I'll get back to you later, possibly tomorrow. Got work to do!
I'm glad we caught this before we spent like 7 hours getting increasingly angry arguing at cross purposes.

At mafia, thank you for the debate. I will get back to you too on that ''second'' point, if I may.

What do you mean when you say reciprocal altruism is unscientific? Do you mean it doesn't exist? Or are you saying it can't be explained? Or that attempts at an evolutionary explanation are wrong?

Nigee, if God has certain...unsavory attributes, it's only because they were given to him.

Mario
The point I'm making is people follow God blindly but if you read the Bible and look at what he did then is this the sort of role model you want to follow, a mass murderer?.
I guess this is why religion and war go hand in hand because religious people think 'if murder and genocide was OK for God it's OK for us'

" 'if murder and genocide was OK for God it's OK for us'"

Indeed. With religion, anything is permitted.

Nigee, I want you to look up the story of The Third Wave. It helps explain how people are able to follow entities which condone/commit actions that would otherwise be considered reprehensible. I hate the fact that you're generalizing. All religion is not associated with murder and genocide. If anything, I'd say that that mindset is restricted to organized religion, and only because some people, a minority, become imbued with a sense of superiority that has no basis in fact or reality.

It's not a minority. You people keep getting elected and keeping imposing your reactionary policies on everybody else. It's not generalizing when you keep doing this over and over again. Take responsibility for your co-religionists actions.

And blaming this on 'organized religion' is a big cop-out. It's as if your god is your personal Djinn to grant you wishes, with no social responsibility to any collective community whatsoever.

What do you mean "you"? I said earlier that I am not an adherent of any religion, and if you must know, I am an atheist, but I'm not going to be an automatic dick toward theists because of it.

And the only responsibility I have is to procure my survival and that of those I care about. To expect anything else from me or from anyone is wishful thinking, whether one is religious or not.

'The Third Wave' or 'The Third Reich', who helped the Nazis escape Germany at the end of the war, the Vatican. God and Hitler have a lot to answer for.
Whar scares me about religious nut-jobs is they think they are normal and nice but they still support the idea of a Rapture when once again God will cleanse the Earth with his genocide, this is what Hitler had in mind also.

It's not being a 'dick', it's recognizing evil for what it is. You can appease people who want to impose a theocracy and think you're morally superior for doing so, I don't.

"And the only responsibility I have is to procure my survival and that of those I care about. To expect anything else from me or from anyone is wishful thinking, whether one is religious or not."

We'll see how far your self-absorbed "ethos" (sociopathy is not an ethos, but whatever) gets you when real tragedy strikes.

"Whar scares me about religious nut-jobs is they think they are normal and nice but they still support the idea of a Rapture when once again God will cleanse the Earth with his genocide."

I agree with that (I especially hate those who fault others for BS reasons, such as Pat Robertson blaming the Haitian earthquake on a pact with Satan).

Putin, you sound a lot like Pat Condell. You take the attributes of the nutjobs and apply them to everyone who identifies himself or herself as a theist. It is not a majority of people who wants "to impose a theocracy" on others, and to think otherwise is simply the result of paranoia and your own biases. It's not much different from the idea of "racial/blood poisoning" in terms of its rationality.

"We'll see how far your self-absorbed "ethos" (sociopathy is not an ethos, but whatever) gets you when real tragedy strikes."

As if you actually care.

@fulhamish

"I have always wanted to ask a believer in naturalism what they thought of this:

''If, as naturalists claim, there’s no god guiding the evolutionary process, then there’s no reason to think our cognitive faculties are reliable in giving us true beliefs about the world. Since we can’t trust our cognitive faculties, any conclusion we reach about the world is untrustworthy, including the claim that evolution is unguided. Therefore naturalism about evolution (and everything else) is self-defeating and must be given up. For us to trust our own beliefs (and we must, mustn’t we?) God must exist, and must have guided evolution.''

I'm not necessarily willing to pigeonhole myself as a "naturalist," because you still haven't defined that whole "purely mechanistic" thing in all its straw-man-y glory, but I'll answer this anyway: I agree that my faculties of comprehension are flawed. But that goes NOWHERE towards proving that anything that can be meaningfully referred to as a "god" exists.

We're both blind, that's fine. That doesn't make your idea of what things look like anywhere near right.

"But that position doesn't disprove God!"

I don't think you believe there is a god. I think you just really, really want there to be one, and you're really, really hoping that he'll approve of you. And that's terrible.

fulhamish: "Mafia, with respect, yours is not a position solely dictated by naturalism. We have very similar views about how we as individuals should conduct our affairs. I am, however, at a loss as to how you arrive there from a purely naturalistic position,"

Try this: don't be surprised that humans don't constantly kill each other. We enslave each other, we rob, we rape, and then sometimes someone decides that has to stop, and the murder happens, and then there's murder that happens back, and we generally behave like the animals we fucking are.

Never mind the idea of a lawgiver "god" to keep people under control. Even if God exists, he doesn't give a shit. People keep each other under control. And the fact that God doesn't exist doesn't stop people from using God to keep each other under control.

It's one thing if God is telling you not to kill. It's the flip side of the same thing if God is telling you to kill a murderer, or if you think God will understand if you kill someone in self defense or because your country was at war. Then there's Romans 12:19.

The fact that morality exists without God is easy to understand once you accept that man created God. "Justice" sounds fine, but when you're asked to justify justice, it's a lot easier to just be able to do an Evil Monkey point at the entire superego. But people didn't used to know what the superego was, so we've got God instead.

