Atheism is Evil - Page 28 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...

For discussion of moral and ethical issues.
Forum rules: No one line posts please.
User avatar
By Godstud
#15159609
Verv wrote:People and society is a very convenient thing to reach for from your nice home in Thailand with a whole society of Buddhists and police with guns to protect you, Stud.
No more relevant than where you live. Are you trying to make some sort of lame personal attack because I am not buying your biased arguments, or religious affirmations?

Verv wrote:Well, yes, people accept 'Golden Rule' type assertions because they think, oh geez, yeah, I don't want my stuff stolen.

But they throw these out of the window as soon as it is burdensome.
What argument are you trying to make, here?

Verv wrote:These are both stupid sentences unless you are a teenage girl obsessed with ascribing emotionality & baseness to whatever your enemy's are saying.
Pathetic ad hominem. Your whole argument has been one of defining evil as Atheist by using your religion to determine that. No one has asserted that Christianity is evil, have they?

Verv wrote:I think it should be well established that I am an enthusiastic internet shitposter.
I can't argue with that fact.
User avatar
By Potemkin
#15159615
XogGyux wrote:That is as close to a meaningless statement as anything I can think off though.
NAZIs are morally better if we judge them by NAZI moral standards.
The Azmat people were morally better if we judge them by their own moral standards, and they were cannibals :lol: .

This is the problem with moral relativism - it renders morality meaningless. In fact, why bother calling it "morality" at all? You are, after all, merely describing social norms in a given culture of which you are not a member. Why not just call it, "stuff those weird guys over in the other valley do"? Lol.
User avatar
By XogGyux
#15159616
Potemkin wrote:This is the problem with moral relativism - it renders morality meaningless. In fact, why bother calling it "morality" at all? You are, after all, merely describing social norms in a given culture of which you are not a member. Why not just call it, "stuff those weird guys over in the other valley do"? Lol.

This is not as big of a deal as some people want to make it seem. For one, religion does not offer any sort of advantage in this matter, if you going to go by scripture... how can you possibly apply moral rulings and evaluation of actions that pertain to things that are happening in a world that is thousands of years in advance compared to when the scriptures were conceived. For instance... is taking a blood pressure medication moral? Scriptures don't mention anything about blood pressure meds.. maybe it is moral, maybe it is not. You might think well... divinity doesn't really care about what you take but you would be wrong, there are plenty of things mentioned in scriptures of various religions that concern what you put in your mouth or swallow. Pigs for jews? Cows for Muslims, Items containing yeast (for real christians :eh: :lol: )... so what happens with blood pressure medication, can you take it?
In theory, if we are concerned about well being, you could argue that you could make a supercomputer and input all the variables down to the quantum state of atoms and spit out what are the set of actions that lead to the most aggregate good for humanity... in theory, we might call this the "definitive" or "absolute" morality.
This, however, is not necessarily practical or essential either.
For instance, if I throw you a ball, the number of calculations needed to accurately predict where it will land and/or the trajectory it will take so that you can intercept with your hand is pretty dense. I am sure you can search the internet for the source code for a robot that catches balls, and that code will be pretty damn long (and it is still an approximation, not the real thing "down to the atom). That being said, if I throw you the ball, you will not be doing those calculations in your mind, you will be having a "good enough" rough approximation. I think this is acceptable even as an aspirational goal.

I am definitely not the last word in morality, but I tell you this, all those that claim to be Christians and claim to this supposed moral superiority are full of it, those that would actually follow what scripture exemplifies would end up in jail faster than I can blink.
User avatar
By ingliz
#15159623
Verv wrote:Christians distinguish themselves by believing in the power of repentance and the reception of grace from God.

Are you saying Christians can do all that evil stuff and still be good because they repent? Good even if they are repeat offenders as long as they repent, and repent, and repent. That Christians are good per se, no matter how evil they are?


:lol:
By B0ycey
#15159626
XogGyux wrote:That is as close to a meaningless statement as anything I can think off though.
NAZIs are morally better if we judge them by NAZI moral standards.
The Azmat people were morally better if we judge them by their own moral standards, and they were cannibals :lol: .


