Atheism-o-Phobia

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
401

hello kamui

Personally, I don’t think you’re an atheist.

Perhaps you’re not religious – and considering all the circular arguing that goes on about religion, that’s a good thing.

It’s more important to live It, see It, hear It. Call ‘It’ whatever you want – Life, Creation, God, Love, Force, Mind, Christ, Brahma, Light, Potentiality, Divine Matrix…

I love mystic and earlier new thought works and have a nice collection. I’ll hit them over and over…like a fine bottle of wine or scotch. A little will go a long way. If you don’t mind my asking, what are your favorites?

402

[quote]JoabSonOfZeruiah wrote:
Me having a child is not creating him in the sense that God has created us. The best analogy I can come up with us humans is if we were capable of creating a robot with consciousness/artificial intelligence; the creator of said robot is entirely in his right to do what he wills to the robot whether to end its consciousness and dismantle it or give it a hardware/software upgrade.[/quote]

I knew you were going to say that which is why I wrote about that :slight_smile:

But for your analogy, no, the creator of the AI does NOT have that right either if the AI is self aware

403

[quote]Sweet Revenge wrote:
hello kamui

Personally, I don’t think you’re an atheist.

Perhaps you’re not religious – and considering all the circular arguing that goes on about religion, that’s a good thing.

It’s more important to live It, see It, hear It. Call ‘It’ whatever you want – Life, Creation, God, Love, Force, Mind, Christ, Brahma, Light, Potentiality, Divine Matrix…

I love mystic and earlier new thought works and have a nice collection. I’ll hit them over and over…like a fine bottle of wine or scotch. A little will go a long way. If you don’t mind my asking, what are your favorites?
[/quote]

I don’t necessarily agree. There’s nothing saying I can’t be atheist, agnostic and “spiritual.” This just goes along with the stigma of atheism; everyone jumps at the chance to deny it. Sorry, no, I don’t believe that the universe was created by a conscious entity. That’s all atheism says. I’m also aware that I can’t know for sure one way or the other. That just frees me to live my life without external cues. I get to decide what my life means.

The way I see it, the beauty of the universe and everything therein is only meaningful because we’re here to appreciate it. You can paint it as spiritual or existential or whatever, but that’s how I choose to give my life meaning.

404

[quote]BackInAction wrote:

[quote]JoabSonOfZeruiah wrote:
Me having a child is not creating him in the sense that God has created us. The best analogy I can come up with us humans is if we were capable of creating a robot with consciousness/artificial intelligence; the creator of said robot is entirely in his right to do what he wills to the robot whether to end its consciousness and dismantle it or give it a hardware/software upgrade.[/quote]

I knew you were going to say that which is why I wrote about that :slight_smile:

But for your analogy, no, the creator of the AI does NOT have that right either if the AI is self aware[/quote]

Been away for a bit catching up on work. BackInAction is right. Once the robot (are we talking about Mr. Data?) has consciousness, the rules change. Perhaps I have the “right” to dismantle Mr. Data, but if I exercise that right, then I would be evil. Yeah, I bring up Mr. Data because I think there was a Star Trek episode on this. A character from a hologram game program gained “consciousness” and there was a real issue whether the program could be “shut down” ethically.

405

And speaking of Star Trek, I too have thought that there may exist some higher beings like “Q” and that we were all just one big science experiment. That would explain A LOT. For one, it would explain the platypus.

406

Mike:

Why did you have to bring out my “inner nerd”, huh???

Actually it was a group of repair robots, that were programmed to adapt, that had gained consciousness. Data was fighting for their right to “choose” whether to make a repair that was certain to lead to at least one of their deaths.

Also…don’t forget the episode where Star Fleet wanted to “experiment” on Data in order to create more “Data’s”…and Picard fought before a magistrate for his right to “choose” whether he wished to be experimented on (he didn’t).

Okay…done!

On with the discussion!

Mufasa

407

[quote]BackInAction wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]BackInAction wrote:
Guys, I just shot fireballs out of my eyes. The only ones around me that saw this were my coworkers that I’m friends with. They told me they believe me, but will write about it 20 years later so I don’t lose my job (apparently, are company doesn’t like fireball shooting employees).

If you read a copy of my close employees reports 20 years from now, will you believe me? Why or why not?[/quote]

What are you claiming? Are you claiming to be a fireball shooter, a super hero, or the messiah?

