Johnny Blade wrote:
...Then I will convert you. It only takes about a minute and I can do it over the phone...

If it's that quick and simple to convert people, why are there any atheists left?

Just type out what you'd say and convert us all now, job done and we can all go home.

Johnny Blade wrote:Theists and Atheists both appeal to the supernatural as being the ultimate origin of our existence. Don't they?

Genius is not required to understand why you insist on bringing up origins. You have a pat answer, maybe even an elaborate one with lots of verbal filigree, but it's the same old, same old, origin by fiat. What about the origin of the originator? You don't realize (let alone accept) that pre-scientific goat herders founded the tradition you inherit. Your god was created by them. They needed a pat answer because they had nothing else and liked fictional morality tales.

Theists appeal to the supernatural in order to talk about origins, and then simply stop investigating by specifying the origin by fiat. Physical cosmology doesn't appeal to origins, but some popularizers of cosmology dumb it down for their theistic audience. You know as well as I do that appealing to a static, eternal, supernatural being is by fiat, axiomatic, arbitrary, and in your case, it's just a dogmatic tradition in your discourse, and you repeat it like a robot. It's just an assumption you make, but you might as well regard the cosmos as eternal, although you'll have trouble talking about it as static. Act like a robot, and that's how I will treat you. And you suggest I should contact you by phone so you can make it personal. If you think personal is acceptable, let alone safe or sane, given your track record of fart jokes and limericks, you're dumber than you think I think you are. Passing out phone numbers in an anonymous internet forurm on such bare acquaintance is "bag of hammers" territory for teh stoopid.

Of course, the only reason this individual is concocting infantile and duplicitous strawman caricatures of scientific postulates, is as a failed attempt to try and distract from the vacuity of "Magic Man did it". Because at bottom, the only "justification" he has for this position, consists of uncritical acceptance of unsupported assertions from a ridiculous Bronze Age mythology, combined with an inability to understand even elementary aspects of the operation of testable natural processes (quite likely grounded in a particularly underhand variety of wilful ignorance, given his sub-rhetoric to date) and a frankly risible and juvenile penchant for class clown mischief masquerading as actual discourse.

Though I'm minded to note that another source of crude and puerile fart references was William Dembski, after his sad little creationist fantasies were immolated in the nuclear fireball of rigour and fact unleashed at the Dover Trial. Dumbski has been a joke figure outside of mutual appreciation creationist circles for over a decade, and his witterings about "design" were long ago replaced by open admission that he's an ideological stormtrooper for the sort of venomous Christian Nationalism that was never far from the surface of creationist apologetics to begin with.

But I've noticed that creationism tends to attract a particular species of lumpen, lowbrow adherent, one given to oscillating between being a Chatty Cathy doll for decades-old creationist mantras that were risible nonsense even before Henry Morris' pen left the paper, fatuous caricatures of anything requiring a level of understanding transcending crayons, and snide condescension toward anyone outside the doctrinal pale. Though some specimens take this latter aspect of the creationist aetiology, several steps further into all-out visceral hatred - Tom Willis being an especially odious example of this trend.

Of course, the pedlars of this dreck never offer any positive (in the epistemological sense) reasons to treat Bronze Age mythological assertions as something other than wish-fulfilment fantasising on the part of the original authors. That said assertions exhibit the requisite conceptual aura is, of course, obvious to people who paid proper attention in class, who understand with ease that the provenance of this mythology is questionable in the extreme. Not least because of such glaring howlers as the assertion contained within the pages of said mythology, that genetics is purportedly controlled by coloured sticks, an assertion that was utterly destroyed by a 19th century monk, when he launched modern genetics as a properly constituted scientific discipline. The idea that this cretinous bilge constitutes the output of a fantastically gifted magic entity is risible to anyone not hypnotised by the music of the spheres of ex recto apologetic diarrhoea, especially as the magic entity in question is asserted to possess "perfect foreknowledge" of the future. An astute child can see through this sham, let alone anyone with a proper education in any genuinely rigorous disciplines.

