
Learning a buncha shit from The God Delusion. I love it.
First of all, you guys should read Judges 19:22-29. It's some fucked up shit, right out of the fucking Bible...
Dawkins pointed it out, it's basically about this guy who remains unnamed, traveling around with his concubine, basically fuck-buddy.
And so they stop at this guy's house, and he welcomes them in, and they have a ball and a buncha fun.
But then, very reminiscent of good old Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah, the men from the town show up at the guys house, and they want to fuck his male guest basically, hell if I know why.
But the master of the house basically says "Hey, guys. No. Don't do this. In case you're disappointed, here, here's my virgin daughter, and this guy's concubine." Then he literally says Let me bring them out now. Ravish them and do with them what seems good to you, but against this man do not do so vile a thing.
So, it seems like this guy has no problem with throwing out this other guy's fuck pal, and his own virgin daughter out to be gang-raped, but not his male guest, who is, after all, male.
So, the guys outside don't want his daughter and the other guy's concubine, but he throws the concubine out anyway, and they gang-rape her all night long, until dawn, when she staggers and collapses on the doorstep of the house.
When her master guy opens the door on his way back home, he sees her lying there on the ground, and says "Get up, let us be going", yeah, she's only been gang raped all night, what the fuck is she thinking holding you up?
But it turns out she's dead, so he ties her up on his donkey, and when he gets back to his house, He fucking takes out a knife and cuts her into twelve pieces and sends them throughout Israel.
That story, it just makes no fucking sense to me... Why did he fucking cut her up? And why is the master of the house not at all concerned at the thought of his virgin daughter being gang raped all night, but he can't have his male guest be had?
It makes no sense...
Now, I guess everyone knows the Old Testament is weird, but Jesus...
That's like something I would think up, and I'm the most perverted guy I know...
Anyway, there was once this Youtube video I saw, and I didn't know how to explain it... So, basically, it was this old guy who said this: So, we have discovered that the bacteria, the species with the fewest possible genes, has about 220 genes. The scientists though this was great, they'd start with this species, and work back until they got to a dozen or less. But they ran into a problem, at about 180 genes, you can no longer have fewer genes and maintain life. So, how is it likely that 180 genes just formed and came to form life? Evolution itself may be sound, but it doesn't explain how life started...
That's a paraphrase, as I don't remember the video exactly, and I can't find it.
Anyway, at the time, while still atheist, I didn't know how to refute that...
But now, from some rational thinking and arguments I've learned from Dawkins' book, I can. I'll do so here.
So, first I'll explain why his theism is inferior rationally, and why atheism is superior in explaining life.
Okay, first, he's postulating that, rather than life forming originally out of 180 genes, an intelligent, thinking being, more complex than the cosmos itself, came into being somehow, I've never heard exactly how from a theologist, but he came into being, and then he created the 180 genes rather than them coming together...
I guess while I'm on the subject I'll refute something else.
First, this video:
Now, this video makes me furious, partly because it's a response to a video by a much smarter, funnier man.
Now, apart from his many obvious logical errors (Human morality has no issues, he points out slavery and Hitler who was an atheist supposedly. You can easily in a second point out the Bible sanctions slavery, and most people who were slavers were religious and got religious justification for it, and you can point out the Inquisition and the Crusades and the persecution of Jews and Galileo to just show some religious moral issues...), he says that atheists say that the universe has always existed.
Well, that's not necessarily true. There are many theories as to where the universe came from...
But it seems logical that either matter has existed forever, or that it somehow came into being from nothing. Even though both of those seem odd to think about, I can't think of anything else, though I'll never stop searching.
But he points out that doesn't make sense without addressing his view, which is that God created everything. Well, okay, where did God come from? Has he existed forever, or somehow came into existence out of nothing?
Or did something create him? And then who created that?
Even though the beginning of the universe seems logically to not make sense in any way in an atheism sense, religion takes a step backward, and also a really stupid one, in saying that an intelligent being more complex than the cosmos created it, and that not only that but he is intimately involved in human affairs, and knows our thoughts and assigns us to heaven or hell...
That makes no fucking sense to postulate, you point out the logical flaws in religion and cover them by making up total shit.
Anyway, continuing in my argument against the guy in the first video, his point makes no more sense than atheism, indeed, less, because he assumes that the more complicated thing came first...
