Atheist bored at work. Feel free to ask questions

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No,just kind of a yes or no answer to do you think all people are equal.
It’s very kind of you to give your time answering everyone’s questions…just wondering why you
are here?
 
goodness is relative to the person ascribing that quality to someone else. You can’t be “good” unless someone tells you are good from their reference point as I understand it. So you may believe your deity is good, but I might not.

Conscious creatures that can communicate to each other can come to an understanding what each creature values as good for them. If there is overlap, great. Like the not beating children. If there is areas where there is not overlap, then there is conflict. Such as, for me, slavery. I’m anti-slavery. Might have a conflict with your biblical deity here. But this is irrelevant to me since I can’t tell the difference between your deity actually existing or an imagined literary figure. Not going to have an argument with Shakespeare’ Puck.

My arbitrary reference point for my version of absolute morality comes from referencing Human Well-being. It’s like referencing nutritional state for people. Is eating apples or oranges objectively good or bad when referencing nutrition for people? not really. but it is objectively bad to drink battery acid. As to picking a deity as a reference point of morality, to me that is no different than picking bob next door. But at least everyone in the world can talk to bob and ask him what is good and bad. The deity reference is no different to me than using Puck from Shakespeare as a moral reference point of absolute morality. What would Puck do? Well until everyone in the world can talk to Puck and agree that Puck should be the reference point we can then go from there, but that’s no the case of this reality so far.

Disobeying the “Master” - Beating the child is bad in reference to human well-being, so by pass the master and just use human well-being as a reference point. AKA be good for its sake regardless of the most powerful person in the room. Also, we can only be good as far as we understand what good is. Example: using pi to solve a problem. If we can not tell the difference in the solution from using pi to the 5th decimal place instead of any other value of pi beyond the 5th decimal place, did we have an absolute answer to that problem? No we did not, since we can only answer the problem as far as we can understand it. That is why good and bad is in reference to what we understand, in reference to our well-being regardless of the “master”. The cultures that did not value “not beating their children” died off and we are the products of people that succeeded since we valued not beating our children.
 
But “level of significance to us” is in turn electron soup.
Don’t care, not a problem since this is what actually matches reality as we currently understand it. Wishing it to be different has no bearing on how reality actually presents itself to be.

My model of existence is grounded in justified reality. It is based on the current understanding of reality, not what my tribe wishes it to be. We can demonstrate that we are made from star dust. I believe you are just being argumentative here and this line of argumentation is soo absurd that it is insulting to the readers. So I’ll just move on.

The volcano - you seem to be presented with a problem of reality, such as a volcano. So to solve the problem you don’t like about reality, you invent a supernatural solution to the problem that reality has presented. But since your imagined solution of the supernatural is actually no different than an imagined solution, it doesn’t really solve the problem you have with reality. Your village is still going to be destroyed by the volcano, you’re still just star dust and energy at this point. Demonstrate the existence of the supernatural is any different than nothing at all.
 
Yes since we don’t have any other data in reality that points to anything else. Wishing consciousness to be a magical being of a soul does not make that true until there is a way to demonstrate that is the actual case. It might actually be the case, but we can’t investigate that yet.
 
Russell_SA said:
AKA be good for its sake regardless of the most powerful person in the room.
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This is where I have a hard time following you. Be good for its sake? It’s almost like you want to believe there’s an objective good not relative to anything but itself (a universal standard) yet you don’t want to admit it. Otherwise “good” has as many definitions as people in the room, none more “right” than the other including the most weak and powerful.
Russell_SA said:
Might have a conflict with your biblical deity here.
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Interesting little jab.
Russell_SA said:
My arbitrary reference point for my version of absolute morality
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This doesn’t sound very consistent nor meaningful.
Russell_SA said:
comes from referencing Human Well-being. …As to picking a deity as a reference point of morality
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Human well-being is a subset of the Christian diety’s morality. Natural law is a well developed discipline within Christianity. Yet you seem to be painting the Christian diety as something arbitrary. You’ll say something like “why follow a diety when I just know drinking battery acid will hurt me?” While Christians are saying that thing you recognize as being good or bad (the preservation of human life), it’s essense is sort of what we are talking about when we speak of God.
 
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Russell_SA said:
It is based on the current understanding of reality, not what my tribe wishes it to be.
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You keep saying this. Is your position that Christians base their understanding of reality on mere wishes? Which current understanding of reality do Christians reject?
 
