This is an argument for removing universal suffrage, and quite honestly I agree. There need to be some greater qualifications for voting other than "Yes, I am a living, breathing human being (or, to account for the voting dead: "a formerly living, formerly breathing human being";-)
People have the strange idea that pure democracy is the best of all possible political systems. It isn't, unless you happen to share the majority's opinions. Otherwise, it may be just as tyrannical as a Stalin.
that complexity isn't exposed to the voter, which was the problem with the Florida ballot -- the calculations were simple, but the ballot was complex.
Hogwash. The "problem" with the Democrat-designed, voter-approved Florida ballot was not "complexity". As was demonstrated repeatedly in the aftermath, children as young as 8 had no trouble using a butterfly ballot. Here's at least one summary. If anyone had problems with that ballot, it was through gross incompetence, and a total unwillingness to ask for assistance.
I didn't vote for Bush, but the only problem with the Florida ballots was that Democrats could not get the vote count they lusted after.
A couple years ago there was a factory in Billings that was empty - the company that owned it left town years before that, and ownership of the place fell to the city. Well, eventually, some business or other decided that this building would be good for them, and so they worked out a deal with the city to bring lots of new jobs to town while they would take care of renovating the building themselves.
The deal fell through at the *very* last minute when the city informed the prospective buyer of the building that they would be required to pay the back property taxes on the building.
Yes.
This amounted to no small amount of change. The end result was that the company took its jobs and its money and its tax dollars elsewhere.
Have you ever seen Billings? It's such a dumpy place that I have no problem believing that this story actually occurred (as my father insists that it did). Skip Billings. Go someplace else.
But whether or not you think the war is justified (and personally, I do) a UK soldier, after a declaration of war, who fires on a uniformed member of enemy armed forces is committing no moral crime. The politicians make the decision to go to war.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with this.
Hypothetical situation: let's suppose the politicians in country X declares war on country Y simply because they've decided they like the mountains in country Y and they want to be able to vacation there. Such a war would be intrinsically evil and unjust, and no amount of "well, my duly elected representatives declared the war, so I'm not committing any crime if I obey their orders and go and kill members of the Y-ian military" is going to change the fact that this is no more and no less than the "I was just following orders" defense. Soldiers have brains and consciences; they have to use them just like politicians allegedly do.
Yes, but even this cannot categorically prove innocence; at best, it means the alleged perpetrator wasn't physically present at the time of the commission of the crime. This is obviously different from demonstrating innocence of a crime. It may well be that the circumstances of a crime make it exceedingly unlikely that the perpetrator was not present, but it doesn't make it impossible: for instance, he may have hired someone else to do the dirty work. So his finger may not have been on the trigger, but it's obvious that he is still guilty of the crime.
The usual standard in criminal cases is that the prosecution must prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt: i.e., they must prove you are guilty. You are not obliged to prove you are innocent -- something which, really, is virtually impossible to do: how do you prove a negative ("I didn't do it!")?
I believe that the URL you cited does not reflect the actual events accurately.
In fact, Microsoft entered into an agreement with Stac to *purchase* the company (or the technology -- I forget which, exactly). As part of the preliminaries, Bill's thugs demanded that Stac hand over the royal jewels -- i.e., the technology. Stac, evidently unaware of the fact that Bill and Co. wouldn't recognize an ethic if it smacked them in the forehead, handed it over -- that's what the deal was about anyway, right?
Once they got their hands on the tech, Bill and Co. canceled the deal -- and kept the tech.
This led to the Stac lawsuit described in the link you mention - which Stac won; Stac's victory led to the countersuit (over the use of undocumented DOS calls); Stac lost that one.
Come now, friend. That's the sort of post-modern drivel they teach in your average government school these days, and it couldn't be further from the truth. Do you really think that you just popped onto the world stage full-grown, and utterly untouched by your upbringing and culture?
Do you *really* expect us to believe that you'd be the same person whether you were raised by Christians, Muslims, atheists, or animistic bushmen?
Your ideas of who you are depend massively upon such things, and it's just silly to pretend otherwise.
Would we even consider the idea of taxing breathing?
