ClaymanOnfire, I think you screwed up with the quotes of Erosion Of Humanity and me.

Your idea of morality actually sounds pretty interesting. Did you formulate that yourself, or did you read it somewhere? I also think I understand where you're coming better than you might think, if I wasn't a Christian I'd probably be some form of nihilist agnostic. I'm really not nearly as convinced of my own beliefs as I'd like (I'm not sure anyone is), and that's why I like having these kinds of exchanges.

I have a question: Did you start out with a set worldview and are you just searching for confirmation for that worldview, or did you form a worldview based on arguments and facts?

That's really just a wishful way to interpret the genetic background of selfless acts and justice/morality to something supernatural or divine. It's all a combination of genetics and learning, and that's it.

To elaborate, humans were supposed to live in family groups of half a dozen to less than a hundred or so, largely isolated from other such groups. That's our history, and there's little to debate in that. After a million years of that, finding someone in trouble makes us feel the need to help the other person, simply because of two things:
1) we have learned that helping each other leads to useful and selfish reciprocity of "good" acts, and therefore leads to a beneficial expected outcome for the individual, i.e. the morality discussed there is, essentially, cultural, or, if you will, an ancient beneficial meme.
2) it makes sense from the point of genetics to help anyone in need of help, because in such circumstances any help to other individual would lead to the increased survival chances of the very same genes that reside temporarily in the helper's gonads. They are supposed to be family members in this scenario, after all.

Nowadays, when people live in unnaturally large groups of thousands or, hell, millions in the greater cities, these memes and genetics do not have the functions they were supposed to have, since the setting is screwed from evolutionary point of view, and do not help the survival of the genes of the helper. But it would be nice if it stayed that way, since, as said so many times by men much more intelligent and thoughtful than I am, a Darwinian society would be a fucking awful place to live.

w0Lf, your argument is fallacious, but not in the way others have pointed out, IMO. The fact is that the IQ tests rely on learning that's essentially only offered by schools and culture modeled after the Western, rich-as-fuck nations, and it simply cannot be applied to traditional Africa, for example. It's usually mostly pattern recognition, and you can't really expect too much from a person who has never heard of arithmetic or stuff like straight angles. It's too culturally insensitive to work as a metric outside the western cultural sphere, and to be frank, IQ is also a very one-dimensional puzzle-solving exercise being used to measure something that we can't even really define yet. Your posts are indeed badly camouflaged racism.

Sounds very clinical. Isn't helping others, and expecting no reward , one aspect that sets man apart , what
about empathy?

Napero's right (no particular surprise there). You can see the conflict of learning and heritage when someone's in trouble in a city. There's usually an impulse to help and then the social conditioning of "they're on their own/we don't do that here/it's someone else's job" stifles that impulse. And it's also very true that without the same environmental conditioning people's answers to symbolic or abstracted shape recognition will be very different (in a picture of a woman with a box over her head, it looks like a window to a westerner and a woman carrying a basket on her head to a third world villager; a picture of a tall splayed shape: a tree for a villager, a coat rack for a westerner). When Napero mentioned the lack of straight angles I remembered that phenomenon illustrated in my psychology class -- people have trouble interpreting the length of a line met at the ends by diverging forks if they aren't familiar with angular architecture, whereas to me it was impossible to see how that could be. EDIT: Also, counting is difficult for anyone whose language does not include the relevant digits. If they have to lay out a line of an equal number of stones, they'll have to match the first line visually. Thus an intelligence standard is erroneously applied, putting aside the obvious fact that the person giving the test wouldn't know shit about nomadic cattle herding or nautical navigation lacking a compass and map.

It's this experiential specificity leading to associations and learning that makes me curious about the evidence of the faithful and why it satisfies them. It's usually pretty scant in conversations like this, and considering the peer pressure that exists to be anti-religious, the case is rarely made in support of the faith (placebo/crutch arguments not withstanding). If it's "personal evidence" or personal experiences, what are they? "I like to think about it in this way" -- well that's very convenient, but you do see that it's intentionally arbitrary, right? "It's just stuff I saw and I know it was God" -- you have to understand how that looks from the outside. It's practically (if not wholly) worthless, and only the people who believe the exact same extrapolation will agree. But if it's ONLY faith, and you know it is, it stands to reason that the cause of its hold on you is more cultural conditioning than any reality of the thing unto itself -- the sheer will and insistence to believe reinforced by positive or negative conditioning imposed by your relevant culture (as much who you choose to spend time with as who you don't) .. because, believe me, you weren't born thinking this way.

