Well said, yes. I know plenty of people who don’t like the term “atheist” because it’s such a declarative line in the sand, and has the flavor of anti-religion, whereas they simply just don’t care; their parents didn’t care, they never went to church (except maybe on Christmas Eve) and religion has just never been a thing for them or their family.
I grew up Methodist, and was told that God was literally a bearded man in the sky by my Sunday School teachers, and that he’d physically sired Jesus, and that there was also the Holy Ghost running around, whatever that was. I was expected to take all of that at face value, whereas I was also told that Catholics were strange and wrong because they worshipped Mary.
I have friends who grew up Catholic or Protestant who now believe that the universe itself is just a synonym for God, or that love and God are the same thing. I don’t think either one would consider themselves an atheist, nor someone who’s created their own religion.
It doesn’t mock the concept of the park at all - it mocks a thousand underpinnings of Western society. How many stories have incest as a central theme? Star Wars and Tristan and Isolde are but two recent examples. Try to find a mythology without it. To say this billboard upends anything is grossly, malignantly ignorant.
You religious folks get special treatment from the government because you think a thing.
That’s patently untrue. Churches get tax breaks because they (are supposed to) engage in charitable works and service to the community. Wether or not they do, and the benefit of that service on a church-by-church basis is debatable.
So don’t give them all tax exemption by default. If I setup “LDoBe Charity House for Hot Single Mothers” I wouldn’t get automatic tax breaks with zero scrutiny and no audits by the IRS ever, unlike 1st Presbyterian Church of Churchology down the street.
Why do I have to prove I’m actually helping hot single mothers to get my tax breaks, when all the churches have to do is say “We like Jesus.”
No.
And while I’ve re-read your discussion with @LDoBe, I still think you’ve never stated clearly why you think that would follow from the first statement. I do have a vague idea based on what I’ve heard other people say before, but you shouldn’t trust me, because it’s hard to correctly reproduce complex arguments that I disagree with on a fundamental level.
I’m probably a compatibilist as described by @nemomen’s link, but I’m not sure. I stopped reading that document after two pages of dense philosophical prose based on ill-defined terms that are completely meaningless in my world-view.
I’m not quite sure how I should answer that question. The thing is, I do not thing the concept of “free will”, or the concept of “no free will” make any logical sense whatsoever.
@nemomen’s link starts by defining Free Will as “the unique ability of persons to exercise control over
their conduct in the manner necessary for moral responsibility”, which makes the whole thing go the other way. I can just come up with any definition of who I hold morally responsible, and then, those people have free will even in a perfectly deterministic universe, by definition. So, not an illogical definition, but a singularly useless one.
Most other definitions I’ve heard down boil down to “a person has a choice”, or “a person could have decided otherwise”.
Well, duh. Of course a person has a choice, the question is how that choice is made! I feel this definition of Free Will somehow presupposes that there is me, who wants to do something and therefore decides to do something, and ME, who wants to want something else and therefore decides to want something else. That doesn’t make any sense to me.
All decisions I’ve ever made in my life where either random, or I’ve had reasons. Reasons might have been rational reasons, or they might have been conscious or unconscious feelings. Sometimes I’ll think “this is what I want”, and sometimes I think “this is what I want because X and Y”. And sometimes I pick at random, and later discover that my gut feeling had (good or bad) reasons. How would I test whether I have “free will”? I can’t just go and want something I don’t want. If I change my decision, that will be because I wanted to prove I have free will.
I haven’t consciously used my materialist beliefs to come to this conclusion, so I believe I would argue the same way if I believed in God. But I might have missed an assumption somewhere.
Now, assuming that Free Will makes no sense, it follows that I will just define responsibility and or culpability in ways that do not explicitly require a concept of Free Will.
Culpability makes sense as an intuitive concept - I will feel angry at someone when they do something wrong, I do not need philosophy to do that.
Culpability makes sense as a practical concept: blaming people is a mechanism for giving them an extra reason to change their behaviour.
As for the Catholics, the Catholic catechism states that those things, just like atheism, are sins against the first commandment. They’ll get weighed against your other sins and virtues, but that doesn’t [necessarily] mean you’re damned.
In Austria, “agnostic” is a popular self-label for “I don’t care, and we can’t prove or disprove it anyway”.
