And billions of people who have ever lived, feel in 100% certainty, that he is involved.
You might liken it to experiencing the effects of gravity, although not ‘seeing’ gravitational pull itself.
I have a little theory that the great majority of people are not strictly unbelievers, but prefer to make themselves god (center of their universe). They do this because to accept the concept of a sovereign being, would mean that they must bow to this sovereign being. Ex. Satan
I am agnostic to the existence of God, and atheist to all organized religions that I can think of off the top of my head.
I remain agnostic, yet curious to the spirituality of nature and how we are all connected. I also understand the importance of community that religions can give people, and have a lot of respect for that aspect of what a common belief can do to a group of strangers.
Atheism doesn’t necessarily make any claims, so there isn’t anything to prove? The burden of proof falls on the one making the claim.
What makes an atheist an atheist is that one does not believe in a god, which is different than a statement of “no god exists” which would require proof since a claim is being made.
I don’t know what this has to do with anything? The amount of people who believe something doesn’t guarantee truth of the thing. An example is that at one point almost everybody believed in a flat earth (some still do for some reason).
No it’s just doing something. When a cheetah kills an antilope it’s not evil. Take this:
•If you kill someone at random in the street, that’s evil
•If you kill someone at war, it isn’t evil
•If you’re an executionner and kill a person sentenced to death, it isn’t evil
What’s the difference? The same action was done, killing someone. It’s just the context that is different, and as such our perception and judgement, based on the values of our society.
3000 years ago slavery was normal. In some cultures canibalism, incest, polygamy are. So tell me, what’s evil? But maybe soldiers just go to hell afterwards
The problem with this analogy is that you can “see” the effects of gravity (things fall) but can’t see the effects of God, only what you believe to be the effects of God. Things fall whether or not you believe in gravity.
Or maybe they rely on a sense of reason over superstition. And even believers make themselves the center of their universe.
The old you have faith in gravity even though you can’t see it seems to come up over and over. The difference is gravity is demonstrable. We have overwhelming proof that the ball will fall, and thus don’t need faith. Believing something /= faith.
This is a slightly separate but VERY interesting topic. It’s actually this debate that ties into determining whether killers are evil or insane, and the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths. May have to do with deriving pleasure or gratification from the act of murder.
Sure you can. People change their habits, desires, plans, actions with a desire to follow a new code of morals and with an eternal prospective, compared to a temporal one.
This is absolutely NOTHING like seeing a ball fall and hit the ground. This is observing a change in someone and speculating about the reasons. I’m not sure how you could even begin to compare these two, but the gravity analogy pops up everywhere, so I guess it’s just a thing now. It’s extraordinarily weak though.
And maybe they don’t know what they don’t know, since many things are still unseen.
Science reveals new discoveries daily, many uncontempated in past centuries. Does that void the discoveries?
A cheetah killing an antelope isn’t evil, because that’s just nature.
Would you say the act of owning humans wasn’t evil in America, because the majority of the south did it at the time?
So do you base your morality off of how many people were partaking in these acts?
I would say owning another human as property is inherently evil no matter the time period or cultural norms.
Denouncing what we did in the past doesn’t need to be seen as inherently ignorant, but as a sign of progress.
How is this just nature, but man killing man isn’t?
Do you think it’s because we’re suddenly the antelope and have that perspective?
I never said a man killing a man is evil, but since you brought it up… I would argue that a man killing a man for anything other than self-defence is wrong, since there’s inherently no need for it. Now if we decide to bring in the topic vengeance or a need for justice, I might call it a necessary evil, but I’m not too versed in this topic to say much about it.
We don’t need to kill each other to survive on our own, in my opinion. I don’t think a man breaking into another man’s home and murdering him in cold-blood is at all natural, actually.
I never said you said killing a man is evil? I specifically said “just nature?”
Do you believe killing animals, say as an example hunting, is wrong?
What could be more natural than survival of the fittest?
If we follow Occam’s Razor (the explanation that requires the fewest assumptions is the most probable), supernatural explanations should be at the very bottom of the list.
Is it more likely that someone has a god placebo effect, and changes their ways, or that an unproved god did it?
son, I’d say if you can’t see the effects of God then you’re one of those blind fellows Jesus helped to see…
Dude you don’t have to convince me, I agree with you. This is called weltanschauung.
I’m not talking about what I believe is evil, or my morals. Just that things are just things and we, humans, are the one that came with the notions of good or evil. It’s good for us. But you’ve seen chimps beat to death and eat one of theirs. People killing each other for centuries for whatever reasons. In the grand scheme of things it changes nothing.
I love history. Of course you know about the armenian genocide or the jewisj one, because they are “fresh”. But I’ve read about many civilisations genocided, annihilated. For what? Who remembers their names? Did God smite their foes in retribution? No, it’s 3000 years later and nobody cares. Why? The victors have written history. They have decided of the truth, and what is evil.
That was an unreasonable assumption on my part, my bad.
Well, it depends. Hunting to control, let’s say, the deer population is only practical. Hunting for sustenance is practical. Hunting for sport and pleasure is pretty shitty, but I wouldn’t compare a life of a deer/bear to the life of a human being when it comes to killing.
I don’t believe in the term survival of the fittest anymore, for humans, since any low-life can pick up a gun and shoot and kill another human being. This doesn’t mean the low-life was “fitter” than the victim.
Survival of the fittest is a description of what happens in the animal world. It does not tell us how we should behave. What is natural for humans is much different than what is natural for animals.
So ending the lives of innocent deer is fine, for population reasons, but it isn’t for man?
Is there a reason you make the distinction that human life seems to be inherently worth a lot more value than non human life?
Survival of the fittest doesn’t literally mean ‘fit in shape.’ it refers to being more powerful than someone/thing. The guy with the gun is obviously more powerful than the guy he just killed.
Survival of the fittest doesn’t tell the animals how to behave either. It’s just a logical description of the entirety of life on this planet