Are you guys actually religious or is it just a meme on this board?

It’s really not.

I like fiction

I also agree with this, I find churches beautiful and enjoy ancient stories. I think being purely rational is a shitty way to live. But none of these things motivate me to makes non-empirical claims about why the universe exists.

What should I masturbate to, lads?

>the universe started x years ago
brainlets not only say this, but start constructing sciences based around such a laughably stupid assertion

you are all hopeless

your own baby pics

whats with all the rules on how to live life then? are those just fun trivia?

I've started to feel guilty about my own thread but it is refusing to delete. Feel free to report.

We could talk about books now if you like?

dae sience is literally infallible, just like how the bible was in the middle ages but this time it's true???

I'd rather that yes. Any writers similar to Lovecraft one could recommend? I finished his complete works and am craving more

Basically yeah.

>I can only think of 2 reasons to believe in God in resistance to all reason

There's another one:-
3. Everyone around you believes in God and you want to fit in.

In fact this is the chief reason people believe in God.

>"It's the current year" isn't an argument
>Atheists claim that god doesn't exist
>Religious people claim he does
Nobody actually knows for 100% certainty so both groups are wrong.

You have to have "faith" to believe in both Atheism and Religion.

Nontheists of Veeky Forums, who are you favourite religious writers?
For me, it's St. John, St. Augustine, Simone Weil, and Martin Buber.

What kind of shitty social circle are you in OP? Athiesm is for mid-class midwits.

Agnostic deism following a moral code to the letter is the way to go.

Also, since we are seconds away from creating a contained AI, I think we can throw an infinite someone a bone and say our existence was created by conscious means, especially considering humanity has had a near constant relationship with "the divine" small d for the last 100,000 years

>following a moral code to the letter is the way to go.
fag

Also, I like how John Galsworthy puts it

Go in peace my brother

ETA Hoffmann

p. good

This board just wants to be contrarian. Atheism relies on the scientific method to progress, and as a result, that is where literature, too, is heading. Veeky Forums just wants to be contrarian because they think that to take the negative position of something, to have a "criticism" makes them seem smart, somehow understanding things better than the brainlet being fed scientific evidence and forming their worldview around rational humanism. No serious intellectual can accept religious beliefs. Philosophy has done away with the logical consistency of god at least since Spinoza, and science ever takes the ground from beneath religious belief. Don't get worked up by them being contrarians.

Meanwhile persons of all stripes go to my church on sunday and participate in charitable events all week, and proselytizing atheists are the contrarians.

wtf i love god now

This. I forget the exact summer, but whenever i first started lurking, i remember one day where there was like 10 christfag posts, and then it seemed like everything changed. Look at the archives circa 2011-2012. No one used to seriously discuss theology here (at least without a thin veneer or irony). Whenever the fedora tipping neckbeard thing started going around, there were some threads posted about the summa, calvin, et. al (which were of high quality, oddly enough), the typical "have you read all of aquinas user?" bait type shit, and i guess the newfags took it seriously. It'd be hard to prove, but I'm sure the /pol/ migration compounded it.

This doesn't make any sense. People of all stripes does not lend credibility to your church, nor does doing charitable events--which any GOOD person will do regardless of their religious beliefs. There isn't a single moral thing that a humanist cannot do that a religious person can do. There are plenty of evil things religious people do that you can only do because of your religion. The whole religious people do more good than other groups has always been a very weak defense of religious membership.

w e a k

The nature of physical reality has no bearing on the capacity for God. You're essentially saying there is no God because we can prove there is no old man sitting somewhere on a cloud in the sky. Have you ever considered a creator's possible position relative to a system of metaphysics?

>which any GOOD person will do regardless of their religious beliefs
God I hate you kind of people. At least Christians have some kind of notion for an objective criterion of goodness. It's all just intuition and social programming with you, and yet you insist on it with all the force of a dogma.DIE moralist faggot

>There isn't a single moral thing that a humanist cannot do that a religious person can do.
Yeah there is: worship God.

>The whole religious people do more good than other groups has always been a very weak defense of religious membership.
Its not about capacity to do good its about capacity to do bad. Atheists who still hold on to their juvenile resentment of otber peoples moral certainty bave a far easier time dropping the act and doing something shitty. I cant think of any two perspectives more different from which you might construct your moral identity between the sense of being a part of a system outside yourself and the sense of being utterly and completely morally self defining.

>it's the current year+3
>still using current year memes

...

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yeah, it's infallible like a hammer is infallible. the statement doesn't really mean much. regarding the infallibility of the morons who use science and hammers though...

youtube.com/watch?v=_NVsyMalJXo

>thousands of years of religion
humans continue to thrive and exist

>100 years of atheism
lol now we have atom bombs and almost wiped out all of humanity and also commit genocide upon genocide

>-We know *wildly controversial and arguably flat-out wrong statement*
ok great argument dude

>humans continue to thrive and exist
t.guy who didn't have to face mongol/arab/napoleonic/conquistador/etc hordes

years of atheism
and the most atheistic societies have to unironically import humans from more traditional societies because they are not self-sustainable

their genocides were nothing compared to the 20th century

The import of cheap labour is because of capitalism not atheism.

You can't prove the bible is true, but you can prove it is false.

>muh juice

>nothing
mongols
>30 million up to 70 million
muslim conquest of india
>over 400 million Hindus

same thing

is that clairo?

what these guys said (although these figures are questionable)
people also have better technology, so don't conflate the effect of technology on our ability to inflict violence with "atheism"
fucking people don't understand basic concepts like causation vs correlation

>[Philosophical opinion] is for [insult/buzzword].
Beat it, kid.

dont bother op. biblefreaks are unreasonable, their outdated ways is being culturally extinguished

...

This is your brain on religion.

Just spend a minute picturing the opposing political party of your own in your country and all the people that belong to that opposing party as having no basis for an objective morality, no historical connection to their culture. Once you picture a group like republicans in the USA without religion, knowing what types of people they are, what do you think would happen? Take a moment to speculate, as human's are built to do.

Veeky Forums never really used to be religious and used to just view holy texts as literature
But you would know that if you weren't just a baiting polfag

You're a little too confident about morality there, bud. Read On the Genealogy of Morality and/or Beyond Good and Evil.

Religion is the highest form of art. If you don't understand art you can't understand religion, vice versa. Tarkovsky said it best when he said that the purpose of art is to help man advance spiritually.
But you wouldn't know anything about that, since you posted that trash meme.

>Who is Beckett
>Who is Joyce
>Who is Calvino
>Who is Ungaretti
>Who is Leopardi
>Who is Lucretius
etcetera

>Praying, dedicating hours and weeks to practicing religion
Lmao always funny when people assume if you believe in God you must believe in some abrahamic religion or some shit like that. Just be a deist.

there's nothing your pathetic judeochristian gods can do that the flying spaghetti monster can't do better

>- We know the universe is 13.8 billion years old and dictated entirely by physical laws
>- We know these physical laws give rise to evolution which can produce conscious beings
>- We understand the all too human origins of the hundreds of religious faiths on Earth that are all nonsensical and mutually incompatible early attempts of apes to explain their surroundings
>- We know that we are nothing but matter and chemical reactions and that there's no such thing as free will
>- Almost no public intellectuals who are taken seriously are religious
>- No arguments for religion or God withstand even the mildest scrutiny

Every single one of these statements is false.

Metropolis is kitsch and not real art..

all we know is that the world is all that is the case, biotch

None of that proves the inexistence of a god tho.

...

Ah, right, you think there needs to be objective morality in order for their to any morality at all. It's ok, we have all turned 16 before and read Mere Christianity.
Secular humanists can feel just as passionately about their morals as a religious person does regardless of the way by which they arrive at their morality. Evolutionary altruism explains why humans developed morals. This doesn't require cloud man, and sufficiently explains it. This is a perfectly valid way to have subjective morality and reach the same conclusions, just by a different method--a more rational and self-correcting method. It is idiots like you that think if morality isn't objective then we are all going to be anarchists and savages. Use your noggin, user. Try picking up some Darwin at your library, or start in the kid's section with Everyone Poops so you can see that even you are full of shit.

This doesn't explain anything. If you are not religious then this doesn't apply to you, and you are back at the same objection.

I have read both. Nietzsche is making precisely this point, that in the absence of god, the individual is responsible for value-creation. If you remember, Nietzsche proposed that in the moment where master and slave morality came to exist, it was the slave morality which in a moment of genius inverted their moral system to value suffering and self-denial so as to regain control over their will to power. But after that moment it no longer served as a useful inversion, and began to harm the religious individuals that acted this way. This conversation is no different. Just continuing to value the slaves, even against Nietzsche's analysis.

Some scientifics qualify religion as a primitive behavior which only produces suffering and death amongst humans. However, they follow a somewhat christian morality. Is there a scientific argument to prove that christian morality is the best for humankind?

It's ok, we have all turned 16 before and read Sam Harris.
Have you ever actually thought about the things you're writing about? Or read about them, instead of regurgitating Wikipedia info and merge it with your adversarial philosophy - your worldview is defined by oppositions to someone you are having a debate with "no, BUT..." The effect of this being that you are always trying to counter someone else's rhetoric, rather than reflecting on the actual meaning and implications of your own arguments.