Now, even though life seems unlikely to have arisen, it's possible.
1, it might have happened through a process we still don't understand, I'm always open to that possibility. And we'll always be looking for one, but even if there isn't one or we don't find it, it's possible it happened through chance.
Imagine you have a monkey randomly hacking away at a keyboard. If he's typing totally random letters, if you let him alone for long enough, say, a trillion years, he will eventually type the entire works of Shakespeare in order with no mistakes ever, just by random chance.
Or, a corollary to that is, if you have a hundred billion billion monkeys hacking away, then chances are that in a year or less, by sheer chance one monkey will do it.
That's like the universe creating life. We can see that in our galaxy there's probably about a billion planets. And there's about 100 billion galaxies in the universe.
So that means there's about 100 billion billion planets in the universe. Assume we're off maybe, so we knock off a few zeroes. A billion billion planets.
Assume each of those has one billion billionth of a chance of creating life every year, an almost nonexistent chance. That means, in a billion years, the time it took for our planet to create life, about a billion planets will have created life. Incredible shit. And it seems miraculous, but remember we have to necessarily be on a planet that has created life, we can't be on a planet that didn't create life and be around to say "oh, well too bad it didn't work on our planet"...
Chance can be valid because of the sheer number of planets it has to work with, as well as the sheer amount of time...
Jesus, I just wish I could have a theological debate with someone. But people are generally too passionate about it.
I just want to have a debate where both people are open to change. Hey, who knows, maybe they'll find a proof for God that even when I think about it for a year, I still can't refute? Maybe they'll change my mind. Or maybe, if they're truly open minded, I'll change theirs.
But they probably won't. Polls show that only 1 in 12 children break from their parents religion. Childhood indoctrination, powerful shit, man...
Anyway, I got a bit frantic by the end cause my computer still fucking shuts off at 11, so I need to go.
So g'night Oasies...
Comments
Theological debate
Your arguments would be very strong against young earth creationists, but I don't think theists necessarily have to defend that position.
Maybe there are a lot more of them in America, but I find your characterisation of Christians (and by extension religious people) no better than saying atheists are therefore eugenicists and stalinists.
Of course, you can't possibly believe that. So all I'm saying is, your argument is valid, but Richard Dawkins and you have only refuted one very specific type of theism.
Well...
Dawkins mentioned this in the book, he wanted to dispel reviews before they were written such as "The God Dawkins talks about in his book and doesn't believe in, well I don't believe in it either. I don't believe in a man with a long white beard on a cloud"
And these arguments work for not just young earth but old earth too, just anyone who thinks God created the universe, they show that God is completely unnecessary for the creation of the universe and life, that there's no reason to postulate him, and that science so far doesn't have all the answers to the beginning of the universe or the beginning of life for that matter, but it would be sheer laziness to say "We'll never know, it must have been God".
And I'm not arguing against spiritual religious people that kinda just believe in a nebulous concept kinda like in Eastern religions where it's like "God is the universe, and everything in the universe is God", hell I've been thinking of converting to Hinduism or some such.
And not even really against Deists who believe basically that God created the universe and laws to govern it, then kinda just went off on permanent vacation and we'll never see him again.
I would never want to get rid of spiritualness or meditating or any of those beautiful concepts one could contemplate.
What I'm arguing against is all too common: In general, people that go to church, mosque or synagogue, believe there is a God that listens directly too humans and is intimately involved and caring in their affairs, and who believes they have laws to follow or they go to hell.
And, I really fail to see how I'm characterizing Christians. I mean, far more than half the people I know are Christian, the vast majority of people I know are Christian. I know they're not bad people, and I don't have jack shit problems with them, well, at least not their faith, if they're people I like to hang around with, I will.
I really don't see how ever in this journal I characterized anybody, all I'm trying to do is inspire debate, to say "this is what I believe, if you disagree, I'm listening. Prove it".
I don't dislike Christian, Muslim, Jewish or really any people whatsoever just for their religion, and I'm not against them, and if religion didn't breed intolerance and vitriol for no reason, I wouldn't even bother to try to argue against it, other people's matters of faith are of no consequence to me.
But religion undoubtedly does on a daily basis foster close-mindedness, intolerance and other vitriol all the time, and it's against that I'm fighting, not necessarily against the people who hold those beliefs, nor even against the beliefs themselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt5ghXdq6Z0&safe_search=on
Hmm...
To quote Adam Carrolla describing Penn Jillette, "You seem to burn too many calories being an atheist."
Essentially, as an atheist, you're not going to convert a ton of people to atheism, probably none, unless they were already on the fence. So, the only point is find a place where you can co-exist with the irrationals, see that they do get non-fiction benefit from a fictional construct, and just enjoy your life.
Even if it does comes up, atheism isn't easy to defend, since they have built a life on very malleable constructs. They think "That's why it's called faith" stitches up their defense, when it basically says "I don't need to understand anything." Plus, their big proof point, is an afterlife. So, they won't ever know they're wrong.
I enjoy reading Dawkins, and Hitchens even more, but I don't care if other people have no interest in it.
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"You can judge the whole world on the sparkle that you think it lacks" - Dawes, When My Time Comes (http://youtu.be/Z0FrcTX6hWI)
"Conversion" to atheism
"you're not going to convert a ton of people to atheism"
I don't view atheism as a "belief" system.
Atheism does, however, carry the message that promised rewards or punishments to be redeemable upon death and in proportion to one's subservience to a particular belief while living --- exist without any (scientific) evidence.
Any belief system, however, that focuses not on what one may enjoy (or fear) after death, but on how to live one's life for the betterment of all while alive will have my support!
Err...
Isn't everything a belief system?
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"You can judge the whole world on the sparkle that you think it lacks" - Dawes, When My Time Comes (http://youtu.be/Z0FrcTX6hWI)
Well...
Yes... if you include not believing in something (in this case, a deity or deities) to be in itself a belief system.
Seems to be a bit of a stretch, though.
Well...
It is called atheism, so the term itself is about your lack of belief in relation to theism.
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"You can judge the whole world on the sparkle that you think it lacks" - Dawes, When My Time Comes (http://youtu.be/Z0FrcTX6hWI)
Paraphrasing?
What's next?
Uhh...
Not sure what you're going on about...
If someone says 'do you believe in God?' there is a yes or no answer. Each path indicates a belief system. Unless you are ceding the use of the word belief to theists, which I don't.
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"You can judge the whole world on the sparkle that you think it lacks" - Dawes, When My Time Comes (http://youtu.be/Z0FrcTX6hWI)
Not sure I know...
..."what you're going on about" either. :(
The exchange commenced with your statement:
"Isn't everything a belief system?"
Am I to understand this to be an expression of disagreement with something I have said? If so, the information content is insufficient for me discern what that "something" might be.
My main difficulty is with the word: everything.
If obliged to guess... I'd suspect that you're pointing to an inference about atheism with which you disagree either personally or academically...
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I think the main difficulty lies in our not sharing a common understanding of the word belief.
I tend to feel that beliefs (particularly as applied to religions) are typically associated with (1) a document of revelation that provides guidance and inspiration, (2) regular gatherings of individuals who are of like mind, (3) confidence that there is a "truth" inherent in this belief, and (4) that subscribing to one's belief will lead to certain enlightenment and/or rewards either in this life or in an existence in another form after death --- a "complete" listing would be much longer.
What I am saying is that if one wishes to classify atheism as a belief... it is a belief that shares not one of the characteristics described by the "beliefs" (religions) described in the preceding paragraph.
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If it is important to pursue this (it certainly isn't to me)... could we do it elsewhere?
My Opinion
Hm, I disagree with you on this one elph.
Atheism is a belief system, even within the framework that you have outlined. I don't think the disagreement between you and jeff are at the second-order level of definition.
Atheism requires you to take a leap of faith as well that God does not exist. Sure, theists cannot prove that God exists, but atheists cannot prove that God does not exist either. Yes, science explains things, but naturalism is a value-neutral way of describing the world. Sure, it has disproved stupid things that organised religion once claimed were true, like geocentricity - but I do not think science undermines the fundamental tenets of certain religions, which requires the interpretation of value-neutral evidence, not just merely the collection of value-neutral evidence itself.
Faced with evidential ambiguity, the default position is not atheism. It would be agnosticism. Atheism still requires you take a doxastic venture that God does not exist.
