What the hell happened?! LOL
Step away for a bit...30+ responses...
@baumhauer:
I'll stop you right at your first sentence--I do NOT say that theism is false, nor do I say that theism is necessary for morality.
The second issue there first: as I don't BELIEVE in morality in general, I'm amoral, because I don't see any objective standard of morality, then I don't see where I would need theism. I can see that you MIGHT say theism gives an absolute account, an absolute morality, ie, The Ten Commandments.
However, there is no reason to believe that we can't have morality without religion or theism, that's not the issue, the issue is one of objectivity, I simply see no way that there can be a completely objective moral standard, and that's true of theism as well--if nothing else, if you wanted to take the religious side, God dictated the Commandments, so it's HIS word...this isn't objective, it's what someone has decided is right and wrong.
That's NOT objective jsut because that someone happens to be a God and can enforce his decision with a Plague or a Flood, it's still, for lack of a better way of putting it, just God's opinion, and even if we were to grant a further assumption, that a God would be of a higher order than us, even perfect, it's still just a perfect opinion, and nothing else. A perfect opinion does not an objective opinion make, the CLOSEST I can grant is that if we were to argue such a God was perfect and so his ideas were perfect then his ideas on morality are perfect and thus the perfect moral code, but that doesn't change the fact that this perfect moral code is still just the product of someone's imagination on what should be right or wrong, even if that person happens to be a perfect God.
I can say "Always Be Respectful" is a perfect moral idea--not that I think it is--but even if it WERE a perfect moral idea and was correct, that we would optimize living by always being respectful, that's still just my opinion. There's nothing to suggest ANOTHER idea might be equally as perfect, but what's more, you might even argue that in some cases you might wish to adopt a less-perfect moral code if, for the situation, it suits you.
The second issue you bring up is that you believe I believe theism is false. I don't.
To clarify where I stand on THAT to everyone...I don't CARE.
Or, to be more precise, it's interesting and even fun to muse about the idea of a God or no god and what created us and where we came from and all of that...
But we do not and should not need to worry about that sort of schtick to get through life. EITHER way, I'm NOT defending atheism here, and I'll go on record and quite possibly piss off a few people here when I say that the New Atheist movement in "philosophy," with Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins is a POISON in the philosophic world, and quite frankly I think these people, PARTICULARLY DAWKINS, are self-important fools who do NOT deserve to even be called "philosophers."
I'll say this: I talk to a LOT of people in my medium-sized Southern California area, and they come from all different walks of life, I don't discriminate who I talk to. I talk to professors, I talk to passersby, I talk to students in the cafe (OK, cafeteria, my community college sucks, I WISH we had a cafe), I talk to construction workers, I talk to priests, I talk to hardcore-atheists, I talk to New Agers, I talk to people about my own age, I talk to older folks and then the very elderly and then seniors, I talk to whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians, I talk to Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, some people who I honestly don't know WHAT sort of system of belief they have and where they got it, but that's fine with me, as long as it's THEIR belief, I talk to the very poor and the reasonably well off, to people who can quote their Plato or Nietzsche or Freud to make a point or to people who can quote the Bible from memory.
And the one reply I get more than any other, whatever the topic, with the possible exception of "The Lord LOVES/CREATED you..." and so on, is "You're a good thinker/philosopher."
And I ALWAYS wave them off at that point.
I do NOT deserve to be called a good thinker or a good philosopher--to me, becoming a good thinker or a good philosopher is something you EARN through YEARS, even a LIFETIME of hard work and determination, of hitting dead ends a million times every time you try to find an answer and STILL having the strength to go looking for it once more in the morning, whatever you think the answer is, because the answers, whatever they may be, mean THAT MUCH to you.
To be a thinker or philosopher is something that requires the ability to go out and HAVE those discussions, no matter who the person is or what they say, and listen to them, even when they're berating you and calling you an asshole or saying you'll go to Hell if you don't agree with them, or that to not rule out even the slimmest possibility of any sort of higher power anywhere any time ever is the dumbest position imaginable and you're as big of an idiot as they've ever seen, to take all that in stride and be THANKFUL for the conversation, no matter what it's like or who it is you're speaking with, because that conversation, any conversation could bring you that much closer to unlocking even the most infintesimal idea, but it might be that little crack of light ath allows you to create a brilliant sun of enlightenment.
To be a thinker or philosopher, you have to DO SOMETHING FOR MANKIND, you have to have added even a tiniest drop to man's collective pool of ideas. What's more, you have to be willing to examine that pool and treat it with due respect, and even if you find Kant a fool or Nietzsche a blathering idiot you have to treat them with due respect because no matter what you might think of their ideas, the fact remains tha they TRIED, they gave the very effort you're giving right now, and it's quite possible whatever you're thinking right now, should your idea prove lasting, will be seen as foolish by someone in the future--but at least you TRIED.