But, I suspect we haven't seen the last of the spectacle of the contents of soiled intellectual nappies being dumped here, by Magic Man fetishists with a rectally inserted Bronze Age mythology to inflict upon anyone stupid enough to give them the time of day.

Johnny Blade wrote:Theists and Atheists both appeal to the supernatural as being the ultimate origin of our existence. Don't they?

No. At least I don't. I don't appeal to anything at all as "being the ultimate origin of our existence".

I consider myself to be an atheist (I don't believe there are any gods) and an agnostic (I don't think it is possible to rule out all conceivable gods. But some. That is: In general, I don't know.)

Johnny’s just as much an atheist as we are. He just can’t stand the “I don’t know”, and fills that part in with a god he knows to be an invention. Recent behavior: When pressed to demonstrate his magic conversion voodoo, we get nothing.

As is typical of the credulous, when we remove ambiguity from the results, their beliefs crumble to uselessness.

The_Metatron wrote:Johnny’s just as much an atheist as we are.

Is that some kind of pluralis majestatis? Ho, hum. I conclude you're trying to speak for me, which I'd ask you not to do on most any topic, these days.

If you want something more challenging than atheism, try letting go of the shreds of theology you still cling to when referencing the moral high ground. If you're still perplexed, just ask yourself why it's referred to as "high ground". You'll find your way back to separating the sheep from the goats.

Cito di Pense wrote:

The_Metatron wrote:Johnny’s just as much an atheist as we are.

Is that some kind of pluralis majestatis? Ho, hum. I conclude you're trying to speak for me, which I'd ask you not to do on most any topic, these days.

If you want something more challenging than atheism, try letting go of the shreds of theology you still cling to when referencing the moral high ground. If you're still perplexed, just ask yourself why it's referred to as "high ground". You'll find your way back to separating the sheep from the goats.

Oh, was I mistaken?

Which of those 18,000 gods of which I spoke do you worship?

The_Metatron wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

The_Metatron wrote:Johnny’s just as much an atheist as we are.

Is that some kind of pluralis majestatis? Ho, hum. I conclude you're trying to speak for me, which I'd ask you not to do on most any topic, these days.

If you want something more challenging than atheism, try letting go of the shreds of theology you still cling to when referencing the moral high ground. If you're still perplexed, just ask yourself why it's referred to as "high ground". You'll find your way back to separating the sheep from the goats.

Oh, was I mistaken?

Which of those 18,000 gods of which I spoke do you worship?

Were you mistaken? You were speaking nonsense, and now you seek to cross-examine me based on some bullshit you started. You know Johnny doesn't see himself as a member of your little club, and you were trolling him. I simply told you not to purport to speak for me. Atheism+ was never for me. If I'd ever been churched, it would've been like going back to church.

When believers (or non-believers) ask me theological questions about my beliefs, I tell them it's none of their fucking business, or that they've asked me a meaningless question. That's quicker than getting into theology, because theology is just nonsense. Once again, it's too bad you don't realize how much "moral high ground" stinks of theology, because it's extracted from the same smelly, authoritarian hole theology came out of. "Moral high ground" boils down to 'politics', so you ought to come equipped with something more effective than nonsense questions.

Yes, Johnny doesn’t see himself as an atheist. I showed that the difference between his level of atheism and mine is undetectable. I showed it using some pretty simple maths. If you seek the etymology of the very word “rational”, you’ll discover why I did that. Johnny is wrong. Looks like his atheism is indistinguishable from yours, too. Yes, I used the pronoun “we” to describe a group of atheists. You can either agree with Johnny, or not. You either believe in one or some of those 18,000 gods, or you do not. Where you land in my use of that pronoun is up to you.

Nowhere in this topic did I discuss moral high ground. That is another straw man of your own making, built by dragging comments from an unrelated opinion topic about Israel and Palestine into this one. In fact, the only person to use those terms in this topic is you. In this one, we’ve been discussing whether atheism is rational or not.

