Do you like how Dawkins, Hitchens et al. represent atheists?

[S.A.M.]

How can anyone take it personally or otherwise? It's silly in the extreme.

Your insulting a lack of belief in theists claims for gods existence. hehe



Is it faulty to not accept your wacky claims of god, sam? hehe

KILLING ME!

:runaway:

Feel free to introduce facts in your arguments.

 

[Xev]

I based it on what Marx himself says of course, about religion,

Marx saw the church, bloated and irrelevent, using the promise of salvation to keep people from trying to achieve more than punishing work for shit wages. I think a bit of anti-Christian sentiment is warrented in such conditions.

Besides, Karl Marx was a member of a Christian communist organization, and you must remember that in the 1840s athiesm was NOT a common thing. There were quite a few Christians in the original communist parties.

I posted in in one of those longer posts. I'm sure that the Christians who were "doing communism" as you call it (sounds rather randy there), were not the ones in power, or are you saying it was the Christian communists who were behind the anti-religion movements in <insert communist country>?

This is what I'm talking about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_communism#Early_Christian_communism

Sure, but they were no devout theists either, most of the ones performing those experiments were scientists, and surely you can't get any more rational and areligious than an evolutionary researcher? Or are you suggesting that their studies were based on the teachings of the church?

The Nazi doctors were evolutionary researchers? Really? I guess this is where you show me that the Nazi medical experiments were done with the goal of evolutionary research, and that they were not motivated simply by cruelty and a bizzare sense of military need.

Well, I take no offence at all the FSMers, or the pink unicorn in (Q)'s attic that keeps giving me the baleful eye.

No, and you shouldn't - they are meant to be funnah.

I come from a country with <1% atheism and my best friend there is a devout Catholic (moi being a Muslim, in case you did not know). Do you think if I handed her a jar of urine with a statue of Christ, it would enhance our friendship? Is that the rational road to mutual tolerance?

No, but when stupid people say crazy things, why shouldn't we have a chuckle?
I see nobody attacked for making sensible posts about religion - it's just that when people post things like:

"Have you refuted God? No? Well you should probably not be refuting him."

You just have to be amused, the logic is like something out of Monty Python:
http://www.mwscomp.com/movies/grail/grail-05.htm

 

[S.A.M.]

Ouch!

I have to warn you, I have a severe headache from being up all night and I'm feeling pretty confrontational. :bugeye:

 

[(Q)]

Feel free to introduce facts in your arguments.

Feel free to join us here on Earth.

 

[Xev]

(Q) :

Is it faulty to not accept your wacky claims of god, sam? hehe

I believe that she meant the faults in the athiest community, as she sees it.
You know, the two of you are intelligent people - I think if you didn't assume that she was irrational because she's a theist, and if she didn't assume that you were an asshole because you're an athiest, you two could have a much more productive talk.

Sorry to get all Mr. Rogers on you.

 

[S.A.M.]

Marx saw the church, bloated and irrelevent, using the promise of salvation to keep people from trying to achieve more than punishing work for shit wages. I think a bit of anti-Christian sentiment is warrented in such conditions.

Besides, Karl Marx was a member of a Christian communist organization, and you must remember that in the 1840s athiesm was NOT a common thing. There were quite a few Christians in the original communist parties.

I posted links to both Marx's and Lenin's sentiments in my edit.

This is what I'm talking about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_communism#Early_Christian_communism

Were they involved in the anti-religion movements?

The Nazi doctors were evolutionary researchers? Really? I guess this is where you show me that the Nazi medical experiments were done with the goal of evolutionary research, and that they were not motivated simply by cruelty and a bizzare sense of military need.

You know, that's what I used to think too, its how it comes across in all the propaganda. I was as surprised as anybody when I entered the Holocaust museum in Washington and was confronted by this whole "scientific basis" of the experiments. Chilling, to say the least *shudder*.

I doubt I could find links online, but I suggest you read up on the aims of their experiments.

e.g.