I am an existential nihilist. On its face, this means that I believe that existence is meaningless. Take that one step further and the fact that existence is meaningless is ITSELF meaningless, which means that I am "free" in the Nietzsche sense of the term to exert my will to power upon reality. Fucking dandy.

"Don't be a dick" works for me.

@ Average:
'' "But that position doesn't disprove God!" I don't think you believe there is a god. I think you just really, really want there to be one, and you're really, really hoping that he'll approve of you. And that's terrible.''

I don't recall making this remark: ''But that position doesn't disprove God!" Can you show me the context please? Then I will respond to the rest of your post

No, Fulham just likes being a contrarian. He doesn't believe god, but arguing that you can't disprove god is his own personal wet dream. Stating the obvious: Check. Countering a widely held modern concept: Check. Being able to drone on incessantly without ever having to deal in fact or create a positive argument: Check.

You fail reading comprehension forever.

verage ''You fail reading comprehension forever.''

Yeah right, what you appear to mean is that you attributed a quote to me, which I did not actually say. Just to help you along a little:
In English writing, quotation marks or inverted commas (informally referred to as quotes or speech marks) are punctuation marks surrounding a quotation, direct speech, or a literal title or name.

''No, Fulham just likes being a contrarian.''

What you call a contrarian I call a skeptic. I do sincerely hope that you do not teach. Your small c conservatism would stiffle any genuine enquiring minds in your charges and, come to that, the teacher himself. Everything has to be santa's way or else it is ''contrarian'' or ''revisionist''. What a brilliant way not to engage with the argument.

"Putin, you sound a lot like Pat Condell. You take the attributes of the nutjobs and apply them to everyone who identifies himself or herself as a theist. It is not a majority of people who wants "to impose a theocracy" on others"

Do you live in the United States? Also, have you bothered following what has been going on at the state level in the US lately? Also, have you bothered following what the leading contenders of the main conservative political party have unabashedly been advocating for the past two election cycles?

Stop pretending as if the majority of Christians are nice cuddly, Unitarian Universalists while the Evangelicals, Mormons, and Catholics are on the margins shrieking their reactionary nonsense where nobody can hear them. That's not the case and you know it.
The religious forces have been waging a near constant war on science, women and gay people with brutal results. The single biggest correlate between identity and party affiliation is religiosity, which means a large majority of devout Christians vote for the right. The degree of batshit rightwing views one has is directly proportional to how religious somebody is.

Stop the constant whining about 'generalization' and start acknowledging the facts on the ground. Christianity has turned vast swaths of America into cesspools of knuckledragging barbarism, where women are deprived of basic medical care, pastors happily talk about rounding up and slaughtering all gay Americans, and science is purged from schools.

Ha conservatism, sure fulham, perhaps I would call you a sekptic if you were one, skepticism requires making a coherent argument, and addressing opposing arguments, something you never do. You are as much a "skeptic" as the Ancient Alien pundits on the history channel. Your MO of ignoring opposing readily available and provided evidence and arguments while tailoring desperate and insignificant pieces of "evidence," does not make you a skeptic, it makes you a bat shit contrarian who will stick to the same brain dead "argument" come hell or high water. Your similar propensity to switch your arguments mid conversation so you can continue holding out (Slavery didn't cause the civil war becomes A Tariff might have played some role) I rarely accuse anyone of being contrarian or revisionist unless they are one, AKA only you and perhaps Tolstoy.

Putin writes: "The religious forces have been waging a near constant war on science, women and gay people with brutal results" plus worse things. Putin, Satan is a liar and the father of lies. Please don't stray too far into his camp.

See, Mujus is just another cute cuddly Christian, accusing people of devil worship. You know, the same pretense his forebears used to torture and burn people at the stake.

Another lie, and another. :/

Putin, you should realize that correlation is not causation.

This debate has been a massive victory for the Atheists, I like to see the good guys win

Uhhhh fulham. I'm sorry. I'm doing my best not to turn this into another ugly fight between us, but you're not a skeptic. Skeptics generally take the position of not believing in things without a good, logical reason. You have a tendency to automatically gainsay any more or less left wing or liberal point of view, by using obscure and more than occasionally misleading arguments, tending instead towards what you evidently consider to be middle of the road arguments, but which are in actuality quite conservative or traditionalist views.

I'm inclined to agree with Putin here. It's not to say that every christian is anti-feminist, or anti-gay or pro-life or what have you. Many are not. But if ever you bring up the role of Christianity in the anti-gay movement, or the pro-life movement, or the anti-feminist movement, everyone says "Yeah sure, if you're one of those 50 or so inbred loonies who go to the Westboro Baptist Church!" Uhh guys, spoiler alert. The WBC is not the only right-wing, anti-gay, anti-feminist religious organization in North America. Not by a longshot. They make a convenient scapegoat, but it's time to face up to the fact that there are tens if not hundreds of millions of people across North America who attend churches which are misogynist and homophobic, and who hold similar beliefs themselves. And even if their religious beliefs aren't the sole reason for their bigotry, it's certainly a contributing factor, and these churches provide them with a language and an organized framework in which to express these views. So can we please, please, please stop pretending there are only a few dozen bigoted religious fundamentalists in the world. That's a transparently idiotic thing to say.

@ Mujus - Wow. And people say atheists are the smug ones.

Hi Mafia moving on from the time wasting, have you had any more thoughts about this: ''I'll get back to you later, possibly tomorrow. Got work to do!
I'm glad we caught this before we spent like 7 hours getting increasingly angry arguing at cross purposes.''

@ fulhamish - I was having a bit of trouble finding a way to express myself and it ended up turning into a really, really, really, really long essay that would even make obiwan say dude tl;dr. I got halfway through and couldn't be bothered to finish. Sorry.