Russell_SA said:
But since your imagined solution of the supernatural is actually no different than an imagined solution, it doesn’t really solve the problem you have with reality. Your village is still going to be destroyed by the volcano
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I’m still not sure what you’re insinuating here? That Christians will not use reason, logic, and natural means to solve the volcano problem?
 
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We do ńot see non conscious matter becoming conscious. Rather, we see consciousness coming from other conscious beings. Is it so unreasonable to infer a n original consciousness?
 
Let’s act like the word “supernatural” doesn’t exist. We have the evidence that the bread did in fact turn to human tissue. The tissue was tested and came back with AB blood type; the heart tissue is from a Middle Eastern male who had undergone severe torture, as though someone pounded on his chest numerous times. This is circumstantial evidence. We can make a hypothesis from this, that the bread turned into the flesh of Jesus. We can say for sure that the bread turned to human flesh because it is known as fact. But we can only assume that it turned into the flesh of Jesus because that cannot be proven. This specific Eucharist has also been preserved from the very moment it was noticed that blood was on it. The Catholic Church takes very careful care when it concerns the possibility miracles.
 
“Arbitrary reference point for morality” - It’s only arbitrary in the reference point just as arbitrary as picking the game of chess over monopoly. Once you pick your reference point of what game to play you can have absolute good and bad rules of that game. Just for me, I pick Human Wellbeing as my game to play as a reference point of morality since that seems to be the most overlapping game that everyone is playing regardless of tribe, time period, etc. However, the religious are referencing a character that is indistinguishable from a literary character. I can demonstrate, and have it demonstrated independently, that my reference point actually exists in reality. How is picking a deity as a reference point demonstrable to be an actual reference point in reality that everyone can access and agree upon? It still comes across as no difference than an imagined literary character like Shakespeare’s Puck. How is picking an apparently imagined deity as a reference point for morality any different than picking your friend as a reference point of morality? You may like her being your reference point but everyone else may not agree with your reference point. They have their own game or friend to reference. This is where we use logic and reason to come to a consensus of morality for the human condition, aka “Human Wellbeing” seems to be that reference point, the game we all agree we are playing.
 
No idea on how the universe came into being. Can you demonstrate that your solution actually is the case and how you can demonstrate that?
 
You seem to be placing God into the equation of morality when my system seems to work without the need to reference the apparently literary character of a deity. Referencing Human Wellbeing as the grounding for moral absolutes for our reality seems to be the universal reference that everyone is using. How do we know your deity’s pronouncements are moral or not? We assess them from the reference point of how it benefits the human experience. So just reference the human experience. There’s no need to complicate this anymore than you seem to be. Also, you still can’t seem to demonstrate that your deity is any different than an imagined idea. So references to that deity are pointless to me until you can demonstrate that it is actually there and that we should actually use it as a reference point of morality.
 
Since religion’s claims can not be demonstrated to be part of reality, we can not tell the difference between the imagined idea of religious claims and those claims actually being part of reality. We have to be able to tell the difference. That is how you come to justified belief about two different ideas. You can demonstrate that they are actually different. At this point, we have no way in determining if someone’s claim of a deity is correct or not. I’m fine with a realm where there are powerful beings, but I do not feel justified in claiming that to be part of reality until I can demonstrate how that is any different than just an imagined cultural tradition. Acting as if that realm is there is no different than wishing that realm to be there since we can not demonstrate that realm is actually there.
 
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Christians seem to be solving their volcano problem by first coming up with the idea of a deity that can solve all problems. Then logically is seems that it could solve their volcano problem. See the issue here? If you can’t demonstrate that the deity is actually there it’s not really a process to solve your volcano problem.
 
Sure, we do that with mathematics all the time. The current understanding of reality is how we create our mathematical models. However, once we run the experiment and we fail at it, we learn and go back and fix our model. So “inference” can tell you where to go look, but it’s reality that lets you know if you are justified in your conclusions, not your inference. You have to demonstrate that it is actually there, not just assert that it is there without ever investigating your claim. The investigation is what will falsify it. Currently there is no way to investigate claims of the religious, so we can’t even run a test to determine if their claims are imagined or real. So by default, they stay in the imagined claims till we can.
 
We have data on consciousness and how it changes when a physical brain is damaged or chemically altered. That’s fine for me since that reflects what reality actually presents so far. If we learn more in the future that it is a soul/ghosts/spirits/deities/etc., then at that point, I’ll update my model of reality. But I’m not going to act as if it is the case until the data shows that. Again, how I want reality to be has no bearing on how reality actually is. That is wishful thinking.
 
  1. Why are you here? Why not an atheist forum instead?
  2. Do you think you will always be an atheist? Does it matter?
 
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