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Author Topic:   Underlying Philosophy
Otto Tellick
Member (Idle past 2331 days)
Posts: 288
From: PA, USA
Joined: 02-17-2008


Message 151 of 577 (555532)
04-14-2010 4:35 AM
Reply to: Message 136 by sac51495
04-13-2010 8:59 AM


Re: Simple starting points
sac51495 writes:
Let me rephrase the question.
1. - Did you (or anybody on this forum) assume from the outset that there was no god, and then based on that assumption, you interpreted the world around you? or...
2. - Did you, from a neutral standpoint, interpret everything you saw around you, and thereby came to the conclusion that a God
was impossible (or inadequate)?
There is actually a third alternative, which is (in my own view, at least) considerably more relevant and appropriate for understanding atheism:
3. - Having seen the many varied, inconsistent and incompatible assertions that have been put forth as describing the "true" nature and will of God, I find, from a neutral standpoint, it is far more plausible and likely that none of those assertions about God can be correct, and far less plausible or likely that any one such assertion can be correct. (And in any case, of course, there really is no objective basis for assessing one to be more or less correct than another.)
My point of view is soundly reinforced for me whenever people try to deny or refute solid empirical evidence, purely because the evidence contradicts some assertions that they derive from their own reading of the bible (or any religious text). I notice that other people, who consider themselves religious, derive different meanings from the same text, such that they do not find it necessary to deny or refute results drawn from careful and repeated observation, but this still doesn't do much to reduce the inconsistencies in their respective assertions about God.
My point of view is reinforced every time people decide to kill on the basis of their religious beliefs, every time they cite the bible or the koran to justify injustice and intolerance, every time they lie or misrepresent facts in order to promulgate their dogma, because these actions subvert and nullify any claim of "moral authority" for whichever religion is thus misused or abused.
And the problem is not just the irreconcilable differences separating the countless sectarian factions within the Abrahamic religions. It's also, equally, the self-contradictions, the internal inconsistencies, and the overall incoherence within any single doctrinal "system": the notion that God is (to us) an utterly non-material "entity" that controls material things; the notion that you can "know God personally" but God is unknowable; the notion that God loves all his creation and condemns many souls to eternal damnation and torture; the nonsensical notion of supplication through prayer to an omniscient / omnipotent / omni-everything deity, who responds to prayer in exactly the same way that "Lady Luck" responds to the supplications of a compulsive gambler. (My favorite "news item" headline from The Onion: "God Answers Prayers Of Paralyzed Little Boy: 'No', Says God".)
Those are just the obvious (perhaps trivial) oxymorons we find in our daily exposure to religion. The more subtle and insidious incoherence rests in the propensity among supporters of religion to use terms and invoke concepts that defy clear or substantive definitions. The acceptance of religious faith is in large part the acceptance of assertions whose meaning is comparable to Lewis Carroll's "Jaberwocky".
Considering the position you are arguing from, sac, I suspect that my position is incomprehensible to you. Maybe you'll want to respond (for example) that the huge assortment of Christian sects do not differ so much from one another. (I've gotten that response from others.) If so, then my question is: how many different denominational churches do you attend on a regular basis? Do you personally partake equally in Roman Catholic, Greek/Russian Orthodox, Baptist, Seventh Day Adventist, Mormon, Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentacostal, Lutheran, Methodist, and Anglican/Episcopal congregations? If not, why not?
When you look at any one of the churches you don't go to, and determine what it is about them that you disagree with, take the next step of putting yourself in their position, looking back at the church you go to, and try to see what there is in your church that they disagree with. Then see whether you can imagine yourself as an outsider to both churches (e.g. coming from yet another church), to notice how they both have things "wrong" with them.
Carry that to its logical conclusion, and you have atheism. Indeed, atheism (as many have said) is just like monotheism, but extending disbelief to include just one more deity/religion.
{AbE: On further reflection, I can see that my alternative #3 is really just an extension or clarification of sac's #2. But there's an important distinction -- as I learned during past discussions with RAZD -- between concluding that "God is impossible" and concluding that "positive assertions made by humans about God are likely to be incorrect." I recognize that the former is unmotivated and generally unsupportable, but I hold firmly to the validity of the latter.}
Edited by Otto Tellick, : spelling correction
Edited by Otto Tellick, : (added last paragraph, as indicated)
Edited by Otto Tellick, : in last paragraph, used "incorrect" in preference to "false"

autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 136 by sac51495, posted 04-13-2010 8:59 AM sac51495 has not replied

Otto Tellick
Member (Idle past 2331 days)
Posts: 288
From: PA, USA
Joined: 02-17-2008


Message 529 of 577 (570313)
07-27-2010 1:30 AM
Reply to: Message 525 by sac51495
07-26-2010 9:57 PM