Of course we could never prove you didn’t do what you just said. So therefore, I weigh under 200 lbs and can squat 1500lbs for reps, bench 1000lbs for reps, and compress water with my asshole. Do you believe me?
Is there a point to this exercise?
[/quote]

The point of this exercise is to show you that without evidence from MULTIPLE, UNINTERESTED SOURCES who ACTUALLY WITNESSED THE EVENT, one should not believe that the event occurred.

Following that reasoning, no, I don’t believe you and your 1500 lbs squats.
[/quote]

There is very little history especially that old, that has multiple cross references. You’re lucky to have even one reference. With archeology we can generally make assumptions about a people or a race, but individual people, individual events, there are seldom more than one source. I understand your doubt, but I don’t think it’s fair to say the events of the bible demand more evidence than other things in history. Let’s face it, there just weren’t that many literate folks around and of those, even fewer interested in recording things for the future.

408

[quote]BackInAction wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]BackInAction wrote:

If God through a rock at me and killed me, he would be evil too.
[/quote]

Couldn’t a creater do that through “natural” occurrence"[/quote]

Well, according to me (and this exercise), no.

If we’re assuming God is aware of his actions, he will be aware of the suffering that he will cause when he throws the rock. If he knows this, and throws it anyways, he will cause my suffering and death. This is an evil act.

If God is simply the cosmic force that exploded into creation (so technically just a big ball of energies), and an asteroid landed on my head, he would not have been aware of such an act (as this God isn’t aware). This would not be an evil act.[/quote]

Depends on what the end result is, though wouldn’t it? Ever watch that old show on Dicovery Channel, ‘Overhaulin’? If you are not familiar, basically the show was where friends or family would steal a person’s favorite car so that it could be fixed up in tip top shape. While the car was stolen, the ‘mark’ was upset and miserable, but unknown to him, he was getting something really special. After a week, they’d get the car back after it was totally reedone and perfect.

So if God threw a rock at you, becuase he want to take you some place better, would that still be evil?

409

[quote]kamui wrote:
Hello
I’m probably the worst kind of atheist you will ever meet.
I’m French
I got a “doctorat” in Philosophy and anthropology, and i am now a teacher.
And i’m obviously what you would call a liberal / anarchist / communist / socialist, like everyone else in old Europe.

I’m an atheist because i fail to see any good logical or ethical reason to believe in a Supreme Being. And, more importantly, i fail to see any good logical or ethical reason to believe in a specific Supreme Being.

I can hear and accept your arguments about the First Cause or the Prime Mover.
But a First Cause/Prime Mover is not a God : It could well be a “It” and not a “He”, a thing, a principle or a force, and not a human-like Being.
And it is not necessarily your God. It could as well be Vishnu, or Odin, or Chtulhu. If anything, it’s an aristotelician god, not a christian one.

I don’t believe in any God because i refuse to choose between Odin, Vishnu and Chtulhu and because I see God as an anthropomorphic and anthropocentric projection.

It doesn’t mean I reject or refuse the Sacred itself.
In fact, i see it everywhere. In the stars, in a qawwali song, in a zen Koan, in the shadows and the lights of a Catholic Cathedral, in the smile of a child, or in the eyes of my cat.

I simply don’t need to give it a first name, a beard, a white tunic, a son or a passive aggressive behavior…
I don’t need to repesent “It”, at all. and especially not in a human form. I just try to feel “It”, respect “It” and live “It”.

If you really want to call “God” the beauty of the Universe, it’s fine for me.
But more often than not, i found that what the “true believers” call “God” is nothing more than their (human, too human) pride.

Personnaly, I have no name for It, so i will remain silent. And btw, “to remain silent” is one of the first meanings of the word “mystic”…[/quote]

You are not an atheist. You are against human projections of what we think God is. I can accept that. Because nobody understands what 'he, she, it, etc. actually is. Anybody who does claim to know that they ‘know’ what God is, is an arrogant moron. In those terms I agree with you. But just because we cannot ‘know’ God we can know things about him.
First, when I am using the term God, I am talking about the first cause, the prime mover. So what ever you call him, he is that. Those who claim they worship the creator, what ever they call him are worshiping the Prime Mover.

It simply sounds like you reject religion…The way religious people, or people who claim to be religious behave, it’s hard to blame you. Having no name for ‘it’ or the ‘beauty of the universe stuff’ sounds very eastern, Buddhist perspective.

If I may ask your opinion on the matter, what properties must a prime mover, an uncaused-cause necessarily have?

410

[quote]wfifer wrote:

[quote]Sweet Revenge wrote:
hello kamui

Personally, I don’t think you’re an atheist.

Perhaps you’re not religious – and considering all the circular arguing that goes on about religion, that’s a good thing.

