Apologists wasting their talent

[_beastie]

Quote:

To simply assert that LDS apologists are wasting their talent is not the equivalent of arguing all religion is worthy of opposition.


Duh?

How soon before you deny having written this post? Give it a couple months. Before then I might be able to hunt it down in short order.

You are a real piece of work. Just one more example of how God’s people do a bang-up PR job for him, as far as what it means to have that “light”.

You made two very specific charges against me, and since I know that both charges included ideas I do not adhere to, and would not have deliberately stated, I challenged you to provide evidence of your charge. In neither case were you able or willing to do so. Instead of admitting that, gasp, you might have actually made a mistake about my opinions on certain subjects – a topic about which I do have a bit of experience and knowledge – you simply insinuate that I regularly deny having said things I clearly said.

Yes, you let that light shine.

This entire conversation is just one more rerun of your “atheists must be nihilists” argument. And, as Coggins helpfully demonstrated on this very thread:

Brilliant. This is, indeed, the box metaphysical materialists put themselves in when attacking religion. whether or not anyone uses or misuses their talents, or never develops them at all, is, in Dawkins reductionist, accidental universe, of absolutely no importance whatever.

A few billion years from now, when our Sun swells to become a Red Giant and swallows our solar system whole, it will have mattered even less. The entire enterprise, in Dawkins view, is nothing more than a fantastically fortuitous confluence of natural phenomena, and need not have happened at all. There is nobody but Dawkins to care whether Wise did this or that or the other; no God, no purpose, no teleology, no meaning.

This is the materialists box canyon: nothing has meaning, but the Atheist spends large quantities of air, print, and froth trying to convince as many people as he can of precisely this.

And, as you were forced to admit on your earlier thread, this argument can only be made if the backdrop of the measurement is INFINITY.

Of course you’re going to insist upon that backdrop. To use a more meaningful one, such as the span of our own mortal lives, would force you to abandon your entire premise, which you have no intention of doing, without bothering to justify why infinity must be the backdrop – just as you have no intention of providing evidences of your charges against me.

You hardly post here, and yet your posts are already all tiresome reruns.

I, frankly, don’t care how apologists use their talents. They may be intelligent, but they are not so intelligent that if their talents were used in a different fashion, they’d be curing cancer or world hunger. It would take a display of truly impressive talent to lead me to ponder how much more useful their lives could be for larger society. Believe me, as intelligent as a few of them are, not one has displayed that sort of talent.

Personally, the majority of theist arguments against atheism all seem to boil down to one thing: they wouldn’t like a universe without God. I mean, really, after our planet’s demise, it won’t matter what any of us said or did. Boo Hoo. That is why these arguments interest me very little, and the only reason I even responded was to correct your misuse of my name, which you obviously will not do.

But, having now gotten a clear picture of what your “light” entails, you can misuse my name all you want, and I’ll feel safe assuming the majority of readers will know what sort of credence to give it.

I will keep reading, however, to see if either you or Coggins manage to address runtu's challenge.

[_Coggins7]

I'd attempt a rebuttal of this, but I think that it's nonsensicalness pretty much stands on its own.

Thank you for the white flag. I accept.

Suffice to say that as I construe morality in my atheistic mind, I see human empathy as its basis. Empathy is a human trait that is made possible by the capacity for abstract moral thought.

Human empathy and abstract moral thought are the accidental and natural derivations of evolution through natural selection. They have no intrinsic value in and of themselves in Dawkin's universe. Just keep that Red Giant in mind every time you make statements like this that continue beg the same old question that Beckwith has already answered.

I'm comfortable that a system of morality based on empathy carries greater legitimacy, on its face, than that of, say, Nazism.

You have apparently not read and understood any of what Beckwith, Light, or myself have been saying. In Dawkin's blind, purposeless, randomly generated universe, empathy is a epiphenomena of consciousness and nothing more. What is your standard or moral basis, external to and transcendent with respect to, the laws of natural selection and physics, upon which, in such a universe, you can make a moral judegment on the superior value of empathy over Nazism?

