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[Leafsnail]

Faith is belief without evidence.

With a lot of additional waffling.

[LordExumius]

Blah blah blah yak yak dribble dribble dribble

Pardon me sir, but I find your excessive amounts of text positively unconvincing.

How exactly do you expect people to answer that question, Drunken? "Oh no, they're completely immoral for disagreeing with me." This is completely farcical. If someone's beliefs do not concern other people, how  can it even be moral or immoral? The entire reason other religions are considered immoral is because of their attitudes towards other people, like Islam urging you to kill the infidel or Yahweh telling you to stone homosexuals.

[Drunken]

Pardon me sir, but I find your excessive amounts of text positively unconvincing.

How exactly do you expect people to answer that question, Drunken? "Oh no, they're completely immoral for disagreeing with me." This is completely farcical. If someone's beliefs do not concern other people, how  can it even be moral or immoral? The entire reason other religions are considered immoral is because of their attitudes towards other people, like Islam urging you to kill the infidel or Yahweh telling you to stone homosexuals.

Actually I expected him to say 'no it is fine, why would anyone care what you believe'. It was the explanation of how this conclusion is reached that interested me. Many religions do consider my beliefs to be immoral, you and I assume metalslime disagree with them. Metalsime claimed that all his moral decisions are based solely on quantified rationality. I have suggested that this is not actually the way most people form their moral framework. I did not dispute that it is possible to have a rational moral framework. I was hoping for an example of his rational morality in order to discuss this more specifically. In my view the basic point of disagreement is the question of whether faith (belief in the absence of evidence) has any value.

Also did you just disagree with me based on the fact that my post was too long, or did I misunderstand that first line?

[Siquo]

Faith is belief without evidence.

Could be. "Evidence" is not adequately defined. "Waffling" is unnecessary, but the vocal minority of faithful has very large mouths. As we say, empty barrels sound the loudest.

I agree with Drunken. Making stuff up and pretending it is real is what human life is all about. I know I now run the risk of the whole "oh yeah how bout you disbelieve this brick in yo face"-argument, but I'm talking about meaning. Yes, the brick will hit me and it hurts, but does it matter? What does anything matter? I make it matter because I get angry but why would I? Am I just that basic instinct or something more? Why would we even adhere to morals or life itself? Why not kill yourself right now? One needs a basis somewhere, and I'm also curious where you base your morals? Secular Humanism? That's okay, and IMHO a really good choice, but it's just as made up as any God.


Edit: Oh hey, article just fell into my lap. On neuroscience, philosophy, and morality.

[penguinofhonor]

I'm going to have to ask people to try to cut down on the size of their walls of text and quote ladders. I know this stuff can get complicated, but at a certain point your post just gets tiring to read and that hinders discussion.

[Graknorke]

Could we please not start with the whole "Atheists are immoral because they have no eternal torture to be afraid of" thing please? It's not true, and unless religion has driven you truly incapable of thought then you know it's not true as well
Our moral systems are defined by our experiences growing up, mostly from what figures of authority such as parents tell us, or what we feel like we must think like to please a certain group. Then from there we can develop our own, from things that have happened fror us, and then ocomsidring not doing things that would result in that for anpther person, becase empathy and such.

Also I won't kill myself because of my inbuilt psychologiclal drives, all of which are either to help me or those important to me to survive. I could rationalise against them all I like but they'll probably win out in the end. It's as though you lock a starving man in a room with some poisoned food. He might be able to rsist from eating it, but eventually the base drive ofn the aquisition of food witll compell him to eat it to get rid of his hunger, overriding rtional thought. In the same way, I could try and do something to kill myself becuse I have no rational reason to exist, but unless I'm in a n emotional enough state that my findamental drives of staying saf are overwritten, then Im going to have a hard time
Also dying woudld make me miss out on the rest of the big brain-drugs party that is life, and who wants to miss that
Sorry if bits of this are illegible./typoes/poorly punctuated. Tablet with bad keyboard blah blah blah.

[Siquo]

Could we please not start with the whole "Atheists are immoral because they have no eternal torture to be afraid of" thing please?