The point isn't "arriving at" morality (as if it were a static destination). Of course our moral thinking and behaviour is dictated by certain processes. Even the Christian registers the world in terms of grace, Fall, temptation, conscience. I'm not sure why you are so excited about the fact that morality can be "explained" by evolution, as if this is some radical information. The point is not whether or not a moral sense exists, but whether or not I actually have any real obligation to follow it. Whether or not there is in fact an 'ought' along the 'is'.

I am not arguing for theism, or for objective morality. I think you are a half-way man, several centuries past his use-by date. Stirner was very astute in his criticism of Feuerbach's 'Essence of Christianity' - Feuerbach has not moved us past religion and God, in fact he has substituted it with perhaps an even more oppressive dictate: the notion of 'Man'. This religious idea of 'Man' which is prescriptive, imbued with all the same moral content as God had been, but completely inexplicably. Why should we reify any attributes of man like this at all? At least the Christian worldview makes sense, at least it pretends it is not make-believe and not a useful delusion (Schopenhauer was quite right when he noted that the "moral truths" in Christianity, no matter how valuable, lose their power once the spell is broken... we cannot reach a compromise). Humanism is utterly arbitrary, but for some reason refuses to admit it. It is all in the last analysis just as fake as its nemesis Christianity.

You are so trapped in this idea of arguing with some redneck Christian strawman who thinks "le atheists have no reason to be moral so they arent" that you only move around upon the surface, engaging with an idea only as much as you need to so you can win debates with retards.

>there needs to be objective morality in order for their to any morality at all.
For their moral claims to be valid and legitimate, yes.
>Secular humanists can feel just as passionately about their morals
So feels > reals, after all?

>thinks physical laws haven't ever changed through spacetime

God is a multi-dimensional being, but religious texts lacked the linguistics and understanding necessary to explain this because humans at the time didn't even understand that they were only 3rd-dimensional creatures.

ok alex

I don't understand the reference.

youtube.com/watch?v=ZFIn708ssFg

youtube.com/watch?v=_NVsyMalJXo

Yes. Exactly the same thing.

It's convenient because religion let's you sort out who just started posting here with views you can entirely ignore.

In the end I think that's why Allah created religion.

Yeah wtf it is

I take your point. I agree that it is important to engage with the ideas rather than know them only insofar as they are useful for arguing. I also agree that often the mainstream atheist movement does use the redneck Christian strawman, which really doesn't get them any closer to developing their position.

Explaining morality in secular terms involves many more processes than just evolution, but I think that evolution provides the model of selection required to show the use of some morals and not others, based on their evolutionary utility. This is separate from whether you ought to follow these morals or not. Your decision to follow certain morals lies in your formulation of value, which will likely exist in a similar way to many other people who live in similar conditions. Those very conditions are imperative enough in dictating morality--that acting good will bring about better conditions for the duration of time you are alive on earth, not some credit score you will have in the afterlife.

Humanism is far from arbitrary. What is best for humans, according to the dictates of reason, forms the content of our morality. This immediately requires an understanding of nature at it's joints in order to properly calibrate a system that maximizes individual freedom and equality. Religion cannot perform this task while enforcing cosmic rulings that clearly interfere with freedom and equality, like homosexuality, and everything of the sort. Christianity is a delusion that takes itself seriously. But why is that a good thing in your view? The humanist position is not a delusion, and is sincere. You seem to be hinting at some refined sense of nihilism, that you would prefer and delusion that "makes sense" to a world without delusion that doesn't make sense. Viewing religion and humanism in these terms neglects the redemptive qualities of both--that some form of authenticity about life can be ascertained by following the principles. I prefer to live with science as my navigator. There is no ambiguity, no delusion.

Thinking you're intellectual for being atheist when the true intellectual accepts there will never be a concrete answer for or against many things like God. If you were playing the scientific argument then be agnostic or theist that's against organised religion. Really you're just a puesd that's scared by the unknown.

Joyce wasn't really an atheist tho. He struggled with Catholicism and whatnot his whole life

>What is best for humans, according to the dictates of reason
what if religion is what is best for humans according to the dictates of reason

It isn't, as I said, because it leads to immoral actions, like rejecting homosexuality, condoning genital mutilation, and necessitating a submissive position to cloud man.

The jews stuck the Torah on the front of the bible.
You need only read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to know Christ. Then you will see (((them)))

All of those are only immoral in your subjective opinion.

the most brutal and violent regimes in the history of the world have been atheist, weird how that works out huh

They violate the principles of equality, which are upheld by a collection of subjective moral agents.

In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But, because, I am enlightened by OP's intelligence.

Indeed I quite rather tip my fedora to you dearest sir, truly I do quite indeed dare say good sir, you are a pillar of rational intellectualism in a quagmire of quite rather irrational superstition.

Carfax