Study: Atheists Find Meaning In Life By Inventing Fairy Tales

You are conflating meaning with morality.

Maybe I should clarify terms. When I say "meaning," I'm talking about the purpose of one's life. If God exists, that meaning would be to follow His laws and worship Him, for example. Doing that is to adhere to what is objectively moral. So in essence, I believe meaning and morality are linked. When you have no objectivity, they aren't necessarily linked, because as you said, Bundy found meaning in killing even if that was not what society at large would consider a moral practice.

Do you disagree with any of the above statements?

Yeah because you're assuming Bundy found meaning, but my main argument is that the meaning has no value. Yes the meaning he gave himself is subjective, and he personally can care about it, but my point is that this meaning is just self-delusion because it has no foundation in objectivity.

This is the number 1 argument from those with faith that kinda irks me; and is a terrifying thought.

What you are stating here at it's simplest is that if people weren't scared of God there would be anarchy and people would naturally trend towards what you consider evil. IE: The peoples goodness only comes from fear.

When you look to the world today, is this not what you see? Those in power oppress those below them because they don't hold to any accountability from a power above them. I think t's very clear that lack of genuine belief in God opens pathways to do things that God would consider immoral, like stealing and adultery.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that if everyone in society didn't believe in God that there would be total anarchy or that everyone would go around murdering. I'm saying immorality increases, and continues to increase, to the point of social degradation. Just compare America now to 100 years ago. How much more violence is there? How much more profanity? How much more open lewdness? I implore you to watch an hour of TV from a few decades ago and compare how those people carried themselves to today. There is a clear downward trend in terms of care for what is "moral" beyond the minimum.

That's a terrible way to view the world.

Okay lol not sure what you think this adds or why you think that's an objective statement. The world is bad, everyone knows it.

But it's also doesn't correlate to what we see. Murder rates go down in atheistic communities; those in the worlds prisons are typically of one religion or the other. This makes sense, if you believe there is life after death, then death doesn't seem as serious as it does to an atheist.

Source? Are these studies from places that are currently in turmoil? Also, do prisoners make up the all world's criminals? Who's responsible for wars?

The people in prisons who believe in the Abrahamic God are sinning, don't you get that?

That being said, just because morality could be subjective does not mean that we don't find similar views of what is good among most of the population. This would most likely be an evolutionary trait in which what is good for society is good for the survival of the individual; and therefore more often then not morality would be subjective based on a community rather then the individual. This is indeed what we see in the world.

I have no issue with this. It still doesn't mean any of it matters. If there is no God who details objective morality, it really doesn't matter whether society thinks murder is wrong. This does not mean as you seem to be inferring, that I'm saying people will then necessarily commit murder or anything of that nature, but you won't see an atheist care about petty theft, or if they see someone drop $20 they may just pocket it, and so on. Survival of the fittest, right?

You haven't demonstrated that it's limited since it's subjective. You've just stated that as fact. If morality varies from community to community, why does that make it less important?

My full sentence was: "With regards to inner meaning, my only point there is if there is a god, then there is some kind of objectivity that gives human beings a meaning, which means subjectivity is limited."

I don't see what's unclear about that. If a god exists and tells us what's moral, that reduces room for someone to make up their own morality.

Putting that aside, if morality varied from every community, who then should be followed? If you don't think it matters that much, then what would you say if I go to Portugal and marry a 14 year old girl right now?

That's not what delusion means. Self-Delusion means having a belief that contradicts what is rational and demonstrable.

No it doesn't? It's just "the action of deluding oneself; failure to recognize reality." If you believe there is no God and still apply to yourself a moral code, that is you deluding yourself into thinking that sticking by your code is important. That's what I'm trying to say.

In that case, subjectivity can never be delusion, as it is only within the eye of the beholder.

Anything that the beholder decides to believe is bogus without objectivity. If 1+1 doesn't always equal 2, then I don't actually have to pay the exact number due on my electricity bill, from an objective standpoint. I only do it because someone else is threatening to put my family in the cold dark at night. But we can demonstrate objectively that 1+1 does equal 2.

The only form of moral delusion that is possible is the case one believes in objective morality when there is no God. Therefore your view has the possibility of being delusion, but not the other way around.

If God exists and has told us what is moral, and we follow it, we are objectively moral. If we are following these morals and God doesn't actually exist, then I still have a reason to stick by the moral code, because I believe that it is from God. The only delusion here would be believing in God for no good reason, like the atheist who believes in morality without objectivity.

What's valuable to man is not necessarily valuable to God, what is valuable to the bear is not valuable to dog. Value is in it's definition subjective. Something can only have as much value as much as someone provides it, so that statement ironically doesn't hold value.

If God exists, what He values is what is objectively valuable. If there is no objectivity, you caring about your family is no more valuable than someone wanting to hurt your family.

This point keeps coming up, cause it's bad. There's so many common rebuttals to this that exist. I could flip the comment around; "If someones religion justifies killing someone, although it harms societies as a whole, why not? They are "objectively" in the right". I believe that's what ISIS did (sorry, i know bringing that up is similar to the Reductio ad Hitlerum; but I think it fits here.)

This is where understanding of religion, and intellectual discussion of its objectivity, comes in. You have to demonstrate why you believe what you believe if you are going to uphold that you are in the right. People from opposing religions can fight because they believe they are in the right, but people of opposing football fandoms also have fights. Getting heated and acting on that needs to have some sort of justification.

If some Joe invents a religion that allows him to kill, it still doesn't mean more than an atheist who doesn't believe in God, committing a murder. Religion needs to be approached intellectually and not through mere desire for any specific outcome, and this should be the mode for any topic. ISIS are condemned by every learned Muslim regarding violence, which is thankfully the majority of the Muslim population, because it's very clear from our books that what they are doing is wrong. 90% of the people they are killing are Muslim, at least by label, which means there is no harm to come upon them. So in this case, why is ISIS justified? They have no arguments beyond the verses they take from the 7th century and apply to the modern day, when they have no right to do so. There are no religious scholars among them. So within Islam itself, ISIS are objectively in the wrong.

Now take someone who believes there is no god, and finds a man on a quiet street with no cameras, and he spots $1000 cash in the man's pocket. He's strapped for cash right now. Why not mug him? This is in fact what goes on in poor areas, within and without America. The murder example is just one extreme that does in fact exist, but I don't see what the difference between murder and theft is in a world without objective morality, nor in fact the difference between theft and charity.

And even if subjective morality is limited, maybe thats for the better. It's a dangerous thought when people claim to have absolute morality.

It's definitely powerful, but to be

/r/islam Thread Parent Link - thefederalist.com