Science must destroy religion

[DCNBILL]

This is the origin of moral
Moral: OED
Used to render L. Moralia pl. as the title of St. Gregory the Great’s work on the moral exposition of the Book of Job, and (later) as the collective title given to Plutarch’s writings other than the ‘Lives’, to the ethical writings of Seneca,

If you want to talk moral and what it is, technically it is a Catholic doctrine, see St. Gregory the Great’s work. The word moral is not in scripture, unless you have a modern use of English bible in which case is subject to change do to the future changes in the use of the English language.

And what is it that one would teach another a set of morals for? Could it be to know what is agreed in a society, or a group of people in behaviors and treatments towards each other? You can’t be a moral agent one way or the other with out agreement.

There was no iniquity, nor sin, nor transgression, unless first there was an agreement:

Gen:2:16: And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
17: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Hardly an agreement.

 

[atheistgirl]

To which the host replied: “I see. Then I think it would be reasonable to examine your person thoroughly right before leaving my home to make certain no silverware or other valuables are leaving with you.” The man did not object and came inside

Meanwhile, all the Christian and non Christian people of faith at the dinner, wiped out the guys family silver

Sarah x

 

[CopticChristian]

Sorry friend, morality without an agreement between two or more can’t exist. You can’t be moral unless you agree to do something and do as agreed, and you can’t be immoral unless you do other than what you agreed to do.

DP,

I am sitting in my room, all by myself, does not matter if I am male or female…I read sordid material, I view unthinkable things, I fascinate sexual impropriety, I think of disposing of those I dislike, I imagine stealing from a bank and more…then on Sunday I go to Church…Monday a friend asks me to smoke marijuana and I agree that it is immoral and illegal…

When I was by myself…was I moral…?

 

[atheistgirl]

I think of disposing of those I dislike…

With some of the CEOs and CFOs I have to deal with, this can be an hourly occurance for me. Nothing immoral in it what so ever

Sarah x

 

[CopticChristian]

This is the origin of moral
Moral: OED
Used to render L. Moralia pl. as the title of St. Gregory the Great’s work on the moral exposition of the Book of Job, and (later) as the collective title given to Plutarch’s writings other than the ‘Lives’, to the ethical writings of Seneca,

If you want to talk moral and what it is, technically it is a Catholic doctrine, see St. Gregory the Great’s work. The word moral is not in scripture, unless you have a modern use of English bible in which case is subject to change do to the future changes in the use of the English language.

And what is it that one would teach another a set of morals for? Could it be to know what is agreed in a society, or a group of people in behaviors and treatments towards each other? You can’t be a moral agent one way or the other with out agreement.

There was no iniquity, nor sin, nor transgression, unless first there was an agreement:

Gen:2:16: And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
17: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

DP,

You are a prisoner and victim of your own thinking.

There was no English language prior to 500

Old English from 500-1100
Middle English 1100-1500
Modern English 1500-present

So since there was no English language prior to 500…there was no word “moral” and since English did not exist in the year 400 there were no morals…

Do you think that makes sense…

We call them morals…but since you have nomanilized “moral”…you deny that they are relevant…so because whatever it is we call morals…was called something else that we now call morals…the word that did exist causes what did exist not to exist…

rethink this…

 

[CopticChristian]

It seems that you might profitably look again at what I’m espousing.

We aren’t all one in the sense you might rail against, whatever that is. I don’t know. So I wonder, instead, are you familiar with the idea that Man, that meaning all human beings, of every discription, from the alleged A&E forward, was, is, and will be made in the image and likeness of God? Is God many? Well, at least three, eh? S while we are not “one” in some Hippy sense of that word, you might concede that we are all made in His One image and likeness?

And all religions are faiths, and in that are they not similar? They are beliefs, as distinct from knowledge? Even though one might have “knowledge” of their faith as a paradigm? They are all, each and every one a faith or a belief system and in that they are equal. **Sorry, including our faith. **
Science has as its province the surface of things and the dynamics thereof, and religion has as its province the interior of theings, or of meaning. To propose that we ought, or that I think we ought to “dump” one or the other is a bit dramatic, wouldn’t you say? But while a perfrectly useful ethical and moral system can be had without religion, nonetheless religions are, despite a lot of conflict and unclarity, a feild of endeavor wherin some can usefully grow. And some not so much.

