Where do atheists get their morals from?

[Barrister]

Moderate christians do not live as if god were real and jesus died for their sins.

This is probably true, but not for the reasons you think.

Did you ever ask yourself, just once, "what if this stuff is allegory", when reading the Bible?

[Razgovory]

Again the "atheism is just another religion" fallacy. To keep it at the silly level "atheism is to religion what baldness is to hair color" and "atheism is a religion like non-stamp collecting is a hobby".

I think it is sad to consider that too much noise here is generated by religiously motivated trolls declaring us crazy.

Good for you, you memorized the stock responses.  Like a Liturgy.  It's not a religion, but inspires the same fanaticism, hatred, dogmatic thinking that the worst religion has to offer.

Fuck you Raz for merely quote mining me and thank you Raz for so amply demonstrating my point.

Was there a part of that post I left out?

you ignore the bit where I said I was going to be silly when you were criticizing me for being silly.

I removed no such part.  So don't accuse me of quote mining.  You are being silly, and I think most people here see it.

[Razgovory]

What else would you call a person who can't respect others because of their religion?

I respect your right to have a religion. That is intimately connected to my right not to have one. I just don't have to respect your beliefs or show you respect when you assert them as true.

The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

this is an assertion that stands and falls on it's own merits and your acceptance of these assertions affects my judgement on your character and if you deserve my respect. You get to believe this tripe and I get to mock you when you do.

No, you don't have to respect me,  but when you insult people over their religion I get to call you a bigot.

[Razgovory]

Moderate christians do not live as if god were real and jesus died for their sins.

This is probably true, but not for the reasons you think.

Did you ever ask yourself, just once, "what if this stuff is allegory", when reading the Bible?

More importantly, he doesn't actually take time to read the context.  Instead he takes a quote from one book about killing gays, but doesn't read the parts in the New Testament that say why people shouldn't do that.  That's not fundamentalism, that's just being lazy and ignorant.

[Viking]

I think I speak for everyone when I say I'm glad you have chosen a point of view that leads you to merely wax tediously on the Internet, rather than one which requires you to engage in murderous sprees. 

+1 on that. Plus Beer, Bacon and Cheeseburgers are three of my favorite things.

But here's the sticking point: not everyone believes in the same way, nor is every belief interchangable in content. For example, take Judaism. It is fundamental to Judaism that the written law of the Torah is explained and supplemented by the oral law. This is what the most hardcore believing Jews believe, and it introduces questioning and debate right into the centre of the faith. The premises of Judaism may be screwy, but a Jew who goes out and kills people who don't believe as he does is simply wrong, within the context of the faith.

I agree. Not everybody believes the same way. I'd like to ask you how the jews know that the written law of the Torah is explained and supplemented? You description of Jewish law is a perfect match of natural morality as I described it in the OP. The book says kill gays, kill apostates and kill people working on the sabbath and yet your legal tradition ignores that bit. How do these scholars know that when god said kill he really meant not kill?

I think this illustrates my point from the OP and my point on fundamentalism very well. How can you if you honestly believe that the Torah is gods law that when god say kill jews who eat lobsters that you should not kill jews who eat lobsters? If you really believe this then how can you not kill jews who eat lobsters? I realize that even Siegy manages to not gun down people at Red Lobster, he might actually like prawns for all I know. Most people do inject their own morals and values when considering if surf and turf deserves the death penalty, that is the central point of the OP.

My fundamentalism point is that you can't ignore the book unless you redefine god in your own head as you like him to be or you don't believe and merely participate in your culture's activity.

[Viking]

Moderate christians do not live as if god were real and jesus died for their sins.

This is probably true, but not for the reasons you think.

Did you ever ask yourself, just once, "what if this stuff is allegory", when reading the Bible?

Yes. And I always immediately ask myself "how do I know if this stuff is allegory".


Why have you not told me if you thought that you BS on pregnancy was relevant?

[crazy canuck]

I dont know Malthus.  Viking reminded you of a Hott chick you wanted to bang as a 17 year old?

[Viking]

I dont know Malthus.  Viking reminded you of a Hott chick you wanted to bang as a 17 year old?

No, my way of thinking reminded him of the hott crazy woman with the crazy ideas all of us tried to agree with to try to get into her pants.

My life was different. I didn't fail to impress the hott crazy woman. I turned off the hott crazy woman throwing herself at me by trying to argue her out of her crazy ideas.

[The Minsky Moment]

Fair enough. If you don't know you don't know. I suggest we do have methodologies to answer these questions

Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will

may be a good place to start on the FMRI free will vs determinism. The consequences on monism vs dualism are quite profound. These experiments really did shake up my worldview.

We've alluded to these experiments already, but they don't seem to do what you think they do.
The Libet experiments didn't really advance the ball because to interpret them as having implications for free will requires making the (unwarranted) assumption that the measured brain activity corresponds to a "decision."