Re: Backtracking
Well, sac, there certainly has been a lot of distance covered since I last poked into this thread... though it seems a lot of time has been spent going in circles. I'd like to make sure I understand this point you're trying to make:
sac51495 writes:
So once again, the wager that I have made, and will now make again, is that you can make absolutely no epistemological claim that is entirely neutral.
Neutral with respect to what? Theism vs. atheism? Are you saying that in order for me to postulate any piece of knowledge whatsoever, I must couch it as being dependent on the presence or absence of a god? Well, if you insist that I handle my knowledge this way, I'll simply tell you that nothing that I know depends in any way on the presence of a god.
Now, if I'm understanding your point correctly, I expect you might be inclined to extrapolate, and suggest that everything I know is somehow dependent on the absence of any god. (But maybe I'm not understanding your point?) That strikes me as inappropriate.
In my own awareness, any notion of a "god" is a purely abstract product of human thoughts, imagination and hallucination, constructed under conditions of severely limited knowledge and understanding. To say that any and every piece of actual, useful knowledge I've acquired is dependent on this awareness about the term "god" is patently ridiculous, because I was able to acquire quite a bit of knowledge before knowing anything at all about the term "god" (and this knowledge is still useful to me). The "epistomological basis" for this knowledge is experiential, and it is validated through social interaction between myself and other humans, many of whom have comparable or equivalent experience.
It is of course the use of human language that establishes this inter-subjective validation of experience. It is the ability to create and manipulate symbols, expressed as acoustic patterns, that allows the sharing of experience and knowledge, particularly when the primary stimili are not physically present. It's interesting to note that other primates (e.g. vervet monkeys), when observed carefully in their natural habitat, have demonstrated an unambiguous use of acoustic signals to refer to specific things -- particularly one or another type of predator.
Here's a video giving a good description that clarifies the importance of this observation. The value of such behavior for survivability should be obvious.
And of course, in the case of humans, the system of symbols has grown to include not just "things", but distinct attributes of things (size, color, animate-vs-inanimate, etc), relationships among things, changes and events that happen to things, and actions performed by animate (or seemingly animate) things. Not surprisingly (for an intrinsically social species), much of the system's most elaborate and discerning resources are focused on humans, their attributes, relationships, the changes and events that affect them, and the actions they perform.
Most crucially, the system has incorporated the concept of negation, providing the ability to refer to things, attributes, actions, etc, in terms of what they are not. Other important embellishments include the ability to express questions, to express time in terms of past, present and future, and to express the subtleties of hypotheticals and conditionals. Add to this the fairly recent invention of visible symbols to represent the acoustic ones, so that any utterance at all can be recorded and called back much later with fairly high accuracy, and you have a remarkably powerful tool for sharing, validating, and preserving the knowledge gained through personal experience.
Now, one of the big problems that come up with this powerful tool is the situation where its expressive capacity exceeds the available knowledge. Questions can be posed that cannot be answered on any sort of experiential basis, and assertions can be stated that bear no relation to (and have no foundation in) experience. This is where issues of metaphysics insinuate themselves into human awareness. IMO, these issues are the chimerical playthings of thinkers with too much free time on their hands. Note that I'm definitely not talking here about "all abstract stuff": things like logic and mathematics are not metaphysical, because they derive directly from and are consistent with experience; emotions aren't even abstract, let alone metaphysical.
To me, "metaphysical" refers specifically to things whose "definitions" are ultimately nothing more than oxymorons and negations of experience-based things. The Abrahamic god himself is just the most blatant example: "existing before time began", "unknowable", "non-material", and on and on, with no positively experiential attribute whatsoever. My wager is you cannot prove otherwise. Frankly, I don't think there's any reason you should even try.
And what about morality?
If society is the determiner of good, then is infanticide, widow immolation, community suicide, and child harassment right in such a society? Or might it still be wrong?
If a society endorses behavior that is intrinsically destructive to society (by way of killing off the living/breathing members of the society), it will be operating at a distinct disadvantage in terms of survivability, relative to societies that don't do this. It's a simple entailment of natural selection that when a society adopts behaviors that improve the overall communal chances for survival and expansion, it will be more likely to survive and expand. Killing able, viable members for no good reason works against this. (How about killing for good reasons? It happens all the time, regardless of choice or presence/absence of religious belief. And it's always debatable -- can't ever be sure that killing someone for cause actually makes things better rather than worse, and that's why many people, atheists and theists alike, advocate against the death penalty.)
There's a very good book by Robert Wright called "Non-Zero" (here's a wikipedia article about it), which explains cultural evolution in terms of game theory -- particularly the interplay between "zero-sum games" (in order for one to win, another must lose) and "non-zero-sum games" (diverse participants elect to act cooperatively toward some common goal -- often against some common enemy or obstacle -- and either succeed or fail together). The tendency for societies to acquire a preference for non-zero-sum interactions is inexorable, because it achieves positive results far more frequently than the alternative. That's not to say that zero-sum "gaming" is doomed to disappear altogether; it's always around as a natural counterpoint -- there's always a struggle between the alternatives. It's really just a matter of maturity vs. childishness, and people tend to occupy all points along that continuum.
... relying solely on personal experience and reasoning in the hope of determining truth, and in the hope of finding some meaning to life, is, ultimately, hopeless. Apart from God, man's reasoning and experience has no real merit.
Damn, what a pathetically dismal point of view! I honestly pity you. You're enslaved in a prison of negative self-esteem, foisted on you by a misguided (and clearly erroneous) interpretation of utterances that were committed to writing thousands of years ago by people, and for people, whose experiences, thoughts, and concerns would bear very little relevance to yours, except for the fact that you have somehow been convinced that they should control you.
Maybe it can keep you from getting run over by a car, but does this really matter?
The purpose of life is to live, to grow, to expand, to diversify, to foster and support more life, to increase awareness, to broaden capabilities, to overcome adversity, to discover and create order within chaos, and perhaps even to transcend (whatever that might mean); having come into existence (by whatever means), life now constitutes and carries within itself its own reason for being. It makes itself matter.
If you have some notion of a deity that serves as a proxy to impose purpose on your life, and you find that your purpose is to promote life, then that's fine, and the rest of us will be grateful for your participation. Alas, there are some theists who see it as their God-imposed duty to squelch life, promote ignorance, create adversity, destroy, kill, etc. If these people can't be cured of their mental illness, the least we can do is make them powerless. Acknowledging that religious beliefs of that nature are an illness is an essential step.

autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 525 by sac51495, posted 07-26-2010 9:57 PM sac51495 has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 539 by sac51495, posted 08-01-2010 12:08 AM Otto Tellick has not replied

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