I've never really understood militant atheists
"Hey, Mrs Timmins - you know that thing that's giving you some comfort and solace in the twilight of your years, the only thing that helped you through the death of your husband, the community that was there for you when it seemed life could get no worse - IT'S ALL A BIG STINKING LIE, YOU STUPID COW! HAHAHAHAHAHA. Also, fuck your coffee mornings - by donating your time and effort to raise a little money for people less fortunate than yourself, you are indirectly responsible for every religious war throughout history, ever. Gullible, evil old harpy."

Cunts. Leave well enough alone, it ain't your business.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Fri 13 Aug 2010, 12:00, 2 replies)

Well,
I suppose the militant atheists (What the hell is wrong with Dawkins btw? Is it his ongoing existential crisis making him so bloody tetchy?) quite reasonably see the enormous damage caused by faiths and inter-faith wars and simply don't have time to differentiate the poor Mrs Timminses from the leaders and noisy fringe elements of the churches to which they belong.

My own personal belief is that if there is a God then His state of perfection would preclude him from wanting anything, because want derives from lack. For that reason I personally steer clear of organised religion and its attempts to dictate human behaviours.
(Happybara The jungle came alive and took him, Fri 13 Aug 2010, 16:09, closed)

and there are those
that value truth for itself. And if you believe that there is no god, which is a fair deduction from the available evidence, then you might want this truth held out for itself. In very much the same way that so many religious evangelise.

And if you've seen some of the utter shit that's put about (creationism, for example), then the urge to defend the truth can be quite overpowering.
( Sextant goes to him is emotionally erect, on this day, Fri 13 Aug 2010, 17:01, closed)

But then you're making the mistake
of stating belief as truth. By all means confront the creationist morons with the fossil record. I think it can be safely demonstrated that the world is not just 6000 years old, for example. Religious nuts and dangerous dogma need confronting, although don't hold your breath for many 'conversions'.

But stating that there is no God is stating a belief, nothing more, nothing less. It is not "a fair deduction". The laws of physics explain most of the 'how', although they are continuously expanding and mutating to encompass new perceptions of reality; they do nothing to explain the why and the wherefore.
(Happybara The jungle came alive and took him, Fri 13 Aug 2010, 17:37, closed)

hmmm
how is belief different to truth? This is a not a simple question to answer. How do we know anything?
As far as most are concerned, if you believe something to be true, that's as much as you can hope for.
As regarding to whether or not to believe in god, from a scientific perspective, it is not generally held reasonable to regard something as truth with evidence or reason, in that sense it falls outside of science. But if you prescribe to a broader positivist empiricist philosophy, you would probably tend to say that there is no reason to believe that God exists.
To say that science does not explain the why and wherefore is to miss the point entirely. You can happily keep asking why, at some point you need to say enough. A great many scientist would happily say that they answer the why questions, small whys perhaps, but still whys.
Science and religion are as compatible as you'd like. The (popular) atheist perspective builds on the philosophy underpinning science, things like falsifiability, empiricism and occam's razor, to arrive at the conclusion: there is no god. The Catholic church is quite happy to believe in the big bang and evolution as they don't see it as incompatible with their theology, it doesn't matter how the world came to be as long as God is still in that world. Large numbers of scientists are quite happy to hold a variety of religious beliefs. Where there is no conflict there is no problem.
( Sextant goes to him is emotionally erect, on this day, Sat 14 Aug 2010, 3:24, closed)

Except that there is a conflict.
They're utterly incompatible: science (and most other disciplines since the Enlightenment) are built on methodological naturalism. Religion and theology are built on methodological anti-naturalism.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Sat 14 Aug 2010, 11:14, closed)

Utterly incompatible?
So any scientific works undertaken by a theist should be stipped of all merit and disregarded? Presuming there's any science left at all, given that Christianity played a major, possibly crucial role in the development of modern science, you'll be leaving the cupboard somewhat bare.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Sat 14 Aug 2010, 16:27, closed)

Oh, don't be silly.
Of course people can and do compartmentalise. It's perfectly possible for a person to wear, say, a geologist hat and a Christian hat. But there's no such thing as Christian geology, nor could there be. And the same applies for any other religion and any other science. The religion bit cannot but to skulk around in the corners where the science hasn't reached.

As for the legacy of religious thinkers - again, you're being silly. I'll ignore Christianity's role in book-burning over the years (Savonarola, anyone?); it's obviously true that religious people throughout history have had an interest in understanding the world, perhaps as a means of understanding the mind of god. However, it's also true that the investigations they instigated moved the world away from the god that they thought they'd come to know. That's why the Enlightenment was not just a threat to religion, but a profound cultural crisis. It's a crisis that haunted Nietzsche - it's at the core of his analysis of nihilism (the phenomenon by which the highest values devalue themselves - and section 125 of The Gay Science for one of the most moving accounts of this crisis I've ever read.

None of this alters the fact that you can't in good faith marry religion and science, though you might try.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Sat 14 Aug 2010, 21:56, closed)

This isn't actually what you said. You understand what 'incompatible' means, I assume?

The role of Christian(ity)/(s) in modern science is not a matter for debate, it's a matter of checking the historical record. They attempted to understand their god, and unravelled him instead. I have no problem with this - but it must really frost your cookies thinking that you owe such a debt to theists.

And yes, of course, religion has been a massive hinderance and burdern to science at times, too. I'd not argue this point for a second, and have not attempted to.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Sat 14 Aug 2010, 23:08, closed)

also, a question for you, Mr (bio)Ethics. Presuming there's no transcendental right, and equally, no transcendental wrong - essentially, no man on a cloud deciding how we should live our lives - your field of study is based upon and predicated by the whims and mores of a given society. You've based your whole career on something transient, something no more scientifically legitimate than religion; an agreement of the masses, with no recourse whatsoever to scientifically-reproducable facts and figures. So - why is it OK to draw a pay-cheque by arguing unscientific concepts such as 'good' and 'bad', and somehow illegitimate to devote your life to an equally-unscientific 'god' who - wait for it - also tells you what's right and what's wrong?
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Sun 15 Aug 2010, 1:51, closed)

Hahahahah!
I'm trying to translate this, and can get no further than "Either morality is divinely ordained, or it's arbitrary. I can't think of any other option, so that must be the whole story." False dichotomy.

Also, you have rather an impoverished view of what academic ethics does. I don't think I've ever, in the course of my professional career, made any claims as simplistic as "This is right" or "This is wrong". Good attempt on the ad hominem attack, though.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Sun 15 Aug 2010, 9:49, closed)

Sprinkling the odd Latin phrase into your diatribe does not make it any more correct. The above was not particularly difficult to understand (for those happy with polysyllabic words), does not require translation, and was not an attack of any sort. If you think one can have ethics without having morality - essentially, right and wrong - I fear you may have misunderstood the term. And being as you brought it up, where do you imagine ethics/morals come from, if not concensus? Is there a metaphysical yardstick by which we can tell right from wrong? Where is this false dichotomy to which you refer?

Ad hominem, indeed. I've done nothing other than argue for people's right to believe in and live by whatever set of rules they choose - how can you possibly think that conceive of the above as an attack, ad hominem or otherwise? Do you imagine, for one moment, that I'm arguing against the concept of morality? No, no - an ad hominem attack would be something more clear cut - such as an ill-conceived assertion that I had only half a brain, starting your reply with 'hahaha' and implying a perfectly-readable comment required translation, or similar.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Sun 15 Aug 2010, 10:36, closed)

I'm beginning to wonder whether I can be arsed with this any more, to be frank...
Ethics concerns itself with right and wrong, of course: but it's not reducible to statements about right and wrong. It's to do with a more general inquiry into how we think about right and wrong, how we should act, how we should live, and so on. Aristotle managed without talking about right and wrong in the modern sense - that's a comparatively modern addition.

As to the false dichotomy: there's plenty of ways that you can get to a version of morality without god or consensus. Kant did it one way. Mill did it another way. There's a huge tradition of metaethics - moral realism and quasi-realism, for example - holding that morality can be naturalised. Granted, realism is a bit unfashionable at the moment, but it's not laughable; quasi-realism is taken very seriously by a good many people.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Sun 15 Aug 2010, 18:37, closed)

Right - you're a lecturer in (bio)ethics, so you obviously have a fair degree of familiarty with the subject. I am really trying to understand this. If you've bailed on the thread, fair enough - but I'm still not getting how morality can exist without concensus, given that it's certainly and demonstrably not defined on the level of the individual.

It seems, from above, that you dislike the term 'transcendental' - so I shall stick with 'external'. Is there an external right, or wrong, by which we can be judged? I'm going to procede on the assumption that there's not, as the alternative would involve invoking Him Upstairs. Therefore, as I understand things, morality is a human conceit - not a part of nature, and not supernatural. We all know in our hearts what is good, what is bad - where did this knowledge come from? Why does it seem oddly-specific to the society we grew up in?

No one person can define his own morality. He can't say - 'On balance, I have decided that X is good!" - if X happens to be something like 'only killing people who look at me funny', most societies will deem him to be a cunt. However worthy the thought process that led him to this point, he's going to be forever known as a wrong 'un, becuase he's done something society deems to be morally bankrupt. His personal morality is an irrelevence, and barely deserves the label; it's the wisdom of the masses that decides and judges such things.

Surely, morality cannot exist without concensus. Individually, it's merely an idiosynchracy.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Mon 16 Aug 2010, 2:20, closed)

It doesn't "frost my cookies" at all.
Perhaps religion motivated the scientific revolution. It doesn't follow from that that the two are in any way compatible. Even at the point of motivation, the methodologies are mutually exclusive.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Sun 15 Aug 2010, 9:45, closed)

If you agree that religion gave rise to what we now understand as science, and accept that many fine scientists - historical and current - have chosen to follow a religion - you're on rather shaky ground by declaring the two 'incompatible'. Clearly, a great many people who have made genuine advances to science have thought otherwise, and lived their lives accordingly.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Sun 15 Aug 2010, 10:51, closed)

No shaky ground at all.
It's plain that anyone can separate what they do during working hours from what they believe outside. But the point remains that you can't do decent science (or anything else, for that matter - the same applies for the humanities to at least some extent) at the same time as being religious. The two simply don't belong in the same thought process.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Sun 15 Aug 2010, 18:32, closed)

I honestly don't think they clock in at 9am and mutter 'right, I'm not going to be religious for the working day'. As I understand things, it's more of a means by which one lives one's life. Joe Q. Scientist attempting to cure cancer can, and probably does, achieve some very good, reproducable, scientific results whilst asking guindance from, and giving thanks to, his invisible friend. He might even cite said friend as his motivation for trying to help out his fellow humans, on scientifically-flimsy grounds such as 'love thy neighbour', or similar. It might not form a crucial part of the work he does, but his religion is still going to be there in the room with him as he goes about he serious business of Science. Which more or less means it's not really that incompatible at all.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Mon 16 Aug 2010, 2:27, closed)

You're right, you don't understand militant atheists.
Very rarely do they target old biddies as opposed to, oh, say for example, the heads of theocracies, fundamentalist lobbyists and any other influential people who try to force their bigotry on everyone else.
(Falstaff's Spiritual Successor, Sat 14 Aug 2010, 11:11, closed)

Nonsense. They take pot-shots at anyone who's decided - for whatever reason - to follow a religion. Very, very rarely to they direct their ire towards the heads of these institutions - how many of the people railing against religion in the comments sections of online fora have troubled themselves to contact the pope? It's simply easier for them to criticise and castigate poor ol' Mrs Timmins.

Test this for yourself. Make a new account, log on, and write 'I live my life as decreed by my god'. If you're right, no-one will question this - instead, they'll write to the head of your church. If I'm right, they'll either try to convert you or, more likely, call you a gullible cunt.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Sat 14 Aug 2010, 16:11, closed)

And vulnerable old grannies are very unlikely to be online
thus I stand by my point. :P

On a more serious note, anyone doing anything in any internet forum that goes against the grain of that particular forum is going to get ripped into, so it's not like atheist ones are different to every other forum, ever. Of course religious people in these places are going to get 'pot shots' taken at them; in fact by logging on to such websites they've openly invited it. Even if they are poor, trembling, innocent, fallacious-appeal-to-emotion grannies called Mrs Timmins.
(Falstaff's Spiritual Successor, Mon 16 Aug 2010, 15:17, closed)