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To not recognize that children raised in a religious family are subtly and continuously taught religion is the basis of all their values is a form of extraordinary blindness. To think individually and deny this almost total possession by a paradigm requires an extraordinary personal effort of basic denial and original thought. There are cases of conversion to and from religion. Since I was never religious I have been spared that struggle.
What is most disturbing to me is the claim of religion that all decent social values originate in their beliefs and non-religious people are automatically social monsters. I do not deny horrible people exist both within and outside religion so religion seems a null factor to an extent but since frightful religious movements of hate and disdain do manifest themselves directly out of religions, religions cannot claim neutrality.

"To not recognize that children raised in a religious family are subtly and continuously taught religion is the basis of all their values is a form of extraordinary blindness."

Not having been raised in a religious family, I would hardly know - I don't think it is "extraordinary blindness" that I do not know what goes on in a family of Bible Belt Baptists or Socialist Frenchmen or vegetarian Chileans.

I DO know that whatever was subtly and continuously taught in my family and my wife;s family - the ones I really know something about from direct observation - it did not really take - very little uniformity of outcomes in the area of values.

"To think individually and deny this almost total possession by a paradigm requires an extraordinary personal effort of basic denial and original thought."

Perhaps for the ennea -1 and ennea-6, which types are paradigm centric, there might be some truth in your statement. But for certain other types it would take an extraordinary effort to conform. I personally and my wife have a strong built in deviationist drive.

You really should get a working sense of how personal differences factor into these things. Or do you still think everybody is you except for being stupid? I admit it took me till I was 20 to figure that one out.

Let me handle this separately:

"What is most disturbing to me is the claim of religion that all decent social values originate in their beliefs and non-religious people are automatically social monsters."

1. I am really beginning to wonder about you - I cannot see how this logically connects with anything that has been said in the trecent past.

2. "the claim of religion"? Are you ACTUALLY ascribing this attitude to RELIGION, or are you taking a stance that you associate with one or more particular flavors of religion and loading it onto all religions?

Sort of like saying "I really do not like the way religions burn cattle on the altar without regard to
air pollution"

3. Be that as it may: most Christian talk I have heard [and I think despite your loose framing of the statement you are pointing the finger primarily at Christianity, or at least the Judeo-Christian complex] explicitly recognizes that the unbeliever may be an extremely moral, virtuous, admirable person. You really should check on what claims are actually made.

I am fascinated at how unaware you are.

What really amazes me, Sand, is how piss-poor a lot of "philosophically sophisticated" theists' attempts to show how philosophically vulgar atheists arguments are, are!

A lot of "Philo-sophisticated theists" tend to be presumptous, more confident of their philosophical education than they should be, and filled with unwarranted assumption after unwarranted assumption.

On page 83 of the God Delusion, Richard Dawkins states: “I’ve forgotten the details, but I once piqued a gathering of theologians and philosophers by adapting the ontological argument to prove that pigs can fly. They felt the need to resort to Modal Logic to prove that I was wrong.”

So when anyone with even a small understanding of the subject considers that Dawkins does not even know that the Ontological Argument is an exercise in modal logic; they are not entitled to have a chuckle at how silly this is?

"I am fascinated at how unaware you are."

So enlighten me. A fact or two?.

You do realize that I could sit here and intone, "I am amazed you fail to perceive the Divine which is so obvious to me."?

Fortunately - because "You blind fools" is hardly the argument of the Übermensch - I pretty much stopped being amazed that others perceived differently and reasoned differently back in 1965. It took me a while to get there, but eventually you realize the oxtail soup [luscious it was] repeats on a two week cycle; exactly so you realize that two thirds of your colleagues are palpating the elephant from the other end.

My saying that all religions are not identical in their claims and attitudes shows that I am amazingly unaware: Yes? No? If so, how?

My saying that not a few branches of Christianity specifically state that unbelievers may be morally excellent shows that I am amazingly unaware: Yes? No? If so, how.

OR, if you prefer, tell me that I am the swine before whom you would be mad to cast your pearls, and that you can barely be bothered to call me unaware.

"What really amazes me, Sand, is how piss-poor a lot of "philosophically sophisticated" theists' attempts to show how philosophically vulgar atheists arguments are, are! "

I sincerely hope that is a generalization, not prompted by anything I have said recently.

I HOPE I am clear in my attempt [yes, like others around Wrong Planet I have my failed communications, but I try] to indicate that I truly desire to hear specific arguments.

Repeatedly I ask for detail as to what is being alleged. Repeatedly I get "how unaware thou art".

I for one hardly claim to be philosophically sophisticated - most philosophies and most poetries are closed to me, as I have pointed out to many. I certainly am not attacking any arguments as "philosophically vulgar" - whatevefr that might mean.

But I have been in academia one way or another my entire life, I have offered and received a lot of arguments, and at a pinch I can distinguished a patterned proffer of data from "how unaware thou art".

In most of these discussions, I am still waiting to see some data, some analysis, a strightforward conclusion.

I hated that "where's the meat" series of commercials - but fellows, "Where's the argument?"

