individuals can determine their own purpose and act with intention to achieve it. that's meaning, and it doesn't require a transcendent god. I'd say it's even more meaningful because it's self-sovereign. not unlike money (or any tech) being better when it doesn't depend on some central authority. open protocols! in tech, money, and meaning.
Discussion
honestly, this is WHY social networks built on open protocols are more "humane" - because individuals can choose the networks, features, connections and interactions that fit their desires and intentions. its exactly the **lack** of coercive "meaning from on high" present in corporate social media that makes open prorocol networks better.
if you'd like for someone to write a "for the non-believer" appendix I'm quite interested. broaden the reader base
If individual choice is the base reality of meaning, it has terrible implications. If we are purely self-actualizing, transsexuality, suicide, and self-harm are Good in an ultimate sense. There's also no basis on which you can establish harm. If I am the center of my universe, I can't believe in an Other. It requires a transcendent reality to bind individuals together.
One book I think about constantly is Human Forever by James Poulos, which traces the trajectory of atomistic (progressive) individualism to the ironic outcome of erasure of individuality. It's a sobering logic, and one which anarchists are particularly vulnerable to. This is something I'll be arguing specifically against in the book.
"terrible implications" doesn't make it any less true, it just increases the importance of being vigilant and individually virtuous.
once again, this is a good thing.
"I don't like the implications" is not a falsification of the premise. It's a call to action to work harder to create the world you want **given the truth** of the premise.
No, there are other reasons to think it's false. For example, if individual choice is the driving principle of the world, where did we come from? In your framework, existence itself is equivalent to slavery because we didn't choose it, and suicide is the only form of emancipation. Therefore, as long as you live, you contradict your own ideology.
Ultimate individualism is neither coherent nor good. A creator God, however, is both. He is logically necessary, and has revealed himself in history. So I choose to believe his word, and approach human flourishing in the way he has designed it.
nostr:nprofile1qyvhwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnndehhyapwwdhkx6tpdshsz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ejxzmt4wvhxjme0qyt8wumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcprpmhxue69uhkv6tvw3jhytnwdaehgu3wwa5kuef0qyt8wumn8ghj7am0wshxummnw3ezuurpwf68jtcqyqh04fc4hw6xm4d7dd7634msqfndz9n5hyfms9u2mk6u9e3anpenzemv0fw here's a good article I always send to people who are stuck in a materialistic or otherwise constricting worldview: https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/
It's not by a Christian, or about Christianity, but I think it very persuasively lays out the logical necessity of God.
I'll check it out, thanks! I find it interesting you think I am the one "stuck" in a worldview...
I've read widely, and engaged with a lot of views (this conversation is a case in point). Some non-Christian ideologies appeal to me to some degree (buddhism, quantum consciousness). But radical individualism ain't one of them.
What I'm referring to by the way is GK Chesterton's observation that just as a bullet is just as round as the earth, all world views are equally circular, but some have more explanatory power. Radical individualism has very little explanatory power IMO.
everything that the atheists do is about destruction
feminism is the destruction of femininity
trans is the destruction of humanity
woke is the destruction of awareness
You've never met an atheist, only strawmen. You sound like a pretty hateful person to be honest.
yes, then we also have the "no bad vibes" "hippy love and light" drones, i forgot about them
they are all about dissolving goodness and happiness
idk how you think there can be good without evil to contrast it to
trying to pretend evil doesn't exist erases good as well
You truly only have caricature strawmen in your head.
I don't need a god to have the concepts of good and bad. I don't need someone looking over my shoulder to choose good.
Like I said above, I'll say it again. As an atheist I have raped and murdered everyone that I want to. If you the christian haven't, which of us is really the bad person?
i know what gaslighting looks like
https://youtu.be/aU3xJH2dgb0?t=33
they should be made to comply with our system, their unhappiness threatens our happiness, Someone Should Do Something About These Malcontents
I'm an agorist. Once again you are wrong about atheists and our desires.
I wouldn't even force you to give up your religion nevermind any of that other stuff. I might choose to avoid you if you seem like a negative force in my life, that's it. I'm just in this thread to shine the light of truth about what an atheist is into a sea of ignorance.
I'm honestly not even writing this for you. I know I'll never change your mind. I'm writing for others who are less certain than you who see this public conversation. I know they'll see who was kind and honest and who put more hate, negativity, and falsehoods into the world.
you just accused me of lying, how bout them apples
You lied about me. It isn't an accusation, it is a statement of fact.
I didn't come into someone else's thread and start listing a bunch of negative falsehoods about all christians. You did that about atheists. I spoke up for the truth about me and people like me.
Sure some of us are bad, and we all make mistakes from time to time. That is true of christians and every other religion too. Most of us are decent honest folk just trying to make our way and build a better future for our family and community.
I don't do any of those things.
I am an atheist.
how does this work?
what is commonly called just "God" I believe it is intended to mean "The Creator God" or "God the Father" in biblical terminology
this is the same as negentropy, emergent order, versus destruction
i look at this way
i am made of life
why should i venerate that which takes life?
you don't have to believe in God to understand that there is forces in our universe that are intangible
mathematics is literally the science of this, and all of its children, physics, chemistry, biology, paleontology, geology, psychology...
Who is taking life? Me?
how did that become an accusation?
if you are living, you depend on negentropy and order
if you are sick, it is because entropy and disorder have come to dominate your organism
the word "psychopath" literally means "sick mind" and people with sick minds worship and venerate entropy and disorder, and one of the ways they do this is by promoting the idea that the intangible does not exist or matter
wrong.
see: mathematics
Who said mathematics is intangible? We teach children math with physical blocks. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, evens, odds, primes, fractions, greater, lesser, and equal all concepts easily demonstrated by physically organizing small blocks that each represent an integer value of 1. 0 and negatives can be easily inferred from those pieces with very little imagination. That is a huge chunk of the building blocks of mathematics including Algebra.
Pythagorean theorem can be proved by physically breaking the triangle into smaller triangles and rearranging, so that adds trig and the xy plane for another huge branch math being physical.
I can tech vectors by waving my arm around in space so scalar is not abstract either.
On and on.
One of my favorite quotes on Atheism, "I've raped and murdered everyone that I want to."
You have not just gods existence as an axiom but the idea that normal people want to do nothing but horrible things unless some greater power compels them to do better.
Think hard about what you would really want if you didn't have the threat of god. If you still believe that about the nature of man it says more about you the Christian than me the Atheist.
I've raped and murdered everyone that I want to. Are you saying YOU haven't?
That is itself a strawman version of evil. Just because you haven't murdered someone makes you the buddha?
Think about it this way instead: at what point in your life have you ever 1. successfully executed any non-trivial plan, 2. been perfectly happy with who you are, or 3. managed to avoid hurting anyone else (emotionally, economically, physically)? Only a deluded egoist would think he had passed all three tests.
You aren't perfect either.
The point of the quote is that being an atheist doesn't cause me to not want to try or to have directionally opposite ideas of right and wrong.
You and other christians in the thread have with varying degrees of bluntness and crassness basically said that all atheists are spending all our time running trans drag pedophile library hour. I'm none of those things I'm being accused of.
I could come here saying that all churches were pedophile rings and all christians are groomers. Confirmed cases of molestation only I'd have more evidence to prove my case than you could find for self identified atheist groups. Would you feel the desire to defend yourself from the obvious slander?
Spoken like someone who grew up in a western society that was guided by Christian values.
My values are not derived from your god or his book. A fair bit of evil around the world has been done in his name and based on his books throughout history.
Remember that your book warns you that the devil knows the scripture and can quote it to serve his purpose. I'll leave it at that because I'm not here to point out the moral failings of christianity or the bible.
My purpose in this thread is to show that atheists are regular folk who just happen to not believe in your god the same way you happen to not believe in Odin.
Calm down, reddit atheist. I'm not even religious. I just acknowledge the effects that Christianity and European genetics have had on society. Many, if not most, cultures are filled with people who want to rape and kill, but are only stopped by the threat of harsh corporal punishment. Look at what happens when they are introduced to European societies.
You should take a step back and consider the effect that the Christian program has had on the minds of people and think about how things might be different if there were a different program running.
People are predisposed to believe in something supernatural. It is part of how we evolved as a species. You can't just go ripping out the foundational religion and expect everything to be fine.
I'm not on reddit or into eugenics. Moving on from your blatant racism there.
Honor cultures breed violence. We have honor cultures with multiple religions and non honor cultures with multiple religions. Christianity even transitioned from honor culture to non honor culture in most of the world. Culture drives religion selection and emphasis on certain rules in the religion not the other way around.
No mixed fibers plain as day and Jesus Christ himself said every law of the old testament stands until the rapture. That is in the bible. Wanna make a bet on what the nearest Christian is wearing?
I'll skip over the real honor culture garbage from the old testament rather than add to how disgusting you already turned the thread with your racism.
Your talking points are run-of-the-mill, reddit tier angsty teenage atheism 101. You are saying them like they are some profound thing that no one has ever heard of, instead of what they are, which is a 20 year old, trite attempt at provocation.
You can cry racism all you want, but that's not an argument. Genes are real, they affect behaviour, and they cluster into varying population groups, which is a large part of differing cultures. Im sorry that this fact is hard for you to deal with.
My guess is, you are under 23 years old. Probably under 20, in which case, this is all excusable. If not, your existence and stunted belief system is just kind of sad.
Atheists were attacked in this thread. I came in here to say I'm an atheist and those things that are being said are strawman that don't represent me.
All the provocations are you and others attacking. I didn't invite you here and I haven't ad hominem attacked you like you have repeatedly done to me.
Other than pointing out the obvious racism in the phrase "European genetics" I haven't said anything negative about you, only disagreed with your positions. You however feel that I must be an inferior person for holding different beliefs. You attack me not my position repeatedly.
