As a naturalist you have made it quite clear that you care for your own feelings rather the feelings of others. If your dog were killed you would grieve whereas your dog wouldn’t know anything about it. The grief of the relatives of the person you sacrificed for the sake of your dog is of** secondary** importance. Your rejection of God enables you to put yourself **first **without any tiresome obstacle…
Absolve yourself in any way you like from your own morality.
And your idolisation of an imaginary person allows you to ignore real sentient beings for the sake of propping up your own arrogant belief in your superiority as a human, and also, evidently, to ignore the feelings of other humans who grieve for the loss of companion animals.
You’re a moral coward, then - you are well aware that I have offered no red herrings whatsoever. You were the one who took advantage of the fact that I mentioned my lately deceased dog, in order to push your own anthropocentric agenda. I have already made it clear that I feel more obligation to my own dog than to a human stranger, just as you would feel more obligation to your own relative or friend than to a stranger - and I make no apology for this, just as you make no apology for hurting and offending a fellow human, even though it goes against your professed beliefs. You think the fact that my dog is not human is somehow relevant in this calculation, but by the lights of the OP, this is completely irrational anyway, so why should you care?
I dont think it does. But as of yet request for clarification of for the intended meaning of “rational” have received no reply.
It seems that you don’t even bother or don’t care to read properly what i say, since if you did you would realize that my being against any particular emotional behavior is purely contingent on metaphysical naturalism being true. But it seems your emotions have compelled you to build a straw-man. Responding to emotions is not a rational problem given the truth of my world view. If life is objectively valuable, then it is rational for me to respond to it as having value since i am simply conforming to its true objective nature. If an action is truly evil, then it is rational for me to respond with guilt and remorse when i do evil. If a person does not share that which is objectively good with the community, i can rationally say that the person is selfish. I can rationally speak of justice and what ought to be done because these words reflect reality given the metaphysical truth of my world view. My caring is rationally consistent with reality because i recognize and respect your true value as a person given the truth of my world view.
Perhaps ironically, I think the pursuit of emotional pleasure is one of the main reasons we seek God. The Catechism teaches that man’s created with a desire for happiness. It’s just that we look for it first in all the wrong, unsatisfactory, places-everywhere but Him, the source of all happiness. So I think our lack of peace/happiness is a driving force in our seeking God. And our cultivation of love/obedience in this life is aimed at the completion of happiness in the Beatific Vision in the next where we’ll see Him “face to face” as scripture puts it.
Read post #73.
Clearly you take it as a term of abuse, although you cannot deny the truth of it.
This was in direct response to the perceived attacks made in your posts - since it is plain for all to see that intended to derogate those who care about other animals - and your subsequent refusal to acknowledge that you had acted in any way contrary to your own religion’s value for compassion.
Why raise the subject of my dog at all if not in response to my own post mentioning him? As I pointed out above, the question of whether one would rescue a dog in preference to a human has nothing to do with the topic of this thread.
Since you are well aware that I consider metaphysical naturalism to be true - or as near an approximation of the truth as we may come to - then we are arguing at cross-purposes.
Yet you have not yet, despite being queried on several occasions now, provided any justification whatsoever for privileging the rational faculties over the subjective faculties, which are just as real, though apparently less valuable to you. We are not purely rational beings, nor is our reason unaffected by emotion - even from before the time we can formulate a rational thought, we are subject to emotional stimuli.
But you have not explained why it is at all necessary for our emotional responses to have any rational justification. According to metaphysical naturalism, emotions and subjective experience are part of what we are. They don’t need a rational reason to exist - they just do.
Emotions reflect the objective reality of themselves. We respond to circumstances and make meaning from them after the fact. Our subjectivity doesn’t wait for permission from our thoughts! You would claim that, for example, murder is wrong because we owe each other respect for the objective value of our human lives. You impose a top-down construction on human morality. On the naturalist view, this is a bottom-up process. We are sentient beings capable of suffering, who prefer to avoid suffering given the choice. Murder causes suffering and misery to those affected by it, thus every human society, regardless of any varying religious or philosophical constructs that might later be used to justify it, has developed some prohibition against unjustified killing.
