Atheists, when will you start believing in god?

When the voices in my head start knowing more than I do.

unchallengeable, first-hand-witnessed miracle*

*we can do so much shit with cgi and holograms and whatever that it would have to be FUCKING comprehensive, like 'building falls on me during nuclear explosion and i live'

The old recant-on-your-deathbed trick is always a good to keep in mind, cause y'know suprises do sometimes happen.

where was that thread full of hot chicks in christian t-shirts?

oh right, sandbox:

http://www.ilxor.com:8090/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=141&threadid=336

The old recant-on-your-deathbed trick is always a good to keep in mind, cause y'know suprises do sometimes happen.

I once saw a sign outside a church that said:

"Those who think they can turn to God at the eleventh hour often die at ten o'clock."

When He actually shows up in front of me and introduces Himself.

Would a worldwide vampire apocalypse caused by genetically modifying the measles virus make you more or less likely to believe in God?

less

http://www.mts.net/%7Ehooch/images/flying_pig.jpg

I once saw a sign outside a church that said:

"Those who think they can turn to God at the eleventh hour often die at ten o'clock." Heh. Hope I don't sound patronizing here but in case anyone doesn't know what I meant, the idea of recanting on your deathbed is famous, I guess, as as shortcoming in Pascal's wager (i.e. you lead a life of reckless hedonism, and at the last minute recant and get into heaven without the work. The Simpsons made a pretty funny joke of the nature is the episode where Homer skips church.

I dunno, the whole fun for me is the not knowing, and what I imagine to be never knowing. Atheism was always a step too far, believing in "God" was always a step too wrong.

*in the episode.

Lisa: Why are you dedicating your life to blasphemy?
Homer: Don't worry, sweetheart. If I'm wrong, I'll recant on my deathbed.

Bah, I thought it was funny

is it socially proper to masterbate using a handpuppet that comes from an evangelical christian childrens show

That's all right, that's all right, that's all
right. Sometimes you feel like trouble, sometimes
you feel down. Let this music relax you mind, let
this music relax you mind. Stand up and be
counted, can't get a witness. Sometimes you need
somebody, if you have somebody to love. Sometimes
you ain't got nobody and you want somebody to
love. Then you don't want to walk and talk about
Jesus, You just want to see His face. You don't
want to walk and talk about Jesus, You just want
to see His face.

Lol Who doesn't believe in G-d?

-Jim Swells

morelike Gym Smells

I'm a pretty strict agnostic (as in, you can't really prove it either way to me) but if suddenly the entire world paused as if frozen in time and Jesus showed up, hung out for a while, and was able to tell me the secrets of life, where the things I lost when I was a kid ended up, and all the other questions I had, I'd totally start believing.

When He actually shows up in front of me and introduces Himself.

Then I will punch that fucker right in the kisser.

I clicked on that sandbox link and I'm not seeing the hot chicks in Christian t-shirts -- someone please start this thread ASAP.

Even if he appears I will try to remain an atheist. Whether he "appears" or I believe (like millions of others do), does not matter: he simply does not exist.

i will start believing in god when that belief starts fulfilling a set of social/culutral/intellectual needs

(needs that i need met, i mean)

I clicked on that sandbox link and I'm not seeing the hot chicks in Christian t-shirts -- someone please start this thread ASAP.

-- wanko ergo sum, Thursday, December 27, 2007 6:01 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

A stunning loss.

i will start believing in god when that belief starts fulfilling a set of social/culutral/intellectual needs

-- max, Thursday, December 27, 2007 3:43 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

give me 10 logically sound proofs that shows it absolutely doesn't.

i can't really make myself believe in God, but i go about my life trying to anyway

i am very much like a mother theresa figure

NEVER FORGET

http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/2328/06ministerxlarge1eg1.jpg

when hell freezes over.

When will Christians start believing in Mohamed?

Then I will punch that fucker right in the kisser.

Presumably, you only punch things you believe exist, amirite?

http://www.justjen.com/Product/ixoye-tshirt.jpg
lolmg

Should Christian attire accentuate the bosom?

