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Old 07-24-2012, 08:27 PM   #31
Flyndaran
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Default Re: Theology Specialization: Comparative?

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Are you truely interested in starting a reciprocal corpse counting contest? I can't think of a better way to derail a thread, it all depends on who counts as what and it has been done to death anyway pun unintentional.
No, just that Jung's ideas never started a war. Religions have. Atheism can't just because a disbelief can't do that anymore than wars are started by unicorn disbelievers.
If I killed anyone it couldn't possibly be because of my disbelief. It would be because of other factors. But if a religion says to kill non-believers any such killing would be because of said religion.

Ok, so I got sucked in. This is my final post on this thread... I hope.
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Old 07-24-2012, 08:32 PM   #32
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You're rolling a bunch of things together here...materialism, determinism, and rejection of free will (or of self?) are distinct ideas that don't have to go together.

It's really silly to think you know so well what properties could have evolved into the human brain. The professionals still have problems puzzling out properties that apparently evolved into microbes.
Free Will cannot be seen, heard, felt, touched, or tasted. And the professionals still have problems. And when every explanation I have heard simply doesn't fly, it draws the suspicion that the emperor has no clothes. And are what you call "professionals" in fact professionals in outside their field. Every single guess they have given is still a guess. It may have relevance inside their field. It has none outside. "Professionals" have no way to say an unexplainable phenomenon has ONLY survival benefits even when they can establish that it in fact has SOME survival benefit. And I have as little love for giving my autonomy to "professionals" as you have for giving your unexplainable autonomy to God. And I do not consider someone else's degrees reason to turn my mind or my heart off for their sake. However "silly" you may think it.
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Old 07-24-2012, 08:33 PM   #33
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Default Re: Theology Specialization: Comparative?

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Because taking it seriously means that every human motive has to be reduced to the biological. There really is no such thing as love or beauty. It's not so much the thought of God that gives meaning as the thought of reductionism that takes it away. As for it being for you and you alone to decide for yourself, you are a chemical reaction. You decide nothing and there is no "yourself".

Be that as it may, that also makes it literally unbelievable to me. All attempts to make motives that have no obvious survivalistic benefit are convoluted and usually end up as myths. Sometimes not all that bad of myths but mythmaking too is not a biological trait. I think I could believe in fair folk before believing in Materialism
Even some reductionists often accept that there are things that fall into the category of "emergent phenomena", where qualities arise that only appear when the parts are there and organized in the right structure and interacting within that structure in the right way ("right", in this context, meaning within the boundaries in which the potential emergent phenomenon manifests). And not all materialists are even reductionists. As for me, although emergent phenomena seem plausible, I withhold my judgement either way.

There are some schools of thought, notably panpsychism and its less extreme versions (I like panprotoexperientialism, even if it is a mouthful), that contend that, at least to some basic, low level degree, "mind" (or at least "experience") is found in all matter down to the smallest components. This is often cited as an answer to the "hard problem of consciousness", namely, qualia (the experience of seeing red as red, or feeling love as love), which don't at this time of our infancy in understanding consciousness seem to have explanations in terms of matter alone. With these schools, there is no "soul" or "mind" stuff, and also no "matter" stuff. It's a monistic "matter-soul-mind" stuff that are inextricably linked. As for me, although panprotoexperientialism seems elegant and plausible to me, I withhold my judgement either way.

I, for one, know my own qualia - how I feel at any given moment. Now, if it turned out to just be the result of some chemicals sloshing about (or, according to some, quantum mechanical processes, but I doubt it based on the classical scales involved at the cellular and biomolecular level), would this matter? Even if there were no "me" (self is a poorly defined concept anyway, and defining it in the common spiritualist way via association with a unique immaterial soul just pushes the question somewhere else and raises more too), would this matter? The point is that the evolving process typing this and uses "me" or "I" as shorthand for itself at this very moment has values, feelings, goals, and meanings attached to itself ("myself") and others. And those seem to be pretty continuous over time, with occasional corrections and very rarely some overhauls.

It seems like you're denigrating the physical, the very elegant and complex and beautiful (and not at all fully understood yet) chemistry that, at the very least, is the full set of your life functions, if not also your mind, your loves, your interests, thoughts, passions.

Does knowing the lights in the gorgeous starry night are mostly nuclear fireballs (with the exception of a handful of planets like Mars and Venus, and possibly a quasar or two) make it any less gorgeous or magical? To me, only more awesome. Same with the smell of flowers, the taste of pizza, and my own more positive mental states.
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Old 07-24-2012, 08:39 PM   #34
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No, just that Jung's ideas never started a war. Religions have.
Also, I hardly think that Jung's ideas are unscientific... at least, not moreso than all of the multitude of other psychological schools out there. True, it's not materialistic, but given our virtual current non-understanding of the mind's origins, we should at least keep an open mind for less-than-materialist approaches; to do otherwise wouldn't be science.
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Old 07-24-2012, 08:41 PM   #35
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No, just that Jung's ideas never started a war. Religions have. Atheism can't just because a disbelief can't do that anymore than wars are started by unicorn disbelievers.
If I killed anyone it couldn't possibly be because of my disbelief. It would be because of other factors. But if a religion says to kill non-believers any such killing would be because of said religion.

