Comments on: An Anti-Response to An Atheist

by: eye of horus

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 17:58:01 +0000

(an earlier version has been posted elsewhere)

There are no minds. Once you’ve seen through soul, you’ve seen through mind as well. Don’t focus on the so-called individual, but on culture and its net of inter-person communication, mediated mainly by language(s).

Xianity has taught dualism borrowed from Plato and Zarathustra along with with a perspective that “reality” must be built from the “inside” out.

Accepting presuppositions which should be overturned vitiates discussions on religion and theology. Metaphysical dualism / moral dualism / mind-body dualism along with a supposed self-evident reality of self-verifying mental states — no wonder so many attempts to understand Nietzsche fail.

“Beyond Good and Evil” and “Twilight of the Idols” deserve to be approached as radical attacks upon dualism and mentalism. (Not as tracts for atheism, immorality, and physicalism!)

Xianity is a syndrome caused by dualistic delusions and epistemological hubris. The mistaken respect accorded it must be swept aside to get at underlying rot. This is the ‘revaluation of all values’ [trans. Kaufmann] sought by Nietzsche in “The Antichrist.”

eye-of-horus

by: Alexander

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 03:33:16 +0000

To: Darren,

My comment “Peace unchecked is death and death is nothingness” was really a response to Michael “Peace be with you”
There was no question as to what what was supposed to mean. However in a God context what sort of Peace is he talking about? For mortals the ultimate peace is death (as in “cross my fingers and hope I will live in heaven”). The death a person can measurably expect is the loss of all bodily functions including mind. So death is nothingness.

by: Alexander

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 02:49:40 +0000

It seems obvious to me that theists start with “there is a God” and if they come up with reasons that convince some people that is a “bonus”, not a requirement. I do not know anyone who has “reasoned” there way to a belief in God (except in the most crass manner - Pascals Wager for example). The decision to believe is outside their conscious awareness, as is the basis for the decision. I think there is an equivalent circumstance with atheists with regard to “reason”. Without reason there is no framework for fruitful discussion but the decision to commit to reason is outside reason itself.
This is not to say that those basis for discussion are equivalent. They are not. Reason is bigger than God, unless we are so hopelessly deluded in our experience of the world that reason itself is an illusion. To some extent the God scenario depends on that being the case. Where there is an entity that has the capacity to alter any or all aspects of our world both actually and/or our experience of it, negates reason, as reason itself depends on order. Without order the rest is meaningless (or perhaps the meaning is arbitrary).
The argument becomes - if reason is primary, does God exist? What is the evidence I would except that a God exists? Those questions are not part of the process that most people have in becoming a believer in the supernatural. In my case it was when I could not explain a part of my own experience with what I currently knew. Someone supplied an answer, which happen to include God. Later, after it had become a belief, I discovered that where was an alternative description of my experience that did not depend on God. The reasons I moved away from believing in God were not simply having an alternative description of my experience – as I believed there was a God it was no longer simply a matter of changing my mind. (But that is another story).

by: Mark

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 16:58:28 +0000

I hope people are still interested in this discussion and following it. If one says that nothing will come of this, then nothing will! I’d like to see if I, having just come here, can revitalize the discussion with my replies to some of you.

For the record, I’m 20 and have been an atheist for 4-5 years. Before that, I would classify myself as having been a Methodist.

Chris:
Darwin was fearful of his big idea because he still believed in the existence of the Christian god, and was extremely uncomfortable coming up with something that went against a literal interpretation of the creation story (I think. If this is wrong or just inaccurate, would someone please correct me?). His god wasn’t nagging at him–everything he had been indoctrinated into weighed heavily upon his conscience, and whatever nagging was present would have been of the same variety that anyone else would have if they came to believe something contrary to a gamut of interconnected, important ideas they had been told. The only difference with Darwin was that his idea not only clashed with that, it clashed with the foundation of an entire worldview. You see, positing his god as the one nagging at his conscience is jumping to conclusions. We’ve learned lots about the human mind. Let’s start there. There’s a perfectly fine and simple psychological explanation. In fact, you don’t even have to have studied psychology to give the explanation I did, which makes the proposal that it was a god who was nagging at Darwin all the more embarrassing, from my point of view.

voiceofreason explained the biological element of your post much better than I can, so I’ll leave that topic to him/her (including the parts about Lucy and the T-Rex footprint).

As for feeling the presence of the Christian savior in your life… that, too, can be countered with a psychological explanation. That which we were raised to believe impacts the way we interpret things. If you were raised to believe that such a person was real and that the Bible contained theological and historical truth, it would be extremely difficult to NOT interpret things from within that framework.

Here’s another way of thinking about this, and from my perspective as someone who likes to know how things happen (i.e. looks for mechanisms). We know what humans (i.e. people) are and what they can do. There are five senses we possess that alert us to the presence of objects external to our bodies. Have you sensed Christ with any of these five senses? If not, there’s a perfectly reasonable psychological explanation, even if you were to claim that he talks to you. And see, voices need to originate from things physical (voice box, etc.). If the voice is just inside your head, then it has to be your own, as there is no evidence that people can speak telepathically. Everything you’ve claimed so far can be explained with just a little logical reasoning and/or scientific knowledge.

Regarding he Big Bang and angular momentum…. I can’t claim to be providing certainly accurate information on this, since it’s been a while since I’ve done relevant physics reading (lay books, not academic), but in the early universe (before inflation went out of control) there were irregularities that gave rise to clumping, from which the first stars and galaxies originated. “Things” were “moving” in this early stage of the universe, and this motion by different “objects” produced angluar motion in different directions, causing the first stars and galaxies to rotate in different directions. As far as rotation of objects in our solar system are concerned, that was explained by another poster quite well, and there’s nothing further I can contribute to that.

You said: “Also, Who wrote all these laws. Not man, they just discovered them.”
The presupposition that a sentient being had to have come up with these laws irritates me. First of all, the laws are our explanations, and unless you believe that God writes (a physical act), humans wrote the laws. Many of them are tentative, to boot, as they just follow from numerous observations and may also be derivations from theorems and formulae. The laws tell us how we think the universe works. Assuming, for sake of simplicity, that the universe truly does behave as our laws tell us, what you’re really asking is “who determined how each elementary existent behaves?”, which is to say “who created these elementary existents?” The existence of a thing implies that it has an identity and an aggregate of properties that are distinct from those of every other existent. But why do you ask WHO created them? If you start the quest by presupposing God, you’ll be unable to end the quest on something other than God. So begin it with the question “how does this happen–what caused it?” Well, if you ask that and are careful about your reasoning and experimentation, you’ll wind up exactly where scientists have. Let me put it this way: “From theists’ perspective, natural laws imply their god’s existence. However, all interacting and existing things must interact in a particular way, because they have a particular nature (what it means to exist), thus the ‘laws’ must exist. So no matter what, as long as things exist, theists believe there is a god. Thus, to theists, there is no scenario under which the existence of things can be attributed to something other than a god. Hence, theists beg the question.”
Humans only discover laws (laws are always human creations, by the way) if said laws existed before their discovery. No, what we discover–or rather, what we think we discover–is how things work. The laws are our attempts at objective formulations of how things work.

Sorry if I’ve come off as being an ass with this post. I’ll be working more on my tone.