It's an HONOR to be considered a philosopher or great thinker. It's the highest honor anyone in the field of philosophy or thought or theology or literature can aspire towards--the idea that, amongst hundreds of millions of ideas uttered each day every deay over thousands of years, YOUR ideas are considered valuable enough to continue to be printed and spoken of and referenced by others by millions and even after your death, that your ideas influenced people, struck a chord with them so strongly that even after your death those ideas live on, and you're preserved in one of the most human ways possible--your mind, a real part of you, is kept alive by people and your opinions are kept alive through books and through speech...people will still talk about you years after you're gone because you meant something to them, not because you conquered a nation or because you discovered a new scientific principle, but because mankind has asked, since the beginning, not merely "What?" or "How? or "Who?" but WHY?"
And people think your response to that question, the greatest question of all, the one that gives meaning to all the others, was good enough, somehow a step closer towards whatever the ultimate answer is, that they want to keep it alive to hear and so that future generations can hear.
That's not to diminish the accomplishments of the politician or the conqueror or the scientist, but to exhibit how the thinker is honored--by being preserved in that manner, and being called a great thinker, a philosopher, that out of the billions of voices that there have ever been, YOURS ranks with those select few who have resonated so much with your fellow man that they, being human beings, beings who can only care so far and so much, even the best of them, cared enough about you to want to make sure your voice got special attention because it MATTERED somehow, it MEANT something special to them.
Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates...Descartes and Spinoza and Hobbes...Shakespeare and Sophocles and Ibsen...Locke and Hume and Russell and Wittgenstein...Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Sartre and Camus...Dickinson and Bronte and Beauvoir...
They and the others that we call great thinkers and philosophers are as close to an immortal state of being here on Earth--whatever afterlife or nothingness awaits one after death, these people live on in their works and in our minds...and sometimes even in people's hearts.
That's a TREMENDOUS honor.
That's an honor I'd be lucky if I was even ever barely in a blurred sight of, and CERTAINLY not anything I deserve at this moment--NOT EVEN CLOSE.
So you can imagine, given how high in esteem I hold such people, even the people I thoroughly disagree with, like Descartes and Kant, who earn the title of "thinker" or "philosopher."
So too see THIS crop of people, people who make their reputation not on building ideas but smashing those of others, people who have no answers of their own and yet relentlessly ridicule and mock those who attempt to give one based on their beliefs, people who contribute NOTHING NEW to that pool of knowledge and yet siphon off old ideas from REAL thinkers from it and use it as if it were there own, and who are as known as they are not for any insight or for any great contribution to thought, but rather for stirring up controversy, for being famboyant or arrogant or infammatory to gain notoriety and to sell books and to pander to those who FLOCK to the fool making a scene because in doing so they, too, feel as if they've found someone who can speak FOR THEM, and not TO them...
It INFURIATES ME to see these people called "philosophers."
THEY ARE NOT.
You may be a philosopher and STILL be a scientist, sure, by all means, or a mathematician or a logician or a physicist.
Aristotle and Rene Descartes and Betrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, to name a few, all were.
You may be a theist like John Locke, or you may be an atheist like David Hume.
You may be a quiet, humble man like Immanuel Kant, or you may be a raging volcano of controversy like Friedrich Nietzsche.
You can be an authoritatian like Hobbes or a proponent of democracy like Rousseau.
You can hold ANY position you want.
But YOU MUST HAVE THE IDEAS TO BACK IT UP, YOU MUST CONTRIBUTE SOMETHING NEW TO THAT POOL...AND THESE PEOPLE DO NOT.
Writing a book called "God is Not Great" or "The God Delusion" doesn't make you an atheistic philosopher!
All it does is shout out that you're going to ruthlessly attack someone else's ideas for 400 pages, and so if you want to see that sort of carnage and NOT think about it, if you essentially want to see someone ridicule another for their take on that great question of "WHY?" for all that time and not have to worry about the answers, just enjoy pages and pages of an attack with no real objective other than to ridicule and to hurt, then by all means, read the New Atheists, as THAT'S what they offer. They offer NOTHING new in philosophy, and what's worse is that they violate that one rule, that one thing I said earlier I care about more than any other.
THEY DON'T TRY TO ANSWER THE QUESTIONS.
Understand that this isn't me taking a stance agaisnt atheism; I've said before that Nietzsche and Hume are my two favorite philosophers, and BOTH are atheists.
That's not waht I take issue with.
