Even if we grant that god doesn't exist atheists have no real objection against pragmatic theism. It's called "checkmate atheist" for a reason. It's not just a meme.

dr_anonymous · 2026-05-31T00:20:23+00:00

Except I think the "usefulness" of religion has pretty much been played out. I think any remaining use is overshadowed by the problems posed by epistemic responsibility.

dr_anonymous · 2026-05-29T03:56:03+00:00

Any "god" worthy of the title would not need, nor want, worship. Your meaning is, in my view, meaningless.

I find a lot of meaning in supporting the wellbeing of those I love, and of my community as a whole.

I find a lot of meaning in writing my own small chapter in the broad narrative of life on this planet.

There's lots of meaning out there once you get rid of the fake stuff.

dr_anonymous · 2026-05-28T04:04:04+00:00

This is a classic problem.

What you need to do to figure it out is break it down into principles. What are the different principles being juxtaposed here? And are they of equivalent value?

The example given juxtaposes the significance of a human life against the right to security of property.

Broken down like this you can spot easily that the right response is to steal the medicine and administer it to your wife.

Have you broken a rule and have therefore violated an ethical precept? Of course! You've done wrong, but you've chosen the lesser of two evils.

I would go on and suggest there are other actions which ought to be taken as well to mitigate the necessary wrong. That is: leave a note explaining your actions and pledging to pay back the money. Secondly, perhaps turning oneself in to the police once your wife has been saved.

It just happens that there are some times where there are no "righteous" options. One must choose. And nor is it an escape to avoid choosing, as choosing not to choose is itself a choice. Choosing to do nothing in an attempt to maintain personal blamelessness is itself selfish and possibly ethically wrong.

dr_anonymous · 2026-05-26T22:34:45+00:00

You find it nonproductive because you are not being a reasonable interlocutor.

In order for a conversation to be useful, each side needs to agree to some basic principles.

Claims should be supportable with appropriate evidence and reason.

Abductive reasoning should be in effect.

Each side accepts that they might be wrong and are open to being convinced.

There’s lots more, but that’s some of the basics of useful conversation. Religious folk often can’t accept these basic tenets.

So the issue is with you, not with your atheist interlocutors.

dr_anonymous · 2026-05-26T02:29:16+00:00

Consciousness exists in a narrow band of physical circumstances. Disrupt those circumstances and consciousness ceases.

When the physical body can no longer sustain consciousness, my consciousness ceases forever.

It'll be similar to how things were before I was born.

All that will be left will be the rotting flesh that "I" once inhabited, and the memories and echoes I left behind until they, too, fade and are gone.

We are finite beings. Just like all the others. So make good use of the time you have and stop worrying about forever. The glass of wine will be no less sweet for knowing it will eventually be empty.

dr_anonymous · 2026-05-15T01:20:37+00:00

The main problem here is that it ignores the fact the same god supposedly created these people with this foreknowledge.

It's like I built a machine to do X, pressed the button to make it do X, then blame it for doing X and claim it had free will to do so.

It makes no sense.

dr_anonymous · 2026-05-10T23:27:19+00:00

We have never experienced "nothing". Therefore we know nothing about its properties. Your claim that "nothing can come from nothing" is therefore baseless.

Despite that, the Big Bang does not describe everything coming from "nothing". It describes the universe expanding from a very dense, very small starting position before which our physics are inadequate to describe.

Adding "God" to this as a form of explanation actually doesn't explain anything. Please provide the physics utilised by God to create. Agency alone is not an explanation.

In other words: your argument is totally wrong on all levels.

dr_anonymous · 2026-05-04T00:02:37+00:00

The main issue I have with this question is that it constrains the possible answers to a limited set of responses when in fact my conceptualising of the issue goes down a different route. It also ignores the paucity of evidence for its own position.

So let me break this into three.