Yes, it’s easy to dismiss a disagreeable viewpoint from your rational ivory tower, isn’t it? This thread is merely the latest in a string of attempts you’ve been making recently to assert that there is some necessary connection between atheism and nihilism. You have thus far failed to establish such a connection, and are failing again in this thread, in large part because you are unwilling to acknowledge the priority of emotion over reason. I have never claimed that rationality plays no part in human behaviour - but it is inextricably bound to our subjective natures. Not because any supreme rational being decreed that it must be so, but merely because it is. We don’t refrain from suicide because reason tells us we should value our objective humanity - we refrain from it because we have the subjective desire and capacity for enjoyment of life, and a deeply-ingrained instinct for self-preservation. Neither of these things are rational, but that does not mean they are not powerful.
What ‘truth’ would this be? Your unsupported assertion that atheism and/or naturalism logically entail nihilism?
Since you are asserting the supremacy of rationality over all other considerations, someone has to provide balance.
It is a response to your statement:
Sooner or later even those who have no belief in an afterlife must have moments of doubt - if they are reasonable - because they know they’re not infallible…
I cannot answer that. I have had two friends who claimed to be atheists. They never expressed any doubts to me. I hope and pray that they had those doubts, as they both died violent, unannounced deaths.It is a response to your statement:
Sooner or later even those who have no belief in an afterlife must have moments of doubt - if they are reasonable - because they know they’re not infallible…
If this discussion were about discerning the truth about anything else other than the rational basis for your existence, you would have no problem seeing why rationality has privilege. Rationality itself is the basis for privileging the objective truth over emotions that do not reflect reality. The rational truth is the rational truth regardless of what your emotions tell you as being right. But you are not interested in the truth beyond any social or survival advantage it may give you. That you can ignore the rational truth when it does not benefit you emotionally is irrelevant and is only representative of the fact that you are not brave enough or willing enough to take reality to its rational conclusion and thus prefer to hide behind emotional lies. And you have the cheek to call tony a coward. Well i can assure you that you are better off looking in the mirror.
That emotions are real is irrelevant. What is relevant is that the meaning of those emotions do not rationally reflect the objective truth; thus your acting upon them is delusional, just like it is delusional to speak to somebody you know does not exist.
You choose to perceive them as such because you think that it gives you some kind of advantage in life.
Its irrelevant how i define them. What is relevant is the fact that absent those definitions your reasons for living becomes irrational; and what ever meaningful definition you give to social contexts is pure fantasy.
If we want them to reflect the truth, then their very meaning has to be grounded in an objective standard.
In otherwords you rationalize when it suits you.
I don’t have to. The fact remains that your response to emotion is irrational. How you choose to deal with that is up to you; but you cannot expect me to respect you as a rational thinker if you only acknowledge those rational truths which support your objectively meaningless value system.
As you well know we are not talking about how or why emotions exist or whether or not they need a reason to exist. We are talking about whether the contents of those emotions are rationally consistent with reality, and whether or not you have a rational basis to continue existing. You have continuously demonstrated that you do not.
In terms of whats “true” of reality, there is no such thing as unjustified killing. Thats just another meaningless term when given the truth of metaphysical naturalism.
I follow rationality where it leads me. I thought thats what you did. I am obviously talking to the wrong person.
I have made no assertions. Given metaphysical naturalism we evidently have no rational basis for survival (which you have admitted); which means, rationally speaking, atheism leads directly to nihilism. Your response to this, is that you can choose to ignore the rational truth in favor of your emotional delusions. Thats entirely up to you
. I cannot force you to face reality or even have respect for the people you debate.I am not asserting anything. The rational truth is the rational truth whether we like it or not. You choose to ignore the truth. It is you that has to give rational justification for placing your desire to survive over that truth. You have given none and cannot possibly.
Peggy, we have to accept the fact that sometimes our suffering is pointless because although it is permitted by God it is due to chance. It is evil but we can transform it into a way of coming closer to Our Lord like the great saints who offered their trials and tribulations as proof of their faith and devotion. John Keats wasn’t a Christian but he believed this world is a vale of soul-making. He died of TB at the age of 25 and suffered mental anguish as well as physical pain. The doctor couldn’t understand how he had lived so long because the autopsy revealed his lungs were almost completely destroyed. Yet his worst torment was being separated from the woman he loved - as he believed forever. Yet Joseph Severn, a Christian who read to him a book by Jeremy Taylor, Holy Dying and Holy Living, and cared for him day and night for months said that an unearthly serenity came over him during the last three weeks of his life and at the very end:
I think you may be misunderstanding me, TonyRey.