Is Agnosticism Bad?

[emanhattan]

The real question is: is the natural actually unnatural. And it's unanswerable.

what a cool question!

[Philip K Dick]

spiritual beliefs cant be bad, rationalizing evil actions through beliefs is

good job this is a very valid statement everyone should read this so i am quoting it

at the risk of turning this into yet another debate thread i'm going to have to disagree with his statement. spiritual beliefs can often lead to people being indirectly hurt out of naive faith. for example, spiritual beliefs may cause someone to turn away from modern medicine in favor of healing through prayer, or thinking starving children need a holy book instead of food - and while they thought their intentions were good, people can easily end up dead because of them.

but theyre still just beliefs, and misleading/manipulative actions are what cause those beliefs. ergo the action is evil not the belief.

[Philip K Dick]

i just dont think religion is absolutely bad. sure it can be an excuse for people to justify stupid or arrogant ideas with no regard for modern culture/circumstance. but at the same time having faith in something can guide people with no other direction to having a better life.

spirituality can work as moral guidelines for some, or a crutch for others. all the same its still a matter of how you interpret and act on the basis of your faith that makes it good or bad.

[rtil]

spiritual beliefs cant be bad, rationalizing evil actions through beliefs is

good job this is a very valid statement everyone should read this so i am quoting it

at the risk of turning this into yet another debate thread i'm going to have to disagree with his statement. spiritual beliefs can often lead to people being indirectly hurt out of naive faith. for example, spiritual beliefs may cause someone to turn away from modern medicine in favor of healing through prayer, or thinking starving children need a holy book instead of food - and while they thought their intentions were good, people can easily end up dead because of them.

but theyre still just beliefs, and misleading/manipulative actions are what cause those beliefs. ergo the action is evil not the belief.

if you see it that way then i'm not sure you entirely understand the psyche behind religion. there's a fine line between "spiritual beliefs" and what people simply want to believe and subsequently justify. anything "spiritual" should be cause for immediate skepticism, because it's really just a mental workaround for what people want to hear. people have used god and spirituality to justify all kinds of crimes against humanity over the course of history. they can be evil, because they are not divine.

[Pants, the terrible]

now a serious moral concept:

morality is formed by popular belief. there is not any way to change it.

if a group of 10,000 people find the idea of rape morally acceptable, and they gather together, they cant be stopped by authority. they will rape whoever or whatever they please.

that, and they can petition.


whats right and wrong has changed since the beginning of time, it will always change if people all like future conceptual ideas.


i'm not atheist, nihilistic, or agnostic, but i believe that people will find their own ways to understand human psychology and existence philosophy.

nothing is right or wrong. stop asking unanswerable philosophical questions.

[rtil]

i'm not nihilistic

nothing is right or wrong. stop asking unanswerable philosophical questions.

you might want to re-evaluate yourself

[Jon]

now a serious moral concept:

morality is formed by popular belief. there is not any way to change it.

if a group of 10,000 people find the idea of rape morally acceptable, and they gather together, they cant be stopped by authority. they will rape whoever or whatever they please.

the fuck are you talking about

[redmongoose]

I created my own religion to follow

[emanhattan]

if a group of 10,000 people find the idea of rape morally acceptable, and they gather together, they cant be stopped by authority. they will rape whoever or whatever they please.

but just because a majority of people or a large group does so that doesnt make it right. And mind you its usually the authorities that instigate or enforce those lines of thought.

i'm not atheist, nihilistic, or agnostic

so you ARE religious

nothing is right or wrong. stop asking unanswerable philosophical questions.

ok then. if you ARE part of a religious group, then you kinda have to recognize and live by that religions terms of right and wrong???. just a thought.

fuck it ill just join redms church

[trent bortknob]

now a serious moral concept:

morality is formed by popular belief. there is not any way to change it.

if a group of 10,000 people find the idea of rape morally acceptable, and they gather together, they cant be stopped by authority. they will rape whoever or whatever they please.

that, and they can petition.


whats right and wrong has changed since the beginning of time, it will always change if people all like future conceptual ideas.


i'm not atheist, nihilistic, or agnostic, but i believe that people will find their own ways to understand human psychology and existence philosophy.

nothing is right or wrong. stop asking unanswerable philosophical questions.

the ideas expressed in this post are total bullshit, and are really confusing if you do not consider yourself a nihilist.

first you say that morality is formed by popular belief and that there is no way to change it, then two paragraphs down you say that morality has changed since the beginning of time. obviously these two statements are contradictory.

in the end, you assert that all moral claims are relative, and then you assert that all truth is relative, without once explaining how anyone could ever know or understand this to be true if nothing can actually be true. one of the main reasons that no philosophers actually believe in the shit that you're spouting is because it makes absolutely no sense, causes more problems that it solves, and is supported by absolutely nothing. and the fact that so many psuedo-philosopher kids buy into it makes it even worse.