Should Christian attire accentuate the bosom?

NO.

This reminds me of a funnyish anecdote I read (ironically enough in a synagogue) about A.J. Ayer (analytic philosopher, logical positivist, and strict atheist extrordinaire) who apparently choked on a piece of salmon, and he claimed saw an all guiding, omnipotent red light speak to him or something. He later wrote this off as a hallucination caused from a lack of oxygen to the brain.

citation?

online article is here

Atheists will never start believing in God. They're atheists. Agnostics might.

Yes, humans never change their minds about stuff.

Their atheism wasn't actual atheism then. Can you choose your beliefs? Your actual beliefs, rather than your chosen affectations?

Seems you have your own definition of atheist.

I clicked on that sandbox link and I'm not seeing the hot chicks in Christian t-shirts -- someone please start this thread ASAP.

-- wanko ergo sum, Thursday, December 27, 2007 6:01 AM

the shirts were from a company called DATOmana.

...for posterity's sake.

thank you, mehlt

Huh?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/23/AR2008062300813_pf.html
"Twenty-one percent of those who describe themselves as atheists expressed a belief in God or a universal spirit"

They've seen the "atheists even more hated than terrorists" poll results so they're just trying to convince themselves that there May Be Something Out There so society will happily accept them. It only takes some hollow acts and statements every once in a while to look like a believer, that's all anyone asks. Intelligent people lie and still privately believe in their god Athos.

"Twenty-one percent of those who describe themselves as atheists expressed a belief in God or a universal spirit"

Lots of people I know who are 'casual atheists' ie "I see no reason to believe in the God of Christianity that God is bullshit anyway" still have a vague belief in "the force of the universe." I'm not surprised a noticeable portion of atheists feel the same way.

those people are not atheists.

Thank you Mister Hitchens.

Don't thank me, thank dictionaries.

A belief in a vaugely warm & fuzzy "force" in the universe that lacks any sentience or benevolence is hardly a belief in God. You're making that leap, buddy, not these folks (among whom I don't count myself).

yep

he is best when he waves his hands around and dismisses really high-minded ideas as bullshit for sure

that Paul Watzlawick book he mentions look awesome. im gonna read it.

Let's assume your task is to create a social organization, aka government, and you believe human nature is absolutely evil and must be restrained by the fear of government. Then, because an absolute evil cannot be mixed with any small amount of goodness, the pertinent question is: what is the countervailing interest that is served by limiting the repression of an absolute evil? There can be none. This is a recipe for creating the Stasi, or worse.

The difference between this and the adage in pirkai avos is the introduction of absolutes into the moral equation.

he's saying that the structures we have put into place in civilization - government, religion, education, etc - are designed to reign in the violence + evil that man is naturally given to perform

Ok but again it loses me at the end. How is man naturally evil? Have we seen man in his "natural" state? What is this natural state? If it is in the woods w animals that he must fight to survive then the violence is in the name of self-preservation, perhaps not so evil. If the natural state is in a social hierarchy then most people in society are not violent or evil. Evil exists and good exists but pessimism makes one appear wise.

So people are just evil? Is that —

Not evil.

Oh, great. Does this man ever stop to choose his words before he opens his mouth?

no

maybe it's more like nature is naturally evil. this is hitler's idea - that a darwinistic view of animals is dominate or be dominated, exploit or be exploited, and it was only the introduction of religion + morality that corrupted humanity from its natural state.

