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Fuck you, Science!

Consent at least provides a describable concept of individuals vis a vis other individuals through society. The concept of "god" doesn't provide that and necessarily sits above the societal concept

If person A doesn't consent to something they say "no" and you can see this tangibly.
 
birdman said:
Yes I will confirm that. I think that society sets and collectively accepts the norms that we follow and society determines what is moral and what is a right. I think there is pretty good evidence that these standards change over time. I don't think there is anything immutable or sacrosanct about individual rights. I am really glad I was lucky enough to be born in a society that embraced the concept and I am hoping it continues to embrace the concept so that my kids get to enjoy the freedoms I have. I think these things are tenuous and I therefore don't take them for granted. I don't judge anyone as weak (and I am not sure why that is such a big component of your second paragraph), it's just the way humans are and the way things work.
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In other words, I've gone full atheist. Not only have I given up on the idea of an involved and loving god that watches over me and cares, I've also given up on the popular new age ideas about "the universe". Right down to the quark level, we are living in a multistate system where every moment is the outcome of a randomized multinomial trial and the next moment is the result of another trial. The probabilities of those future outcomes can maybe be influenced by our current perturbations of the system and so maybe we should work to influence future states of the system.
 
I think that's the most likely scenario. I go back and forth between "agnostic" and "atheist" but that's really just semantics I think.

I don't personally believe there is a God and struggle to imagine a scenario where that's either the correct or most likely scenario. But I also think it's difficult to say for certain, or to prove, that there is no God.

I feel very confident in saying there is no God in the Christian sense, or in any individual sense. It makes no sense at all because there are so many similar versions of a monotheistic God and a creation story based predominantly on geographic/regional differences. If you're a Christian in America and were born in a predominantly Muslim nation, you would likely be a Muslim. I see no evidence to believe that any one specific monotheistic religion would be "correct" compared to another specific one.

The only version of "God" that I would feel comfortable saying "maybe" about is there's an energy that has always existed and still exists today. It's not personified, it certainly has no interest in anything, and it's just energy. If you want to call the unexplained portions of this energy "God" then I can get on board with that to some degree.
 
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Junebug said:
This isn't a very good argument. I'm not making exceptions to a rule and thereby undermining it; I'm defining the parameters of the rule. The difference is obvious. It's like saying gravity is real but its effects are felt differently on Jupiter than they are on Earth. The fact that we are at 1G and Jupiter is at how many ever Gs doesn't mean that the rules of gravity apply differently on Jupiter and Earth. The rules are the same, but the difference is in the facts upon which those rules are operating.
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Sorry, but, the laws of gravity do not chance with space or time. The only thing that changes is our perception of gravity. The difference is not in the facts, it is in our perceptions.
 
Junebug said:
My prior post was focused on weakness because it plainly takes a certain strength of will to be able to look into the face of nothingness and, rather than be crushed by the meaningless of it, continue to put one meaningless and purposeless foot in front of the other. The foot is there by biological accident, and the brain that moves it too, but on some level there is a "you" in there somewhere that has to decide to move it. I have found that very few people have the strength of will to examine themselves, let alone walk away triumphant when they realize there is nothing else there.
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With the caveat that I've never had a near-death experience, I'm not scared by the concept of death. There's a certain level of serenity to the concept that each of us is merely a tiny speck on the time continuum that has existed long before we arrived and will last far after we are all gone. My answer to "so what happens when we die" is "we just die." We are part of the physical world around us and I don't believe that the energy that exists inside humans is any different than the energy that exists inside other animals or plants - at least from a "there is a 'you' in there somewhere" perspective. We are a part of nature and are a byproduct of the environment in which we live. When we die our bodies become part of this environment. You become part of the world around you, just as billions and trillions of species have before us and will become after us. While your "spiritual mind" ceases to exist, your body can become nurture for other physical parts of the world - fertilizer for plants, food for bugs and bacteria, etc.

I don't believe that one needs an eternity of consciousness to be amazed and inspired by the role that each of us will play in the world and universe's continued existence.

Nihilism is only a required end result of atheism if you only look at your existence through a consciousness lens rather than through a broader spectrum IMO. The "something" that exists is the physical world around us.
 
Why does it need to be morally wrong? Why does it need to be morally anything? If you kill someone you as an autonomous human chose to deprive another autonomous human of their options.
 
Junebug said:
So, I know from engaging you on the Tunnels that you are pretty liberal politically. If not "individual rights" or "consent" or some other new-fangled notion about right and wrong, what motivates you politically? What "future states" are you hoping to influence and why?
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Good question. On the why front, influencing future states is really all about creating a better world for my kids and their eventual kids, etc. to live in. There is an unemotional genetic progeny aspect, probably, but I also love my kids passionately (which probably also has a genetic component) and I want them to have a beautiful world to live in. I especially am focused on the environment and women's rights (because I have two daughters). I really hate to think that my grand kids will probably live in a world with out Rinos and maybe coral reefs, but also that their food security will be dwindled and clean fresh water supplies will be a privilege.
 