I don't take issue with their being inflammatory, not by itself, because that's part of the business, you likely ARE going to anger some people with what you say, that's just how the human species is.
But there's a difference between just antagonizing and doing nothing else and angering people, maybe even antagonizing them, but AT LEAST you have something new you thought up that you're bringing to the table.
Again, to use Hume and Nietzsche--how INFURIATED do you think some people were about Hume's infamous passage "On Miracles?" People were LIVID! And he KNEW they would be, you could definitely go so far as to say he was antagonizing the, that he was picking a fight, but why is that OK in his case? Because Hume picked a fight not just to pick a fight, not just to look smart by attacking other ideas, not just to boost his book sales or his notability or his own ego...
He did it because he GENUINELY had something to say and to say contrary to the idea of miracles! He had a view of the nature of man that featured some new ideas, and these conflicted with older dogmas, so he took them head on, but he didn't do it just to boost his sales or prestige...in fact, if anything, it diminished those things, as in 18th century England you're going to have a rather difficult time selling what essentially amounts to some of the most fundamental and founding ideas of atheism!
To use another example, Nietzsche--he entitled a whole BOOK "The Antichrist," and he starts off "The Gay Science" with his infamous saying, "God is dead."
But he DEFINITELY didn't do it to boost sales or make himself appear the great intellectual of his age...in fact, his books hardly sold at first! And Nietzsche didn't care much for quite a few "intellectuals" and that scene in his day!
He came out that bombastic and that fiery because he actually WAS angry, angry at what he thought was the demise of the extraordinary in favor of a celebration of mediocrity, and the fact that his idea for a greater form of man clashed directly with the Bible's rules and ideas!
The New Atheists have none of that, they present no new ideas, and what's worse, what draws them clinching ire from me, is the fact that their attacks not only are just attacks and are, in fact, full of sound and fury and signify nothing, that they have no new ideas, but that a good deal of people THINK that their ideas are new when, in fact, a good dealo of these people have never READ Hume or Nietzsche or Bertrand Russell, to name another great atheistic philosopher, or Jean-Paul Sartre, and so on.
In essence, they're living of other people's ideas on both ends--they live off of attacking some people's ideas while sounding deep and philosophical by repeating what the Humes and the Nietzsches and Russells and Wittgensteins and Sartres have been saying for centuries.
They don't try AND they, indirectly at best and directly at worst, pass old ideas off as new and their own, paying no homage or respect to the real thinkers and theologieans and writers and philosophers who actually cared enough about this race to try and come up with these ideas for the betterment and explanation of man on their own!
And to be fair, I, again, as I've said before, get JUST as angry at those who'll spout Biblical passages at me with no thought behind it, they've just been taught what to say and they say it, and that's the one time, in my many discussions with people, thta I EVER cut people off.
Why have I just spent an hour on this incredibly-long-winded diatribe, which if anyone reads all the way through will most likely scoff at and call me an idiot and fool and point out all the ways I am such?
For two reasons:
You said I don't believe in theism, and I said I don't care about it--the fact of the matter is I DO, but there are incredible issues that man must struggle with first before the subject of a creator or lackthereof or his place in the universe can even be broached: what IS man? What does it mean to be human? Forget God and forget atheism, forget all of that arguing--consider yourself as you are NOW, where you are NOW, at this very moment...what are you? WHO are you? And how do you know? And why do you know? And why does that matter to you, or does it not? And why? And will you be the same person tomorrow, and if not, why? And what's a person, for that matter, if we change every day, am I the same person when I go to bed as I was in the morning? And why does THAT matter?
And on and on and on.
You get ONE LIFE here on Earth. ONE. You get one shot to try and find your place, and you have absolutely no idea what will come afterwards, even if you argue you know and there's a heaven, you don't know what that's like, or if you know there's just nothingness and death, you don't know what that's like, either.
But you DO know that there are so many questions, so many things to be and to do and to say and to feel and to think in THIS life!
And I HATE, ABSOLUTELY HATE to see people WASTE that life of theirs arguing about the next life, whether they believe it exists and they're living for a next life or if they don't believe on exists and they treat this life as just something to fool around with because hey, there's no divinity to life, it may be unique and interesting, but there's nothing grandiose, nothing more than sheer science and facts can describe.
And that leads to my second issue--dogma. I said before I care about effort.
There is NO EFFORT in mindlessly following Dawkins or Hitchens or Sam Harris about and buying their books and spending your life taking your answers from them and that movement, from ANY movement. There's NO EFFORT in quoting the Bible off to me because you learned it was important and that this passage meant that as a kid. There's nothing about ridiculing Christians for believing in a God that's either honrable or intelligent, it adds NOTHING to that pool of knowledge humanity has, and if anything it detracts from any progress we might make by just driving the divide larger, which is my third issue with both movements, the New Atheist movement and their God-touting counterparts who throw "God" or "the Lord" or "Jesus" into every other sentence to give it the sense of being deep and holy and important.
