Persuasion does happen occasionally. However, I think the most important impact isn't the effect on those you argue against or disagree with, but those on your side. It is relatively common is for someone to come here who is already an atheist/agnostic, and then learn what other atheists believe and what attitudes they hold towards Christians, Muslims, etc. Similarly for Christians. The peer effect is most important.

Agreed. You have already showed me that my way of thinking about logic was deficient.

Also, I apologise for that mild intemperate outburst I had a few pages ago against you. It was uncalled for.

Arugula;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oisNHAz-M7o

This is quite likely.

This is quite unlikely. I would be taking a line similar to the one I've been taking with you. While there is mocking, I'm also laying out your errors for you. I'm telling you what you're doing wrong.

What you are doing is firing nonsense into the air. You're running poo-flinging tilt monkey garbage from your mouth. Think about the irrational dumbness involved with holding me personally accountable for something that some people who I don't know and don't know me have done.

What's happening is a purely symbolic move. You are trying to offload your frustrations on me as if I actually represent the thing you're angry at. I mean, this is stuff that moody teenagers do to their parents. You're not actually solving anything, you're not moving towards a better understanding of the reality of the situation, and you're certainly not making any type of reasoned argument. You're just whining about crap and directing it towards me.

But this is still just stupid of you. You're just trying to rationalize stupid at this point. As things stand, you've managed to get yourself deeply immersed in a shallow view of the world. You can pull yourself out by becoming intellectually engaged in the content of the discussion, or you can pick your nose and eat it.

Personally even if I hadn't analyzed things or thought about it rationally, I'd prefer to be on the side that's not blowing up buildings, regardless of what the arguments were or who was truly correct.

I'm sure that blindly playing the us vs. them game has no downsides at all.

Agree. For me the former is sufficient though as it is for many other people.


On the complete absence of evidence for outside help and on the plethora of evidence for gradual, man-made progress


My and others' basic intuitive and learnt sense of morality. For different people these will never completely overlap but I would argue that for the majority of reasonable people significant overlap exists.

I would define suffering as conscious experience of physical and mental pain, anguish or discomfort. If you look at humanity's history of war, poverty, slavery then these are major external causes of human suffering both past and present.


The first paragraph is definitely true and I also plead guilty to being an idealist. I disagree with the 2nd and 3rd paragraph. I think these traits are present in most people, as are many other 'bad' traits. As I said earlier, I think we are a mixed bag of good and bad with for most people the capacity to distinguish between good and bad. Do you really believe that most or all people are 'bad' and that only help from outside can hope to make us 'good'?

I think the data is biased because powerful people have a much greater stake in the outcome then other people and because these 'bad traits' are overly represented in those seeking, obtaining and maintaining power.

The vague "many other people" for whom this is "sufficient" I think it a bit telling. I wouldn't quite call it on the level of the anti-vaccination movement, but at least in terms of the intellectual merit it's similar. You have *one* person who made a claim and the argument has been soundly defeated by others in the field. If you want to follow along with the guy who has the losing argument, then I'm doubtful that there's anything anyone can say or do to stop you. Nonetheless, here is a thread that goes into detail about the problems.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/47...ritics-969552/

On what basis are you measuring "the absence of evidence for outside help"? It seems to me that you're merely assuming your conclusion here.

So... morality by consensus?

Your definition of suffering is far too broad for this to be a successful argument. You would, in particular, be denying suffering that happens on the level of individuals in the light of their individual circumstances and the day-to-day decisions that they make. It's just far too blunt of an instrument.

I also think you're overstating the total volume of suffering from war, poverty, and slavery. Until only recently in history, "war" was a fairly localized skirmish. It usually involved only a couple countries at a time and most of the rest of world didn't even care that much that it was happening.

I believe that there are more people in slavery than at any other point in history. How much suffering is there in the world? Is the majority of suffering caused by slavery? I don't think so. 36 million people out of 7 billion total? (Not to minimize the fact that slavery does cause suffering, but it's specifically highlighting how it's insufficient to look at slavery as attribute the majority of human suffering to it.)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money...aves/70033422/

I'll lay out my response in single sentence claims:

* I agree that we all have the capacity for both good and bad.
* I believe that bad is far more common than good. (For example, humans are more inclined to be selfish than generous.)
* I don't believe that human efforts for "trying to be good" are that effective at actually causing the types of changes that are required to flip the previous claim.

