coffee_enjoyer
☕️
No bio...
User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
If the whole human endeavor disappears without a trace, leaving no influence, and no one remembers them, then by definition it has no impact or significance on the universe. In human life, when something has no greater significance, like we make a medicine that was ineffective or we build a building that collapses, we say it was meaningless. If I give someone a kidney but they die immediately, it had no greater significance. In other words, it didn’t matter.
If I will die, and every human will die, then what I do has no greater significance because it is only temporarily affecting things that will disappear shortly. Those “good feelings” I create in others will cease to matter one day, so what were they for? It’s almost the same thing as if I do heroin and then face withdrawals — temporary happiness that doesn’t matter. What’s more, my moral intuitions have no greater purpose and are just an accident. This we know from science. So I have no need to listen to my moral impulse and can completely ignore it for my own gain, as if I’m playing GTA. The only duty remaining is to feel good, because only pleasure is real. If someone tries to shame me (which feels bad), I can pretend that he is wrong and that I am right. We already have humans doing this today in fact!
It’s a worldview that can’t help but breed dysfunction if you actually dwell on it. Like yeah, you can ignore the atheistic truth, but then you might as well develop some theistic view for fun. An atheistic man who confronts the ultimate purpose of things head on would say: “I exist as an accident, there is no greater significance to morality, morality is an accidental instinct that I can ignore, and I need not care about humankind because I won’t be judged for it.”
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
You’ve already brainwashed yourself into believing that “human flourishing” matters, when objectively it does not as all of humanity will die and be forgotten — mere blip on the timeline, an accident, a nanosecond to eternity’s year. So I’m asserting that there is a superior way for you to brainwash yourself for maximal happiness.
When you imagine the perfect Father-Son relationship, is it one of smothering? If not, then you haven’t even succeeded in imagining a perfectly loving deity, let alone trying out belief. When you imagine perfect justice, do you imagine shackles? If not, you haven’t succeeded in creating in your mind the image of a perfectly just creator. By definition, imagining a perfectly loving deity can’t make you feel smothered. It would make you feel “loved such that there is no greater experience of love”, that’s what perfect means.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
For one, there’s consequences for your life as a whole, so you’re never left without motivation and purpose, which humans require constantly given our evolution. God is a “final consequence” that makes sense for every human; if you remember doing well in school and showing a parent, or getting the praise of a teacher you admire, God is constructed as a maximization of these experiences. He’s Parent/Mentor but also King (powerful and grand) and Judge (righteous, truthful). So you are always motivated to do your best because you will answer to the greatest possible human (or human-like being, more precisely). I’m not saying here that “the God in the Bible is all-loving”, I don’t care about that, I am saying “if you define for yourself that God is the most loving and just you can conceive”, that is taking full advantage of your mind. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more satisfying basis for a teleology. You can wake up every day and examine all of existence and be happy, not confused. It’s a good basic source code.
The other benefit is prayer, common to so many religions, because humans are social. Being able to always communicate with this maximal Being aids happiness and motivation. I mean, if you’re choosing what to believe, what is better than believing in this? Human psychology shows that simply observing something beautiful is beneficial to mood. And so if we’re deciding on the best teleology, certainly willing ourselves to believe in the most beautiful Being/World is the best thing to do before we die. The act of praising God is the act of organizing our mind around our best memories. Which is gratitude training.
Then I would just say, the fact that monotheism expanded so well in humanity’s most competitive era is probably good proof that it is useful. And the 2500 years of poetry and stories on God is beneficial simply because now you have libraries upon libraries to bolster your teleology. Whereas thinking atheists just have Dawkins, Hitchens, maybe some Sam Harris, Rick and Morty…
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
In the absence of objective morality, or in other words, a final judgment, then a thinking person would not “prefer to follow rules”. Why would they? They would prefer to feel good, right? What would be the point of feeling worse, if there’s no reason to? They would not conclude that following the rules leads to feeling good, because every time they have the choice of either following the rules or feeling good, they would choose feeling good. To prioritize rules over feeling good, following the rules must have existential importance. Otherwise what would be the purpose of following the rules?
