Atheism is Evil - Page 30 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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By late
#15159995
Verv wrote:
I do not understand why you think that ideals are what holds society together, and not concentrations of power and their ability to enforce law.



Because you can't have cops everywhere, and you would not want to.

Law is always an attempt to balance competing rights and interests. While you need policing, most of the time ideals, tradition, and legal recourse are enough.

England had shoved peasant farmers off their land. Some of them wound up doing crime. It was an era of massive upheaval. It took generations to adapt to capitalism. But adapt they did.
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By Verv
#15160009
late wrote:Because you can't have cops everywhere, and you would not want to.

Law is always an attempt to balance competing rights and interests. While you need policing, most of the time ideals, tradition, and legal recourse are enough.

England had shoved peasant farmers off their land. Some of them wound up doing crime. It was an era of massive upheaval. It took generations to adapt to capitalism. But adapt they did.


I think we convince ourselves that we are really good people because we do not have any serious desire to murder someone out of revenge, right.

But, if there was a 90% chance that you and your friends could set up a roadblock at midnight & hijack 4-5 cars on a Saturday night and get away with it... we'd then live in a world where a bunch of people would do this, and a bunch of other people would go to Bubba's house at 2 AM armed with shotguns when they heard that Bubba was with the guys who stole their cousin's car, and they will shoot him to death and hang his body in a public place as a warning to others who would do the same.

Replace 'Bubba' with 'Jose' and we are basically just talking about El Slavador.

Are the British & American people just 100x more moral than El Salvadorans or other people living in high crime areas & war zones?

Are white Mormons in Utah far more morally superior & cultivated than black Americans in Detroit because what rpevents Mormons from committing crimes is their moral education..?

It is simply the case of the environment.

Where people can make easy money through crime, invariably some will, particularly thsoe who find it difficult to obtain money with dignity otherwise.
By late
#15160031
Verv wrote:
I think we convince ourselves that we are really good people because we do not have any serious desire to murder someone out of revenge, right.

But, if there was a 90% chance that you and your friends could set up a roadblock at midnight & hijack 4-5 cars on a Saturday night and get away with it... we'd then live in a world where a bunch of people would do this, and a bunch of other people would go to Bubba's house at 2 AM armed with shotguns when they heard that Bubba was with the guys who stole their cousin's car, and they will shoot him to death and hang his body in a public place as a warning to others who would do the same.

Replace 'Bubba' with 'Jose' and we are basically just talking about El Slavador.

Are the British & American people just 100x more moral than El Salvadorans or other people living in high crime areas & war zones?

Are white Mormons in Utah far more morally superior & cultivated than black Americans in Detroit because what rpevents Mormons from committing crimes is their moral education..?

It is simply the case of the environment.

Where people can make easy money through crime, invariably some will, particularly thsoe who find it difficult to obtain money with dignity otherwise.



You need a lot better than Whataboutism. What about El Salvador? GMAFB.

El Salvador is that way largely because we keep screwing it over.

This country has had to deal with a lot of crisis. As we developed, we became better able to maintain law and order.

What is needed is to take places like Detroit, and help them recover. Speaking of screwing, Michigan has screwed Detroit a bunch of times. That needs to stop, it's barbaric.

Btw, helping places like Detroit would be putting our ideals into practice.
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By Potemkin
#15160033
You need a lot better than Whataboutism. What about El Salvador? GMAFB.

El Salvador is that way largely because we keep screwing it over.

Like most American right-wingers, @Verv seems to have almost no sense of history. Things are as they are because people are as they are because things are as they are, so there's no point trying to change anything. As Nietzsche pointed out, a sense of history is humanity's sixth sense. Getting to the root of things means exploring the history of things, the 'genealogy' of things. With no sense of history, we end up just skating over the surface of things, moralising about the 'national character' of this or that group of people....
By Patrickov
#15160034
Potemkin wrote:Things are as they are because people are as they are because things are as they are, so there's no point trying to change anything.


1. I don't see Verv asserting that. He seems to believe human behaviour is prone to environmental influence, which to me, is a rebuttal of the above logic. If anything, I have much more serious stereotype against groups of people than he does.

2. Even if people are as they are and things will be as they are I will not say attempt of change is absolutely no point. We merely should not expect our work to have significant results in a short time, and we should be prepared that what we do might make things worse instead, but that's a different story.
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By Potemkin
#15160035
Patrickov wrote:1. I don't see Verv asserting that. He seems to believe human behaviour is prone to environmental influence, which to me, is a rebuttal of the above logic. If anything, I have much more serious stereotype against groups of people than he does.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh on @Verv, but his choice of El Salvador as an example was a poor one, given what the USA did to that nation in the 1970s and 80s, of which he seems blissfully unaware.

2. Even if people are as they are and things will be as they are I will not say attempt of change is absolutely no point. We merely should not expect our work to have significant results in a short time, and we should be prepared that what we do might make things worse instead, but that's a different story.

