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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[TheBiggerFish]

Oh goodness.

If only I could.

[smjjames]

*throws a troll-bomb into the room* Okay, not really.

Just something interesting I found: http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/15/living/jesus-debate-man-versus-myth/index.html

On whether he existed or not, I don't know. He very well could be based on an actual person, but it's heavily wrapped in myth and tall tales. Probably not too different from the King Arthur mythologies, theres some evidence that it's based on an actual ancient Briton king, but a huge amount of it is myth.

[Telgin]

I would be quite surprised if Jesus turned out to be entirely fictional, but it does leave an interesting question on what the real Jesus would have been like.  Whether Jesus was a real person or not, the New Testament is a departure from the tone of the Old Testament so one has to wonder how it ever caught on.  Presumably there were many other similar prophets during the era that met with terrible fates without their movements ever catching on, so maybe it was just luck or chance.

Anyway, I've been fairly interested in the other gospels that have been unearthed since they tend to paint Jesus in a different light.  There's obviously the rumor that he was married and maybe had kids, but there's also a particularly strange one (Gospel of Thomas I think?) that took the whole spirituality thing even further to the point that I've seen it compared to eastern religions.  That might have even been the book that said that the God of the Old Testament wasn't really the true God and was literally some evil thing that simply thought it was God, and the true God was beyond approach and comprehension to the point that communicating with it was literally impossible for humans.  Admittedly, that would explain some things.

I wish I could remember more details, but I'm at work at the moment and can't really research it at the moment.

[TD1]

Jesus fit the bill, or was made to do so. He was seen as a continuation of the whole John the Baptist thing, and he seemed to be very adept at speaking to the common people in sympathetic/ knowledgeable terms. People wanted a messiah, they'd been told one was coming, and the God of the Israelites wasn't one to abandon his favourite people. So, a man comes along who seems holy, it's said he works miraculous healing, so he must have a close connection to God. Add in his persecution at the hands of the Romans, and that of John the Baptist, and you had a holy figure close to God who got on well with people and was connected with an already established movement, who also in some way stood up to the ones challenging their way of life. Add in a bit of current-or-posthumous prophecy fulfilment, and it's not hard to see why eventually the "holy healer man" everyone talks about becomes the Messiah everyone yearns for and talks about.

As for Arthur, I think Gildas mentions him as being a Roman soldier leading the Britons, but the impression I got was that he was a figment created to give some one to fight against the Northern Hordes. You see that type of thing a lot - Robin of the Hood is fighting your enemy so have heart, or Prester John of Africa is fighting the Muslim tide, or Arthur is fighting the Danes.

[MoonyTheHuman]

This is orange wizard's thread. I make a memorial here.

[ChairmanPoo]

This is orange wizard's thread. I make a memorial here.

His name is Robert Paulson

[McTraveller]

Regarding 'belief' in things in general, I recently came across this interesting talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uIvOniW8xA.  It's a bit long, but if can spare the hour, it's worth it - even if you don't agree with Keller's worldview.

Basically: everyone has faith in something, so it's worth understanding how people decide to believe the things they believe.

I'd love to discuss some of the talking points from that one - they include things like:

• Does being a non-theist really require as much faith as he says?
• Can materialism / evolution really only tell you what's practical to do, not what you ought to do?
• We should really be trying to get more humanists in the world.

[TempAcc]

Oh, Umbasa.

I'm ok with atheism ~non theism~ and even materialism (to some extent). What I usualy make fun of is the edgy atheist who is 100% sure that everything we currently know about existence is the unquestionable truth of everything, which in turn is far more like a religion than atheism, but those tend to be few and nobody really takes them seriously.

[Gentlefish]

-snop-
I'd love to discuss some of the talking points from that one - they include things like:

• Does being a non-theist really require as much faith as he says?
• Can materialism / evolution really only tell you what's practical to do, not what you ought to do?
• We should really be trying to get more humanists in the world.

Haha, oh man. What's practical. I had a guy like that in my metaphysics class. He's technically right in that we can only know what's practical to do (ie, it's practical to understand that we can't breathe water, but we don't KNOW that we can't because we can't know anything.

Being a non-theist requires absolutely zero faith. It simply requires you to acknowledge that you cannot know anything, and thus cannot know a God or Gods, nor may it be practical to do so (see above water argument). And as to the last point, it's basically saying we should be more compassionate about how we treat people? Abso-goddamn-lutely we should. In fact, technically Christianity is humanist, if you truly believe we were made in the image of God; by worshipping God, we are also worshipping ourselves.

[McTraveller]

but we don't KNOW that we can't because we can't know anything.

Are you sure? 

[Frumple]

Unfortunately yes. There's always room for the good ol' evil deceiver or its equivalent to be stuck somewhere in things. Solipsism always wins if you're not going to do what you should and tell it to bugger off once you reach whatever point of absurdity is appropriate to the particular discussion. Generally we just roll with less than whole knowledge states and get along pretty alright.

Though yeah, a nontheist doesn't require much faith, if any. Certainly significantly less than most/all more metaphysically burdened positions to have on theism, and what faith they do require is mostly not of the religious sort. Usually if someone's saying otherwise they're trying to hoodwink you one way or another, heh.

Materialism or evolution can totally tell you what you ought to do, though. Sorta'. There's optimal or necessary paths to achieve whatever goal you're aiming at that can be decided on (with whatever degree of functional effectiveness) using principles that aren't in violation of either sort of thing. They're not exactly able to tell you what you ought to do on their own, though. They're not prescriptive systems, though certain strains of materialism might be. Can't even tell you what's practical, tbh. Just what is.

That said, nothing can establish an ought without there being a goal to ought towards. Religions tend to presuppose whatever their goal is (heaven, escaping resurrection, whatever) is the one being aimed for, but that doesn't give them particularly special grounds on that front. Anything that provides a framework for effectively accomplishing a goal can tell you an ought, to one extent or another.

[RAM]

 Haven't watched but those questions seem simple.
 The absence of theism does not require any faith at all. It is just familiarity. People don't have faith that they will remain on the ground, people are accustomed to not floating off into space and have no reason to speculate otherwise. There is no extrapolation or speculation here, it is just conditioning from being exposed to consistent stimuli. You do not need to believe in the world, you just need a background of cooperating with it, and amazingly enough people who don't cooperate with the world aren't very common, something about leaping off of tall buildings to fly away causing them to leave the world or something... Still, no reason to hate on them, give them a nice padded cell and a straightjacket and they can be all sorts of inspiration.

 Granted, once you start getting philosophical you start needing to trust a few things, or not, there are some certain facts and relying upon the familiar really isn't an act of faith but the two certainly do have a lot of blurring once you get into metaphysics. But the question is a pretty obvious false dichotomy. The third option is, of course, to just not care... Then again, you need faith in other people, except you don't, people are all terrible. You have faith in the future or else you commit suicide, right? or not, future is bad, hope is fiction, but death is a part of life so there is no escape to be found there and a lack of faith suggests that perhaps there is some unknown element that might justify the malevolence that went into a world where life requires the consumption of a greater quantity of life(Or the slow death of a star, which many people have worshipped as a living being over the years...) and thus inherently removes its own justification unless humans openly admit that they think that some lives are more important than others and then we get slavery and genocide... Well ,we get those regardless, but at least people don't start worshipping them.

 Evolution is very clear on what you ought to do: obey your own nature and be lucky. "Be yourself" is corny but it is actually the correct answer to the "meaning of life", more or less. Evolution is definitely not about winning, it is about letting the world judge if you are a winner or not, and the world is a very inconsistent judge... Of course, Evolution is wrong, obviously. You get a system that is mostly about competition, then introduce the ability to churn through untold millions of years' worth of solar energy in under a century then of course it will go into mad consumption mode and become unstable. This sort of thing is inevitable when your system is repetitive such that children will generally be okay if parents are okay because of similar conditions. Some critters have birth control, so it is not like adaptability is not evolved towards, but competition really is the star of the show to a massive degree and it just leads to a pretty much certain doom once you get the ability to wipe out your food, which happens a lot but is usually only local, and can be recovered from externally, but hey, what could be wrong with globalisation! Breaking away from evolution is the important thing that humans need to focus on right now, but they can't do it. I mean, the ideals are pretty obvious. Preserve diversity to maintain inspiration. Focus upon persistence rather than potency because everything you have ever done becoming meaningless kind of lowers the value of human civilisation and hedonism only works if you value humans over their environment which is obscenely stupid as humans cannot survive to be hedonistic if they don't have an environ in which to exist. And then just remember to have some philosophical curiosity just in case there is somehow a meaning of life that is both valid and useful out there so we aren't stuck choosing one or the other...

Humans are nothing special. The Roman legion disrespects what they do not understand:
A gun: It fires, they are overwhelmed by automatic weapons and defeated.
Contemporary society: All guns and explosives spontaneously vanish, ten thousand armed legionnaires march on a peaceful town and force it to submit to The Empire by brutally quashing all resistance.
Same story, different outcomes, because force is more forceful and civility is difficult to measure. People assume that because they cannot understand the life of a lettuce plant that it has no value. It could easily be that they are correct, but there really is not basis for such a judgement. The same thing occurs between humans, it is inherent to human nature to value some things over others. There was once a laughable study that suggested that humans are not born racist because babies can't identify race. Humans are born with a boatload of bias and it just gets worse, now maybe it won't express towards racial appearance, maybe it will be a split between gender, or region, or culture, or economic status, or profession... humans, in general, innately devalue that which is different from themselves. The humanist cry of "GO TEAM HUMAN!!!" is just feeding the worst aspects of humanity and is this inherently unstable because it just takes the slightest chink in the perception of human homogeneity to trigger a cascade of witch hunts to preserve human purity... The path to virtue lies in humility, not narcissism...

[Frumple]

Ah... evolution isn't clear about what you ought to do. At all. The system is entirely descriptive. Doesn't say anything about what to do, just what's going on.

[Rolan7]

That said, nothing can establish an ought without there being a goal to ought towards. Religions tend to presuppose whatever their goal is (heaven, escaping resurrection, whatever) is the one being aimed for, but that doesn't give them particularly special grounds on that front. Anything that provides a framework for effectively accomplishing a goal can tell you an ought, to one extent or another.

Don't forget self-preservation, and in the more successful cases self-propagation.  From the religion's perspective.  There are exceptions, mostly gone now... funny how that works.

[Gentlefish]

Ah... evolution isn't clear about what you ought to do. At all. The system is entirely descriptive. Doesn't say anything about what to do, just what's going on.

Yeah. It's a practical belief to hold, if one were to assume we cannot truly know anything. Which, to be fair is a good position to assume. How can you truly know something? By knowing you know it? But how do you know that? It's a fair position to hold as an axiom, just as much as acquaintance == knowledge that most people ascribe to.

@RAM you don't need to trust anything, beyond "okay, that's practical for now". For example, for the longest time, it was practical to think of the elements as water, fire, earth and air. Why? Because it worked. Once empirical knowledge caught up, it was no longer to think of "water" as a singular element as much as oxygen, which we call atoms still, ie indivisible. Which we have divided about twice more since their conception as a human idea.

The path to virtue is another great argument point. Ask a philosopher about the philosophical definition of justified beliefs. One of the steps was to hold evident that a belief is justified, or summat. To have a justified belief, it must be justified. Or, from a precursory wikipedia article, a justified belief is a belief that we are "within our rights" for holding. Thus, racism is a justified belief in America. It's well within our rights to think minorities are worth stepping on. Creationism is also well within our rights to believe in, in America.

tl;dr epistemology is a feckin' mess.