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jam070406
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You don’t have to fantasize bro, just humbly surrender to grace and the gift can be yours too.
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KyivAndrew
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AntiTheist, in one of your other posts you stated we are just “another race of creatures”, and then you chided another poster for “know[ing] absolutely squat about human nature”.
O.K. if we are just another race of creatures as you state, what differentiates “human nature” from the “nature” of other creatures like dogs, snakes, or penguins? Has any dog ever felt the need to pen a tragedy in the vein of Shakespeare? I knew a very smart Lab once, but…
O.K. if we are just another race of creatures as you state, what differentiates “human nature” from the “nature” of other creatures like dogs, snakes, or penguins? Has any dog ever felt the need to pen a tragedy in the vein of Shakespeare? I knew a very smart Lab once, but…
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jam070406
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Hey Andrew, isn’t it great to know that we have a loving God that loves you, me and AntiTheist?
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KyivAndrew
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Not too loud jam. He may really get upset! And I mean upset. I think for some atheists, this type of debate is not strictly “rational” as if we were engaging Mr. Spock, but very much emotional as well for obvious reasons: i.e. "you know nothing!’, you this, you that. There is an emotional superstructure or better, emotional foundation, to what we might term “rebelling against God”. Oh wells, it’s all the fault of the Red Wings.
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KyivAndrew
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Not too loud jam. He may really get upset! And I mean upset. I think for some atheists, this type of debate is not strictly “rational” as if we were engaging Mr. Spock, but very much emotional as well for obvious reasons: i.e. "you know nothing!’, you this, you that. There is an emotional super or substructure to what we might term “rebelling against God”. Oh wells, it’s all the fault of the Red Wings.
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AntiTheist
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When I said that the universe is cold and uncaring, I was simply expressing the fact that the universe itself does not care about what happens to anything in the universe and that there are no supernatural beings watching the universe to care about what happens to anything in the universe.
I make this statement on the basis that there is no compelling reason to think that the universe is capable of caring, nor any compelling reason to think that supernatural beings exist that care about the universe.
“Human nature” is the term we use for the way humans behave and the motivations behind that behavior. The poster was trying to claim that all people have the potential to be Dr. Mengele, which I think expresses an exceedingly poor understanding of human nature.
“Human nature” does not refer to some magical quality possessed by humans.
Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, buddy. There’s another one of those comforting narratives. Anyone who recognizes that there’s no evidence for any of this supernatural junk must be “rebelling” against such an obvious “truth” as the cosmic importance of human beings.
Feel free to write back when you’ve actually got compelling evidence.
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KyivAndrew
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AntiT. You should know by now that one cannot prove the existence of God by scientific formulae. What can be and is claimed is that there are reasonable grounds for believing in the existence of God.
Why the vituperation? You’ve made it clear before that the only “evidence” you will accept is scientific evidence and you discount completely such pursuits as “metaphysics” which have consumed some of the greatest minds in Western civilization as basically fantasy in your words I believe.
I posted on some other thread that even Ludwig Wittgenstein thought it ridiculous when people (such as yourself) believe only the scientific method can be used to gain “truth” and that applying this method to metaphysics or aesthetics was ridiculous in Wittgenstein’s view. The only truth you recognize is “scientific truth” and, as I posted on another thread, per philosopher Karl Popper, there are even qualifications to “truth” in science. The religion you preach is Scientism.
Attempt using the scientific method to explain human altruism, or human evil, or concsience, sacrifice. Science is not even close to that, never mind agreeing on such things as string theory or neutrinos or a unified theorem. You have closed off yourself to a whole world of knowledge by fooling yourself into believing the only truth is scientific “truth” and the rest is the study of unicorns or dragons, I believe, these being your strawmen of choice.
If what we were really engaging in was an unemotional rational debate, I don’t believe you would have used the level of emotion you did in your posts.
On “morality”, it seems (I may be wrong) your view of it has been conditioned by growing up in a comfortable American home and lifestyle. When one comes from such a background it is quite easy to think as you that all humans share the same “values” I believe you put it and we can find comfort in this. To my mind, this is a quintessentially American view of the world.
To see just how “cracked” human values and morality can become in, say, totalitarian societies, read Anne Applebaum’s latest work in the New Republic where she writes of meeting directors of orphanages from Stalin’s time, when innocent children were taken by the state as in the Politburo’s mind their parents were enemies of the state. To this day, many of those people who ran the camps see nothing wrong with what was done in the Soviet Gulag or that they had basically destroyed families of innocents. There really are warped looking-glass worlds out there, i.e. North Korea where propaganda does damage one’s sense of right and wrong. I’d wager you never even studied them because as Robert Conquest once wrote, the horrors that occurred in these societies and the “moralities” they espoused were beyond the comprehension of many Westerners.
To hold the view you do of “morality” or common “values” I would argue betrays a real lack of knowledge of history and what evil other peoples and societies had to undergo. As I said, no offense, but I think yours is the comfortable couch-atheism of the satiated North American. You would sound entirely different if you were born in and writing from North Korea.