We may not do so, but I think it's a safe bet that the idea has passed or will pass through the mind of more than one idle bureaucrat. Consider the following scenario - which is easy to envision in California:
Due to the continued degradation of air quality, the state is going to mandate a pollution control tax which will be used as a subsidy to assist polluting industries in fulfilling the cleanup laws passed by the state. This tax can be considered a use tax; the more you use, the more you pay.
Never overestimate the depths to which a lazy, no account bureaucrat will stoop when searching for ways a) to spend your money, and b) to justify his own salary.
No, a practical necessity. Science tries to explain phenomena, period. You cannot "explain" something by simply referencing the supernatural.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. The naturalistic assumption rejects without consideration even the possibility of non-naturalistic explanations of events. By making this assumption, the scientist betrays that he is not interested in explaining things, but that he is interested only in explanations that suit his biases. In my judgment this raises two questions:
What potential explanations is the naturalist ignoring?
What other assumptions is he making that are similarly untested?
And it doesn't work the other way around: just because you can't explain something doesn't mean it's supernatural.
Of course. But the naturalist goes too far. He says, "I can't explain it, but it is definitely not supernatural." This is preposterous. A man who admits he can't explain something is not in the best of positions for making bold claims about those things. The fact that a thing cannot presently be explained certainly does not mean that it has an immediate supernatural cause, but it may have one. Rejection of this possibility is intellectually dishonest when it comes from someone who would have us believe that he is only seeking to "explain phenomena", and it reveals that the "seeker" is not really interested in the answers, but only in answers of a certain kind.
This fact, in my view, more than justifies the observation that scientists are no more "objective" than politicians. They have their axes to grind, too, and we need to stop believing the myth of neutrality.
It is an assumption that prejudices the scientist's view of the data: he does not consider the possibility of non-naturalistic phenomena having any impact upon the data. That is an intellectual prejudice.
Again - I'm *not* debating here the validity of the prejudice: that's a discussion for another day. The point here is that it's ignorant to pretend that science is actually performed "objectively". That's nonsense. There are no "objective" scientists, because there are no "objective" people.
science itself, the pursuit of knowledge is apolitical.
If you intend to suggest that the pursuit of knowledge is (or even can be) neutral and unbiased, then -- no offense -- you have no idea what you're talking about. There is no such thing when human beings are involved. The naturalistic approach to science (for example) assumes that all phenomena can and must be explained without reference to anyone or anything outside the observable universe. This is a prejudice. We may debate the value of it, but it is a bias, pure and simple.
On the other hand - and for the sake of equal time - the religious person assumes at the very least the possibility of divine involvement in "the system" at some time or other - past, present, or future. Again, we may debate the value of it, but it is a bias, pure and simple.
Science does not take place in a vacuum, and there is no such thing as an uninterpreted "fact".
You must be the poster child for the "Who needs history?" gang, because your utter disdain for the past is disgraceful. Murder laws are millennia old. Is that outdated and irrelevant too?
Far from ignoring the past, we desperately need to learn from it, friend. If we listened to the founders of this country, we would not have the issues with copyright that we do. It is the failure to learn from the "irrelevant" past that has us in this pickle.
Freud's sex addiction notwithstanding, the real point I wanted to make is that it's purely ludicrous to attempt to turn every use of otherwise innocent language into a sexual reference - as the individual did to whom I was replying. The word "endowed" is by no means strictly associated with sex or sexual organs and was clearly not used in any such sense in the post that originated this silly thread.
As our AC correctly pointed out, algore actually said "the initiative", not "an" initiative.
More importantly, I did not say (nor did I imply) that "taking the initiative in creating" while in Congress is tantamount to saying "I invented it".
My assertion is that what he actually said is absurd: he cannot have taken "the initiative in creating" something that was already some years old by the time that he even got elected to Congress!
If algore had said something to the effect that he was a supporter of the Internet from its infancy, that would have been a far more plausible assertion. But that's not what he said.
What Gore said may have been a deliberate lie, to puff up the ol' resume on national TV. But even if it wasn't, the very best that can be said is that it was a laughably poor choice of words. And like I said, he and his cultists would be a lot better off just admitting that he misspoke. The fact that they defend this nonsense - as you are! - is just hilarious. Pathetically hilarious.