Take it easy. We have exhibited our understandings. I do not expect anything I say will have the slightest effect on you or your world outlook. You have not presented anything I can take seriously. You must have other interests than being under-evaluated by me.
OR, if you prefer, tell me that I am the swine before whom you would be mad to cast your pearls, and that you can barely be bothered to call me unaware

Last edited by Sand on 29 Nov 2010, 4:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

It was mostly a general statement of annoyance with the "you atheists don't get it, existence is too vulgar an attribute to ascribe to God" camp, but it was a bit too personal and I apologize for that.

The general arguments against a Christian-Islamic-Jewish God are:

A) The argument from Dysteleology: The world looks exactly as it should were it not designed in a top-down way (numerous advances in various natural sciences ad credence to this probablistic argument).
B) Problem of suffering: If God is omnibenevolent and omnipotent, then he should be able to design a world where natural disasters don't kill innocent bystanders and infants. The world we are in doesn't correspond to such a reality, therefore an omnipotent/omnibenevolent God doesn't exist.
C) The notion of omnipotence is paradoxical - can God create being so powerful he himself cannot be defeated by it? If he can't, he's not powerful enough to do so, if he can he's not powerful enough to beat it.
D) The contradiction of transcendance and omniprescence: How can God "transcend" or be outside the physical universe while being everywhere in it at the same time? This is a contradiction in terms.
E) Argument to the Best Explanation of Mythology: It's much more probable that God is social construct that's been "inflated" from the status of a local superman in the sky to some contradictory, transcended/omnipresent entity. This is supported by other arguments here showing the improbablity if not impossbility of God and also the minimal entities and processes the mythological explanation would require contrasted with the theistic realism explanation.
F) Argument from personal disbelief: If God existed, every human being should be obviously aware of his existence if he is omnipotent and desires everyone to be aware of his presecence. Numerous biblical passages and statments by religious officials seem to indicate that he does desire this. I find his existence not apparent at all. Therefore, God doesn't exist if he possess these attributes.
G) Argument from Parsimony: Postulating some definitionally mysterious entity to explain numerous properties of the universe (like the apparent "reality" of religious belief, coincidences, or seemingly lucky [for us] features of our solar system and planet) doesn't really explain anything and overcomplicates matters. It's much better to look for other explanations.

I'm sleep deprived, so they'll be numerous grammatical and spelling errors in this post.

Our universe certainly does look like it has been designed for life. There is a great deal of teleological evidence for the existence of God. For example, a change in the strength of the atomic weak force by only one part in 10^100 would have prevented a life-permitting universe. The cosmological constant which drives the inflation of the universe and is responsible for the recently discovered acceleration of the universe’s expansion is inexplicably fine-tuned to around one part in 10^120. Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of the Big Bang’s low entropy condition existing by chance are on the order of one out of 10^10^(123). Penrose comments, “I cannot even recall seeing anything else in physics whose accuracy is known to approach, even remotely, a figure like one part in 10^10^(123).


The argument against this is that the teleological evidence can only be accounted for by chance, necessity or design. No serious scientist disputes that the evidence actually exists (the tend to argue, unconvincingly in my view but that is for another time), that it is due to chance.



If this argument was to be considered correct then it would have to be proven that God and the existence of evil are logically incompatible. Alvin Platinga has argued (to the point that his position now represents the mainstream of philosophy) that they are not incompatible. Here is his argument:

A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can't cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren't significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can't give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God's omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.



The problem with this is that the argument itself is a paradox. The words ‘God and Cannot’ are the logical contradiction, not God and omnipotence. The task you are describing is logically impossible and omnipotence does not necessarily entail the need to bring about the logically impossible. If it did entail that need, then God could do the logically impossible.



Many things in our universe exist in this way, for instance Mathematics. These things exist out of necessity of their existence; God logically is such a thing.



This is a logical fallacy, explaining how something exists does not disprove beliefs attached to such a thing. This works in the same way that understanding evolution does not mean that the universe requires no contingent explanation.



I would hold that the religious position to be well founded from my own personal experience. Moreover, the lack of a subjective experience does not disprove an objective reality. Moreover, if God were obvious then it would not be a choice to believe in him.

Master Pendant. I went through most of this a week ago with AG, it can still be found in the ‘Taking the Fight to the Real Issue thread’, along with some of the arguments for Gods existence.

Consider the difference between a bug and a feature.

What you have indicated is a happenstance.

ruveyn

The monstrously idiotic and self centered assumptions you dispense without hesitation is highly amusing. I hope you have a false nose and a peaked hat to go with the act.

Thats a leap of faith in favor of chance considering the evidence. Here is some more:

If the initial explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as one part in 10^60, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. In either case, life would be impossible. (As John Jefferson Davis points out, an accuracy of one part in 10^60 can be compared to firing a bullet at a one-inch target, twenty billion light years away, and hitting the target.)

Calculations by Brandon Carter show that if gravity had been stronger or weaker by one part in 10^40, then life-sustaining stars like the sun could not exist. This would most likely make life impossible.

Yes? That is the way things happen to be. None of these probability arguments -prove- design. They merely make happenstance unlikely, as opposed to impossible.

ruveyn

There are some creationists who make that argument about evolution; your standard of evidence to infer a hypothesis is quite subjective. If one continues to see such evidence (I have seen some academics list up to 100 instances of fine tuning) it becomes quite reasonable to infer design.