You still haven't addressed the question of individual responsibility. Yes, we know that bad leaders can cause people to do bad things. The many Nazis were influenced by Hitler's leadership. But what is the responsibility of the individual? Individuals followed the leadership. They chose bad over good, often being at least somewhat aware that the choice they were making wasn't good. Leaders are only leaders because lots of individuals that are making the decision to follow them.

And while we feel the moral repulsion of it, it's also very hard for us as individuals to say that we would have had the moral fortitude to reject Hitler if we were people put into the exact same circumstances and the exact same pressures that were present in Germany. We know from the Stanford Prison Experiment just how susceptible the "average" person is to the influence of circumstances. I think this type of acknowledgement is critical to understanding the true depth of the inclinations that we have.

If people truly were more inclined towards good than evil, then large scale things like that would never happen because enough people would be standing their moral grounds and choosing good over evil. But we don't, and then bad things happen.

What I meant is that I'm not absolutely married to the concept of the existence of truly objective morality in the strong sense. Morality by consensus based on rational thinking and assertions such as the golden rule are sufficient for me.

On the same basis as I measure the presence of absence of other things: by our senses and whatever technological advancements we have at our disposal which can allow us to look beyond our ordinary sensory capabilities, and by analyzing the path by which this progress continues to take place.

Human beings worked and reasoned together to gradually improve the human condition, with many struggles and atrocities along the way and up to this day. There has been an upward trend throughout history that warrants an explanation. Religion has played both a positive and a negative role in this process, but I would argue that Enlightenment-thinking was one of the most prominent advancements. Why would we assume that any outside cause has had anything to do with this slow, painful, arduous process of improving the human condition?

Some aspects of morality are highly subjective and opinions strongly differ (abortion, euthanasia). However things such as murder, stealing are widely viewed as bad so a strong consensus exists to call some acts bad and conversely others good. I think any morality worth calling morality also ought to contain some version of the golden rule.


Leaders also remain leaders by controlling and manipulating the population, aided by many individuals. Those individuals I would definitely consider bad people and personally responsible.

Authoritarian regimes throughout history have been very harsh against dissenters. I don't think the average German advocated the policies of the Nazis. To call their inaction bad or cowardly would be unfair imo. I do not think the average German soldier was a bad person, nor would I classify them as Nazis. There were many truly bad Nazis though.

So whatever we agree on? I don't really know what role "rational thinking" actually plays in this formulation. Can you effectively distinguish between rational and irrational consensus? I'm not sure that's the case.

But you don't have access to any of that information. You're just waving your hand across human history and making a universal declaration about events that you have no information about.

Why would you assume that there wasn't?

This is sort of like the question of consciousness. On what reasonable basis can we conclude from the laws of physics as we know them, that it would generate creatures that have this capacity to not only experience the universe, but to know that it's experiencing the universe. The laws of physics as we understand them do not have anything in them that indicates that this type of behavior should be possible.

You picked a rather poor collection of examples for your argument. There are cultures in which "honor killings" are viewed as a moral positive. And "stealing" by some views is not "stealing" by other views. But I will grant that there exist behaviors that are broadly looked down upon as bad.

So you have the ability to define your own sense of morality and others are subject to it?

Again, you're removing individual responsibility for lots and lots of people.

True Scotsman Fallacy.

You also defined a "good person" by specific behavioral characteristics that we do not particularly see as being present in German soldiers.

I would push back against the "bad person/good person" dichotomy in general. Having already accepted that people are capable of both, it's not as useful to declare that people must be one or the other. What we have is more of a "good behavior/bad behavior" dichotomy.

With all due respect, d2_e4, that you need citations for these claims makes it clear you're not educated enough for this debate. I'm sorry if that seems harsh, but it's true.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.97217b80e532

I wonder, if we drew a Venn diagram of "all US adults who believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows" and "all US adults who believe in a literal god", what the overlap would be. What do you think Aaron? I'm throwing in for 100%.

And yeah, I know. You're going to say, with righteous indignation "How can you compare these ******s to us enlightened evangelicals?". Here's how, Aaron - when you teach kids to believe in bull**** from a young age, and not question it, you stifle any hope of critical thinking in the future generation. They'll believe anything St. Limbaugh tells them on the airwaves, whether it's about god, chocolate milk, Obama's birth certificate, pizza parlor child slave rings, etc. etc.