Please find something to defend that is more worthy of your energies than algore's verbal gaffes. You won't find me defending Dan Quayle's spelling of 'potato', and I should think that you would have better things to do with your time than defend algore's nonsensical claims about his role in the Internet's creation.
What Gore said was: "I took the initiative in creating the Internet..."
Balderdash. He did no such thing. Internet research was years old by the time this Johnny-Come-Lately appeared on the scene in a Congressman disguise.
What Gore said was indefensible and manifestly false. It's hilarious that anyone ever tries to defend it, or to explain it away. The much better tactic would be to admit that it was a stupid thing to say. The fact that Gore and many of his cultists cannot or will not do so says more about them than it does about the facts of the case.
Thank you for pointing this out to me; I've never seen it before.
Having looked briefly at it, however, I don't believe that IPD is a sufficient response to what I have been arguing.
What I have been saying is that atheism cannot make truth claims or claims about ethics. It cannot do so because of what it claims about the nature of man. Essentially a man is a glorified electro-chemical machine, according to atheism: based, that is, upon atheism's ideas about human origins.
But if this is true, then it is no more possible for a man to say "it's good to help the little old lady across the street" than for a pot of boiling water to do so. Boiling water doesn't make ethical claims: to even suggest otherwise is absurd. But if man really is nothing more than a glorified batch of incredibly complex chemical/thermal/electrical reactions/interactions, then it is equally absurd to pretend that man can say any more at all about helping old ladies than that pot of water.
If I asked you to inquire of a hurricane whether it is ethical to destroy property and human lives, you would probably laugh in my face. But the atheist, who says that man is - similar to that hurricane - nothing but a batch of chemicals mixed up in intriguing and highly reactive ways, nevertheless expects me to listen to him when he starts chattering about what's "right" or "wrong". I'm sorry, but I fail to see why I shouldn't laugh in his face, IPD notwithstanding.
IPD depends first of all upon the interaction of rational agents - but atheism simply demolishes rationality because of what it says that man is.
This is why I say that atheism reduces ethics to personal preference: because a bag of chemicals doesn't "do" anything. It doesn't think. It doesn't evaluate. It doesn't judge. It's impersonal. Thus, whatever it does is just that, and nothing more. What it does is what it does. The atheist, as a bag of chemicals, can't condemn what atheist bag of chemicals Stalin or Mao does, because bags of chemicals don't have an ethical sense.
Hint: the fact that man really does have an ethical sense ought to be a sufficient clue to you that atheism is a load of nonsense.
I must say, I'm disappointed by your reply. I don't think that you've thought this through very carefully.
Philosophy is a science, it is the search for answers.
It's debateable whether philosophy is a "science" or not: certainly it's not in any sense a science like, for instance, astronomy or genetics. But you are correct that it is a search for answers: but answers to what questions? The answer to that question is that the philosopher seeks answers to the same questions as the theologian. It is the same exact enterprise; in the case of the atheistic philosopher, the answers are assumed to come from someplace other than a god or gods, while for the theist those answers quite likely *do* come from a god or gods. Nevertheless, it's the same questions. The fact that you don't like the answers provided by whatever religions to which you have been exposed doesn't change the fundamental truth that the questions answered by theism are the same questions for which the atheistic philosopher seeks answers.
Lastly, I find it interesting that you describe rocks and keyboards as atheists, because ultimately atheism reduces man to nothing more than an impersonal thing, like a rock or keyboard! Because atheism is materialist (in the philosophic and not economic sense here), you and I are nothing but big bags of chemical reactions. We're more complex than boiling water or a campfire, but we're not fundamentally different, from the atheistic perspective: we're just bags of chemicals. And chemicals - or chemical reactions - don't seek answers. They don't give answers, either. They just sit there, like your rock or keyboard. That's what atheism does to us: it destroys the possibility of knowing anything, because bags of chemicals can't "know" anything. They're impersonal. And atheism reduces humans down to the impersonal.
Silly AC, Communism is an *atheistic* religion. And Stalin and Mao - both good communists - were atheists (Stalin started out as a thelogical student, but changed sides).
Wrong, the atheist simply says I do not have a religious belief.