I came here to prove that atheists are kinder than the average non atheist. Thank you for the help.
So, yea, probably a teenager. You didn't ad hominem, you used poisoning the well, if you want to play the logical fallacy game.
Another strawman. You decide that I'm a teenager with no evidence to my age then dismiss my entire position because all teenagers are dumb which also isn't true.
I'm still waiting for my any of my points to be addressed by any of your responses. Lashing out at random traits you assume I have then bashing additional people who have those qualities is all you've done.
Where did I poison the well? Even when you have made clearly racist statements I haven't used them to dismiss every point you made, only that specific statement. When I state a fallacy I don't just yell the name of the fallacy and run away like it was a smoke bomb. I tell you where you made it and how it fits the definition.
"You decide that I'm a teenager with no evidence"
There is evidence.
"then dismiss my entire position because all teenagers are dumb"
That's not why I'm being dismissive. It's more to do with your talking points being about 10 -15 years out of date. Nobody cares that you're an atheist. It's not some identity to cling to. It's just a worn out internet personality type.
"I'm still waiting for my any of my points to be addressed"
Which points would those be?
"Where did I poison the well?"
You just keep saying "that's racist" with nothing intelligible to add. It's crazy to think that this is how I came off 15 years ago when militant atheism was really welling up online. I used to talk very similar to the way you talk now.
The problem is, you are having this conversation while attached to an identity (pseudonymous as it may be). This will cause you to unconsciously accept or reject things based on social pressures that you don't even realize you have. That's another part of my dismissiveness. It feels probably not worth it to have the conversation, because your identity and reputation are more important than the truth.
I'm wondering if you are a kid now. I'm clearly a teenager but my talking points are 15 years out of date. 4 year olds who have mastered Dawkins soundbites but don't learn anything new before they turn 20 are common after all.
The four horseman days weren't an atheist movement, it was Anti-Theist. The point was to attack religious people with the faults of their religion. I have gone out of my way to avoid running down the litany of biblical instructions that are appalling to modern christians in this thread.
I felt the need to point out one of those bible rules that we ignore because of our culture to make the point we fit our religion to our cultural morals not the other way around. I picked mixed fibers because it was the least offensive example. If you truly were a part of the Anti-Theist movement you know how dark I could have gone there. I have clearly updated my approach.
You can't say no one cares I'm an atheist. People in this thread said that anyone who doesn't believe in god would obviously be guilty of a variety of moral faults. Some of them pretty offensive to me. I joined in here to say "I'm an atheist and I do none of those things you accuse us of." I even made a post on my timeline about being open about your atheism so those strawmen aren't the only atheist people know.
You explicitly said you believe different races have different moral reasoning capabilities and European genes are better at it. That doesn't even require wokeness, that's 100 year old dictionary definition racism. Stating that you believe in facts that you explicitly said you believe in isn't poisoning the well. You were working those same racist talking points at the time so it wasn't even off topic.
So, you want the Christians to take your well reasoned atheist talking points seriously, despite the fact that they find your lack of belief in god to be morally repugnant.
However, you refuse to even engage with race realist talking points, because you find the genetic explanation for behaviour to be morally repugnant.
You might think that you're being much more tactful with your replies, but I'm telling you, they look exactly the same as they did 15 years ago. You are replying just like I would have back then. The total dismissiveness of the positive impacts of Christianity is what really turns people off. You are not fully considering the downsides of leaving a vacuum where a decent religion once was. It's not a coincidence that "woke" filled that void for many people. It's basically just christian morality inverted and turned against its own people.
interesting argument. i'm seriously interested the relationship between dogma of chrischan "mission" and self sovereignty. from aspect of intrinsic motivation and sustainable energy.
How self sovereign can you be when you believe you live under an all-powerful being?
The very concept of sovereignty is incoherent in that setup
That's a good question. I have a hunch that the relationship between these two comes about when we live self-sovereign lives based on the "mission" we have in the world, rather than external motives like fame, approval, money, etc. It's about how we live our individual lives.
Why would you choose one purpose over another?
An enormous complex of interconnected motivations including genetics, upbringing, luck, culture, etc.
why would you choose one purpose over another?
Same reason. Just wanted to see if you would acknowledge the genetic factor.
what kind of maniac doesn't recognize genetics as massively influential on everything? :)
Genetics affect people sure, but the dude you are talking to is a racist trying to trap you into siding with him.
People that don't want to have their worldview changed by having to come to terms with immutable differences between population groups and the consequences of those varying behavioural predispositions living under the same set of societal codes.
I think there's a lot of nuance here. there is more difference within populations than between populations, so the correct thing to do is still err on the side of treating individuals individually. that is: genetic profiling doesn't pay off. other forms of profiling are probably way more efficacious (like by belief system. ahem)
This is like saying "there is more difference within cars than there is between cars and trucks" 