• burgermeister@lemm.ee
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    10 days ago

    Honestly the whole “if there’s no god then how do you know right from wrong” argument is astounding to me, I don’t know how someone can say that with a straight face.

    • radix@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don’t want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don’t want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you. – Penn Jillette

      • hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 days ago

        Hell, I’m not even an atheist, but if someone actually came up to me with this kind of shit, I’d run as fast as I could. Like, why would you want to rape or murder in the first place? If you need to be threathened with eternal torture in order to be a good person, then maybe you’re not a good person.

    • otp@sh.itjust.works
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      10 days ago

      Without the [holy book], how would morality exist?

      Maybe we need to thank religion for saving us from some literal sociopaths…

      • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        This right here is the answer. Religion was an effective way to control many psychopaths. Very useful before there was an effective legal system and police force.

  • YamahaRevstar@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    I remember a YouTuber explained that since watches work and had a maker, that humans are immensely more complex, so that’s evidence of a maker of the human.

    • Mayor Poopington@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      Don’t get me started on how badly crafted the human body is. If someone designed us, they should be dragged out in the street and shot.

      • YamahaRevstar@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        Why can’t I breathe out of my nose ever? Why does food go down the same hole as air? Why do I have to sleep? Why did I have to get boners in Mrs. O’s second hour Spanish class right before the end of class and have to walk to lunch at half mast for the whole second semester sophomore year?

        • Tower@lemm.ee
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          9 days ago

          The recurrent laryngeal nerve. Our liquid waste evacuation tubes sharing space with our reproductive organs. Our reproductive organs being immediately adjacent to our solid waste evacuation tube. Hangnails. Acne. Teeth (god damn luxury bones).

          But my go to for “if there is a god, they’re not worth worshipping” is always Children’s. Bone. Cancer. Those 3 words should not fucking go together.

          • tpyo@lemmy.world
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            9 days ago

            But my go to for “if there is a god, they’re not worth worshipping” is always Children’s. Bone. Cancer. Those 3 words should not fucking go together.

            I watched my sibling deteriorate over the course of a few years and then die a couple days after their sixth birthday. They had a brain stem tumor which was inoperable. There is no god

      • gibmiser@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        Without knowing the constraints I’m going to have to withhold judgment.

        Unless God is omnipotent cause if so he really sucks at this.

    • steeznson@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      That’s Paley’s Teleological argument from the 18th century. It’s a classic but back then you have to remember clocks were more impressive.

      The modern day spin on it is the “fine tuning” argument. Basically: the chances of life existing at all with our earth and the solar system being in a goldilocks zone seems too perfect to be a coincidence. You can probably explain it with selection bias but it’s a better argument nonetheless.

      • MajorMajormajormajor@lemmy.ca
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        9 days ago

        Which would make sense if this was the only solar system in the galaxy. 1 in 8 chance (rip Pluto) is pretty impressive, but when you include the rest of the galaxy 1 in however many trillion stars with however many trillions of planets is pretty low odds. Mathematically there should be more planets with life on them, so either we can’t find them, they’re too far away, they all killed themselves, or some other reason is preventing us from finding them.

        • adarza@lemmy.ca
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          9 days ago

          rare enough and spread out enough (both in time and space) that we may never encounter another ‘intelligent’ civilization, or evidence of one, during our own extremely minuscule window of existence in the grand history of time.

  • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    9 days ago

    ‘If God isn’t real, why do you say oh my God?’

    That was from the deputy head of my school…

    • kabi@lemm.ee
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      9 days ago

      My friend once told me he had heard this very convincing argument on why he should believe…

      I told him the usual “gimme your wallet, I’m your god or whatever”, and he relented that maybe it’s not so simple.

      Then a few years later, there he goes bringing it up again…

    • radix@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      “My God thinks I should drink, and do drugs, and rob the blind and sick. I’m not entirely sure if that’s right, but I should do those things just in case I have to to get into his good graces.”

      Even they have to think it sounds pretty silly when you turn it around on them.

  • MagicShel@lemmy.zip
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    9 days ago

    The Bible. Never understood how anyone could read that and believe. The answer I leaned much later on is that they don’t read it.

  • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Not necessarily God but intelligent design. I saw someone talk about a banana being the perfect fruit and how well it matched the shape of our hands. So obviously someone planned that out. Must’ve been God, the same being that releases half a dozen new apple varieties every season.

