Atheism
Community Guide
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Statement of Purpose
- This is a support and conversation community for people who don't believe in gods.
- Superstition hucksters have no reason to subscribe or post here at all.
- If you are looking to debate or proselytize, options will be linked lower in the sidebar.
Acceptable
- Honest questions or conversations.
- Discussions on parenting or advice.
- Struggles, frustrations, coming out.
- Atheist memes. We can have fun!
- News headlines relevant to atheism.
Unacceptable
Depending on severity, you might be warned before adverse action is taken.
- Anything against site rules.
- Illegal and/or NSFW material.
- Troll posts and comments. There will be no attempt to explain what that means.
- Leading questions, agenda pushing, or disingenuous attempts to bait members.
- Personal attacks or flaming.
Inadvisable
- Self promotion or upvote farming.
- Excessive shitposting or off-topic discussion.
Application of warnings or bans will be subject to moderator discretion. Feel free to appeal. If changes to the guidelines are necessary, they will be adjusted.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a group that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of any other group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you you will be banned on sight.
Provable means able to provide proof to the moderation, and, if necessary, to the community.
~ /c/nostupidquestions
If you want your space listed in this sidebar and it is especially relevant to the atheist or skeptic communities, PM DancingPickle and we'll have a look!
Connect with Atheists
- Matrix: #atheism:envs.net
Help and Support Links
- Freedom From Religion Foundation
- The Secular Therapy Project
- Secular Students Alliance
- Black Nonbelievers
- The Clergy Project
- Atheist Alliance International
- Sunday Assembly
- Atheist Ireland
- Atheism UK
- Atheists United
Streaming Media
This is mostly YouTube at the moment. Podcasts and similar media - especially on federated platforms - may also feature here.
- Atheist Debates - Matt Dillahunty
- Rationality Rules
- Friendly Atheist
- Making Sense with Sam Harris
- Cosmic Skeptic
- Genetically Modified Skeptic
- Street Epistemology
- Armored Skeptic
- NonStampCollector
Orgs, Blogs, Zines
- Center for Inquiry
- American Atheists
- Humanists International
- Atheist Republic
- The Brights
- The Angry Atheist
- History for Atheists
- Rationalist International
- Atheist Revolution
- Debunking Christianity
- Godless Mom
- Atheist Freethinkers
Mainstream
Bibliography
Start here...
...proceed here.
- God is Not Great (Hitchens)
- The God Delusion (Dawkins)
- The End of Faith (Harris)
- Why I Am Not a Christian (Russell)
- Letter to a Christian Nation (Harris)
Proselytize Religion
From Reddit
As a community with an interest in providing the best resources to its members, the following wiki links are provided as historical reference until we can establish our own.
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"We agree that compassion and empathy are our foundations of moral"
So something that is widely rejected as irrelevant in moral philosophy.
By changing the definitions you can falsely equivocate anything, what an intelligent person...
Since when is this rejected as irrelevant? Many moral frameworks have their roots in such emotions instead of dogmatic ideologies.
I established that to avoid discussions like "ye, but which moral?", to make the setting clear.
"to make the setting clear"
Which was that people are considered moral because they engage in behavior that is not intrinsically moral. You realised that directly claiming that atheists are more morally good requires them to engage in morally good behavior, but for some reason (probably because you are a individualistic moral relativist who wouldn't want to be caught arguing for following moral principles) you wanted to avoid claiming that and so searched for the closest thing that you thought would suffice.
Depends on your definition of "intrinsic moral". But assuming that we are speaking about the lack of a universal ethical framework, then yes of course. More on that further down.
How about you ask me about things you might be wondering about instead of just assuming them?
To say it again in different words: There is not "the" moral. There is a tremendous amount of moral concepts people live by. In order to evaluate moral behaviour in a statistical, scientifc, manner, you need to define the criteria to judge by.
From what I understood, those studies cited in the video use those moral concepts which are rooted in emotions like empathy, which is the basis of the moral a large amount of people live by and even constitutes legislation in a lot of nations worldwide. Which seems like a meaningful choice to me.
Those results become worthless if you live by an entirely different moral. For example, someone could come by and find racism, hating women and killing people cool and morally justified due to their ethical framework. To them atheists would be the most immoral people alive and the results of those studies would have an inverted meaning to them.
And to avoid these kinds of fundamental relative ethical discussions, I made clear which moral concept is used as a basis for the analysis.
No.
"Which is the basis of a lot of morality"
Morally good behavior is not a logical consequence of empathy. Therefore measuring empathy will not tell you anything about morally good behaviour. This is true even in moral relativism, because as you correctly claim the moral system to be judged by still does not intrinsically require empathy.
"Avoid these kinds of fundamental relative discussions"
So you claim to not be a moral relativist, and yet the clear basis for your argument is intrinsic to moral relativism (and contrary to non-relativism). Now to clarify the error you are making is not that you are a moral relativist, it's that you are asserting that moral relativism makes your argument valid. It doesn't, it does absolutely nothing to your argument.
"No"
Yes. Firstly, it's the basis for your flawed defence. Secondly, I can't claim clairvoyance (you might just be lying) but I think I can build a pretty strong inductive argument that you probably believe the same things as all the hundreds of other pop philosophy anti-realists I've debated.
Agreed. I didn't say that. I try to convey that empathy and compassion can and do serve as the roots of more complex ethical frameworks by which morally good or bad behaviour is then judged by.
That depends on your ethical framework, e.g. whether behaviour is even relevant for a moral judgement.
What argument? That I tried to shortly outline the moral frameworks which are used as basis for the classifications made in the studies reviewed in the video?
No.
It seems to me that you are interpreting too much into this.
If you approach this conversation under the assumption that I'm lying we can stop talking right now, since nothing I say will have any value to you. I'm telling you that I don't see myself as an individualistic moral relativist, take it or leave it, I don't care.
More importantly, I don't see how the ethical framework I live by is relevant for our issue here.
That issue, as I'm seeing it, started by two things:
I prefer to focus on that and clear this up instead of derailing the conversation towards irrelevant topics. (I invite you to explain how this matters to you with respect to our issue here, though.)
Agreed"
So you recognise that it is therefore irrelevant, and the conclusion does not follow from the premises (it is invalid). So why are you so slavishly defending it?
"I don't see myself as a moral relativist... I don't see how my ethical framework is relevant"
Ok, you are literally too stupid to have this conversation.
The idea that moral judgements come from synthetic frameworks,is moral relativism. You deny that you are a moral relativist (good for you) but the reason I call you one is because the assumptions you make require that moral systems be synthetic. (Since you read a philosophy article you must know what this means).
So either you are a moral relativist or you are lying. I'm a rational person and cannot prove that you are lying so I defer to believing you to be a moral relativist who simply doesn't understand what it entails.
I am defending my words against your baseless claims.
Are empathy and compassion necessary or required for "a", i.e., any arbitrary, logical consistent ethical framework? No. That's where I agreed with you.
But do they nevertheless play an (important) role in many ethical framworks and can be seen as their roots? Yes, indeed they do and can.
But I already said that in different ways trying to level with your objections, showing you where these are lacking relevance or are incorrect.
And because you, the one who made claims which are factually incorrect, are saying this, this must of course be true. /s
Since I prefer to talk to people who behave in a civilised manner, this is where our conversation ends.