Not to mention the whole Exodus problem

The pharaoh was bad guy at first but then became a victim of Adonaiyahwehjehovahbob's torture

(I didn't mean to comment twice)

I mean, if you believe their stories, god told the first lie. so why would you believe his divinely inspired horror novel when it says someone is the bad guy?

(good news- the exodus never happened. you'd think that rivers turning to blood would be something somebody in egypt would have mentioned/written down. Or the frogs. or the locusts or the whole slew of dead first born sons.)

A screenshot of a comment I made a while back. Link to original comment

Yeah, but you're forgetting a really important detail. These teenagers were like, really annoying.

We evolved into social creatures - apes together strong. The group becomes weak if we are always knocking down or killing our neighbour. If we all work together and gather bananas, then we can feed those in the group who can not gather bananas. Healthy ape brains receive pleasure helping other apes (and animals) in need.

Of course it all falls apart when we have malfunctioning ape brains in the group who promote hate, greed, and fairy stories of a magic sky ape or we have Musk ape, Trump ape and Zucker Ape who want all the bananas.

oh I'm well aware of how awful the story is. Basically the entire point was to flex how powerful 'god' was.

I don't think that most "lack" a conscience. I do think their conscience is either malformed or severely stunted.

I often use it as my answer to "you just hate god" because agreeing with that statement (with a good reason as to why) is more fun than denying it entirely

Interestingly, law is considered a more effective deterrent for immoral people than religion itself!

Yes, in all likelihood you have some kind of neurodivergence. That's why you've probably noticed people around you rarely function through rational choice the way you do.

People are generally programmed to follow the tribe, keep opinions to confirm and demonstrate fealty to the tribe, and to avoid committing any taboos that could cause them to be cast out and die alone in the wild.

And the people who did not do this mostly just had this exact happen and died.

Nature has essentially built a concept of good and bad into us through evolution. Traits such as cooperation, reciprocity, and concern for others can improve survival and social cohesion, giving individuals who possess those traits an evolutionary advantage over those who are consistently uncooperative or harmful.

You do not necessarily need religion or philosophy to understand the basic distinction between what is good and what is harmful. Human beings already possess psychological mechanisms such as sympathy and empathy that allow us to recognize and understand the experiences of others through our own subjective experiences.

If you understand that something causes you pain, suffering, or fear, empathy allows you to recognize that the same experience is likely to be harmful to someone else. Likewise, if you understand that something brings you pleasure, security, or happiness, you can recognize that similar experiences may be beneficial to others.

That does not mean every individual instinct or emotional response is morally correct. It means that the foundations for morality can exist naturally within the human psyche, without requiring religion or a formal philosophical system to create them.

So I guess your question is.
Is God good or just pretending to be good ?

Well, you will certainly be very successful not to answer this if you refuse to listen. And that's the with the rest, you will be better of not listening if your goal is to keep torturing yourself with deeply intricated philosophies.

It is your free choice. At all time

There's no distinction between sociopath or psycopath, both were dropped from the DSM in favor of ASD.

I'm gonna assume you're not arguing in bad faith and have just been brought up sheltered or in a cult - the reason we have POLICE which enforces laws through VIOLENCE is that people generally need fear to not do bad things.

It's not something religious people need, nor people with ASD, the majority of the people in our jails are not mentally ill.

It's something every society in every era of history has recognized as a necessity, including the one you live in right now.

People WILL do bad things unless they have fear of punishment, people are not naturally empathetic or oriented towards social cohesion. That's why crime and punishment is a perennial instution throughout all recorded history.

I'm going to avoid all the insults at the end, I don't know your past history but the voracity with which you sling insults whenever someone disagrees with you has apparently never occured to you to be immoral, unempathetic, or against social cohesion, so I doubt it will land today either.

So I guess your question is. Is God good or just pretending to be good ?

No, my question is, again, whether the things God says are good because God says so, or whether the things God says are good because you've independently evaluated them to be good. "Pretending" has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

Well, you will certainly be very successful not to answer this if you refuse to listen.

You are the one who's refusing to listen. I've asked you the same question three times now, you still haven't given anything resembling an answer.

And that’s the with the rest, you will be better of not listening if your goal is to keep torturing yourself with deeply intricated philosophies.

Torturing myself? Do you find it torturous to examine philosophical questions? I certainly don't. I also don't think I'm asking anything "intricate" here. This is a simple question that Plato first posed 2400 years ago.

It's concerning that you're dismissing this question as some "intricated philosophy" and even more concerning that you call it "torture" to even think about it. There's this big contradiction right in the middle of your beliefs and you're desperately trying to pretend it doesn't exist.

I am neurodivergent, but I'm not prepared to accept the implication that neurotypical people lack moral agency. Anyone is capable of thinking critically about their behavior and changing it. Not every vegan is neurodivergent.

Had I been alive during WW2, I'm pretty sure myself and majority of my neighbors would have Hitler on the kill list.

I think, for the ones who are just decent people, it's more that they misattribute where it's coming from

You do not need to be neurodivergent to be vegan, but if you have arrived at veganism through rationality, you are neurodivergent.

Neurodivergents have very strong empathy, so it is nearly psychologically impossible to see neurotypicals for what the really are. The truth is simply too painful that even though confronted with it thousands of times, and hurt deeply by it, most neurodivergents prefer the delusion to reality.

It's not about listening to me..

Good because god or good then god ? For us and with the level of knowledge we have god is above everything.

But the goal is to reach him. And then what ? What happen when we become like him ? Do we get to see other stuff, things beyond ?
I guess ask me again when we get there

So you're really advancing this idea that all neurotypicals are essentially p-zombies? That every moral philosopher or moral person in history was secretly neurodivergent?

I don't disagree with your general point but

Traits such as cooperation, reciprocity, and concern for others can improve survival and social cohesion, giving individuals who possess those traits an evolutionary advantage over those who are consistently uncooperative or harmful

Doesn't explain animals that are predators like say sharks. They don't cooperate yet they thrive. You could say that even immorality is an evolutionary trait because it gains you an advantage gaming a system built on trust.

All I mean is you can point at any biological organism and say "the reason it is like this is because it is evolutionarily advantageous" and you wouldn't really be saying anything more meaningful than "it is the way it is because that's what's best for it". It's a near perfect example of begging the question.

It's a bit painting the target around the arrow.

Once again ignoring the question to just dump these empty platitudes.

Why did you even respond to my comment in the first place if you have nothing to say?

I definitely agree with that. They think their conscience is "the voice of God" even when it specifically contradicts their preferred fable.

Religious law and civil law are not very different, the latter is based on the former, historically speaking.

The difference is in who gets to judge and dole out punishments.

calibration, unfortunately, only helps on smooth flat ground when aimed at stuff on the same plane

there's a McDonald's drive through that I go past sometimes that is right next to oncoming traffic but 10 ft higher in elevation, and I fucking hate that thing. I just hold my horn down whenever somebody is sitting in there with blinding headlights so I can't see if somebody is turning across my lane at the intersection just ahead. they still haven't put something up to block headlights. maybe if more people get on the horn they'll finally do something about it

@mrgoosmoos @HeyThisIsntTheYMCA I've heard that most of the cars in the rest of the world have some sort of mechanism by which their lights will not shine directly at the faces of drivers in other cars. But of course here in the US we can't have that.

matrix headlights are only suitable for environments where vehicles are the only other things that will be encountered, like highways

they don't work for pedestrians or cyclists, and they're not quick enough to react on hilly or windy roads

great tech for high speed highways, not appropriate pretty much anywhere else. it's not the loss a lot of people think it is, to not have them in North America

They're both not currently official diagnoses but they mean different things in common use.

"People" do not generally need fear to not do bad things. Some people need fear to not do bad things. Outliers do not define the norm.