Could you please not put things like that in other people's mouths because nobody claimed that. It is not conducive to pleasant conversation and constructive discussion.

Sorry if bits of this are illegible./typoes/poorly punctuated. Tablet with bad keyboard blah blah blah.

I already hate tablets for being a bad excuse for bad spelling/typing
But in all seriousness, you're just going with "animal instinct and peer pressure" then?

[LordExumius]

Pardon me sir, but I find your excessive amounts of text positively unconvincing.

How exactly do you expect people to answer that question, Drunken? "Oh no, they're completely immoral for disagreeing with me." This is completely farcical. If someone's beliefs do not concern other people, how  can it even be moral or immoral? The entire reason other religions are considered immoral is because of their attitudes towards other people, like Islam urging you to kill the infidel or Yahweh telling you to stone homosexuals.

Actually I expected him to say 'no it is fine, why would anyone care what you believe'. It was the explanation of how this conclusion is reached that interested me. Many religions do consider my beliefs to be immoral, you and I assume metalslime disagree with them. Metalsime claimed that all his moral decisions are based solely on quantified rationality. I have suggested that this is not actually the way most people form their moral framework. I did not dispute that it is possible to have a rational moral framework. I was hoping for an example of his rational morality in order to discuss this more specifically. In my view the basic point of disagreement is the question of whether faith (belief in the absence of evidence) has any value.

Also did you just disagree with me based on the fact that my post was too long, or did I misunderstand that first line?

I was pointing out that, not only are you very long winded, but you aren't terribly convincing either.

But concerning this whole "rationality as moral framework" thing. You said that the question was whether faith has any value. Short answer? No. Quite honestly, if you need to be told what to do by a God or indeed anything that cannot be proved, you don't seem to be as developed as the rest of us. Like Graknorke said, morality is hammered into us at an early age.Our parents are what keep us out of danger, and therefore we feel inclined to listen to them. This, funnily enough, also explains by so many people believe in what is very likely a load of nonsense. Because there parents told them so.

If anything, it seems faith has become detrimental. All these extremists and fundamentalists who support proposition 8 and bomb buildings are have scripture to back them up. They can quote the Bible or Koran in order to justify their acts. So it seems to me that faith is a pretty shitty moral framework.

Bottom line, unless your faith is squeaky-fucking-clean, I don't think it's gonna have much value to any of us.

And Siquo, that's what we call pseudophilosophy.

[Leafsnail]

Could be. "Evidence" is not adequately defined. "Waffling" is unnecessary, but the vocal minority of faithful has very large mouths. As we say, empty barrels sound the loudest.

That "vocal minority" includes every person who I've ever seen attempt to defend faith, present company included.  I've never seen someone present an actual succint argument for faith, as opposed to several huge rambling paragraphs with no actual point.

I agree with Drunken. Making stuff up and pretending it is real is what human life is all about. I know I now run the risk of the whole "oh yeah how bout you disbelieve this brick in yo face"-argument, but I'm talking about meaning. Yes, the brick will hit me and it hurts, but does it matter? What does anything matter? I make it matter because I get angry but why would I? Am I just that basic instinct or something more? Why would we even adhere to morals or life itself? Why not kill yourself right now? One needs a basis somewhere, and I'm also curious where you base your morals? Secular Humanism? That's okay, and IMHO a really good choice, but it's just as made up as any God.

Oh right, there's also blatant JAQing off.  I forgot.  I'll give my answers in order anyway.

1. I don't care and it's not relevant
2. I don't care and it's not relevant
3. I don't care and it's not relevant
4. I don't care and it's not relevant
5. a) "adhere to morals" Because society works far better that way and if you're nice to others others will be nicer to you b) "life itself" Doesn't make sense and isn't relevant
6. Because I enjoy life and there's no reason at all to kill myself
7. On what allows society to function and people to be happy
8. You don't know what secular humanism is

So yeah, try and make an argument.  Spouting random irrelevant questions does not qualify as participating in a discussion.