But, perhaps an atheist can will himself to believe that following the rules actually does have existential importance. I intuit that you might have done this, as you go immediately to “lead to maximal flourishment of humanity”. (There is no reason to care about this in atheism, because it doesn’t matter. It feels good to give to someone you like, due to evolutionary prosociality, but it does not feel good to construct rigid systems of maximal flourishment of humanity, which is artificial.) I suppose I agree an atheist can have this kind of faith. But at that point, they might as well maximize the benefit of faith by believing in a Just and Loving God.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
If you’re just assenting to memetic indoctrination, you’re halfway to theism already, because our culture is still upheld by the residue of religion. A “thinking atheist” would not simply do what others tell him. That’s my point.
If it feels good to do good things, I think you’ll find that people choose the goodest feelings over rational analysis. This leads to virtue signaling, people dumping money into failed charitable projects, etc.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
A thinking Christian would consult the Gospel as a guide, where he would find that God actually wants us to celebrate and be happy in honor of his glory, as well as to reduce the suffering of others. But a more general point can be made. Can we devise a teleology where purpose and motivation are maximized? Such that a person dwelling on the purpose of things and the nature of life can actually be motivated toward bettering the world, and not say to himself “well I will be dead so who cares”? Yes, we can. The easiest way is to believe in a loving judge, something shared broadly among theistic religions. Another would be a reward or punishment cycle based on deeds, which is the karmic wheel.
In the theist worldview, while the material world is fleeting, human action is immensely important — every action will be accounted for. Therefore there is motivation to behave according to a standard.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
What I am getting at is that the things which we value most in life — betterment of things, morality — do not seem to value in a thinking atheist worldview. If a thinking atheist wakes up every morning to dwell on the nature of life, there is no reason for him to pursue betterment or morality. A theist who believes in a Loving Judge, however, will be motivated toward betterment and morality. In a hedonic philosophy, if feeling good is the only motivator, then we can do things like ignoring guilt to pursue more pleasure. It becomes very easy to lie to others to obtain what we want. In Abrahamic religion, the very foundation of human life is a repudiation of this temptation — man tried hiding from God only to be discovered, naked.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
We say that something matters because of its consequences. “Life matters” is obvious from the standpoint of maximizing pleasure — pleasure is real, I like to feel good, this is obvious. What’s not obvious is why a thinking atheist should care about such things as:
-
the lives and happiness of others
-
longterm betterment of humanity
-
improvement in any way that does not lead to more pleasure
-
society at large
-
doing anything “good”
-
“important” issues in politics and culture
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
Why would I care about how I make theists look? If nice Christians were all it took to convert then everyone in Amish country would be Anabaptist. In any case I am not trying to persuade someone to theism but explore how “thinking atheism” is inherently non-motivating
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
Would you play a sandbox game if what you made is destroyed, and in fact you have no memory of ever having played the game? Well, maybe you would play it to pass the time. Is this how you see life, though? If you see life as a way to pass the time, then my thesis that conscious atheism prevents motivation and purpose would be correct.
choosing values in this world for no other reason but their own sake
Surely you can see how I accuse atheists of not thinking about the consequences of their belief fully. What is the “inherent value” of something that will be destroyed and forgotten, never to be seen or remembered, for all intents and purposes being as if it never existed? There will be no observer, no judge, no human, no memory, no trace. Which value is “inherent” yet becomes valueless and forgotten? If there is a value underlying it, that’s very close to theism, and I would just call if God. If there is no underlying value, then it becomes valueless.
It seems to me, and again I’m just not persuaded by the arguments I’ve read so far (but perhaps I need to reread them), that the way out is necessarily that the atheist creates his own faith — the same process as theism, no more “realistic” — or he falls into hedonism, where the only value is what feels good. If the only value is what feels good, this results in humans lying to themselves and others to obtain what feels good, and ignoring anything that’s for a longterm social good. It means there’s no purpose in any moral training, because we’re only going to do what feels good. And it means ignoring the suffering of others because by ignoring if I feel good.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
Because ultimately all of humanity will be forgotten, meaning what happens has no greater significance, and when you die what you did will not matter, as you will cease existing. If humanity is a temporary blip in eternity, human actions do not matter in the grand scheme of things. Thus, when dwelling on the grand scheme of things, you cannot sincerely maintain motivation and purpose.
An atheist can believe that some things are more morally right than others
Can they do this while dwelling on the facts of their worldview? My point is more specifically that while an atheist may perform moral judgment in a distracted sense, being a social organism in a greater whole and internalizing moral judgment as such, their morality is inconsistent with dwelling on their worldview and actually deeply considering its consequences. This is in sharp contrast to theism, where continuing to dwell on one’s worldview is sought out and leads to more motivation and moral action.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
“Because it matters now” and “because current life matters” begs the question. I can ignore human suffering and focus on my own pleasure, and then I will have more pleasure, and there will be no consequences because we will all die and be forgotten. And I feel no guilt or shame, because I am doing what I want to do.
That is a good question: why do palliative care to a child with cancer? I mean, I can completely ignore that whole cohort of humans, and be content with my own pleasure. Then that cancer patient will be dead and it will be like they never existed. There is no one to judge me, so why bother? And if someone else judges me, again I can ignore them. If they press on, I can lie to obtain their social validation. This is where thinking atheism takes us IMO. Life becomes like a video game, where people make alliances and then break them for fun. And IMO, atheists find this repugnant and so develop their own faith — disorganized and ad hoc, but of the same quality as theists.
Another question is why we would care about creating new human life. We can take all those resources and make our lives as pleasant as possible, and then humans will cease to exist. But we would live like bachelors.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
I think this just moves the question down the line. Of what purpose is human flourishing? If flourishing is important because it makes humans happy, then happiness is the point. What is this thing that makes humans unhappy that they must do out of obligation, and what underpins it in the face of the inevitability of extinction of all humans across an infinite time span?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
All of those things require that you believe life has a purpose, or else completely ignore thinking about human life as a whole. A reasonable person does not spend a decade building a house that will be immediately destroyed, draw on a canvas that will be immediately incinerated, or donate a kidney to someone who is immediately going to die. Those endeavors must have a point. Can you explain why an atheist would spend time reducing suffering if none of it matters once all human life has passed away? And if there’s no moral reason to ease another’s suffering, because there is no actual moral judge and in any case no one cares about the moral failings of ancient Assyrians? You can get away with literally everything because you will die and it doesn’t matter.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
But I think you need to start from the presupposition that God is maximally loving as an unquestionable dogma. As this was the dogma of Christianity since its advent, pun intended. Lacan’s construction of post-modern God should be of little interest to us, because a “theist-by-faith” can simply say he is wrong by the very first assumption. Once you define God as loving dogmatically, there’s no room for criticizing God by saying he is confused, evil, etc. Now, I accept that there is room for arguing against the epistemic leap to a God who finds us special and listens to our plea — that this forms something of a special pleading fallacy. But that’s a separate argument.
The angle I am coming at is that in the everyday life of a Christian theist, or some portion thereof, there is a willful belief and anticipation that they will meet their Loving Father and creator at the end of their days, and tell Him all about their life — though He already knows — and all things will be accounted for and made sense of. The description in the Gospel is of a heaven like a mansion with many rooms, which Christ the Friend goes to prepare for us. Now, I am not interested (personally) in the argument for this from deduction. I am just interested in how, if someone assents to a belief in this, they can think about their life forever without ever losing motivation and good spirit. Are they “wrong”? Well, from the atheistic angle it appears that there is no such thing as wrong, that in fact there is no significance whatsoever to being right or wrong because there is no Final Accounting. But the theist can make sense and ponder his whole life and even the nature of life (within the realm of faith) and spend an eternity writing poetry about this. As such, atheism is more wrong than theism, because only theism can define “wrong” from a vantage point of significance.
