Jeremiahcp
Well-Known Jerk
Whatever.... You really need to relax.
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Atheistic Double Standard?
- Thread starter Jeremiahcp
- Start date
Whatever.... You really need to relax.
Jeremiahcp
Well-Known Jerk
I think the one thing this thread does, is perhaps gives us clues into which members are atheist just due to their natural skepticism and the members that are religious atheist.
JustWondering
Jerk
Good to hear.
Now you're making assumptions.
Yes, I made the assumption that since you posted this in the DEBATE section you wanted to DEBATE. I have been on these forums for years. The easiest way to get me riled is when people make, or seem to make, stereotypical remarks about a group of people, I don't like it. The other day I was in another thread defending Muslims, so I'm not mindlessly jumping on any thread to back atheists against theists.
JustWondering
Jerk
I took some deep breaths........I'm good now.
Jeremiahcp
Well-Known Jerk
Sorry if I don't fit your standards, but it occurs to me that you are nobody.
JustWondering
Jerk
I'm just another anonymous jerk on the internet.
gnomon
Well-Known Member
I'm somebody. I have curly red hair and tap dance eloquently!\
The Good Ship..........Lollipop!.......
Seriously....we all just need to laugh.
edit: Seriously. I apologize for coming across so hard on your OP. No explanation. I could have argued it better. I did not. Maybe in a better state.
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JustWondering
Jerk
He may have been trolling but he's relatively new on these forums (according to his joined date), so, whatever. If he posts stuff again that looks like he's trying to troll people than I'll know for sure and not bother responding to him.
Milton Platt
Well-Known Member
What's a religious atheist? You mean like Buddhists?
Jeremiahcp
Well-Known Jerk
Do you envision that I sit behind the keyboard rubbing my hands together or twirling a mustache?
gnomon
Well-Known Member
You were right.
This was a stupid thread.
I should never have apologized.
Because this is....upon a reread.....the dumbest thread I've read on this forum.
It's garbage.
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Jeremiahcp
Well-Known Jerk
For one post you sounded like an adult, but now you are back to sounding like a little kid. It is amazing how defensive a handful of you are getting over this thread. You'd almost think your atheism was your religion. Honestly there is nothing to get upset about here, anyone who thinks they don't hold some double standards or is a hypocrite in someway is just flat out lying to themselves.
Jeremiahcp
Well-Known Jerk
Just look at the people in this thread who are the most upset over this thread, and feel a need to defend atheism because they see an "attack" on it. It a religious like zeal for atheism.
1robin
Christian/Baptist
Having to repeat this process with every new non-theist poster is tiresome. I think I will copy, can it, then simply paste it for the opening post concerning morality.
Firstly, do not confuse moral ontology with moral epistemology.
Ontology concerns the objective nature of a thing.
Epistemology concerns how we come to know about a thing.
You didn't get the two mixed up too bad above, but left alone you eventually will. I used to warn people not to take an epistemological off ramp concerning morality, until I saw they would eventually do it anyway. Regardless what I am referring to is moral ontology. With God it is objective, without God it is merely the social fashion at an arbitrary point in mind and an equally arbitrary location.
Some culture prey for their neighbors and some cultures pray on their neighbors. Only if God exist is one group doing good and the latter doing evil.
Anyway, when you say morality you mean something entirely different than what a theist means. So we do not step on each others toes lets separate the two by using differing labels. The best definitions I know of are Latin.
If Yahweh exists then objective morality exists defined as Malum in se (plural mala in se) is a Latin phrase meaning wrong or evil in itself. The phrase is used to refer to conduct assessed as sinful or inherently wrong by nature, independent of regulations governing the conduct. It is distinguished from malum prohibitum, which is wrong only because it is prohibited.
Malum in se - Wikipedia
This is what most people think of as morality so for convenience lets label the above with the term morality.
If Yahweh (God) dos not exist then only subjective or relative "morality" can exist defined as
Malum prohibitum (plural mala prohibita, literal translation: "wrong [as or because] prohibited") is a Latin phrase used in law to refer to conduct that constitutes an unlawful act only by virtue of statute, as opposed to conduct that is evil in and of itself, or malum in se.
Malum prohibitum - Wikipedia
Those two definitions couldn't be any more different so for the sake of clarity lets call the second category ethics.
In summary:
Yes, without God you can have a set of ethics a society is forced to live by at the point of a gun. As your description makes clear those ethics are relative and are usually relative to who can impose their will upon others. Atheism does not justify objective moral values and duties. What it does justify is might makes right, moral nihilism, or moral anarchy. That is probably why no society has ever based it's legal system on nature "red in tooth and claw", the closest we ever came was Hitler's Germany. I would give him an A- for implementing policies consistent with social Darwinism.
However with God, you get objective morality that is independent of a race of morally insane creatures who have had 300 out of the last 5000 years without major war, and who kill our own young in the womb on an industrial scale. Whenever asked I always tell people that even if we knew God did not exist, society would be far better off, pretending that he did.
Only if God exists is there a real and objective foundation for morality, rights, and all of our most cherished beliefs.
BTW you mentioned "emotion" as a source of morality, who's emotion, which emotion? The emotion of Joseph Stalin or Billy Graham? The emotion of love or hate? A huge numbers of laws are based on stopping us from carrying out many of the actions that are emotionally motivated. For the Donner party to conserve their "well being" (actually just to live) they ate two Indians who were trying to help them. By your definition the Donner party deserves a medal for moral excellence.
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Sometimes.
I've seen two sides to you, one I like, and one not so much. On other threads, you are a serious poster engaging in substantial conversation. You may have noticed that I have "liked" about three of your comments lately contradicting the poster who claims that secular humanism owes a debt to Christianity.
But your purpose seems to be very different here. You begin with an attack on atheists in the title. There was no need to single out atheists for what you are calling a double standard.
Then you describe a strawman atheist who seems to continually demand proof of god from theists while refusing to provide any evidence for his own claims, when in reality what is the case is that we all at times ask for evidence and at other times provide it, but not always in either case. Has anybody asked you to support your thesis? I know that I haven't. I've merely rejected and contradicted it. I see no double standard there, and the only thing that limits your charge to atheists is you limiting the request for evidence specifically to asking for a proof or evidence for God. The creationist does exactly the same thing, but regarding evolution.
Next, you threw in a gratuitous "hypocrite," but there is no hypocrisy in that behavior. You do it yourself. You at times require evidence, and at others, do not. I presume that at times you offer it, and at other times are satisfied to make an unsupported claim. It depends on whether there is a desire to convince.
If I want to convince others that you sometimes request evidence, I'll provide evidence of my own, which I wouldn't normally bother to do inasmuch as I generally have no reason to, but this time, I will. Whether evidence is provided or not depends on my purpose and my audience.
So, you were unfair to atheists in the OP, and as you can see, you have offended many. You appear to be deliberately trying to be provocative and offend.
Furthermore, you have been playing a little game called "you just proved my point," which would be accurate if your point was that sometimes people (or atheists specifically) make unsupported claims, but what kind of point is that? It needs no proving. We admit it. I just did.
And that fact doesn't prove any point about hypocrisy, it demonstrates no double standard, and it is not a characteristically atheist behavior.
But you appear to like to push buttons further with the "you just proved my point" claims. It's likely to rankle somebody for you to claim to have used his own words to defeat him.
Then when you get a rise, you demean your interlocutor by condescendingly telling him to calm down, as if his resentment were unwarranted and somehow diminished his message (ad iram fallacy, also, see Bulverism).
You don't seem to have much interest in the subject matter as others have noted, as you don't really debate. You've made no case of your own except that atheists make unsupported claims - not your point - and ignored the refutations to your claims. You've not addressed mine. I've previously challenged your claim that there is a double standard here in the same way I just did again to which you did not respond. Didn't you care to defend your basic premise?
Anyway, put it all together - what's present and what is lacking - and it looks like you are playing a game of atheist baiting here. Several of us have come to this or a similar conclusion. If that wasn't your purpose, you could have handled this better.
And if you weren't doing what it appears you were, you probably would have been surprised and a little concerned by the angry reactions. I would have asked what made the poster angry. You seemed to already know, and you lacked the remorse we would expect if one angered another unexpectedly.
Incidentally, anger is often an appropriate response. It does not undermine an argument:
[1] "But I also have to quarrel with the very notion that a person's arguments can be dismissed because of anger. Smugly accusing someone of anger doesn't do anything to discount the content of the argument. I'd argue that people who see vile behavior in the name of religion and don't get angry are the ones who have something wrong with them." - Amanda Marcotte
[2] "Atheists aren't angry because we're selfish, or bitter, or joyless. Atheists are angry because we have compassion. Atheists are angry because we have a sense of justice. Atheists are angry because we see millions of people being terribly harmed by religion, and our hearts go out to them, and we feel motivated to do something about it. Atheists aren't angry because there's something wrong with us. Atheists are angry because there's something right with us."- Greta Christina
[3] "I've wondered, for awhile, why Christians think that accusing me of being angry at their religion is actually an argument against my objections. I mean, even if I were abnormally angry ... I have absolutely no rational reason I can come up with that makes that a good enough reason to think I'm wrong ... the reasoning often seems to be that, because I'm angry, my argument is flawed and I can be dismissed." - Peter Mosley
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The apology reflected well on you.
Incidentally, were you aware that the post you apologized for seems to have been deleted? I couldn't find it anywhere except in the quote section of a reply to you. When I clicked on the arrow to take me back to your post, I received an error message ("Religious Forums - Error You do not have permission to view this page or perform this action."), which I interpreted as meaning that the link took me to nowhere.
I've enjoyed it at two levels: rebutting the OP, and what we are doing now - considering and discussing motives and reactions
Also, I studied your deleted post to try to determine why it was deleted, and found nothing in it that seemed to justify that, which concerns me. It is my desire to abide by and respect the site's guidelines, but that will be difficult if it isn't clear when they are being violated:
Forum Rules
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No. With God, it is the social aspect of God that determines it. That doesn't make it objective. It makes it rely on the subjective view of God.
Again, wrong. One group is contributing to human well-being and the other is not. That is an objective standard.
And the point is that it is NOT evil in and of itself. It is evil because God wants something different. That is NOT an objective standard. The *objective* standard is to look for the promotion of human well-being.
And again, this is wrong for the reasons above. First, a decision of God doen't make anything objective. And it ignores that there are objective standards for human well-being.
And what I have stated shows that this is exactly backwards. With a deity, the morality is subjective: it depends on the whims of the deity. Without a deity, morality is objective: it depends on the promotion of human well-being.
So what? Nobody has. Your values are no more objective than anybody else's. Did you have a larger point?
Do you make a distinction between absolute moral values and objective moral values?
Is "justify" the right word here? Atheism is merely a "No" answer to the question of whether one believes in a god or gods. That justifies nothing.
The only time I see a might-makes-right argument any more is when it comes from a theist telling me that God made us and can do whatever he wants with us including drop us conscious into a lake of fire.
I've read the Old Testament. Much of it is instruction on who to hate and who to kill.
First, you need a god.
If you have objective morality, why is it that no two Christians can agree on what that is?
And if that's the case, what point is there whether an objective morality exists or not if nobody can find it and is free to guess what it is for himself?
You would wish for the Christian god to exist? Name a character in fiction or history that has inflicted as much harm on mankind as the Christian god. Apart from keeping most human beings ever born conscious to suffer gratuitous and eternal pain, we are told that this god has unleashed his fallen master demon on earth and humanity and left the kids there in the garden alone with it knowing the consequences for them and all of their descendants, gave us free will that will lead to self-destruction, orchestrated a global flood that drowned nearly all life, and is planning another apocalypse coming soon, all while sitting idly by watching much of humanity suffering.
I know how offended you get at things like that, but see if you can actually address any of that and reconcile it with the claim that this is a good god and we should hope that it exists.
Here's Hitchen's take on wanting that god to exist:
"It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us waking and sleeping, who knows our thoughts, who can convict us of thought crime, thought crime - just for what we think, who can judge us while we sleep for things that might occur to us in our dreams, who can create us sick (as apparently we are) and then order us on pain of eternal torture to be well again. To demand this, to wish this to be true, is to wish to live as an abject slave. It is a wonderful thing, in my submission, that we now have enough information, enough intelligence, and - I hope - enough intellectual and moral courage to say that this ghastly proposition is founded on a lie, and to celebrate that fact, and I invite you to join me in doing so." - Christopher Hitchens
We can come up with a better moral code than the Christian one. We already have.
More from Hitchens, this time on morality secular humanist style, and comparing it to what you praise as an objective moral code, but which the rest of see as just another human artifact voiced through a god so that it can be claimed to be superior and mandatory:
"In other words, that the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure, and what is true could always go on. Why is that important? Why would I like to do that? Because that's the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don't know. But, I do know that it is the conversation I want to have while I am still alive. Which means that to me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can't give way is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don't know anything like enough yet; that I haven't understood enough; that I can't know enough; that I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn't have it any other way." - Hitchens
Does that sound like "might makes right, moral nihilism, or moral anarchy" to you?