We seem to be fated to speak at each other instead of with each other as you require a full-proof mathematical equation to explain any “truth”, it would seem. This really truncates the human personality of just about all its breadth.
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AntiTheist
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You’re all over the place in your post, and it’s hard to even know where to begin.
“Truth,” the way I use the word, is the matching of ideas to the world outside my head (or the world that appears to exist outside my head, for you philosophy nerds reading this). The only way I can go about doing this is to use evidence.
In the vast, vast, vast majority of cases, no scientific inquiry is required at all to determine truth. It is trivially easy for me to determine right now that it’s true that I’m hungry. No science required – I simply observe the evidence and draw conclusions.
Now in that case, the evidence is only available to one person (me), and I’m not drawing a conclusion that we would reasonably expect to be independently verifiable. But in other cases and other claims – like “the earth rotates around the sun” or “a supernatural intelligence exists and intervenes in human affairs” – we would expect these kinds of claims to be independently verifiable.
If you can think of a better way to come to conclusions than by using evidence, I’d like to hear it – becase all other methods (including trusting in the notoriously unreliable emotions and “intuition” don’t work).
How would that make it any more likely that a supernatural being exists?
This is the classic argument from ignorance. “I don’t know” doesn’t automatically mean that a god did it.
This is actually not true. Most of the things I recognize as truth I do not subject to any kind of scientific scrutiny whatsoever.
“Truth,” the way I use the word, is the matching of ideas to the world outside my head (or the world that appears to exist outside my head, for you philosophy nerds reading this). The only way I can go about doing this is to use evidence.
In the vast, vast, vast majority of cases, no scientific inquiry is required at all to determine truth. It is trivially easy for me to determine right now that it’s true that I’m hungry. No science required – I simply observe the evidence and draw conclusions.
Now in that case, the evidence is only available to one person (me), and I’m not drawing a conclusion that we would reasonably expect to be independently verifiable. But in other cases and other claims – like “the earth rotates around the sun” or “a supernatural intelligence exists and intervenes in human affairs” – we would expect these kinds of claims to be independently verifiable.
If you can think of a better way to come to conclusions than by using evidence, I’d like to hear it – becase all other methods (including trusting in the notoriously unreliable emotions and “intuition” don’t work).
You’re getting way off topic here, but I’ll indulge you. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that scientific inquiry has no good explanations for the existence of any of those things (in point of fact, we have some very good explanations, but I’ll grant your position for the sake of argument).
How would that make it any more likely that a supernatural being exists?
This is the classic argument from ignorance. “I don’t know” doesn’t automatically mean that a god did it.
Yeah, I was a little more grumpy than usual on this thread – I think someone here rubbed me the wrong way. At any rate, it seems to have produced some pretty good posts from me, so I can’t say I’m unhappy about it.
Again, what is this supposed to prove? I know that people do horrible and cruel things all the time. How does that demonstrate that supernatural beings exist?
Claims made about the world require evidence. If you don’t agree on that fundamental point, then yeah, of course we’re going to be talking past each other – I’m dealing with the actual world, and you’re dealing with la-la land, where you don’t need evidence and can still be right.
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jam070406
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That’s great. You’ve got it all figured out. Not sure where that’s gonna get you. The world will still go to hell in a hand basket. You’re still gonna die, like the rest of us. And you still have to face the fact that your life will come to an end and everything you’ve done in this life was for nothing. With some of the attitude you’ve displayed you may even be lucky to be a distant memory to some people, although, seeing that I don’t know you personally, I would hope that *in person *you are a more kind person then what you have displayed on these threads.
Andrew’s evidence is all around him in many areas, past and present, that you choose not to accept because it doesn’t serve your ideology.
Btw, I’m not sure why you feel you have liscense to insult his view of Truth when you yourself claim there is much you recognize as truth without scientific scrutiny.
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KyivAndrew
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Again, you misunderstand me. I was taking issue with your overconfident statement on human nature in another post that the “vast, vast majority of people” share the same view of right and wrong as you, which I found wrong in the face of what the 20th century demonstrated in man’s capacity for Megadeaths, in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s words. I wasn’t making the jump from this to the existence of God.
I was disagreeing with your characterization of human nature. The topic of this thread was life in a post-Christian society, not philosophical arguments for the existence or not of God, which is usually taken up in the philosophy subforum but which topic is banned there so I am not going to use this forum to start a new God exists thread. Hence, my dealing with the issue of morality in this new world.
Tell me something AntiT, was the Shoah, or any other 20th Century genocide, EVIL? Do you believe in such things as Good and Evil or Morality? And on what grounds? Why would the Holocaust be an evil in your view or do you not claim it to be “evil” and wish to use some euphemism which doesn’t deal with morality?
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Gerry_Hunter
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All that needs to be said is that by the criteria this person is using, he has no basis to believe that there was a battle fought between Greeks and Persians on the plains of Marathon, either.
As for his dismissive comments about Jesus Christ, I told you they get vicious.
Blessings,
Gerry
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