What Happens When You Remove Faith

I guess if nobody is getting hurt then it really isn’t bad.But there are things, like stealing a pack of gum from Walmart, that don’t hurt anybody in particular that are still bad. And there are things, like self defense, that hurt other people that aren’t bad.I can’t simply use ”hurting others’ as an absolute for determining if something is good or bad. So? I didn’t type better (moral) person. It makes me a better person because of my actions, not my philosophy behind the actions. That’s how most people are. Take away the punishments or penalties for the bad behavior and people are going to be bad.Ever been in a mosh pit? Its practically lawless in there. There’s guys in there groping girls and picking pockets. If your in a mosh pit trying to be nice to everyone, you’re going to get groped and robbed.Or how about Mardi Gras or a riot? People go balls to the walls when there’s no penalties for their behavior. And these people rely on the penalties to keep the bad guys in line in order for this to work. Otherwise, while you’re trying to be nice to everybody, bad people are going to be getting the best of you.How long do you think Walmart would last if there were no penalties for stealing? What about when you’re surrounded by selfish assholes? It doesn’t work so good then.And I guess that’s where our differences begin. Most of the people I encounter are not “moral (good) persons” as you described above. We need to have laws and penalties to keep these people in line. Yeah, as self defense.

No. I don’t think that I am a bad person and belief in a supernatural father figure is not the only thing suppressing my “badness”. But it does act as additional suppression.I think that most of us are sorta bad by default. I also think we could resort to “badness” very quickly if necessary (or even just convenient). I think that a lot of people need penalties to keep them good. There’s much more disgusting things to be heard. If you want to bury your head in the sand pretending everyone is outside being nice to each other and nothing is disgusting, then have fun.

Are you just talking about primates? I think an animal, in general, values another animal for its own benefit. They are ”thinking’ of themselves first. Belief in god is irrelevant to adhering to social rules of right and wrong. It can, however, provide additional incentive to adhere to the rules. Or does that make it relevant?

That's bullshit. There are a lot of non-sociopathic people that are not empathetic and are only good because there are penalties for the bad behavior.You got rose colored glasses. But there are penalties for not eating. There aren't any penalties for not being empathetic (while also not being bad).It is not an ability and a motivation. Nah. That's too much causation, you got it backwards. We lived in social groups therefore we evolved empathy. But it doesn't require hard-wrining. People could just fake the empathy to stay in the group.

In fact, the very basis of our society (um, I'm referring to the constitution mostly) is the fact that people have a right to be unempathetic and selfish. For an example of this, all you have to do is watch those idiots on reality shows.

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We are BOG. Resistance is voltage over current.

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Disclaimer:

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Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.

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He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!

No - though they are the easiest example of course. Merecats and horses as well as lions and...many other other animals (notably those that live in social groups) have crime and punishment. Although violence is one punishment, it is a dangerous one to give out. Usually exile from the group is the worst punishment available. Actually, I think an animal values another animal for the benefit of its own genes. I don't think humans differ from any other animal in this regard. Indeed - us humans can definitely conceive of other punishments, even punishments that are seemingly impossible (like a thousand years of burning). If we believe that those punishments will be exacted for doing certain things, we might be more motivated to not do those certain things more than others. That is part and parcel of of having forethought - it works for real punishments too ("hand me the money or I will shoot you").It is likely that animals like merecats don't have the extent of foresight that we do - and they simply cooperate with the group because that is the 'right' thing to do as far as merecatity is concerned. Likewise, most humans go along with societies rules because they are generally the 'right' thing to do as far as humanity is concerned.So even if we are godless animals without any real meaning to our existence, then it is not "fuck y'all" for most humans. If you knew there was no God would you rape and kill your neighbour for the contents of their house? Probably not. If you lived in a small tribe, you might go and kill the other small tribe over there and steal the contents of their house. Not only are you not going to be punished for it, but it doesn't necessarily scream against your humanity to do it. Believing in a God doesn't necessarily stop you - it will only serve as a justification for the way you behave...as evidenced by millennia of religious wars and battles, and religious leaders who go to battle against other tribes/nations and steal their resources. Less compassion for the outgroup is well documented and religous persuasion is only another grouping for their to be an outgroup from.If you weren't religious, maybe you'd be a worse person. Maybe you wouldn't, and instead of talking to god, you'd talk directly to your humanity before you did something ethically questionable.To the OP, personally I think that religion serves us now by providing another layer of grouping. Another us versus them mentality above and beyond the layer of nation. If we removed that grouping by removing faith, we might find that there are less reasons to distrust/hate another group. One less us versus them. People will still find reasons to dislike people of course. And yes, some people may find they are more willing to commit social and legal crimes because they are not deterred by the current potential punishment as opposed to the definite punishment promised through certain faiths, but I think that is a fair price to pay.Now - can we talk about those damned commie-French? I think it wise we don't even begin to discuss the shifty asians or women or shifty asian women. Before we do though, us Stretfordians have got some beef to sort out with the Heaton Park posse.

