Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Aug 10, 2022 5:47 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Aug 10, 2022 5:37 pm
Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Aug 10, 2022 5:30 pm
That part of the description wasn't the problem, it was all the other attributes of atheism that you took it upon yourself to attach to the definition that turned it into a straw man.
Those are implications of Atheism, not definitions of it.
Your implications.
No...Atheism's own.
If you think it's otherwise, show how Atheism can rationalize anything else but some form of Materialism and amorality. I'd be interested in seeing any such argument.
That's cold comfort, though: because where you get the first one, you're going to get the other two eventually, too. There aren't any logical alternatives, and while people can live irrationally for a long time, eventually the logic of their basic beliefs bleeds through and erodes the traditions they no longer believe are real.
So it means that Atheists have to end up somewhere on the Physicalist-Materialist spectrum, and over generations, gradually lose confidence in morality as well. It's just how the logic of the thing works.
But that isn't what works out in practice, so your logic has gone wrong somewhere.
No, the logic is correct, if you read me (or Nietzsche) carefully. I wrote, "over the generations." That means that for a time, society can roll on its old, traditionalist momentum, even while the "engine" of that momentum has been shut off and killed. But it rolls to a stop, eventually; and inevitably so.
Nietzsche says exactly the same in "The Parable of the Madman." That's why the madman says,
"I have come too early...my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves."
That's a direct quotation, by the way. (underlining my emphasis). He's speaking of the "deed" of "killing" God. And it's also Nietzsche's madman who says,
..."how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?"
You see, once God is gone, the moral compass and the compass of teleology are also gone. We have no way of orienting ourselves to the values we practice every day, no way of any longer proving to ourselves what objective right and wrong might be. It's that that throws us into amoralty...not instantly, as he says, but inevitably, when "the event" reaches our "ears," so to speak.
And that, he says, takes time.