Can't violence and evil in part be a result or social symptom of those structures?

my new atheist contact brought up this book repeatedly:

http://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/dp/0395877431

nature is violence; civilization is about mediating that violence, cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

there are societies in the animal kingdom. maybe it is the social structures creating the violence.

i'm not sure that the structures that we use to organize our societies are similar in kind to the natural organizations found in the animal kingdom

people could have formed societies for all types of reasons

isnt that the basis behind pointing to the animal kingdom for evidence of mankind's natural predispositions?

agree w you there but once we start pointing to animals for evidence of a natural inclination towards violence we are inviting those comparisons.

xpost

but if you're making the argument that man is naturally predisposed towards violence and it is our institutions that keep him in check, and your counter-proposal is that animals have social institutions too and it doesn't stop them from being violent so maybe it's the social institutions that are the problem, then if we're not talking about like + like that would undermine the counter-proposal no?

otoh "[There] is irrefutable evidence that the threat of lethal violence has exerted a strong evolutionary force on chimpanzee nature, and its effects are visible on a minute-to-minute basis in chimpanzee society. It is the origin of the very unusual social bonding among male chimpanzees — they must hang together to protect against extra-group murderers." -https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-naked-ape/201104/is-lethal-violence-integral-part-chimpanzee-society so maybe social institutions keep us and chimps from releasing our unbridled murder inclinations

im not entirely sold on seeing a chimp as the natural form of a human

i'm pretty sure non-humans don't have social institutions

...

what do you call an ant colony

or really any species with tribal hierarchies

what do you call an ant colony

― Οὖτις

an ant colony

do ants ever transgress the unwritten rules of their societies?

*werner herzog voice*
can an ant go crazy?

im not entirely sold on seeing a chimp as the natural form of a human

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Friday, November 6, 2015 2:19 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How about early Homo sapiens? Because they helped shuffle the Neanderthals off to an early extinction.

i'm pretty sure non-humans don't have social institutions

― rap is dad (it's a boy!), Friday, November 6, 2015 2:21 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ludicrous.

The Ant Who Would Be Queen

do ants ever transgress the unwritten rules of their societies?

idk if yr joking but ants can definitely be manipulated to behave against the interests of the colony, using p much the same tools that are used to keep ants acting within the interests of a colony

zizek’s obv hyperbolic there
but in significant respect otm
(i think) all he’s saying is,
he rejects idea of perfectibility of human nature (specifically via politics), an end to history overcoming human alienation etc etc
in some respects an old conservative-skeptical idea (e.g. skeptical of certain promises of “revolution”, cf skepticism of someone like montaigne)
but it’s not necessarily conservative nor right-wing— it's skeptical of so to speak an absolute leftism, or certain absolute demands of leftism, a utopian leftism (which obv has justified certain historical horrors in the past)
obv expressed out of pessimism here, but imo not necessarily pessimistic (absolutely) either
it’s strain of salutary humility, sense of the limits of politics with respect to human nature (nb don’t mean ‘nature’ here in essentialist sense), which is good for the left imo

how would you ever know the interest of an ant colony if you've never even spoken to an ant. assuming you haven't

Ant colonies are governed by pheromones, which (in combination with genetically predetermined roles) guide the behavior of the colony as a whole

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jtU9BbReQk

http://antark.net/ant-life/ant-communication/pheromones/

there is definitely a social structure at work here, and institutionalized roles, etc. and ants are hardly unique there are plenty of other species that do this kind of thing, all across the evolutionary spectrum.

xp

social institutions should be able to be held to a higher standard than "possibility of manipulation" and "repeated observable behavior" or something idk

yr being vague

(makes a note: it's a boy! is not on the BF Skinner bandwagon. files it.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjxyW6Er95o

Ant colonies are governed by pheromones, which (in combination with genetically predetermined roles) guide the behavior of the colony as a whole

me irl

I guess we need to get semantic here (always an ILX favorite pastime) but imo any time you have social tools (language, pheromones, threats of violence, rewards of procreation, etc.) being used to guide the behavior of subgroups within a species, that's a social structure. I guess you could argue that calling something an "institution" would require that structure to span generations, but that clearly happens with animals as well. I mean even just the fact that every ant colony has a queen guiding behavior is evidence of that, i.e. the whole concept of "queen" is an institution.

xp

there are some fundamental structures of human society like family / community but a lot of the more complex organizations economically + politically seem different from eg eusocial living partially bc they feel more optional? like there are human societies throughout the world where govt has entirely broken down and they live in ungoverned [violent] chaos (but the family identity as a base organizing structure doesn't dissipate). i'd think of the family as more comparable as an institution to hive eusocial organization, but democracy or communism or feudalism as new human things that are malleable and not really comparable. does that make any sense? idk.

