On 02 Feb 2017, at 17:50, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 2/2/2017 1:40 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Initial remark: I am not a theist! It is possible to reject both
theism and atheism. It's called agnosticism.
On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 9:20 PM, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net>
wrote:
On 2/1/2017 3:10 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
I agree with the video. You might also like this:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/a6/a9/9f/a6a99fb6a3ad81cefc08ba8a67dab9e0.jpg
The narrator says: "putting god ahead of humanity is a terrible
thing". I agree, but what I meant from the beginning is even more
general. I would say:
"putting absolute belief ahead of humanity is a terrible thing"
But that is exactly what theism demands - God is the ultimate
arbiter of all
morality and is to be worshipped and obeyed.
I oppose most organised religions for this very reason, but I don't
agree that theism "demands it" (as we've discussed before). The
problem with atheism is that it defines the side it opposes (which is
inconsistent), and thus engages in the fiction.
Inconsistent? Would you have people who oppose fascism not have a
definition of fascism - so that they were just opposing some
undefined, amorphous ideology? And theism is not a fiction - it's
something that can be defined ostensively. It's the common core
beliefs about God held by those who call themselves Muslims,
Christians, and Jews, which constitutes a large portion of the
Earths population. It is disingenuous to pretend that it means what
the first person who used the word meant. Meanings are detemined by
usage - unless you want to be misunderstood, as Bruno does.
But anyone with a slightest interest in the field can see that the
jewish, christians and muslims have, on the rational subject matter,
oscillated between Plato and Aristotle theology, and eventually
converged to a strongly Aristotelian view of reality, like Atheism.
Metaphysical naturalism is mainly Aristotle theology (simplifying
things to be clear on the key difference).
Now, yes, we can say that the christians, or muslims, or jews, and
perhaps even the atheists, which kept the idea of Plato are closer to
the truth than the Aristotelian, and in science, we know that this
matter is simply not decided, and even still taboo in some university
based in part on the gnostic atheist "confession" (the belief, more or
less explicit that matter exist in some primary sense, and that
physics is the fundamental science.
Brent, if you have a physicalist theory of mind, let us know it. It
cannot be computationalism, as this needs non Turing emulable, nor FPI
recoverable, actual infinities to keep an identification of person and
body.
Why are atheists not jumping of joy when seeing that we can do
theology with the scientific attitude? Why do the atheists defend so
much the theories of God that they claim to not believe in?
All humans have talks about god(s) and goddesses since they are there,
and all universal numbers grasp there is something big beyond them,
but which is such that nobody can really talk about, except in
theoretical terms and with interrogation mark.
You should really read Aldous Huxley, or inform yourself on all non
abramanic theologies. Even the greek get most of their ideas from the
persians, the indians, ... Pythagoras was mainly a great taveller.
Bruno
PS I posted this yesterday, but it did not seem to have gone through.
I repost it today (03 February 2017).
You want to fight the encroachment of religion in our lives? I'm on
your side.
This includes organised religion but also stalinism, the Chinese
cultural revolution and other horrors. These were also done in the
name of absolute belief. I don't think that it matters if absolute
belief comes with the label "god" or something else.
But they didn't claim revelation from a supernatural being and
they didn't
demand faith as the basis of morality.
They did. For example, the rejection of Mendelian genetics and the
insistence on Lamarkism for purely ideological reasons in the USSR.
Marxism-Leninism was based on a belief in a specific type of social
engineering, the idea that you could gradually improve society by
changing the way people act and then wait for these behaviour to be
transmitted and accumulated across generations. Scientific theories
that implied that you cannot transmit characteristics that you
acquired after birth through purely biological processes was
verboten,
and overwhelming scientific evidence resisted (just like the
creationists do).
You make my point. They had scientific rational reasons they put
forth for their policies. It was wrong science and it was enforced
by violence (as other religions have done) - but it wasn't an appeal
to supernatural revelation and faith.
But that is exactly what the dogmatic christians says, except for one
book, where the mystic encourages the person reflexion and the
personal experience. You are the one making such capitaulation of
tought and research possible. You categorize a entier inquiry by
stupid because the last theories were imposed by violence. It would be
better to criticize the violence, and to stay serious on the theories,
and here I mean those behind the legend of course.
The greek origianl question what not does god exist or not, because
for them god is what exists by definition. The question was: does the
physical universe exists of is it the shadow of a more fundamental
reality (at a time they got the Pythagoras theory in mind).