"We do not stand alone": Nazi poster from 1936 with flags of other countries with compulsory sterilization legislation.

. Positive eugenics can also be coercive. Abortion by "fit" women was illegal in Nazi Germany, and William Shirer (in The Decline and Fall of the Third Reich) mentioned unsubstantiated reports that Aryan women unwilling to become pregnant were often forced into pregnancy through state-supported rape.

No, and you shouldn't - they are meant to be funnah.

That works both ways, but its a fine line between funny and offensive sometimes.:shrug:

Though I have to say, my threshold for being offended has been raised by a million miles after coming here.

No, but when stupid people say crazy things, why shouldn't we have a chuckle?
I see nobody attacked for making sensible posts about religion - it's just that when people post things like:

"Have you refuted God? No? Well you should probably not be refuting him."

You just have to be amused, the logic is like something out of Monty Python:
http://www.mwscomp.com/movies/grail/grail-05.htm

[/QUOTE]

I have as well developed a sense of humor as anyone else, its mass hysteria that I avoid.

 

[S.A.M.]

(Q) :



I believe that she meant the faults in the athiest community, as she sees it.
You know, the two of you are intelligent people - I think if you didn't assume that she was irrational because she's a theist, and if she didn't assume that you were an asshole because you're an athiest, you two could have a much more productive talk.

Sorry to get all Mr. Rogers on you.

Its not an assumption and has nothing at all to do with his beliefs.

Feel free to join us here on Earth.

 

[S.A.M.]

On Nazi Eugenics (oh by the way, officially into Godwin's law)

But at the exhibition everything emerges with a kind of tragic restraint, weighted with carefully outlined detail. There is no resort to cliché or posturing. The opening sections even cause a certain uneasiness, because they make it clear that before the 1930's, eugenic ideas were commonplace. Galton had written: "If the twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle what a galaxy of genius might we not create!"

Such enthusiasm was infectious. The ideas, as the historian Daniel J. Kevles points out in the exhibition catalogue, "could and did strike root almost everywhere." "Only healthy seed must be sown," reads a British eugenics poster from 1930. Swedes worried about the genetic effects of Finnish blood. British worried about the Irish. In the United States, such fears helped inspire the restrictive 1924 immigration laws. And in 1927, in the case Buck v. Bell, eight Supreme Court justices agreed that a feeble-minded woman should be sterilized; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. concluded after considering her genetic history: "Three imbecile generations are enough." By the late 1920's, eugenic sterilization was practiced in two dozen states, with California accounting for more than half of the 16,000 operations between 1907 and 1933.

So some ideas and procedures were widely accepted. Moreover, the racial inquiries undertaken by the Germans were also part of physical anthropology as it was then practiced. The study of difference and the tracing of genetic lineage was a legitimate subject of inquiry.

Is the Nazi case different because of degree rather than kind? Was German medicine and science so dehumanizing that they caused everything to go awry? Was the element of anti-Semitism decisive, perhaps, leading the anthropologist Josef Wastl to purchase skulls and death masks of Polish Jews and steal 220 Jewish skeletons from a Viennese cemetery for further study?

No, it seems that something else took place in Germany in the years after Hitler consulted Fritz Lenz's 1921 treatise, "Foundations of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene" and invoked its ideas in "Mein Kampf." Eugenics was not incidental to the construction of the Nazi state; it was at its heart. As one slogan said: "National Socialism is the political expression of our biological knowledge."

http://www.pipeline.com/~rougeforum/nazieugenics.html


Exhibits:
http://www.dhmd.de/neu/index.php?id=944

http://www.thetartan.org/2007/3/5/scitech/science

 

[iceaura]

I go by their anti-religious attitude and the fact that they destroyed several churches. And their sense of right and wrong was based on reason remember?

You claimed creeds and morals were theistically based by definition. I pointed out that atheistically derived creeds and moralities are quite common, and you yourself have identified several.

The reds were atheist? The Chinese are atheist? That will be news to them. Last I heard they were both religious

Atheistic religions are quite common. Some American reds (certain Navajos, say) deny they have or had a religion at all - a denial partly based on their contact with Western assumptions of theism in religion, IMHO.