^ cry of FREEDOM to change our social structures for the better or the worse

no freedom for ants crushed under the iron heel of an t instinct destiny

I like how Wikipedia uses the standard war template for the infobox for Gombe Chimpanzee War.

see i consider "ungoverned chaos" to be failures of governance rather than the lack of governance. imo Lord of the Flies shows the failure of state power rather than the failure of anarchy.

in timothy snyder's new book he argues that hitler was only able to commit the most extensive + comprehensive liquidations in places that had fallen outside of the state apparatus so even in germany most jews were sent to poland before being killed bc germany was still under a certain level of rule of law. you had to go to ukraine + poland to do the really serious killing. idk a lot of ppl have argued that he's eliding over some of the history to make this argument but i do think there's something to the idea that the most dangerous part of the world is the one where the state is completely gone.

for the purposes of the argument of whether man is inherently evil/violent at the foundation level -- beneath religion, civilization, society, anything that defines him as human -- it is important to draw a distinction between a purely stateless place (which may not even exist outside of fantasy for us state-embedded beings) and a post-govt power vacuum (which tends to be manipulated and formed by state power). the power vacuum is often violent due to being in part a reaction to the violent states that formed it. even if there is no "law" per se, it is still shaped by state power.

i'll let snyder speak for himself but i think the idea is that the presence state power and the presence of a state apparatus are two different phenomena:

Citizenship is the name of a reciprocal relationship between an individual and a sheltering polity. When there was no state, no one was a citizen, and human life could be treated carelessly. Nowhere in occupied Europe were non-Jews treated as badly as Jews. But in places where the state was destroyed, no one was a citizen and no one enjoyed any predictable form of state protection. This meant that the other major German mass crimes, the starvation of prisoners of war and the murder of civilians—mostly Belarusians and Poles and Gypsies—also took place almost entirely within zones of statelessness. These policies together killed about as many people as the Holocaust, and they were implemented, and could only be implemented, in the same places. Where the state was not destroyed such extremes were impossible.

In states allied with Germany or states under more traditional occupation regimes, where the major political institutions remained intact, non-Jews who protected Jews were rarely punished for doing so. Non-Jews who were citizens of states could not simply be killed if they aided Jews. In the General Government and in the occupied western Soviet Union, however, the punishment for aiding Jews was death. More Poles were executed for aiding Jews in individual districts of the General Government than in entire west European countries. This is not because Poles were particularly inclined to rescue Jews, which they were not. It is because they were, in fact, sometimes executed for doing so, which rarely happened in western Europe. Indeed, in some places in German-occupied western Europe it was not even a punishable criminal offense to hide a Jew.

fuck u jeses lovrs

the structures we have put into place in civilization - government, religion, education, etc - are designed to reign in the violence + evil that man is naturally given to perform

I don't think this is their primary goal, all these institutions have their own objectives which they will organize people to attain. peace and stability is often a part of that, but obviously these structures have facilitated violence of a type and on a scale that would never have been possible without them.

evil is an idea which has come up within these structures. you can go back and retrospectively deemy the carthaginians evil for sacrificing babies, but it doesn't explain anything about why they did it or what it meant. sophisticated human groups&ideas (civilization if you like) allows you to develop and refine moral, legal and political ideas, but to take these judgments and sensibilities and to project them backwards is nonsense. I am unimpressed by any attempt to look at chimpanzee morality, or really the counter example of bonobo behaviour. do you really think it makes sense to say that chimpanzee hearts are full of wickedness? or is it just us distinguishing ourselves away from perceived moral dirt and disorder

I don't think there's any fundamental social unit, families tend to be very practical but they vary enormously in how they function and there are places in the world where the family unit has broken down completely, such as parts of the DRC.