But religions do point to the idea of meaning and Source. In that, as to the degree and kind of explanation they offer that is commensurate with Reality, they are useful. It is the uncommensurate parts, the parts of great conflict, where clarity, critical thinking, and a host of other disciplines can be applied. As Isaid elswhere, most folks stop at the story telling level of religion, whatever theirs is, and do not penetrate it much further, that penetration being the actuall usefulness of having a faith. Soo until something better and more universal is recognized, we have faith and its teleoplogy.
that’s right, but what is the funda-mental “man?” And as it is, the rulers are guided by money, wouln’t you think? In this comming election billins will be wasted to convince wage slaves that one or another named opposame is a better obfuscator of the fact that our wallets are being vacuumed empty so that obscenely rich folks can have more. The point of that might be then that we peeons will kill each other for what;s left and take some pressure off the Earth so a few can survive? I don’t know. Seems like it some times.
Why would they? It might work for you in an environment of consensus, but in the aggregate religions as contentious parties are endangering us all, as are political parties. And dictators. And corporations. Don’t feel special on thier account.

So, nothing is going to change.

Peace,
Ed Nothing can’t change. It isn’t there, Or “nothing” it is the appearance of ALLness to the human intellect. But you and I can change relative to our experience of the Reality that underlies the appearance even of religion.

RONIN Catholic,

You do not share the same Faith as you have posted emphatically that you support homoexuality that is contrary to our Faith. I believe that masquerading as someone of the Faith espousing beliefs as if of the Faith should be questioned. In posting on homosexuality you clearly are not of the faith. I suggest that if anyone reads here anything that is contrary to the Faith that they recognize that RONIN is not Roman and whatever belief system you have is contrary to the Roman Catholic Faith.

 

[Gaber]

RONIN Catholic,

You do not share the same Faith as you have posted emphatically that you support homoexuality that is contrary to our Faith. I believe that masquerading as someone of the Faith espousing beliefs as if of the Faith should be questioned. In posting on homosexuality you clearly are not of the faith. I suggest that if anyone reads here anything that is contrary to the Faith that they recognize that RONIN is not Roman and whatever belief system you have is contrary to the Roman Catholic Faith.

I don’t “support” homosexuality. I didn’t invent it, or foster it, or choose it. It is something that simply is part of human nature as part of its natural manifestation. As such, all your articicial moralizing about it on whatever allegendly holy gorund is essentially useless and counterproductive. I say “allegedly,” because so much of what is taken for granted as “God’s wiill and law” is human extrapolation on agendified ground. YOU are the one with an agenda, my friend.

So if you don’t like it, don’t do it. What you are doing is lending far more support to your imagination of what homosexuality is than doing the impossible task of diminishing it, CC. It’s like the war on terror or drugs: both are supported by the very thing that wrongly alleges to combat them. All your posturing on grounds adopted from a third party that suits your own prejudice only brings more to the fore the very thing you feel is your business which it’s not. It is God;s business, not mine or yours, unless someone attempts to homosexually assult you. then you have a specific complaint, and even then it is about assult, not homosexuality. So stop already.

 

[epan]

Sorry friend, morality without an agreement between two or more can’t exist. You can’t be moral unless you agree to do something and do as agreed, and you can’t be immoral unless you do other than what you agreed to do.

I come across a blind friend at a corner, and help him across the street.

Please explain what the “agreement” is in that hypothetical, because I don’t understand your point.

 

[prodigalson2011]

Sorry friend, morality without an agreement between two or more can’t exist. You can’t be moral unless you agree to do something and do as agreed, and you can’t be immoral unless you do other than what you agreed to do.

So as long as Jeffrey Dahmer never AGREED not to kill and eat people, he was doing nothing immoral. I follow you.

 

[CopticChristian]

I don’t “support” homosexuality. I didn’t invent it, or foster it, or choose it. It is something that simply is part of human nature as part of its natural manifestation. **As such, all your articicial moralizing about it on whatever allegendly holy gorund is essentially useless and counterproductive. I say “allegedly,” because so much of what is taken for granted as “God’s wiill and law” is human extrapolation on agendified ground. YOU are the one with an agenda, my friend. **
So if you don’t like it, don’t do it. What you are doing is lending far more support to your imagination of what homosexuality is than doing the impossible task of diminishing it, CC. It’s like the war on terror or drugs: both are supported by the very thing that wrongly alleges to combat them. All your posturing on grounds adopted from a third party that suits your own prejudice only brings more to the fore the very thing you feel is your business which it’s not. It is God;s business, not mine or yours, unless someone attempts to homosexually assult you. then you have a specific complaint, and even then it is about assult, not homosexuality. So stop already.