Two related points. First, you may have missed an earlier post of mine in this same thread, in which I assert the fact that philosophy and religion are merely two sides of the same coin: they both seek to answer the same sorts of questions. The atheistic philosopher attempts to answer them without reference to supernatural forces; the theist tries to answer them in a framework that *does* include the possibility (or certainty) of supernatural beings at work in the world. Though the answers each side gives are often quite different, the questions are essentially the same. Thus it is a puerile dodge on the part of the atheist to claim that he doesn't have "religious beliefs". He has beliefs that occupy the exact same position in his life that religious beliefs have for the theist. He has beliefs that, for him, possess the exact same power and authority as anything the theist believes. To deny this rather obvious fact would be absurdly naive.
Secondly, the atheistic philosophy is hardly so childishly simplistic as you suggest. The atheist must ask (and answer) the question: "Where do I come from?" The answer to that - since he denies the existence of a god or gods - can only be that he is the product of impersonal forces: he has denied the possibility of personal forces (a god or gods) already, so what else is left but IMpersonal ones?
Hence my statement - to which you objected - stands.
This is, of course, nonsense, as it assumes that the only possible source for moral or ethical
values is the belief in a deity or deities.
There's nothing nonsensical about it at all, and it has nothing to do with theism. Atheism cannot support ethics that are more substantial than personal preference because of its cosmology. The atheist says that he is ultimately the product of completely impersonal forces. It is the height of absurdity to pretend that impersonal forces have anything to say about right and wrong.
Atheism demands that we are nothing more than a bag of chemicals with some interesting electrical and biochemical reactions going on. But if this is so, it is even more preposterous to pretend that atheism provides ethical categories! Chemical reactions don't make statements about ethics. If human cognition is no more than chemical reactions - as the atheist claims - then humans can no more make ethical distinctions than can boiling water or a crackling campfire. The personal is destroyed; there is no person to make decisions about right and wrong. Bubbling, sparking chemicals are all that remain.
Thus the whole attempt by atheists to make ethical claims (or, really, any other claim, since *all* human cognition is no cognition at all in their system) is based upon theft. They must engage in theft of some ethical categories from somewhere else, because their own system cannot support it.
And all this being true, we should not be surprised when a Stalin or a Mao commits atrocities in the name of atheism: atheism itself cannot provide ethical categories to induce them to behave well.
maybe you can just say that evil people are responsible for slaughter, and they use their religion to justify it
I don't know if you really meant this, but even if not, there's a kernel of truth in what you wrote: namely, that atheism is no less a religion than religions are philosophies. Religions and philosophies (such as atheism) all seek to answer the same fundamental questions.
While I suspect that you are right - that some folk do use their (professed) religion (or philosophy) as an excuse to justify behavior that is clearly not consistent with what they claim to believe -- however bizarre that is -- nevertheless, in the vast majority of cases people actually do act more or less consistently with what they *really* believe.
In my judgment, Stalin's and Mao's atrocities were completely consistent with atheism. Atheism has no more substantial foundataion for ethics than simple personal preference.
This being the case, we should not be surprised by what happened in the Soviet Union or in China. It's in no way inconsistent with an officially atheistic state.
Slashdot Mirror
Clever, but no.
People have the strange idea that pure democracy is the best of all possible political systems. It isn't, unless you happen to share the majority's opinions. Otherwise, it may be just as tyrannical as a Stalin.
Hogwash. The "problem" with the Democrat-designed, voter-approved Florida ballot was not "complexity". As was demonstrated repeatedly in the aftermath, children as young as 8 had no trouble using a butterfly ballot. Here's at least one summary. If anyone had problems with that ballot, it was through gross incompetence, and a total unwillingness to ask for assistance.
I didn't vote for Bush, but the only problem with the Florida ballots was that Democrats could not get the vote count they lusted after.
I'd call this a tin lining at the very best.
The deal fell through at the *very* last minute when the city informed the prospective buyer of the building that they would be required to pay the back property taxes on the building.
Yes.
This amounted to no small amount of change. The end result was that the company took its jobs and its money and its tax dollars elsewhere.
Have you ever seen Billings? It's such a dumpy place that I have no problem believing that this story actually occurred (as my father insists that it did). Skip Billings. Go someplace else.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with this.
Hypothetical situation: let's suppose the politicians in country X declares war on country Y simply because they've decided they like the mountains in country Y and they want to be able to vacation there. Such a war would be intrinsically evil and unjust, and no amount of "well, my duly elected representatives declared the war, so I'm not committing any crime if I obey their orders and go and kill members of the Y-ian military" is going to change the fact that this is no more and no less than the "I was just following orders" defense. Soldiers have brains and consciences; they have to use them just like politicians allegedly do.
Sorry for the delayed response ;-)
Yes, but even this cannot categorically prove innocence; at best, it means the alleged perpetrator wasn't physically present at the time of the commission of the crime. This is obviously different from demonstrating innocence of a crime. It may well be that the circumstances of a crime make it exceedingly unlikely that the perpetrator was not present, but it doesn't make it impossible: for instance, he may have hired someone else to do the dirty work. So his finger may not have been on the trigger, but it's obvious that he is still guilty of the crime.
The usual standard in criminal cases is that the prosecution must prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt: i.e., they must prove you are guilty. You are not obliged to prove you are innocent -- something which, really, is virtually impossible to do: how do you prove a negative ("I didn't do it!")?
In fact, Microsoft entered into an agreement with Stac to *purchase* the company (or the technology -- I forget which, exactly). As part of the preliminaries, Bill's thugs demanded that Stac hand over the royal jewels -- i.e., the technology. Stac, evidently unaware of the fact that Bill and Co. wouldn't recognize an ethic if it smacked them in the forehead, handed it over -- that's what the deal was about anyway, right?
Once they got their hands on the tech, Bill and Co. canceled the deal -- and kept the tech.
This led to the Stac lawsuit described in the link you mention - which Stac won; Stac's victory led to the countersuit (over the use of undocumented DOS calls); Stac lost that one.
IIRC ;-)
Do you *really* expect us to believe that you'd be the same person whether you were raised by Christians, Muslims, atheists, or animistic bushmen?
Your ideas of who you are depend massively upon such things, and it's just silly to pretend otherwise.
We may not do so, but I think it's a safe bet that the idea has passed or will pass through the mind of more than one idle bureaucrat. Consider the following scenario - which is easy to envision in California:
Due to the continued degradation of air quality, the state is going to mandate a pollution control tax which will be used as a subsidy to assist polluting industries in fulfilling the cleanup laws passed by the state. This tax can be considered a use tax; the more you use, the more you pay.
Never overestimate the depths to which a lazy, no account bureaucrat will stoop when searching for ways a) to spend your money, and b) to justify his own salary.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. The naturalistic assumption rejects without consideration even the possibility of non-naturalistic explanations of events. By making this assumption, the scientist betrays that he is not interested in explaining things, but that he is interested only in explanations that suit his biases. In my judgment this raises two questions:
And it doesn't work the other way around: just because you can't explain something doesn't mean it's supernatural.
Of course. But the naturalist goes too far. He says, "I can't explain it, but it is definitely not supernatural." This is preposterous. A man who admits he can't explain something is not in the best of positions for making bold claims about those things. The fact that a thing cannot presently be explained certainly does not mean that it has an immediate supernatural cause, but it may have one. Rejection of this possibility is intellectually dishonest when it comes from someone who would have us believe that he is only seeking to "explain phenomena", and it reveals that the "seeker" is not really interested in the answers, but only in answers of a certain kind.
This fact, in my view, more than justifies the observation that scientists are no more "objective" than politicians. They have their axes to grind, too, and we need to stop believing the myth of neutrality.
It is an assumption that prejudices the scientist's view of the data: he does not consider the possibility of non-naturalistic phenomena having any impact upon the data. That is an intellectual prejudice.
Again - I'm *not* debating here the validity of the prejudice: that's a discussion for another day. The point here is that it's ignorant to pretend that science is actually performed "objectively". That's nonsense. There are no "objective" scientists, because there are no "objective" people.
If you intend to suggest that the pursuit of knowledge is (or even can be) neutral and unbiased, then -- no offense -- you have no idea what you're talking about. There is no such thing when human beings are involved. The naturalistic approach to science (for example) assumes that all phenomena can and must be explained without reference to anyone or anything outside the observable universe. This is a prejudice. We may debate the value of it, but it is a bias, pure and simple.
On the other hand - and for the sake of equal time - the religious person assumes at the very least the possibility of divine involvement in "the system" at some time or other - past, present, or future. Again, we may debate the value of it, but it is a bias, pure and simple.
Science does not take place in a vacuum, and there is no such thing as an uninterpreted "fact".
Far from ignoring the past, we desperately need to learn from it, friend. If we listened to the founders of this country, we would not have the issues with copyright that we do. It is the failure to learn from the "irrelevant" past that has us in this pickle.
Freud's sex addiction notwithstanding, the real point I wanted to make is that it's purely ludicrous to attempt to turn every use of otherwise innocent language into a sexual reference - as the individual did to whom I was replying. The word "endowed" is by no means strictly associated with sex or sexual organs and was clearly not used in any such sense in the post that originated this silly thread.
I think Freud would be interested that you think something like that is Freudian.
More importantly, I did not say (nor did I imply) that "taking the initiative in creating" while in Congress is tantamount to saying "I invented it".
My assertion is that what he actually said is absurd: he cannot have taken "the initiative in creating" something that was already some years old by the time that he even got elected to Congress!
If algore had said something to the effect that he was a supporter of the Internet from its infancy, that would have been a far more plausible assertion. But that's not what he said.
What Gore said may have been a deliberate lie, to puff up the ol' resume on national TV. But even if it wasn't, the very best that can be said is that it was a laughably poor choice of words. And like I said, he and his cultists would be a lot better off just admitting that he misspoke. The fact that they defend this nonsense - as you are! - is just hilarious. Pathetically hilarious.
Please find something to defend that is more worthy of your energies than algore's verbal gaffes. You won't find me defending Dan Quayle's spelling of 'potato', and I should think that you would have better things to do with your time than defend algore's nonsensical claims about his role in the Internet's creation.
Balderdash. He did no such thing. Internet research was years old by the time this Johnny-Come-Lately appeared on the scene in a Congressman disguise.
What Gore said was indefensible and manifestly false. It's hilarious that anyone ever tries to defend it, or to explain it away. The much better tactic would be to admit that it was a stupid thing to say. The fact that Gore and many of his cultists cannot or will not do so says more about them than it does about the facts of the case.
Having looked briefly at it, however, I don't believe that IPD is a sufficient response to what I have been arguing.
What I have been saying is that atheism cannot make truth claims or claims about ethics. It cannot do so because of what it claims about the nature of man. Essentially a man is a glorified electro-chemical machine, according to atheism: based, that is, upon atheism's ideas about human origins.
But if this is true, then it is no more possible for a man to say "it's good to help the little old lady across the street" than for a pot of boiling water to do so. Boiling water doesn't make ethical claims: to even suggest otherwise is absurd. But if man really is nothing more than a glorified batch of incredibly complex chemical/thermal/electrical reactions/interactions, then it is equally absurd to pretend that man can say any more at all about helping old ladies than that pot of water.
If I asked you to inquire of a hurricane whether it is ethical to destroy property and human lives, you would probably laugh in my face. But the atheist, who says that man is - similar to that hurricane - nothing but a batch of chemicals mixed up in intriguing and highly reactive ways, nevertheless expects me to listen to him when he starts chattering about what's "right" or "wrong". I'm sorry, but I fail to see why I shouldn't laugh in his face, IPD notwithstanding.
IPD depends first of all upon the interaction of rational agents - but atheism simply demolishes rationality because of what it says that man is.
This is why I say that atheism reduces ethics to personal preference: because a bag of chemicals doesn't "do" anything. It doesn't think. It doesn't evaluate. It doesn't judge. It's impersonal. Thus, whatever it does is just that, and nothing more. What it does is what it does. The atheist, as a bag of chemicals, can't condemn what atheist bag of chemicals Stalin or Mao does, because bags of chemicals don't have an ethical sense.
Hint: the fact that man really does have an ethical sense ought to be a sufficient clue to you that atheism is a load of nonsense.
Philosophy is a science, it is the search for answers.