Did you have something to add to the discussion on the rationality of atheism? Or do you claim theism is the rational position?

Is atheism irrational? Clarify whether we are talking about weak or strong atheism?
I think we can apply disbelief to the vast majority of Gods on offer.
Some concepts of god like perhaps pantheism, panentheism and the general arm waving of some first cause are worthy of some skepticism or lack of belief.

The one less God argument while cute, is a little bit irrelevant. But it is the idea behind my perseverative question to Paul how to handle Baltic Gods. Now, some theists argue we can't be "good" without God, I have a sneaking sympathy for this position. Many atheists counter with a subjective high ground (morality). I personally don't need morality, though to be fair it creeps into the psyche all the time. I suspect the feeling of morality is a result of evolutionary development and left over from millennia of theistic societal thought. And the Palestine/Israel thread is an excellent example of our morality (subjective high ground) on display.

The only sympathy I can lend to the good without god idea is that it’s plain to me many, many people are, in fact, unable to be good without some external model of what that means. Their internal compass showing right from wrong doesn’t work, or they ignore it. The problem with the idea of a god defining what’s good is the god is nothing more than an invention of men. So, it really isn’t a situation of people unable to be good without god, but unable to be good without being told what is or isn’t good. Unable to be good on their own.

Yes I get that ...

It is more that there is not a "good" without God.
And here you are referring to the internal moral compass that points to the high ground.
From a physicalist point of view which movements of patterns of molecules and atoms are good? And which are bad.
One might point out this is nonsense I would agree with them. Yet we do hold some movements are good and some evil.

romansh wrote:Yes I get that ...

It is more that there is not a "good" without God.
And here you are referring to the internal moral compass that points to the high ground.
From a physicalist point of view which movements of patterns of molecules and atoms are good? And which are bad.
One might point out this is nonsense I would agree with them. Yet we do hold some movements are good and some evil.

Your point, expressed even more directly, is that there is no good or bad without people. My corollary is that people are completely superfluous to the functioning of the cosmos, as if you needed to be told. They're self-absorbed. That's what it is to be human, and that's why there is always all that nonsense from filosofeezers about consciousnessness, and more noise from the people who read ethology and evolutionary psychology. This is nothing I haven't said before, on many occasions, but some people are just never gonna learn. Maybe they're looking for a "good without god" ticket that's irrevocable.

So, the discussion is human-centered. Whether secular or religious, humanism (not at all the same thing as theology) can't lead to goodness any more than theology can. All we get out of humanism (hopefully) is a chance to "be good on our own". Those to whom that's somehow meaningful may be reflecting that they care what religionists say about them to their faces. Someone can oblige me not to be bad by imposing sanctions; obliging someone to be charitable is a fool's errand (and what so many theists try to do), and that is maybe what is denoted by "being good on our own"

Only someone who once believed in god-given morality (or at least went along with the congregation to "be nice") has to deal with the congregation that was left behind asking, how can we be good without gawd. I don't know what that's like. Trying to delineate the necessary behaviors is what religious congregations and village mentality are all about. The short version is "don't hate the perpetrator", and I don't do it in my discourse here, but I do lose patience with the learning-challenged.

So I recognize the "good without god" obsession, but that's just a donnybrook with theists. Theism is a non-starter, end of story. If mention of "moral high ground" doesn't belong here in this thread, where TF does it belong? If it comes up elsewhere, it's being used as some sort of ace in the hole the same way the theists use it.

I've had reason to think lately about why we incarcerate violent criminals. It's not because we decided they're "bad". It's to protect society from them. Then some do-gooder decides to reflect on their being "victims of their harsh circumstances". But anyone can be both a victim and a perpetrator, as with the woman who kills her rapist. The folkloric protagonist in the song linked below prays to god when first attacked, but then realizes no help is on the way, and violently takes matters in hand: