Why does it need to be anything else? I met my wife on a 7 day free trial on a dating site and have heard some express it as divine intervention, much the same way as your previous post about the gay dude with the balloons and flower petals. However, to my wife and I, the fact that it simply could be accident and coincidence makes absolutely no difference in the "meaningfulness" of the event. Why should it, if the results are the same?

Its purely subjective, much the same as your gay dude's coincidental events and his interpretations thereof.No different than someone interpreting classical music as "music" and rock and roll as "noise". Objectively speaking, they're both "noise" however the subjective definitions depend on how each genre makes an individual feel when they are listening.

I have no problem defining myself as a "piece of meat" with feelings. The subjective life experiences give it "meaning", yet it will make no difference to me if theists see it otherwise.

I have no problem with what either of you have said. You experience things as meaningful to you, okay, accepted. You're assigning meaning to an arrangement of molecules and atoms and you think the molecules in your head are more meaningful than the molecules in a hot dog, be my guest. 

I don't think you really have a basis to do so, but you can certainly do it. Like I said, if you want to say 'meaning' amounts to what makes your pile of meat think warm fuzzy thoughts that's fine. 

But by that logic, it would seem that Mr. X's crystal meth habit/experience is equal in meaning to the love you feel for your child or wife or mother. On a reductionist view they are no different. The enjoyment and happiness Mr. Y gets from jacking off, or even raping women or children, has the same amount of meaning your love for art has, etc. You get the gist.

Well, neuroscience has made giant headways into the working minds of addicts. Most drug addicts ( I have recovering drug addicts and alcoholics in my family) are compelled to do their drug, and hate the fact they are entrapped by that drug. Yet, they continue to do so. Why ? Because of chemical imbalances of the brain and the fact that the drugs they are taking stimulates other parts of the brain that over ride the logical thinking of consequence. ( I, E. my uncle said that he used to be full of self-hatred, guilt and loathing when he did meth and drank alcohol, but he could not stop on his own, no matter how hard he tried. He ended up having to seek professional help before he could get off of them altogether). 

They have also made quite a bit of headway into the working minds of sociopathic behavior. Their brains work alot differently than the average human. Certain stimulations like fear and empathy do not work in the same process as other people. 

There are several volumes of work on the subject and a few documentaries, but I would have to do some digging around to find all the sources. 

I get a thrill from riding a motorcycle, some people say that it is foolish to do get on one. What makes one man's meat another man's poison ? 

Since you seem to be taking an opposite view, then let me ask you this : Is your love, compassion, empathy, irritation, anger, inquisitiveness, or calmness arbitrated by a deity ? A force ? A spiritual power ? 

Where does the pleasure of a rapist and child molestor come from ? If the good qualities of humans are given by a higher being, then it would seem to me, that the "bad" qualities would have to come from the same being. 

What makes sadists ? Masochists ? Thrill-seekers ? Risk Takers ? Overtly cautious people ? 

What causes some parents to be neglectful and others nourishing ? 

A higher being ? Nature ? Society ? 

That science can tell us what chemicals cause a drug addicts behavior, for example, does nothing toward your point. When you talk about 'imbalances' in brain chemistry you aren't saying anything objective. All you're saying is that the certain chemical balances are more common in people and are thus considered 'normal' or average, and those result in behavior/outlook A, whereas other chemical balances are less common and result in behavior/outlook B. 

You seem to place all these moral values and significance on the experience or addicts. On a reductionist view you're attributing moral value and significance to lumps of matter. Matter doesn't possess such things as meaning. You want to say that we can help these lumps of matter feel better, and that that is a moral thing to try to do. That's an illusion. The drug addicts lump of brain matter isn't morally or meaningfully inferior to his lump of brain matter sober. It's just different, and that's all. 

I don't want to say I'm taking an opposite view just yet. I'm just pointing out what meaning is reduced to on a reductionist atheist view. By definition it is reduced to configurations of molecules, and molecules do not have moral values or transcendent meaning of any sort. 

I'll try to suggest an alternative view. It would be something to the effect that we are souls, we are not merely our bodies, though we are embodied in them. Take a look at my quick and crappy outline of one Jewish mystical belief, here:

The embodied person 'consists' of different parts: ruach, nefesh, and neshama. Roughly translated that's flesh, emotion/mentality, and soul or holy spark. The eternal truth of what a human being is is a spark of the divine, a soul. The body experiences desire and the emotions are stirred up through it and through life. Those things are temporary illusions and to the extent that we give into believing that we are nothing but body and emotions is the extent to which we fail to see that we are really holy beings. As such, lust, rage, and jealousy, etc. are the result of forgetting the holy and living solely through the flesh and the emotions. When we see that we are sustained by, and in fact are, God we see that we are all holy. It becomes possible to see through the delusions of separateness and hate and judgement, and to experience love and compassion for your fellow human beings. 