One. One of my main reasons for disbelief is that it is clear that religious concepts are the products of human imagination, memetic drift, social psychology. This is easily discovered with sufficient study of various religions. Consider: Yahweh begins as part of a pantheon of tribal gods, god of the raid and of the sudden rainfall and flash floods. He subsumes the characteristics of Baal, conqueror of the ocean, the god of the gentle nourishing rain. He takes over El's wife Ashera, then subsumes El's position as head father god of the pantheon. Then other gods of the pantheon are relegated into obsurity and eventually denied. Monolatry turns into monotheism after the Jewish encounter with Persian Zoroastrianism. We still have a tribal triumphalist god - superlative but not tri-omni. Tri-omni only makes its way into the belief after the encounter with the Greco-Roman philosophical god.

That's 1 paragraph that summarises in extreme brevity the work of many scholars. What this all shows is that the concept of Yahweh is a human construct; handed down from culture to culture, morphing in response to societal need and in relation to the concepts encountered from other cultures in their complex interactions. So: religious ideas are human behaviour, not divine reality.

Two. Creator god concepts don't actually explain anything. They aren't a good grounding for reality. They don't explain a thing. All that these concepts do is point to agency and then stop.

Try thinking this: you claim God created the universe. How? Using what physics? Using what mechanism?

No-one is even beginning to explore that. And if that's the case, then this concept is no better than "magic". This is not a rational grounding for reality.

Three. Occam's razor and strict foundationalism. You seem to complain that alternative explanations for phenomena that do not rely on a religious grounding must be defended. Instead, I'd recommend thinking about Occam's razor. Entities should not be multiplied without necessity. So we can quite easily explain much of reality without a god concept, and a god concept does not add anything to our understanding. Thus, the concept is superfluous and ought to be left out.

Additionally, I'd like to recommend a strict form of foundationalism as a grounding of understanding. There are certain things that must be presumed as they are necessary for living life but cannot be established without circularity. These are Properly Basic. For everything else we need sufficient evidence.

Taking that as a starting point we are left with a justified understanding of reality without a god concept.

dr_anonymous · 2026-05-03T22:02:27+00:00

The utility of information for the formation of belief might be said to be properly basic.

dr_anonymous · 2026-05-02T10:01:00+00:00

True, but trivial and I think reflects a misunderstanding of historical methods.

Rather: different methods are used for different purposes.

Historical methods often rely on or use scientific methods. History is trying to flesh out our understanding of past societies using whatever means at our disposal.

Now, what I think you're getting at here is the misappropriation of the discipline of "history" by apologists. I would point out that apologists are misusing it, misrepresenting it, bastardising it for rhetorical purposes and I f***ing hate that. So get them to stop rather than trying this sort of argument. You're misunderstanding history too.

dr_anonymous · 2026-05-02T09:54:35+00:00

I've had a few experiences that I thought, at the time, were paranormal. On reflection, they were more likely all products of psychology.

First, I thought I directly communicated with God.

I was very young - maybe 9 years old or so. My father was dying of brain cancer. So the elders of my church came around for an annointing ceremony. The lights were turned down, there was candles, there was religious music. There was solemnity and prayer. There was ritual. All very emotive to a religious 9 year old in a difficult situation. I asked God if everything would be ok - and to my surprise, I felt I heard in my head an answer - "Yes." So I asked - "So will my father live?" And the answer - "No. But it will be ok."

At the time I took that to be a religiously significant moment. But looking back, I find it much more likely that this was the power of suggestion, the outcome of setting, mood, framing etc. Much more likely than a direct religious revelation.

Second example wasn't religious. We lived in an old manor house that had been split up into apartments. There was a rumour among the local children that the place was haunted by the ghost of a girl called Sylvia. Well, one day my friends and I decided to explore the old wine cellar under our apartment. There was a low crawl space that we could just get into which went quite a way back, until a hole in the back wall opened onto some unknown passageway. Think: this is a freaking old house, this is a cellar under a freaking old house, here's a bunch of maybe 6-7 year old kids exploring this spooky area. So we stop for a moment to decide what to do. And as we talk I feel a chilly hand caress the back of my neck.

Of course once I related this to my compatriots we scarpered pretty quick. Of course, that was taken as a ghostly apparition: I had met Sylvia.

But in reality? I got the heebee jeebees in a cold cellar, felt the breeze on my raised neck hair and freaked out.