Buridan's ass paradox suggests that the brain must have some mechanism for quickly making choices as between arbitrary options.  One plausible mechanism would be that the brain is constructed in such a way that it generates pre-decisional provisional responses, which are then reviewed by a subseqent decisional process if the decisional function determines that the matter is essentially arbitrary, then it just lets the provisional response go through.

If this account were true and we had the ability to view the brain activity pre-decisional provisional response, then one would expect that with respect to truly arbitrary decisions, one would be able to predict the ultimate result in advance with near perfect accuracy, but that accuracy might decline to the extent the decision in question is less arbitrary.  The Haynes experiment is pretty surprising, not for the reasons you claim, but because the decision whether to pick a left or right button is so arbitrary one would expect 100% accuracy, but in fact Haynes was wrong almost 40% of the time.  That would suggest (under the assumption that this decisional audit/review model is correct) that very little substantive decisional content is required to render the neuroscientists unable to predict what the subject will do.

I can't see how if lex parsimony makes a full soul superfluous that it also doesn't make a partial soul or marginal soul equally superfluous.

That's true.
But it doesn't reject an account that does not posit the existence of a separate mind-as-substance, but does claim that mental experience can't be reduced to physical, electro-chemical brain impulses.

[The Minsky Moment]

You just made a deepity.

Never heard of this, but based on the definition, I did the opposite.

If you are going to insist that there is a fundamental level below the physical I'm going to have to ask you if you were honest when you claimed philosophical agnosticism on materialism and determinism, because right now it looks like you're not.

When you use the word "fundamental level" you are making no sense and you are certainly not defining your terms.

I thought I was being pretty clear - that a question raised about the subjective perception of a personal experience can't be answered by pointing to a physical mechanism. 

With regard to subjective experiences they are only truth claims of the experience, not of the truth of the content of the experience.

Exactly so.
And there is no reason to dispute the truth claims of the experience.

What is left then is to claim that despite the fact people are telling the truth about their experiences, that such people are systematically misperceiving those experiences wrongfully ascribing content to them that doesn't actually exists.   That is a rather awkward claim to make for a person who also claims to such strong views that human behavior is driven by evolution - why would evolution select over time people who are prone to such enormous and catastrophic errors in mapping their experiences to reality.  But even putting that aside, you are still left with the problem with refuting that the objective content of their experiences is true even where the subjective description is accurate, and you have yet to advance the criteria for doing that or the basis for the that conclusion.

[HVC]

Oh, boy the atheist brigade is out in force today.

Hey, not all of us are militant

hey, you started this by declaring me militant without reading my post.

what do you mean by militant. Define your terms.

no, i called you anti-religious, or at least your stated views

My definition of a militant is basically like a fundi, but term fundi doesn't really work for athiest. A "i'm right and your wrong and or stupid for your belief" type of atheist view. Personally i don't care what someone believes. it's their right to belive it and not my right to diminish their belief. Beliefs only become an issue to me when someone tries to force their views onto others.

[Malthus]

I dont know Malthus.  Viking reminded you of a Hott chick you wanted to bang as a 17 year old?

No, my way of thinking reminded him of the hott crazy woman with the crazy ideas all of us tried to agree with to try to get into her pants.

My life was different. I didn't fail to impress the hott crazy woman. I turned off the hott crazy woman throwing herself at me by trying to argue her out of her crazy ideas.

I didn't fail to impress her - I failed to keep up the necessary pretense of being interested in her particular line of bull. I just couldn't do it long enough. 

[Malthus]

I agree. Not everybody believes the same way. I'd like to ask you how the jews know that the written law of the Torah is explained and supplemented? You description of Jewish law is a perfect match of natural morality as I described it in the OP. The book says kill gays, kill apostates and kill people working on the sabbath and yet your legal tradition ignores that bit. How do these scholars know that when god said kill he really meant not kill?

I think this illustrates my point from the OP and my point on fundamentalism very well. How can you if you honestly believe that the Torah is gods law that when god say kill jews who eat lobsters that you should not kill jews who eat lobsters? If you really believe this then how can you not kill jews who eat lobsters? I realize that even Siegy manages to not gun down people at Red Lobster, he might actually like prawns for all I know. Most people do inject their own morals and values when considering if surf and turf deserves the death penalty, that is the central point of the OP.

My fundamentalism point is that you can't ignore the book unless you redefine god in your own head as you like him to be or you don't believe and merely participate in your culture's activity.

You know the oral law expands on the written law the same way you know that the written law is significant. 

Why are books so important to you? People generally do not worship the book itself. It is merely one way in which god's mysterious will is allegedly revealed. Another way is through the oral law. This isn't some modern injection of secular morality, the oral law has been around for at least a couple of thousand years if not longer.

[HVC]

She obviously wasn't hot enough

[Malthus]

She obviously wasn't hot enough

You forget I was 17. Any amount of hotness was hot enough at that age. 

But pretending an interest in Trotskyism for more than a couple of meetings, I could not do, not to save my life, let alone get laid (events of appoximately equal significance at 17  ).