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GOHEAVY.COM Debates Forum
Re: yet you'll believe a 2000 yr old book
Posted By: Dave Caligaris (75-163-149-99.clsp.qwest.net)
In Response To: Re: yet you'll believe a 2000 yr old book (ken wheeler)
Date: Saturday, March 15, 2008, @ 11:08 a.m.
Ken,
To answer your qstns about my involvement in the PL game, I don't compete now. Instead I engage in Master Track and Field throwing events. As for powerlifting, my house is a gym. I open it to youngsters and direct their activities. I have a heart-warming story about Josh Chapel, the NASA flyweight American Record holder, for example (something you can look up). Lately the gym is used to condition young men for the military.But back to the thread, if you really spent thousands of hrs in attempting to decide whether your beliefs are valid, then it is perplexing to me that you'd make sttmts like you know "the ultimate truth". If you've studied philosophy you'll find "truth" is very subjective, esp., when it comes to attempting to understand the meaning of life, or to vailidate yours or anyone's beliefs based on the burden of proof.
So while waiting for my kid to show up from CU-Boulder for a jam session I've got some time to hit part of your previous post.
"what caused evolved goo (i.e. humans) to develop the need for God if in fact He doesn't exist? What primordial reasoning would cause the brain to even remotely think there was a higher creating power if there isn't one? Why would man create the concept of a being greater than himself? What "need" exists to cause that thought if the creator we "need" isn't really there?(if you answer this query you will have accomplished what many of the great atheist minds of today fail at doing)."
+ I am willing to answer these qstns, but other things need be covered first: abiogenesis for example. Please do not take offense but I can deduce that you haven't had science courses at the university level if you still refer to humans as evolved goo. (or maybe you attended bible college)
here's an article that explains the background problems with various hypotheses as to the orgin of life.
And let me slip this in there, you mention Hitchens, that's fine and his books are fun to read but for a real grounding in zoology and evolutionary biology, consider Dawkin's body of work. One I think you'd find useful is 'The Ancestor's Tale' (Dawkins, Richard. The Ancestor's Tale. New York: First Mariner Books, 2004.)
"Where did morality come from if not from a God of morals? And how did this all begin? What is the cause of the anthropic universe? Finally, atheism is every bit a religion of faith as much as Christianity. It is equally a "crutch" of those who do not wish to be bound by ultimate truth. It is a religion of "don't tell me what to do" preached under the pretense of "free/rational thought"."
For this i'm going to paste how i responded to another with a similiar question:
THERE IS NO MORAL VALUE SYSTEMS WITH ATHEISTS......ONLY WHAT ONE THINKS IS RIGHT OR WRONG AT THE MOMENT.....AND IT CHANGES AS THE WIND.....
Dear _____
Even tho i have explained morals to you, you're not interested in letting go of your absurd belief that the Ten Commandments imparts a standard for the inhabitants of this planet. This is a Judea-Christian decree. What of the other billions of inhabitants? How do you explain their morals, or do you believe they have none? The ten commandments are meant for a particular group. How hard is it to modify or come to them independently to be a loose "standard" for all humankind? (And I actually am not crazy about that idea, but it's a heck of a lot better than your view, the view that others outside your religion are not to be trusted.)
I've made available to you the ten commandments in revised form. But you're not about to read them. Frankly, and since you wish to take the gloves off when you refer to me as one of the amoral, I have the sense you live your life in fear, tho you will resist that notion mightily. I think most people just grow up accepting the beliefs of their family. Even when a person attends confirmation classes or something like that as a teenager, for most people it really functions as additional indoctrination. There is no balanced information about alternatives that would lead to a true choice.
You might ask, "so what? It's my comfort zone. What extent does the decision to believe in God screw everything else up?"
And I wud answer: any worldview a person has that is based on incorrect information has the potential to cause harm -- to them and others. It's hard enough to make good decisions anyway, without starting with flawed assumptions.
And further, given our human propensity for taking things too far, any belief which includes an absolute -- such as a god or gods, or a political belief -- is just asking for somebody to do something ugly.
Religions, like political systems, create organizations; and in bureaucracies individual accountability, compassion, etc. tend to be lost. That's pretty screwed up.
Okay now that you are grinding your jaws. I want you to read this. Then you won't be so quick to claim moral superiority in that a religiously mandated standard precludes my (or my ilk's) capacity to be moral, and in fact are just naturally less than moral. Steven Pinker's book "The Moral Instinct" gives an interesting take on the basis of morality - and relieves me of the need to keep trying to distinguish between morality and ethics. Now this is not a dissertation on or against religious values that are imposed so don't think of it as having any axe to grind. Here's one paragraph:
"So dissecting moral intuitions is no small matter. If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded. Yet as we shall see, the science of the moral sense can instead be seen as a way to strengthen those grounds, by clarifying what morality is and how it should steer our actions."
~ Dave Caligaris
Article here if not archived: http://tinyurl.com/2txmmo
Now if you're still with me after this, I'll continue. Hey, I'm doing this bcz you said you've devoted countless hours on the subject. Perhaps I can steer you in a direction that makes your future study time more efficient. ~dave
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