Thank you sincerely for such kind words. I feel exactly the same; thank you for sharing your wealth of knowledge and wisdom, it's been such a privilege spending a bit of time conversing with you.
Hopefully one day I'll be back and we can have another go.
God love you
As much as I've enjoyed my brief time here, I'm afraid I have too much going on in my life right now to be able to keep this up. I've been having to neglect other aspects of my day to day in order to make time to post here, and it's catching up with me, so I'm going to have to go cold turkey for...
And that's exactly what we find - it's commonly referred to now as Natural Law, and it's been the subject of philosophical study for millennia.
You're very right, but the key word is "effectively". You may be able to effectively use the chair as a small table, but you'd run into trouble trying...
So, you don't consider your beliefs to be true and all others to be false? Then why do you believe them? And why are you here on a forum trying to convince others that you are right and they are wrong?
And the "progressive" culture sees a black man get shot and automatically assumes it's a hate crime.
Both are frequently wrong, and both would do well to stop irrationally jumping to conclusions in the absence of conclusive evidence.
A very simplistic analogy would be something like a carpenter building a chair. Because the carpenter is the one who created the chair, it means that the chair has the intrinsic purpose that the carpenter intended it to have. Similarly, because God created the universe, it means that the...
So, it seems the general consensus in this thread is that altruism in a purposeless universe doesn't need rational justification because altruism doesn't really exist. Acting in a truly selfless manner, doing what's good simply because it's good, is not a coherent concept - everything we do is...
You added "therefore a god exists" - that wasn't included or implied in what I said. I was only arguing for the first part, that for the world to have meaning it must be the product of a mind. I said nothing about the soundness of any of it, only the validity of the reasoning.
Fair enough, on both accounts.
So, you're not claiming it's rational to believe in destiny in the absence of God, only that people can believe it because people hold irrational beliefs all the time?
As long as we agree it's irrational to believe in destiny without God, I'm fine leaving it at...
This is an interesting idea, and I think it's at least somewhat accurate. How conscious it is, though, seems like it would be up for debate. I don't see evidence in our history that we've been consciously breeding in favor of moral behavior. I wonder what makes you claim it's conscious?
That...
Not to a theist.
It's not "feeling better about God", it's feeling better about the suffering, itself.
Though neither of us can know this firsthand, wouldn't you say women feel much better about the pain of childbirth than they would about an equivalent amount of pain they were enduring for...
I didn't claim they were; I was explaining why such methods of living are the most logical course of action for an atheist.
Of course you don't need to rationally justify behavior for yourself that you don't engage in, but any behavior one does engage in should have a rational justification...
Only due to a lack of understanding.
Not at all; it's a purely logical conclusion. You simply still don't understand what I'm talking about when I used the term "God".
So you believe in free will?
Reproduction is not a purpose; purpose requires a mind with intention. If nature is mindless...
If we live in a meaningless universe where nothing, ultimately, matters - where nothing we do will have consequences for us after we're gone - then serving your own interests is the only rational course of action. If you simply experience life for a little while and then your experience ends -...
So, am I understanding you correctly that you're arguing that we have, by the use of our rational minds, gone effectively "above and beyond" what nature has selected in terms of moral behavior and done a sort of selective breeding of our own species?
So, essentially, groups are being "selected"...