Quote from: CoinCube on February 15, 2017, 08:21:39 AM

Quote from: miscreanity on February 14, 2017, 04:07:22 AM

The following two (relatively) short videos may be of interest regarding previous discussion:
The moral argument for God
Why Does God Allow Evil?

The videos provided by miscreanity are quite good and I recommend people following this discussion watch them.

The first video states, "if God doesn't exist, then there is no 'evil'".

The point being claimed is that if the categorization of evil is open to differing opinions, then evil is not objective and thus doesn't exist. And that the only way evil can be objective is if there is a God to define evil.

For example, I can claim the SJWs are evil because they are creating a power vacuum of self-destruction. But since that outcome is a natural result of human nature, others might argue it is not evil, just natural.

Fundamentally the argument being made is that nature is subordinate to God. And underlying this is an emotional need of the believer that there is something noble or grand plan or heaven at the end of the rainbow and not just this callous nature of winners and losers.

And it is precisely that emotional need which I claim is the addiction and delusion that drives religion.

As I said, I posit I understand CoinCube's position better than he understands his own psychology. Because I had to reason my way out of that delusion and addiction. So I learned to analyze why I was drawn to it. It was a form of comfort, when I didn't like the natural results I was getting in my life. It can also be a way of handling guilt for being happy and successful when others are not.

The video then employs hyperbole to try to make its case. For example, it says that if evil is subjective then cannibalism is rational as a form of a strong animal. But a strong animal wouldn't eat its own, because it would incur mutual self-destruction. Lions don't eat other lions. Humans have big brains and understand they must work together to maximize their resilience.

Quote from: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7348#comment-1805660

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The road of life is rocky and you may stumble too; so while you point your finger, someone else is judging you.

Yes, but that fails to concern me. Judgment is necessary.

For evil to triumph it suffices that good men do nothing. For evil ideas like totalitarian collectivism to triumph, it suffices for nobody to point out that left politics is morally imbecilic and leads to mass death whenever it is seriously applied.

When I eat an animal, it is not a sophont that suffers. (This is why Im careful about possible borderline cases like dolphins, elephants, and cephalopods.) Jeffs politics, on the other hand, are a royal road to the worst evils in human history, sophont suffering and death on a scale that would have been unimaginable before Marxism reached its full, hideous, and inevitable flowering.

Dont try to tell me these things are equivalent.

Then the video goes into more simplistic nonsense about how evil wells up from inside of us and this is what causes wars. Whereas, real evil such as SJWs hating nature and wanting to create utopia is what causes power vacuums that lead to wars. The problem isn't due to that the evil spontaneously welled up, but that the SJW doesn't understand his/her own mistake about reality.

It claims that suffering (i.e. winners and losers) is necessary to have a relationship with God, when there is a simpler reason it is necessary because winners need to be rewarded and losers need to be penalized so that nature anneals to fitness and resilience.

The video then spirals off into how we can't use our big brains to learn, adapt, and become more resilient, and instead we need to be dependent on God and accept our failure as an offering to God (very pagan I say). It is just the pagan ritual sacrifices reconstituted in a slightly obfuscated meme.

The video then goes into selfishness as being evil. Just as how the capitalist does not have constant marginal utility of wealth (i.e. the more wealth they have, the less rapidly they can grow the wealth and the more difficult it becomes to defend the wealth), selfishness is rational only to the point where it is irrational. There is a natural balance and our big brains can compute this without any need for God to tell us to be unselfish.

Quote from: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7348#comment-1805530

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Yes, sell software. For money.

Savor the irony. The left-winger urges selfishness; the libertarian insists on doing what is best for civilization as a whole even though it costs him hardship.

The full subtlety of this lesson will, of course, be lost on the left-winger, because like all left-wingers) he is necessarily a moral imbecile not even capable of understanding the actual consequences of his own premises, let alone the libertarians.

Btw, when I was attempting to be a born-again Christian, I would reason to myself that if I didn't have to trust an unfalsifiable God, then there would be no risk in being a God believer and thus no reward should be expected in the absence of risk. Thus for reward to exist, I reasoned risk had to be present. That for me was more rational argument than the one being presented above. Nevertheless, I have decided it isn't rational because we don't prove an affirmative with a negative. An incalculable and inestimable risk is never a reasonable reward, i.e. the commensurate reward is indeterminate.