The Paris Attack Debate Thread

[Razgovory]

Really, the one can't have a meaningful life, a morality system without religion?

Define "meaningful".

You can choose to give your live meaning.

That's not really a definition, it's still subjective, and it is questionable if you even can do this.  From a materialist stand point the concept of "choose" may be itself meaningless.  You don't really "want" to do thing things you "love" because "want" and "love" may not have any meaning.  These words may simply be inaccurate folk descriptions of chemical reactions.  We lack the words to properly describe what is happening just as the Aztecs lacked the vocabulary to describe quantum physics.  So instead of saying something like "I give my life meaning through charity" it is perhaps more accurately understood as, "I continually engage in "w" activity because it triggers x, y, and z brain activities."  This might strike you as absurd, but seems like the logical end point of materialism.

[The Brain]

[DGuller]

Incidentally, there are 10 countries in the world that penalise homosexuality with death penalty. Every single of them is Muslim.

This is what we should focus on when discussing the merits of Islam as a religion, not proclivity towards terrorism.  For whatever reason, Muslim countries seem far more prone towards using religion as a basis for their laws.  So even if the Bible and Koran contain equal amounts of fucked up shit, the fact that Muslims codify it in legal code while Christians may lip service to it or effectively renounce it is a very significant and relevant difference.

[The Brain]

Incidentally, there are 10 countries in the world that penalise homosexuality with death penalty. Every single of them is Muslim.

Their parents were mean to them.

[DGuller]

Why were you lucky to not be taught this?  Are you so deep in your position that you can't see any benefit of thinking otherwise?

I can see the benefits of thinking in both ways, precisely because I wasn't brainwashed at the age when I couldn't think for myself.  I generally don't subscribe to the notion that fooling oneself is a long-term winning strategy.  Try to be objective about everything, your mind will get used to it, and you'll be making decisions based on the best information.

It's funny because what say about me I've seen from your eastern European crowd time and time again.  Those clever American leaders, scientists and politicians who claim to have a religious spark must be secretly atheist, because what right thinking person wouldn't be? 

They are disproportionally atheist, though.  Why not 100% of them?  I don't know.  How in the world could Ben Carson know so much about brain surgery and think so little about anything else in his life?

Personally I don't see any much benefit in the materialist worldview.  It is nihilist and eventually anti-humanist.  Your life and everything you ever do is pointless.  There is nothing objectively positive, all things are subjective.  That we don't mutilate a baby girls genitals has nothing to do with whether it is right or wrong, it is just happenstance that we are born to a culture that does not.  We see it as wrong, if we were born in a culture that thought it was right for whatever reason then it would be right.  Right and wrong are simply the consensus view point.  Your life is worthless.  You are simply an ephemeral chemical reaction occupying a tiny speck of the universe.  There is no real difference between you and a gnat.  All our culture, science and accomplishments are the work of gnats trying  to impress other gnats.  You will die and be totally obliterated.  In 20 years old a few people will be able to even remember you.  In 100 no one will.  In a million human kind will likely be extinct so not even any genes you pass on will exist.  Hell, you may not even have a mind.  Or mental states.  They may be just as fictional as God.

Yeah, most of this is true.  I will quibble about morality, I'm not sure about how different what you described for atheist is for religious people.  Different religions teach you sometimes radically different absolute truths, so how are you any better in that regard when it comes to the luck of place of birth?

[mongers]

Really, the one can't have a meaningful life, a morality system without religion?

Define "meaningful".

You can choose to give your life meaning.

That's not really a definition, it's still subjective, and it is questionable if you even can do this.  From a materialist stand point the concept of "choose" may be itself meaningless.  You don't really "want" to do thing things you "love" because "want" and "love" may not have any meaning.  These words may simply be inaccurate folk descriptions of chemical reactions.  We lack the words to properly describe what is happening just as the Aztecs lacked the vocabulary to describe quantum physics.  So instead of saying something like "I give my life meaning through charity" it is perhaps more accurately understood as, "I continually engage in "w" activity because it triggers x, y, and z brain activities."  This might strike you as absurd, but seems like the logical end point of materialism.

It wasn't meant as a definition.

My point was yourself can choose to find meaning in life without necessarily needing to refer to any external definition, be it a god or any other elaborately worked out theory about how humans operate or should behave. 