Maybe another angle is to read your comment, which is logical and well-argued, and say (politely), “so what?” If you have argued against God, you have lost the argument because you have now entered a realm where “right” and “wrong” are undefined. It’s a null zone. Nothing has been solved because there is no Ultimate Solution.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
I want to resurrect a variant of an old question that has got me wondering again. Is it possible for an atheist to think deeply about life without losing motivation to live well?
It’s trite to phrase it like this, but the atheistic model still seems utterly devoid of motivation or purpose when you dwell on it. Obviously, if you don’t dwell on the facts of life, you can distract yourself with various concerns and pursuits. But what if you don’t distract yourself? Someone with a religious model involving a loving God can ponder his existence forever and be motivated and purpose-filled, provided that they forever presuppose a loving God as an article of faith. But I’m trying to envision an atheist pondering life while still maintaining motivation to live vibrantly and maximally. How do they do it, do they do it, or are they just distracting themselves?
Eg, “an atheist believes they need to make life count” —> count for what? Your life does not count, by your own definition. You will cease to exist, like the dinosaurs, who surely did not count. So why are you programming your own Operating System as a hobby? It doesn’t count! “But it makes me happy” —> drugs will surely make you more happy. Why not do them?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
If LGBT stuff were objectively a moral obligation, then yes. It would still depend on “conditions” though, right? Namely that someone from a very traditional social background is going to naturally be more stubborn to change than someone raised by a gay couple in NYC.
However I don’t think today’s LGBT issues are an example of something objectively moral. There are some interesting moral questions that are often ignored like —
-
Does extolling gay union reduce the social significance of heterosexual union? If so, then there are negative consequences, because a society needs to extol heterosexual marriage to operate peacefully and orderly, for the greater of the society
-
Is homosexuality “naturally” disgusting to heterosexuals? If so, you have to balance the desires of gays with the disgust of straights, because disgust is an inherently bad feeling.
-
How important is being sexually active to a gay person?
Out of curiosity, I tried to find out whether celibate gays were as happy as sexually active gays, and I couldn’t find any compelling research, but I did find this:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/soin.12154
The results show that religious affiliation is a significant predictor of LGBT individuals’ happiness. Surprisingly, no significant differences are found between mainline Protestants (whose church doctrine often accepts same‐sex relations) and evangelical Protestants (whose church doctrine often condemns same‐sex relations)
Also this
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10943-021-01289-4
Results of path analysis involving sexual minority participants (N = 1317) from diverse sociopolitical contexts revealed health outcomes to be associated with internalized homonegativity and the resolution of conflict between religious and sexual minority identities. Contrary to expectations, several markers of religiousness were not directly associated with either improved or worsened health outcomes for depression or anxiety. However, religious activity moderated the influence of internalized homonegativity (IH) on depression such that IH was less strongly related to depression among individuals who frequently attended religious services than among individuals who infrequently attended religious services. These findings have special salience for advancing a more accurate understanding of conservatively religious sexual minorities and directing culturally sensitive research, clinical services, and public policy.
Also this:
https://heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.journals/ilmed36§ion=7
Contrary to expectations, these differences were not associated with health differences in depression, anxiety, and social flourishing.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
To a degree the paradigms are similar, sure. Did you have an example in mind? If we’re talking about the morality of slavery, that’s kind of what happened — moral development determined it was immoral. But if we’re talking about, let’s say, the bombing of Hiroshima, the moral paradigm is informed by “what would the Japanese do to us?” and “what are the costs of invasion”. Then, if we’re talking about individual morality in everyday life, norms have to be considered because moral actions are usually costly… I would allege that at a certain threshold of students cheating in a university course (51%?), it becomes morally permissible to cheat because that has become a new norm.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
The autonomy I personally believe in, and which is probably unpopular, is an autonomy that is the result of efficient morality. A person who is free from addictions, vices, consumerism, and general poor habits has a substantive autonomy that allows him to pursue whatever great heights of life he wills to pursue. To get there, we should eliminate the evils of human life that take advantage of primitive animal instinct. (As such, gambling should be banned.) Now to answer your question specifically, yes in theory. We should reduce the autonomy of unwise and immoral people for their own good. The question of whether you can practically do this without risks is a separate question. I would point out that in the formative years of teens we eradicate autonomy, forcing them into a very specific weekday routine with courses they usually can’t pick. Then if they go to college they also lack autonomy. Then if they go to work, they lack autonomy. Civilized life is about lacking autonomy, or, another way of putting it, externalizing cognitive labor.
