Why an atheist based morality is inferior
Offline Let's set up a simple game. We'll call it Moral. It is a two person non-zero sum game.
Suppose you have the following conditions for the game:
1) A moral choice that each player agrees exists. Each player has two available strategies: one, make the moral choice (do the right thing), and two, not make the moral choice (cheat).
2) Defined individually preferred payoffs based on adherence to this moral choice, where the payoff is greater for either player if that player can silently cheat the system.
The game does not rely on what the exact details of the moral choice is only that the players agree what it is. As it exists both players when acting with rational self interest will choose to cheat.
Suppose we add a third condition:
3) A third party judge that both players believe exists and is omniscient and fair. Both players also agree that this judge can punish cheating by reducing payoffs to zero.
The game does not rely on the judge actually existing only that the players believe he exists. The judge adds the component of complete knowledge. If the omniscient judge does not exist and there is no notion of complete knowledge the players are more prone to cheat the system.
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...It's also worth noting that this whole game is a strawman fallacy. In real life, doing things that are immediately and obviously destructively selfish (like murder, theft, rape, etc) do not offer 'big payoffs'. Even if we didn't have an effective judicial system they wouldn't have big payoffs, because you'd still be cast out from the group, labelled dangerous/untrustworthy, possibly killed in retribution, etc.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
It is important to note that atheists are fully capable of being good. I would not be surprised if an atheist picked up my wallet for me or helped a woman who was being attacked. That is not the issue.
The issue is the degree to which an atheist can offer a rational justification for the truth of his views on why something is right or wrong. I have yet to see an atheist offer something that is neither subjective nor arbitrary. None of this is helped by the general physicalist worldview, which holds that all actions are dictated by natural laws and therefore humans act within the physical constraints of determinism, in which case nobody is ultimately responsible for what they do.
Here are some examples of the problematic/fallacious arguments that atheists give:
-- An action is right if it contributes to the advancement of the society and/or species.
-- An action is right if it amounts to the least amount of pain and suffering.
-- Different societies have different values.
-- Nothing is right and nothing is wrong.
Etc.
I do not believe it is helpful to the theist position to bring up the communist regimes. These regimes were not examples of rationality permeating throughout the ethos of society. At the same time, atheism as a personal philosophy is an irrational position and if a society is built on such secular values, then perhaps such wickedness is correlated. Or perhaps not. It is striking, though, that such chaos could happen in modern times, as advanced as the world is, whereas there is no real chance that something like the Salem With Trials could happen today.
Says who? What about the rapist who rapes and kills someone and gets away with it?
He got a big payoff. He felt lots of pleasure for 20 minutes and nobody will ever find out.You ought to read the book "Zombie" by Joyce Carol Oates.
Are you suggesting that justice will always prevail?
What standards are you using to measure justice anyway?
He started off talking about how it was a two person non-zero-sum game. Then he talked about strategies and specific payoffs. But then he didn't talk about any cooperative or competitive elements he just went off on some bizarre point about how his religion is superior because he believes he's being monitored all the time.
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
Will has already said what I am trying to point out here but I'll reiterate. You provided the definition, "cheating" as a premise. You need to back up that premise with some information on how Option 2 constitutes cheating and what particular relevance that reasoning has to the real world scenario you're trying to model - because, it's not clear by all in your argument that taking option 2 "other than the agreed moral" = "cheating".
Yes. The title of the game is moral, and yes, perfect moral cheating can have a lower payoff. OOps I've run out of time.. I will be back to complete this post.
Theist badge qualifier : Gnostic/Philosophical Panentheist
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These are both tired arguments. Let's start with Kagan's suggestion of a simple moral system:
Do no harm, and help as much as you can.
How's that? Was that hard? Because from those, you could infer things like "don't steal" or "don't murder" pretty easily, couldn't you? I just set out those two things above without difficulty, and I don't see that they're "arbitrary", but I do see that they're rules, and definitely form a morality without need of any deity. In fact, they were arrived at based on simple feelings: negative emotions associated with harm, and positive emotions associated with helping. Yes, that's subjective, but would you argue that the above moral system is flawed in some way?
The second part, determinism: physicalism doesn't equal determinism. That's archaic at best, and others have argued it ad nauseum even after being informed that they've unwittingly set up a straw man. If quantum mechanics is correct, and the universe is founded on the indeterminate behaviour of particles, then we live in a probabilistic world, not a deterministic world. Considering the difficulty in making things happen exactly the same way twice, I'd have to say determinism doesn't have a strong argument from a physical point of view.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
It is almost certainly IMPOSSIBLE to be a decent person if you are a genuine christian. Luckily most chrisitians ignore most the nasty crap in the bible and are generally far more decent than their holy book.
Gandhi once said when asked about christians “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” Ghandi
He was very wrong most christians are decent people its the fictional christ/god that is twisted, hate filled and all around evil.
As the story said 'love a christian hate christianity'
I would give my left nut to take a swing at Gandhi.
You have given me a reasonable model regarding the genesis of moral knowledge. But telling me how we make an inference to moral principles does not justify them. Furthermore, simply stating "Do no harm" is about as functionally useful as saying, "Don't be immoral."
You may not see that they are arbitrary and yet you cite simple feelings as a mode of inference which is, by its very nature, arbitrary. What if my feelings lead me to a different morality? What basis do you have for telling me that I am wrong?
So yes, as a functional model for rationalizing a values system, your idea is flawed, if not useless.
(1) If everything is physical, then everything obeys physical laws.
(2) If a human being acted in such a way that s/he could not have done otherwise than s/he did, then that human cannot be held blameworthy or praiseworthy for that action.
(3) If everything obeys physical laws, then human actions are attributable to them as they are necessitated by certain chemical reactions.
Therefore, if everything is physical, then humans cannot be held morally responsible for what they do.
You can insert the premise "human actions are unpredictable and random," but that will not change the cogency of the actual argument. Even *if* human action was unpredictable, determinism would still be true.
Morality is entirely subjective. No one has the exact same moral set, even people that follow the same religion.
Everything was moral at some point to someone out there. Pedophilia was a moral lifestyle in ancient Greece, and in fact was very common and approved of.
Things change depending on if the society thinks something is harming it or not. It is just a change in the social contract that determines what most people view as morals.
If you were required to kill someone to live, because of say limited resources, that choice would likely not be considered immoral.
The social contract is ultimately what decides most of this. It nearly always trumps any religion in any area, simply because society wants to better itself, and protect itself as a whole. That is why christians choose to ignore things like Leviticus, because it is not socially acceptable....society has decided that things the bible approves of like slavery, stoning women for speaking out, and killing gays indiscriminately...are evil.
Of course, christians usually just try and overlook those passages, because they will not find fault in their own religion no matter what is pointed to them. When people come out to try and follow their religion 100%, they are usually called extremists even though they are adhering to the barbaric rules their holy text put forth by a society thousands of years ago.
Because that society was severely underdeveloped compared to most of the ones around today.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
I agree. Game theory as such has a set of 'rules', allowing a limited set of strategies, with defined payoffs for each of the correspondingly limited possible outcomes. Ideally, for clarity, there should be just two possible options, and therefore just four possible outcomes.
The scenarios in the OP are much less precisely defined, and so aren't as easy to analyse as properly formulated ones, and also don't map well to real-life scenarios, so don't yield much fruitful insight into human behavior and motivations.
'Cheating' could be how we might traditionally view some strategies, but that is not to the point of standard Game theory scenarios.
The point of game theory, AFAICS, is to focus on the consequences of specific well-defined rule-sets, including the implications of the same players repeatedly encountering each other other, either the one pair of players or different pairings out of a small group. From analysis of the results of repeated runs of the game, possibly with different rule-sets, we hope to draw more general conclusions and insights into real world behavior. This analysis/synthesis approach is one of the most useful scientific approaches to understanding complex phenomena, such as human society.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
If morality is subjective, then you have absolutely no basis for morally evaluating the actions of other people. You cannot tell murderers, pedophiles, rapists and thieves that they are wrong for what they do. Human minds are different and their morality may be different from yours. According to your worldview, their values system is equally as valid as yours, just as your taste in art or music is no better or worse than mine.
The rest of what you've written either partakes of your dishonesty or misinformation. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter. Christians do not "ignore" Leviticus because of societal conventions. Christ had fulfilled the law of the Old Covenant and freed Christians from its rules which were God's revelation to the Israelites, not to Christians. "Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes." -- Romans 10:4
The mutability of societal convention is irrelevant to the actual issue, which is that which justifies someone's ethical framework. Yes, different cultures and societies throughout history have had different social mores. That does not mean that each ethical system was/is equally valid nor does it mean that there is no absolute moral framework in humanity.
In terms of functionality, the idea that is of central importance in codifying any legal system (the closest thing that atheists can get to moral absolutes) is the metaphysical assumption that human life has a value to it that is other worldly and, moreover, that all humans are equally valuable despite obvious differences in intellect, strength, and the like. Think about that for a second! You and the brain damaged individual are considered equal! If you were to evaluate that in scientific terms, you and this person are clearly not equal. In fact, it can be argued that society would be better off if the government was not giving subsidies to the individuals who, by all scientific observation, are not equal. Why should we help disabled individuals? They do not work or do anything to maximize the utility of society. And yet, somehow they are considered equal.
Hence, morality has a dimension that is clearly unscientific.
How do you know it is less cost? The time it takes to look up the answer might be greater than actually solving the problem. I will use a better more easier to see example. Lets say you need to solve a math problem. The cheater might be able to solve a problem in less time, but that won't help the cheater solve future problems especially if they rely on the same methods that would have solved the original problem. Cheating will not help over actually solving the problem as the cheater cannot use the answer to the question to solve other problems. Who has the net gain again?
Sounds made up...
Agnostic Atheist
No, I am not angry at your imaginary friends or enemies.
SAYS ME!!! LOLOLOL!!!!@!@!!
Jesus fucking Christ, why do you assholes demand such drama & theatrics?
Yeah, you're right, a sociopath who rapes someone and gets away scott free has had his ship come in. Thing is, it doesn't happen all that often thanks to our social networks and capacity for figuring things out. So every time Jimmy goes out to get his rape on, he's taking a fairly big social risk because if he gets caught, he's fucked (aside from that, Jimmy the sociopath doesn't give two fucks about anything - including a magical omniscient judge - because he's a sociopath. Good thing God invented sociopaths to subvert his perfect morals, eh?)
Not to mention that your whole argument is non-sequitor anyway, given that it does not follow that since some people get away with rape and suffer no penalties, there must be no penalties for rape.
And who brought-up 'justice'? Not me, but thanks for putting words in my mouth, chief.
To answer the question anyway, our sense of justice and fairness is a trait that has evolved over time (and in that sense is objective; there is no mentally healthy human being who will perceive rape, murder, theft, etc as being okay, in the same way that there is no mentally healthy human being who will perceive jumping in the way of a freight train to be a safe course of action). Appealing to a codification made by a magical dictator is the highest level of absurdity; things become totally arbitrary after that, given that whatever the dictator says is suddenly law - rhyme and reason need not apply.
Enjoy your ration increase from 4 to 2, cupcake.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
... not that you would have any way of knowing that if, in fact, they are doing it without getting caught.
Sir, you've implicitly made the claim that in "real life", the scales of justice balance themselves out insofar that the horrific actions of evil individuals have inherent negative repercussions. This is your exact quote:
"...It's also worth noting that this whole game is a strawman fallacy. In real life, doing things that are immediately and obviously destructively selfish (like murder, theft, rape, etc) do not offer 'big payoffs'. Even if we didn't have an effective judicial system they wouldn't have big payoffs, because you'd still be cast out from the group, labelled dangerous/untrustworthy, possibly killed in retribution, etc."
Now in the context of this very discussion, I would presume that this constitutes, at least partially, your basis for determining an objective ethical framework which exists in nature and humanity. I'm merely pointing out that extrapolating morals in this way, in fact, does constitute an arbitrary basis and that horrific acts do offer payoffs to people who get away with them.
Would you say that certain actions would stop being evil as soon as society would accept them as good?
Remind me again what is informing your moronic values system?
So justice is measured in accordance with convention or in the way that humans in a certain mental state happen to feel? That's hardly "objective," since it, aside from being unquantifiable, presumes an ontological dependence on the minds of contingent beings. It is also a statement of omniscience on your part, as you are making a universal claim about human thought patterns based on your abstraction of a certain number of particulars. You have no idea if there exists a mentally healthy human who believes that rape is okay. Such a statement is a posteriori. In fact, there was a period of time where rape, defined under the today's standards, was considered morally permissible, even by people who today would be considered "mentally healthy."
Your last statement is a straw-man. I never claimed that morals were invented by God. You are simply projecting onto me the arguments that you want me to make.
So you agree that God changed his mind on what was morally right and wrong? Doesn't that fly right in the face of the god-given objective morality? Or did God order the Israelites to do things that he knew were 'wrong'?
''Black Holes result from God dividing the universe by zero.''
Can you give a specific example or passage?
I read a book discussing Prisoner's Dilemma. In simulations with computers, where programs with different cooperate/defect patterns were pitted against each other, the most successful program was, almost always, essentially, a "tit-for-tat." Being one of the simplest programs, all tit-for-tat did was copy the other program's previous move, except on the first move, when it always cooperated. Thus, it performed excellently against programs that defected as well as programs that didn't defect.
This is, of course, as natural said, a fantasy game, but so is the OP's game.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
We act with rational self interest. This is a fact. Even if in real life it is often complicated with group considerations, multiple forms of uncertainty, a multitude of players, multiple possible enforcers, etc ... The bare behavior is still valid. Because of this there is still insight that can be had from a simple abstraction of this behavior.
By making this observation you are agreeing with the conclusion that the judge decreases cheating. There is still a choice. Would a rational player make a cheating choice given a certain judgement? No. This stark contrast is used to demonstrate the point. As I have talked about, you can add forms of uncertainty to the game to "entice" a player to cheat if you wish, but the fundamental principal still holds.
As I pointed out, we act with rational self interest. This is why when we remove cooperation in the prisoners dilemma we get defection. The motivator of group behavior is ultimately still rational self interest. We can create new games where self interest can be feed through cooperation, but all of life is in fact not always group activity. Most moral choices are not group cooperatives. Most economic and political choices are group games, but not what we typically call moral choices. Even within the group there is temptation to cheat in the form of allowing others to make the correct group choices in mass while an individual shirks.
Groups themselves can act in self interest and then cheat other groups. Allowing, the conclusions highlighted in Moral to be extended to groups of individuals as well.
No this is no strawman. No more then adding group cooperation. Real life choice is often complicated with group considerations, multiple forms of uncertainty, a multitude of players, multiple possible enforcers. The bare behavior is still valid. Because of this there is still insight that can be had from a simple abstraction of this behavior.
So can I not say that harm to others is an intrinsically unpleasant thing? In the "absolute morals" case, justification takes the form of referencing a written document, so I think it's debatable which method of arriving at justification is superior: determining the level of social unpleasantness, or consulting the manual.
If you feel that someone can only be justified if they have a manual and follow it, then I suppose I could write those things down in a manual, and spend the rest of the manual refining the ideas. On the other hand, if you feel that justification can only come from a being of debatable existence, then we have a big question mark hanging over the very idea of justification.
That's not true at all. "Do no harm" is more specific than "don't be immoral", because the latter assumes a pre-existing moral system. Keep in mind that I'm creating "rules" that nobody will actually be able to follow all the time (like the 10 commandments) in order to illustrate how easy it is for people to come up with them. I'm not suggesting that they're practical.
Not entirely arbitrary, if we're going to be honest in this discussion. Theft and murder are two things universally recognized as harmful. Why? Well, it can't be because we all have the same rulebook, because we know we don't all have the same rulebook. If it's something inherent in us to revile theft and murder in societies, is that arbitrary?
As for what basis I have for telling you you're wrong, that's a complex question (I mean logically a complex question: there are assumptions in it I can't address). I can't tell you that you're wrong for valuing something -- that wouldn't make any sense.
(1) Is flawed because of its phrasing of "physical laws". Physical laws in the scientific sense are not things to be followed, they're descriptions of how the world works. We observe at various levels different chaotic and probabilistic dynamics in the physical world, so your characterization of "obeying physical laws" is based on outdated Enlightenment-era Cartesian thought that hasn't been very seriously considered for about 200 years. It also assumes an extremely linear process of cause-and-effect that can't be demonstrated in the physical world.
(2) True. If a person has no responsibility, a person is blameless.
(3) This is a jump even if I grant you (1), which is demonstrably false. You're appealing to ignorance, here, and assuming exhaustive knowledge of the chemical processes of the body as completely deterministic and linear.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
There is no such thing as a vacuum yet we still see self interested behavior all the time.
I don't think you always understand the implications of what you say.
Please provide citations.
So you have evidence that your cycle of "remorse healing" does not exist in atheists?
Anyone who presents a correlation has the burden of demonstrating more then a simple correlation. If this were a real scientific study that was under scrutiny of peer review there would be a clear discussion about confounding issues.
It seems most of your posts are argument from authority(to me anyway), but I never see any references to these authorities that would allow some form of bona fides.
The game as I defined it is not subjective.
I read your description. Adding ambiguity does not clarify the game. Please provide the normal form for your suggested game.
You have yet to explain why the title of this thread is not completely inaccurate. The game may be valid as a way to gain insight into something, but you really haven't explained what that something is, other than, "People are less likely to cheat if they think they will get caught." As I pointed out earlier, your model doesn't represent a typical theistic judge anyway. The immediate payoff for cheating still exists. The only thing in jeapordy is a potential post-game payoff. So this model is not accurate, and therefore not applicable to real-world morality.
And there's the question of your definition of "inferior." Which is superior: the moral framework that promotes cooperation and progress in spite of cheaters; or the moral framework that promotes hate and oppression with no cheaters at all?
I think both your game and your metric for superiority is broken.
"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers
He's built a game to show how the morals of Christians are better than the morals of atheists.
Unfortunately, he doesn't follow the rules of Christianity to show it. Christians have the infinite mulligan of forgiveness. Christians can cheat in the game without penalty as long as they ask the judge for forgiveness (until the next time it benefits them to cheat). Then they just ask the judge for forgiveness again.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
No! It's a hypothesis. It's a hypothesis largely espoused by economists, who are notoriously wrong with things involving the real world. Long Term Capital Management springs to mind as an illustrative example. If you're using game theory, just say you're using game theory.
NO! The game itself (as presented) is not valid, especially in its conclusion. I know you go on to qualify that statement, but I find it grossly disingenuous to pretend to use a well-known mathematical problem like the Prisoner's Dilemma, and then misrepresent it in such a way that it supports a tangential point. Can't let that go, it's too much smoke-and-mirrors for me.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
This reaction was a behavior within atheists resulting from their belief.
Sure I have.
Yes, I got it from the beginning. English is only vague if you don't understand what is being said. A logical construct can be just as vague if the formulator uses poor or ill-conceived English when stating the premises. Logical constructs are only as good as the persons ability to understand the problem trying to be communicated.
If you read our subthread from the beginning you will see that the counter claim to mine was "There is no such thing as an "atheist based" anything". My claim is that there is atheist based behavior just as there is Christian based behavior. Notice the discussion was not about the specifics of that behavior or what can be concluded about that behavior.
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
Two things are going on: 1) they reduced the penalty for cheating, 2) they added uncertainty to the enforcement. The first item was, in effect, moving toward no enforcement which increases cheating. Your increased cheating correlates with this. The second item had the effect of reducing the gap in payoff between cheating and not cheating. It did not eliminate the gap. This reduced gap increased your cheating plays because you had to play more cheats to get the added gain you wanted. Please notice that this behavior is an exact example of how cheating is more desirable to people because of self interest.
Now your argument is that if the gap were large your cheating events would be less because your payoff is big each time you cheated. This is not an argument that no enforcement leads to less cheating. It is just an argument that people will cheat as much as they need to get the gain they want. Suppose the payoff gap was large between cheating and not cheating. Suppose also that the player could not exceed a certain gain. They would not have less cheating because of any change in their character. It would be due to the fact that the gain was capped.
Okay, okay. I'll retract that statement. I was trying to play nice, by saying, "Even if we assume this game isn't bullshit, it's complete and utter bullshit." But you are right: that is giving his game too much credit. And I agree with the smoke-and-mirrors. I called it a strawman earlier for the same reasons.
For the sake of your bloodpressure, HisWillness, I shall stop playing nice.
"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers
I used what is called perfect information and enforcement. There are plenty of examples of games with perfect information or uncertain(partially perfect) information along with enforcement. In this game the enforcer did not have to really exist. Only that the players believed it existed.
The game does not rely on the details of what the morals are.
Rearranging the enforcement mechanism does not change the game. Ostracization is still a form of reducing the payoff for cheating. No difference. People will still act with rational self interest if they think they will not get caught.
But it's not perfect information as you didn't include the rule that says the Christian can cheat without penalty by apologizing to the judge after each infraction.
If you are going to compare Christianity to atheism using game theory, please let us know al the rules - thanks.
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
The rules I gave can be easily transfered to normal form, and the dominance I claim can be easily shown. This is exactly why some have pointed out it's similarities to the prisoners dilemma. I have made numerous posts about the relevance to the real world.
Except when you leave out the rule that changes the game...
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
Then cheating would not be a rational choice. Do you honestly believe rational people who are trying to cheat on a test will spend more time cheating then doing the work if they did not at least have the perception that the gain would be greater. Perhaps they think the answer has a better chance of being correct. This is still a perceived gain.
Irrationality does add a twist, but it does not say anything about rational behavior. In other words, you can still draw conclusions about rational behavior even if we sometimes behave irrationally.
Thank you for your honesty. It is refreshing. Regarding the use of the word inferior. The word is used in the context of the game. In other words a strategy is superior only in the sense that it accomplished a desired result - less cheating. I left the actual definition of the moral out of the game.
It may not be financially or technically feasible for them to disable player's accounts because an algorithm determines that they're probably botting. If you're caught botting by a person you still have your account disabled so the penalty hasn't been reduced. It's been increased by the addition of point deduction as in your example.
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
I'm not using the Prisoner's Dilemma. If you understood games you would see that it is nothing more then a simple non-zero sum game. Just because there are other non zero sum games does not make them all the same. This is silly. I don't think you understand the fundamentals here.
So the Christian strategy is best because they are less likely to cheat because they would get caught or is it that rule that you forgot about where a Christian gets zero penalty for cheating by asking the omniscient judge's forgiveness?
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
who cares about perceived gain. I am talking about real gain. A cheater could take more time solving a problem than those who don't cheat for many reason. Example would be if the math involved is simple, but looking up the answer on their cheat sheet would take longer than just figuring it out. I don't want to go into speculation as to why they cheat it is irrelevant to the point of this exchange.
Sounds made up...
Agnostic Atheist
No, I am not angry at your imaginary friends or enemies.
If you mean blindingly obvious then I agree. Then it follows that the following is non-sense.
Perceived gain is relevant and you admitted so when you said "and the accomplishment is diminished because it isn't really their own accomplishment".
Which you've not done so far.
Likely because you can't.
Likely because atheists, like everyone else, vary too much in behavior to pin down psychologically as a group.
As for the OP: Why isn't it possible for a society's enforcement of broadly agreed upon morals/rules be the actor in the position of "judge"? That always seems to be the one workable godless moral system that gets totally ignored.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
Face-palm!
LIke this maybe (for the other side)?
1. Sins can be considered immoral acts.
2. Christians have a God that forgives them of their sins.
3. This forgiveness removes all penalties associated with sins.
4. Therefore, Christians have a greater potential to commit immoral acts.
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
Just for clarity: I'd argue that the progression fails because no matter their "belief" in ultimate forgiveness, their actual moral mettle comes from the society and culture they grow up in. I'm fairly certain religion excuses certain moral values (anti-gay sentiment and the like) rather than produces it. WHich is why acceptance of gays inccreases even though the religious dogma excusing it remains unchanged.
Similarly, societal and cultural mores are what drive atheists in thier own moral choices. There may well be a greater likelyhood of an atheist being "liberal" about morals and more likely to question them, but this is probably correlation rather than causation.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
Thanks - it's been a while since I've done anything even remotely using my philosophy degree. I've been too busy satisfying my long unrequited love of the theatre.
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
I didn't say the perceived gain was irrelavent, but that the speculation as to why they cheated was. I asked who cares about the perceived gain? Not that it was irrelevant.
Sounds made up...
Agnostic Atheist
No, I am not angry at your imaginary friends or enemies.