Oh! That's nonsense. Religion is a human invention, much like father Christmas and the tooth fairy. The difference is that many people never get over it.
Religion has no right to claim to be the source of morality! Morality stems from a desire to cooperate to our mutual benefit. Religion never even comes into it.
I see no clear tendency of religious people to be nicer. I've seen quite a few who were real bastards.
Jeroen Belleman
That's pretty much my experience too.
I've been acquainted with some atheists whose main objection to the concept of a God seemed to be that it would necessarily imply there was an entity smarter and/or more powerful than them out there somewhere.
Certainly might rub a number of engineers the wrong way:
"Ok so here's the structure of the pyramid. First there's the animal kingdom, and then there's the degenerate people. and then there's the good people. and then there's all the other engineers (who are themselves better people than non-engineers), and then there's me at the top of the engineers. And then...well...that's about it. that's where the capstone is I guess."
I don't know what soul travel is, but I'm sure there is no afterlife, just as there was no forelife. There is no soul. My existence is the result of an uninterrupted sequence of incredibly improbable events, going back billions of years into the past, and I will cease to exist, never to come back, when some essential part of my body fails.
While I'm certainly not looking forward to dying, I'm not afraid of being dead. The need to believe in an afterlife is just another of those weird religious ideas.
Jeroen Belleman
Religion and atheism are probably somewhat tangential issues to the state of "being a jerk", which tends to develop based on experiences that begin in very early childhood, well before a person is able to grasp what either term means very well.
That is to say I'm skeptical religion or atheism alone has the power to put the jerk in anyone who wasn't more-or-less already there, and I'm skeptical religion or atheism alone has the power to un-jerk anyone who showed up that way, already.
Well the whole area is full of intelligent, pragmatic, religion-averse bastards so...
To be fair a bunch of them call themselves "liberals"..
[...]
Again, that has nothig to do with religion. Some people do need to believe they are better than others. Maybe in some way, some of them are! We all have our qualities and our blind spots.
Jeroen Belleman
Yes, that's probably true.
Who was it that said: "Kill them all, god will know his own!". Some
-presumably religious- crusader commander? Now there's a jerk.
Jeroen Belleman
That's the peculiar thing about the new Leftists, though. These people call themselves "Liberals" but in truth they couldn't be farther away from the original meaning of the word. Classical Liberals would be horrified at the solution of executing or imprisoning someone who disagreed with them. Not so the neo Liberals. It's a deeply disturbing new trend and it's not confined solely to America.
My experience is the complete opposite.
Well, I'm not religious at all but am convinced there's an after-life. And that's not just so I can feel all warm and fuzzy. I actually find the prospect deeply concerning. I'd much rather be like you in outlook!
Incidentally, a significant amount of the rancor surrounding the debate on abortion hinges on the "nature" of the transition from not-life to life and from not-person to person.
Richard Dawkins pointed out that it doesn't make much logical sense to call a clump of cells a few moments after conception a "person" and it doesn't make much sense to call a baby 1 second before birth a clump of cells, but that implies there must have been an exact moment at some point over the 9 months of gestation that a transition from not-person to person occurred. Which also makes no sense.
Interestingly, there seems to be much less intense debate over the process of death, even though pretty much all the same conundrums with respect to binary transitions being nonsense happens there too, just in reverse order!
Anyway, in summary: Birth is nonsense. Death is also nonsense. Thank u for coming to my TED talk.
As if John Larkin would have clue. He's an ignorant sucker who can be flattered into believing total nonsense, and resents it when his intellectual inadequacy is shown up.
Not that Cursitor Doom can identify a single example of a "neo-liberal" acting that way, probably because the label is one that has has been invented by people who need a an imagined target to be rude about.
How did you come to be convinced of the existence of an afterlife, and what kind of experience do you expect to have?
Jeroen Belleman
I'm afraid that's *way* too big and off-topic a subject for expansion on this forum!
[Snip!]
This whole thread has been OT from the start, but OK, fair enough.
Jeroen Belleman
You are talking specifically about your freedom to post fatuous nonsense. You'd like people to take you seriously and that isn't going to happen.
You can be pretty sure that primitive creation myths aren't going to be helpful.
Try reading some Spinoza.
Religions are a political systems, and not a a particularly constructive example of the breed.
Except that you also think that Donald Trump has common sense. Your judgement isn't wonderful.
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