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Luke_K
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I guess it depends on what you define “moral” to be. I understand it to mean “acting in accordance with God’s divine will” in one way or another so by that definition morals wouldn’t exist without God.
- Status
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packermann
Guest
Actually, I think it is very naive of you think that a couple of quotes would nullify a caste system in which there was religious justification for discrimnation and unequal treatment.
This is why argument from analogy is often times such as poor argument. If you can show that all the 20th century tyrants were vegetarians, then maybe you can argue that it was vegetarianism that killed 100 million people in the 20th century. But what these regimes had in common, Nazis, Soviet Union, China, Polt Pot were that they were all atheistic, not that they were all vegetarian.
I also disagree that atheism, especially in those regimes, was simply the lack of faith. In these regimes, believers were specifically sought out to be tortured and killed. This is hardly the attitude of people who merely lacked faith.
Even if I accepted your premise that atheism is not a belief-system, you even admit that atheism does provide a moral argument for mass killing. So if Christianity is to be blamed for the deaths in the Inquisition and the Crusades, then Christianity is to also be credited for preventing far more mass murders, as those that have happened in countries that lack faith. So even if we cannot blame atheism, this still shows that if it was not for the Judeo-Christian ethic within countries, there would have been millions of more mass killings.
Finally, this argument is fallacious beccause it is non-falsiable. There is no scenario where atheism, from your perpective, would be blamed for mass-killings. Even if, hypothetically speaking, every single atheist was a mass murderer, you would still argue that atheism cannot be blamed. So unless you can give a scenario where atheism can be blamed, your argument is non-falsifiable, and therefore is a very weak argument.
Just as you presented the vegetarian analogy, so I can used that same argument. The Jews in the Old Testament and, I think, the Muslims also, don’t eat pork. So maybe the problem is that they did not eat pork. It is using the same argument you did for blaming all the atrocities from 20th centuries on vegetarianism. So don’t blame theism, blame not eating pork.
Also, it is unfair to blame Christians for what Muslims do. The Muslims view God entirely different than how Catholics view God. Muslims view God as a strict Master, we see God as a loving Father.
Also, why do atheists only believe the parts in the Bible where there are killings? Why do they consider these parts of the Bible to be historical, and yet everything else is a myth?
This was not the view of evolutionists until after WWII. Until then eugenics was very popular among the leading evolutionists. They believed that the unfit did not have the right to survive. It was not after the discovery of the Nazi death camps that evolutionists started to change their tune.
Evolution is about the survival of the fittest. The reason a species becomes better is the weaker of a the species is not able to adapt as well as the stronger species, and so the weaker dies off more quickly than the stronger. Nature itself does it own selective breeding by rewarding the stronger to live longer and to breed more. This causes a species to become healthier. Before WWII, evolutionists criticized the idea of charity. Charity prevents nature from rewarding the fit and punishing the unfit.
In Ben Stein’s movie, “Expelled!”, Stein visited a Nazi death camp that specialized in the killing of the disabled. The caretaker there explained that the Germans were applying the principles of evolution, that it is good for the evolution of the species that only the fittest survive.
Modern evolutionists may explicitly disavow this belief, but that is only because this belief has now become so unpopular because of the Holocaust. But in many ways this view is still be held, only more covertly, with abortion, Terrie Schiavo, forced euthanasia in the Netherlands, etc.
Love may be an evolutionary advantage in some instances, but in many instances it is not. It is hard to see how Mother Teresa rescuing some dying person on the streets so that the person dies with some comfort and love gives some sort of evolutionary advantage.
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Touchstone
Guest
The giving is the compassion. Charity isn’t charity because the giver gets emotional about it. Nothing wrong with doing so, but that doesn’t feed the hungry. Providing food and sustenance to the hungry feeds the hungry – that’s charitiy in action. If I remember correctly, the Stoics expected or desired nothing in return, and could not even suppose this was part of plan that got them eternal bliss.
That’s fine, but my point raised was that Christianity did not introduce charity to the world, which was the thrust I was getting from your post. Telling us that Judaism pioneered the systematization and idealization of charity is a lot more credible, but still problematic in light of practices and ideas found in other cultures. In any case, as expressed, it’s an irony – a manifestly uncharitable view of the history and development of the principles and practice of charity.
-Touchstone
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Isambard
Guest
Something similar could be levied against the historical reality of christiandom as a system of oppresion, political control, sexism, racism etc.
Nazis were not atheistic. Hittler himself said he was doing the work of God. Just look at his criticism of secular schooling
“Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people.” - Adolf Hitler, Speech, April 26, 1933
You also seem to confuse ascriptive attributes with ideological reasoning. All the people you described were also men. Are all men tyrants? No? Are all men with funny mustaches tyrants? No?
Did they explicitly say they were killing for atheism? No?
Did the christian related genocides have the explicit motive of “doing God’s will”? Yes?
No duh.
“Communists are atheists, but not all atheists are communists”
Neither does science, mathmatics, the arts, etc.
Check out the history of Christianity and re-think your statement.
Or a complete genocide like in the case of alot of the original inhabitants of the Americas.
Thats because atheism isn’t an ideology. Its merely a statement. Its like trying to blame not-stamp collecting for a murder.
Did they specifically say they were killing for God? Yes? Then the point is moot.Just as you presented the vegetarian analogy, so I can used that same argument. The Jews in the Old Testament and, I think, the Muslims also, don’t eat pork. So maybe the problem is that they did not eat pork. It is using the same argument you did for blaming all the atrocities from 20th centuries on vegetarianism. So don’t blame theism, blame not eating pork.
Wrong. They too seeing him as a loving father. Even their interpretation of Genisis is different with Allah being kind, and not cruelly rejecting his creation.
Because theology inspired genocide is pretty common and well documented. Unlike instances of talking animals, people ressurecting, etc etc.
Care to cite some evidence?
I see someone failed their biology class
Survival of the fittest is about which individuals are best adapted.This is Lamarkian evolution. “Darwinian evolution” wasn’t taught, and even banned in some of the regimes you mentioned.
Ben Stein is also intellectually dishonest and full of BS.
talkreason.org/articles/Hitler.cfm
packermann;4009822Modern evolutionists may explicitly disavow this belief said:
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Touchstone
Guest
None of that nullifies the caste system. Spartans leaving babies out in the cold doesn’t nullify the charity that was shown, where it was shown, either. There’s no claim that Hindu, or Jewish, or Chinese charity – if we go look at that history – denies or even prevents all kinds of awful things. The Jews took care of orphans and wives, but stoned brides who couldn’t prove their virginity in the wedding bed, and slaughtered other tribes, down to the last infant. That doesn’t deny that the charity they showed to orphans and widows wasn’t charity – it was.
No, my point was the negation of that very idea. Even if we were to learn that all the bloodthirsty despots were vegetarians, we are no closer to causation. Without some kind of causal linkage, it doesn’t attach, even if all of them were vegetarians. All of them were male, I think we might agree, but being male does not entail mass slaughter.
This is where I fail to see the linkage. Stalin believed in no supernatural gods, from the books I’ve read, but believed himself to be demigod or a “human god” – an image and message which he promoted to devastating effect. Which, I think, shows something quite different than what theists suppose with their superficial interpretations of Stalin; he represented a kind of theism in himself, and capitalized on the credulity and irrationality that had been distilled in the Russian culture in previous centuries through Russian Orthodoxy and the Czars. Stalin inherited a credulous, religious society, and used those dynamics, the dangerous dispositions of the faithful, to his own wicked ends.
In any case, if it was atheism that demanded the mass killing of millions of Ukrainians, I’d be interested to see how that argument works. I don’t suppose that the Czars before Stalin found it necessary per their theism to wreak the terrible pogroms against the Russian Jews in the 19th century, but even there, I can point to a religious connection to anti-Semitism – the Jews killed God and all that nonsense.
Stalin, for example, saw devout religious people as a threat to his religion, the cult of Stalinism. He, like Yahweh, is a jealous god, and takes a dim view of competing cults. But this is a war between gods. As for “merely lacked faith”, you are proving my point for me. It wasn’t a lack of belief in God that animated Stalin, or entailed a strategy of mass killing, but a will to power, a matter of realpolitik, Russian-style.
No, that’s not at all what I said. I said that because atheism is the lack of belief in God or gods, its minimalism as an ideology DOES NOT STOP other goals. Atheism neither demands, approves nor discourages such an agenda. Those are ideas that get established and affirmed or rejected through moral frameworks that sit on type or beside the belief that there is no God of gods. I repeat, just so we’re clear: atheism is not able to provide an argument for mass killing.
That may be the case. In the case of Stalin, he carries the moral guilt and responsibility for the millions of deaths of innocents he caused. But it needs to be said that Russian Orthodoxy and the Czars provided fertile ground for a monster like Stalin. The mass disposition to credulity and cultic authority was a “monster toolkit” waiting to happen. That doesn’t mean that the Czars carry the guilt for Stalin’s murders. They don’t. But it does mean that Christianity, like all mystical, authoritative faiths, is a double-edged sword. It’s arguable that Christianity can be considered to have a mitigating influence in some cases, but in others, its a kind of seed bed for atrocities, psychologically. When killing is OK when God says to do it, that’s a withering message to promote inside a culture.
Non-falsifiability is not a fallacy, just an observation that the proposition is a truism. Even so, in principle, I think it’s possible that one could show historic actions and characters that somehow construed a lack of belief in God into a rationale for mass killing, or other horrors. In fact, I’m quite convinced that has happened, given all the killing that’s happened over centuries. And that would falsify the claim that atheism doesn’t animate horrors and atrocities in some cases. I think it has, even if I don’t have any examples to point to at the moment.
But that’s a different idea than the idea that atheism entails support for such actions. Manifestly, in contrast, some forms of theism demand genocide and mass killing under (putative) orders from God. I can’t think of a case where a “non-god” was the source of cosmic imperatives to kill neighboring tribes or ethnic minorities or gypsies or what have you. If we dig up cases where mass killers attribute their actions to atheism, I expect we will find some very curious arguments as to how that works. For Moses, it’s very straightforward: God says kill 'em all, he kills 'em all!
As above, I’m open to cases where atheism is the demand factor for mass killing. Atheism does not provide a moral proscription for mass killing, any more than it commends it – it’s inert with respect to that question, so far as I can see. But if you have cases where killers demonstrate that a lack of belief in God or gods or the belief that there are no gods was the animating force for killing, as opposed simply something like their vegetarianism which wasn’t equipped to provide arguments either way, I say those atrocities should be held in account as liabilities for atheism.
-Touchstone
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Touchstone
Guest
(continued)
packermann:
Winding up with a “loving God” as your object of credulity is something like a “good spin” of the Russian Roulette pistol. Militant Islam would be a much more dangerous and execrable circumstance. But the point here is – there’s no good reason to even engage in that kind of credulity.
Even if Numebers 31 is a myth, it’s advanced as historical, which is exactly as problematic.
As above, such a view of evolution is terribly naïve. Groups that have developed social structures that dispose them to care for widows, orphans, the handicapped and others who are disadvantaged are much better adapted as a group, and will outcompete the “Nazis”, the Spartans, or whoever. Charity and altruism are the hallmarks of evolutionary advancement, not inferiority.
-Touchstone
Yes, you are confirming the poverty of the “association” argument, pointing to what these monsters have in common as the reason for their actions. That’s a an exceedingly weak argument, as “not eating pork” shows. With theism, we can point to scriptures in various religions that demand killing, and mass killings often, as obligatory to believers and recipients of the message. We do not need to see “what they have in common”, in other words. We can understand that Islam demands its credulous believers accept the imperative that a muslim who abandons Islam is to be killed. We can read Numbers and see that Moses was commanded by God to exterminate the Midianites, etc.Just as you presented the vegetarian analogy, so I can used that same argument. The Jews in the Old Testament and, I think, the Muslims also, don’t eat pork. So maybe the problem is that they did not eat pork. It is using the same argument you did for blaming all the atrocities from 20th centuries on vegetarianism. So don’t blame theism, blame not eating pork.
The problem is not the nature of God, which is decidedly quite different in the Islamic and Christian views, I grant. The problem is more fundamental – unwarranted belief in the reality of God is a disposition that is quite reckless and dangerous. Modern Christianity has sort of been chastised by the liberal ideologies of the Enlightenment, but Chrisitianity wasn’t always so gentle as we happily see now. Islam never really grew up, or perhaps did grow up some, and is rapidly regressing under the onslaught of rationalism, capitalism, and technology.
Winding up with a “loving God” as your object of credulity is something like a “good spin” of the Russian Roulette pistol. Militant Islam would be a much more dangerous and execrable circumstance. But the point here is – there’s no good reason to even engage in that kind of credulity.
I don’t, and suspect that accounts like the slaughter of the Midianites were either greatly exaggerated, or just complete fabrications. That said, mass killing like we see recorded in the OT isn’t a stretch of my credulity at all. If I were to learn it was historically grounded as a report, I’d just shrug a sad shrug – such was life in that era, alas. The sun standing still for two hours for Joshua, in contrast, is unbelievable on its face. Mass killing just isn’t hard to allow for as a historical event, unfortunately.
Even if Numebers 31 is a myth, it’s advanced as historical, which is exactly as problematic.
Eugenics is no more necessary as the product of evolutionary theory than mass killing is a necessary implication of atheism. The fact that you note some kind of change in attitude regarding eugenics, while Darwin’s ideas endure and proceed, works right against what you are arguing. If Darwinism entails eugenics, how do you explain the failure and absence of eugenics from the scene?
Again, that’s a very naïve view of the dynamics of evolution. I don’t doubt that such views were held historically – evolution was ‘theory in embryo’ at one point, remember. As it happens, naïve self-interest is a poor competitor against social contracts and social frameworks that include more and community expectations, ones that carry stiff penalties for transgression. Societies that incorporate the practice of giving when they are able to those in need have individuals that can expect aid when, later, or previously, they are in need. It’s in their indirect interest to participate in social arrangements where sharing and charity occurs – it’s a more effecient deployment of resources toward survival and reproduction.
That’s interesting, because Darwin had a term that described what Hitler did – “artificial selection”, the conscious control of death and life and propagation by humans. His theory was about natural selection, and how it worked as an environmental phenomenon, something quite distinct from ‘artificial selection’, if you read his works.
As above, such a view of evolution is terribly naïve. Groups that have developed social structures that dispose them to care for widows, orphans, the handicapped and others who are disadvantaged are much better adapted as a group, and will outcompete the “Nazis”, the Spartans, or whoever. Charity and altruism are the hallmarks of evolutionary advancement, not inferiority.
I think you are just unaware of what has been achieved and gained in terms of the current models of evolution.
That particularly case may not do so directly. But a population that has developed strong commitments to welfare, empathy, and sharing – a population that will produce individuals like Mother Teresa, in other words – is a population that is “institutionally” strong. A weak child, who might have been left to die in another society, may live to recover thanks to charity received and to reproduce, and not just reproduce, but to be economically productive, aiding the overall survival prospects for the species. One factor I think you are missing is that proliferation becomes a huge evolutionary advantage when it’s realized.
Agreed. I don’t suppose anything you say can detract from the benevolence and charity of those works. But for your readers, it obscures and dimishes the value of the great things they did do when you over-reach.
-Touchstone
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buffalo
Guest
Why didn’t the first atheist murder the second?
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Newbie2
Guest
Funny, I always thought Jesus was Jewish.
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packermann
Guest
I think you need to read some church history. It was Christianity that took away gladiator shows and exposing babies for starvation. The Catholic Church was far more egalitarian that the pagan culture it uprooted. It taught monagamy, so that a woman was no longer part of the harem. It taught that divorce was wrong for the man as well as for the woman. In the culture that the CC supplanteed, it was easy for a man to dump his wife for any reason. And since there no alimony back then, this meant instant poverty for the woman. According to the Catholic Church, the highest creature ever made was a woman, the Blessed Viirgin Mary. This is hardly the act of a sexest institution.
One of the Catholic popes was himself a slave. We have had a black pope. Some of the canonized saints, such as St Martin de Pores, was black. There have been several canonized saints that are American Indians. If the Catholic Church was racist, it would not have sent missionaries throughout the world. The Catholic settlers in Mexico, South America, and Canada were far more humane in their treatment of the natives than the Protestant settlers were to the natives in the U.S. territory. The pope condemned forced slavery while the slave trade was going on. The slave ownrers in the South were Protestant, not Catholic.
As far as political control, when Constantine moved the capital to Constantinople, but the pope stayed in Rome to show that the Church is independent from the Emperor. If the pope wanted political control, he would have joined with Constantine. The emperors in the early Christendom were Arian and Monophysites, and they tried to force their heresies. Many of the popes at that time were imprisoned or exiled for resisting the emperors.
I do not remember the names right now, but there was a king who massacred a whole village. When the pope found out, he excommunicated him. At first, the king just laughed, he doid not really care about religion. But then it was pointed out that since he was excommunicated, any of his subjects were free to plot for his overthrow. He realized the danger he was in, so he kneeled before the pope’s house for months in order to be reinstated. The news went out all through Europe how the pope humbled a king. This is the kind of check and balance in the Middle Ages. The pope was the conscience of the leader. If the leader goes too far, the pope can humle him. This is hat we are lacking in modern leaders. They answer to no one. They answer to no God and to no pope. They answer to no one but themselves.
Hitler was notorious for his propaganda. And yet you believe in one of his speeches!
Indeed, the leading Nazis—Hitler, Himmler, Rosenberg, Goebbels, and Bormann—were all fanatically anti-Christian, though this was partly hidden from the German public. . . . The conviction that Judaism, Christianity and Bolshevism represented one single pathological phenomenon of decadence became a veritable leitmotif for Hitler around the time that the “Final Solution” had been conceived of as an operational plan.
- Robert Wistrich in Hitler and the Holocaust, as cited in the Irrational Atheist
- The first document was from the Nuremburg trials, that was release from the archives in 1945. The document described the Third Reivh’s plan to ursurp the Catholic and Protyestant churches in Germany and replace it with a religion of racial superiority.
- The second is a document drawn up by Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. This is a plan to establish the Nation Reich Church. It has 30 points to its plan, but here are three of them:
2. The National Reich Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany as well as the publication of Sunday papers, pamphlets, publications, and books of a religious nature.
3. The National Reich Church does not acknowledge forgiveness of sins. It represents the standpoint which it will always proclaim that a sin once committed will be ruthlessly punished by the honorable and indestructible laws of nature and punishment will follow during the sinner’s lifetime. *
The overwhelming number of leader have been male. So it is not significant at all that they were all male.
But it is very significant that they are atheist. As Vox Day has pointed out, 58% of all atheist leaders have killed at least 20,000 of its citizens.
The total body count for the ninety years between 1917 and 2007 is approximately 148 million dead at the bloody hands of fifty-two atheists, three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war, and individual crime in the entire twentieth century combined.17 The historical record of collective atheism is thus 182,716 times worse on an annual basis than Christianity’s worst and most infamous misdeed, the Spanish Inquisition.
- Irrational Atheist
It does not matter. Not all of the fifty-two leaders were communists. But they were all atheists.
Here is the breakdown of mass-murdering regimes headed by atheists:
Country Dates Murders
Afghanistan 1978–1992 1,750,000
Albania 1944–1985 100,000
Angola 1975–2002 125,000
Bulgaria 1944–1989 222,000
China/PRC 1923–2007 76,702,000
Cuba 1959–1992 73,000
Czechoslovakia 1948–1968 65,000
Ethiopia 1974–1991 1,343,610
France 1793–1794 40,000
Greece 1946–1949 20,000
Hungary 1948–1989 27,000
Kampuchea/Cambodia 1973–1991 2,627,000
Laos 1975–2007 93,000
Mongolia 1926–2007 100,000
Mozambique 1975–1990 118,000
North Korea 1948–2007 3,163,000
Poland 1945–1948 1,607,000
Romania 1948–1987 438,000
Spain (Republic) 1936–1939 102,000
U.S.S.R. 1917–1987 61,911,000
Vietnam 1945–2007 1,670,000
Yugoslavia 1944–1980 1,072,000
Suppose a total anarchist became a leader of a country and instituted a law that completely abolished all policemen, all judges, all jail, and all prisons. Then there is a massive rise in looting, mugging and murders. When the anarchist is blamed for the the increase in crime in his country, he says “Hey, don’t blame my law. My law did not command anybody to loot, mug, or murder”. Would he be right? Would his law of abolishing all law enforcement be guiltless of the increase in crimes because his law did not *command *anyone to commit a crime? Of course not! His law , even though it did not command anyone to commit a crime, caused the rise of crime in his country.
I agree that atheism does not command anyone to kill. And I agree that religion, at it worst, in very rare times, does command to kill. But more times than not religion, especially the Christian religion, tells us NOT to kill. Atheism does not command us to kill, but the implications are that if there is no God, and no jusdgement, then we can do whatever we want. And that is very dangerous for a man of power to think he can do whatever he wants. This is why 58% of all atheist leaders are mass murderers.
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rpp
Guest
Being Catholic and Jewish are not mutually exclusive. All the Apostles and the first Christians were both Catholic and Jewish for example.Funny, I always thought Jesus was Jewish.
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packermann
Guest
The statistics about the mass murdering atheist regimes were taken by The Irrational Atheist by Vox Day.
You can download it for free at irrationalatheist.com/
This is an excellent book, athough there were some minor points I disagreed on.
You can download it for free at irrationalatheist.com/
This is an excellent book, athough there were some minor points I disagreed on.
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packermann
Guest
You make a good point.
So let me re-phrase my argument. It is not that there was no charity at all in pre-Christian cultures or contemporary non-Christian cultures, but that Chrisrtianity introduced charity in a far grander scale then was done before. Unlike the Stoic, Christian charity was done more from the heart, which is longlasting, whereas Stoicsm, because it lacked compassion behind it, soon fizzled away. Christianity was far more charitbale in all areas than the OT Jews were, as you yourself have shown. The Jews helped the widows and orphans (actually, though, we only have a record that God commanded them to help the widows and the orphans, we do not, as far as I know, know to what extent this command was obeyed before Christ), but then would stone the adulterous, not a very charitable thing to do. The Hindus said some positive things about helping the poor, but still kept the poor oppressed within their caste system (again, the only record we have is that some Hindu sages said that it is good to help the poor. But that does not mean the Hindu people took the advice, at least there seems no record of that practice before Christ).
OK. I agree that Christianity did not introduce charity into the world. But it did introduce it to the world in a far deeper level then it was before.
Perhaps there is nothing greater on earth, than the sacrifice of youth and beauty, often of high birth, made by the gentle sex in order to work in hospitals for the relief of human misery, the sight of which is so revolting to our delicacy. Peoples separated from the Roman religion have imitated but imperfectly so generous a charity
- Voltaire
- W. E. H. Lecky
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Touchstone
Guest
OK, I’m quite happy with your re-statement. Christianity brought lots of bad stuff into the system as well, but I can affirm that the Christian church pushed the enterprise of charity and self-sacrifice for the good of others – especially “strangers” (not blood, kin or tribe) to levels not matched anywhere else, and Christian church deserves recognition for that.
As a Protestant, I was always struck by the proselytizing ambitions of evangelical and fundamentalist missions, in comparison to the Catholic charities I often encountered in getting involved in evangelical missions. One of the early and deep draws for me to Catholicism was its “no strings” charity. We evangelicals always used help and blessings as the “carrot” to entice the unwashed masses to a bit of preaching and the inevitable altar call. They could never understand the Catholic mission in the next village that provided food and medicine and care of all kinds, but didn’t demand anything in return, or make the locals wait through a sermon and altar call to “earn” the meal they needed so much. “They aren’t even telling them about Jesus!” you’d hear the more strident evangelicals quip.
But of course, that always brought up the quote from St. Francis about preaching the gospel, using words if necessary. The Catholic workers weren’t shy about sharing the Gospel when asked and when the opportunity arose, but they “spoke the gospel” through giving and aid that had no strings attached. That’s a commitment that deserves recognition, I think. I don’t suffer the idea that such charity was an invention of the Christians, but in the Roman church, it was pursued to extents you just cannot find anywhere else in the history of the world.
-Touchstone
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JimG
Guest
Any concept within the mind may correspond to an external reality, or not. “Imaginary” refers to those concepts, such as a unicorn, which do not refer to an external reality. Your concept of eternity may exclude the idea of its reality, mine does not.
The concept itself, however,–any concept—has reality at least insofar as it exists in one’s mind. For the materialist, that concept would be identified as a particular brainstate. The non-materialist would hold that while the brainstate forms a necessary precondition, the concept itself—the abstract idea—might be devoid of all materiality.
Judging from the discussion on this thread, the extent of and manner in which the concept of Quantum Theory is expressed in external reality, seems to be a matter of dispute. Yet the concept itself is undoubtedly real and useful.
I’m not sure to what degree the sciences would exclude from external reality the idea of some entity that has no extension in space or time. Until recently, it seems, certain subatomic particles were thought to be “point particles,” being entirely dimensionless. I always wondered how a four or more dimensional universe could be built up from a substrate of dimensionless particles, but that’s a matter for the physicists.
So what we perceive as our self—that within us which unifies our experiences over time and space as attributable to a single sentient subject, the “I”, is explainable by certain arrangements of matter within our brain, which manage to persist essentially unchanged for a lifetime?
If that is the case, the microbiology, the neurophysiology, the chemistry and physics of any particular “self” should ultimately be capable of being analyzed in significant detail, and even being reproduced. Cloning the body is one thing, but if one’s “self” could be reproduced in the lab, that would be a significant revolution.
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packermann
Guest
Wow! I appreciate your honest appraisal.
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buffalo
Guest
Again - what prevented the first atheist from murdering the second?
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ateista
Guest
Why would anyone murder his “soul-mate”?
Now, the “good” believers just loved to kill the “infidels”… where the infidel was defined as someone who does not worship their particular deity. (You know who belongs to a “sect”? Answer: those who attend the church next to yours!)
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buffalo
Guest
try again.
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Starwynd
Guest
Since millions of people have been killed in the name of religion since the dawn of time, I’d say that statement has no merit and only reveals personal bigotry and prejudism.
And before you say it, Stalin was an Orthodox Russian, not a Christian, who believed in the power of the state above all else, and was no atheist.
And before you say it, Stalin was an Orthodox Russian, not a Christian, who believed in the power of the state above all else, and was no atheist.
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buffalo
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- Status