Religion is a cancer on humanity. You might think it's a harmless bit of fun and everyone is free to believe whatever they want, but it really isn't. It's a way to indoctrinate people, from a very young age, not to apply critical thinking to anything they may be faced with in future, because faith and dogma needs to prevail.

You might say that I am not very good at applying critical thinking, and a lot of my arguments have been found wanting - and you'd be right. However, at least I try. Be honest Aaron, how many of your evangelical brethren even attempt to see the world in a way that differs from the dogma with which they (and you) have been indoctrinated?

I don't believe in god and I believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, so that is one data point against your thesis.

I should have said "exclusively" for the pedants.

I would wager that it's not.

I continue to assert the shallowness of your thinking, and laugh at the fool that you make yourself out to be by posting nonsense like this. It's like you've made it a personal vendetta against me to try to pin *ANY* idea you have in your little mind that is anti-religious on me.

The sad thing is that you don't actually try. You think you do, but you don't. You don't try to pursue truth. You just try to win an argument, regardless of how little intellectual merit it has. You've shown this repeatedly, and you continue to do so now. No matter how weak of an argument you put forward, you imagine that your attempt to make the world a better place by making literally false statements and poor arguments is doing good.

You are just as bad as the people you think you are mocking. You're simply mocking yourself.

On the topic of changing views on things, I actually take the perhaps naively optimistic view that forums change minds MORE than the (effectively zero) that they superficialy appear to. I say this because I think people are extremely unlikely to acknowledge, mid discussion, that they were wrong, but over time will still change future beliefs. I know this has happened to me several times, and have made pretty profound changes after arguing the opposite way, and sometimes I didn't even "feel" it in the heat of the moment but recognized it long after. Even if it isn't like changing "core beliefs" like religious to atheist or repubican to democrat or something, there is an enormous space for refining beliefs. Another phenomenon I've noticed is in protracted arguements, how often the opponent makes considerable shifts from beginning to end of the debate. Can you get people on this forum to ever awknowledge that even the slightests refinement happened? Usually not. But people frequently do undergo pretty substantial change in what they are arguing which is observable and points to the efficacy of such discussions in my mind.

So I'm not convinced it is all the pessimistic views it outwardly presents from peoples inate stubborn refusal to ever acknowledge they profoundly lost the argument.

.

Actually, there's little intellectual fervor in what I present to you. I'm mostly just mocking you for being stupid. If you would like intellectual fervor, please take the step of opening with an intellectual position.

Okay. But now I have to call you a liar again:

No, you don't "try." And you've agreed with me that you don't.

But what's probably a healthier thing for you to do is not to "blow off steam" because you actually habituate your mind to engage in anti-intellectual practices when you do so. In other words, you make yourself dumber by engaging in the practice of not thinking about things.

It's not my fault that you've chosen to behave like the people you want to mock. You should acknowledge this and then take active steps to change your behaviors. Otherwise, you continue to prove yourself to be no better than those you look down on. That makes you both a liar and a hypocrite.

I can't argue with this - it seems pretty true.

Now that we've got that out of the way - what are you going to do about the fact that a large proportion of children in your country are indoctrinated with dogma and taught to distrust science from birth? My being a liar, hypocrite, and bad debater does not change this fact.

This.

From this thread, I have learnt:

- Not all religious people are total mouth-breathers
- There is a lot I don't understand about religion in general
- There are degrees of atheism
- I need to be specific when discussing religion, as opposed to say, simulation theory

So, yeah. This thread has been pretty helpful for me.

What do you expect me to do? In the same way that you seemed to wish to hold me accountable for being a enabler for millions of people who don't even know who I am, I'm literally not able to influence the overwhelming majority of those people.

I will point out, however, that you are one person that I seem to have influence with. So perhaps this is a bit of a test case. If I can't get you to be less of a liar, less of a hypocrite, and a better thinker (forget about debate), what are the chances I can change someone else?

Who said you can't? I think my admitting it means you can, no?

I really don't understand how the interaction in religious communities works. I mean, what goes on there? Do you guys talk about god or something? Is it just a big communal get-together? What do you personally say if you meet a creationist?

"I just support this and believe in it - I'm not responsible for what everyone else who supports the same thing does!"

Please.... I have admitted a lot of where I have been lacking in the points I have been making, but intellectual honesty starts at home, bro.