Increase of Atheists around the world, increase of crime any coincidence?

[upant]

you pick what you want of faith and disregard what you don’t want.

your morals have no backbone. nothing to hold them up. no accountability. the con-man is the judge and the jury. he can not lose. he can have morals when needed and throw them aside when they hinder him.

illness isn’t bad, nor is it good. it is just a condition of the breakdown of the body due to living in this world. none of these are good or bad. it is, after all, a matter of luck.

is stealing wrong if you are constantly hungry?

but we don’t agree on some morals and can’t because I can’t change my code. who is the arbitrator? you pick by feeling and I don’t get to choose. yours can change, mine can’t

do you really have a universal moral code if anyone can change it?

 

[Freddy]

illness isn’t bad, nor is it good.

I am desperately trying to find some common ground here. You seem equally determined to avoid that at all costs. And if you have reached the point where you won’t even agree that illness is bad and health is good then I see no point in discussing anything at all.

Your intransigence has been noted (and not just by me).

 

[Spaten]

it is against God’s law.

God’s law is not declared, nor enforced.

man’s law doesn’t matter

Try that defense when you violate a human law, and you are caught.

 

[HarryStotle]

upant:

Spaten:

This whole attempt to declare atheism as “immoral” is just an attack to declare Christianity as superior.

How can you have morals when you don’t have good and evil.

Didn’t we have this dance? Who on earth says that there is no good and evil in our lives? Where are these people?

Still don’t understand the difference between claiming there is moral good and evil – which you claim no one denies – AND providing a rational defence of that belief from an atheistic materialistic perspective – which you haven’t even attempted.

That kind of provides prima facie evidence that you don’t think the belief in objective good and evil can be justified from atheistic principles.

You keep reframing the challenge to you as… “everyone accepts there is good and evil.”

The challenge, however, isn’t whether everyone does or does not, in fact, believe in it, but whether that belief can be rationally justified solely by atheistic premises – i.e., does atheism by itself justify rational belief in objective good and evil?

You haven’t so much as attempted to provide an argument.

 

[HarryStotle]

I don’t think this theory holds water. To start with, there are a lot of countries with high levels of religiosity where crime is still very high. Brazil is absolutely a Catholic country but it still has high crime rates.

The main cause of crime tends to be poverty. When people are desperate they’re more likely to resort to crime to make ends meet, as well as more susceptible to recruitment by criminal organizations if they feel membership is the only way to get a support network.

The data on that isn’t specific enough. Just who in Brazil is responsible for violent crimes? Is it church attending Christians or Catholics? Perhaps the data sets need to be tightened up from “majority Christian.” How do we know it isn’t the minority that is committing the violent crimes?

Neither is it clear that poverty causes crime. That is a talking point from the left, but it never seems to be bolstered by data. Could you provide that instead of merely making the claim?

 

[HarryStotle]

Just saying it might reveal nothing. So why are we spending digital ink writing about what might be?

Why do you waste so much digital ink on what the climate MIGHT BE?

 

[Freddy]

You keep reframing the challenge to you as… “everyone accepts there is good and evil.”

The challenge, however, isn’t whether everyone does or does not, in fact, believe in it, but whether that belief can be rationally justified solely by atheistic premises – i.e., does atheism by itself justify rational belief in objective good and evil?

You haven’t so much as attempted to provide an argument.

I haven’t used the term ‘evil’. It has religious connotations and is best avoided in secular dicussions. I have simply referred to that which we can all agree is either good or bad. And as I said, it is beyond me that someone will deny that anyone and everyone can distinguish between the two whatever their religious beliefs or lack of them.

If you are walking down the road and meet an old friend you haven’t seen in years then that is good. If you meet a mugger who beats you up and steals your money, then that’s bad. And you don’t need a belief in any deity at all to be able to describe the first incident as good and the second as bad.

At this point I am reluctant to take the argument any further because as we have seen, even this blatantly obvious proposal - we all know the difference between what is good and what is bad, can be met with a blanket denial.