What makes it possible for you to be mad at someone or for someone to desire sex or drugs compulsively? The body and 'messed up' psychology. The belief that we are bodies, and you're one body and he's a separate one, etc. When we see someone suffer we understand that he a soul just like anybody, just like you, who is trapped in delusion and in darkness, not seeing the truth of his own goodness and holiness. Compassion is thus a moral duty flowing from the knowledge of God and from God, the ground of morality and of love. The Jewish mystics believe that those, the body and troubled emotions, are left behind at death and what remains is pure soul. When we realize and act on the knowledge that we are not just a body and feelings we sanctify creation and bring ourselves closer to It in this lifetime, we earn closeness to God through our actions. Love becomes more than an arrangement of atoms. It is an expression of an ultimate and objective Good.

  Really ?  jeffreyalex on June 17, 2012 - 12:50pm.

Marty Hamrick wrote: ' my .. dude '  

     Oh, Lighten up!

  Song Lyrics () : "Why are there so many songs about rainbows and what's on the other side? Rainbows of visions, though only illusions, and rainbows have nothing to hide. So we've been told and some choose to believe it. Know they're wrong, wait and see. But, Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection. The lovers, the dreamers and thee. Who said that every wish would be heard and answered when wished on the morning star?  .. What's so amazing 'is chili-dogs and sea shells'.. Oh, Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection. The lovers, the dreamers and thee. All of us under its' spell. We all know that it's probably magic. Have you been half asleep and have you heard voices? You've heard them calling the same. Is this the sweet sound that called the young sailors. The voice might be one and the same. So many have heard it too many times to ignore it. It's something that I'm supposed to be. But, Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection. The lovers, the dreamers and thee".

  Paraphrasing Fonzie This is being pointed out as just another PC 'attempt to' 'distract from' the subject.

Uhhhh, SMD?

Oh that was the church's ad campaign that they sold to a gullible public for control. This should be obvious. If you control the populace's "worldly" things (their money, food and sex lives), you control them. "This worldly money will corrupt you, so give it to us and we'll do the Lord's work." "Sex is bad, but we need a confession from a suspected witch, so our Grand Inquisitor has the godly right to rape a suspected witch multiple times until she confesses.What's a little earthly pain and humiliation if it saves her immortal soul?" Yeah right.

That fact also gives me motivation to improve life for all in the here and now.

You haven't read any of Sam Harris's writings about atheistic morality have you? Basically he debunks the theistic moral party line by first showing how morality developed through natural selection and says that we, as social political animals need morality to function properly and thus have a moral obligation to fellow human beings and not a pile of rocks. This is based on sentience and another living being's ability to feel pain and suffering. The amount of moral obligation is directly proportional to the amount of sentience in a given being. Thus, we as humans have moral obligations to fellow human beings and animals but on a different level. I think most meat eaters agree that its perfectly OK to kill a cow for meat, but to do so humanely and not torture the poor beast to death. Likewise we have no moral obligation to living things such as viruses or bacteria.

                                        Why so cryptic ?  Just say it.

  At what point after creation did your non-interventionist deist god attempt to impart moral guidelines ?  

   Uh, no thanks.  I will respectfully decline your homo-erotic overture....

God is the paradigm and root of morality. It isn't judged by any exterior moral standard. 

Imagine having a recording of a symphony performance on a record or CD. You could judge it's fidelity to the actual live performance. Maybe it's a great recording, maybe some instruments were drowned out or didn't record faithfully for some reason. But you can't compare the sound fidelity of the actual live performance to anything. That's it. That performance is the standard. 

And it is an excellent answer. If I take a position that the balloon I'm holding is blue, it doesn't follow that I need to take a position with regard to the color of any other balloon. That's just immediately obvious. 

You mean there's such a thing as objective morality? Are you a student of meta ethics? What's the purpose of morality anyway? Is a rule a rule just because its a rule or is it a rule because it serves a specific social purpose?Why is one view of morality superior, because you feel it? How does morality become objective and why does it have to be in your opinion?

Or, more importantly, WHY a thing is sanctioned or not. Most religions are content to just teach that a thing is right or wrong just because, "Thus sayeth the Lord."

there's no way you can come to this sort of belief without a predisposition or early exposure or something. Nothing in this omelette of assertions makes any real sense. You are using terms that have no definition, that are unproven, that are unprovable, that are subjective. There is a point were you are simply leaving behind the epistemological discussion of what can or can't be proven and stepping out into a void of self-projected cultural belief. This is fine. But positing it as truth, which you must admit you seem to be doing, given your repetition of these ideas, is harder to support. 

It seems to me you seek a 'clothes peg' question, a fundamental doubt that cannot be answered, this frees you up to just decide what to believe on the basis of your own personal cognitive biases and motivated reasoning, generally plugged in by early exposure. My christian brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces are all orthodox christians with a tendency to the evangelical. This is exactly the environment they grew up in. All their arguments are based on creating room for the possibility their preconceptions might actually operate in reality.  

The correct position is the fallibilist position, the retention of doubt, the acceptance of modifiable explanations, the acceptance that real understanding is almost certainly outside of our comprehension, the realisation that certainty is certainly assertion. Here you are taking us through a process of anthropomorphic simplification with what seems a complete rejection of the fast-developing science of neurology and brain function and all this based at least partly on some fundamental 'feelings' you have about certain coincidental 'cosmic' semiotics and your sense that morality cannot be the product of a biochemical system existing solely to restore free energy to equilibrium.

I think it's fair to say you are hitched in some way to the theism you must have been exposed to at home, at school or in the community when you were growing up. As a child of the church, my sense is that you have a fundamental baseline of god-think. I know you have denied this in the past but I think it's probably true. You appeal to emotion most strongly when it comes to these ideas of love and morality, which is very sweet in you but not a proof of god.

The knowable fact is that love is a label for a group of feelings which are demonstrably based on the atomic arrangement of brain chemicals, Jeff. And I just don't understand why you think that makes love any less worthwhile than it would be if it were instead based on the necessarily inexplicable. Our incomprehensible human situation is intense, fierce and wondrous. We invented the idea of god to help us explain the ache of our raw humanity. This is the most probable truth.  

I was aware you were paraphrasing a mystical belief but I considered that paraphrase contains many elements of the core beliefs you have outlined elsewhere on the boards. The existence of a soul, a supernatural source of mind, morality being objective and immaterial, love being immaterial and not possible via biochemical process. You would have to agree that these are ideas you have expressed elsewhere. 

I have a couple of close friends, he, german jewish shorn of ancestors and relatives, agnostic with that same tendency to the warm hearth of cultural deism, she froth-haired displaced yemeni, vociferous atheist who will state with hot vigor in any company that all religion is fucking bullshit but those fucking rabbis will tie you in fucking knots. Daughter leans to Dad. Son leans to Mum. Dad's devotional arguments are much like these proto-arguments you are picking over in the process of deciding whether and what to believe. After much red wine I can see in his face that my rage at monotheism pains him deeply. 

You currently espouse deism. I'll argue against deism for the pleasure of the debate but if all muslims, christians, hasids and assorteds became deists, that would be an excellent outcome. Some minds are simply spiritual. With my christian background I can feel the shape of that potential alternative reality in my own mind. The rooms are closed up now, the blinds drawn but I know where those conceptual spaces are. Personally, I think we should be brave enough to stand on the vertiginous edge of human knowledge and not reach for cognitive band aids. To embrace entirely the symbiotic chemical and cellular fundamentals that ultimately comprise our limited comprehension, to own our fear with complete self honesty, this is the greatest expression of the human spirit. 

My argument would be similar to parts of yours but much narrower. I would argue pre-bang, outside the Hubble Constant and inside particle physics. I would probably try to redefine first cause as something completely different from the usual mythical anthro silly. It's name would not be god. 

I wouldn't use abiogenesis or speciation. I'm very convinced of evolutionary theory and could not bring myself to challenge it without feeling foolish. Nor could I argue for a supernatural source for objective morality. I think humans don't like to cause pain because we feel pain and that morality is a product of brain chemistry reinforced by culture. I think we elevate in-group sacrifice as the supreme good because we evolved to do so. 

I'd be thinking of a non interventionist prime mover. I'd be considering the nature of what seem to be universal laws. It would lead to philosophical aspects of physics, the vagaries and mysteries of which I consider very much un-mined by the theist side.  

I don't think molecular biology is random but instead believe it follows predictable patterns in particular environments. As such, I believe that in this universe, in reactive and energy-rich conditions, carbon-based life is inevitable. At the same time, at the heart of what we claim as being more or less empirically true lies some species of supersymmetry, a place/set of conditions as bizarre and mysterious as any theological assertion could ever hope to be. 