RONIN,

Thank you for displaying why we don’t share the same Faith…

 

[ThinkingSapien]

RONIN,

Thank you for displaying why we don’t share the same Faith…

I’m guessing you are not familiar with the word “ronin” (浪人)?

 

[Candide_West]

Great, thanks.

First we need to agree on a couple of other things.

1. When speaking of being moral, in general, being good or bad, people are generally agreed, with some exceptions to be sure, that they are talking about the same types of behavior.

i.e. Someone who randomly walks up to a person and kicks them hard in the shin would be bad (immoral) behavior and someone who helps the person who has been kicked find a seat and takes care of their wound would be good (morally right) behavior.

From my observations i would say that there are a great many similarities in the morality of any given group of individuals, and closer groups of peers tend to share their morality more closely. However, it is worth noting that there are often radical differences between the moral zeitgeists of people in disconnected cultures, for example cultures on different continents and distant from each other in time. Our world and our history is peppered with examples of this.

I guess you could say that at the most general level most codes of morality say that causing suffering is wrong and reducing suffering or creating happiness is right. That said, in any given code of morality the specifics are very important.

1. the concepts of morality (god and bad) (right or wrong) exist exclusively in “the mind.”

Seems reasonable, although it’s worth noting that it’s not just human “minds” various different social animals have forms of morality as well. Of course these are often radically different to ours, but clearly a morality nontheless.

Would you agree with these propositions?

Not sure if that is sufficient agreement for you.

 

[Touchstone]

I guess you could say that at the most general level most codes of morality say that causing suffering is wrong and reducing suffering or creating happiness is right. That said, in any given code of morality the specifics are very important.

Would toward that it were. The CCC says:

[man] alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life. It was for this end that he was created, and this is the fundamental reason for his dignity.

Later, it says, on sin:

sin is an abuse of the freedom that God gives to created persons so that they are capable of loving him

A Reformed catechism, the Westminster, says, more succinctly:

The chief end of man is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever

That’s a problem, because it supercedes – all too often – what you are rightly pointing out as a reasonable disposition to practical ethics. For example, the Catholic Church teaches that homosexuality is sinful, a kind of flagrant violation of that practical ethic that has become institutionalized in the Church and much of western culture because of the deontological demands placed on Christians by church doctine. If God says turn the other cheek, do it. But if he also says, slaughter all your enemies, down to the last infant, do that, too. Or, at points, stone the virgin who cannot demonstrate an intact hymen at marriage. Etc.

I think your point is a good one, but naïve with respects to the corrosive effects of religion on this. It easily trumps this basic disposition.

Seems reasonable, although it’s worth noting that it’s not just human “minds” various different social animals have forms of morality as well. Of course these are often radically different to ours, but clearly a morality nontheless.

Yep.

-TS

 

[CopticChristian]

I’m guessing you are not familiar with the word “ronin” (浪人)?

TS,

Of course I am. I happen to be a fan of Robert DeNiro

 

[tonyrey]

That depends whether or not they believe in free will. If they don’t they have a carte blanche.

According to science** all **our activity has physical causes which preclude free will and also the ability to establish for ourselves a moral code already established for us by physical causes.

There seems to be no particular reason why a code from such a person would necessarily be inferior either. But I’m more than willing to be corrected if you have an explanation.

According to science **all **our activities have physical causes and are neither inferior nor superior but amoral like all other physical events.

Even if they do they can conveniently decide for themselves what is right and wrong…
As can and indeed do many people who have a strong religious views. As we have previously noted in this conversation many catholics decide for themselves what is right and wrong, often in direct contradiction to views of the church of which they are members.

According to science **all **our decisions have physical causes and our beliefs or non-beliefs are established for us by physical causes and it is not surprising that everyone without exception holds contradictory views.

We have discussed this previously and I provided examples back then as well. I guess you are asking for examples of first principles, so here are a couple - “suffering is bad” and “happiness is good”. Suffering and happiness are words which refer to concepts of experience which are respectively negative and positive. As such the above statements are axiomatic. Incidentally please note that suffering refers to much more than just pain just as happiness refers to much more than just pleasure. So this is not a simplistic “pleasure / pain” morality.