It's debateable whether philosophy is a "science" or not: certainly it's not in any sense a science like, for instance, astronomy or genetics. But you are correct that it is a search for answers: but answers to what questions? The answer to that question is that the philosopher seeks answers to the same questions as the theologian. It is the same exact enterprise; in the case of the atheistic philosopher, the answers are assumed to come from someplace other than a god or gods, while for the theist those answers quite likely *do* come from a god or gods. Nevertheless, it's the same questions. The fact that you don't like the answers provided by whatever religions to which you have been exposed doesn't change the fundamental truth that the questions answered by theism are the same questions for which the atheistic philosopher seeks answers.
Lastly, I find it interesting that you describe rocks and keyboards as atheists, because ultimately atheism reduces man to nothing more than an impersonal thing, like a rock or keyboard! Because atheism is materialist (in the philosophic and not economic sense here), you and I are nothing but big bags of chemical reactions. We're more complex than boiling water or a campfire, but we're not fundamentally different, from the atheistic perspective: we're just bags of chemicals. And chemicals - or chemical reactions - don't seek answers. They don't give answers, either. They just sit there, like your rock or keyboard. That's what atheism does to us: it destroys the possibility of knowing anything, because bags of chemicals can't "know" anything. They're impersonal. And atheism reduces humans down to the impersonal.
Silly AC, Communism is an *atheistic* religion. And Stalin and Mao - both good communists - were atheists (Stalin started out as a thelogical student, but changed sides).
Two related points. First, you may have missed an earlier post of mine in this same thread, in which I assert the fact that philosophy and religion are merely two sides of the same coin: they both seek to answer the same sorts of questions. The atheistic philosopher attempts to answer them without reference to supernatural forces; the theist tries to answer them in a framework that *does* include the possibility (or certainty) of supernatural beings at work in the world. Though the answers each side gives are often quite different, the questions are essentially the same. Thus it is a puerile dodge on the part of the atheist to claim that he doesn't have "religious beliefs". He has beliefs that occupy the exact same position in his life that religious beliefs have for the theist. He has beliefs that, for him, possess the exact same power and authority as anything the theist believes. To deny this rather obvious fact would be absurdly naive.
Secondly, the atheistic philosophy is hardly so childishly simplistic as you suggest. The atheist must ask (and answer) the question: "Where do I come from?" The answer to that - since he denies the existence of a god or gods - can only be that he is the product of impersonal forces: he has denied the possibility of personal forces (a god or gods) already, so what else is left but IMpersonal ones?
Hence my statement - to which you objected - stands.
There's nothing nonsensical about it at all, and it has nothing to do with theism. Atheism cannot support ethics that are more substantial than personal preference because of its cosmology. The atheist says that he is ultimately the product of completely impersonal forces. It is the height of absurdity to pretend that impersonal forces have anything to say about right and wrong.
Atheism demands that we are nothing more than a bag of chemicals with some interesting electrical and biochemical reactions going on. But if this is so, it is even more preposterous to pretend that atheism provides ethical categories! Chemical reactions don't make statements about ethics. If human cognition is no more than chemical reactions - as the atheist claims - then humans can no more make ethical distinctions than can boiling water or a crackling campfire. The personal is destroyed; there is no person to make decisions about right and wrong. Bubbling, sparking chemicals are all that remain.
Thus the whole attempt by atheists to make ethical claims (or, really, any other claim, since *all* human cognition is no cognition at all in their system) is based upon theft. They must engage in theft of some ethical categories from somewhere else, because their own system cannot support it.
And all this being true, we should not be surprised when a Stalin or a Mao commits atrocities in the name of atheism: atheism itself cannot provide ethical categories to induce them to behave well.
I don't know if you really meant this, but even if not, there's a kernel of truth in what you wrote: namely, that atheism is no less a religion than religions are philosophies. Religions and philosophies (such as atheism) all seek to answer the same fundamental questions.
While I suspect that you are right - that some folk do use their (professed) religion (or philosophy) as an excuse to justify behavior that is clearly not consistent with what they claim to believe -- however bizarre that is -- nevertheless, in the vast majority of cases people actually do act more or less consistently with what they *really* believe.
In my judgment, Stalin's and Mao's atrocities were completely consistent with atheism. Atheism has no more substantial foundataion for ethics than simple personal preference.
This being the case, we should not be surprised by what happened in the Soviet Union or in China. It's in no way inconsistent with an officially atheistic state.