I think this statement pretty much proves we all preach what think rather than any form of moral code especially when we select what parts of the religious text we will follow and which parts we don't. I remember once a user (Victoribus Spolia) claimed that morality is objective, but multiple threads of people arguing from different standpoints of what constitutes morality has basically threw that argument out the window. :lol:

This isn't to say that many of the preaching of the bible wouldn't make society better from my personal point of view or that faith in a deity is wrong. Murder, adulty, love thy neighbour seem pretty sound rules we should follow to me. But even they can be questionable if you want to be pedantic. Is killing a cow to feed your family morally wrong? Or having a relationship from a broken marriage? Or hating someone who did you wrong? Perhaps not. So we allow ourselves loopholes even from the standards we set ourselves. Perhaps that is religion right there. Selective union and perhaps no more moral than a social contract. :hmm:
User avatar
By Potemkin
#15159631
XogGyux wrote:This is not as big of a deal as some people want to make it seem. For one, religion does not offer any sort of advantage in this matter, if you going to go by scripture... how can you possibly apply moral rulings and evaluation of actions that pertain to things that are happening in a world that is thousands of years in advance compared to when the scriptures were conceived. For instance... is taking a blood pressure medication moral? Scriptures don't mention anything about blood pressure meds.. maybe it is moral, maybe it is not. You might think well... divinity doesn't really care about what you take but you would be wrong, there are plenty of things mentioned in scriptures of various religions that concern what you put in your mouth or swallow. Pigs for jews? Cows for Muslims, Items containing yeast (for real christians :eh: :lol: )... so what happens with blood pressure medication, can you take it?
In theory, if we are concerned about well being, you could argue that you could make a supercomputer and input all the variables down to the quantum state of atoms and spit out what are the set of actions that lead to the most aggregate good for humanity... in theory, we might call this the "definitive" or "absolute" morality.
This, however, is not necessarily practical or essential either.
For instance, if I throw you a ball, the number of calculations needed to accurately predict where it will land and/or the trajectory it will take so that you can intercept with your hand is pretty dense. I am sure you can search the internet for the source code for a robot that catches balls, and that code will be pretty damn long (and it is still an approximation, not the real thing "down to the atom). That being said, if I throw you the ball, you will not be doing those calculations in your mind, you will be having a "good enough" rough approximation. I think this is acceptable even as an aspirational goal.

I am definitely not the last word in morality, but I tell you this, all those that claim to be Christians and claim to this supposed moral superiority are full of it, those that would actually follow what scripture exemplifies would end up in jail faster than I can blink.

I think you misunderstand where I'm coming from. I'm a Marxist who broadly agrees with Marx on the nature of religion; it is indeed "the opium of the people" which only exists because we have projected our own best qualities outwards onto a fictional consciousness in the sky because the hostile economic and social order we find ourselves in will not allow those best qualities to exist in reality.

No, my quarrel is with the whole concept of moral relativism, rather than atheism. Like all forms of extreme scepticism, it is self-defeating and pointless. If nothing is true, then even the assertion that nothing is true cannot be true. Lol.

I am also concerned by your apparent conflation of morality with utilitarianism. Pace Jeremy Bentham, they are not the same thing.
XogGyux wrote:In theory, if we are concerned about well being, you could argue that you could make a supercomputer and input all the variables down to the quantum state of atoms and spit out what are the set of actions that lead to the most aggregate good for humanity... in theory, we might call this the "definitive" or "absolute" morality.

:eh:
By late
#15159633
Potemkin wrote:

No, my quarrel is with the whole concept of moral relativism, rather than atheism. Like all forms of extreme scepticism, it is self-defeating and pointless. If nothing is true, then even the assertion that nothing is true cannot be true. Lol.

I am also concerned by your apparent conflation of morality with utilitarianism. Pace Jeremy Bentham, they are not the same thing.



How does an atheist escape limits?? If you don't have a deity, how do you get to an absolute ethics?

Asking for a friend.
User avatar
By Potemkin
#15159634
late wrote:How does an atheist escape limits?? If you don't have a deity, how do you get to an absolute ethics?

Asking for a friend.

"Absolute ethics"? Ethics is a work in progress for Marxists, the emergent result of a dialectical interaction between the material basis of human society and human aspirations for a fuller and more humane social reality. This means, of course, that what we call "morality" will evolve over historical time, and is not and should not be fixed. Does this mean that "nothing is true; everything is permitted"? No, not at all. The whole point of Marxism is to permit the full flowering of human potential, which requires an harmonious society based on the principle that the full flowering of society requires the full flowering of each and every individual in that society (and vice versa, of course). The interests of the individual and the interests of society as a whole will therefore coincide; and what else is this than what Plato called "the Good Life"? Morality is not a set of copy-book maxims, nor a set of commandments handed down from Mount Sinai on clay tablets. But neither is it a purely relative thing, in which the morality of, say, the Aztecs is neither better nor worse than the morality of, say, modern Luxemburg. If that were the case, then 'morality' would be a vacuous category, just "stuff those weird guys over in the other valley do."
User avatar
By ingliz
#15159641
Potemkin wrote:If nothing is true

It is possible to hold to an agnostic position and still be skeptical.

Google is your friend.

Non-Cognitivism.

Adjusting statements based upon objective reality and adjusting reality based upon statements are contrary uses of language; that is to say, descriptive statements are a different kind of sentence to normative statements. If truth is understood according to correspondence theory, the question of the truth or falsity of sentences not contingent upon external phenomena cannot be tested.