Granted. When undertaking any sort of revolutionary or even reformist change, the short-term effect may well be to make things worse, not better. Yet, ultimately, we live only in the long-term; or rather, in a whole superposition of long-terms....
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By Rugoz
#15160036
Verv wrote:I do not understand why you think that ideals are what holds society together, and not concentrations of power and their ability to enforce law.


What I meant to say is that one cannot disconnect empathy from cooperation.

But I certainly do think ideals hold society together because they form the basis of any hierarchy among human beings.

Verv wrote:Are the British & American people just 100x more moral than El Salvadorans or other people living in high crime areas & war zones?


I don't know about Americans and about 100x, but yes, I would argue they are more virtuous because are more likely to have an aversion towards such behavior.

Verv wrote:It is simply the case of the environment.


Ultimately, yes.
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By Potemkin
#15160037
Verv wrote:It is simply the case of the environment.

And how was that environment formed? :eh:
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By Verv
#15160156
Potemkin wrote:Perhaps I'm being too harsh on @Verv, but his choice of El Salvador as an example was a poor one, given what the USA did to that nation in the 1970s and 80s, of which he seems blissfully unaware.


I actually regularly invoke El Salvador for these things because I'm fascinated by MS-13.

I don't know why you would begin ranting about the history of El Salvador and implying all sorts of gross things about me.

My argument is clearly that Mormons aren't morally superior to El Salvadorans and the average resident of Detroit, but simply live in an environment where there's no reason to resort to criminality. That which prevents criminality is not the upstanding morality of the people, but is the surveillance state, force of arms, and economic opportunities.

This is an extremely liberal argument.

I don't know why it's viewed as so objectionable other than maybe left wing atheists being uncomfortable with arguing for the fact that there's a special moral quality in certain societies that others don't have... which we now have @Rugoz arguing for.

My only guess is you read @late more than you read me and assumed some problem that wasn't there.

@Patrickov is correct in the understanding of my argument.
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By Verv
#15160157
Potemkin wrote:And how was that environment formed? :eh:


Why are El Salvador and Detroit shit holes?

Lack of economic development and economic collapse, respectively.

I don't have any special arguments about why some places are rich and others are poor to offer here. I actually stay away from a lot of arguments that go back to economics or history because they become weeks worth of unfun posting between people who'll never change their position.
#15160159
Verv wrote:That which prevents criminality is not the upstanding morality of the people, but is the surveillance state, force of arms, and economic opportunities.


I think the answer is more complex than this.

I can think of many cities with both high crime rates and lots of cops and cameras. This disproves the argument that more surveillance and more force of arms will result in less crime.
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By Verv
#15160160
late wrote:You need a lot better than Whataboutism. What about El Salvador? GMAFB.

El Salvador is that way largely because we keep screwing it over.

This country has had to deal with a lot of crisis. As we developed, we became better able to maintain law and order.

What is needed is to take places like Detroit, and help them recover. Speaking of screwing, Michigan has screwed Detroit a bunch of times. That needs to stop, it's barbaric.

Btw, helping places like Detroit would be putting our ideals into practice.


This is my argument, what you're actually arguing against:

"It is simply the case of the environment.

Where people can make easy money through crime, invariably some will, particularly thsoe who find it difficult to obtain money with dignity otherwise."

I said El Salvador because it's famous for particularly high crime rates in a region of high crime rates and the famous street gang MS-13.

I'm literally arguing that the El Salvadoran people have zero moral shortcomings compared to people in prosperous countries, and that the crime and despair they face is due to the environment ... that crime in El Salvsdor happens because opportunities for crime exist and they're more appealing than the economic opportunities available.

Basically the most politically correct and acceptable assessment available.
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By Rugoz
#15160362
Verv wrote:Basically the most politically correct and acceptable assessment available.


Do you want a medal?

It is perfectly reasonable to assume that people who grow up in a peaceful environment are more peaceful in nature, something we would generally consider to be a virtue. Of course they might be unfit to live in a conflict zone.

P.S. That doesn't mean people cannot change to a great extent if put in a different environment.
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By MrWonderful
#15160373
In his book Illogical Atheism, former militant atheist, Bo Jinn incisively lays down the failure of atheism to provide a grounding for reason:

“Scientific facts cannot justify reason. It is reason [that] justifies science. But, then, what justifies reason? The reliability of reason, just as the existence of morality and beauty is simply taken for granted by the atheist on purely pragmatic grounds. There is no sufficient ontic referent for their actual existence. Truth/value judgments can be supported by empirical facts, but at the very last instance they will always require a judgment from a personal agent. And unless that judgment is made on the basis of an objective standard of truth, then the judgment is therefore meaningless.”

“…As we speak, there are atheists the world over insisting that atheism is a conclusion which intelligent people come to on the basis of reason. But, if atheism is true, then human reasoning has no validity at all, because valid reasoning implies a standard of truth that can be reasoned toward and a sufficient reason for believing that human reasoning works in the first place.”

“…Theism reasons to and from an objective standard of ultimate truth grounded in an absolute mind (God) which gives validity to rational beliefs, and atheism reasons to and from a completely subjective standard that cannot give validity to any belief (ourselves). We cannot reason to the conclusion that our reasoning is valid, since it is as circular as the proposition B → B”

[In answer to the eternal snark by atheists, "Which God," the God of Christianity, the largest organized group on earth, the God of the Holy Bible, the best selling, most read book ever published, the Nature's God, referenced in America's Declaration of Independence, the God to which George Washington and our Founding Fathers prayed. "God bless this Honorable Court." - The opening prayer for every session of the Supreme Court. That God.]
#15160388
Theist belief in god is not an objective standard of truth.

Theists (or at least, most of them) simply believe that god is an objective standard of truth, with no evidence.
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By Potemkin
#15160392
Pants-of-dog wrote:Theist belief in god is not an objective standard of truth.

Theists (or at least, most of them) simply believe that god is an objective standard of truth, with no evidence.

The point he's making seems to be that religious faith can provide an ontological grounding for value-judgements. Which is undoubtedly true. But it requires the acceptance of the axiom that God exists, which (like all axioms) does not require or even allow proof of its validity.
By late
#15160394
MrWonderful wrote:
In his book Illogical Atheism, former militant atheist, Bo Jinn incisively lays down the failure of atheism to provide a grounding for reason:

“Scientific facts cannot justify reason. It is reason [that] justifies science. But, then, what justifies reason? The reliability of reason, just as the existence of morality and beauty is simply taken for granted by the atheist on purely pragmatic grounds. There is no sufficient ontic referent for their actual existence. Truth/value judgments can be supported by empirical facts, but at the very last instance they will always require a judgment from a personal agent. And unless that judgment is made on the basis of an objective standard of truth, then the judgment is therefore meaningless.”

“…As we speak, there are atheists the world over insisting that atheism is a conclusion which intelligent people come to on the basis of reason. But, if atheism is true, then human reasoning has no validity at all, because valid reasoning implies a standard of truth that can be reasoned toward and a sufficient reason for believing that human reasoning works in the first place.”

“…Theism reasons to and from an objective standard of ultimate truth grounded in an absolute mind (God) which gives validity to rational beliefs, and atheism reasons to and from a completely subjective standard that cannot give validity to any belief (ourselves). We cannot reason to the conclusion that our reasoning is valid, since it is as circular as the proposition B → B”

[In answer to the eternal snark by atheists, "Which God," the God of Christianity, the largest organized group on earth, the God of the Holy Bible, the best selling, most read book ever published, the Nature's God, referenced in America's Declaration of Independence, the God to which George Washington and our Founding Fathers prayed. "God bless this Honorable Court." - The opening prayer for every session of the Supreme Court. That God.]



A hundred years ago, all the so called proofs for a deity were refuted. Academic theologians had to start saying things like "Leap of Faith".

You author is an idiot, sorry. The burden is always on the assertion; and the assertion under question is the existence of deities. And Santa...

There is neither argument nor evidence for the existence of deities.

You mentioned pragmatism. My thinking is analogous to the school known as Contemporary American Pragmatism.

Anyway, scientists say morality is rooted in our biology. That's one of the recurring themes in life, science replacing myth with fact.

Your pal said "The reliability of reason, just as the existence of morality and beauty is simply taken for granted by the atheist on purely pragmatic grounds." It's not purely pragmatic grounds, biology, custom and culture combine to do most of the work. Part of that culture is the work on law and ethics that people have been doing for centuries. There is really quite a lot of it.

Your pal also said "Theism reasons to and from an objective standard of ultimate truth". There is no ultimate truth. He assumes his conclusion, and not just in that spot.

"Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word “true” or “good,” supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area... The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call “philosophy” – a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that “there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a “relativistic” or “subjectivist” theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. They are in a position analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, or the Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists are not saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear about what it would mean to affirm His existence, and thus about the point of denying it. Nor do they have some special, funny, heretical view about God. They just doubt that the vocabulary of theology is one we ought to be using."

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/rorty.htm
By Pants-of-dog
#15160396
Potemkin wrote:The point he's making seems to be that religious faith can provide an ontological grounding for value-judgements. Which is undoubtedly true. But it requires the acceptance of the axiom that God exists, which (like all axioms) does not require or even allow proof of its validity.


These theists also seem to assume that god is the only possible ontological grounding for value-judgements, and that atheists therefore have none at all.
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By ingliz
#15160397
MrWonderful wrote:a standard of truth

Scientific 'facts' do not describe the world as is, only a chosen model of the world as may be. As long as the model of choice produces useful results, who gives a shit if the 'facts' are philosophically objectively truths.


:lol:
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By Potemkin
#15160399
ingliz wrote:Scientific 'facts' do not describe the world as is, only a chosen model of the world as may be. As long as the model of choice produces useful results, who gives a shit if the 'facts' are philosophically objectively truths.


:lol:

Precisely. Modern science does not require an ontological grounding; and in fact such a grounding may well be impossible. The Young two-slit experiment alone demonstrates this. It's just that we grew accustomed to having such an ontological grounding during the Middle Ages, and we still feel nostalgic for it. Lol.
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