Rational BAC

I praise you for your completely rational mind. You definitely live and think "within the box".

If that works for you, suffices for you, then fine--------go with it.

Virgil Tibbs

As any atheist, I have plenty of "gut feelings," but I never pretend that they are definitely true, and further more even my gut feelings have some sort of circumstanstial evidence going for them that is lacking in "faith" as it is used in the religious sense.

As for the latter two above, I confine them only to abstractions that have no evidence either way (for example saying "murder = bad." I don't see why or even how one would go about questioning that meaningfully). However, something like an afterlife is not an abstraction because it is supposed to (meta)physically exist as a thing that will affect your consciousness.

The afterlife has one obvious piece of evidence against it: all our best information suggests consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, so if this is true and the brain stops working, no consciousness. Personally, I don't see what the big deal is: I'll just try to make the most of the time I have and try to contribute useful things that will last beyond me if possible.

And I should clarify I don't take the above as proof the afterlife can't exist, just that the afterlife is so amazingly unlikely to exist that I should just dismiss it. For example, there is a finite chance that meteor will fall from the sky and strike me dead as I type this, but I can't sit here worrying about it. The afterlife is even more infintesimally likely than the meteor, IMO.

When confronted with something I don't know the answer to and have incomplete information to offer even an educated guess on, I think it's more intellectually honest to admit I don't know than to take what I prefer on faith. Who says the things we don't yet know about reality will be comforting? Could be Cthulu out there!

This remains to be seen, as even irrational behaviors could possibly be modeled, and anything that could be modeled could in theory be programmed.

As for this subject of believing what one prefers to be true for the sake of mental health: I'd honestly rather wrestle with and potentially be destroyed by my psychological problems head on than just dodge them with comforting delusions. Perhaps that is not a rational attitude, but then we can certainly all agree human beings are not entirely rational.

Tibbs

EDIT: If I'd waited twenty minutes, you would have saved me a lot of typing, Godless Wonder. Good post.

Calzaer

Why would he kill himself if he's really scared shitless of death? Wouldn't that be sort of counter-productive?

If it IS the (hideously inconsistant) end result of having to deal with reality, he needs to see a THERAPIST, not make up a Frankenstein's Religion to cling to.

My first reaction to someone threatening suicide because they're scared to die is: "First-Degree Attention Whore". And that's the most kind. The rest involve some sort of serious mental insanity that would normally render a person non-functional.

HelenM

I don't consider suicide to be a rational decision. So asking 'why?' is somewhat fruitless.

Do you know that he isn't seeing one?

As I already said, I don't consider suicide to be a rational decision - meaning that people who contemplate it/act upon it are somewhat mentally ill.

Everyone who posts on IIDB is in some sense an attention-whore. They post because they want to be heard.

Helen

Godless Wonder

Ok. I guess we have to agree to disagree on this.

Hmm. You call yourself "Rational BAC". I could suggest "Irrational BAC" instead, since you find the box of rationality too confining. ;-)

dangin

No, I just do it because I'm right.

Doubting Didymus

I think I mostly agree with you. I'm certainly not trying to push anything on him, and even if I was, what would I say? All that it's in my power to do is to show him that his belief in an afterlife is irrational and probably not the factual truth. He already knows that, and explicitly makes it part of his belief system. If it's truly neccessary for him, then that is what he must do, and yes, it is his buisiness.

But it's still sad. It's sad that a human should have to harbour such a terror of death that he must voluntarily choose to abandon rationality to escape it. It's sad to see that it's even possible to do what emotional does with his mind. While it's not usually particularly sad to see rational people expressing religion, it's sad to see someone doing it because they feel they have no other choice, just as it would be sad to see an innocent man forced to spend his life in prison because they would otherwise be killed.

Rational BAC

I think very few Christians have a "horror" of death.

Christianity gives you a promise of everlasting existence. Don't want that ----then do not choose it.

The alternative-- the atheist alternative -------an eternity of lack of consciousness of any kind of all----------aint all that bad either if that is what you choose.

Personally I do not believe in any kind of fire and brimstone hell.

I do believe in a glorious heaven.

Virgil Tibbs

Question: Given that the vast majority of people through out human history have a habored some sort of supernatural belief, and that they usually do so out of long standing traditions, wouldn't that make that naturalists the ones who are "thinking outside the box?"

EDIT: Decided to respond to this too:

This is rather putting the horse before the cart, Rational BAC. I (and likely most atheists) don't "choose" atheism because I don't want to exist after I die. Rather I reason that I am unlikely to have consciousness after I die because that is what the evidence strongly suggests. My "wants" never enter into the picture when I am trying to discover how the universe works, if I can help it. My reason for this is that believing what one prefers to be true is a method of understanding the has failed continuously throughout human history (the story of Genesis, Noah's Ark, a Flat Earth, Terracentric Theory, etc.). However, taking a more positivist approach like humanity has in the last century has yielded amazing results.

Tibbs

Rational BAC

I don't see it.

Those who think that the only reality is what we can see, hear, smell and touch with our limited senses ---those who think that our very limited intelligence understands reality to any definite and not to be disputed measure--------those live within "a box".

Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and any kind of spiritualist who think outside of the "norm" are thinking outside the box of our "reality". They may possibly be wrong but they certainly represent what makes humans humans.

I do not think that a cat or a dog or a lion or a bear thinks outside of what they perceive as reality. Nor should they. that is a definite human trait.

Human naturalists represent the lower animals. Believers in the supernatural represent humanity.