Well, I disagree too. It's a nice analogy, but experience has shown that it is not accurate.I don't think I would mind if you said that the urge to care for others was still being evolved, but right now I think we are stuck on A #1 ourselves. In fact, in all the religions that emphasize empathy (ha ha) it was already presumed that we were selfish. Love others as you love yourself. Sure most of aren't sociopaths, and most of us will take the path of least resistance, avoiding irritation of others so that we may not be irritated.Most of us still need a jab in the ribs to be really nice...it's more like making us eat healthy even when we don't want to, making us eat even when we are full, and making us eat when we can't stand the food presented.Edited by anastasia, : No reason given.

What about the people who claim they do the right thing simply because it is the right thing, and not because of selfish reason, and find people that are willing to admit selfishness as a reason to be disgusting? So you don’t find these reasons for good behavior to be disgusting? I don’t really think that people, in general, “care” much about things doing the right thing. I think they are just following societal pressure to do the right thing. Without the pressure (ie remove the penalties), and people will do what they can get away with doing as we see in riots and mobs, etc. But all you need is a local majority of “fuck yall”’s to screw over all the righteous people. The righteous people need to maintain the ability to enter the “fuck yall” mentality as a defense against it. That’s what I’m talkin’ ”bout.In the big picture, people aren’t as righteous as Schraff seems to think they are. But if it serves as a justification for avoiding bad behavior, then isn’t it stopping you? That seems, to me at least, to be a fault of the specifics of the religion and not of religion, in general. I agree that religion offers another label that can be used for outgrouping, but I don’t think the religion is the cause.Did you see that episode of South Park where religion was gone, and they had all the atheist leagues fighting against each other? I think it makes a good point that people are going to quarrel regardless. All you need is two groups and some time. Sure, religions have been used this way, as has nationality and all kinds of stuff. I don’t think it is the fault of the particular label, its just something we do as people. But without god, I enter this nihilistic mentality where, because we are just another animal and like where you said we don’t differ from them above, we are only being righteous for selfish reasons. When you add god, you add another layer to existence that can include non-selfish reasons for righteous behavior. This makes us different from the other animals, and in turn provides a reason for deserving the righteous actions. Like I was saying with the South Park reference, its not the layers themselves that cause the behavior. People are that way naturally. If you remove one of the layers, then that gap will be fill with something else, IMHO. You’re assuming that it is going to make a difference, that there will be something valuable that we’re paying for. I can see why you think that and don’t really have anything to refute it. But I don’t really think that its going to stop anything. If you remove religion, people are just going to find some other bullshit to fight over, IMHO. I have no idea what your talking about . Looks like a joke that is over my head.

Well, even though I did not say anything even remotly to that extent, I can sort of understand how someone as coarse as you have been in this thread could invent that characture based on how I feel about this absurd tendency for religious people to abandon all dignity and humanity with their mythology.I am fully aware that people out in the world are assholes. We have ample demonstration of that all the time. But I tend to think that it is a lot worse for people to KNOW that they WILL BECOME assholes the very moment they stop believing in fairy tales.Worse still is the use of this line of argument to try to say that because of this there is some kind of value in faith! There very well may be value in faith but it is not because it provides some invisible force to stop you from being a selfish jerk.That is what I find disgusting.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

Says who? You?I can think of plenty of penalties for never having empathy.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

I have been overly coarse. I'm sorry, I've been having a bad week and I'm kinda crabby. I just want to point out that I wouldn't abandon all dignity and humanity. First of all, its hypothetical, I don't KNOW that I'd turn to asshole-ism. I just think that I would be more asshole-ish if I stopped believing in a particular fairy tales. Why is that so bad? Why do you find that disgusting?