"I believe it is so." So what? .. or, slightly more constructively, "wtf!? WHY?"

Our brain rewards for showing empathy, true. That can mean two things: It's in our genes our we're Pawlow's dogs, conditioned to find pleasure in empathy. Might be a mix of both. Still, what Napero said explains how it came to it.

Here's some brain fodder:
According to the writings of 19th century philosopher and theologian Sören Kierkegaard, there is no rational way into faith. If I'm not mistaken he coined the famous term "leap of faith", which in this context means real faith in god, as opposed to just theism-leaning agnosticism which most believers have, can only be acquired by "leaping" into it, without any transition inbetween. Kierkegaard admits that there can be no rational argument justifying such a leap, but nevertheless he regards the existence of the true believer as the superior form of existence, simply because as opposed to other forms of existence it solves the problem of nihilism. If there is a god, nihilism is not true and there is absolute meaning to life.

For the record, I'm an atheist and do not see myself doing a leap of faith anytime soon, but I can nevertheless see the validity of this line of thought. I just don't have that much of a problem with nihilism. My summary of his complex teachings is probably far too compressed to avoid misunderstandings, so feel free to ask me for clarification before screaming "bullshit".

@Mindshadow: no I haven't seen it but I'll check it out for sure.

@Clayman: yeah you for sure got those quotes mixed at the bottom of page 3 and I forgot what else I was gonna say to you cause I'm on my phone and I can't see that stuff while posting this but I'll edit it later.

@Grave_Wyrm: if you want personal evidence/testimonials I can give you what I can and I'm sure that there's at least a few other religious people here that could as well. Also a little bit of Google searching could provide you with that as well.

This excerpt from the article for my class attends the OP. It refers to data collected by the World Values Survey conducted across 70 countries in two waves between 1995-96 and again between 2000-2002, said to encompass over 80 percent of the world's population:

“... citizens in some Muslim societies agree overwhelmingly with the statement that ‘politicians who do not believe in God are unfit for public office’ (88 percent in Egypt, 83 percent in Iran, and 71 percent in Bangladesh), but this statement also garners strong support in the Philippines (71 percent), Uganda (60 percent), and Venezuela (52 percent). Even in the United States, about two fifths of the public believes that atheists are unfit for public office.”

Sorry about that. I hit the quote button and during the process of editing it down I must've made that mistake.

Anyway, yes, I was brought up Christian. But I was also brought up to always use critical thinking, so I try to remain as unbiased as possible. The possibility of becoming said nihilist agnostic is very real. And of course, your question can go both ways.

Napero, I would love it if you could recommend some reading material/documentaries about herd instinct and the like. But let me point out, C.S. Lews did address that. Reread the quote, he draws attention to the fact that while there are certainly evolutionary forces at work, there is also something that decides between the impulses. I suppose that could just be another evolutionary impulse, but apparently I need to reread some of it because I'm pretty sure he addresses this too. Also keep in mind, that is a very small quote. I was really just using it as an example of worthwhile evidence for Theism (or at least a good first step).

EDIT: Hold on, I see what you're saying there, Napero. That morality is partially learnt? How would you explain the similarities in morals across the world, throughout time?

Personally, automatically putting God into that gap in the understood is like touching the metal in Operation.

If you're addressing me, there's much, much, much more to the moral argument to bridge that gap. So far, I'm not really arguing for a god, much less the god of Christianity. Just the possibility that our morals come from some external source.

sorry, I neglected the quote. I was referring to that part of your C.S. Lewis reference, that which decides between the two impulses.

@ClaymanOnFire.

Why not regard that "something" as just another evolutionary impulse? There is infinitely more ground for it than "a god did it". I know I'm repeating myself time and time again, but as Napero already said that quote is just putting christianity in front of it. Without any explanation to why it is in front of it. You could switch christianity with any other religion of deity and it would still be the same. I don't know anything about the writer, but it seems to me that he's working from an already set worldview.