Whose suffering and whose happiness?

What is the “solid starting point”?

Axiomatic ones are pretty solid.

Are you referring to “suffering is bad” and “happiness is good”? If so are they the only axioms?

“homosexuality is EVIL” because there is no rational reason that says why “homosexuality is EVIL”. Others include things like “women should be subordinate to men” and “it is not wrong to kill an unbeliever”.

What about “All forms of sexuality are good”, “men should be subordinate to men” and “it is wrong to kill a believer”?

If a false belief makes a person happy it must be good according to your definition.

That’s hardly surprising given that they were not born into an amoral environment…

Indeed, exactly. However, many of them were raised in an areligious environment. So it makes my point rather nicely.

That areligious environment is ultimately the product of a religious environment.

I’m not sure it would be safe to be your neighbour if you did!

Nope, no man is an island. So it is entirely impossible to work out all your moral values and principles independently. The only way to do so would be to be raised in an environment with absolutely no other living things (aside from possibly plants) present.

With whom did you work out your moral values and principles - and on what did you base your decisions (apart from “suffering is bad” and “happiness is good”)?

 

[Candide_West]

Would toward that it were. The CCC says…

That’s a problem, because it supercedes – all too often – what you are rightly pointing out as a reasonable disposition to practical ethics. For example, the Catholic Church teaches that homosexuality is sinful, a kind of flagrant violation of that practical ethic that has become institutionalized in the Church and much of western culture because of the deontological demands placed on Christians by church doctine. If God says turn the other cheek, do it. But if he also says, slaughter all your enemies, down to the last infant, do that, too. Or, at points, stone the virgin who cannot demonstrate an intact hymen at marriage. Etc.*

I think your point is a good one, but naïve with respects to the corrosive effects of religion on this. It easily trumps this basic disposition.

Funnily enough I did click the edit button to add a point about the affect of religion and other absolutist philosophies but missed the time limit.

I think my point stands reasonably well in a general level, in peoples day to day interactions in all kinds of different cultures. People don’t like suffering and being social animals don’t (in general) like seeing other people suffering. Our empathy even extends to other species to an extent.

But as you quite rightly point out the problem arrives when a religion or some other justification is considered to be absolute or at least above all other considerations. With that it suddenly becomes very much easier to justify causing suffering because there is an argument to say that the end justifies the means.*

So, fair point.*

 

[tonyrey]

I am delighted to note there has been no response to the points made below:

To derive insight from blind particles is undoubtedly a form of sorcery. Mechanical machinery can produce nothing but mechanical machinery which doesn’t even know it exists, let alone understand itself. There is no such thing as “an explanation” in the materialist’s scheme of things. As you have pointed out it’s just an isomorphism of inanimate objects which just happen to exist for no reason or purpose whatsoever.

It’s not the universe experiencing itself but atomic particles succeeding in becoming aware of themselves. The onus is on you to explain how that is possible. There is certainly no scientific explanation to that effect, merely an assertion on the part of materialists that it has occurred, their sole reason being the assumption that reality consists solely of material objects. Yet they know matter exists only because they have a rational mind - which is conspiciously absent in inanimate entities.

I’m saying worship is not a part of the picture here, at all. Nature it what it is. It’s impersonal, and there’s no basis for worship. You get to this view, in part by understanding problematic nature of worship, and its inapplicability, here.

Worship occurs when you regard something as the supreme factor in your interpretation of reality, pay it homage and adapt your way of life in accordance with its demands (even if these turn out to be illusions!) There is obviously nothing else you consider to have greater power and significance than physical energy. So you should be full of awe, adulation and gratitude towards it if you value your life…

If love, hope, beauty, etc. are real, and on my view they are, they realized, reified as configurations of matter. That’s what makes them real. That isn’t “mere” or “just” in some deprecating way, and neither is it magic. It’s just the what anything real obtains as real. Which is more than I could say about my understanding of these things as a Christian, which held them as unreal fantasies, immaterial “things” – a cognitive dissonance right there – that had all the features of non-existence, but I believed in as a kind of magic, a supernatural fantasy.

If everything is composed of isomorphisms of atomic particles everything must be subject to the same laws and limitations as atomic particles. Nothing cannot defy, for example, the law of conservation of energy. All events must be determined or indeterminate - and also purposeless - which rules out free will and rationality.