Human beings teach - raise, nurture, bring up in wisdom - by telling stories. The stories don't have to be about gods - although gods have proven handy, in the doing. ”
Very nice, but fantasies are not the realm of the atheists; they are rationalists remember?

Nothing fantasy there - cold, hard, objective fact.

They do? You mean all the theists are trying to deliberately override their biological instincts?

I mean that's what they say. Like you. It's not a minority opinion.

I think you'll find there was plenty of anti-religionism.

You changed the subject - it was Hitler. He was just anti-particular-Christian, which he apparently found to be a betrayal of the Godhead. This theistic Higher Authority base of Nazi ideology has always been obvious, and the association one of the attractions of Fascism to this day - the Ku Klux Klan in the US did not choose a Cross to burn by accident, and the picture postcards of theist lynchings in the American south compare quite well, in the "chilling" department, to the bureaucratic recording of horror from Mengele's "research" efforts.

And interpreting Marxism as anti-religious is fine, as long as you recognize that there is a dispute about that, and that Marxism promotes creeds and morality, and that acting against other religions is no evidence of not having one of your own.

Persecuting religions is something that other religions do, a lot.

Deriving morality without the invocation of deity is something that people have always done, a lot.

Commiting atrocities in the name of higher principles is something that people with higher principles have often done. Theistic higher principles have proved as amenable to atrocity justification as any others - and more than atheistic higher principles, which tend to things like golden rules and Taoist tolerance, rather than establishment of Belief as the core of human worth.

 

[Cyperium]

I don't get why atheists should think that theists don't think for themselves.

We all have reasons for what we believe, even if you are indoctrinated into theist or atheist you still have your reasons, you still have free thought, you still have doubt and belief, you still have knowledge, you still have reason.

Perhaps God is not meant to be known to us in the form of objective evidence, why not just accept that and we can understand why you don't believe, and you can understand why we do.

We only have a lifetime, let's make it worthwhile.

 

[S.A.M.]

.

Persecuting religions is something that other religions do, a lot.

Deriving morality without the invocation of deity is something that people have always done, a lot.

Commiting atrocities in the name of higher principles is something that people with higher principles have often done. Theistic higher principles have proved as amenable to atrocity justification as any others - and more than atheistic higher principles, which tend to things like golden rules and Taoist tolerance, rather than establishment of Belief as the core of human worth.

There is no written law that says atheists may not suffer from a suspension of judgement. Rationalism without moral balance can be as horrific as fundamentalist religion and theism is not a prerequisite. Anyway, I presume from our previous conversations that you already know this.

 

[(Q)]

I don't get why atheists should think that theists don't think for themselves.

Oh, theists probably do, like when deciding what clothes to wear or food to eat. But, when it comes to understanding the world around them, the bliss of fantasy doth preclude.

We all have reasons for what we believe, even if you are indoctrinated into theist or atheist you still have your reasons, you still have free thought, you still have doubt and belief, you still have knowledge, you still have reason.

What reason is there in believing myth and superstition? What doubts will arise in your mind as a result of believing in those myths and superstitions? What knowledge can be gained when beliefs clash with reality? What free thoughts can one peruse when worship and obedience are the only goals?

Perhaps God is not meant to be known to us in the form of objective evidence, why not just accept that and we can understand why you don't believe, and you can understand why we do.

If no objective evidence is available, what could possibly spark the concept of gods to become one of the most important factors in peoples lives? And to that end, a variety of gods has made itself readily available for consumption.

So, how is it you don't understand disbelief in a god? Do you believe in them all?

We only have a lifetime, let's make it worthwhile.

So, why waste it worshiping imaginary gods?

 

[Xev]

I posted links to both Marx's and Lenin's sentiments in my edit.

I'm not digging through several pages to find them. I know Marx's sentiments about religion - still doesn't change the fact that there were a lot of Christians in the communist movement.

Were they involved in the anti-religion movements?