Ok, so I got sucked in. This is my final post on this thread... I hope.
Atheism can declare persons to be non-persons, and I remember a certain poster claiming he wanted to genetically brainwash his children. Perhaps you know who that is?
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Old 07-24-2012, 08:48 PM   #36
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Even some reductionists often accept that there are things that fall into the category of "emergent phenomena", where qualities arise that only appear when the parts are there and organized in the right structure and interacting within that structure in the right way ("right", in this context, meaning within the boundaries in which the potential emergent phenomenon manifests). And not all materialists are even reductionists. As for me, although emergent phenomena seem plausible, I withhold my judgement either way.

There are some schools of thought, notably panpsychism and its less extreme versions (I like panprotoexperientialism, even if it is a mouthful), that contend that, at least to some basic, low level degree, "mind" (or at least "experience") is found in all matter down to the smallest components. This is often cited as an answer to the "hard problem of consciousness", namely, qualia (the experience of seeing red as red, or feeling love as love), which don't at this time of our infancy in understanding consciousness seem to have explanations in terms of matter alone. With these schools, there is no "soul" or "mind" stuff, and also no "matter" stuff. It's a monistic "matter-soul-mind" stuff that are inextricably linked. As for me, although panprotoexperientialism seems elegant and plausible to me, I withhold my judgement either way.

I, for one, know my own qualia - how I feel at any given moment. Now, if it turned out to just be the result of some chemicals sloshing about (or, according to some, quantum mechanical processes, but I doubt it based on the classical scales involved at the cellular and biomolecular level), would this matter? Even if there were no "me" (self is a poorly defined concept anyway, and defining it in the common spiritualist way via association with a unique immaterial soul just pushes the question somewhere else and raises more too), would this matter? The point is that the evolving process typing this and uses "me" or "I" as shorthand for itself at this very moment has values, feelings, goals, and meanings attached to itself ("myself") and others. And those seem to be pretty continuous over time, with occasional corrections and very rarely some overhauls.

It seems like you're denigrating the physical, the very elegant and complex and beautiful (and not at all fully understood yet) chemistry that, at the very least, is the full set of your life functions, if not also your mind, your loves, your interests, thoughts, passions.

Does knowing the lights in the gorgeous starry night are mostly nuclear fireballs (with the exception of a handful of planets like Mars and Venus, and possibly a quasar or two) make it any less gorgeous or magical? To me, only more awesome. Same with the smell of flowers, the taste of pizza, and my own more positive mental states.
What you describe is embryo pantheism or a variation of animism or I'm not sure what, not materialism. And if materialism is true the concept of the "very elegant and complex and beautiful" has no meaning. Beauty is not a chemical reaction. It is-whatever it is. The smell of flowers is only for the purpose of attracting fertilizing organisms. Don't ask me why it attracts humans. The taste of pizza reflects the survival benefit of eating. And what the heck is a "positive" mental state?
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Old 07-24-2012, 08:48 PM   #37
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Atheism can declare persons to be non-persons, and I remember a certain poster claiming he wanted to genetically brainwash his children. Perhaps you know who that is?
You mean not believing in gods has a bearing on personhood, a legal definition?

You mean correcting a genetic failing on any children I have is brainwashing?

You like inflamatory language even more than I do.
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Old 07-24-2012, 08:52 PM   #38
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You mean not believing in gods has a bearing on personhood, a legal definition?

You mean correcting a genetic failing on any children I have is brainwashing?

You like inflamatory language even more than I do.
Perhaps I do, but I remembered that one a long time ago and it corrected any notion I had of buying into that line about questioning authority.

And yes correcting your child's opinion by surgery would be brainwashing.

And atheists have in fact supported the declaring of people as non-persons. Enough every year to equal a major war.
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Old 07-24-2012, 08:53 PM   #39
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What you describe is embryo pantheism or a variation of animism or I'm not sure what, not materialism. And if materialism is true the concept of the "very elegant and complex and beautiful" has no meaning. Beauty is not a chemical reaction. It is-whatever it is. The smell of flowers is only for the purpose of attracting fertilizing organisms. Don't ask me why it attracts humans. The taste of pizza reflects the survival benefit of eating. And what the heck is a "positive" mental state?
You sound like those wack jobs that say their marriage loses meaning if society defines it to allow gays to marry. (A simile, I know you aren't homophobic, I think.)
My ability to love loses nothing by knowing how evolution created my neural tissue's ability to experience it.
Ignorance is not magical.
So what if my life only has meaning that I give it? Why is having control over our own lives so horrifying to you?
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Old 07-24-2012, 08:54 PM   #40
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Atheism can declare persons to be non-persons, and I remember a certain poster claiming he wanted to genetically brainwash his children. Perhaps you know who that is?
I'd argue there can be and are atheistic religions. Actually, by some accounts, at least variants of Buddhism are, but that's not what I meant. Specifically, I'm thinking of Marxism as practised in the former Soviet Union (most notably under Stalin). There, "God" was replaced by a combination of "History" and "Society". But there was a fervour very comparable to religious fervour; heck, it even suppressed science that went against dialectical materialism, the core metaphysics of Marxist philosophy.

Religion involves a deep emotional attachment to one's beliefs / philosophy, and almost always in the context of society. It's this emotional attachment that's the problem... beliefs about what's true and what's false should have no emotion attached to them, and be readily discarded if they don't match the evidence, make good predictions, or are otherwise useful for what they're meant to be useful for. Believing anything because it "feels right", or you don't want to imagine a world in which it isn't true always has the ugly potential to lead to violence and death and oppression... whether it be an atheistic and materialistic belief or a more traditionally spiritual one.

And I do find it telling that religion and its beliefs (whatever the religion) seem to always serve the social order first, and the individual last. "God" is usually "Society" under a pseudonym because fewer individuals would swallow the rules otherwise.
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