It’s more important to live It, see It, hear It. Call ‘It’ whatever you want – Life, Creation, God, Love, Force, Mind, Christ, Brahma, Light, Potentiality, Divine Matrix…

I love mystic and earlier new thought works and have a nice collection. I’ll hit them over and over…like a fine bottle of wine or scotch. A little will go a long way. If you don’t mind my asking, what are your favorites?
[/quote]

I don’t necessarily agree. There’s nothing saying I can’t be atheist, agnostic and “spiritual.” This just goes along with the stigma of atheism; everyone jumps at the chance to deny it. Sorry, no, I don’t believe that the universe was created by a conscious entity. That’s all atheism says. I’m also aware that I can’t know for sure one way or the other. That just frees me to live my life without external cues. I get to decide what my life means.

The way I see it, the beauty of the universe and everything therein is only meaningful because we’re here to appreciate it. You can paint it as spiritual or existential or whatever, but that’s how I choose to give my life meaning. [/quote]

It’s not about stigma, that what you described is not a strict definition of atheism.

411

[quote]MikeTheBear wrote:

[quote]BackInAction wrote:

[quote]JoabSonOfZeruiah wrote:
Me having a child is not creating him in the sense that God has created us. The best analogy I can come up with us humans is if we were capable of creating a robot with consciousness/artificial intelligence; the creator of said robot is entirely in his right to do what he wills to the robot whether to end its consciousness and dismantle it or give it a hardware/software upgrade.[/quote]

I knew you were going to say that which is why I wrote about that :slight_smile:

But for your analogy, no, the creator of the AI does NOT have that right either if the AI is self aware[/quote]

Been away for a bit catching up on work. BackInAction is right. Once the robot (are we talking about Mr. Data?) has consciousness, the rules change. Perhaps I have the “right” to dismantle Mr. Data, but if I exercise that right, then I would be evil. Yeah, I bring up Mr. Data because I think there was a Star Trek episode on this. A character from a hologram game program gained “consciousness” and there was a real issue whether the program could be “shut down” ethically.

[/quote]

Technically, you cannot kill consciousness…Just sayin’

412

[quote]MikeTheBear wrote:
And speaking of Star Trek, I too have thought that there may exist some higher beings like “Q” and that we were all just one big science experiment. That would explain A LOT. For one, it would explain the platypus.[/quote]

I often feel like an experiment…Sometimes, I look for cameras and am waiting for somebody that it’s all a big joke…

413

Good shit fellas, gotta run.

414

[quote]Mufasa wrote:
Mike:

Why did you have to bring out my “inner nerd”, huh???

Actually it was a group of repair robots, that were programmed to adapt, that had gained consciousness. Data was fighting for their right to “choose” whether to make a repair that was certain to lead to at least one of their deaths.

Also…don’t forget the episode where Star Fleet wanted to “experiment” on Data in order to create more “Data’s”…and Picard fought before a magistrate for his right to “choose” whether he wished to be experimented on (he didn’t).

Okay…done!

On with the discussion!

Mufasa[/quote]

Mufasa, I recall the one with Star Fleet wanting to experiment on Data, but I don’t recall seeing the one about the robots.

Here was the one I was talking about: Elementary, Dear Data - Wikipedia
The Prof. Moriarty character gains a sense of self-awareness but the crew have no way of saving the program such that the character could live outside of the hologram program. Perhaps we are all just characters in some alien’s World of Warcraft game. The very idea deserves a double face palm.

415

[quote]pat wrote:

If I may ask your opinion on the matter, what properties must a prime mover, an uncaused-cause necessarily have?[/quote]

“Objection your honor! Counsil is leading the witness”

“Sustained”

…now we’re on the topic, i wanted to ask you: how do you go from the logical assumption, and i’m going along with this for the sake of argument, that there’s a prime mover to the god of Abraham? I can’t see a logical linear train of thought going from prime mover —> God [of Abraham]. How do you do this?

416

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]MikeTheBear wrote:

[quote]BackInAction wrote:

[quote]JoabSonOfZeruiah wrote:
Me having a child is not creating him in the sense that God has created us. The best analogy I can come up with us humans is if we were capable of creating a robot with consciousness/artificial intelligence; the creator of said robot is entirely in his right to do what he wills to the robot whether to end its consciousness and dismantle it or give it a hardware/software upgrade.[/quote]

I knew you were going to say that which is why I wrote about that :slight_smile:

But for your analogy, no, the creator of the AI does NOT have that right either if the AI is self aware[/quote]

Been away for a bit catching up on work. BackInAction is right. Once the robot (are we talking about Mr. Data?) has consciousness, the rules change. Perhaps I have the “right” to dismantle Mr. Data, but if I exercise that right, then I would be evil. Yeah, I bring up Mr. Data because I think there was a Star Trek episode on this. A character from a hologram game program gained “consciousness” and there was a real issue whether the program could be “shut down” ethically.

