next »

[Drum]

ETHICS FOR DUMMIES

ATHEIST WORLD:
  what should i do with my life?

  do what's best.

  what is that?

  *silence, crickets chirping*

WITH JESUS:
  what should i do with my life?

  do what's written in this book.

  ok! *goes to heaven*

Ok, so you do think that what is written in the bible is what's best.  That's what I thought.
So why are you arguing?
I'm not talking about atheistic ethics - I'm describing ethics itself.
If you think following the bible is what everybody ought to do, it must be because it is what is best.  Of course, you can't show it's best and have apparently given up trying.  Like a lot of nihlists and solpsists.

[im9today]

of course you should do what is best. that's a non argument. the argument is what is best in life conan

and i can show you that loving jesus is best. i just need some time and some faith

[Blademasterbobo]

Praise the Lord!

[im9today]

Praise the Lord!

i'm glad i finally got through to someone. even if it had to be you bobo. heaven just might be better off without some people

[Drum]

Sounds like you missed or ignored my point.  I am talking about what is best, period, with no arbitrary qualifiers.  If you add a qualifier like 'what is the best knife?' all you are going to get is a bunch of talk about knives.
So don't talk about knives if you don't want to talk about knives.
There is only one logical answer to questions like 'how should we be?' or 'what should we do?'  That is: whatever is best.  That is what I call ethics.  If you think ethics is something else, whatever you think it is is necessarily worse.  But I don't think you do think that.

that doesnt answer anything at all. you still have to find what is "best" and you cant do that with any fact based analysis. total gibberish.

You don't have to find what is best - in fact I think it is extremely unlikely or improbable that you will - but that is what you should be looking for.
If you don't think anything is better or worse than anything else, you are a nihlist or a moral solipsist and you can fuck off.

so i "should" be looking for what is best

sure sounds like an ethical claim

and of course i think things are better and worse. god is perfectly good and all of his commands should be obeyed. the devil is completely evil. this isn't hard.

Why waste my time arguing with me if you agree?

So now:

Why do you think god is perfect?  Surely it means that he's better than anything else, and not that he's tautologically perfect, like you were saying before?
Seems like for such a non-argument you have been vacillating and arguing an awful lot, unless you see an opportunity to be a condescending shithead, in which case it was obvious all along.  People were looking for a foundation of ethics.  I gave the best one I know.  Now that we know what ethics is instead of dicking around with biological survival strategies or normatives or whatver, we can start the comparitive analysis.
Unfortunately, that excludes religion of its own volition and insistence, so I guess it can't make any claims about best-ness.  Sorry

[im9today]

why is it a problem that gods perfection is a tautology? that's just how airtight and tigsource-sophistry proof the argument is.

i was saying there is no logically consistent empirical fact based basis for ethics, at least not that i have ever heard of, and you didnt really help me there. you sure used a lot of words though, including some pretty nasty ones!

also have you run out of philosophical grab bag catchphrases to call me yet

edit doing what god says is what is best. i dont know why you are trying to make this harder than it is. just that old adamic nature i guess

[Drum]

I better start a list of stuff that can't be best.  Now that we know what ethics is all about, we can see that while you may never know what 'best' is - you can definitely tell what it isn't.  Here we go:

1) Anything that refuses comparison, or demands faith in order to exclude itself from analysis.  This is a given.
2) Murdering children.
3) Anime

Pretty good start.

[im9today]

keep making your list - im sure god will be real swayed by your arguments

i would like to note that point 3 is a very good one. i would move it up the list some.

[Drum]

why is it a problem that gods perfection is a tautology? that's just how airtight and tigsource-sophistry proof the argument is.

i was saying there is no logically consistent empirical fact based basis for ethics, at least not that i have ever heard of, and you didnt really help me there. you sure used a lot of words though, including some pretty nasty ones!

also have you run out of philosophical grab bag catchphrases to call me yet

edit doing what god says is what is best. i dont know why you are trying to make this harder than it is. just that old adamic nature i guess

The thing is that it's not a tautology - only your shitty argument was.  God can be best because he really is the best of anything.  A tautology is just a shitty argument that doesn't prove anything, which is what you tried on and now are disowning apparently.  Say what you like about 'best', it's not a tautology.
Also, you have been rude and condescending to me throughout this exchange (and I replied in kind).
Also, obviously I agree about there being no empirical basis for ethics, but it can employ it - and should.  Jesus would no doubt agree.  Obviously you can have faith in anything - that's hardly a basis for an ethical system.  I could have faith in empiricism! (but I don't)

[im9today]

being right and being condescending are often confused by atheists  

gotta love em!

[Drum]

keep making your list - im sure god will be real swayed by your arguments

i would like to note that point 3 is a very good one. i would move it up the list some.