Junebug said:
Based on some of the things you have said, you are more than just "full atheist." You've crossed the Rubicon into nihilism.

I am personally of the view that the logical consequence of all atheism is nihilism (at least that's where I ended up when I was an atheist in college), so, even though I disagree with you strongly, I have to give you credit for arriving there, even if you seem to have sort of backdoored your way into it based on your presuppositions of biological materialism (which, by the way, is the same way I arrived there in college too, with a healthy dose of Neitszche for good measure).

My prior post was focused on weakness because it plainly takes a certain strength of will to be able to look into the face of nothingness and, rather than be crushed by the meaningless of it, continue to put one meaningless and purposeless foot in front of the other. The foot is there by biological accident, and the brain that moves it too, but on some level there is a "you" in there somewhere that has to decide to move it. I have found that very few people have the strength of will to examine themselves, let alone walk away triumphant when they realize there is nothing else there.
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I've always associated nihilism with purposelessness and hopelessness and I don't think that is the case for most full atheists. On the contrary, the world is a beautiful place and once someone sheds the shackles of capitalist motivation and religious devotion then you can fully enjoy the beauty. I guess it is sort of like a zen awakening. I feel a little like Lester at the end of American Beauty right now.

Edit: your extended definition of moral nihilism, is more accurate. I've heard it called moral relativism and I think it fits. Society sets the rules and defines the moral code. Thus the rules and the morals are revised over time and society changes. The quote that "without god everything is permitted" doesn't fit, I'd revise it to say, without society, everything is permitted.
 
Just wanted to say that it's been enjoyable reading the both of you discuss this. I enjoy the semantic digressions and the topic very much but find it difficult to form my own thoughts into words so I avoid discussion. It's also nice for a discussion not to devolve into an argument (as it so often does on these boards), and both of you seem intent on laying out their views...though the questioning nature of junebug's posts and corresponding answers from birdman seem to make it an attack/defend kind of back-and-forth, it hasn't really gone that way.

Though, I admit, I have been feeling like junebug has been building to some sort of "mic drop" moment where he proves his point, at least to himself. Maybe that was the nihilist comment or descriptor, IDK.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
I don't think you need a god to figure out killing someone else isn't a good idea.
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Wakeforest22890 said:
Why does it need to be morally wrong? Why does it need to be morally anything? If you kill someone you as an autonomous human chose to deprive another autonomous human of their options.
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Wakeforest22890 said:
So as a society agreeing to live together we collectively benefit from having a baseline set of rules. I don't know why there needs to be an objective moral underpinning to this.
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I think the thrust of Junebug's argument is that, in the absence of God and objective morals, words like "good" and "benefit" are nebulous, if not outright meaningless. What good and whose benefit are you seeking, and what's your standard for achieving that if there is no objective good? Words like "rights," and "justice," and "liberty" lose their meaning in a physicalist/ontological reductionist viewpoint. Physics and chemistry don't recognize right and wrong--they simply do. Naturalism offers natural selection and species survival as a possible end, but people frequently take stances contrary or ambivalent to that goal, with gay rights being a prominent contemporary example.

In a world with objective morals, you can say that human rights are good and should be protected and murder, racism, and genocide are bad and should be outlawed. In a world where there's nothing inherently wrong with the, and they're only frowned upon based on the whims of society, you're forced to come up with some other justification for why they should be restricted, and I think Junebug is looking for that reason
 
Junebug said:
No mic drop. If I had all the answers I wouldn't be spending my time on here.

I, like you, greatly appreciate Birdman's intelligence, honesty, and willingness to engage on this topic. This thread -- and his responses in particular -- have caused me to think about and articulate things I haven't thought about in a long time, and for that I am grateful.
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There will be no Junebug mic drop because he is just plain wrong on all counts. Boom!
 
Junebug said:
This may be a bit pedantic, but I do think the terms "moral relativism" and "moral nihilism" are meant to designate different concepts. Although they both agree there is no objective morality, a moral relativist would be able to say something like "murder is wrong in western culture" or something similar, while a moral nihilist would only say something like that as a descriptive matter (i.e., western culture has declared murder to be wrong). For the moral nihilist, there is not even intra-cultural morality.

In the end, I think the difference is vanishing -- insofar as I think moral relativism collapses into moral nihilism -- but I do think the terms formally denote slightly different things.
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Sure, I'll defer to you on the definition of those terms. I was just thinking the along the lines of the theory of relativity (Einstein's) where the scale of time is relative to your velocity, but in this case morals are relative to the society and time in which you live. I don't believe morals are static. I believe there is pretty strong evidence that the definitions of right and wrong have varied over space and time depending on the prevailing cultural norms or who is in charge. We in western modern society think we are at the pinnacle of moral revelation but just like genetic evolution and natural selection there is no directionality to moral evolution. Even in Christianity the definition of acceptable behavior has evolved over time and every stage of the progression has believed that those that came before or those in other societies were primitive. Nothing is permanent, everything changes. Buddha was a smart dude.
 
What matters to us matters mostly, if not entirely, because of the context of our existence as we understand it.
 
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