How did you stop believing?

[Penelope]

quote:

Penny, My comments were addressed to Ant, not you. What have I missed? Where were we discussing money buying love and trust?

Oh dear! I was just joining in....

[Robert Tulip]

I think Robert is a religious person, but is, like myself, trying to fit the square peg of traditional teachings into the round hole of scientific discovery and philosophy. It is a bloody battle for me (a bear of very little brain), and it must be a mammoth battle for a boffin like Robert. But we keep on, keeping on because there is something, so tangible and undeniable lodged in our psyche....I wonder if it is the 'gift' of faith. I often feel like throwing up my hands in disgust and being 'cool' and atheistic like Richard Dawkins - who makes absolute sense to me when I read his work. But then, faith is not of the intellect. Faith is a spiritual discernment (or summink) which is why 'bears of very little brain' can gain it as much as people of great learning and intellect, and vice versa. Didn't St. Paul call the gospel 'foolish'? Anyway, I can't stamp out the flame in me, it just keeps bubbling up......a bubbling flame, mixed metaphor....innit?

Hi Penelope, thanks, I always enjoy reading your comments. As Elvis might have said, every man has a bubbling flame, a bubbling flame, over his shoulder.

You are right that I see myself as a religious person. My interest is to take the ideas within religion at face value and explain them coherently. This leads me to the view that traditional religion is infected by massive false consciousness, and that a fundamental reformation of Christianity is essential to bring its dogmas into line with rationality.

I recently watched a televised debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox, a religious philosopher of science. While the religion guy did chuck in a few whoppers, I thought Dawkins came off second best overall in the debate, because of his inability to see how religion is essential to community.

It isn't that I am not satisfied with the evidence that life is all there is....it is just that I have this itch.....that I can't reach to scratch.....that there are wheels within wheels....that there is so much more to us than just a brain and a body....and that is why I love great art, music and poetry.....because thereby one can glimpse the extra dimension within us mere mortals. So, whilst I chuck out the dirty water of traditional Christian dogma, I can't chuck out the baby of spiritual insight....it won't go down the hole.

I'm glad you mentioned the wheels within wheels Penelope. This is a line from Ezekiel that people generally see as very obscure. But to me it is simplicity itself - Ezekiel is talking about religion as based on natural observation, where the cycles of astronomy do form wheels within wheels. Dogma has corrupted the clear vision of nature that originally inspired the writers of the Bible.

We live sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity, so culture connects us to the timeless. This is something many atheists cannot understand.

[geo]

. . . An atheist ascribes morals to happenstance that became advantageous to the survival of a species.
So, for instance, the immorality of the crime of rape. To an atheist, who does not need religion to declare what is moral and what is immoral, the immorality of rape is just as arbitrary as the development of 5 instead of 6 toes.
That seems pretty vacuous to me.

Many atheists do look for natural explanations for moral behavior as opposed to ascribing such behavior to a supernatural agent. We don't think of animals as having moral behavior and, yet, we can look to the behavior of other primates as containing the emotional building blocks on which our own "morality" is built. To believe supernatural explanations without evidence seems both arrogant and much more vacuous than naturalistic explanations which recognize our evolutionary heritage. In the end, our individual beliefs have almost nothing to do with how we behave because our behavior is hard-wired. I would certainly hope that all decent people recognize that rape is wrong regardless of religious affiliation. Certainly someone who refrains from rape only because their religion tells them not to is no moral person at all.

[Interbane]

To an atheist, who does not need religion to declare what is moral and what is immoral, the immorality of rape is just as arbitrary as the development of 5 instead of 6 toes.

That is a very stupid sentence. The only way someone could believe the above strawman is if they do not know a single atheist(unless that atheist were a sociopath).

I quoted this from within geo's quote, I'm not sure who originally wrote it.

[ant]

religious people I have encountered in life and interact with almost weekly for that matter, are happy, optimistic, loving, giving people. That to me signifies a joyous appreciation for life, and not mere satisfaction... the reason people of religion seem more optimistic and pleasant than atheists, who to me seem much more pessimistic, bitter (because this is the only shot at life), and arrogant, is because the very thought of a rewarding afterlife makes them that much more eager to do good deeds here on earth and do unto others what they would have them do to them.

Hi Ant, it still seems you can't get no satisfaction. Science says there is no reason to believe any claim that lacks strong evidence. Religion says communal desire is more important than evidence. Now, it may be that communal belonging makes people happy, and that focus on evidence makes people sad. But that is hardly evidence that we should simply accept what people around us think and ignore evidence. Your comment about belief in the afterlife having ethically and psychologically positive effects illustrates the power of delusion. It does not provide any evidence for an afterlife. Just because delusion makes people happy is no reason to accept it.

Perhaps the real afterlife is lived by our descendants, and the religious attitude of being among the elect who will go to heaven is a very adaptive delusion. Certainly Weber argued this way in his analysis of how Calvin inspired capitalist wealth accumulation. Belief in an afterlife leads to personal sacrifice, which in turn inspires prudent investment which in turn creates wealth.

I still don't think you get LOS's comment. If we are satisfied that material reality is all there is, then we do not look for anything more. If we are not satisfied that material reality is all there is, we do look for more. Satisfaction is not just an emotional feeling of fullness, it is an intellectual sense of completeness. It is precisely the sense of incompleteness in nature that leads the religious to imagine their supernatural fantasies.

Hi Robert,

I'm not sure where I've stated that religion provides evidence that should be recognized as such. Also, i'm not certain where I have indicated science and religion both serve the same purpose. I do not believe that. I'm aware that science relies on evidence, derived from the interpretation of data, which is for the most part subjective experience colored by the scientific communities current definitions and interpretations of the natural world.

You have no evidence that there is not an afterlife, or a Creator. And perhaps you have faith that there never will be evidence to confirm what some people chose to believe in without said evidence.
If faith (or delusion, as you call it) is something that inspires people to good here on earth, then perhaps it should be of no consequence to evidence driven people such as yourself.

I disagree with your insistence to define "satisfaction" in such an absolute manner. Also, from my experience, a belief in a universal intelligence is precisely why I feel a sense of completeness with/in nature.

[ant]

Hi Penelope

I too think that Robert is a religious person - not in the traditional sense, of course

Thank you for your comments.

[ant]

To an atheist, who does not need religion to declare what is moral and what is immoral, the immorality of rape is just as arbitrary as the development of 5 instead of 6 toes.

That is a very stupid sentence. The only way someone could believe the above strawman is if they do not know a single atheist(unless that atheist were a sociopath).

I quoted this from within geo's quote, I'm not sure who originally wrote it.

Hi Interbane,

I said it. I think you knew that though. It's not very hard to tell.

Naturally, I do not think that any atheist in his or her right mind condones rape.

The belief that the crime of rape, as an example of something morally abhorrent, is as arbitrary as the evolutionary evolvement of digits is a belief that Richard Dawkins apparently subscribes to. You might want to cast aspersions his way.

Thanks

Morality
Perhaps the most controversial point in my interview with Dawkins was the admission on the fact that his naturalism does not allow for moral absolutes. It was this area of whether a fixed morality exists, or whether belief in the atheistic evolution of morality commits us to arbitrary moral beliefs, which for me was the most interesting part of my conversation with Dawkins. Here is the nub of our conversation on the audio in this respect:

JB: When you make a value judgement don't you immediately step yourself outside of this evolutionary process and say that the reason this is good is that it's good. And you don't have any way to stand on that statement.
RD: My value judgement itself could come from my evolutionary past.
JB: So therefore it's just as random in a sense as any product of evolution.
RD: You could say that, it doesn't in any case, nothing about it makes it more probable that there is anything supernatural.
JB: Ultimately, your belief that rape is wrong is as arbitrary as the fact that we've evolved five fingers rather than six.
RD: You could say that, yeah.

http://www.bethinking.org/science-chris ... debate.htm

[geo]

I have no problem with the idea that there are no moral absolutes, at least not in the sense of morality being rooted in some external entity like God. Morality is culture-based and, as such, it varies from culture to culture. In the West, we are horrified by the notion of stoning a woman to the death for the "crime" of adultery. We are shocked today by the violence during the Middle Ages. Likewise, most cultures believe that killing is wrong except in cases of war or when meting out capital punishment, etc. We are very good at rationalizing our own culturally-accepted behaviors without recognizing that some of our current attitudes may some day feel as inappropriate as stoning a woman to death for adultery.

Regarding the question that the belief that rape is wrong is as arbitrary as the fact that we've evolved five fingers. It's a rather simplistic and out-of-context way of talking about morality. It's not the way I would frame it and I suspect not the way Dawkins would frame it either. To be fair, Dawkins is only answering in the affirmative the question as posed to him by the interviewer.

[Penelope]

geo:

We are very good at rationalizing our own culturally-accepted behaviors

Yes, don't we just. Any fule can see that factory farming chickens is an abomination. Well, factory farming any sentient creature is an abomination. Ducklings kept indoors, with water to drink, but no water to swim in.....It's just got to be wrong. I don't believe anyone who says they feel comfortable with doing it. We do it anyway.....but at least, let's own up that it isn't right.

I think people know what is right and wrong....without religious dogma.....In fact, there is something wharped going on when people feel righteous about not eating fish on Fridays, because the liturgy says so, but eating, tortured animals with gay abandon.

[Interbane]

The belief that the crime of rape, as an example of something morally abhorrent, is as arbitrary as the evolutionary evolvement of digits is a belief that Richard Dawkins apparently subscribes to. You might want to cast aspersions his way.

I ascribe to the arbitrariness as well, but that makes it no less abhorrent to me. Many theists who see the false solidity of religious morals as absolute still fail in abiding by them. Human morality involves the mechanisms instilled by evolution, where the fodder for these mechanisms is cultural. However, even cultural moral teachings are below the free-floating rationale of a highly altruistic lifestyle. Such game-theory level altruism is what inspires books such as The Case for Global Ethics by Tremblay. When "enforced" by the mechanisms of our evolutionary heritage, such a moral compass is far stronger than anything you'll find in religion, specifically because it does away with the faults of religious morality.