i think that this is a fundamental understanding of how knowledge of anything works. knowledge is gained over time, it builds and it evolves. we are never spoon fed the truth. scientific knowledge has changed and shaped over time, after new evidence is found that dismisses or changes old conclusions. we once thought the earth was flat, we now know that the earth is round. we once thought that we were created by a higher power, we now know that we evolved over the course of hundreds of millions of years. etc etc. the same is true with morality, it has developed as our knowledge has evolved. our understanding of the world, our place in it, how societies and cultures succeed and function, the causes and effects of certain actions, etc etc, has lead to a more developed moral understanding.

it's very obvious that there are correct and incorrect answers to moral questions. and there may be many equally correct answers to moral questions, but that doesn't mean that there are no wrong answers. there may be many possible answers for "what food should i eat for dinner?" but there is nonetheless a very obvious distinction between food and poison.

[trent bortknob]

i just dont think religion is absolutely bad. sure it can be an excuse for people to justify stupid or arrogant ideas with no regard for modern culture/circumstance. but at the same time having faith in something can guide people with no other direction to having a better life.

spirituality can work as moral guidelines for some, or a crutch for others. all the same its still a matter of how you interpret and act on the basis of your faith that makes it good or bad.

i mean what you're saying has some merit, but i think the way that you're phrasing it is what is confusing the issue. first you say that spiritual belief CAN'T be bad, which is silly. then you say that religious belief is not absolutely bad, which is reasonable and probably justifiable. it's where you're drawing the absolutes in the phrasing that makes or breaks your argument

however, i still completely disagree that spirituality can work as a moral guideline. i mean, spirituality is supposed to be reflective of something that is supernatural. if it is supernatural, it is not natural. how could something that is supernatural tell us anything about how we should or should not be or act in the natural world? how would anything supernatural even understand the natural world, if we can't understand the supernatural world? it seems like they're two separate worlds (let's just skip over the fact that there is no evidence for a separate, supernatural world), so how could either one know anything about the other? and how could either one tell a person in the other one how to lead a good "life"? (who knows if life even exists in this supposed supernatural world?)

unless you're just referring to spiritual belief as in beliefs that are purported by books like the bible, in which case i'd say that the bad certainly outweighs the good. claiming that the bible is a good moral guideline is like saying a cluttered, weed-infested garden is well-maintained. sure, there may be a few pretty flowers, but overall it's pretty bad.

[DrRumack]

the ideas expressed in this post are total bullshit

it's a post by dante

pseudo-intellectual bullshit is pretty much a given

[put]

being an antihumanist makes things pretty easy

[Philip K Dick]

what is supernatural in a spiritual context is essentially just what lies beyond human understanding. so to accept the limitations of humanity's perspective should ideally be the basis for any religious belief.

[trent bortknob]

i thought the definition of supernatural meant something that was not natural i.e. did not occur in the natural world. i mean if we're defining it as something beyond human understanding, it gets hard to define what is supernatural and what isn't. at one point the moon was supernatural but now we know a lot about it and understand how it works and where it came from through natural processes. how do we know when something is beyond human understanding?

[trent bortknob]

being an antihumanist makes things pretty easy

your best post. +1 pizza point

[Pants, the terrible]

i love your responses, but i do believe in a diety. why not?

oh, and i have yet to hear 1 good example of why popular morality does not govern all morality.

if everyone but you thought that killing dogs with an axe just because they thought it was humorous, and you were raised to believe it was, is it right or wrong?

[Philip K Dick]

i thought the definition of supernatural meant something that was not natural i.e. did not occur in the natural world. i mean if we're defining it as something beyond human understanding, it gets hard to define what is supernatural and what isn't. at one point the moon was supernatural but now we know a lot about it and understand how it works and where it came from through natural processes. how do we know when something is beyond human understanding?

supernatural doesnt mean something that isnt natural, because then my breasts would be supernatural because i got implants. the prefix "super" doesn't imply difference or even absence of, it actually just means above.
so aside from silly semantics, the point is that not everyone knows everything about what happens in the universe and why it happens. even to this day when some religious beliefs seem absurd - they're all still based on believing there is more to life than just what we know as a species. that's what faith is.

[Sinitron]

CAN'T YOU SEE THAT YOU'RE SMOTHERING ME

HOLDING TOO TIGHTLY

AFRAID TO LOSE CONTROL

BECAUSE EVERYTHING THAT YOU THOUGHT I WOULD BE

HAS FALLEN APART

RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU

[Gladius]

In time even father won't be able to contain me...