First, I gotta say that the whale graphic keeps cracking me up.

yea… andy, you got pwned… and for good reason…

Your premise that altruism is an evolved characteristic doesn’t say anything about it’s rightness or wrongness although you implied that it does (or jonswerens inferred it but you let it stand).

I posted a comment on his site (a very looong one), and it’s awaiting moderation. I’ll send it to you and you can post it here if he doesn’t.

@ David H. You should post it here too. It’s relevant.

Yeah, Andy, what you did was anticipate too much.  Let him explain what he means by “Christian ethics” (or hang himself if he’s unable or unwilling to define it).

Also, hold his feet to the fire when he evades.  You started by specifically asking if he thought the Golden Rule was limited to Christians or Christian thought.  He didn’t answer that.  He also didn’t respond to your clear answer of why you oppose Prop 8: because it causes harm (of a sort), and you want to avoid people suffering that harm. If that’s not a good enough answer for him, get him to say so, and ask him why not.

Instead you two went off onto this evolutionary psych tangent that’s pretty much irrelevant, since even a group of (say) emotionless AIs could agree to a social contract of altruism, since it’s to their mutual benefit.  The evolutionary origins of altruistic behavior only become relevant if the party arguing the side of theism goes into “But how come people have a gut-level moral sense—not just an analytically arrived-at social contract—at all if the world is just naturalistic?” territory, as C.S. Lewis did.

And call a spade a spade.  If he’s claiming only Christians are “good” or “ethical” (because other religions, or the lack of religion, don’t or can’t suffice to make a person so), then he’s a bigot. This should be pointed out to him. Ask him if he’s aware that most people on Earth aren’t Christians, yet are actual living, feeling people who want to lead good lives, just like him. This will come across as condescending, no doubt, but that’s because a decent person like you really does have to stoop to enter that den of willfully ignorant tribal chest-pounding. If you pretend like you’re not doing so, when both you and your audience can see that you are, you’re likely to come off as disingenuous. And you’re likely to let false premises slip by unchallenged and wander off into irrelevancy, as happened here.

Also, hot damn, I like the new site design. Logical, blockily laid out (I consider that good), bold logo, correct width, even a Sagan Quote.

The comments could be improved by a spell check, a preview function, and nixing the justified text. Left-aligned is easier on the eyes, I think.

Thanks Butter. It’s a work in progress. Personally, I like the justified text in this layout. I’ll see what I can do down the line about a spell check and previews on comments. Although if you’re a Firefox user, you should get the little dashed red line under a word that you’ve misspelled (or isn’t in Firefox’s dictionary).

“I posit that the atheist cannot stay true to his beliefs. If he does, he loses logic, language and love, because they, like anything else worth living for in this world, are not “provable.””

From the little I’ve seen so far, I really like Jon.  However, I can’t tell you how much I despise this “nothing is really provable” argument.  It’s like the offense is headed for a touchdown, so the defense not only moves the goalposts, but nukes the stadium and un-invents the sport.

Andy, your pwnage doom was sealed the moment you not only let Jon (twitter difficulties or no) get away with this, but complimented him on it.  That’s just bush league. 

Some thoughts…

First, when regarding morality I think it’s a good idea to emphasize the premise that (for most of us at least) morality stems from that which is beneficial to life (some extend this to animal life in varying degrees) and that which degrades life is immoral (as an aside this is why I have come to consider religion immoral…). This is pretty cut and dry until you come to areas of competing desire, some of which is unavoidable and some of which can be inoculated against. To me one of the key goals of a moral system is to enrich the lives of all those around it while protecting them from harm. The ‘Christian Ethic’ fails to do this in many places, the shameful stigmas on sex are detrimental to a healthy psychological outlook on life, the whole basis of fear and shame at the root of it are also detrimental, and the outlook that you should be willing to allow someone to harm you without defending yourself or give more than a thief asks for is an abject failure to prevent harm.

With regard to his idea that Atheism means that you have to have ‘proof’ for everything, he’s standing on a false assumption and that assumption is what you need to take on. Here are some points you could bring out.
1. Atheism makes no claim of absolute proof that gods do not exist. Typically the key assertion is that there is insufficient evidence indicating the existence of gods and the supernatural. Furthermore, through science and logic it can be rationally deduced that our existence and the state of the universe is fully possible through solely natural causes and that these natural causes better explain many of the problems religions struggle with (e.g. the problem from pain and suffering).

2. The areas he is challenging do not fall under that category of evidentiary lopsidedness. Language is a human construct, at it’s beginning it was an agreed upon consensus that certain sounds were symbolically representing certain objects, as it developed it was applied to abstract thoughts etc. While there is an interesting question raised as to whether or not your red is the same color as my red in that what my brain perceives as red yours could perceive as what mine calls purple; this question has no real world implications as the basis for color comes down to what wavelengths of light are reflected by an object, that information is not subjective. So even if our minds interpret that wavelength differently we’re still perceiving the same wavelength so we can form a common word for it. Using my mind as the basis, I may stop at red lights, you may stop at blue, and bob may stop at hot pink, but we’re all stopping at the same wavelength of light and our language calls that wavelength red.

3. On logic, again we’re coming to agreed upon constructs. When discussing math a world wherein 2+2=18 is fully consistent with math and language. Numbers are simply constructs to represent a certain quantity, this is why at it’s basic level math is taught by putting groups of things together (if you have five apples and bob gives you 2 apples, how many apples do you have). So for the sake of this paragraph I will use this symbol * to represent a quantity of a single unit, that which we call one. So if you have ** and add to that ** you will always have ****, in our language we call that 4, in another world they could call it 5 or 18 or sploofackt, but the key to any mathematical system is that **+** always =**** regardless of what symbol you attribute to it. we say 1=* 2=** 3=*** and so on, but we could just as easily say 8=* 4=** 7=*** and still be correct mathematically and linguistically if that is the agreed upon construct by consensus of the group speaking the language.

4. With regard to love, it is a word given to a certain range of emotions and quite frankly our language does a horrid job of expressing it. The Greeks had a better system in that there were different words for different kinds of love and that does a better job of emphasizing their evolutionary basis. There’s brotherly love, the love you feel toward family and those of your group (herd is also applicable). This form of love evolved due to the necessity to work together and depend on each other to better our survival, a tribe that cared for each other, nursed the sick, helped those who fell on hard times, etc, would be more likely to survive and thrive than a group with no regard for the well being of those within itself, the second group would likely even destroy itself as brotherly love is the key to resolving conflicts of interest. Unfortunately the flipside of this is the origin of our zenophobia, as this brotherly love can be twisted to fear of the outgroup (e.g. the irrational fear of homosexuality that drove the religious right to push prop 8). Love of the same can breed fear of the different. Romantic love also came from the need to form strong bonds to improve odds of survival. The parrents who felt love for eachother would remain together and provide for their children, even passing a form of the love they felt for their mate on to their children as a reflection of their mate.

As far as prooving love, no such thing is possible as it’s basis lies in a personal emotional experience (and higher forms of love go beyond simple emotion to a choice). If i feel a certain way about someone I call it love. Interestingly enough the object of that love neither needs to return it or even exist for the love to be real. This is why it’s always hard to argue against the personal experience reasons for belief in god’s existence. The key is always to acknowledge that the persons emotions are real, and their experience is real, but stress that the experience is no less real if the object of it’s focus doesn’t exist.

Dunno how helpfull all that was, but one last thought to keep in mind… Forums that dictate a short response form will always play to the favor of the person with less logic and reason on their side. It takes far more space to present a cohesive argument than to spout superstition and derision.

<i>Thanks Butter. It’s a work in progress. Personally, I like the justified text in this layout.</i>

Eh, I’ll adapt.  I just think it’s a tad harder to read when the justifying puts ginormous spaces between words on one line, then has them normally spaced on the next.

<i>Although if you’re a Firefox user, you should get the little dashed red line under a word that you’ve misspelled (or isn’t in Firefox’s dictionary).</i>

Red underlines. We hates them, my precious.  Nasty, filthy underlineses, sneaking in our Word documentses and Firefoxes and tearing them up!  We can’t think about what we’re typing when the red underlineses or the green underlineses distract us, can we, precious?

Yeah, so,  I always turn that feature off.

It doesn’t take manually entered html tags either, I see.  Any way to turn that feature on?  Having to use a mouse and a toolbar for simple formatting makes me a sad panda.

I don’t think morality is an absolute. Just a hundred years ago or so, child labor was okay, beating your children as a punishment was okay, just to name the first two things that came to mind.

The debate was pretty interesting, but I definitely think you were outmatched. Jon seemed to use a lot of misdirection and nonsequiturs to get you off track.

My daemon has many forms.  Goose is common.

**goes and poops on a sidewalk**

@ Butter, sorry, it’s Rich Text Editing or none on the comments. I am a little surprised that it doesn’t accept basic HTML…

Lemme see. <b>Bold</b>? <em>Italics</em>?

<blockquote>Foo</blockquote>

FAIL!

It’s no big deal, though.  I’ll add your biological and technological distinctiveness to my own.

Ooo… I don’t like that at all. Although I should point out, there are keyboard shortcuts. No need to touch your mouse unless you want to insert a link.

And yeah, I noticed the blockquote button is missing on the rich text editor for comments (this is actually a noted bug by the TinyMCE Comments plugin developer). Sorry Butter, you’re going to have to live with it for a while. I already fixed one plugin developer’s mistake today.

No need to touch your mouse unless you want to insert a link.

INNUENDO-ROBOT MAKES AVAILABLE YOUR SXY CHOICES:

1) That’s what she said!
2) …hawt
3) That’s NOT what your momma said!
4) Heath Ledger shuld win best film LOL!1!!

YOUR CHOICE: 1

EXCELLENT CHOICE SIR.>>>

That’s what she said!

Joel: Please stick around; you’re awesome.

I agree entirely that Christian thought goes beyond being orthogonal to personal morality and actively causes harm.  So many of the presuppositions that it’s based on are asinine, with the biggest culprits, of course, being an inborn brokenness called sin that only they have the snake oil to cure, and the idea that there’s a magical freaking man who can hear your thoughts.  Many of them actually believe that this telepathy is real, and failure to control your thoughts is wrong. 

Of course, it’s really just what any good marketer does: sell the need, then sell the product.

Even the nice parts are often stupid (thanks Nietzsche!). Although I’ve heard it explained that turning the other cheek had a particular significance in the culture of the time (forcing the attacker to slap you with a certain hand and thus regard you as an equal or something), and was therefore more defiant and subversive than it at first appears, it’s not often taken that way, and instead is taken as an admonishment to be passive.  Combine that with the unhelpful “Render unto Caesar” (but what is rightfully Caesar’s?  What if Caesar’s an unjust dick?) and the impossible “Love thine enemies”, and you get a prescription to be an amorphous sack of tepidity with no inclination to fight against tyranny or injustice.  (This contradicts much of the Old Testament, but ignore that; Christians do.) Fortunately, almost no one actually puts that spinelessness into practice, but that just opens the door to the charge that “We’re all sinners!”, and we’re back to the fake need that only their product can satisfy.

Then there’s the fact that the way they satisfy it—waving your transgressions, if indeed that’s what they are, away onto a magic scapegoat who didn’t even have the decency to stay punished—is inherently immoral.  Christopher Hitchens is fun when he gets going on this point. 

It’s a quite ingenious little meme package.

Butter,

If you would like left-justified text in the comments, add the following text to your User Stylesheet file (excluding the ‘begin’ and ‘end’ lines):
———- begin ———-
.commentcont p {
text-align: left ! important;
}
———- end ———-
Different browsers store the User Stylesheet file in different locations and under different filenames. Here are instructions for a few browsers:

Mozilla/Firefox (userContent.css)
Internet Explorer
Opera

Sorry I can’t be more specific; I don’t know what browser and OS you use.

[...] Welfle has now posted our Twitter exchange on the Freethought Fort Wayne site, where his atheist friends try to help him outwit my superstition, derision, tricky misdirection [...]

@butter
Is this from the “Things you thought you’d never hear asked” category
What if Caesar’s an unjust dick?

LOL

@Andy

I think some others have identified some assumptions that you let jonswerens get away with or questions he didn’t really answer. I don’t agree necessarily that twitter is a bad forum for debate but it has unique requirements you have to take into account

As for what should you have said, “I don’t want to play anymore, I’m taking my ball home and you smell like cheese”

Seriously, for me the bottom line comes down to the absolute very beginning. If moral/philosophical thought is a progression from point A to B to C, it is increasingly difficult to have an argument about C if two people arrive at it from different starting points or come to the table with difference assumptions about what happened at A or B.

You have to start with point A. In this specific example, “Why have you (jonswerens) chosen Christianity as the basis of your moral code?” On what basis (logic, reason, personal experience) did you (jonswerens) decide that the Bible is the truth for moral behavior? What life experiences did you draw on?

Let me rephrase using Prop 8 as a specific item. jonswerens believes homosexuality is wrong based on biblical “principles” but on basis does jonswerens believe the Bible is right to begin with. What *other* evidence led him to believe such things. I have to believe that jonswerens has reasons for his belief that are independent of the Bible.

Now that can open a whole conversation that I have always found very interesting plus it gives you an opportunity to understand where he is coming from.

More specifically…
If he wants to stick with bronze age/biblical morals or accuses you of having a moral compass without a true North (i.e, God) then ask him if God’s actions (genocide) with regards to Jericho in the book of Numbers(?) were moral actions.

Answers might be,
a) No. That’s not likely to be his answer and i’ve never heard a Christian say no, since God cannot be immoral. In fact, I don’t know what I would do if I got that answer maybe, “You believe that the basis of your morality comes from a god that is himself immoral?”

b1) Yes, God is the ultimate in morality. Now here comes the rationalization because God cannot do anything wrong, “By killing the men and enslaving the women and children, God was using the Israelites to exact his punishment upon the wicked ways of the Jericho-ites(?)” or “Sometimes the parent has to punish the child out of love”.

If you get the most likely copout answer, “We are not bound by Old Testament dictates” or “Christ’s death changed everything”. Don’t give up. Remember the same schizophrenic god of Numbers 22 is the same god that rules today. Either god’s morality has changed (ha! fat chance) or we are judging God by man’s standard of morality. And if “genocide is wrong” is man’s standard and not god’s, I’ll pick man over god any day, even if I truly thought god was real.

b2) Yes,  God’s ways are mysterious. With reasoning like that well…
“Why did you stab me in the neck with your pencil?”
“God’s ways are mysterious *shrugging*”

Anytime the argument is raised that “Jesus changed things”, I’ve found it useful to use this point…

The authority of Jesus rests upon the authority of the Old Testament as its foundation. If the Old Testament is invalid then there is no basis for the belief that Jesus was the Christ. If the whole thing isn’t 100% the true inspired word of God then the basis for Jesus’ divinity is nonexistent. Once you allow that parts of the bible are not the inspired word of God you lose any grounds for believing that any of the bible IS the inspired word of God. I may think the literalistic Fundies are a little cracked in the head, but at least they’re true to their faith. Any act of looking outside the text of the bible for justification of your belief denigrates your faith as faith is not supposed to need outside confirmation (if it did it would be called evidence, not faith). Therefore any argument beyond “it’s what the bible says” shows that God is not the basis of your belief. At the end of the day either you think the bible is 100% the inspired word of god, or (if you’re honest) you have to conceed that you have nothing on which you base your belief in god.

Oh yeah, one thing I’ve always enjoyed watching them squirm around is the story of Jephthah sacrificing his daughter to god in Judges 11. Throw it out there and ask if it was moral for god to allow it, but familiarize yourself with the story first as some of the rationalizations can get pretty convoluted, a familiarity with some of the original language can help too, as there are those who will use specific translations to say that he didn’t really kill her even though the original language makes it pretty clear that he did, and unlike with Abraham god just sat back and watched a human sacrifice. If that’s righteousness I’ll take sin any day of the week…

Is this from the “Things you thought you’d never hear asked” category[?]  What if Caesar’s an unjust dick?

Well, he could be a Biggus Dickus; I even saw a movie about it.

If he wants to stick with bronze age/biblical morals or accuses you of having a moral compass without a true North (i.e, God) then ask him if God’s actions (genocide) with regards to Jericho in the book of Numbers(?) were moral actions.

It’s in Joshua 6 (though they had themselves a good Midianite slaughter in Numbers 31).  More than that, Jericho was just the kickoff of a trans-Canaan tour of murder, mayhem, looting, and virgin-stealing. (Including, interestingly, in Gaza, in Judges 1:17).  Until, of course, the power of YHWH was humbled before the “chariots of iron” in Judges 1:19.  Which is just funny.

@ Joel:

Anytime the argument is raised that “Jesus changed things”, I’ve found it useful to use this point…

Another one is that there was still a couple-millennium-long  Old-Covenant interlude, coming after 200 kiloyears or so of Homo sapiens’ existence, during which Yahweh apparently thought the cruel ways were swell. He sat around wanking for eons, then appeared as various burning objects to a desert-dwelling tribe and set up rules about their foreskins and menstrual emissions and such, then, in a blink of an eye (compared to the vast swaths of prehistory already passed) undid it all by sacrificing himself to himself and then not even staying dead.

If they’re educated enough to not be YECs but still cling to the divinity of Jesus, some version of this chronologically improbable narrative is probably what they believe.