[_Coggins7]

And, as you were forced to admit on your earlier thread, this argument can only be made if the backdrop of the measurement is INFINITY.

Correct.

Of course you’re going to insist upon that backdrop. To use a more meaningful one, such as the span of our own mortal lives, would force you to abandon your entire premise, which you have no intention of doing, without bothering to justify why infinity must be the backdrop – just as you have no intention of providing evidences of your charges against me.

Upon what basis is a purely temporal basis more meaningful?

I, frankly, don’t care how apologists use their talents. They may be intelligent, but they are not so intelligent that if their talents were used in a different fashion, they’d be curing cancer or world hunger.

Now, back to the great white whale your striving mightily to avoid: why is curing cancer or world hunger important. Why does it matter if Dawkins is, in fact, correct?

Personally, the majority of theist arguments against atheism all seem to boil down to one thing: they wouldn’t like a universe without God. I mean, really, after our planet’s demise, it won’t matter what any of us said or did. Boo Hoo.

Ahhhh, finially you've got it.

[_beastie]

Coggins,

You insist the backdrop must be infinity. You justify that assertion instead of asking me, instead, to justify something else.

But please, answer runtu's challenge first.

[_Coggins7]

Why is it that "in a randomly generated universe, all values are meaningless"?

Because any values held by any sentient beings with a CNS capable of conscious self awareness and abstract thought are nothing more then mechanistic and randomly generated epiphenomena, or sub-phenomena, of that universe. They are derivative psychological propensities created by accidental chance accumulations of mircromutational changes in DNA mediated by natural selection, which just happened, by chance, to produce Homo Sapiens, and the capacity for abstract thought.

If you had read my initial OP in the Existence and Meaning thread, you would have had my entire argument set out there. This is why I cut and paste for you Runtu, because you always need remedial instruction and I get tired of composing new posts on the same points over and over again.

Which value judgments does Dawkins hold and why?

Well, the one we have been talking about thus far is his insistence that Wise was wasting his life by holding to a creationist belief system when he could have held some other more to Dawkin's liking. As to why he holds that belief, ask Dawkins.

And the kicker is Dude's question: in what way are Dawkins' statements contradictory?

I'm not going to cut and paste, and I'm not going to answer your question, which is just nothing less than silly at this point, because I've been answering it in a number of different ways over and over again since yesterday. Come back when you've read and digested what I've said thus far, and when are at the point at which you can stop playing ring around the rosie.

[_Coggins7]

But please, answer runtu's challenge first.

I've already done that.

[_beastie]

Well, I'll let runtu respond to your explanation, but it sure looks to me as if your "explanation" was simply a reiteration of the very statement he asked you to defend.

But, in the meantime, defend why infinity is the only acceptable backdrop to measure meaning.

[_Coggins7]

Well, I'll let runtu respond to your explanation, but it sure looks to me as if your "explanation" was simply a reiteration of the very statement he asked you to defend.

But, in the meantime, defend why infinity is the only acceptable backdrop to measure meaning.

As I delineated in another post:

That anything lasts forever is actually the key, as I pointed out in another post at length. Anything bounded by time to the degree that time is the transcendent, pivitol factor upon which meaning is derived, loses all meaning as "meaning" moves beyond time. In other words, as each individual and what he does moves through time, he ascribes meaning to his existence. However, when he ceases moving through time (death), time creates an ultimate and absolute boundary to meaning.

[_beastie]

That anything lasts forever is actually the key, as I pointed out in another post at length. Anything bounded by time to the degree that time is the transcendent, pivitol factor upon which meaning is derived, loses all meaning as "meaning" moves beyond time. In other words, as each individual and what he does moves through time, he ascribes meaning to his existence. However, when he ceases moving through time (death), time creates an ultimate and absolute boundary to meaning.

This does not explain why infinity is the only acceptable backdrop to measure meaning at all. You have a tendency to simply reassert your original assertion when asked to defend it.

[_A Light in the Darkness]

Say Light, you're quoting me here, not Dude.

I know. I was using that quote to explain to Dude a synopsis of what Beckwith is saying.