Agnus_Dei posted:and this ends up
just like christianity "ends up" with people being good and helping their neighbor and turning the other cheek?
Agnus_Dei posted:Atheism is absolutely a positive set of beliefs in which you disregard all human spirituality as superstition and emphasize the importance of material reality, and this ends up having moral implications about the value (or lack thereof) of things which are only held as valuable for spiritual reasons. While it is true it manifests itself as a great variety of individual belief systems, they all have this underlying current within them.
what if i have a nonspiritual value system that assumes that life has value and that moral activity is important to begin with, not because big divine daddy is gonna whup me if i dont
tpaine posted:MindMaster posted:saying the word random in an unashamed, postgoon sort of way is cool
Hi everyone and welcome to Random Church, where we worship cheese and BLORT. But, nggrreeh, don't be too cunthatted with these sacred and hallowed motherbitching walls, fuckbutts, or our dead gay nigger lord will punish your asshole with the swiftness! *deep breath* Fffffnnnnnaaaaaaaaaaaaa
damn.. that is one random set of beliefs
Agnus_Dei posted:Atheism is absolutely a positive set of beliefs in which you disregard all human spirituality as superstition and emphasize the importance of material reality, and this ends up having moral implications about the value (or lack thereof) of things which are only held as valuable for spiritual reasons. While it is true it manifests itself as a great variety of individual belief systems, they all have this underlying current within them.
do you literally have no way of conceiving the value of life without the supernatural, souls, god, etc?
roseweird posted:because you have inherently no respect for my perspective or goals. you can't think my knowledge is interesting but then just arbitrarily dislike the results of that knowledge when they seem too abstract or eclectic. sometimes i , shockingly, actuallly believe what i read, and sometimes i get my theology from plato and sometimes from enheduanna and sometimes the bible and sometimes from friends acquaintances and sometimes religious teachers whom i respect. and i'm not going to talk about my beliefs in depth or with feeling here because this isn't the place for it and i don' tneed to justify myself to you, but i don't take this lightly. i don't know what conversation you think you initiated in a cordial way but maybe if you only ever make fun of me when i am being serious or having a discussion with someone else that you don't understand, that has something to do with the defensive reactions you get?
roseweiurd i appreciate ur contributions but on this point i think ur critics have a point; faith and theology should not be a matter of picking and choosing bits from various faiths that suit your interests but absolute fidelity to a singular truth
roseweird posted:that seems okay to me but i have no better an idea what "nonspiritual" means than i have of what "spiritual" means
basically i dont see what's wrong with declaring that life has meaning/value without simultaneously invoking some supernatrual mechanism that makes sure it's true regardless of what i do. i'm fine with morality and the value of life being my own non-objective fantasy.
deadken posted:roseweiurd i appreciate ur contributions but on this point i think ur critics have a point; faith and theology should not be a matter of picking and choosing bits from various faiths that suit your interests but absolute fidelity to a singular truth
how do you know what the right truth is? it would suck if you picked judaism and it turned out that actually neopaganism was Correct and True.
c_man posted:just like christianity "ends up" with people being good and helping their neighbor and turning the other cheek?
If someone sincerely tries to incorporate Christianity into their belief system, rather than just pretending to, then yes. But to be honest, I don't see any logical reason within the atheistic mindset to support helping other humans at all. That is a spiritual belief from Christianity that you have carried over because it is dominant in your society. Since moral values are sort of spiritual by nature, they eventually get cast aside, and one ends up focusing on raw bodily pursuits without any pretense of moral justification.
tpaine posted:i hope to one day lead a worker's revolution and i can't think of any reason to do this except that god wills it
finally you're making sense
c_man posted:deadken posted:roseweiurd i appreciate ur contributions but on this point i think ur critics have a point; faith and theology should not be a matter of picking and choosing bits from various faiths that suit your interests but absolute fidelity to a singular truth
how do you know what the right truth is? it would suck if you picked judaism and it turned out that actually neopaganism was Correct and True.
truth is a process, flungo
Agnus_Dei posted:If someone sincerely tries to incorporate Christianity into their belief system, rather than just pretending to, then yes. But to be honest, I don't see any logical reason within the atheistic mindset to support helping other humans at all. That is a spiritual belief from Christianity that you have carried over because it is dominant in your society. Since moral values are sort of spiritual by nature, they eventually get cast aside, and one ends up focusing on raw bodily pursuits without any pretense of moral justification.
of course we always have to return to making sure the religious belief is "legitimate" or "authentic", which is somehow supposed to be objective despite it being a futile exercise based on the exegesis of fairy tales told by insane people
roseweird posted:.custom221794{color:#4D0200 !important; background-color:#EDEDED !important; }deadken posted:roseweiurd i appreciate ur contributions but on this point i think ur critics have a point; faith and theology should not be a matter of picking and choosing bits from various faiths that suit your interests but absolute fidelity to a singular truth
that seems absurd to me in the light of my studies. there do not appear to me to be genuine boundaries between faiths, only between their followers as pseudo-ethnicities. traditions are not truth propositions.
tell that to God.
Agnus_Dei posted:That is a spiritual belief from Christianity that you have carried over because it is dominant in your society. Since moral values are sort of spiritual by nature, they eventually get cast aside, and one ends up focusing on raw bodily pursuits without any pretense of moral justification.
i agree that i have basically taken some set of morals that could be called "christian" if someone wanted to, and removed the "supernatual" elements, but 1) the moral system proposed by christianity is superficially very similar to lots and lots of other types of religious (killing people is bad juju, etc) so trying to claim it as uniquely christian is futile, 2) there's no reason to think that the specific secular cultural lineage of these moral systems has not been shaped strongly by its position against faith in a way that some people would consider beneficial and 3) you still have this weird ideological determinism where you believe that some ideas are forever related to other ideas and that its impossible to have one without the other, which is pretty deluded considering all of the thriving variations of the minutia of christian theology that exist today.
c_man posted:of course we always have to return to making sure the religious belief is "legitimate" or "authentic", which is somehow supposed to be objective despite it being a futile exercise based on the exegesis of fairy tales told by insane people
You criticize fairy tales, but our fantasy lives make up a huge part of our moral outlook. Narratives can instill a value in you firmly and be easily recalled as an example. Many people are indoctrinated by the moral values in the movies and TV they see. It would be better if they based their beliefs in time-tested morality tales rather than shocking pop entertainment.