Then they built monuments to science and progress, made to inspire
awe
and fear, just like cathedrals. An example is the Fernsehturm in
Berlin, made to resemble the Sputnik and the be seen from afar. It
was
also a powerful TV signal transmitter, in an attempt to silence the
dangerous transmissions from the west. People who like facts and
reason are not afraid of debate. They don't try to silence the
opposition.
They also don't use words to obfuscate meaning.
A funny story about the Fernsehturm is that, when the sun is shining,
the reflection on the big ball on top looks like a christian cross.
People called it "the Pope's Revenge". Intuitively, everyone knew
this
was a battle of religions.
They made arguments for their
position, which implies that they recognized the importance of
facts and
reason
So did the nazis. But then they also had concentration camps. The
USSR
had goulags, the KGB and the Stasi.
They cared about facts only to the degree that they agreed with their
preconceived notions. Just like the religious extremists.
I always find in this type of discussion that there is a tendency to
want to pretend that certain (big) things did not happen. They did,
and there are lessons to be learned from them.
- even though they lied about what they were. It is only theism
which says, "It's a mystery. You must accept God on faith."
The problem with atheism is that it knows no nuance. Yes, it is
stupid
to demand god or anything else to be accepted on faith, but it is
also
stupid to pretend that there is no mystery.
I don't know any atheist who pretends that. It's certainly not an
attribute of atheism per se.
The gnostic atheists behave like there is no mystery and question for
them. My inquires were obstructed by them much before I use the term
"theology". For them even "conscicence", "mind" and even
"quantum" (God knows why?) was taboo. For them philosophy is an
invention to provide job to people who cannot reason, by their own
definition. They work in a non transparent way, and some academies are
infected. It *is* a form of religious radicalism, disguised in
rational talk, but unable to dialog.
Science and atheism are different things. The first is a method of
inquiry, the second is a belief system (which is not coherent,
because
the thing that it opposes is also not coherent).
Sure they are different. But, no, atheism is not a belief system.
It's no
more a belief system than failing to believe there are fairies in
the garden
is a belief system. Atheism is failure to believe in a certain
class gods:
Supernatural eternal beings who created the universe and who judge
human
behavior. I partly agree with Sam Harris when he say "atheism" is
an
unnecessary word; we don't have a word, "a-fairiest", for those
who don't
believe in fairies, or "a-yetist" for those who don't believe in
yetis. But
only partly, because theism is (a) common and (b) demands faith
(absolute
belief independent of evidence); which is different from belief in
fairies
and yetis. Even the advocates of fairies and yetis don't say you
should
believe in them by faith.
I agree with Sam Harris on this also (and many other things, but not
all!). I enjoy listening to his podcast.
You are accepting the theists framing of atheism as an absolute
belief that
there is no god of theism. But that's wrong. Atheism is just
saying that
based on the evidence theism is no more likely true than fairies
in the
garden or yetis in the Himalaya's.
Then why do people feel the need to crate the word "agnostic"?
I think it's a cop out to avoid the question of whether the God of
theism exists. Agnostics were originally people who were not just
uncertain about God, they held that the question was impossible to
know anything about, a-gnostic. So it was not a "nuanced" position
- epistemologically is was an extreme position and so deserved a name.
When Dawkins, who is often castigated as
a radical atheist, was asked, on a scale of 1 to 7 how certain was
he that
there is no God, he said "6". And since you like to credence
original usage
of words over current usage you should know that agnosticism was
originally
just considered a form of atheism - since it implies not believing
in God.
And even deists, like Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine, were
considered
atheists because they didn't believe in the god of theism.
The religious people in my family consider me an atheist. If I
explained all the things that I am discussing in this thread, they
would still consider me an atheist. That's what pure belief does to
nuance.
Yes, I used to tell people I was an agnostic. But the problem was
that they assumed I was just on the fence and undecided about their
God (usually Christian in the U.S.). But I wasn't at all undecided
about Yaweh, any more than I was undecided about Zeus or Baal or
Thor. And although I supposed there could be some god-like being,
e.g. the great programmer in the sky of our simulation, it was a
bare possibility which I estimated to be less likely than finding a
teapot orbiting Jupiter. So I decided it was disingenuous to call
myself an agnostic, and also led to annoying attempts to convert me.
Brent
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