I've said I'm an agnostic before, and I'm saying it here again--I DON'T KNOW what the big questjon is, but do you know...
I'll LISTEN to what other people have to say on the matter, and I'll think it over for myself and accepot or reject their idea, but I'll respect their ideas as well as my own...
IF they don't come into the discussion with the attitude that they KNOW the answer.
The New Atheists do not KNOW there is no God, you can't disprove something that is, by definition, unproveable to begin with, God is and should be a matter of FAITH, he's essentially a magical, non-rational, un-scientific being, IF he exists, so really, Dawkins can call it a delusion all he wants, the only delusion *I* see in that book is that of a man who has deluded others--and possibly himself--into thinking he's managed to destroy an idea that CAN'T be destroyed any more than the Idea of Freedom or the Idea of Love or the Idea of Justice can be destroyed.
It's a leap of faith, and if Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris don't want to take it, feel it's stupid, that's fine, there's no penalty for not doing so, hey're free to do as they wish--but in so doing they do NOT earn the right to say they've managed to make God vanish in a poof of logic when FAITH, not logic, is the basis for any God.
And I say FAITH...NOT RELIGION.
You can have a religion, but you must FIRST have FAITH. I've gotten on the New Atheists for their claiming to have disproved god--well, I get JUST AS ANGRY when a religious group says they KNOW God wants them to do this or that, or that they KNOW what they're doing is right and in the name of God or, for a clincher, that they KNOW there's a god.
In faith, you have--here's a shocker--FAITH that something exists, you do not, cannot, will not ever KNOW.
That's part of why its supposed to be so POWERFUL! That's why it's so vital! That's why, no matter how much some today, myself included, will get on the case of religions for being dogmatic, I, at least, and I think most others will NEVER get on someone's case for simply and truly believing in something and leaving it at that--not sticking their faith in someone else's face, not ranting and raving about how they've got it all figured out, not saying you must share their faith or face punishment, but by quietly holding onto their faith and not feeling the need to defend it or trump it up.
And the people who DO...they DON'T have faith--they have a dogma, they have a mantra, they have an idea ingrained into their minds that they cannot stand to see attacked, not because they have true faith in the idea, but because they cannot handle a challenge to their views without feeling the strain and so want to eliminate such strain. TRUE FAITH doesn't need to answer for itself, doesn't need to fight a war with atheism, as true faith and the people who hold it are perfectly content to simply and quietly hold their belief and be happy with it to themselves, as they believe in their faith, whatever it is, so much they don't NEED to silence every naysayer to keepo their faith safe--it's strong enough, true enough to them as it is, without the need to safeguard it.
The quest for an answer to the theistic questions is still ongoing, and it's a long process, it can take a lifetime for even the tiniest bit of enlightenment, if even that comes, but the trial is worth it because life is worth it because mankind is worth it...
But that quest and that worth get obscured by these dogmas on BOTH sides and the ridicule and shouting and absurdity on both sides, the New Atheists shouting down their religious counterparts, who in turn try to out-shout them...
And in the calamity and noise, the path to any real enlightenment or progress, thorugh discussion and contemplation and thought and care, is left neglected.
And THAT saddens me.
If anyone made it thorugh all of that, again, you probably disagree with a TON of what I said and you probably think I'm an asshole or an idiot or a fool seven times over, adn you have your list of ways in which I'm a waste and this entire diatribe was a waste of your time and is utterly pointless all ready.
And I encourage you to post it.
I, again, LISTEN TO EVERYBODY. I WANT you to respond and, yes, if you think I'm foolish, I WANT to be told so. I actually CARE what you have to say.
Discussion is dying, but not with me, not here.
Again, I'm not a philosopher, I'm not a thinker, I'm probably not even a good writer at this point, not good enough, anyway, for anything remotely important.
I don't pretend to be.
But it's towards such a goal I strive, if even in the smallest way, and something I think everyone should strive towards--not that everyone should become philosophers and writers and thinkers, but that everyone should want to contribute something to mankind, and it just so happens this is how, in some small way, I hope one day to contribute.
Again, you get one life on this Earth, and the closest thing I will come to giving you all a dogmatic statement is:
MAKE IT MATTER.
To someone, anyone, and DEFINITELY at least yourself.
And now...I'm tired as all hell after typing that and not getting sleep all night, so off to bed I go. ;)
Olidip back online...
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