My advice people, spend more time in the outside world, there less opportunity to fixate on what X or Y might be causing Z or me to do, think or feel. Often the environment you find yourself in causes you to do things or experience things which aren't solely or even largely the product of an interior life.   

[LaCroix]

This is what we should focus on when discussing the merits of Islam as a religion, not proclivity towards terrorism.  For whatever reason, Muslim countries seem far more prone towards using religion as a basis for their laws.  So even if the Bible and Koran contain equal amounts of fucked up shit, the fact that Muslims codify it in legal code while Christians may lip service to it or effectively renounce it is a very significant and relevant difference.

For whatever reason

what if the reason is culture and not religion? some backward cultures really hate gays and have anti-gay laws:



and when some of these backward cultures are controlled by certain religious extremists, you get death penalty for gays:

Mauritania, Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen (countries where death penalty is actually implemented across the nation rather than simply existing on the books)

seems to be less about religion and more about backwater countries. there are tons of backwater ideas littered throughout every religion that more civilized cultures have rejected. less civilized cultures have yet to reject those backwater ideas. what a surprise

[Eddie Teach]

Iran is pretty advanced compared to the rest of those countries and it is actually ruled by religious figures.

[LaCroix]

Iran is pretty advanced compared to the rest of those countries and it is actually ruled by religious figures.

it's ruled by religious extremists, isn't it?

[Jacob]

I don't blame your typical Muslim for ISIS.  I do, however, think it's fair to blame them for raising their children in a belief system that has a non-trivial chance of leading them to terrorism.

Okay, so if I understand your position correctly you hold that:

1) There's something about Islam as a religion that make it especially prone to violence, compared to other religions or ideologies people may subscribe to.

2) It is fair to blame average Muslims for raising their children in a belief system that has a non-trivial chance of leading them to terrorism.

What do we do with that?

If we accept that Islam is inherently more prone to violence, where do we go from there? Are there actions and policies that we should take and implement as a result of accepting that as a fact? What do we do differently once we've agreed that Muslims are inherently more violent due to their faith?

One thing you've said is that it's fair to blame Muslims for raising their children in a belief system that has a non-trivial chance of leading them to terrorism. What does blaming them mean? Are we talking about thinking or saying "you jerks, look how your child has grown up to be a terrorist - you would have raised him as a 7th Day Adventist or an Atheist or neo-Pagan if you'd been responsible parents" and leaving it at that? Do we look askance at people raising their children as Muslims the same way we look at people who have the wrong (in our view) opinion on other parenting issues? Or do we attach some sort of legal sanction to that blame which we can fairly assign?

Basically, are there any further conclusions we can get to from agreeing that Muslims are inherently violent and they are to blame for raising their children as Muslims if those children become terrorists one day? Or do we just leave it at "yeah, we agree on those facts, but we are drawing no conclusions from them"?

If grumbler or Berkut read this I'm curious about their take on that too. I've read your guys positions as being that there is some sort of inherent proneness to violence in Islam that is absent from other religions and ideologies (or at least most of them). Once we agree on that, where do we go from there? Are there any new conclusions we can draw or actions we ought to take as a result of determining that Muslims are more prone to violence than others?

[Admiral Yi]

What do we do with that?

I don't know.  No response that I can think of is a pleasant one.  But that isn't a reason to pretend something isn't true.

[Admiral Yi]

what if the reason is culture and not religion? some backward cultures really hate gays and have anti-gay laws:

What if the reason those backwaters have backward cultures is religion?

[LaCroix]

What if the reason those backwaters have backward cultures is religion?

because culture shapes religion, not the other way around.

hundreds of years ago, western countries were backwater nations from today's perspective. those backwater countries were christian, and they had backward cultures that promoted abhorrent things. as those christian backwater countries began civilizing, the culture changed from backward to progressive(!) and so the totally abhorrent things stopped.* islam differs from christianity because, by and large, islamic nations suffered under imperialism for a long time, which has kept the islamic nations pretty backwater.

for the argument "or they got rid of christianity," first - christianity is very prevalent in europe despite what languish posters say. second, look at other western christian nations, like the US.