Let's suppose that we're talking about a decade. How much should we expect a person's morality to be "improved" in that time period
I don’t know if it’s a matter of expecting. If you know someone with anger issues who is actually consuming information and practicing whatever helps his issues, intuitively we know to give this person praise and not blame. If you take another person and they are laughing off the suggestion of helping their anger issues because they say it doesn’t matter, intuitively we know that this person deserves blame. Now applying this to historical figures, did the founding fathers laugh off the idea of black people being equal in the face of insurmountable evidence? Well, no. Such evidence wasn’t widespread or unanimous. But obviously in 1970, the evidence would be, and so blame is due. [ignore HBD for the sake of my example]
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
To a degree, yeah — wealth makes moral choices easier by reducing stressors and increasing time for contemplation. The way I see it, we we can only improve our moral behavior b by some x percent over some period of time y. The conditions are the base number that we start at, according to things like education, parents, genetics, and random experience. Someone who has a genetic propensity for alcoholism, as an example, should be held to a lower standard re: falling into addiction compared to someone whose genes make them sick from drinking. You don’t have to phrase it as “morals you can afford”. It’s a psychological fact that our willpower and growth are limited given a certain period of time. As in, you can’t master calculus in a week — the learning must take place over time.
I just added the word conditions to make a more general point. I think that’s essentially how people judge the morality of those around them in their own lives.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
I agree on your main point but I don’t agree with your characterization of Rufo’s argument. Rufo is trying to elevate the conversation to a deeper level of substance, and Robinson refuses to break from the realm of connotation. Being a racist is bad because being a racist is immoral, and Rufo is disputing the immorality of the founding fathers by reminding Robinson that the consensus at the time of Jefferson was that Blacks were inferior. We judge people morally based on whether they did morally better than expected in their conditions or milieu. We shouldn’t, for instance, declare MLK Jr evil on the whole just because he was a supporter of conversion therapy. If we held to a milieu-controlled standard we would have to declare that there is no moral man left, because we all fall short of perfection. How bad is it that we buy vanity products from companies that abuse workers? Or that we pollute the earth? Why would future generations find this forgivable, rather than the purchasing of already-enslaved people from an undeveloped part of the world during a time period where slavery was normalized and historically ubiquitous?
So I don’t think Rufo let anything slip. He explained his position not badly for the time allotted. Robinson is using lawyerly tricks to make Rufo look suspect to the ears of an untrained audience by refusing to charitably entertain Rufo’s nuance. And also, Rufo doesn’t believe that immorality (true racism) should never be cancellable. Rufo believes that the standard of cancellation is too low. It’s not as if Rufo is trying to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler or Mosley or someone who was genuinely more racist than their time period without ever having produced some balancing commensurate good to society. Good examples of what I mean by the latter are John Lennon (wife beater), Wagner, and Kanye West. We don’t cancel them because their good on the whole far outweighs their bad on the whole. I think this is genuinely how people see moral judgment in practice, rather than a less nuanced rules-based morality.
Re: prostitution, perhaps a general rule is that it’s much more difficult to argue against someone who has committed themselves to a general rule. Destiny can say “women should do what they want with their bodies if not harming others”, and then the opponent has to scour through psychological sciences and moral philosophy and the anecdota of history to adequately present the view that prostitution is bad for the sum good of society. Consider how much harder it is to argue against gambling than for it. To argue against gambling you have to have an understanding of addiction, genetic proclivities to addiction, the data on who gambles, and the adaptability of human happiness. To argue for gambling you just say “people should be allowed to do what they want unless harming someone”.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
We have a lot of shame today. There’s a lot of shame involving conformity to fashion, hairstyle, mannerisms, schooling, slang, and so on. Shaming is not wagging your finger and yelling “shame”, shaming is the negative side of every social judgment. You cannot be on the losing side of a social judgment without risking shame, that’s just what the emotion is. When a student does badly in school or gets a bad hairstyle, they are negatively socially evaluated by peers, and then they feel shame.
What we should obviously be doing, if we want to evolve as a people, is only shame people for moral things. This means we stop socially evaluating people for things that don’t matter in terms of morality, and only evaluate them on things which they have will over.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
I disagree with this conception of evil. Or rather I think there is a better conception available. IMO we want a formulation that answers “how do I feel about inexplicable suffering in a way that preserves an optimal state of mind, ie continues to encourage optimal behavior.” Just as an example, you want someone to pursue things which maximize happiness without ever being perturbed by the inevitability of random miseries, like the fact that his brother could have randomly been killed by a car, or his country could be affected by the plague. The best way to handle these random miseries is to not mind them, because you can do nothing to prevent them, or perhaps also to see them as metaphorical warning. This requires a simplified explanation of the world that answers why unfair evil occurs. If you say, “because evil is necessary”, this goes against the idea of a loving powerful God who created everything. If you say “evil balances good”, this disincentivizes the pursuit of Goodness. You want someone to continue to cling to the Good in spite of the fact that he could randomly die at any moment, and still believe God is Perfect despite the existence of evil.
I appreciate your responses a lot, they’re great.
I agree that humans can enjoy things and be motivated to enjoy things in the face of annihilation of the human race and a lack of objective judgment. I agree that humans will help others if it means they feel good. My disagreement is that things like the motivation to pursue the betterment of humanity and the amelioration of suffering and a general non-hedonic existence is greatly diminished in the atheist framework.
But maybe we should look at concrete examples. Let’s say two humans are deciding how to go about their career as doctors.
Theo believes that his conduct as a doctor will be judged by a powerful and important and loving Person. Theo believes this Person’s opinion of him is more important than any human being he knows. Theo loves this Person because this Person gave his life for him. As a result, Theo ignores the temptation to overcharge and over-medicate, he ignores the temptation to see too many patients to acquire money. The hospital’s management is upset with him; his coworkers are enjoying life more than him. But Theo believes that the Great Person is doubly proud of him for withstanding social pressure.
Athena believes that her conduct is never judged except by other people who are only privy to how she presents herself publicly. Athena believes that life is about enjoyment, that she will die and never live again, and that feeling good is the most important thing. She overcharges patients, she over-medicates, and she rushes appointments. She loves the praise she gets from her manager. If she ever feels guilty, she goes on social media and signals her virtue as a feminist doctor, and instantly she feels better. She knows that she can feel less guilty more effectively by ignoring the substance and focusing on appearances. A lot of people suffer because of her, but she can hide this from her mind easily, as the other people around her do.
We would certainly agree that Theo is greater than Athena here. I bet our disagreement solely lies in my description of Athena. I’m describing the worst possible atheist, or something. But I think my description is accurate for a “thinking atheist” who has plotted out all the consequences of her belief system. Theo has also plotted out the consequences of his belief system, and it leads to morality and a qualitatively different happiness predicated on human affection in the face of suffering. Perhaps there’s someone similar to Athena — let’s call him Athanasius — who believes that he must behave morally to better humanity. That would be an act of faith and does not follow from atheism. Athanasius is willing a new belief into existence in the same way Theo does. I would then just say that Athanasius should take a few more steps and try to imagine the most motivating belief system, and this would look awfully similar to theism — hell maybe he would develop something even better than religion.
More options
Context Copy link