A Plea for Atheists

[cheddarsox]

I actually answered the purpose question in the thread somewhere with a quote from an atheist.

I now WANT to ask:
Doesn’t being alive denote some purpose? (i.e. What are we going to do to make money, will we marry someone, etc.?)
If there was no purpose…why not just kill ourselves?
Why do I exist? Does it not amaze anyone that we exist?
We exist just to die?
What is it that keeps you alive as you sleep?
Where did inanimate objects come from to be able to come together and become life?
Where did matter come from?

But what I will actually ask is:
What is the standard for making the best of it?
Especially, what is the standard for doing GOOD for others and ourselves?

Good cannot be a subjective term.
Because then evil becomes a subjective term.

As I posted somewhere earlier…maybe good is bad to people and vice versa.
(i.e. Some people think abortion is bad, some people think abortion is good;

• some people think it is good to hate people of other races and think it is bad to like them, some people think it is bad to hate people of other races and think it is good to like all people;
• some people think it is good to help the sick and the poor, some people think it is best to let them die [as they curtail evolution] )

This then leads me to wonder…because then we all have a different definition of hate and love.

What is the standard from which we judge “good” and “bad”?

I like the questions you want to ask more than the one you did ask. Lol.

the standard humans use to judge good and evil is based on a complex mixture of culture, situation, and personality or personal tendency.

Religious teachings are an example of cultural imput, as are what the culture at large teaches, believes and how they behave, and what we learn spoken and unspoken in our families.

I know people who believe abortion is evil, yet they’ve had one. I am using this as an example of how pretty much all of us, even if we try not to, practice situational ethics.

My take is that in the end, what we believe is shown in how we act, not in what we profess. What we profess is what we wish we believed or wish others to think we believed, but what we truly believe is in what we do.

Good and evil are human terms, very useful for creatures that live in societies. They help us order and control our behaviors, with the idea being that it improves the odds of survival for the group.

That is why they change according to situation/knowledge, etc. Once upon a time it was good for the society/family to have lots of kids. It provided farmhands, and many would succumb to illness before adulthood, so it made it more likely the genes would get passed on.

These days, the tide has changed. It costs more to meet society’s standards in raising a child. People live in cities, most kids live to adulthood, the need for large families seems passe, and with resources becoming harder to get ahold of, more expensive, and the environment in danger…it seems “good” to more people to limit family size.

In reality, how many kids a couple has is really neither evil or good…but when you put it in the context of complex society and all the other ramifications, people feel they have a stake in it and judge it.

gotta go, time for work.

Have you ever hung out at yahoo answers religion and spirituality section? People are answering these sorts of things all the time. About half the folk there are atheists, if you want to know how they think, that is a great place to people watch.

 

[MrWhy]

I now WANT to ask:
Doesn’t being alive denote some purpose? (i.e. What are we going to do to make money, will we marry someone, etc.?)
If there was no purpose…why not just kill ourselves?
Why do I exist? Does it not amaze anyone that we exist?
We exist just to die?
What is it that keeps you alive as you sleep?
Where did inanimate objects come from to be able to come together and become life?
Where did matter come from?

But what I will actually ask is:
What is the standard for making the best of it?
Especially, what is the standard for doing GOOD for others and ourselves?

Good cannot be a subjective term.
Because then evil becomes a subjective term.

What is the standard from which we judge “good” and “bad”?

There is no connection between being alive (just existing) and purpose. Not in the same sense that an appliance has a purpose. Appliances are designed and built by people with a specific goal. We can identify, touch and see the entities that produce appliances. This simple relationship does not apply to us and naturally occuring things in general. We have not been able to demonstrate the existence of any creator entity that produced us. No creator identified, then how would you construct a purpose. Examining the facts, our existence appears to be solely the results of events and condtions which may or may not be rare in the universe. Here, we should avoid the temptation to say we exist because the conditions are perfect, as in designed. Instead, we exist because life just exploited the conditions that were present, and we should also note that the conditions are often far from good. In general the universe is very hostile to life. It’s too cold, or too hot, and full of deadly radiation.

Why not just kill ourselves? Strange question. We don’t for a wide range of reasons. Some enjoy their days. Some just get by and hope for improvement. Some don’t enjoy life at all, but stay alive because they are afraid of dying. etc., etc. Struggling for life is natural behavior because it’s a characteristic that aids the evolution process. That is, critters that don’t struggle to stay alive don’t reproduce as well as those that do stay alive.

"Where did inanimate objects come from to be able to come together and become life? "
We don’t know (yet). There are some ideas around, but the evidence is weak. “Don’t know” is an acceptable answer, it promotes inquiry.

“Where did matter come from?”
Kinda’ depends on which matter you’re referring to, but in general, the elements that makeup the observed universe were produced by suns and other very hot dense bodies. Current common scientific opinion is that the suns accumulated gas from the energy that the big bang produced. What was before the BB, what cause the BB, or what was the BB instant? We don’t know. The first cause question is a facinating one, but there appears to be a fundamental problem with our understanding about time. The scientific idea is that time came to exist with the universe. Time and space were not generated by the universe, but are integrated properties of the universe. With this in mind we need to ask if there was a “before” the BB. If, at the BB instant, time (as we know it) did not exist, then does discussing a “first cause” make any sense. We may not even have the capacity to ever understand this time conundrum.

The question about judging good and bad is a popular one for theists. It implies that there was no such thing as moral behavior before humans invented religion. This is highly unlikely. There is a good case for morality also having an evolutionary base. For any social animal, individuals need to conform to certain behaviour or they don’t get the benefits of the social group. It’s another one of those characteristics that make reproduction more likely. It should be noted that forms of behavior that could be called moral exist in all social critters. Even ants.