:lol:
User avatar
By Potemkin
#15159643
ingliz wrote:It is possible to hold to an agnostic position and still be skeptical.

Google is your friend.

Non-Cognitivism.

Adjusting statements based upon objective reality and adjusting reality based upon statements are contrary uses of language; that is to say, descriptive statements are a different kind of sentence to normative statements. If truth is understood according to correspondence theory, the question of the truth or falsity of sentences not contingent upon external phenomena cannot be tested.


:lol:

Granted. But for a religious believer, moral statements are not merely normative but are also descriptive - that is to say, they believe that moral statements describe the will of God, which we must obey.
By Pants-of-dog
#15159649
Moral relativism does not seem to say that nothing is true.

Instead, it says that we judge morality based on our own moral standards. This seems to be true regardless of whether or not morality is true.
User avatar
By Potemkin
#15159655
Pants-of-dog wrote:Moral relativism does not seem to say that nothing is true.

Instead, it says that we judge morality based on our own moral standards. This seems to be true regardless of whether or not morality is true.

But this is trivially true. If that is all moral relativism consists of, then it is trivially true in the sense that nobody could rationally disagree with it. It is in its non-trivial sense that I am critical of it, since it seems to presuppose that it is possible to occupy a position of 'objective truth' from which all moral assertions are simultaneously equally true and equally false. There is no such position. We are, each and every one of us, members of a particular human culture, and thereby we share the moral values of that particular culture. From that position, one can respectfully disagree with the moral values of other cultures, but one cannot coherently assert that one believes them to be equally (in)valid. If a member of a Papuan New Guinea tribe who have not yet abandoned their traditional culture invites me to partake in a feast involving the mortal remains of someone's recently deceased great-uncle, then I'm going to politely decline the invitation.
By Pants-of-dog
#15159656
@Potemkin

I disagree. If it is true that we judge morality by our cultural standards, it seems that it is presupposed that is impossible to “occupy a position of 'objective truth' from which all moral assertions are simultaneously equally true and equally false”. Even if there was such a position, we would be unable to occupy it.
User avatar
By Potemkin
#15159657
Pants-of-dog wrote:@Potemkin

I disagree. If it is true that we judge morality by our cultural standards, it seems that it is presupposed that is impossible to “occupy a position of 'objective truth' from which all moral assertions are simultaneously equally true and equally false”. Even if there was such a position, we would be unable to occupy it.

The version of moral relativism which you are describing is trivially true. Of course we judge morality by our own cultural standards. What other standards would we use? The non-trivial version of moral relativism asserts that we should not judge morality by our own cultural standards. This is, it seems to me, an incoherent position. As you say, there is no such position and even if there were, we could not occupy it.
By Pants-of-dog
#15159659
@Potemkin

I do not think that moral relativism claims that we should or should not do anything. It seems, instead, to claim that we can and cannot do certain things.

So, it seems to be saying that even if we wanted to judge morality by some standard other than our own culture, we could not.

I think it says we should be mindful of our own biases when judging the morality of others.
User avatar
By Potemkin
#15159670
Pants-of-dog wrote:@Potemkin

I do not think that moral relativism claims that we should or should not do anything. It seems, instead, to claim that we can and cannot do certain things.

So, it seems to be saying that even if we wanted to judge morality by some standard other than our own culture, we could not.

But even Victorian imperialists would have agreed with that assertion, and no-one could have accused them of being moral relativists.

I think it says we should be mindful of our own biases when judging the morality of others.

That seems to be a rather milquetoast version of 'moral relativism'. It's basically just saying that we should disagree politely with other cultures' morality, which is no more 'relativist' than my own position.
By Pants-of-dog
#15159672
@Potemkin

It may be milquetoast, but it seems like the only possible conclusion that is logical and consistent with observed reality.
User avatar
By Potemkin
#15159673
Pants-of-dog wrote:@Potemkin

It may be milquetoast, but it seems like the only possible conclusion that is logical and consistent with observed reality.

In other words, extreme moral relativism, like extreme scepticism in general, is incoherent and self-defeating. But as I said before, your own interpretation of moral relativism seems little different from a more respectful version of what the more intelligent of the Victorian imperialists thought. Richard Burton would likely have endorsed it. Lol. ;)
By Pants-of-dog
#15159678
Well, the Victorians were not universally wrong.

They were the first Englishmen to use a sewage system, for example.
  • 1
  • 26
  • 27
  • 28
  • 29
  • 30
  • 37

I would bet you have very strong feelings about DE[…]

@Rugoz A compromise with Putin is impossibl[…]

@KurtFF8 Litwin wages a psyops war here but we […]

[usermention=41202] @late[/usermention] The[…]