Yeah, this is not a thread of religion.

You're confusing 'atheism' with 'cultural relativism'.
Atheism simply says: There is no God. That's all. Nothing else. It doesn't say anything at all about 'morals', it doesn't say anything at all about how atheists should dictate their lives. You can be an atheist and still believe in moral absolutes, still believe in 'right' and 'wrong', there just isn't a 'God' to dictate them. Some forms of Buddhism would fall into that catagory, as well as Humanism. Atheists can believe whatever they want, as long as it doesn't require a 'God'.


'Cultural relativism' is the thing you have a problem with. Different cultures have different ideas about what is 'right' and what is 'wrong', and there is no objective standard by which to measure them. That's basically what cultural relativism says.
Cultural relativism is basically what you'll be using when looking at cultures throughout history. In the 1500s, public executions were a form of entertainment for all the family, and they considered that 'good'. You can't really say they were 'wrong' in the 1500s, you'd be judging them from a contemorary viewpoint. You can only study the effects that public executions had on society in the 1500s.
The real point being that if they were studying you, they'd consider you just as 'wrong' as you consider them. Judging their society based on the teachings of our society is to say that our society is superior to theirs, and that sort of arrogance is completely unfounded.

Exactly the same principle is used when studying the different cultures across the world. When eskimos reach a certain age, they put on an iceberg and sent off to die. For eskimos, this is considered much more dignified than clinging desperately on to life at the suffering of the rest of the community. Your culture teaches differently. You cannot judge eskimo culture based on your own culture, because you cannot qualify how your culture is superior to theirs. You can only study the differences.
There are so many different human cultures, and there is nothing that they all have in common. There have been many attempts to try and pin down something, anything, that is inherently 'human', and they have all failed. There has always been some remote culture, often in Brazil or Africa, that is different.

So cultural relativists will find the concept of absolute 'right' and 'wrong' as absurd, even arrogant. 'Judging' cultures, or aspects of cultural norms, will be done by 'usefulness' and their evolutionary advantages.

'Rape' is a particularly interesting example.
"Why is rape wrong?" is an absurd question to most, because 'it just is' is usually a good enough answer. but not to a cultural relavitist.
The vast majority of other mammals reproduce by what we'd call rape (though often females are more succesful at fighting off males than human females are), so why not humans? It would certainly maximize population growth.

However, that population would have a high child-to-parent ratio, and would inevitably suffer the deaths of many of the children, and perhaps even the parents. Because human children take a very long time before they can be independent, it is far more useful to maximize the chance of survival, rather than maximize the population growth. Even though single parents do a very good job today, it is still of course much easier to raise a child with two parents; one to look after child and one to get food. This is why it would be more beneficial for a human society to promote consenual reproduction and form a nuclear unit to maximize survival of the population, rather than forced reproduction like in most other mammals to maximize growth of population.

This is the kind of the discourse a cultural relativist goes through, on all issues. Instead of simply accepting rape as 'wrong', because 'it just is', the cultural relativist will draw up a list of pros and cons, and judge whether something will be beneficial or detrimental to a population, shunning the absurdly arbtirary moral absolutes.


(Terribly sorry for the hijack, but I think even the thread starter acknowledged that this topic of logging probably wasn't going anywhere, and this issue of 'atheism' is something Obi has hinted at in several threads and I figured I wanted to address it once and for all. also, bring back religious forum.)

I was watching Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law last night, and on it the Jetsons travel back in time to sue the world for causing global warming. Harvey is in the car talking and he said "How can one man destroy the environment?" and as he said it, George Bush drove past him in the background in his Presidental Limo.

Are you saying that without god, a mother would never care for her child? Or that men would never have learnt the value of honesty or loyalty? In the animal kingdom we can observe a mother caring for her child, or animals joining together to hunt a common prey.

Really, saying that you need religion for morals is absurd!

People, people! Notice that I used the adjective "materialistic". Unless I am very much mistaken materialism only acknowledges the existence of that the we can since or reason, and denies the existence of a spiritual or extra physical world. Materialism is a subset of atheism, IE. All materialists are atheists, but not all atheists are materialistic.

Ok, moving right along, I was only responding to THRAWN’s post where he said,



I could be wrong, but it sounded like he said that every atheist knows that murder, ect. is wrong, where under moral relativism, you would arbitrarily decide for your self weather it’s wrong. In other words it sounded like he was putting a moral absolute in moral relativism.

I think many of the argument in past have risen up over the fact this I think of morals as absolute standards, where-as many of you don’t

I didn’t mean to offend anyone, I was just trying to have a discussion. I really hate going into these issues because they’ve already been discussed a thousand times, and it always result in people getting mad at each other.

(Shoot I have to go, I’ll proof-read it later)

You are right, but the more commonly-known definition is that of a person who obsesses with physical goods. Even I didn't know that materialism was an actual philosphy.

That was because of the continued hijack in the one thread where I can kick ***. Not that I don't appreciate a good religious debate, but we get those every other weeks.

Yeah, I think 'materialism' is a bad choice of word, 'rationalist' is probably more appropriate (but of course 'materialist' is probably a subtle jab at rationalism, because of the instant negative connotations that 'materialism' has).