Yes, there are things about which two people can disagree. There’s no denying that. But if you can’t even accept common ground in that good and bad are concepts that are universally agreed upon then, as I said, there is no point in further discussion.

So if you’d like to continue, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you what probably appears to everyone as a ridiculous question. Do you accept that we can, in a general sense, determine between that which is good and that which was bad?

 

[niceatheist]

Freddy:

First up we have the Golden Rule. It’s universally accepted and endorsed by the Son of God. Do unto others as you would have them do to you. Let’s keep it in mind.

we don’t first have to have a golden rule. there is no good or evil in a random existence. you need to overcome this hurdle first. everything else is just majority rules.

First of all, “random existence” is an assertion made by theists about the human animal that I doubt you’re going to find any atheist agrees with. Even among other social animals there are social hierarchies and social rules, so evolution certainly can create some sort of ordered existence, whether it’s a bison herd, a chimpanzee tribe, or human societies.

Second of all, to an atheist, declaring that there is an objective standard put in place by God looks a lot like “here’s my subjective moral standard, except I’m claiming God says so.” Stamping “God commands thus” isn’t terribly compelling. Can you justify “sex outside of marriage” as an immoral act without resorting to the Ten Commandments?

 

[HarryStotle]

The problem for your argument is that dictators wth religious belief have behaved in the same way. Although I would not call him a dictator, Joshua was willing to kill every man, woman,child and animal (bar one) in Jericho. His reason? He believed God told him it was right.

You forget about the part where the walls of the city fall down of their own accord after Joshua and the Israelites walk around the city seven times praying and singing. That would be an indicator that the power of God was behind the command. So it wasn’t just Joshua imagining something outrageous.

Now I suppose you would have been more willing to trust your limited intellectual capacities and moral judgement during a time when war and barbarism was pretty much a way of life, but if the continual miraculous interventions by the omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God who has been orchestrating and supporting the past 50 years of your people’s journey does not suffice to make you take God’s command seriously I am just not sure we can take your judgement on the matter to be reliable.

Never mind what you as a modern-secular-society-inhabiting individual today would suppose to be true, what would you propose to have been the better option if all that had happened to Joshua actually did occur? Would you have acted differently?

Of course, we know better today, being the modern intelligent creatures that we are.

Sure, God hasn’t acted in the modern world as he did then, but there may have been good reasons for that and good reasons why he is very subdued today. That is hardly a good reason for thinking the God who brought the universe into existence from nothing couldn’t intervene when and where he chooses.

Neither is it a reason to trust the hubris of modern human beings who also seriously propose that a person’s biology is irrelevant to gender or that killing our own offspring in the womb is a good thing.

 

[BornInMarch]

The first post in this thread made a bold claim “more atheism means more violence” and felt no need to back that up with sources, so if he didn’t feel the need to include sources why should I?

In any case, Brazil being a country with high poverty and high religiosity is common knowledge. I’m not going to back those two claims with article links, for the same reason I wouldn’t feel the need to prove that there are a large ammount of English speakers in the United States.

 

[HarryStotle]

The first post in this thread made a bold claim “more atheism means more violence” and felt no need to back that up with sources, so if he didn’t feel the need to include sources why should I?

In any case, Brazil being a country with high poverty and high religiosity is common knowledge. I’m not going to back those two claims with article links, for the same reason I wouldn’t feel the need to prove that there are a large ammount of English speakers in the United States.

Except that the language one speaks would, on the face of it, have little bearing upon the behaviours of individuals who speak that language.

Values – including religious and moral values – would seem to be the very basis upon which actions are based. Would you disagree with that?

Why does anyone act the way they do? They value something, either ordinately or inordinately.

Religion provides a ground for values.

Atheism, on the other hand, insists that the ground for existence is material and neither transcendent nor purposeful.

So if atheism throws out, from the realm of being itself, the very grounds we have for valuing anything, that would seem to have huge repercussions to how individual atheists would determine what is of value. No values, atheists would have to claim, are inherent in existence itself. That kind of alters the moral landscape just a tad, no?

Now if you can make the case that language somehow impacts the determination of values, we would, then, have reason for looking at the numbers of speakers of different languages for a correlation to behaviour. Do you want to make that case?

In the meantime, the GROUNDS we have for values generally and morality specifically would seem to be crucial for arriving at moral behaviour, no?

If you were to ask your spouse, “Why do you love me?” that would seem important to understanding what they mean when they say, “I love you?” Aside from the fact that articulation of the reason might be difficult, would you accept the answer that they don’t need any reason at all?

Or that the reason isn’t because you have inherent worth or because of anything about you but merely because they happen to love you subjectively and don’t need any reason apart from the fact that they happen to have feelings for you?

 

[HarryStotle]

Aquinas11:

If there is no “objective” ethical system, you couldn’t even objectively say “there is no…” or “meaningless” or “cannot be answered” since all of those require an objective ethical framework

Sorry, you confuse epistemology with ethics.

Care to make a case for why there is no epistemological basis for ethics, or are we just to presume that to be true because you assert it?

Is your claim that ethical systems have no objective epistemological justification, or that there is none if we assume atheistic materialism?

I will grant you the latter, but that hardly means we are compelled to assume atheistic materialism.

@Freddy has backed away from doing so. Perhaps you can make the case for why atheistic materialism should be the default metaphysical position?

 

[Freddy]

Spaten:

Aquinas11:

If there is no “objective” ethical system, you couldn’t even objectively say “there is no…” or “meaningless” or “cannot be answered” since all of those require an objective ethical framework

Sorry, you confuse epistemology with ethics.

Care to make a case for why there is no epistemological basis for ethics, or are we just to presume that to be true because you assert it?

Is your claim that ethical systems have no objective epistemological justification, or that there is none if we assume atheistic materialism?

I will grant you the latter, but that hardly means we are compelled to assume atheistic materialism.

@Freddy has backed away from doing so. Perhaps you can make the case for why atheistic materialism should be the default metaphysical position?

Freddy didn’t back away. The discussion failed when upant wouldn’t agree that there are concepts such as good and bad. You are free to continue the discussion whenever you are ready.

 

[HarryStotle]

Freddy didn’t back away. The discussion failed when upant wouldn’t agree that there are concepts such as good and bad. You are free to continue the discussion whenever you are ready.

And Freddy backs away again.

 

[Pattylt]

I’m going to dip my toe in the water here…please be kind, I’m not a philosophy expert not a theologian.

Part of the problem with insisting on an objective morality is that you then get to claim it’s God. I don’t believe there is a God but I do believe we all have morals (excluding the pathological outliers). Where do they come from? Evolution, culture and our brains. We have some basic morality baked into our genes, our culture builds and shapes them and our brain processes them.

Science has identified several regions in our brain that processes moral questions. One part of the brain tends to deal with me versus us and a different region processes us versus them. The first set is more emotionally based, the second adds reason to the process.

We, as a society, usually have no problems with basic moral question of theft, murder, rape. When societies get larger then divisions can occur. Secular morality is based as much as possible on maximizing happiness. Happiness is not just what makes us smile, it includes how to live together in peace while maximizing happiness for the most people and trying to exclude behaviors or laws that exclude certain people from also obtaining happiness.

Conflicts with religions that exclude certain groups from obtaining general happiness are often in conflict with secular groups or other religions which is why arguments over the morality of a behavior or idea need to have secular arguments made…all religions and atheists will not agree with each other. Even invoking God doesn’t clear things up. You still have to decide which God or which moral statement from God is the correct interpretation. So even God’s objective morality is reduced to subjective understandings of Gods commands. You can claim it’s objective, but it’s not. Subjective humans have to make sense of them, reason through them, explain them…and it’s our brains that do that.

 

[Spaten]

Care to make a case for why there is no epistemological basis for ethics, or are we just to presume that to be true because you assert it?

You could figure it out for yourself. Ethics does not deal with “what IS”, it deals with “ought” statements.

 

[HarryStotle]

HarryStotle:

Care to make a case for why there is no epistemological basis for ethics, or are we just to presume that to be true because you assert it?

You could figure it out for yourself. Ethics does not deal with “what IS”, it deals with “ought” statements.

Well, okay then. Make the case that epistemology only concerns itself with what IS and not at all with what OUGHT to be.

Why can’t ethics (OUGHT statements) be just epistemologically grounded as IS statements?

For you to make that case, you have to demonstrate that it cannot be known with anything like epistemological certainty that murdering an innocent individual for no reason is something we ought not do. We cannot be certain of that? Really?

My claim would be that we can be as epistemologically certain about OUGHT claims as we can be about IS claims. Prove me wrong.

By the way, IS claims are not as certain as you might think, given that they are virtually all either inductively established or axiomatically self-evident.

I would have no hesitation stating that the logical law of non-contradiction or the principle of sufficient reason are no more self-evident than, We ought not murder or torture innocent human beings.

I would further claim that to hesitate or disagree with that is a sign of moral turpitude, just as disputing the law of non-contradiction is a symptom of intellectual disfunction.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

Freddy didn’t back away. The discussion failed when upant wouldn’t agree that there are concepts such as good and bad. You are free to continue the discussion whenever you are ready.

And Freddy backs away again.

I am not going to waste my time exaining my views on morality with you unless you are prepared to agree on some basic concepts. The first being that there aspects of existence that we can both agree are good or bad.

This is such an axiomatic proposition that it beats me why you are avoiding it. But it’s patently obvious to all that you are.

 

[Freddy]

I’m going to dip my toe in the water here…please be kind, I’m not a philosophy expert not a theologian.

Very well put. If you haven’t read the book that was mentioned earlier - Moral Tribes, then I wouldn’t bother. It’s not likely to teach you anything. It will only confirm what you already know. You have summed up a few hundred pages in a couple of paragraphs.

 

[HarryStotle]

I’m going to dip my toe in the water here…please be kind, I’m not a philosophy expert not a theologian.

Part of the problem with insisting on an objective morality is that you then get to claim it’s God. I don’t believe there is a God but I do believe we all have morals (excluding the pathological outliers). Where do they come from? Evolution, culture and our brains. We have some basic morality baked into our genes, our culture builds and shapes them and our brain processes them.

Science has identified several regions in our brain that processes moral questions. One part of the brain tends to deal with me versus us and a different region processes us versus them. The first set is more emotionally based, the second adds reason to the process.

…

You can claim it’s objective, but it’s not. Subjective humans have to make sense of them, reason through them, explain them…and it’s our brains that do that.

What you are getting at here, is that morality assumes a transcendent or supernatural order of value and meaning or significance. I don’t dispute that.

If materialism is true and human development is purely the result of purely accidental biochemical sophistication, then morality is an illusion.

It wouldn’t, in that case, be morality that is “baked into our genes.” It would be some kind of preferential behaviour that points us at biological survival. That would merely mean that survival is preferred by individuals over the alternatives.

That, unfortunately, does not imply that it is morally wrong to capriciously end the life of innocent human beings. Someone might claim that such preferences raise to the level of moral claims, but that wouldn’t be so.

In what sense would it be morally wrong to kill some innocent person if all you mean by that statement is that person and those who care about that person would have preferred – as a matter of subjective determination – to not have been killed?

That isn’t morality. Moral claims are much stronger than that. To say it is morally wrong to kill an innocent person is to make a statement of objective significance – that the value of that person far exceeds their own subjective preference but is grounded in the very being of that individual as an important part of moral reality. A wrong was done to the fabric of existence, the moral order of which that person is/was a very valuable part.

This goes to how reality itself is viewed, not merely how we subjectively feel.