Be awfully silly of them, wouldn't it? Besides, those were Stalin's attempt to solidify state power and convert people to the cult of the dynamic leader - nothing really to do with Marxism at all.

You know, that's what I used to think too, its how it comes across in all the propaganda. I was as surprised as anybody when I entered the Holocaust museum in Washington and was confronted by this whole "scientific basis" of the experiments. Chilling, to say the least *shudder*.

A quick googling leads to:

# 1 Experiments

* 1.1 Freezing experiments
* 1.2 Malaria experiments
* 1.3 Lost (mustard) gas experiments
* 1.4 Sulfonamide experiments
* 1.5 Sea water experiments
* 1.6 Sterilization experiments
* 1.7 Typhus (Fleckfieber) experiments
* 1.8 Experiments with poison
* 1.9 Incendiary bomb experiments

From Wikipedia.
None of these have a lot to do with evolutionary biology.

I also get:

"This ruling has been largely disputed within the scientific community since the experiments were conducted. For the most part, the experiments have been discarded due to their scientific failings along with their blatant ethical wrongs, but there are a few sections in the corpus of Nazi medicine that have survived because of their possible scientific use. The major group of experiments still up for discussion is the Dachau human hypothermia series."
http://www.geocities.com/pennpuab/foundations/naziresearch.html#footnote1

Again, nothing to do with evolutionary biology, and not even scientifically sound.

That works both ways, but its a fine line between funny and offensive sometimes.:shrug:

Yes, but that's true for anything. Example: I was talking to a girlfriend about her boyfriend and their, ahem, congress. Her quote:

"The boy goes down like a helicopter in Somalia"

Or I'm talking with another friend, and he's threatening to "return" his son, who's being a brat. Says I:

"Only his mom can do that - she's the one with the box he came in"

Offensive things are awesomely hilarious, it's just dependent on who you're dealing with.

 

[iceaura]

There is no written law that says atheists may not suffer from a suspension of judgement. Rationalism without moral balance can be as horrific as fundamentalist religion and theism is not a prerequisite.

There is no correlation between theism and moral balance, or atheism and moral imbalance, is the point.

Nurturing moral faculties in children by telling them stories about God(s) has often worked well - at least in the short term. But it has side effects - patterns of them. There is nothing wrong with taking a long, close look at these patterns.

 

[S.A.M.]

I'm not digging through several pages to find them.

Ok, right here

I based it on what Marx himself says of course, about religion, I posted in in one of those longer posts. (Lenin shared those views) I'm sure that the Christians who were "doing communism" as you call it (sounds rather randy there), were not the ones in power, or are you saying it was the Christian communists who were behind the anti-religion movements in <insert communist country>?

I know Marx's sentiments about religion - still doesn't change the fact that there were a lot of Christians in the communist movement.

And there are lots of atheist suicide bombers. Kinda makes you think, na?

Be awfully silly of them, wouldn't it?

See, not that hard to understand why they'd participate.

Besides, those were Stalin's attempt to solidify state power and convert people to the cult of the dynamic leader - nothing really to do with Marxism at all.

Hmm, so if a theist does it, it's obvious delusion, but if an atheist does it its to consolidate power?

A quick googling leads to:


From Wikipedia.
None of these have a lot to do with evolutionary biology.

I also get:

"This ruling has been largely disputed within the scientific community since the experiments were conducted. For the most part, the experiments have been discarded due to their scientific failings along with their blatant ethical wrongs, but there are a few sections in the corpus of Nazi medicine that have survived because of their possible scientific use. The major group of experiments still up for discussion is the Dachau human hypothermia series."
http://www.geocities.com/pennpuab/foundations/naziresearch.html#footnote1

Again, nothing to do with evolutionary biology, and not even scientifically sound.

Yup, its not PC these days, although samples were being used right up to the 1990s if I am not mistaken and many of the scientists exported themselves to the West to conduct sound studies. There was no stigma associated with it until the full horror came out, after that it became sorta faux pas to be associated with the gunk.

