Am I out of line here? (antispore.com)

[Isaac]

So I come accross antispore.com after becoming more interested in the game "Spore" from this post. Coming from a Catholic Mexican background I stopped believing in 'organized belief systems' because of the angry Mexican judgmental (sometimes violent) people who attended. Ever since, I've been trying to tone down religion.

After all, their billions in revenue and all the advertising in the world are no match for the power of God.

You're thinking about this incorrectly. God and games are an EVEN match for the "interest of man". "Power" is neither here nor there. The ocean is more powerful than a poisonous snake, but either can overcome you, if you give yourself up to one. The power of choosing is what you dislike.

Most religious people are wrong for believing things are good or evil. Everything is good. But good topics can contradict other good topics. It's only a matter of perspective. Even those who think they're evil aren't.

What I wrote isn't very original or complicated. But because I'm sure he wont reply to me or will simply throw biblical text in defense (which normally means nothing to me anymore), I would like criticism from my dbb forum, if you have a moment.

Also, I haven't sent this yet, but plan to. Any advice on improving it will be appreciated. Thank you!

[Isaac]

oh it's a \"she\" not a \"he\". The edit button isn't working for me right now.

[Kilarin]

Most religious people are wrong for believing things are good or evil. Everything is good. But good topics can contradict other good topics. It's only a matter of perspective.

If everything is good, then you are really saying that there is no such thing as "good" and "evil", right? It's all just a matter of your perspective.

You're saying that Mother Teresa isn't actually any BETTER than Osama Ben Laden. Their views of the world contradict each other, but there isn't actually any absolute standard by which to judge between them, so both views are equally "good", it's just a matter of perspective, any persons perspective is just as valid as anyone else's.

In your view, the difference between Mother Teresa's world view and Osama Ben Laden's world view lies on the same level as the difference between the points of view of two drifting spaceships approaching each other. Spaceship A says it is moving towards a stationary Spaceship B, and Spaceship B says it's moving towards a stationary Spaceship A. There is no absolute standard to judge between them so both points of view are equally correct and valid. It all just depends on your perspective.

Am I understanding your point of view here? I just want to get it clarified before we go any further into some pretty deep philosophy.

[Isaac]

Yup.

[Spidey]

Can I give you some friendly advice instead…

Don’t start every debate with “you are wrong” (paraphrase).

I notice you and a lot of other people here do this as well.

If you want to start open & honest polite debate…start with something like…Interesting, why do you believe that? instead.

[Isaac]

Sure thing.

[snoopy]

You're thinking about this incorrectly. God and games are an EVEN match for the "interest of man". "Power" is neither here nor there. The ocean is more powerful than a poisonous snake, but either can overcome you, if you give yourself up to one. The power of choosing is what you dislike.

I'll also point out that this is a matter of opinion based on philosophy. If you ask me, God is completely sovereign, and could make all of us hate Spore, and we'd think we were deciding for ourselves about it. We generally try to debunk this by trying to put ourselves in God's shoes and saying "If I were God, I wouldn't let this happen" or some such... the problem is that we're not God, we have very limited understanding, and God doesn't have to answer to us. (That's all my opinion on the matter.) So, my 2c is that we (all of us- being all of the aspects of the individual, and all mankind.) are subject to God's will, like it or not.

I will say (this isn't meant to be sarcastic at all) that I commend you for being consistent enough with your atheism to recognize that "good" and "evil" cease to exist without a perfect standard (God) to define the difference between the two.

[Kilarin]

As snoopy said, your viewpoint is internally consistent. But it has philosophical and behavioral consequences that can be quite dark. Although, I guess \"Dark\" wouldn't have any \"moral\" meaning under them, so lets change that to \"Frightening to the majority of humanity\".

If someone tortured your mother to death, you couldn't say that what they had done was wrong or evil, those words have no meaning in your philosophy. You could only say that what they did was inconvenient or annoying, and chalk it up to a different, but equally valid point of view.

With all morality just an ephemeral delusion, on what do you base your actions? If someone was in your way, why NOT murder them?, as long as you thought you could get away with it? Osama Ben Laden and Mother Teresa's morality are both just opinions. They have illusions of morality, but there is no real meaning to it, and neither one is actually right OR wrong. So why take the route of self sacrifice when you could be blowing up buildings?

You seem like a decent guy Isaac, what am asking is WHY do you bother being a decent guy if there is no real meaning to the word \"decent\" ???

[snoopy]

After all, their billions in revenue and all the advertising in the world are no match for the power of God.

I'll point out the problem in this statement, too. The implication is that God is going to do something to compete with EA's corporate power... and you get the feeling that her blog will have something to do with it. The reality is that God will do as He wishes, and while her statement is true, the implication that something will happen isn't a given- in fact I'd venture to say that's it's probably unlikely to happen in some "miraculous" fashion that she could point to. (This, again, is according to my philosophy, which is based on what I understand of the Bible.)

She's obviously looking for a fight, and your response (and this thread) will really only add fuel to her fire. If you really think she's a nut and completely wrong, then I'd say a response to try to make her see the light shouldn't be worth your time.

[CUDA]

There's Good in this world Mr Frodo. and its worth fighting for

denying that there is good and evil is what our government is trying to do by making everything poltically correct.

[fliptw]

ADVERTISING GOOOD

[Canuck]

The site is a prank, a roll page... fake Isaac. Read.

[Ferno]

ADVERTISING GOOOD

NAPSTER BAAAD

[CUDA]

ADVERTISING GOOOD

NAPSTER BAAAD

YOUTUBE BLOCKED



well at work anyways

[Isaac]

The site is a prank, a roll page... fake Isaac. Read.

No kidding. The site was intended to get a rise out of atheists. It certainly got one out of me.

[Jeff250]

As snoopy said, your viewpoint is internally consistent. But it has philosophical and behavioral consequences that can be quite dark. Although, I guess "Dark" wouldn't have any "moral" meaning under them, so lets change that to "Frightening to the majority of humanity".

Exactly!

I will say (this isn't meant to be sarcastic at all) that I commend you for being consistent enough with your atheism to recognize that "good" and "evil" cease to exist without a perfect standard (God) to define the difference between the two.

If you're saying that good and evil exist because God's standard is perfect in some ethical sense, then aren't you just postponing the problem, i.e. by what ethical standard can we say that God's standard is the ethically perfect one? If you're saying that it's because God's standard is perfect in some nonethical sense, then aren't you in the same condundrum of the atheist, trying to show how some nonethical properties can give rise to ethical authority?

To say this another way, as Kilarin pointed out, it would have been a sleight of hand for him to have invoked an ethically loaded term like "dark" when what we're discussing is what is ethics to begin with. "Perfect" is also an ethically loaded term that I believe you may be using unfairly here for the same reasons.

[Foil]

Ah, you're right, Jeff. Using God as the standard for determining good/evil begs the question, \"How can we say God is perfect/good?\"

I'm curious, Jeff: philosophically, what would you say to making it an axiom, defining good by God's character, rather than arguing it as an attribute God has?

[Jeff250]

Sorry for the delay.

I'm trying to make sense of what kind of thing this axiom would be. We certainly have axioms in math, but these axioms are used as starting places for a priori knowledge. They don't purport, in themselves, to describe anything about the universe. We just use them as starting places to make logical deductions.

But your proposed ethical axiom is different from this, because you're meaning to not just make a starting place for logical deductions, but you're also making a claim about how the universe actually is. Your axiom is that something about the universe just is some way, that some fact about the universe just is true, namely that God just is supremely good. And that seems like a much more peculiar thing to do than just setting up some initial rules for a complex logic game as we do in math.

Can you think of other possible axioms like the one you proposed to compare it to? I think that if your ethical axiom is the only thing of its kind that we can think of, then it doesn't speak well to its viability.

For more of a criticism qua ethics, I think by introducing an axiom like this to solve a problem you're creating one in the process. You're introducing an axiom to avoid having to provide an ultimate reason for why good things are good. But ethics seems to resist this kind of solution. We want to say that things are good for a reason. We want to say that what's good isn't completely arbitrary. But an axiom is at odds with our expectations, as an axiom says that somthing is true for no reason and completely arbitrarily.

One of the enormous challenges in ethics is the problem of normativity, i.e. trying to answer the skeptics' question, \"Why should we do what's right?\" You might answer that it makes people happy, but then the skeptic asks why should we make people happy, and so on. It's not clear to me that your solution actually solves this in a meaningful way. Although... if you append to your axiom, \"And this axiom solves the problem in a meaningful way!\" then the philosophical problem is solved, right?