Penalties are irrelevant. Read this, from here:

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Experiment shows good impulses such as altruism are basic to the brain like food and sex.

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Shankar Vedantam / Washington Post

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WASHINGTON -- The e-mail came from the next room.

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"You gotta see this!" Jorge Moll had written. Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., had been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.

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As Grafman read the e-mail, Moll came bursting in. The scientists stared at each other.

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The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex.

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Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

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Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as St. Francis of Assisi, who said, "For it is in giving that we receive." But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.

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Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass. The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.

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No one can say whether giraffes and lions experience moral qualms in the same way people do because no one has been inside a giraffe's head, but it is known that animals can sacrifice their own interests: One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating.

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What the new research is showing is that morality has biological roots -- such as the reward center in the brain that lit up in Grafman's experiment -- that have been around for a very long time.

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The more researchers learn, the more it appears that the foundation of morality is empathy. Being able to recognize -- even experience vicariously -- what another creature is going through was an important leap in the evolution of social behavior. And it is only a short step from this awareness to many human notions of right and wrong, says Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago.

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The research enterprise has been viewed with interest by philosophers and theologians, but already some worry that it raises troubling questions. Reducing morality and immorality to brain chemistry -- rather than free will -- might diminish the importance of personal responsibility.

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Even more important, some wonder whether the very idea of morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be just another evolutionary tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate.

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Apparently, empathy and general altruism are, in fact, tied to the same primitive centers of the brain that respond to hunger and pleasure.And did you notice the rat experiment? How even a rat, if given a lever that gives him food but shocks another rat, will actually stop eating at his own detriment to avoid shocking the other rat?I think the idea that, without some deity, we would all convert into selfish, immoral anarchists is complete horseshit. That's certainly the case for some sociopaths, and it is, as you said, why we have a system of laws. And I'll agree that religion, with its additional penalties, can also help to convince inherently immoral sociopaths to "play nice." And you're right - evolution doesn't work in that order. But the evolution of empathy IS, in fact, what allowed society to form, despite the fact that it seems the trait evolved long before humans were walking around. Actually, I'd say ALL people who possess no ability to feel empathy are, in fact, sociopaths. Being a sociopath doesn't mean that you disregard penalties - those are just the ones that wind up going to jail.I think you're just afraid to call people who feel no empathy sociopaths because, by your own admission earlier, it may in fact make you one of them.

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Every time a fundy breaks the laws of thermodynamics, Schroedinger probably kills his cat.

That's kinda a Strawman.Not being empathetic is different from never having empathy. And I was using penalty in the context of how pain is the penalty for not eating.

Thats good. I am happy to heard that. I was also happy to hear Phat back down from his original statement.I seems kind of weird that one of the knee jerk reactions from the openly religious is to say, "heck yea I would be bad/selfish/immoral if there was no god" and that once they think about it for a minute they realize that this is not really true at all.LIke you said: Which is very much a lighter statement than before. IMO at least. I suppose I can start to see that problems arise due to the conditioning of a lifetime of altruism based on faith being removed. You never had a chance to develop non-religious reasons for being non-asshole-ish. I suppose that at the very least we might expect something of a burst of egotism before the religious slowly learned that there are good non-religious reasons to give, volunteer, etc. Your newest clarification is not as disgusting but it is pretty bad.The claim being examined is that, " religion is good because it keeps me from a monster". That is not a good argument. Your latest post just softened it up with words like "hypothetical" and "more asshole-ish".Remember we are also not just talking about you. I wonder if someone could help me remember the thread awhile back where someone admitted that they would likely cheat on their wife if they didn't have their religion. IIRC the pattern was very similar. After being confronted and thinking bout it for a minute he backed down from the extreme position.But it is still shocking I feel that this is the initial reaction that religious people have when confronted with the idea of abandoning their faith.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

Well, I mean now we are just playing with scope of words and forgetting the context. Anastasia was talking about the difference between being nice and being empathetic. That necessarily presumes that you are faking empathy.Regardless if this applies to all situations, most situations, or "more" situations in the case of your most recent and softer post, I can still concieve of consequences for lacking empathy. Few are externally driven, but they very much can have external effects.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)