[Graknorke]

Could we please not start with the whole "Atheists are immoral because they have no eternal torture to be afraid of" thing please?

Could you please not put things like that in other people's mouths because nobody claimed that. It is not conducive to pleasant conversation and constructive discussion.

Except I never said you said anything
I made a erequest to the general population of the thread to not start up saying that, because the conversation was bordering dangerously close.

Anyways, religion stuff is also down to peer pressure/desire to be in a group. That's a reason for it being so widespread throughout history, it's a group with defined boundaries and everyone in it feels close through their belief that they are all special for being in it.

[Grek]

"Evidence" is not adequately defined.

Alright, let's do this. Everyone here is (or, should be, I hope) familiar with the basic idea of inductive logic. Maybe they've never heard that term before, but I'm sure they agree with the idea "The sun has come up over the horizon in the east every morning of my life. Every person I've ever asked has said that every time they've seen the sun rise, it rose in the east. Never has the sun been seen to rise in the west, north or south. Therefore, the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning."

That's induction: the idea that things that have happened are indictative of things that will happen. If we approach the idea more analytically, we get three parts to induction: The "what I thought before I used induction", "what I thought after I used induction" and the "what I saw to make me use induction". Or, in more formal terms, your prior probability, your posterior probability and your evidence. Even more formally, we have the following mathmatical relationship between them:

Posterior Probability = P[Idea|Evidence] = Prior Probability * Evidence Ratio = P[Idea] * P[Evidence|Idea] / P[Evidence]

An example:

We have a room with some people in it. 25% of the people in the room are male and the rest are female. You know for a fact that 75% of the women speak French while only 50% of the men do. You're told this all in advance, and know it to be accurate. Someone slips a note through the door, written in French. What are the odds that a man wrote it?

P[French] = P[Male] * P[French|Male] + P[Female] * P[French|Female] = 68.75%

P[Male|French] = P[Male] * P[French|Male] / P[French] = 25% * 50% / 68.75% = 18.181818...% = 2/11

The evidence for a hypothesis is the ratio between the probability of what you've seen so far if the hypothesis is true and the probability of seeing what you've seen so far in general. If you're more likely to see what you've seen if the hypothesis is true than you would in general, then you should beleive that hypothesis more. And if your hypothesis suggests that you shouldn't have seen what you saw before, you should start doubting it.

So, to restate LordExumius's prior post:

Faith is belief in a hypothesis with certainty out of proportion to the ratio between how likely the world is to be how it is according to the hypothesis and how likely the world is to be like it is in general. Or, in short, "Faith is belief without evidence."

[MrWiggles]

Belief=/=faith.

Indeed, and faith is just another belief.

Faith is belief without evidence.

Faith is belief in defiance of evidence.

[Frumple]

I've never seen faith defined as that. Unjustified or unjustifiable belief have been the primary definitions of faith that I've seen.

With that out of the system, maybe we can drop the semantics debate that's not going to go anywhere? Please? It gets threads locked.

Anyone have an opinion of panentheism? Spinoza was a pretty cool dude, iirc. Or any of the more interesting theological concepts you're aware of, really. Maybe try to steer discussion somewhere less vitriolic and more educational.

[Grek]

Pantheism (of which panentheism is a subset) is probably the most reasonable of the theisms, I think. It's basically the Simulation Argument, with the addendum of "And there's a being from outside the universe looking in and seeing all this who is responsible for the simulation existing in the first place." Maybe the universe is a toy for alien teenagers. Maybe we're the dreams of a giant space butterfly. Who knows.

Probably the most interesting point about panentheism is that, if it's true, it gives us all a factual and selfish motivation for helping others: If you and everyone else are actually just a giant space butterfly who's dreaming of being a bunch of different people, then you want the lives of all those people to be as pleasant and happy as possible so that when the giant space butterfly (who is also you) wakes up, it wakes up with happy dreams.

[LordExumius]

Spinoza was a pretty cool dude, iirc.

You're 400 years old, are you?

To be honest, though, I think deism has to be a more reasonable one, too. At least it doesn't pretend to know what a god thinks.