[Berkut]

...and here we arrive at the crux of the matter. It is all the fault of the West, of course.

[Razgovory]

Why were you lucky to not be taught this?  Are you so deep in your position that you can't see any benefit of thinking otherwise?

I can see the benefits of thinking in both ways, precisely because I wasn't brainwashed at the age when I couldn't think for myself.  I generally don't subscribe to the notion that fooling oneself is a long-term winning strategy.  Try to be objective about everything, your mind will get used to it, and you'll be making decisions based on the best information.

It's funny because what say about me I've seen from your eastern European crowd time and time again.  Those clever American leaders, scientists and politicians who claim to have a religious spark must be secretly atheist, because what right thinking person wouldn't be? 

They are disproportionally atheist, though.  Why not 100% of them?  I don't know.  How in the world could Ben Carson know so much about brain surgery and think so little about anything else in his life?

Personally I don't see any much benefit in the materialist worldview.  It is nihilist and eventually anti-humanist.  Your life and everything you ever do is pointless.  There is nothing objectively positive, all things are subjective.  That we don't mutilate a baby girls genitals has nothing to do with whether it is right or wrong, it is just happenstance that we are born to a culture that does not.  We see it as wrong, if we were born in a culture that thought it was right for whatever reason then it would be right.  Right and wrong are simply the consensus view point.  Your life is worthless.  You are simply an ephemeral chemical reaction occupying a tiny speck of the universe.  There is no real difference between you and a gnat.  All our culture, science and accomplishments are the work of gnats trying  to impress other gnats.  You will die and be totally obliterated.  In 20 years old a few people will be able to even remember you.  In 100 no one will.  In a million human kind will likely be extinct so not even any genes you pass on will exist.  Hell, you may not even have a mind.  Or mental states.  They may be just as fictional as God.

Yeah, most of this is true.  I will quibble about morality, I'm not sure about how different what you described for atheist is for religious people.  Different religions teach you sometimes radically different absolute truths, so how are you any better in that regard when it comes to the luck of place of birth?

Okay, just for you, I'm going to reveal the big secret.  I don't believe in God.  Well not completely.  I want to, but I find it extremely difficult.  When I argue about religion I'm arguing with myself just as much as any of you.  The idea that we won't be obliterated, that there are objective rules even if they are strict and strange, the idea our choices have meaning, that we are part of something, I want to believe this.  But I am beset by doubt. I doubt everything.  I doubt myself, I doubt God, I doubt that I'm even the same person in the morning as I was in the evening.  There are times I think to myself if there is a God, would I really want to meet it?  Doing anything for eternity is also terrifying.  And there in lies the source of madness.  The doubt and fear that has crushed me for 20 years.  You talk to me of Cognitive Dissonance, but I know first hand the cognitive dissonance  of those who reject religion.  They must have it or they would be all crazy.  You can't just wake every morning and look at the waiting void, that at any time you go from here to irreversibly destroyed.  You have to drive it to the back of your mind, something I can't do.  The superiority of a philosophy that requires you don't examine it too carefully without becoming depressed seems pretty flawed.

I hate the doubt, but I also dislike Atheism.  The smug elitism, the pretentiousness, when some arrogant clod lectures me on Darwinism and gets it fundamentally wrong.  When some idiot says that smart religious people have to be lying because atheist is what smart people are.  I dislike the illiberalism of it, I dislike when some pompous atheist fail to understand not only where religious ideas come from but the history of their own ideas.  When an Atheist values the work of Charles Darwin not for it's scientific value but as a fetish to drive away religion.  When they cherry pick religious scripture, quote antiquated sociological theories, or can't internalize basic facts like when the fucking Iron age is.

So yeah, I have a aversion to Atheism.  When some smug asshole comes to me talking about "Mind viruses" or other such nonsense, I want to shove their face into the Abyss and say, "Look!  Look at the emptiness of your future!  Look at the futility!  Look how meaningless all your cleverness is!  I want you to see how the smartest dead man on earth is equal to a dead cockroach.  I want you to keep it in the front of your mind for weeks, months with no reprieve. I want you to understand what you say, I want it always be there ready to come unbidden into your mind, I want it to drag on you for the rest of your life and no amount of drugs or distraction or cognitive dissonance will make it go away.".