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JCC Arena The Theist/Atheist Thunderdome™

Discussion in 'Community' started by Harpua, Jan 29, 2014.

  1. GregMcP

    GregMcP Force Ghost star 5

    Registered:
    Jul 7, 2015
    Sure. Jest.
    Honestly it was a pretty bitchy thing for me to say. The people who take that stuff seriously... well, it's important to them. I was mocking something close to his heart.

    But god the Rosary a mindless repetitive grind.
     
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  2. Darth_Invidious

    Darth_Invidious Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    Jun 21, 1999
    You forgot the five Our Fathers between each set of Hail Marys, then the litany of praises and additional prayers that goes in for another half hour.

    I mean, seriously, what is the point of that grind? How does anyone think that that or any sort of mantra will make any higher power take your seriously?

    But yes, that person is completely immature if that's the attitude he's taken.
     
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  3. anakinfansince1983

    anakinfansince1983 Skywalker Saga/LFL/YJCC Manager star 10 Staff Member Manager

    Registered:
    Mar 4, 2011
    Why God will not die

    Pretty good article about humankind's search for answers, and why for me personally, agnosticism makes more sense than atheism but organized religion makes less sense than atheism.

    And Camus is one morbid son of a ***** no matter which language one reads him in.
     
  4. TheAvengerButton

    TheAvengerButton Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    Aug 11, 2011
    I think a reasonable human being is a person who is agnostic. Even though I was raised in a world of faith and I still retain such a faith, I don't believe that it is an abomination to God that I hold agnostic ideals.

    I just can't say for certain that something happens when I die, just as an atheist can't say that nothing happens when I die. Without someone to come back to life and tell us what is beyond death, who's to know?
     
  5. Darth Guy

    Darth Guy Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Aug 16, 2002
    It's demonstrable that everything that makes us "us" are manifestations of the electrochemical processes among a mass of neurons contained within our skulls. It's obvious to anyone who's ever experienced or known someone with a brain injury or suffered from degenerative disorders such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's; or anyone who's consumed any sort of mind-altering substance. It should be obvious to everyone. We are not the same people we were when we were infants because of the way our brains change. The electrochemical processes cease upon (brain) death. The neurons wither and rot, or some ****** dunks them in a jar of foul-smelling preservatives. Either way, dead is dead. It's perfectly reasonable to say with certainty that what happens when we die is exactly what we see.

    Sure, you can argue faith because that's the trump card, but you can't say atheists "don't know."
     
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  6. seventhbeacon

    seventhbeacon Jedi Knight star 3

    Registered:
    Dec 3, 2015
    I think the issue people have is in terminology. There isn't a spectrum where you have theism on one end, atheism on the other, and agnosticism in the middle. There are agnostic believers, and there are agnostic atheists. There are dogmatic believers and dogmatic (anti-theist) atheists. Agnosticism has its own spectrum, it is not the midway on the line. Being an atheist is NOT an active disbelief in god, it is the lack of a belief in a god. It's the difference between saying "there is no god" and "there's no evidence of a god."

    It doesn't help to have pedants and miscreants like "The Amazing Atheist" (and tons more on YouTube) who are more interested in pumping out angry reactionary videos which continue to color the "brand" if you will of atheism.

    It becomes much easier to discount specific deities and holy texts when you can point out blatantly factual errors or contradictions within them. I was raised Methodist, which I like to refer to as "potluck Christians," but as I found the faith lacking, I walked away from it.There's a lot to appreciate about the teachings, and now I choose to hold out hope that there is a higher morality and a greater purpose in this life and hopefully in a next life, but it's more about creating my own personal code of conduct and goals in the short time we are blessed (heh) to have on this Earth.

    Oh, and I still reserve the right to make vicious fun of Scientologists and people who actually believe horoscopes are a legit science.
     
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  7. True Sith

    True Sith Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    May 10, 2015
    Yeah, as a fairly new atheist myself, my position is much more "there's currently no evidence and therefore no reason to believe there's a god" rather than a declaration of certainty that a god can't exist. Which could be called agnostic atheism depending on whom you ask I guess.
     
  8. Jabba-wocky

    Jabba-wocky Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    May 4, 2003
    I take your point, but find it a bit overstated. Clearly, neuro-chemical interactions are the mechanism by which our thoughts and personalities are realized. In similar fashion, physical actions are expressed through coordinated systems drawing multiple tissue types, including muscle, tendon, and bone. Changing the architecture or function of either system will skew its capacity for expression. Strictly speaking, though, that's not the same thing as a definitive argument that system of expression is the thing being expressed, or that the two are inherently inseparable.

    Admittedly, the alternative proposal is basically untestable, both at this time and in the forseeable. But science is only really equipped to answer a certain subset of questions. I'm not sure this is one. In any case, the argument advanced here would seem to abut a sort of neurological reductivism. It is at the least unclear how the idea of brain plasticity would interact with the proposed model, and more to the point how we would reconcile notions of responsibility. That is, if individuals are solely the direct result of cascading chemical interactions in defined neuronal networks, how does one assign guilt for socially undesirable actions (robbery, molestation, murder, etc)? As another alternative, consciousness may also be fairly proposed as an emergent but non-localizable property of brain activity, but since we can't tell the difference between in a collapse in our ability to detect such a property and its actual collapse/non-existence due to the loss of underlying structural components, this theory isn't really very testable either.

    Finally, though, I too find the "nobody knows" thing to be sort of silly and beside the point. These are not issues to be decided by what makes the most sense. There's really no assurance that sensible predictions will turn out to be at all correct, especially since what seems sensible is shaped by our current state of knowledge. One's decision to be an atheist or theist deserves to be rooted in other, more meaningful factors than who you think is possibly going to be right in a basically untestable hypothetical that has no real bearing on how we live our lives.
     
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  9. WebLurker

    WebLurker Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Mar 12, 2016
    I don't think you can 100% prove that God (or any other supernatural entities for that matter) exist or don't exist, although you can prove one or the other to be more plausible. Based on probability and statistics alone, I think God's existence is very plausible. The fact that such a worldview is more internally consistent also helps.
     
  10. seventhbeacon

    seventhbeacon Jedi Knight star 3

    Registered:
    Dec 3, 2015

    There are no probabilities or statistics to prove something likely. What numbers, what data, are you using for your baseline? Also, logic games =/= evidence or facts. There is no tangible evidence a deity exists. One always possibly could, but the evidence so far is completely void. There is none.

    What makes "sense" to us, who have flawed brains that react emotively and remember details wrong all the time, is not at all the best way to assert it.
     
  11. GregMcP

    GregMcP Force Ghost star 5

    Registered:
    Jul 7, 2015
    Indeed, what statistics?

    I was brought up Catholic, and Catholicism has a very precisely defined Canon Universe, to use Star Wars terms borrowed from religions. "This is precisely how God and Man operate." It's not probabilities, it's Fact.

    The vague idea that perhaps some super intelligence created the universe is not sufficient to legitimise established religions.

    Is there Life elsewhere in the Solar System?
    Perhaps. We can have a chat about that, throwing in all sorts of speculation. But that's all it is. Idle chatter. None of us actually know anything.

    And that's what I concluded as I grew up. The priests, my parents... They just had opinions, formed from hearing other opinions, but no one, not even The Pope, actually knew anything. It's just talking about life on Mars
     
  12. WebLurker

    WebLurker Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Mar 12, 2016
    Okay, let's see if I can explain what I was thinking. It seems to me that there are basically only two possibilities: the Universe was created by God or some other supernatural being(s) or it evolved on it's own via the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution. We on the same page so far?

    As I understand it, you can crunch the numbers on probability of the later, the mathematical odds of the Universe as we know it evolving. From the accounts I've seen, including some made by pro-evolutionists camps, they're are very bad odds. Basically, according to that evidence, the world just evolving from nothing into what it is today is about as likely as a twister going through a junkyard and assembling a working jet that's ready to be fueled up and fly. That does not instill me with confidence on the atheist worldview being correct.

    If there are only two possibilities, and one is not very likely, the other is more likely to be more accurate by default.

