A discourse on Atheism (not a religious debate)

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Originally Posted by YesNo

I've heard that Buddhist monks are expected to be celibate. So celibacy is not something peculiar to Catholicism if I've got my facts straight.

Although I can sort of see a motivation for celibacy in putting all one's energy into worship or meditation or whatever one practices, having a family offers many more challenges that may even be more useful spiritually. When I see a couple fighting, and they claim to be of a particular religion, I assume that their religion is not very useful or they aren't effectively practicing it.

The same would go for atheists who fight within their family which brings this back to the OP which was about atheism and not religion. Do atheists offer any better practice to make their family lives better?

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I practice all sorts of things to make my family life better. Of course I do. Why wouldn't I?

"Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer." - Hitchens

Religion is useless to me. I don't need sanctions and threats to make me behave decently to other people. If a person thinks they need that, there is something wrong with their thinking.

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Originally Posted by Climacus

And you don't mean this hyperbolically? But to draw this conclusion, you need to canvass the religions for truth-claims, quantify them, assign truth values to them, and do the math. Surely you're not saying that you've done something like this?

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Yes, I've pretty much done that. You have too if you believe in one or none of them. We're all at least vaguely familiar with the truth claims of most religions. All or most of them are faith-based and therefore empirically equivalent.

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Originally Posted by Varenne Rodin

I practice all sorts of things to make my family life better. Of course I do. Why wouldn't I?

"Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer." - Hitchens

Religion is useless to me. I don't need sanctions and threats to make me behave decently to other people. If a person thinks they need that, there is something wrong with their thinking.

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Well, when theists say things like "we can't be good without God," they don't mean "we can't be good if we don't believe in God." (Unless they're morons, of course, and we needn't discuss morons.) They mean that if God doesn't exists, then good and evil don't exist either, at least not objectively. And so we can be neither good nor evil. (Maybe they're wrong about this, but that's what they mean.)

The soundness of Hitchens' sentiment, on the other hand, is contingent on whether or not God exists. For if God exists, then there are good actions that atheists cannot perform. In example, if God exists - an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing being - then it is a good thing to reverence him. But if you don't believe in him, you can't do so.

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Originally Posted by Climacus

Well, when theists say things like "we can't be good without God," they don't mean "we can't be good if we don't believe in God." (Unless they're morons, of course, and we needn't discuss morons.) They mean that if God doesn't exists, then good and evil don't exist either, at least not objectively. And so we can be neither good nor evil. (Maybe they're wrong about this, but that's what they mean.)

The soundness of Hitchens' sentiment, on the other hand, is contingent on whether or not God exists. For if God exists, then there are good actions that atheists cannot perform. In example, if God exists - an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing being - then it is a good thing to reverence him. But if you don't believe in him, you can't do so.

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No. I don't agree that it would be a good thing to reverence him. That would be akin to slavery. Is slavery a good thing? A person can decide to be a slave to their god, but even if it is real, they will not convince me that I and my children should be slaves.

If a god created the universe, I would appreciate the enormity of that, but I would wonder at the choices for earthlings to live mortal suffering lives. I would wonder at a deity's complacency to the torture of his "children". I do not agree with sacrificing children. If theists do, there is something wrong with theists.

"If slavery isn't wrong, then nothing is wrong." Abe Lincoln

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Originally Posted by Darcy88

Calidore, while I agree with the overall tenor of your post I must take issue with the part in bold. There are such a high number of pedophile priests because the church forbids them from having sex or marrying. Their natual sex instinct is suppressed and thereby perverted. You do hear of coaches and other persons molesting children but not nearly as often as you hear of priests. The reason behind their not being allowed to marry is really quite sinister. I heard a historian explain that the vatican instituted this ban so that their priests would be left without heirs and their property thus turned over to the church. Much of the church's staggering fortune and land holdings have come about due to this.

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Way late in responding, sorry, and other people have already weighed in, but here's my thoughts:

I hadn't heard your reason for the marriage ban, but it certainly sounds plausible. I do disagree that priests who were previously normal men become active predators of children because their sex drive is suppressed.

I wonder if the numbers on clerical predation have ever been crunched by anyone without an axe to grind. Are there really proportionally more predators in the priesthood than, say, teachers, coaches, etc.? Or do we simply hear about it more now because 1) decades worth of cases previously suppressed are all coming out at once; 2) people smell money and want some.... Damn, I know I had a 3) when I started, but now it's gone.

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Originally Posted by Darcy88

I have no idea what a dialetheist is.

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One who doesn't believe in rotary phones.

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Originally Posted by Varenne Rodin

No. I don't agree that it would be a good thing to reverence him. That would be akin to slavery. Is slavery a good thing? A person can decide to be a slave to their god, but even if it is real, they will not convince me that I and my children should be slaves.

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Well, I guess theists wouldn't agree that reverence is akin to or synonymous with slavery. They would think it a good thing to reverence the good. And they think that God is supremely good. Here's another way of looking at it. Most cultures throughout history have thought it a good thing to reverence parents. Because, among other things, parents are the source of our being and are - or ought to be - our benefactors. But, if God exists, he's ever so much more our source of being and benefactor. So we should reverence him too. It's a sort of a fortiori argument. Again this is predicated on the conditional, if God exists . . .