I'll stop here before I go on forever.
Thanks for the clarification!
I think the discussion has been useful.
The concern I'm left with... at what level is this classification crucial in human pursuits (i.e., atheism = belief --- and here is where I stumble: Jeff's "like everything is"!)?
And this question is inevitable (in my mind, at least): Can we as humans conceive of a world in which belief in deities or an existence after death never arises? Then, would all of the inhabitants of this world share atheism as a belief system?
The inhabitants of this hypothetical world, however, would likely have discovered (after surviving conflicts, plagues, and other mishaps) that co-operation and charity are virtues that operate to the mutual advantage of all.
As you understand a "belief system." would this evolved behavior be so characterized?
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If we're not on the "same page" here... I'd like to move on, remain friends... and just skip the final exam in a course that I may be flunking. :)
I think someone needs to read the God Delusion...
Dawkins points out how agnostics are incorrect.
Technically, one could not prove the existence of anything, as you could add an infinite number of Ad Hoc Hypotheses, which mean you could never prove or disprove anything.
The example commonly used is Russel's Teapot. This Russel guy, to satirize religion, hypothesized that between Mars and Earth there is a teapot orbiting the sun, and he was quick to add that it is so small that it cannot be seen by any of our Earth Telescopes.
Therefore, there's no evidence to prove him wrong, any more than there is to prove him right, but it would not be considered hubris to assume that the teapot is not there, because while you can't prove it's nonexistence, the probability of it being there is very close to zero.
Agnosticism says that for any question you can't know the answer to, then the chance must be 50/50, you can't take a side.
Well, you can't really ever know anything, I can't prove that the table I'm typing on is real, I might be hallucinating all of this like Captain John Black out of the Martian Chronicles, but I assume that it does exist, because so far I have much evidence to think it does, and none to assume it doesn't, so while I can't prove my desk exists, I assume it does, and that's not a leap of faith.
What about Apollo and Zeus and Baal, and the pagan Gods of the indigenous people of Papau New Guinea? Are you completely agnostic about them? Or would you consider it a leap of faith to assume they don't exist, considering few, if any people believe in them anymore and they haven't given a rumble?
And so, atheism is not a leap of faith, in that, through the laws of science, you can't necessarily prove God's nonexistence, but the likelihood of him existing is very small. And so therefore the default position from a scientific perspective would be to assume that God does not exist, and therefore to be an atheist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt5ghXdq6Z0&safe_search=on
Penn Jillette...
... stitches that up nicely, by saying they answer two questions. Agnosticism asks if you know there is a God, whereas atheism asks whether you believe in God. If your answer to whether you know there is a God is no or I don't know, then it stands to reason that your answer to whether you believe in God, whose existence you are not certain of, would have to be no. So, agnostics are atheists by default.
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"You can judge the whole world on the sparkle that you think it lacks" - Dawes, When My Time Comes (http://youtu.be/Z0FrcTX6hWI)
My take
First I would like to thank you for that response, just to say this bears no ill will.
Yes I agree with you that if we do not subscribe to some degree of modal scepticism, our imaginations would go wild. And I certainly agree with you that reasonable belief without a leap of faith does not have to be based on full evidence, just adequate evidence.
But just two more things. God is not a teapot. Evidential ambiguity is different to inductive unlikelihood. There is nothing immediately unlikely about the existence of an omni-God. Teapots floating around space is a hypothesis strictly testable and confirmable at the first order level. Whether God exists is not just a proposition about finding how old the universe is and how it scientifically began.
Not a full post, but all I say now yeah.
Certainly...
Atheism clearly hit #4. When you stop trying to secure a better afterlife, and focus your energy on this one, that is certainly a reward for your beliefs.
I think you're elevating the word belief to a higher plane in the context of religion, which is unmerited. If I believe ketchup is better than mustard, it is only the importance the faithful give to religion that makes that any more valued than I believe in Jesus more than Zeus.
If in a book store, you believe fiction is better than non-fiction, that is almost a direct corollary to preferring theism to atheism.
So, yeah, everything is a belief system. Sort of how all non-conformists of the same age tend to look, dress, and act the same as a by-product of their attempt tp not do what the majority do.
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"You can judge the whole world on the sparkle that you think it lacks" - Dawes, When My Time Comes (http://youtu.be/Z0FrcTX6hWI)
I'm not trying to
convert the whole world to atheism. That would be shallow.
What I want to inspire and do myself is to inspire constructive debate, I want to be constantly reminded why I'm an atheist, why I believe the things I do, I love to debate with people that disagree with me. Because, who knows, they might be right.
But I think the best way to structure your beliefs is to constantly remind yourself of the reasons you believe the things you do. Because, for a lot of people, there isn't a reason. The book said that only 1 in 12 people break from their parents' religion.
That means that most children are indoctrinated throughout childhood to believe in a certain thing, taught that that certain thing is the best, that people who believe other things are practically just the devil's minions. And, if your parents never let you debate or do anything but believe in their religion, you have to be either incredibly intelligent or incredibly free-thinking by nature to break from it.
Now, my parents' religion is atheism, so I'm not exactly bucking the trend here.
So my thought is that the only way to insure I'm not a victim of childhood indoctrination is to constantly question my beliefs, and be willing to change them no matter how cherished they are if I see a reason not to believe them anymore.
So my main goal is not simply to convert people, it's to try perpetually to find a theoligan to debate with. I want to hear their arguments, not necessarily to refute them but to make sure they haven't thought of something I haven't, who knows, there might be a God, and evidence for him, but I haven't found it yet, and if they have, I want to know.
And my other goal is to inspire the same in other people, because generally I don't bring up religion with people because they've been taught these things from birth and they won't give them up no matter how irrational, using a process very similar to doublethink of 1984, they'll just forget and ignore any evidence to the contrary of their beliefs.
I just want to find someone willing to discuss it who's not an atheist, I want to make sure I still think I'm right, and I want to inspire the same free thought in other people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt5ghXdq6Z0&safe_search=on
These are the questions......
And it sounds like I need to read this book.
One thing that I wonder: What about entropy? If everything's natural inclination is to decline - the matter in the universe growing ever colder and farther apart, organisms aging and dying, buildings crumbling to ruin - then why do we assume that creation must have come from simpler things than exist now? It seems so right that more complex life should have come from more simple life, but doesn't that go against the principle of entropy? It seems completely wrong, but, according to entropy, shouldn't everything have come from something more complex and perfect?
Entropy increases (=increased lack of organization)...
...only within a closed system in which there is no inward flow of energy.
For local organization (e.g., life) to develop there has to have been an inward flow of energy. (For living organisms, food and radiant energy such as provided by the sun.))
So, if you place an imaginary, impermeable shell around any portion of the universe... a shell that allows no inward flow of energy... the total entropy of all the contents of that shell cannot decrease. But the energy that was originally contained within the shell may redistribute to create islands of lower entropy... and, possibly, life!
The universe as a whole is presumed to be moving towards higher and higher entropy... but, this does not prohibit widely isolated islands within that universe temporarily developing a lower entropy through an influx of energy (e.g., the earth & its inhabitants).
Eh
Yeah, think of crystals forming out of molecules suspended in water. Or snowflakes forming in clouds. Entropy as a whole seems like it'll keep increasing and increasing, but as Elph said, there are pockets where it will decrease.
And if you were talking about entropy that would appear to assume that God himself would eventually break up and decay... That doesn't seem right...
So yeah, there's a examples, like stars start as nebulous clouds of gas floating around, but then gravity compresses them until they become so hot they then ignite, and become very orderly stars...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt5ghXdq6Z0&safe_search=on
Understood and agreed.
Thank you both.
I guess I was just kind of thinking (and I don't believe this, just find it an interesting idea) - what if all there is now is the decayed remnants of something greater that used to exist? So, yeah, God would have ceased to be, would have created everything by becoming it...... I don't know.
I'm also amazed at the way life - more than anything else I can think of - is constantly transforming the more simple into the more complex. Taking small, inorganic compounds and crafting enormous molecules that would take years to develop in a lab. Evolving from a single-celled prokaryote to something as advanced as a baobab tree, or a human. Sure, maybe there's a way for this to happen naturally, through some combination of chance and selective pressures, but it's still miraculous, isn't it?
Totally looked it up,
damn that is a messed up story! But there is much more crazy shit in there than you know for now. Sure it's a neat book and has some nice stuff but there's some weird stuff too. lol