Personally, I’m not willing to back down from my position of atheism. I think that the statement “I believe there is a God, He loves us and has created this beautiful universe for us” is no more benign, friendly or tolerant than “I believe there is no God. This beautiful universe exists for no purpose whatsoever. We humans can choose to enjoy it together”. And as long as people feel compelled to sugar-coat their atheistic beliefs, there is something seriously wrong.
Not so patently. Apparently, a nonreligious organisation does not automatically get the same tax breaks. So, either churches are assumed to be more charitable than nonreligious organisation by default, or spreading a religion is interpreted as a service to the community, while spreading irreligion is not. Either way, I feel discriminated against.
When was the last time the Catholic Church was audited? Is it never? Or merely rarely, even though we know for a fact that it’s administration is deeply involved in covering up felonies.
Now let’s compare that with Planned Parenthood, who are constantly under investigation in multiple states year-round, with no evidence of legal shenanigans.
Tell me again how religious organizations aren’t being treated with special privilege?
[quote=“IRS”]
Special Rules Limiting IRS Authority to Audit a Church
Tax Inquiries and Examinations of Churches
Congress has imposed special limitations, found in section 7611 of the Internal Revenue Code, on how and when the IRS may conduct civil tax inquiries and examinations of churches. The IRS may begin a church tax inquiry only if an appropriate high-level Treasury official reasonably believes, on the basis of facts and circumstances recorded in writing, that an organization claiming to be a church or convention or association of churches may not qualify for exemption, may be carrying on an unrelated trade or business (within the meaning of IRC § 513), may otherwise be engaged in taxable activities or may have entered into an IRC § 4958 excess benefit transaction with a disqualified person.[/quote]
Nope.
Churches do not have to have an actual charitable purpose other than just being a church, nor do they need to perform actual charitable works or community service. Churches don’t even have to apply for a 501(c)3. Instead, they are automatically presumed to be tax exempt, because they are churches. They can apply for a 501(c)3 if they really want to, but they don’t have to. Religions get special treatment that non-religious charities do not.
To be fair, the Noah’s Ark tale is probably one of the older ones still told. Perhaps the ones since then just took the example? The Brothers Grimm might fit right in, for instance…
Of course it mocks the Ark Park. Generally speaking, the Christians who support this park believe the park to be a celebration of their religion, a religion they hold to be one of moral superiority, under the edicts of of a benevolent god. The billboard, with brilliant brevity, succinctly highlights the vacuity of that position. Instead of a monument to the wonders of their god and their moral superiority as adherents, the billboard shows the park to be a monument to mass murder and to sexual relations they condemn in modern life.
The cognitive dissonance is such that even you are trying to deny the obvious fact that this does mock the park.
I think talking about “the entity with the closest causal involvement” is a nice neutral way to describe culpability. But let me push a little.
Imagine that you go to the zoo and, while you are there, someone releases a leopard which mauls you. The leopard is the last entity involved, but I think we would generally agree that it was the human who was culpable.
The difference, I think is that we instinctively believe (rightly from my point of view) that animals are simply objects of their natures, but humans are somehow self-determining.
It is very difficult to not think like this. For example you speak of being “strongly influenced” but this still seems to imply that the human has the final say – as if, after all is said and done, he or she might choose against the forces driving this way and that. But in a deterministic world, aren’t people “wholly influenced” or simply “programmed”? Isn’t anything else an illusion?
I think that test question is good one and is a hard one for me to answer. I’m pretty convinced that proper free-will means incompatibilism – an degree of real self-causation. But what would that look like? How can it be when we generally act according to instinct or reason? All I can suggest is that a free will moment would involve a situation where there are reasons on both sides of a choice and you actually have to give one of them greater weight. But wouldn’t that giving itself come from some reason – and thus back to determinism? Not if free-will is real.
True. What I’m trying to suggest is that the intuition is true and that the alternative is kind of unliveable – which is why atheists keep talking as if humans should be held accountable even though they believe humans are just machines.
Yes, though it’s also kind of cruel and manipulative if they are really just victims. Of course nobody could blame you for being cruel and manipulative because…
By the way, zathras, I keep wanting to say. Thanks for sending us all that luggage