I think I already addressed that in my last post.

And that external source would be what? Some sort of force of consciousness and morality? Sounds like some sort of deity to me.

EDIT Woohoo! 2000 posts!

Something like that. But I thought the step from an external moral force to a deity was what you were criticizing?

And congrats on 2000 I just realized I got to the not quite as substantial 300

Well, I don't know what a external moral force is. There is no evidence for it, so why should we include it when talking about truth? It's the same with a deity. The second the existence of a outside force/deity is actually proven I"ll accept it's existence without blinking. I feel like this mindset is the best mindset to have.

That's what the excerpt was for. C.S. Lewis argues that the voice in our heads that tells us which evolutionary impulses to encourage cannot itself be an evolutionary force, and must be something else (e.g. an external force).

It also bears mention, that if there is a god that created everything, the evidence for it would most likely be very unorthodox. How could you prove something completely separate from everything we know or understand with science? That's why I find the moral argument so compelling.

But Lewis doesn't say why it has to be an external force. He doesn't give any arguments. He just says that "it can't be an evolutionary force" Why can't it be? I don't see why the source of evolutionary impulses itself cannot be evolutionary.

I just googled Lewis, and I see that he is a Christian apologist. Which means he's probably very biased anyway.

You can forget about the "probably", Henk. Apologists of any kind are always extremely biased, and their opinions are to be taken with an industrial sized sodium tablet.

I always try to see the good in people, Xlxlx Plus, I say probably because I don't know anything about the guy. You are right though.

EDIT Have you come for your part of the shift? I'm going to bed. Hurray for global networking!

Meh, I don't have much to add here. I have already discussed the stuff you and Clayman were talking about many times before, and I don't feel like tackling the subject again. If anything particularly stupid/fascinating pops up here, I'll be sure to come back.

He was a Christian until around fifteen, when he became atheist. He didn't return to Christianity until much, much later. He said that the night he did, he must have been the most unhappy convert in the country. In other words, he was extremely critical, and really fought against it. And once again, he has much more to say than just "it must be an external force." I just can't quote the entire book here. You know, even if I try to explain it, I'll be doing it all a disservice, it would be better to just check it out from the library. A lot of the concepts take some time to sink in, anyway.

Morality is shaped by our experiences and outlook of the world and life. If an external force shapes our moral codes then it would make sense that everyone has the same morals, and that is not true. Correct me if I'm wrong but you seem to be talking about consciousness as opposed to morality. Consciousness tells you what will make you happier and morals tell you think is right but not necessarily for yourself. I've come to despise the word "morality" because every time the word is mentioned, it is implied that it is immutable and universal, which is incredibly arrogant.

Well, everyone doesn't have the exact same morals, but there are certainly common themes throughout the world and history. Things like, don't be selfish, don't rape everyone who turns you on, don't kill your neighbors, etc. And I am talking about morals as you define it. Why do you find it arrogant?

All of that stuff can be tied to evolution. We're social creatures, ergo, being selfish isn't a productive course of action. And hell, you don't go around raping and killing people because that has consequences. Anyone who isn't mentally ill understands that.

Well, reproduction furthers our genes, so that's rather curious. I kinda feel like this exchange is winding down though, we all seem to have made our points and I've been debating for a while I'm gonna log for the day, but thanks for the interesting discussion.

Of course, reproduction furthers our genes, but I believe that we have progressed beyond having to rape a member of the opposite sex to achieve such a goal

And yeah, the discussion is going a bit stale. Better to let it breathe a little.

What is curious about morals and values, is that we human beings seem to be born with no morals and values at all, in fact, we tend to do the opposite, one has just to see how children are raised. Kids are often told to NOT do what naturally springs from them, like lying, stealing or hurting others. Now, if this selfish, harmful nature is proper to us, then how did morality evolved along the human race? In what moment did it appear in our lives?

