Yeah, fortunately, evolution is selective for survival.
Why atheism makes you mean
- Thread starter S.A.M.
- Start date
Yeah, fortunately, evolution is selective for survival.
Yeah, and now that you mention it, has it produced ANY society of any consequence?
Baron Max
iceaura
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really?
apparently our deepening environmental issues indicate there are greater issues at hand
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that's your values speaking
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that and any other ideology you care to mention, yours included
Noooo.
Your hypothesis was that religion produced more prosociality and, thereby, stable societies. The onus, I'm afraid, falls on you.I will await your evidence.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
That's an impossible assignment because there have never been enough atheists to band together and form a society. Hopefully by now everyone has been immunized against your fraudulent assertion that communism is an atheist philosophy, since it's an offshoot of Christian ethics and in any case below the leadership caste the ratio of religious people to atheists in communist nations is about the same as anywhere else.
You keep flipping back and forth between atheism and religion, and the result is muddle.SAM said:
There were several aboriginal atheistic societies in the Americas with lifespans as long as most others as far as appears. The Navajo and similar, the various Inuit and similar, a variety of rain forest tribes, and so forth. (This is under definitions of "Deity" that exclude ghosts, leprechuans, mythical ancestors, etc).
The Song dynasty you referenced earlier included large, long-lasting, stable, atheistic societies.
And of course normal humans have other wishes of their society than merely that it last.
You seem to regard events such as the North Korean devolvement to nascent theistic religion as speaking in favor of theism and its influences. Others have a different take. If atheistic tyranny is what cannot last, that would explain some historic events of breakdown in a way more favorable to atheism than not.
Yep. You may have noticed, for example, lawyers involved.light said:
For whom is accountability to others not a value ? You ?light said:
How do our "environmental issues" not involve human accountability ?light said:
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
As a linguist and an atheist I find a definition of "god" that excludes the entire roster of supernatural creatures to be a little specious. At least one respectable source, Princeton University's WordNet, agrees with me and defines "deity" as follows:
A religion is a collection of archetypes, and the particular archetype under discussion here is a supernatural force that can cause the natural universe to behave in violation of the natural laws we have so painstakingly and logically derived. Does it really matter whether that force is a recognizably humanoid creature with a beard and a handful of lightning bolts who derives perverse amusement by the discomfiture his perturbations cause us, or a gigantic winged reptile with minimal consciousness and a propensity to show up just when we need some nearly inscrutable guidance and the psychic reverberations of our need stimulate his metabolism, or just a tempest that occurs at odd intervals in the cosmic weather cycle, destroying the villages of friend and foe with equal likelihood?
If people believe in that force, accept it as supernatural but nonetheless most emphatically real, ascribe mythical powers to it, and worship it, then it's theism and I think that trying to call it something else is not only splitting hairs but it dissipates the focus of the discussion. Where would we draw the line? Religions other than the ones we're most familiar with have deities that are clearly non-human animals (e.g. coyotes or snakes) but nonetheless fill the same role that old man Yahweh fills for the Abrahamists. To arbitrarily dismiss them as non-deities strikes me as more than a little bit Eurocentric.
iceaura
maybe that's what religion needs .... more lawyers
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:roflmao:
maybe that's what religion needs .... more lawyers
You cannot even begin to be accountable unless you begin with values of some sort or other
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its more to do with your statement of "humans being accountable to humans" is sufficient for all issues. To think that there is nothing else required is a very provincial outlook.
Accountability itself is a value. Do you share it?light said:
We were discussing theism and atheism. Any theism needs to answer to reason before being allowed to govern human affairs.light said:
I didn't say it was sufficient. I said it was necessary. A minimum.light said:
Communism isn't "moral ethics", and it isn't "applied", and it isn't from "Darwinism".light said:
That definition agrees with my examples, pretty much - outside of the "any - - personification of a force", which is stretching things IMHO.fraggle said:
Surely you are not going to include the entire roster of what we now call "supernatural" creatures? Or the personified spirits of ships, dead pets, and the deep blue unworshipped sea ?
Noooo.
I will await your evidence.
Still waiting on a response to this. Did you overstate your case?
There are no "thriving atheist societies", all societies that have persisted have a religious basis to them. Through marriage, church and law, which all have religion at its base [see origin of laws in all present societies]. Atheists are like epiphytes, who merely parasitise themselves in these established societies and then bitch and moan. All civilisations, through their icons, gods and temples, have been shown to be ones that were institutd by theists.
Atheist societies barely make it through a generation of two and most people are happy to throw them off.
Atheist societies barely make it through a generation of two and most people are happy to throw them off.