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Originally Posted by Calidore

One who doesn't believe in rotary phones.

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:biggrin5:

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Originally Posted by Climacus

Well, I guess theists wouldn't agree that reverence is akin to or synonymous with slavery. They would think it a good thing to reverence the good. And they think that God is supremely good. Here's another way of looking at it. Most cultures throughout history have thought it a good thing to reverence parents. Because, among other things, parents are the source of our being and are - or ought to be - our benefactors. But, if God exists, he's ever so much more our source of being and benefactor. So we should reverence him too. It's a sort of a fortiori argument. Again this is predicated on the conditional, if God exists . . .

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If a parent is abusive or neglectful, that parent should no longer be revered. It should be fought. This god "parent" theists revere sits by while his children are mutilated, decapitated, burned, hanged, shot, stabbed, raped, beaten, gorged, eaten by disease, executed, enslaved, starved. For thousands of years there have been genocides and plagues. The horrors of North Korea, AIDS in Africa, starvation in Somalia, the holocaust, the dark ages, hundreds of years of extremely high infant mortality rates. If there is a god, if this is by design, it's evil.

Much better to realize we alone have responsibility for our lives and how we effect others than to leave everything in the hands of a god who, if there, ignores atrocity. If he rewards suffering with another life, he is still sick. It's like a slave holder. There is no gray area here. There is no interpreting torture differently. Torture is torture. Painting a rosy picture of it only further enables it. I would rather enjoy my life and seek genuine truths for the entirety of it than abide torture in the hopes of a paradise reward. Theism is fantasy. It should be kept private and not thrust upon a vulnerable society.

I'll state it more simply. Theists who believe their god should be revered are like abused wives living in denial of what is being done to them. They are afraid of misbehaving for fear of punishment. The abuser buys them a present and it's all good again. That sucks. We should empower people to get out of that mindset. It's false security and the abandonment of freedom.

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Originally Posted by Climacus

And you don't mean this hyperbolically? But to draw this conclusion, you need to canvass the religions for truth-claims, quantify them, assign truth values to them, and do the math. Surely you're not saying that you've done something like this?

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You are amazing Climacus. I think only you could do that job because in your bizarre book, there is not even 0.000000001% of the staggering number of claims. Actually you are the most credible Protagorian that ever lived, except perhaps Erasmus of Rotterdam and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

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Originally Posted by Varenne Rodin

I'll state it more simply. Theists who believe their god should be revered are like abused wives living in denial of what is being done to them. They are afraid of misbehaving for fear of punishment. The abuser buys them a present and it's all good again. That sucks. We should empower people to get out of that mindset. It's false security and the abandonment of freedom.

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You struggle with the problem of evil. I understand that. Don't we all? All I was doing was suggesting a theistic line of thought, a way to understand the theist's point of view. Your analogy doesn't hold for the theist.

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Originally Posted by cafolini

You are amazing Climacus. I think only you could do that job because in your bizarre book, there is not even 0.000000001% of the staggering number of claims. Actually you are the most credible Protagorian that ever lived, except perhaps Erasmus of Rotterdam and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

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What book are you talking about, a religious book? I never said I was religious.

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Originally Posted by Climacus

You struggle with the problem of evil. I understand that. Don't we all? All I was doing was suggesting a theistic line of thought, a way to understand the theist's point of view. Your analogy doesn't hold for the theist.

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I understand theists quite well. I was raised by theists. I live in the united states. What's to misunderstand? They're very vocal about their causes.

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Originally Posted by Climacus

Well, when theists say things like "we can't be good without God," they don't mean "we can't be good if we don't believe in God." (Unless they're morons, of course, and we needn't discuss morons.) They mean that if God doesn't exists, then good and evil don't exist either, at least not objectively. And so we can be neither good nor evil. (Maybe they're wrong about this, but that's what they mean.)

The soundness of Hitchens' sentiment, on the other hand, is contingent on whether or not God exists. For if God exists, then there are good actions that atheists cannot perform. In example, if God exists - an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing being - then it is a good thing to reverence him. But if you don't believe in him, you can't do so.

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Nice way of putting that. I agree.

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Although this thread is about atheism, it keeps going back to religion and then a criticism or defense of religion. What I am wondering is if atheism has any sort of specific practice that helps the atheist live a good life, specifically, how do atheists avoid fighting within their own families? In other words, I'm trying to find out if atheism has anything positive to offer or if all it has is a critique of what other people want to believe in.

Now I can see the sort of things that some atheists actually practice--at least the vocal ones. Here are two things that I see atheists practice:

(1) They tend to practice self-righteousness when it comes to other people's spirituality.

(2) They tend to refuse to forgive religious people because, I suspect, that would defuse the first practice.

Now, I'm not saying religious people are any better, but neither of these habits or practices seem like something that would make an atheist's family life joyful. When tensions arise in the family, I can see the self-righteousness and unforgiving attitude get directed at a spouse, parent, child or other close relative.