All of Lawless's Comments + Replies

Lawless20

Maybe I got a little confused with the conditional words of the English language. What I meant was: logically, before one can answer the questions "Why don't people help each other more?", one should be able to answer the question "Why do people help each other?", that is, what is it that makes people help each other in the first place.

Once you have an answer to that, you can proceed to asking why don't people help each other more than they are doing it now.

Lawless30

The starting point of your subject is the question: "Why should people help others?"

Once you have answered this, we can move on with the discussion.

0The_Duck
It's perfectly possible to study the empirical question of how to influence how altruistic people are, without making any sort of argument for why people should be altruistic. This empirical question seems to be what peter_hurford is writing about.
0fubarobfusco
"Because that's how we got here, and that's how we got all the awesome stuff we have ... and induction."
Lawless-10

a darn good piece of evidence that stuff like the argument from evil or argument from silence weren't why you were an atheist.

I don't think my being an atheist has anything to do with the argument from evil or the argument from silence. (I can explain more if anyone's interested.) I am an atheist because, based on my current knowledge, the hypothesis that God does not exist seems far more likely to be true than the hypothesis that God exists. That's all there is to it.

you can test this with hallucinogens

I assume that hallucinogens cause hallucina... (read more)

2gwern
That's pretty much the question. Wright could have reasoned the exact same way... and he didn't. Would you - really?
Lawless-30

The psychological resistance I felt to admitting God's existence, even after having seen Him descend to Earth, was immense. And, I realized, it was exactly the amount of resistance that every vocally religious person must experience towards God's non-existence.

I'm amazed. I totally can't understand this kind of thinking (which you believe to be human nature).

Me, I don't believe that God exists. In fact, I hold the belief in God for little less than a mental disease. That is because there is virtually no evidence to support the existence of God, and a... (read more)

9gwern
If you really believe that then you can test this with hallucinogens; in a non-trivial fraction of users (in good settings), they induce mystical or religious experiences and so there's a good shot they would do so for you. Have such an experience and still maintain your atheism, and maybe I will credit your claims to be atheistic based on purely rational grounds. Otherwise, you just look to me like, say, SF author John Wright: a strident atheist until he had some hallucinations after surgery and immediately flipped his views to become a strident theist. Seriously. Standard hallucinogens like psilocybin or LSD are easily obtained, cheap, and safe for at least a few doses. What's stopping you? Don't you believe your beliefs why you don't believe?