Albert Cipriani

Dear Keyser,
Sure, I’ve seen “A Beautiful Mind” like everyone else. Don’t see how Nash’s theory relates tho. He did not amputate Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” with it but merely added a prostheses to Smith's lassie faire economics. Again, please connect the dots for me.

You argue,
I know more than most that morality works not just for the individual but for the group. But why should I care about the group? I can only feel my own pleasure and pain, not the group’s pleasure and pain. So on what logical basis do I care? As a theist, my logical basis is God. As an atheist, you have no discernable logical basis. That’s why I refer to morally good atheists as parasitical theists. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Jobar

Albert Cipriani:
I know more than most that morality works not just for the individual but for the group. But why should I care about the group? I can only feel my own pleasure and pain, not the group’s pleasure and pain. So on what logical basis do I care? As a theist, my logical basis is God. As an atheist, you have no discernable logical basis. That’s why I refer to morally good atheists as parasitical theists.

After all the thousands of posts you have read from moral and logical atheists, Albert, I would have hoped that you had learned better than all that rot. How can you be so obtuse as to not see how the group's well-being increases the individual's, overall? And vice versa?

Consider the terms with which we describe our pleasures. Love, friendship, respect- those are individual pleasures which *require* the group, and group well-being. Pain is much the same- anger, malice, greed, all damaging to both the individual and to the group.

Where is belief in God involved in any of that? "My logical basis is God"- I'm disappointed that you seem to believe that says a single intelligible thing about logic or God.

keyser_soze

keyser_soze

Never mind, my wife told me. A beautiful mind was a movie. Got it. Looked it up to see if it was worth watching...the thing is nearly 3 hours long! How in the hell do you expect me to watch something that takes as long to watch as that? BS! No way am I going to sit through that crap. Probably doesn't even reflect Nash's life in the first place, hollywierd has a tendency to screw up 95% of a documentary of someone's life. If you would like to give me the short of it(like how you can get enough out of anyone's life to make a 3 hour movie ) I would be happy to entertain whatever argument you are trying to make re: the economy of group theories and how they don't apply to civilization in addition to market economies. Please be concise though...apparently hollywierd wasn't, and two wrongs don't make a right.

keyser_soze

Addition, it has russell crowe in it. I may give it a shot, I really liked gladiator. I'll rent it this week.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Jobar,
By now you should know me better than this:
Tho I’ve had more than my share of Almond Joys, I am not half as obtuse as you take me for. A case could be made that I’ve lived my adult life for the group and not for myself. Yes, there’s a symbiotic relationship between group pleasures and personal pleasures, but they are distinctly different. To blur the distinction is to play fast and foot loose with our moral underpinnings.

You need to see the movie “The 13th Floor,” which illustrates my point here. Our group pleasures are derived from a hidden assumption that the group is made up of REAL individuals just like ourselves. If they are not, if they are all computer models and not real, would you die for them? Would you suffer to even stub your big toe to save one of their lives from a torturous death? I think not. Why? Because your pleasure is real and virtual people’s pleasure is not real.

Ergo, the group’s well-being increases my own well-being only to the extent that I can believe that the group REALLY is composed of individuals just like me. To the degree I can empathize with the group is the degree to which I can derive vicarious pleasures from their pleasures above and beyond my own individual, selfless sacrificial pains I altruistically endure for the group’s sake.

So my altruism is a house of cards built upon the real existence of other people. But I can’t defeat the solipsism that other people may not exist any more than I can know for sure that God does exist. Ergo, I must have faith in the real existence of others in order to empathize with them and increase their well-being. AND SO MUST YOU.

But Fiach (and you I presume) don’t believe in free will. Ergo, what passes as faith in you and Fiach I must recalibrate myself to see as merely your genetic programming. The only “reason” atheistic evolutionists do the moral and upstanding things they do for our group well-being is that they are programmed to. I submit, by definition, that this is no reason. This constitutes the antithesis of reason and should shame you all into ceasing and desisting from altruistic behavior if you had a modicum of intellectual decency or rational pride in yourselves.

You ask If we define belief in God as belief in what cannot be proved but only inferred or hoped for, then your belief in the real existence of other people is synonymous with my belief in God. As you require faith in other people’s existence to justify your involvement in group pleasures, so, too, do I require a belief in God’s existence to do the same. Point is, logic alone cannot justify altruism. That house of cards requires a foundation of unproven and unproveable faith in man or God or both. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Alix Nenuphar

Albert Cipriani:

In which case, how do you define 'proof'? I have emprical evidence for the existence of other people, evidence that I can share with those other people. I can set up indirect tests for other people which return empirical evidence.

Since this cannot be done for God, I conclude that your equivocation of 'proof for God' and 'proof for other people' is at best fallacious, and at worst, ingenuous - you are trying to establish a correspondence by way of definition, rather than fact.

Since you use this fact to anchor your assertion that logic alone cannot justify altruism, then it appears also to be fallacious.

Have you any other, more supported arguments to make?

Darkblade

Albert Cipriani: I have included my actual post so that you could see what I actually wrote:

Now, in the future, I’d appreciate it if you (and all theists) would not create straw men out of EVERYTHING that I wrote, by either taking it out of context or intentionally misreporting it otherwise. You do realize that claiming that I said something that I didn’t is a lie? [deleted insult]

keyser_soze

deleted- off topic

Keyser, anyone is welcome to contribute to our conversations here, but *not* to just make random observations. Jobar.

Albert Cipriani

My My,
What a testy two we have here in the form of Keyser and Darkblade.

It's no wonder Keyser's reality does not include God, he can't even bare my allusion to a movie that he disliked. But if he liked the movie, maybe my allusion to it would have been more acceptable to him.

Therefore, in deference to his highly-tuned sensibilities, I promise to allude to no more movies that Keyser dislikes. To ensure that I don't upset him again, I will hereafter reduce my motion picture repertory to cartoons. – Insincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic