them?

The source for one persons sense of morals could be that it comes from the influence of society, not just your parents (other people, the media, any and all human interaction and socialisation).

Even if morality is something innate to a human being, the source of that doesn’t have to be god or anything supernatural; “moral” behaviour could be an evolutionarily advantageous adaptation. Back in our distant past we would have been living in much smaller groups of people, and would have been related in some way to almost all of the people we were around on a daily basis. This creates a strong potential for altruistic behaviour and co-operation to benefit people with many of the same genes as yourself, so a gene that predisposes you to help people will lead to you helping people who also have that gene, thus increasing the likelihood of the gene being in the next generation of people (so it would be selected for, and we would evolve towards being moral)

You can see all kinds of examples of co-operation in the animal kingdom, our invention of ‘morality’ is an extension of that born from our increased intelligence and social organisation. I suspect the development of understanding for the minds of others (see theory of mind) also helped, as it allowed us to make more complex judgements about how our behaviour would affect other people, and in turn affect us when they respond to it.

I can feel that I’m not explaining this perfectly, but the idea of what I mean is there.

What happens when I’m dead?

Worms and bacteria eat your corpse and the universe carries on without you without really noticing the difference. No matter how unpleasant you find the idea of not existing, it’s not a reason to invent a magical happy land where we all go after death.

And why does no one like my itembuilder posts?

They’re too busy upvoting mine.

Dunatis Posted:

To all atheists in the forum who claim some sort of scientific basis.

Isn’t atheism itself based upon faith thus making it not very scientific at all? Science only declares any sort of certainty when the opposite is disproved in repeatable experimentation where all other factors were removed and given the impossibility of disproving the existence of God, wouldn’t that make Agnosticism the true scientific religion?

It’s true that in scientific terms, nothing is ever certain, only supported by evidence/observation to differing degrees. The real problem is defining god well enough to know what we’re supposed to be looking for. Any time you find enough evidence to say “No, the god you were describing almost certainly doesn’t exist”, a religious believer can just say that their god isn’t like the thing you disproved.

Taking god as a proposition, you can search for evidence of some entity existing that matches the description, but given that the normal description includes things like “invisible” and “mysterious” the best you can do is infer from cirgreat timesstantial evidence – you can say “If a god matching description X exists, then we would observe Y. We do no observe Y therefore god X is unlikely to exist”. You can choose to believe in a different kind of god than X, but scientifically speaking X has been disproven

Using that method, the more we can explain about the world without the need for god to be involved, the fewer potential descriptions of god are viable – if you describe a god that created the universe and everything in it 6000 years ago, it conflicts with colossal amounts of scientific evidence in the fields of cosmology, astronomy, geology, biology, even human history. But if you describe a god that stood back and watched while everything happened without intervention, then it doesn’t conflict with science, but does run up against the fact that such a god has zero evidence in his favour because he isn’t purported to have done anything.

At the end of the day, there is no scientific evidence that points towards god’s existence and no scientific theories (proposed or actual) make use of god in their explanation of any known phenomena. As far as science is concerned, god is entirely unnecessary. There is no scientific reason to believe that god exists, so if you “try to live on science alone” (to quote the song) then you would be an atheist – no belief in god because there’s no reason to believe in God, and it’s silly to believe in things without a reason to do so…

It is however important to note that “atheism” can be two different things. Lack of belief in god, or an active affirmation that god does not exist. The first is definitely scientific (as described) so to answer the question, yes atheism is tenable for a scientist. The second is a stronger position that technically speaking makes the unprovable claim that there is definitely no god. However, I think it’s still supported by the evidence – we have no evidence in favour of any kind of god, only a lack of evidence against the kinds of god that are described in such a way that there’s nothing we could find that would be solid evidence against it.

Put another way, there’s no way to scientifically prove whether or not there exists in the world an invisible, intangible, immortal, rabbit. There is no way to say for certain that there isn’t a teapot orbiting the sun somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. We can’t know for certain that we won’t one day discover unicorns or fairies or leprechauns. There is no evidence in favour of these things, their existence would contradict a lot of what we think we know, but we can’t solidly prove that they don’t exist. As far as I’m concerned god is in the same category, and I feel no scientific qualms about saying that he doesn’t exist.

Also of note, agnosticism and atheism aren’t incompatible – an agnostic atheist would be one who says “I don’t believe in god, but I don’t know for certain”, which is probably the most strictly scientific position available. You can also be a theist agnostic or a neutral agnostic, and even agnosticism comes in two variants. Either simply not knowing yourself, or believing that it is fundamentally impossible to know would be agnostic positions.

Why is?

I approve this thread.

Just because watching people pick apart someone else’s beliefs for a change is refreshing. Log in to see images!

Dunatis Posted:

In that case it becomes an argument in semantics Log in to see images!

Not entirely, there’s still value to applying science to the various descriptions of God people come up with… if you can refute a popular one then … well to be honest they’ll probably ignore you or demonise you because their faith trumps logic and evidence, but you might manage to convince a couple of fence-sitters.

Frankly that’s the part I find most obnoxious about religion – they’ll say in one breath that they know they’re certainly right because they have faith, that certain things are sinful and dirty and wrong because god told them so and that people who disagree are condemned to an eternity of torture and fire. Then in the next breath they’ll be saying that their religion is about tolerance and love, and that it’s the atheists who have closed minds and are spreading hate.

That and the fact that (to quote Dawkins) religion teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding. That “god did it” is an acceptable explanation. Really makes me laugh when people say anything to the effect of “without god your life is meaningless” or that denying god means you can’t have any awe in the world. I honestly can’t understand that – surely there is more awe to be had when there isn’t an easy answer, when we can look at the cosmos and not think we have some special status in it. Truly see ourselves as a small part of something greater, without collapsing our world view to the point where a divine creator of everything would take special interest in what human beings are doing.

I’ve gone off on a tangent, but I might as well go all the way off on one, the Pale Blue Dot speech from Carl Sagan always feels like a perfect expression of what I mean here. (If you prefer, there’s a Youtube version, but it doesn’t have the explanation of where the eponymous image comes from)

man-man edited this message on 06/13/2009 4:19PM

I meant moreso the difference between Agnostic and Atheist given the splitting of them into many different forms of each. Whether or not one considers them self one of the other would then depend on a fair number of factors especially considering the potential for being an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist. Suddenly there are a lot of Philosophical issues regarding epistemology at play besides the obvious theological ones and it becomes a semantic issue when it comes to finding out the specific differences between each one and where anyone would fall.

man-man Posted:

Not sure why you quoted the male reproductive organ/woman's genitals thing, but I’ll bite.

Lack of faith definitely does excuse poor conscience, if anything religion gives you an out-card to excuse yourself by saying that god will forgive any sin so long as you say you’re sorry. Faith also tends to imply that what happens in this life is rendered somewhat meaningless by the next life, so long as you do enough good to get into the good afterlife.

Religion doesn’t hold a monopoly on morality, there are perfectly good ways to ground your moral thinking without having to hold yourself responsible to an invisible judge. I personally prefer humanist ethics, but it doesn’t really matter. The natural state of a human being isn’t one of immorality; we tend to co-operate because we’re a social species, we form bonds with people and care about them and work together to improve things.

As for why I’m an atheist, because I see no reason to believe in god. Short and simple. To take that a step further, I find the concept of god as normally described to be inherently implausible – I don’t think we will ever find evidence of such a thing, so whilst technically I remain open to further evidence, I don’t consider it a real possibility and will be identifying as an atheist. I don’t believe that it’s impossible to know, so I don’t consider myself an agnostic; I think if there were a god to find, we’d see the signs. The only kind of god left over is one that didn’t ever do anything particularly noticeable, and I feel justified in not believing in that.

Just for the record, the people who believe that just by “saying sorry” they can get away with whatever they want and live however they please are not Christians, and are not saved.

It says throughout the Bible a repentant nature is necessary for salvation, which excludes these pseudo-Christians who live how they want but claim to follow Christ anyway.

man-man Posted:

Even so, being forgiven for anything by being repentant after the fact seems to trivialise whatever the bad behaviour was. I’m also not sure I agree with seeking forgiveness from a ‘higher power’ when you ought to be trying to make it right with whoever you wronged.

The Bible also emphasizes that as well. Jesus commands in Matthew that if anyone comes to the Father (like at church or something, for example) and remembers that he has a quarrel with his brother, to leave and make it right first. Then, come worship.

One of the more famous pbumages in the Bible is simply, “Forgive others as your Father has forgiven you.”

Christianity isn’t supposed to be a self-centered religion. That’s just an unfortunate result of the modern-day laziness and apathy in our culture.

EDIT: I’m not trying to convert you or anything; just letting you know that the typical “Christians” you see and hear about are really just hypocrites, according to the Bible.

man-man Posted:

Good to know that even if they’re right, they’ll be joining me in the hot place Log in to see images!

Also, WHEEEEEEE!!!

I don’t want them there Log in to see images!