Religious people are not less violent or criminal than nonreligious people. See all of recorded history. I don't have data for ASD other than that until quite recently it was under-diagnosed and very poorly understood so there's little value in historic comparison.

Law enforcement looks pretty different across time and cultures but the general through line is not "every person has to be watched lest they descend into barbarism" (despite what thin blue line types would have you believe) it's that an unguarded flock is easy prey. Predators are rare and always have been.

People are naturally empathetic and we aren't the only animals like that. Toddlers have empathy well before they can be taught the cause-and-effect of possible punishment. Altruism is a very valuable trait for social animals to ensure survival of the species. The specifics of etiquette are taught but basic principles of fairness and comfort are in our DNA. Crime and punishment exist because the natural systems aren't perfect, and desperate/traumatized people are more likely to take advantage of others for personal gain. It's worse when society rewards amoral self-enriching behavior, as it does under Capitalism, because hate and selfishness can be taught just as surely as morality is. (Morals and ethics aren't exactly the same thing, and they do differ between cultures, and some pretty heinous things are enforced thanks to religious indoctrination.)

Your claims aren't backed up by any kind of science. And if you think that's a cavalcade of verbal barbs maybe it is your first day on the internet.

We're atheists and have raised our son (almost 10) as such, but always answer any questions he has about religion, especially since he hears it in school. He has no qualms telling friends he doesn't believe in God and one friend told him he was going to hell. This was essentially my statement for him to use in the future andI love that he has no fear expressing himself.

in theory the difference is dogmatic vs pragmatic but actually civil law is still mostly dogmatic just less so

I like what Ricky Gervais said about it. He asked Stephen Colbert if he believed in any of the other 3000 gods from human history. Stephen said he did not. Ricky told him that he just believes in one less than he does.

Religious law and civil law are not very different, the latter is based on the former, historically speaking.

Hammurabi's Code disagrees with you.

Not to get into a debate, but someone did write about (something that could reasonably be) it, potential motivated reasoning by the source aside. Sources from that far into the past (or even the relatively closer past) very rarely survive to the present day, especially literary sources (which tend to be written on papyrus that rots away), and even historians of relatively well-attested periods like Rome and Classical Greece basically have a few texts they rely on*, supplemented with archeology, epigraphy (inscriptions on stone) and straight up magic, and that's a thousand years before (edit: after) the period in which the Exodus is taken to have happened without the advantage of Medieval monks painstakingly preserving the material. Now the Egyptian corpus is uncommonly big (yay for the Sahara), but it's also very fragmented. For the most part what we don't and can't know is orders of magnitude more than what we can know, and it's not even like we've studied the whole Egyptian corpus (we haven't; there's a shortage of trained Egyptologists able to do that work), so it's very plausible that an event of even that magnitude would just... not show up in a way we can recognize. So what I want to say is: Truth of the Exodus aside, our sources for ancient history are nowhere near that comprehensive. Three thousand years is a long time.

*For example Roman military history basically entirely relies on two guys (Livy and Polybius), whose works very frustratingly only survive in part, supplemented by some less reliable sources and fragments. When talking about Alexander the Great it's basically just Arrian, again supplemented by less reliable/comprehensive sources and fragments. And it can get worse; we get straight up nothing in the way of literature from Carthage. There's a lot of dumb luck involved in what does and does not survive.

I think it’s a bit more complex than this.

I think, in religious households, instead of being taught to be a good caring person you are taught to be as selfish as possible while staying within the rules.

So it’s not that religious need eternal threat of damnation, it’s that they have been taught to be as selfish as possible.

So I don’t think they lack morality naturally but they have been taught to be horrible people who obey laws.

The term of sociopathy was retired in the 60's, so no, it doesn't mean anything. You aren't talking to anyone who was alive back then, so if you've heard it used it's been misused.

The idea that children are born with empathy is hilarious, while there are interesting baby studies suggesting this, any school yard or classroom will quickly dissuade anyone of that notion. Anyone who has gone to a school or worked as a teacher knows this.

And it's a good example to go into, because once again, the only thing that keeps a large subset of children from doing bad things is punishment, and usually that just makes them better at avoiding it.

And humans... come from children, and they largely don't change or mature as they grow up, studies who have tried to estimate the general mental age of humans find that they are stuck around 13-16 years old and stay there. And when we see how most people are just one bad day away from exploding, getting out and fighting someone in another car, or similar, that's not much of a surprise to anyone.

I don't know what "thin blue line" is, I assume it's American thing, but no when it comes to greater civilisations throughout history we actually do find that law enforcement looks about the same, and that people can be exceptionally cruel and callous even when they don't gain anything from doing it except the pleasure of inflicting pain, emotional or physical.

There's no evidence that people are naturally empathetic, and if they can be found to be so at the toddler stage we are effective at growing out of it. But you are right to point out some important point, we have invented Capitalism, probably the least empathetic system of governance we could come up with in which the individuals ability to take as much from everyone else is celebrated and deified - and whoever fails is seen as a loser who just didn't try hard enough. As expected, it's no manifestation of some innate empathy there.

Then there's the fact that at any given time there's at least a 100 different armed conflicts going on on the earth at any time. Oh, and currently a Genocide too.

Then there's our enormous system of law, which is always in an armsrace trying to illegalize the new ways in which people attempt to break the rules so that they can gain from taking from others, or just destroy what others have so that they have less. From giant corporations fighting each other, to simple neighbour feuds where two people simply cannot manage to coexist even if there weren't any problems between them to begin with - strife is the nature of humans on all levels and it needs constant arbitration to find out who was wrong, who was right, and how much they need to be punished.

And they certainly don't need any religious excuse for these things, they're quite happy to do it without any divine justification. The ills of religions are simply an extension of the ills of humanity.

I appreciate you pointing out that if you're on the internet you apparently should be ready to be insulted, because otherwise you're what, weak? Or naive? Once again the default human assumption is that we should expect there to be no consideration, probably that someone will hurt us, and if we don't like that, we better just toughen up because humanity is just so damn empathetic!

What do you mean "advancing"? Every great person in history was clearly neurodivergent. They were clearly described as weird even for their time.

And of course every moral person was neurodivergent? Why do you think moral people are emphasized in our history? Why do you think people talking about morals are emphasized in our history? Do you think that's because morals are normal?

If someone was moral it was noteworthy, because it was abnormal. They were literally divergent.

He derived his laws from the god Shamash. He just codified and imposed his interpretation. I am well aware of the stele, I've seen it! As sure as Shamash is my witness!

Have you got a citation for the claim that the laws were supposed to be the divine commandments of Shamash? All the articles I can find on the code or the stele just talk about the laws themselves with no mention of religious connotations.

That's a ridiculous perspective. It's basically eugenics. Moral people do not just have some innate mental quality that causes them to be moral.

Religious idiot wanting to sound smart. A classic.

It is not about winning an argument nor a game. It is about escaping the game, and helping others to do so.

Thing is you first have to be disgusted by the game of this earthly life to want to escape it. He can not help you get out of the matrix if your wish is to stay in it. Witch you are fully free to do.

Alright well I showed an actual study and you continue making unfounded claims so I'm done. You're not interested in the truth, just reinforcing your jaded cynicism.

i mean, have you considered the possibility that you know intuitively what is "right" and what is "wrong" because it has been enshrined into you by 2000 years of religion?

What if it has been enshrined into us by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution because altruism is a trait that increases the survival chances of a social species?

It's cute that you think a Jewish stick-zombie is the prevalent religious influence in the world

It says a lot about how little you know, and how worthy your opinion is

!it's not worth a Donald Trump promise!<

That's a remarkably good point

It's conspicuous how adept the religious are at mental gymnastics

I always thought that it was because were looking for ways to justify their shitty behaviour, it never occurred to me that that was a taught thing

That makes it so much worse...

Do you clap with your fingers spread nice and wide?

That's just a bandaid. And not a good one.

No, first you have to show that it's real and worth believing in.