Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Atheists launch inquisition...

[ben]

Damien Broderick wrote:

"...what sanction could there possibly be for *worship* of such a 
programmer? What moral authority would such a `god' have over us, other 
than brute force? What duties would be entailed upon us (except, 
perhaps, self-respecting revolt against its arbitrary dictats if they 
were disclosed in a convincing fashion)?"

I have a question, quite apart from the other considerations here:

You seem to be assuming that the kind of god that religious people 
believe in is automatically due the kind of worship they give it.

Your quite reasonable questions refer to a celestial hacker, but I'd 
like to know what sanction could there possibly be for worship of ANY 
god, however it is construed?

What moral authority could any god really have over us, other than brute 
force? As far as i can see, the only valid moral authority has to come 
from within each person, not imposed from outside, regardless of the 
source. If somebody tells me that eating peanut butter on wednesday is 
wrong, i'm going to want to know why, and it'd better be a good reason, 
that i can consider and agree with. Otherwise, it's just bullying. Maybe 
i would refrain from doing it if i was persuaded that i would go to 
hell, or suffer some equally undesirable fate, but that's got nothing to 
do with behaving morally.

Even if you do believe in a god, that's no reason to respect it, let 
alone follow it's percieved wishes. Surely there must be, somewhere in 
our history, at least one sect whose scripture reads something like "we 
believe in almighty god, and we think he's a complete bastard"?

(btw, this thread is, for a change, very entertaining. Now i know why i 
keep coming back!)

Just to contribute my little bit of oxygen to the discussion, my 
dictionary defines Atheism as "Rejection of belief in God or gods".

I think that that's not quite the same thing as asserting that god or 
gods don't exist (Anti-theism?), just that one rejects belief in them. 
Makes sense, as i always understood "a-something" to mean 
"not-something", not "anti-something".

An Agnostic, in my 1979 English english dictionary, is "A person who 
claims, with respect to any particular question, that the answer cannot 
be known with certainty."

I don't know what the correct term is for someone who just doesn't care 
whether or not gods exist.

So, there are Anti-theists, who say "There is/are no god/s", Atheists, 
who don't believe in god/s, Agnostics, who don't know, and 
Don't-care-ists, who, er, don't care one way or the other. Oh, and of 
course, there's anti-religious people, who think that religion itself 
(irrespective of the existence or not of gods) is a Bad Thing.

ben
(who tries hard to be all of the above, and is especially happy to be an 
agnostic, 'cos "There's nothing an agnostic can't do, if he really 
doesn't know whether he believes in anything or not.")