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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
the gigantic fusion furnace that is Sol. The sun will convert to a red giant and expand to the present orbit of Mars. Earth will be incinerated. All life as we know it will cease.
As Stephen Hawking has pointed out, if man does not leave Earth, then we are all doomed. So why does Kauffman need to make life sacred? Can't it just be an interesting, if irrelevant, digression from the overall progression of the Universe into entropy?
Mankind cannot outlast the universe, so in that sense it is "doomed" anyway, without finding some way to transcend our current physical limitations.
Dawkins doesn't have the mental agility for the faith experience. Fine. No one expects him to. But he has plenty of time for a scientist's mental masturbation. It's funny too that such a great rationalist hasn't noticed that religious folk are the ones caring for the poor and defending the oppressed, while rationalists sit on their self satisfied asses.
Ah yes, yet another omniscient statement of fact from fans of omniscience. There's never been a charity on earth that wasn't run by "religious folk," has there? Nobody but god-fearing "folk" go into medicine, or social services, or legal aid, or Doctors Without Borders, or Greenpeace, or AIDS Project Los Angeles, or so many other self-satisfied asses.
Isn't that right?
...you lost me. Honest. I mean, I understood what you said, but I cannot for the life of me make much of a connection between what you said and what I said (which I guess you were replying to). Probably not your fault. I wasn't that coherent my own self, in my original post.
I would probably, were it worth your trouble, refer you to a later post by spoodles, who said what I was thinking much better than I thought what I was saying.
See?
Seriously.
...if you're still following this:
Thank you! I must have been impaired when I posted my initial impressions. You said what I feel, think, whatever, assuming I even exist. Maybe I don't. That's about the most benign thing I can draw from the "How dare you believe something you can't show me?" crowd. Yet I feel, I think, I even, on occasion, bleed. Kinda like Shylock. So I believe I exist, and I don't think I did it myself, nor do I think science created me, although science certainly does a good job of explaining how I happened. So I'm happy about science. As a medic I damn well ought to be. They don't get that.
I think maybe you do.
At any rate, you're really smart and I'm presently in awe. Great job. Sorry to be so late in saying this, but, well, life just keeps getting in my way. Life or whatever that is that keeps making things move and talk and stuff. OK, maybe science got in the way. At any rate you done good. You done real good.
Your argument that without meaning we wouldn't behave...
Is the precise accusation I highlighted that is so common with the religious left. It ignores the relatively low crime rates and rates of violence amongst non-believers in favour of your own faith based worldview, a view I cannot change because the basis to your argument is essentially your feelings and what goes on in "your gut."
If you ever find yourself in the last moment of your existence:
Reach out in the darkness
Reach out in the darkness
Reach out in the darkness
And you may find a friend
-- Friend and Lover
What your original screed was about was "A curse on both their houses" with scientists and religious leaders - ignoring that there is a case to answer.
As to Spoodles:
Spoodles, basically said that if the the universe was meaningless we would all be amoral monsters. That is what Spoodle's crap boils down to.
Which is to say that those of us who do not percieve a specific meaning to the universe, we are all go around eating babies.
And hey, if somebody takes that message and decides to go kill some heathens, well thats just a religious right fundie nutcase.
And you don't see any problem with that do you? The most you will do is claim I am "Building a straw man" while ignoring that this is precisely the product of religion's claims of morality.
All atheism boils down to is a lack of belief, the idea that hey, we don't know but we aren't just going to take the first answer that comes along.
But what do you have in America? You have the religious left telling everyone that atheists can't express wonder, be moral, or care about other people, and the religious right doing the same but with an added little aspect of trying to do something about these horrible atheists - who can't express wonder, be moral, or care about other people.
The essential argument between atheism and religion isn't actually about God. God has suprisingly little to do with it, that is just an argument over the evidence. The essential argument is that the religious don't want to admit that people don't need God to be good people.
That is why you have angry atheists. You sit there comfortably arguing that we are foaming at the mouth fundementalists - meanwhile it is not your humanity that is being denied by these pricks.
Add to that the constant use of circular reasoning and truth by fiat from the religious types.
I've yet to endure a single argument with one of them that, ultimately, was not based on their own religious mythology. i.e. "I'm right because my holy writ says so."
JSwift ("Sounds Familiar...") makes a good point. Value(s) come to life when a creature begins to learn what is good for it (e.g. food) versus what is bad for it (poison). When this happens via natural selection (i.e. those that get it wrong don't get to have offspring), it's hard to say where those values are written down, as it were, except in DNA. When it happens via culture (i.e. through observation, imitation, and then oral and written media), those values are easier to point to and discuss as such. To the extent that values transcend individual moment-to-moment utility and become prudential (i.e. good for the group, and/or life-enhancing over the very long term), they become part of Constitutions as well as our constitution (e.g. the incest taboo, once cultural, now all but instinctual).
What has this to do with God(s) or divinity? Atheist: nothing. Believer: everything: it is the Word that lifts us out of earlier barbarities. Wise observer: both are right, but the believer is more right in the following sense: morals and values, like the commitment to preserve, honor, and promote all forms and instances of life-promoting life, have a supra-individual reality. They are abstract linguistically but real algorithmically, as when we live them out through our actions and so give them (to) the witness of others. Atheists call this "doing good". Believers call this "doing God's will." It's only when you realize that God *is* our doing of good that you can see that both are right, and that their quarrel is over the utility, and advisedness, of personification in the matter of transmission. Says a New Believer (or a New Atheist): moral law is the algorithmic DNA of God; but God is embodied only in and as our doing of good. Extend the metaphor: God is an "application" not in any box or CD, but "running" in your brain, hands, and tongue.
I find interesting that nearly all "old" atheists--and certainly the ones in this forum--proclaim that they don't *need* God (or rather "God"), the implication being that they are strong-minded and believers weak-minded, that they can feel all the fine feelings at nature (awe, wonder, gratitude [though that one's harder], etc.) without, "resorting to" or "falling back" on God. Don't feel much of that? Fine. Living with meaningless is the stuff of manliness. Believers: you are ignorant sissies.
But these attitudes are pretty adolescent, are they not? Fresh from the high-school yard, uninformed except by the most obvious skepticism about figurative language, and aimed at the beliefs of children. I am struck by how little internet atheists (and yes, Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris) have read of modern theology, this while they accuse believers of ignorance of Science. Figurative language is all we've got, science-heads, and that includes you.
And believers: do not for a moment blanket-accuse atheists of Godlessness. Just watch what they do. They may be more Godly than you.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