That is exactly why religion is all about faith. God doesn't want people to believe in him cause they have to or cause it's the most logical standpoint. Believing in God isn't just accepting something because it's true, it's taking it for what it is and putting your faith in that what you believe is true. The reason I believe in God isn't because it makes logical sense or anything, I admit it sounds crazy and I was once a skeptic (maybe not full on but for many years I was trying to figure out if I really did believe or not) but through my own personal experiences I have come to believe in him. It isn't like anything I say or do will make you ever believe (and that's not my point in any of this) it's just something you have to feel for yourself to believe.

Unlike you, I believe in Him because He's tremendously logical and obvious to me.

Erosion gets a free pass because he admits that faith and logic have nothing to do with each other, but Thexhumed..... You have a lot of explaining to do regarding that little statement of yours.

Do I have faith in God? Yes, faith is needed to believe that He will save you. Do I faith in His existence? No, since I don't need it. He's proven Himself to me through personal experience and the world surrounding us. I don't believe in the God of the gaps, instead, I believe in the architect, in the agent behind the creation. As Newton stated (I forgot his exact words) every discovery found by men does not get you rid of the creator, instead, show you how His work was done, discovering the mechanism gives account of the agent.

Faith simply can't be logically explained, it's like believing in Santa Claus because why not. Believe in what you want, sure, but saying it's "logical" is pushing it. It's linked with empiricism and scientific evidences and unfortunately none of these are concrete yet. If doing a pilgrimage to Jerusalem is logical to you, so be it but it will be on the behalf of your faith and not based on the existence of something that was written centuries ago.

I think it's a matter of preference, you either believe that as everything (the Universe and life) is so perfectly tuned that it has to be created, or either you think they're a bunch of coincidences, awaiting for a scientist to discover where it all came from. Faith or a mere preference? I don't know.

Aye,

To expand upon a point that perhaps is not worth expanding upon - we must tread lightly where language is loaded - we tread where angels fear to, and as such - we must be careful.

Logic, at least in the modern sense of the word, indeed as little to do with religion - as logic is far removed from "logos" and especially "Logos" in the divine sense (i.e, the "logical" is that related the the Truth [note the capital 'T'] of the world - which was almost always divine [Plato's forms, the atom, whatever it was smacked of a sense of divinity]). Alas, now it is entirely based on the worldly assumption of generalized Truth - and while your truth may provide you with the type of release and relief that only it can provide - it does not make any experience, no matter how beneficial and wondrous - anymore true to anyone else. HOWEVER, this does not predicate any sort of judgement upon the word "logic" in relation to faith.

I agree with Tony that they have very little to do with one another, and that the tenants of religion (any religion) have nary proven themselves in terms of metaphysical value (where is God?) but to call them illogical in the sense that they are damaging (which Tony does not seem to do) is another. The vast majority of objective thought (whether faith place in God, in a philosophy, in the platonic forms - whatever) where man strives towards a higher external purpose - is vastly more important and necessary and better for mankind than the wallowing post-ironic devaluing of all things external/metaphysical/'illogical' that our generation has made particularly popular.

Sure, this is a product of the age, but at the same time - there is a harrowing lack of objectivism in the thoughts of philosophy today. We have taken the children of Sartre's thoughts but have not put in the MASSIVE effort in applying our own to such things. We take that "God is Dead" or that "Existence is before Essence" but we have rarely taken it upon our own shoulders to quantify it with our own existences.

I do not clamor for gods and idols - but at least peasantry feared something back in the unenlightened age, as opposed to the peasantry in the first world now - dominating the zeitgeist of the century.


Ehh...who knows...

So basically you're saying mankind needs to feel like there is a purpose to all we know? If so, I'm going to have to disagree there. The lack of purpose does not diminish the value of anything but most people seem to believe that it does. It doesn't matter if a god created everything or if it's all a cosmic accident: if you strive for better things for yourself and others and you act upon that idea, then life has meaning. If you drop a multicolored vase and you can then see how the shards form a mosaic, it is no different than if you broke it on purpose and arranged it yourself. Its worth does not suffer.

Not what I'm saying at all. Not even close, friend! The objective thought encased in value is immensely important - regardless of it's actual worth.

OK, now I see it. Man, I'm really dense. Thanks for not being a dick about it, though!