Our comprehension seems book-ended by the speed of light's ability to reach our sensing devices from what we think are the verges of the universe, and our inability to find the expected fundamental molecular arrangement at the heart of matter. I do believe there is an answer to questions of first cause but even if we guessed the right answer we could never truly know we'd found it. 

Running my mind over the options, it's tough. I can't help but think the universe made mind, not the other way around. Nor can I help thinking that those 3 words, "I don't know", express the truth of my feelings about these questions best; while also expressing, entirely; the fallabilistic nature of agnostic atheism.  

        The perpetual shifting in god concepts by jefferyalex is devilishly clever as it's much harder to hit a constantly moving target.   Kudos to the shirtless wonder.

Well of course that would be an irrational position. I am unaware that anyone has taken that position. After all, science is forever making new discoveries and new theories that change everything we know. 

A science or astronomy book from 1970 is going to be far outdated to a science book of 2012. 

We know very little about the "natural" world around us and our observations are limited. The room I am currently sitting probably would be assessed quite differently from everyone. Not to mention what it would look like from my dog's eyes, a fly on the wall's eyes or even my girlfriend's eyes. 

If humanity has not nuked itself out of existence, 500 years from now, we will probably look very ignorant and backwards to that future world. 

Even though Da Vinci was years ahead of his time, I doubt very seriously he could grasp some of the concepts and everyday living were he to be magically transported here. 

Hell, even in my lifetime, when I was a kid, the idea that I could sit at a computer and chat with people all over the world was unfathomable to me. 

I personally have never claimed to "know" what the answers are. A part of me might be disappointed if I did know, because then the constant searching, reading, evolving and changing would end. 

Opie,

Your first definition is partially right. Knowledge and reality ("existence" or being) are part of  philosphy. But there are 4 major parts which also include ethics and aesthetics. If you are a liberal then you would add value theory which is really um, worthless since it is ouside and impossible via a dependent on the 4 major categories as just described.

Philospohy also deals with method. The methodological means of consistency from point A to B. People who go around pretending they're atheists have trouble with method since they are dishonest and non consistent (exceptions would be Mao).

Philosohy is also the means of reason and propositoinal logic. Without philosohy you would not be able to have the means of the reason. Naturally, this is part of the Imago Dei though perverted and dead which is why you call yourself an atheist (agnostic though).

So regarding TAG, you simply got bored of it and then pretended that it didn't exist until it went away? lol.

lol, is this why you hate philosophy? People who pretend to be atheists are actually atheists due to emotional reactions. At least I have one that now admits this.

And no wonder you despise philosphy, philopshy is about logic and proposional means of argument and knowledge of, you are emotion and antithetical to such.

Tag originally was from Kant. Cornelius Van Til framed it and George Bryson systemised it. Via the impossiblity of the contrary and have yet to see a refutation of the argument but rather a gripe and vent thread lol.

Though i rarely use this argument, I find it an okay argument both in validity and soundness, I would simply modify a few points.

In reference to PROOF. This shows me you are ignorant of TAG since TAG is non-proof via a-posteri but starts from a a-priori position.

Logically speaking, proof is another subject that you don't understand. Black's dictionary of law under evidence and proof has this for "definition" (denotative)

Persuasion

That's more like what you call proof. If those who are not persauded don't join the club (guess the scienc club I'm referring to) adominems are thrown around without logical consideration.

You are a pretend atheist because you are a filthy evil human being. You are rotten to the core. YOu are selfish, arrogant and a stupid fool (Psalms 14:1).

You do not have a logical reason to hate God excpect you wish not to be accountable for your disgusting actions. Let me guess, are you divorced? yet?

If you have the balls give me your address and come on the Mt. Saint Helens Hike this August with the world renonwn geologist and expert on Mt. Saint Helens and the Grand Canyon. Once in a life time chance, way off trail studying the data.

The problem you may have if you go on this hike is that you won't see "feelings." You will see hard "evidence" of this and that in correlation to the grand canyon.

I suppose you will not come and throw ad hominems at the issue. That's because you're all talk and no action.

You as a wannabe atheist and wannabe scientist need to grow a pair.

Respectfully,

Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).

But it's actually a prominent position called 'Naturalism'.

I'd have to agree with you. I was a teenager less than a decade ago and I didn't even see the iPhone coming. 

That's a good point, thanks. I guess I had an easier time of it in New York City. You know, it would be nice if everywhere was like here. You can believe something or you can believe nothing, as long as you don't get in anyone's face. 

But even here we have groups. In a lot of instances I think you're probably right, it helps to get rid of baggage. I think, though, that there are lots of other motives, too. 

How, would you say, is the sentiment "I only want to date white guys/girls" different from "I only want to date atheist guys/girls"?