    • poweruser@lemmy.sdf.org
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      9 days ago

      The banana is one of the earliest cultivated plants. It is specifically cultivated, by humans, precisely to be the best fruit possible.

      Bananas rule, and we can thank their creator: 10,000 years of human ingenuity

  • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Chicken and Egg argument. Christian apologist said it’s only a paradox for atheists. God just made eggs and chickens at the same time.

    Of course, as an atheist who has seen dinosaur fossils… Eggs existed hundreds of millions of years before chickens.

  • endeavor@sopuli.xyz
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    9 days ago

    If there were no god wed all have no morals.

    If violently abusive rapist psycopath threatening to torture you is your only reason for being nice, maybe you’re a pos to begin with?

  • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeM
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    9 days ago

    I believe in God but found the arguments in The Brothers Karamazov (and yes I read the book) to be misguided. There’s a part in particular where a quasi-villainous character loses faith in God and suddenly goes right to murdering other characters who have been getting on his nerves. The whole thing takes Nietzsche to a whole new level. We aren’t the sum of our schools of thought; in fact, in my faith, God doesn’t really care about faith as much as he cares about how good we are. I’ve never met anyone before who doesn’t have at least some innate sense of some kind of boundaries.

  • AliSaket@mander.xyz
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    9 days ago

    How would anything have been able to form, i.e. make more order, without decreasing entropy?

    Of course there are multiple errors in that thought.

    1. Entropy does not mean an actual grade of (dis-)order or organization. It’s one model to grasp certain processes through that concept. Outside of these the model doesn’t hold.
    2. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy cannot decrease in a CLOSED system (i.e. mass, energy, information flow at the boundary = 0). It doesn’t mean that within that system there can’t be local imbalances. For example: For a plant to be able to “order” - to use this term - its molecules to cells, Hydrogen atoms had to have been fused to Helium in our fusion reactor 150 million km away that we call sun which increases local entropy.

    Of course there’s more wrong with it, but those would be the blatant ones for me.

  • Phantom_Engineer@lemmy.ml
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    9 days ago

    Weirdest would have to be that miracles were actively occuring at their Penacostal church. On the one hand, if that were true it would be strong evidence for a god. On the other hand, I don’t believe the claim is true.

    A lot of believers point towards the fine-tuning argument. It’s “the god of the gaps.” Essentially, the argument boils down to the claim that since we don’t know why various laws and properties of nature and physics are the way they are, there must of have been a god that set them. Like many theist arguments, it falls apart when you consider that the lack of an alternate explanation doesn’t mean that there is no alternate explanation and that the believing explanation has to be correct.

    As an atheist, I think the strongest argument for god is the moral argument. It’s simple. For objective morality to exist, there must be an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-moral being capable of establishing it (that is, a god). Objective morality exists, so God exists.

    It’s easy to look at that and say “Well, objective morality doesn’t exist. End of story!” I think there is a decent argument that can be made for the existence of objective morality, though I don’t believe in it. Still, do I not believe in god because I think objective morality doesn’t exist, or do I think objective morality doesn’t exist because I don’t believe in god? If I’m being honest, it’s more the latter than the former, and that’s not really a great way to come to the conclusion.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Objective morality doesn’t exist. Even if it did that doesn’t necessitate a God. Let’s use colors for a stand-in to morality, now you have two colorblind people arguing whether objective color truly exist, one might say that his holy book says that God gave colors and an apple is red, while the other might say that there’s no God and apples are green. They’re both (at least about the color part) right (or wrong depending on how you want to look at it), and objective color still exists regardless of it without the need for any God to have created it. In the same way it’s possible for objective morality to exist without the requirement of a creator, if it is objective it should be demonstrably so, otherwise it’s subjective. In our color example the colorblind people can argue all they want, but if you use an equipment to measure the light waves you’ll have an objective answer for the wavelength of the apple, they might disagree on what that wavelength is (the subjective part) but they agree on the value (the objective part). If something similar could be achieved for morality it would imply the existence of an objective morality (regardless of God) but since we can’t then no objective morality exists.

  • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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    9 days ago

    The weirdest to me are variations of, “If God didn’t exist it would make me feel bad.” Uhh???

  • kn33@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Personally, I just prefer it. I get a lot more anxious considering that death is the end, given how it could come at any moment. I prefer to think it’s not. Since I was raised with the alternative being that God exists, I go with that.