The mysterious transmutation of matter into mind is an article of faith constantly overlooked in your process of “reasoning” - which should be restricted - if you are consistent - to strictly quantitative descriptions of material events.

We have evidence of matter’s existence. That doesn’t take faith.

It takes faith to pin all your values and hopes (if you have any!) on the primacy of matter.

We observe nature and the way matter and energy are configured, changed, preserved, etc. over time. Based on what evidence we have, mind as matter has a huge advantage over any other hypothesis in terms of evidence, falsifiability, and economy. It takes no more faith than a computer would have analyzing the situation according to the rules we give it (“Prefer evidential support, falsifiability, economy”)…

Mind as matter has an insurmountable disadvantage. The only fact of which we are certain is the fact that we are thinking. We infer that everything else exists from our perceptions. There is not one jot of evidence that neurons are aware of anything or know what they are doing whereas our thoughts are intangible but inescapable. To put matter first is to put the cart squarely in front of the horse - with no one in the driving seat! Your thoughts are unbridled and therefore taking you in many wrong directions because there are far more ways of being mistaken than right if they are out of control.

Unfortunately “ideals”, “values”, “superstitions”, “view”, “wonderful”, “terrible” and “glory” are meaningless terms from a scientific point of view - which is after all the only isomorphism (to which the isomorphism described as Touchstone is linked…)

No, these are all real, natural phenomena. Concepts and emotions humans develop and experience in their minds, naturally. There’s nothing about them that puts them out of the reach of science, or renders them meaningless. They are meaningful because they are really, actual phenomena that govern human actions and interactions.

You have already ruled out the existence of independent minds by deriving them from events in the brain. A mind is an entity whereas events in the brain have no unifying factor or control-centre. It would be more consistent to argue like Hume that there is merely a bundle of perceptions although that hypothesis is faced with the same difficulties - further exacerbated by the problem of personal identity, continuity and responsibility.

The foregoing is no more than a meaningless collocation of scientifically unrecognisable terms and therefore of absolutely no significance…
“constructs”! Quine pointed out that material objects and gods are in precisely the same epistemological category. It is worth reading “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (online) to understand (hopefully) that your entire concept of reality is vitiated by your blind adherence to a logically untenable mechanistic doctrine falsified by every rational (?) statement you utter and the occupational hazard of those whose lives are immersed in the unreal world of computer systems (the nightmarish apogee of a dystopian, inhuman elimination of persons by an amoral scaffold erected to satisfy your desire to justify your own notions of what you are entitled to believe and how to live - thereby unwittingly depriving yourself of any power to choose what to believe or how to live if you take your determinism to its logical conclusion… but then logic is unimportant, isn’t it?

                                                  That would be a discussion for another thread, but Quine's argument  that all belief frameworks are ultimately pragmatic, and cannot be  cleanly and fully separated into synthetic and analytic camps I agree  with, largely, and materialism has no problem with that, so far as I'm  aware. My materialism is not dogmatic, but thoroughly pragmatic in a way  Quine would understand, and to a large extent, shared. It isn't that  "something beyond" cannot or doesn't exist, by dogma or necessity. That  kind of thinking is problematic in and of itself. Rather we have no  practical basis to think anything "beyond" obtains.

It is not a question of something “beyond” but something “within”. When you are out of your mind you have left your mind behind! It is preferable to have a bodiless mind rather than a mindless body…

Quine’s point is that all our knowledge is based on mental constructs which clearly have epistemological precedence over anything else we claim to know. In other words try as we might we cannot dispense with mental activity without destroying the source and foundation of all our knowledge.

Materialism is rare in the history of philosophy because it is based on a fatal flaw - as logical positivists discovered to their dismay after prematurely discarding metaphysics as nonsense. The verification principle was the cause of their downfall because it cannot be verified by sense data. Pragmatism works up to a point but it fails miserably when it comes to explaining intangibles. It is impossible to ignore them without descending into absurdity.

To reduce truth to isomorphisms of atomic particles undermines rationality because it becomes mechanistic parallelism rather than the correspondence of thoughts to facts. If facts don’t exist knowledge becomes an illusion for the simple reason that we don’t have direct knowledge of anything except the contents of our mind.