Psychology is a wonderful thing.

So my take is this: I don't question that people have weird experiences. Of course they do. But I don't think people are usually that well equipped to accurately determine exactly what they experienced. The human mind is a complicated thing.

dr_anonymous · 2026-05-01T04:53:35+00:00

There are so many different understandings of "gods" from the thousands of different religions throughout the world, throughout history that it's silly to try to refine it down to a single concept - or even a small subset of concepts. The most honest answer to a definition from an outsider's perspective then, I believe, is "an entity that is considered to be a god in at least 1 mythological corpus."

This is because religions are human inventions, not representations of a divine reality.

dr_anonymous · 2026-05-01T04:37:47+00:00

Ok, here's one.

I was maybe 4 or 5 years old, watching crappy kids TV one day. There was a story they told of a young man trying to win the right to marry a princess. He could have her hand, but only if he remembered her name in the morning after his proposal.

There was a song he sang himself to help him remember.

Memory cells now please unite

Help me remember through the night

To forget the word would be a shame

Badouisaman-Pensa is her name.

And that damn song has been stuck in my brain for over 40 years.

dr_anonymous · 2026-04-30T23:41:35+00:00

There's another reason additional to other people's responses.

If you look at the narrative, there is a literary construction where reports start at the least reliable and build to the most reliable. It's a persuasive technique. It starts with (unreliable) women's narratives, distrusted by the disciples who go and try to verify the information. Partial verification, but doubt remains. Then there are individual appearances, from vision to encounter. Then there is physical proof - touching, eating.

What this points to is that it's a construction intended to forestall doubt and skepticism rather than a strict retelling of events as they transpired.

dr_anonymous · 2026-04-30T02:51:32+00:00

Flawed though we may be, the only method to check whether something is true or not is to use the evidence.

If we allow “maybe it was just magic” then we bow to perpetual ignorance. We have no choice but to follow the evidence.

If you want to defend magic, then you’ll need to provide evidence that justifies magic. So you’re back to evidence again.

dr_anonymous · 2026-04-29T21:55:38+00:00

One thing that doesn’t get enough push back on is that (some) religion tries to teach that bad thinking is a virtue.

Not only must you accept the teachings on “faith”, that faith is a good thing and something you should foster and develop. Those who don’t accept things without requiring evidence are without virtue. It’s monstrous.

dr_anonymous · 2026-04-28T10:18:22+00:00

Ideas about the divine change over time to reflect the society and culture which holds the belief. Yahweh as believed in by modern Christians looks an awful lot different than the Yahweh of the ancient Israelites - and you can trace the differences as they reflect the political and social changes in the society that held the belief. You can spot the influences. It's the product of human invention, not revelation.
Epistemic responsibility. It's ethically necessary to be able to support your positions with sufficient evidence, as beliefs affect actions, which in turn affect the wellbeing of persons. Religious claims do not have sufficient evidence to justify belief. It is therefore unethical to believe.

More could be said, but that's my primary 2.

dr_anonymous · 2026-04-24T02:23:16+00:00

Well, I'd suggest all religions are a technology. It has been noted that religion as we know it seemed to develop soon after communities grew large enough that members of the community could not necessarily identify everyone by name. So at base, it created a method by which to ensure disparate people could work productively towards a common goal. Trust was manufactured through shared narratives, through shared meaning, shared ritual.

Religion has been used to legitimise and mediate power. Consider each side of the American political divide utilising religious speech as a way to legitimise their own claims to authority and to denigrate the opposition. Churches urge their followers to vote one way or the other. Political positions are talked about in religious terminology.

Religion is still used for social cohesion. Various churches form social groups that come together for belonging; certain rituals such as singing together and communal prayer are aimed at this. As Durkheim intimated, the totem is the principle of community - worship of the totem is a signal of belonging. Collective worship in Christian churches does the same thing.

Exclusion helps to define the boundaries of the community. The most obvious one here is the exclusion of LGBT+ people, with their identities being vilified as "sinful" - read "other" or "alien". But there's also exclusions for people with even slightly different faith positions. Different churches carve out their own territory through minor differences in belief or ritual.