I still suggest you see one of their exhibits if you can. There is still debate in some circles if the research should be used, some have even claimed it might honor the memory of the victims. In fact, last year we had a discussion on it right here.

And how are experiments on fitness and selection not a part of evolutionary biology?

 

[S.A.M.]

There is no correlation between theism and moral balance, or atheism and moral imbalance, is the point.

Nurturing moral faculties in children by telling them stories about God(s) has often worked well - at least in the short term. But it has side effects - patterns of them. There is nothing wrong with taking a long, close look at these patterns.

What I want to know is, are these patterns absent in atheists?

 

[Xev]

What I want to know is, are these patterns absent in atheists?

Yes - I am killing hookers as we speak.

 

[S.A.M.]

Yes - I am killing hookers as we speak.

Beware I am selling armed hamsters to women

http://www.lunatic.no/tihi_.jpg

 

[Xev]

Ok, right here

On cursory reading, it sounds painfully Hegelian but not painfully stupid. What's your point? I've stipulated that he criticised Christianity - that doesn't mean that communism must persecute the religious.

And there are lots of atheist suicide bombers. Kinda makes you think, na?

There are?

See, not that hard to understand why they'd participate.

I suppose under fear of death, as Stalin was a mean dude. But I doubt those Christians who joined the communist movement in the 1840s did so because they hated theistic belief.

Hmm, so if a theist does it, it's obvious delusion, but if an atheist does it its to consolidate power?

It depends. If we are talking about something like the European witch-hunts, we are talking about a situation that religious belief and superstition made much worse. If we are talking about the terrorist attacks against America on 9/11, we are talking about governmental incompetence, bad policy, and an act of warfare - I am going to get flamed for this, so let me say that in no way did the people in those towers deserve their fate, nor is it justifiable to kill civilians - but those particular suicide bombings had little to do with Islam and everything to do with the Reagan administration's support of the Taliban, American unilateral support for Isreal and generally bad foriegn policy.

And how are experiments on fitness and selection not a part of evolutionary biology?

They were experiments in military fitness, how long a human can endure nasty conditions. There's no real relevence to evolutionary biology, that was not their aim, and it's not cited in any literature on evol bio that I've encountered.

 

[S.A.M.]

On cursory reading, it sounds painfully Hegelian but not painfully stupid. What's your point? I've stipulated that he criticised Christianity - that doesn't mean that communism must persecute the religious.

Not that they must, merely that they did. You asked how Marxism-Leninism is based on atheism, I think a disawoval of religion and its presumed elimination is a pretty standard definition

There are?

Sure, from the marxists in Lebanon, to the original communist Palestinians, to the guys who made suicide bombing so popular, the anti-religious LTTE.

I suppose under fear of death, as Stalin was a mean dude. But I doubt those Christians who joined the communist movement in the 1840s did so because they hated theistic belief.

Yeah, ideologies have a way of getting out of hand, did these Christian communists also support the destruction of the churches and the gulags for the "purification of society"?

It depends. If we are talking about something like the European witch-hunts, we are talking about a situation that religious belief and superstition made much worse. If we are talking about the terrorist attacks against America on 9/11, we are talking about governmental incompetence, bad policy, and an act of warfare - I am going to get flamed for this, so let me say that in no way did the people in those towers deserve their fate, nor is it justifiable to kill civilians - but those particular suicide bombings had little to do with Islam and everything to do with the Reagan administration's support of the Taliban, American unilateral support for Isreal and generally bad foriegn policy.

Exactement. I'm glad you're not the polemic Dawkinist like many others I encounter here.

They were experiments in military fitness, how long a human can endure nasty conditions. There's no real relevence to evolutionary biology, that was not their aim, and it's not cited in any literature on evol bio that I've encountered

They also did studies on infants who were deprived of human touch and kept in isolation, they systematically euthanised the weak, the ill, the "lower races", the homosexuals. It was a ritual purification of the genes. And I will still insist you look up their studies on the preservation of the Aryan "race"