Considering that the mind-matter problem has been discussed for over two thousand years it is hardly likely that there is a simplistic solution like AI.

 

[DeepBlueSea]

The Affordable Health Act in the USA (among other things) closed some loop holes for allowing companies to do that. Though the act was challenged and the USA Supreme Court reviewed it. We’ll find out if they will allow it this Thursday. If key parts are struct down then insurance providers can continue to deny medical coverage for “pre-existing conditions” (a term I don’t completely understand, since even some infants have been denied treatment because their ailment has been classified as “pre-existing”).

Thanks. But the terms seem ambiguous. Prevention of discrimination based on eligibility and discrimination based on payment are two different things. Anyway, I hope the Act is properly enforced and deliver what it promises. But Acts, as with all man-made rules and laws, are made to be broken. It is just an expensive way to govern human behavior and actions. But I guess there is no better way to keep godless people in line. Gotta pay our way out.

 

[uther]

Getting back to Sam Harris, I think that in terms of public policy, presuming that his idea has captured enough social and political force to be implemented, it might be worthwhile for any who are atheists and agnostics to consider and make a kind of Pascal’s wager.

Let us presume for a moment that not all atheists and agnostics are part of the elite who can spare themselves the consequences of any given public policy. Moreover, let us presume that not all atheists and agnostics have obvious social value. Some may be uninterested in working, others may be deformed, defective, diseased, disabled or otherwise not prime productive people. Let us just imagine the wide scope of humanity and every possibility that we can witness or think of is represented in the atheistic or agnostic community.

Now let us suppose that the proposal is on the table to eliminate religion, one way or another. Since we are on a Catholic forum here, let us then take the Catholic religion as our marker.

The Catholic Church teaches that the human person is intrinsically valuable, regardless of its development, its physical or psychological defects, its age or even its attitude toward God.
(It should be noted that not all Catholics in all times have acted as though they believed this to be true, but it is still the teaching of the faith.)

On the other hand, the a-religious, the non-believer in any kind of God, the atheist or the agnostic accepts the idea that man is only matter, and mind is a result of that combination of matter and energy in whatever way the god-less scientists wish to explain it. From that the rational conclusion is that no individual human being has any more intrinsic value than any other material thing, regardless of the human emotions that may be involved.

Therefore, as a matter of public policy, for the atheistic society, were it deemed necessary or desirable to irradicate or eliminate any portion of the human population for whatever reason, rationally speaking there should be no objection, for none of the individuals targetted have any particular intrinsic value, especially if we are targetting the non-productive in a time of economic suffering on the larger scale. In fact, should we doubt the premise, there is ample eveidence to demonstrate it. We have seen such public policies from the National Socialists in the past as well as the Communists, both ostensibly atheist in their official outlook. In fact, there was nothing irrational about their policies and practices of genocide, providing the premise is in place that no individual human being has intrinsic value apart from their social value. This is the rational principle or equation at work leading to forced abortion and sterilization to support the one-child policy in China to this day.

However, inconsistencies aside, the society built upon the Catholic idea of intrinsic human value holds much better odds for the survival of the atheist or anyone else who may or may not be considered socially valuable by a strictly rational godless society. It would be a better bet for any kind of misfit, atheist or not, to promote the governance of society based on the Catholic principle of intrinsic value. And, were he of the right temperment he could well sit back and snipe at the Catholic faith, the Church and the Catholics, safe in the knowledge that they will likely never succumb to the temptation to shut him up permanently. Actually it would be in his interest and security to encourage Catholics to be as faithful and good Catholics as they could possibly be, and promote their elevation to public office.

But for my money, give me even the Catholic hypocrites over the atheist true believers any day.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

Getting back to Sam Harris, I think that in terms of public policy, presuming that his idea has captured enough social and political force to be implemented, it might be worthwhile for any who are atheists and agnostics to consider and make a kind of Pascal’s wager.

Let us presume for a moment that not all atheists and agnostics are part of the elite who can spare themselves the consequences of any given public policy. Moreover, let us presume that not all atheists and agnostics have obvious social value. Some may be uninterested in working, others may be deformed, defective, diseased, disabled or otherwise not prime productive people. Let us just imagine the wide scope of humanity and every possibility that we can witness or think of is represented in the atheistic or agnostic community.

Harris went through a thought experiment similar to this in “The Moral Landscape.” He came to a different conclusion.