It's simply the rejection of anything supernatural, often citing hypocrisy; fear of black cats running across the street is considered 'superstition', but fear of omnipotent being smiting thee to eternal suffering isn't, while they are both equally irrational.

Again, read the chunk on atheism. You don't need a supernatural entity to enforce absolute morals. You can have absolute morals without having to justify them supernaturally.

What's probably more likely is the implementation of relativistic 'morals' (I use inverted commas because I don't think it's the right word but I can't think of an alternative) based on general usefulness to a particular population, see my previous chunk on cultural relativism. You can use rational approaches to conclude that the "Murder is bad" stance is superior to the "Murder is good" stance. The rational approach concludes not that murder is 'bad' or 'evil', but is generally detrimental to the wellbeing of a population.
You seem to think that rationalists must conclude that all beliefs are equally valid. Logic doesn't work like that. Rationalists can quite easily conclude that a particular belief is illogical, and base decisions on that. (and sometimes not quite so easily)

I see. However, what about a situation where murder would benefit you? Wouldn't this just survival of the fittest? I do realize that in almost all situations is wouldn't be beneficial, as you would be on the run from the police. Also, from a materialistic viewpoint, why would killing a human be any worse than killing an animal? And also, do you consider it wrong for a male deer to kill another during mating season? Surely this is only natural.

Please don't taking this the wrong way, I'm not trying to start a fight.

Deer don't have the same logic and reasoning that humans do.

As for materialism, anything can be considered it. Even religion. You study religion to believe in God and hope one day you will enter Heaven right? Wel Heaven is materialistic, it's a place, just like your house, car, clothing, etc. You want to get there, thus you are chasing after a materialistic item, that is, eternal peace/bliss/heaven/love whatever it may be.

But I was not saying that all athiests believe murder is wrong. I apologize if you took it that way.

Yes, you actually raise some very pertinent points.

Humanists often tends towards the idea that humans are superior to all other animals. Putting it as bluntly as that will concern some people, but if you really think about it, all animals consider themselves superior to all other animals. If they didn't, they wouldn't survive. The notion that "all animals are equal" really doesn't mean anything.

Even if you don't like that idea, you will accept that humans have some charactertistics that other animals don't have, so factors that govern other animals aren't relevant to humans.

But what is probably more often the case is that you're just comparing two very different animals. You compare humans to deer on the basis that they're both mammals. Sensible enough, but animals are not all the same. It would be more appropriate to compare humans to lions, pack hunters, than it would be to compare humans to tigers, lone hunters. Lions live in large prides and live for the survival of the pride, not the individual lion. Lions killing other lions in the pride would indeed result in the sole survival of the fittest lion, but the lion would then have to hunt alone, which lions aren't very good at. So it is the best interest not to compete with other lions in the pride, but rather maintain the survival of the pride as a whole. As a result, they've produced a complex social system.
Similarly with dolphins, wolves, and humans.


The idea that animals are all 'simple' and 'predictable' stems from ignorance; look a little deeper and you'll find fascinatingly complex systems.

Mort-Hog, in a sense, humans are above all other animals. You put me 1 on 1 in a room with a lion, I am royally screwed. You give me a high powered rifle and stick me in that room, I can kill the Lion.

You put a dog in the room with the lion, that dog isn't gonna stand a chance. Put that dog in the room with a gun and the lion, that dog doesn't stand a chance.

How about we get back on the goddamned topic?

Sounds good to me.

Threads evolve. Get over it.

If you call this "evolving".

Scenario B:

You don't have enough time to concentrate on raising the rifle. Instead, you manage to bash yourself in the eye with the scope. The lion pounces.

But what if the room was dark? You'd probably be better off with an SMG. Of course this raises many interesting points, such as: Would the lion still be able to kill you before he died of the bullet wound? Also, what if it's really small room? You might not get a shot off in time. We must consider other weapons and options. Some sort of force pike would work well, though while were at it, we may as well wish for a lightsaber.

/me flushes the thread down the toilet.

Ok, a room with a high powered rifle, capable of killing an elephant easily. Maybe an elephant gun. Plenty of ammo, the lion is a good 50 feet away, the room is well lit, with a scope, proper weapons training on firing a gun quickly in a "tense" situation, and for the hell of it toss in some kind of explosive too, and something to duck behind just in case you throw a gernade.

Now thats just cheating.

You shouldn't get to decide the layout of the room.

And even then, a grown lion can close 50 feet pretty quickly.

Ok, you've beat level one. You are now in a large dimly lit room with boxes and other large debris along the edges. There is one lion. What do you do?

npc spawn jet_li

Bah, CNN is the worst news media ever. They're so biased about things. Might as well have Rather reporting it.

:p

IBTL!

~devmapall <enter>
~god <enter>
~give all <enter>
~setforceall 999 <enter>

IDDQD

:p

And free--there's a difference between threads 'evolving' and threads getting thrown off course. There was still a valid discussion to be had in this thread, but that's obviously long gone. Did I just give a bit to the derailing of this thread? Yeah, but it's not like it'll make much of a difference either way.

If anyone feels like really discussing the effects that mining will have on the ecosystem, please, give me a PM or something.

/Puts last nail into coffin just for more more post count.

Wait I'm confused....the lion is cutting down the forests?