It's not in order of how bad it is, but I would definitely put anime under religious faith if it was.  Religious faith is ultimately narcissistic faith in yourself - whatever you believe by faith may or may not be true, but you'll never know (or care), or it wouldn't be faith.  So it just comes down to you and your stupid fat ego that you use as a proxy for god.  For all you know, I mean.
Anime has jiggling cartoon titties and giant robots, which gives it a half-point over religion.  Anime with religious references to give itself weight is even worse than religion, by 87 utils.

being right and being condescending are often confused by atheists 

gotta love em!

And raging egoism is always confused with god by religious people.  Again, for all you know or care.

[phubans]

I wrote a cool program to collect some data on the recent activity of this forum. It collects its data based on user activity, post count, sign-up time and then compares it to volume of posts (in characters) expletives and other keywords used (notably the use of I, as in "I think" "I believe" etc) as well as a clever algorithm that gauges tone and attitude (negative readings for "Fuck you!" "Kill yourself" etc) Here is the output:



Interesting data to say the least!

[Drum]

SEGA of America – Quality Assurance
San Francisco, CA_____August 2005 – December 2005

Tested pre-release titles including Shadow the Hedgehog ... for the XBox 360 gaming console. Regarded as the expert tester for Shadow, I was chosen to assist a third party advertising group in obtaining video and screen capture footage.

I win.

But I am going to delete my account in a big display now, in accordance with TIGsource crybaby tradition.  If anybody asks you can take full credit, because I hate you just that much.  You can even add it to your resume!

[phubans]

Huh? I don't get it.. You edited part of my resume to make it look like I was bragging about Shadow the Hedgehog? lol... Thanks for reminding me to update my resume, though; a lot of that stuff is pretty obsolete now.

EDIT: Oh wow, he really did leave.

[Blademasterbobo]

phubans, you of all people shouldn't be making dumbass posts about people needing to "GTFO," you condescending, self-righteous jackass. You bitch and moan about not being part of the in crowd, or about how everyone doesn't understand you, and then you act like a complete douchebag, waving whatever shit clubs you think you're a part of in someone's face. "Senority?" Fuck off. What, someone is being "offensive?" Mr. "Ohohoho I can be offensive in the name of comedy, I won't self censor and rape is hilarious!"? Quit being such a fucking hypocrite. Oh, wait, I forgot, you're allowed to act like a jackass because Derek Yu played Madhouse and you're an "oldfag." Man, I wish I knew some important people, then I could be a complete hypocrite, too!

inb4 three pages of phubans-persecution-complex

[ஒழுக்கின்மை]

I don't think that's really what most people mean by ethics. An ethical proposition isn't something like "Acting honestly will ultimately, on average, benefit you". That's just a statement about the world. An ethical claim would be "You should act honestly regardless of whether it benefits you". (Or, equally, "You should act honestly only when it does benefit you" - the point being that the statement hinges on 'should' instead of 'is'.)

i guess i just don't understand why someone "should" do something unless there's some benefit from it, or why someone should avoid doing something unless there's some harm that comes from it. if ethics is used in the sense of 'what you should do regardless of benefit or harm' then in that sense i don't think people need ethics, they don't need to be told what to do regardless of how useful or useless it is or how beneficial or harmful it is -- what's the point of doing good if there's no benefit of doing it over not doing it? if there's no reason or "why" for a moral choice, why would it matter?

[phubans]

phubans, you of all people shouldn't be making dumbass posts about people needing to "GTFO," you condescending, self-righteous jackass. You bitch and moan about not being part of the in crowd, or about how everyone doesn't understand you, and then you act like a complete douchebag, waving whatever shit clubs you think you're a part of in someone's face. "Senority?" Fuck off. What, someone is being "offensive?" Mr. "Ohohoho I can be offensive in the name of comedy, I won't self censor and rape is hilarious!"? Quit being such a fucking hypocrite. Oh, wait, I forgot, you're allowed to act like a jackass because Derek Yu played Madhouse and you're an "oldfag." Man, I wish I knew some important people, then I could be a complete hypocrite, too!

inb4 three pages of phubans-persecution-complex

lol, I thought it was pretty clear that my post was a joke, but in retrospect I'm not surprised he took it seriously considering he was engaging im9today's obvious troll posts this whole time. Hey man, I didn't think he'd actually leave, but it was kind of irritating that he was telling people to "kill themselves" over nothing. It was really dickish, especially coming from somebody who's practically a stranger here. I can take a degree of that shit from you guys, but damn, at least have some involvement with a community before you start attacking its most active members.

[Dustin Gunn]

Phubans, confronted with his behavior, falls back on "It was a joke, guys, come on! Duh!"

~and the wheel in the sky keeps on turning~

[phubans]

Behavior? I called him on his shit and he got mad and left. It's as simple as that; don't make this about me.

Oh, and maybe find some better material instead of the same old going out of your way to be offended over the one time I made a rape joke

[Pineapple]

you didnt put the option for people to change their votes. i think you should because now i have made some posts.

Good point, I'll be sure to fix that.
Edit: It won't let me change that 

2) Murdering children.

Ever read the old testament? Yeah, god does an awful lot of that.




Also, I'm on hubans' side here. I don't think he did anything remarkably bad.