[/quote]

Technically, you cannot kill consciousness…Just sayin’[/quote]

For me, consciousness is the opposite of the problem of evil. On one hand, the fact that evil exists tends to disprove the existence of God. Consciousness does the opposite. There have been attempts to explain consciousness as an emergent property of the brain. Is that a satisfactory explanation? I’m not sure. If it is linked to the physical brain, then it can be killed. But that brings up a whole 'nother issue that I won’t go into for fear of being called insane.

417

[quote]MikeTheBear wrote:

[quote]Mufasa wrote:
Mike:

Why did you have to bring out my “inner nerd”, huh???

Actually it was a group of repair robots, that were programmed to adapt, that had gained consciousness. Data was fighting for their right to “choose” whether to make a repair that was certain to lead to at least one of their deaths.

Also…don’t forget the episode where Star Fleet wanted to “experiment” on Data in order to create more “Data’s”…and Picard fought before a magistrate for his right to “choose” whether he wished to be experimented on (he didn’t).

Okay…done!

On with the discussion!

Mufasa[/quote]

Mufasa, I recall the one with Star Fleet wanting to experiment on Data, but I don’t recall seeing the one about the robots.

Here was the one I was talking about: Elementary, Dear Data - Wikipedia
The Prof. Moriarty character gains a sense of self-awareness but the crew have no way of saving the program such that the character could live outside of the hologram program. Perhaps we are all just characters in some alien’s World of Warcraft game. The very idea deserves a double face palm.

[/quote]

…the analogy here is that the Moriarty hologram was made to believe he escaped the holodeck with his girlfriend and they were free. They didn’t go anywhere, nothing really changed except for what they believed; they were unwittingly fooling themselves…

418

[quote]MikeTheBear wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

Technically, you cannot kill consciousness…Just sayin’[/quote]

For me, consciousness is the opposite of the problem of evil. On one hand, the fact that evil exists tends to disprove the existence of God. Consciousness does the opposite. There have been attempts to explain consciousness as an emergent property of the brain. Is that a satisfactory explanation? I’m not sure. If it is linked to the physical brain, then it can be killed. But that brings up a whole 'nother issue that I won’t go into for fear of being called insane.[/quote]

…this is a free Psychology 101 course from Yale, and altough it’s cursory it did give me an idea of how science relates consciousness to the brain: Online College Courses & Accredited Degree Programs - Academic Earth It’s also pretty interesting (:

419

[quote]MikeTheBear wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]MikeTheBear wrote:

[quote]BackInAction wrote:

[quote]JoabSonOfZeruiah wrote:
Me having a child is not creating him in the sense that God has created us. The best analogy I can come up with us humans is if we were capable of creating a robot with consciousness/artificial intelligence; the creator of said robot is entirely in his right to do what he wills to the robot whether to end its consciousness and dismantle it or give it a hardware/software upgrade.[/quote]

I knew you were going to say that which is why I wrote about that :slight_smile:

But for your analogy, no, the creator of the AI does NOT have that right either if the AI is self aware[/quote]

Been away for a bit catching up on work. BackInAction is right. Once the robot (are we talking about Mr. Data?) has consciousness, the rules change. Perhaps I have the “right” to dismantle Mr. Data, but if I exercise that right, then I would be evil. Yeah, I bring up Mr. Data because I think there was a Star Trek episode on this. A character from a hologram game program gained “consciousness” and there was a real issue whether the program could be “shut down” ethically.

[/quote]

Technically, you cannot kill consciousness…Just sayin’[/quote]

For me, consciousness is the opposite of the problem of evil. On one hand, the fact that evil exists tends to disprove the existence of God. Consciousness does the opposite. There have been attempts to explain consciousness as an emergent property of the brain. Is that a satisfactory explanation? I’m not sure. If it is linked to the physical brain, then it can be killed. But that brings up a whole 'nother issue that I won’t go into for fear of being called insane.
[/quote]
Concerning the problem of evil, did you see the axiological argument video I posted?

420

Ah!

Professor Moriarty!

Well,Mike…the one I was speaking of is appropriately named “The Quality of Life”:

The Quality of Life (Star Trek: The Next Generation) - Wikipedia

Mufasa