    (For the record, I do have my specific convictions, but was framing this as odds and possibilities for the sake of discussion.)
     
  13. WebLurker

    WebLurker Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Mar 12, 2016
    Okay, let's see if I can explain what I was thinking. It seems to me that there are basically only two possibilities: the Universe was created by God or some other supernatural being(s) or it evolved on it's own via the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution. We on the same page so far?

    As I understand it, you can crunch the numbers on probability of the later, the mathematical odds of the Universe as we know it evolving. From the accounts I've seen, including some made by pro-evolutionists camps, they're are very bad odds. Basically, according to that evidence, the world just evolving from nothing into what it is today is about as likely as a twister going through a junkyard and assembling a working jet that's ready to be fueled up and fly. That does not instill me with confidence on the atheist worldview being correct.

    If there are only two possibilities, and one is not very likely, the other is more likely to be more accurate by default.

    (For the record, I do have my specific convictions, but was framing this as odds and possibilities for the sake of discussion.)

    Well what would be constituted as evidence in the first place?






    Come to think of it, Judeo-Christian theologians would agree with you, in as far as human reasoning not being what it's cracked up to be.
     
  14. blackmyron

    blackmyron Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Oct 29, 2005
    With the advent of complexity theory and self-organizing systems, that argument is fairly spurious.
     
  15. GregMcP

    GregMcP Force Ghost star 5

    Registered:
    Jul 7, 2015
    One theory is that this universe and our planet and our lives exist, because if you have a vast number of random creations, then sometimes the Monkeys write Shakespeare. We don't see the failed creations because we only exist on the successful one.

    And again, all speculation. You've got opinions, cherry picking ideas that work for you, and so do I.

    "Pro-Evolutionists"... Ah. Sorry dude, for me you're left behind with the Priests.
     
  16. WebLurker

    WebLurker Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Mar 12, 2016
    Huh.

    Hey, look, I'm still new here and trying to figure out the best way to frame things.

    Poor wording choice? Sorry, couldn't come up with anything better at the time.
     
  17. seventhbeacon

    seventhbeacon Jedi Knight star 3

    Registered:
    Dec 3, 2015
    The argument pre-supposes the need for a cause to the beginning, if there is one. That supposition isn't by any means backed by fact or evidence, or even that the Big Bang was actually the beginning and not part of an ongoing cycle.

    Then, even if you want to put a causality behind the beginning, the argument becomes "The God of the Gaps," filling in those areas for which we have no evidence or answer and claiming that a god exists there. That argument hasn't held up very well over the last couple centuries, as gaps close and the argument has to change to find new gaps.

    I do recognize that there is a natural beauty and symmetry to things, and the poetic side of me would absolutely love to give that beauty, that art, an artist. However, the idea that our ancestors stumbled upon the right answers millennia ago, while being wrong about so many things, doesn't at all create a framework that holds up to scrutiny.

    Again I ask, what numbers are you crunching? Where are you getting them from? How were these numbers observed and recorded?
     
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  18. VadersLaMent

    VadersLaMent Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Apr 3, 2002
    ---- the Universe was created by God or some other supernatural being(s) or it evolved on it's own via the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution. We on the same page so far?----

    No. The Theory of Evolution and the Big bang theory have nothing to do with each other.

    ----As I understand it, you can crunch the numbers on probability of the later, the mathematical odds of the Universe as we know it evolving. From the accounts I've seen, including some made by pro-evolutionists camps, they're are very bad odds. Basically, according to that evidence, the world just evolving from nothing into what it is today is about as likely as a twister going through a junkyard and assembling a working jet that's ready to be fueled up and fly.----

    This is called a strawman. The twister through a junkyard has nothing to do with with the actual functions of how evolution works. It's not even close. Evolution has some randomness but does not operate on randomness alone. It also does not have a goal where the twister in a junkyard problem has a goal set from the onset.

    Here is more detail on the matter

    Here's a vid on how it actually works too:



    Here's a large page of explanations versus creationism
     
  19. seventhbeacon

    seventhbeacon Jedi Knight star 3

    Registered:
    Dec 3, 2015
    My biggest issue with the perception of Evolution is how it was handled in, say, Star Trek: the Next Generation, where there's this attitude that we are evolving toward something more. Evolution is random. It does not have an end goal because it is a process of genetic replication and mutation, which when it benefits the survival of a species, allows it to flourish and propagate. There is no driving force seeking out a better, higher level of being.
     
  20. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    I hate logic games, whether they're being used to "prove" or "dis-prove" that God exists. If God exists, he must necessarily exist on a plane of existence so much higher than ours that our logic is meaningless. Can God make a rock so big he can't lift it? Probably there aren't "rocks" on the God plane and I'm pretty sure God doesn't have "arms" either. Our logic games are so damned reductive.
     
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  21. seventhbeacon

    seventhbeacon Jedi Knight star 3

    Registered:
    Dec 3, 2015

    That's basically the problem with logic games. They can't be used as a replacement for repeatable, testable, observable data. That's why, the burden of proof is on the claimant. Atheists make no claim. The preface "a" in "atheism" means the "absence of" a theistic belief. They simply lack the evidence to prove the existence of a deity, afterlife, etc. Also, one can't disprove a negative, hence the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You can't prove the FSM doesn't exist because there is no evidence one way or the other. Therefore, the most reasonable, logical, intellectually honest conclusion is "I don't know. There is no evidence, so it's safe to assume the Flying Spaghetti Monster and God do not exist."
     
  22. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    In theory, sure, atheism is only the absence of belief. But I think there's very much a trend in modern atheism to make claims, rather than simply ceding the burden of proof to the believers. I think many atheists have a very specific idea of the God they believe doesn't exist, which I think is quite a bit different than just not believing. I know plenty of atheists who are closer to the theoretical principle of atheism as an absence of theism and I respect that & them. But I think there's a big difference between "I don't believe in God" and "I believe there is no God." Once you find the former weak sauce, as I think many modern atheists have, you stake claim to the latter because it feels more like a stance. But since it is one, it pulls atheism into the same quagmire of logic puzzles and arguments that religion has always been in. If I don't believe in a presence, that's one thing; if I believe in an absence, that's another. And when atheists try to prove that they're right or that I'm wrong, they're ceding their biggest advantage: they don't have to prove anything. Because, of course, they can't prove an absence. Damned if a lot of 'em don't try though. Activist atheism is a cognitive dissonance of its own.
     
  23. Harpua

    Harpua Chosen One star 9

    Registered:
    Mar 12, 2005
    There are allegedly thousands of gods, man. Read my opening post!
     
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  24. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    I've read it. I don't really connect what you're saying to what I was saying. I don't believe in most of those Gods; and they matter so little that I can't even remember most of their names. But I'm not an "atheist" because I have a specific theistic belief, even if those Gods don't come into it. But I'm making the point that "this specific God does not exist and I will prove that to you" isn't atheism. But you run into a ton of "atheists" who seem to believe that it is. It's like seventhbeacon said: atheism has no claims. But a lot of "atheists" do. If I was an atheist, you wouldn't catch me trying to prove I was right. I don't have to and I couldn't anyway. But modern activist atheism is all about the compelling argument or the logical proof. And I'm just saying that compelling arguments and logical proofs are quite a bit different than the atheism seventhbeacon is talking about.
     
  25. seventhbeacon

    seventhbeacon Jedi Knight star 3

    Registered:
    Dec 3, 2015
    I realize we're talking broadly here, and not to just use semantics, but I can see how this would be more Theist/Anti-Theist thunderdome. You're absolutely right, Rogue 1.5, though I think it's pretty easy to disprove/undermine the Abrahamic god by pulling apart claims and arguments made by both the religious texts and apologists.

    I also think a fantastic starting point is one of the video series made by the Mr. Deity guy, so I'm going to share that one now. Very amusing little asides, too, so he makes it entertaining, even if one doesn't necessarily find themselves on his "side" of the issue.



    Edit: He is a self-ascribed Anti-Theist Atheist.