Frustrated athiest asks why do you believe in God?

[F1fan]

LOL.



And here we go again; homo omnisciencis.

You went down your dead end again. You can't even rebut.

 

[PureX]

We understand the illusions people choose to believe, and that some think these illusions are real. We critics just point out these illusions are imaginary and not real as believers claim.

What you don't understand is that YOU are one of those people, too. And because you don't understand this, you keep insisting on judging everyone else's illusions by he criteria of your own. Oranges by the criteria of bananas. It's idiotic, and yet it never stops.

 

[cladking]

. You're upset because critical thinkers are pointing out the table has nothing on it.

Maybe you're looking on the wrong table. Tables can be as different as oranges and bananas.

I just made a "ladder table corner stool". It's intended principally as a stool that can hide in a corner masquerading as a table but it's strong enough to use as a ladder to save a trip to the shop.

God only knows where the oranges and bananas fit in (mebbe they are on the bottom step and can't be seen from many perspectives).

 

[Yazata]

Frustrated atheist asks why do you believe in God?

If Atheists are frustrated and or not satisfied with this ism, don't they deserve , in the first place, to return to the religion they were born in, please? Right?

Regards

I think that Daniel's frustration in the OP was with believers in God that he took to be "people who do not listen to reason, logic, evidence, and facts." He admitted (correctly) that the dismissal in that sentence might not be fair, so he started this thread to give believers in God an opportunity to say what they think, rather than what atheists imagine that they think.

So I don't think that Daniel was expressing any frustration with his own atheism. He was just acknowledging the possibility that it might be reducing theists to caricatures.

I applaud that. Sadly the good intentions predictably didn't survive the first page of the thread.

 

[cladking]

You went down your dead end again. You can't even rebut.

No matter how many new ways you invent to gainsay somebody it is never going to be an argument. It's never going to be fact and and logic but merely another kind of semantical argument.

Now you'll deny even this is true.

 

[Kenny]

1. Beliefs inform actions and since atheism is not a belief but a DISbelief of a specific thing, it does not inform actions.

This is a good example. DIS belief - is still a "BELIEF" that there is not a God. A nice play on words and, IMO, it is used to wiggle out of defending a position. Whether a believe or if you disbelieve something... both carry actions or both can display inaction. That why it sounded so full of fancy words but left someone wondering... "just what did they say?"

2. a sense of morality / ethics is inherent to the human condition and does not need to be "given" to us. As a secondary point, I said that even if a morality is given to us, we would have to necessarily use some other source of ethics in order to make a value judgement about that "given morality", to recognize it as "good" or "bad".

I would tend to think that it would be a mixture of the two. (Of course, it may not be provable or disproved).

Yes... it is inherent. But the question would be, "Is it just chemicals that make us think it is moral or was it hardwired by another being" (In my case, God).

It may not have to be "given" but it does need to be "written" because people have the capacity to become numb to morality and ethics. This is provable. Some people find no problem with human trafficking (having had their conscious seared over time)... yet others would say it is a violation of morality.

The fact that there are so many people that have differing views of "this is good" vs the same item "this is bad" also is a provable fact.

Of course, as you said, it would be necessary to go to some other source on occasion.

 

[cladking]

It may not have to be "given" but it does need to be "written" because people have the capacity to become numb to morality and ethics. This is provable. Some people find no problem with human trafficking (having had their conscious seared over time)... yet others would say it is a violation of morality.

Indeed, it's pretty easy to get people to stack up corpses or hack away at living people.

Herding people into gas chambers can come to be seen as just another job that at least keeps you away from more dangerous work.

People believe and can come to believe ANYTHING through propaganda and making them want to believe it. Anything can come to be seen as natural or commonplace because so many people are willing to give up thinking for themselves or never learned critical thought. Instead they buy a set of beliefs and call themselves "skeptics" joining the rest of the human race who each know everything.

Anyone can think for himself should he choose.

 

[sun rise]

has predictably turned into episode #2873496 of the never ending atheist vs religion battle.

Along with that endless repetitions of the same points

 

[sun rise]

If I were inclined, I could count the number of times the word "you" was followed by a put down or insult, sometimes obvious and sometimes more subtle.

From my psych background, the only decent way to have a real conversation is when the word "I" is used not "you". As in this is how I believe and why I believe it. This is what I'd need to... This is why I disagree... and so forth.

 

[F1fan]

What you don't understand is that YOU are one of those people, too. And because you don't understand this, you keep insisting on judging everyone else's illusions by he criteria of your own. Oranges by the criteria of bananas. It's idiotic, and yet it never stops.

How am I asserting there things existing that we humans can't verify exist?

Explain exactly what I do not understand.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Intuition and imagination can sometimes be almost as valuable as the "truth".

Only when independently verifiable objective evidence also confirms it.
Not when it doesn't and certainly not when it does the opposite.

Just about every breakthrough discovery of science was counter-intuitive.

 

[F1fan]

Maybe you're looking on the wrong table. Tables can be as different as oranges and bananas.

Perhaps theists want me to look at an imaginary table that has imaginary oranges and bananas on it that they assert are all real?

If that's not what you mean, then finish your vague thought.

I just made a "ladder table corner stool". It's intended principally as a stool that can hide in a corner masquerading as a table but it's strong enough to use as a ladder to save a trip to the shop.

So you resort to tricks?

God only knows where the oranges and bananas fit in (mebbe they are on the bottom step and can't be seen from many perspectives).

Yet theists believe they know. They just can't explain how they think they know.

 

[F1fan]

No matter how many new ways you invent to gainsay somebody it is never going to be an argument. It's never going to be fact and and logic but merely another kind of semantical argument.

Now you'll deny even this is true.

You make too many inaccurate and untrue statements. That's your problem.

 

[F1fan]

This is a good example. DIS belief - is still a "BELIEF" that there is not a God.

So you BELIEVE there is no Santa?

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

So what motivates all the anti-religious rhetoric from so many atheists? Why are so many atheists so hostile towards religion and towards religious believers? Why all the knee-jerk dismissals?

Millenia of oppression?
The fact that American christians in polls have shown that a majority of them would rather be neighbors with a serial rapist then with an atheist?
The constant judgmental and condescension when saying that atheists "have no morals"?
The constant homophobia?
The constant lobbying to getting their theology legislated in secular democracies?
The constant lobbying to stripping women of the freedom of deciding for themselves what happens with their bodies?
The fact that some 50% of US christians believe science is a conspiracy and who actively lobby (in some cases even succesfully) to replace biology textbooks with absurd tales of magical gardens and magical boats?
The asocial behavior of theists to the extent that coming out as an atheist means social suicide in religious communities? To the point even where your own family shuns you?

In short: lots of reasons.

For me personally, I think rationality is its own reward. I live in Europe and theism, christianity in particular, isn't quite the "force" here that it is in the US. Nevertheless it can show its ugly head once in a while anyway.

But for me, it's all about rationality.

Having said that, I'm not sure why you are asking these questions in response to the statement you are quoting there... You are butting into a conversation and ignoring the context.

To catch you up: the point was about someone asking me why I care what people belief and my answer was "because beliefs inform actions". Someone then tried to say that my atheism informs my actions. The part you quote was my response to that: "beliefs inform actions. Disbeliefs, which is what atheism is, don't".

Why you feel the need to go on this rant about "anti-religious rhetoric" in response to that point, is a bit of a mystery to me. How is that "anti-religious" rhetoric?

One would think that if atheists have IQs above room temperature, they would recognize the importance of the metaphysical, epistemological, psychological and existential issues that religion addresses. And if (as they so loudly insist) they don't have any preexisting beliefs about these matters, one would expect an attitude of openness and curiosity about the possibility of learning something important and new.

Do you think this is my first encounter with religion?
I'm always open to learning new things. But theists haven't come up with something new for centuries.

Human societies construct more formal and codified moral principles atop that scaffolding. And just empirically, we discover that not all of those moralities are the same. So what happens if two people, or two societies, disagree about some fundamental ethical belief?

War.
Stuff like what is happening in Ukraine.
This war is not a war between Russia and Ukraine.
It's a clash of ideology. About much more then the Crim or Donbass.

Russia (well, Putin and his comrades) don't believe in personal freedom. They believe in authoritarian rule.
Ukraine believes in freedom.

These are what I would say "clashes of fundamental ethical disagreements".

Is there any underlying truth to the matter?

Morals don't really deal in "truth". Morals rather deal in how one is going to organize society and what is going to be "acceptable behavior" and what isn't.

Morality, I'ld say, can be obtained objectively, but only if we agree on rather subjective starting points.
The main difference between the west and Putin's Russia is that we have different starting points.

Putin's moral outlook seems to be underpinned more by Machiavelian ideas. Mafia style "morals", where holding on to power is the be-all, end-all. By whatever means - even if those means include brutal killing, lies, deceit, etc.

Is there anything besides our own traditions and our own feelings, that informs our moral judgments?

In humanism: reason.

If our "traditions and feelings" were the standard, we'ld probably still keep slaves.
Moral progress is achieved by understanding the world better and reasoning about the implications.

Is there any objective truth to the judgment that something that other people are doing is wrong and that they should instead behave like us? If so, what grounds it?

There is an objective methodology called "reason".
And what grounds it, in extremely simplistic terms, would be:

Well-being = good
Suffering = bad

And that, coupled with making dogma taboo.
No amount of reason will make a dogmatic fundamentalist christian, for example, realize that being gay is okay.

But if you don't start with a dogmatic outlook that says "gay = bad", then reason and facts of the world can inform you that there is nothing inherently wrong or "sinful" with it.

Dogmatic ideology is moral progress' biggest obstacle / enemy.

We are back at the familiar Is/Ought problem. We can construct all the evolutionary ethics we like, we can poke into neuroscience perhaps, to explain why people have the ethical intuitions that they do. But the question still remains, if both our moral intuitions and their moral intuitions can be explained in the same way, what determines that our intuitions are right and their's wrong?

The starting point (well-being =good; suffering = bad) and the presence of dogma ("I don't care what you say, homosexuality is a SIN, PERIOD").

So arguably religious ethics are in the same position as evolutionary ethics up above

The difference being that religious ones will reflect the morals of the age and culture the religion was born in, with (usually) very little room for progress and change.

While a lot of moderate christians no longer condemn gay people, it can not be denied that whenever a christian says that being gay is okay - it is a departure of the biblical texts dealing with that.
So while I off course applaud christians who go down that route, it can not be denied that this moral progress is despite what christian theology says - not thanks to it.

 

[cladking]

Just about every breakthrough discovery of science was counter-intuitive.

Yes! Exactly!

And this usually requires imagination and/ or intuition.

 

[cladking]

So you resort to tricks?

What "tricks" are those?

You should see what I'm making in my shop today. Suffice to say it will be very functional and possibly unique.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Yes! Exactly!

And this usually requires imagination and/ or intuition.

That makes absolutely no sense at all.

Intuition will not lead you to counter-intuitive ideas.

 

[cladking]

You make too many inaccurate and untrue statements. That's your problem.

...And you won't even specify what these are so they can be discussed!!!

This is just more gainsaying because you have NOTHING except your beliefs.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Yes! Exactly!

And this usually requires imagination and/ or intuition.

On the contrary it is usually a combination of very hard work and considering all possibilities.