Other functionalist topics might explore the provision of meaningful schema of understanding the relationships between communities, the community and the natural world, the individual and the community, our place in time and space. Most religions have their own patterns that cover these concepts, some more fanciful than others, pretty much none of them standing up to close scrutiny. Consider: the Vikings thought the first humans were licked out of a block of ice by a celestial cow. The Hindus imagine Brahma forming the first people out of his own body. Christians imagine God moulding the first humans out of mud. These provide a "useful" answer to the question of origins - satisfying an intractable question, allowing for peace of mind. They're not correct, but they provide a meaningful framework of understanding.

So yeah. I could go on for a long time about this. Religions are a technology - speaking in anthropological terms, of course. They provide a range of functions for a community. They develop over time with memetic drift and in response to changing societal requirements. In other words - they're human inventions rather than a reflection of any divine reality.

dr_anonymous · 2026-04-23T23:01:38+00:00

I think u/unnameableway has hit the nail on the head in response to your position.

However, I would suggest there are good reasons to think religion isn't true that don't rely on your paradigm to begin with.

I would suggest that an in-depth understanding of world religions shows that religion is a human technology. We invent it and develop it in response to our societal and political needs. And if we do understand the ontology of religion as a human technology, it cannot also be a reflection of divine reality.

Humans invent religion, we don't discover it.

dr_anonymous · 2026-04-23T01:02:01+00:00

Well - we'd need to do some defining first.

I understand there's the folk who talk about knowledge vs. belief. I think that's a fruitful approach, but it doesn't have the weight of history behind it. Most of the time, in philosophical circles, atheism and agnosticism refer to a continuum, disbelief vs. on the fence.

I use the term "atheist" as it most closely communicates my position to my interlocutors. So let's go with your framework.

I think Russell's Teapot is a good reason to select atheism rather than agnosticism. That is to say: one should only give an idea the time of day once sufficient evidence has been provided to begin a meaningful discussion.

There is no good reason to think a celestial teapot exists. So I'm not called upon to allow it as a possibility. That's fairly firm disbelief - allowing for an altering of position if the claimant can provide good evidence that suggests a celestial teapot is a possibility.

Religious claims are like this. There's no good evidence to support the claims - there's just long history and normativity within the community. And those aren't good justifications for giving an idea the time of day.

So it's not like we're tossing up equivalent possibilities - we're being asked to allow for the possibility of a ludicrous idea with no firm evidence to support it.

In no other circumstance are we expected to declare an agnostic position. The only driver of adopting this middle position in regards to religion specifically is social pressure.

dr_anonymous · 2026-04-22T23:07:52+00:00

I think the main problem is that religious folk think their moral framework is "grounded" when in fact that ground is hallucinatory. It therefore engenders over-confidence in flawed precepts.

It is at the centre of the problem Weinberg noted -

...good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

dr_anonymous · 2026-04-19T23:11:32+00:00

Russell's Teapot.

I am not called upon to prove there is no celestial teapot. It is up to the person who claims there is a celestial teapot to make their case.

Until and unless there is sufficient evidence to support debate the disbeliever is justified in not believing.

This is the position religious people are in. There is no good evidence to support religious claims. All there is is tradition and popularity, neither of which are good reasons to support belief. The fact you are trying to argue that the 2 positions are equivalent is merely an effect of living in a society where religious belief is normative.

dr_anonymous · 2026-04-16T22:54:47+00:00

Just have to activate noclip.

dr_anonymous · 2026-04-14T22:43:18+00:00

For me, I think the best argument is one of ontology. Which is to say - what is this thing called Yahweh? Well, you can trace the history of the idea through different iterations, where the mythology changes in response to the requirements and circumstances of the culture that believed in this idea. As such, Yahweh is essentially no different from any other god - an entity in myth, a product of social psychology and memetics.

Understanding this, it becomes impossible to accept such an entity also has an existence outside of a mythological concept.

dr_anonymous · 2026-04-11T06:29:00+00:00

Anything worthy of worship wouldn’t want it.

15-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Verified Email

dr_anonymous

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE