I'm saying that any belief admitting empathy is illogical according to science, this IS true...
Oh really, how so? People have got to start to learn that just by saying "This is true" does not make it true at all.
Anyway, empathy is real, despite your evidence-free and citation-less claim. It's been observed and tested for, not only in humans, but in primates and other mammals as well.
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache...tes&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&client=firefox-a (I hope this link works, let me know if it doesn't. It's kind of a weird one.)
The fact that you didn't know about this established tenant of psychology shows that you didn't even bother doing the meanest and most basic of research into the stuff you're trying to talk about. Already, your whole argument has been undermined. Please, learn to research such things before trying to establish an argument or position on them. It will save you from such embarrassments and make you a more knowledgeable and wiser person for it.
believing in free will directly opposes neuroscience and cause effect nature, yet it is also absolutely necessary for any sort of good and bad, or any kind of empathy to exist.
Well, empathy does exist, as shown above. Free will is a more subjective area, vulnerable to arguments over semantics, but I will say that neuroscience does not directly oppose free will, but it's not a free will in the sense you seem to believe it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Neuroscience
The free will that we have and enjoy is really more of a, to borrow a phrase from the wikipedia page, "free won't", or a freedom to choose not to do an action that is put forth by the unconscious parts of the brain (probably originating from the amygdala and the limbic system). Yes, there are reactions we have that are involuntary and over which our conscious brain (the neocortex) does not directly control or enact upon, but that's mostly stuff that doesn't even need to rise to the conscious level, like breathing, your heart pumping blood, secreting hormones, digesting food, etc, etc. However, there can be certain situations in which your body will take actions involuntarily that aren't part of the normal unconscious homeostasis your body tries to maintain. Here's an example. You're alone, late at night, walking through the woods. You're nervous and scared, anxiously looking around to make nothing is following you or going to attack you. Suddenly, a friend of yours leaps out unexpectedly from behind a tree, yelling "boo!". You'll probably automatically let out a scream, and maybe start to run away, or even involuntarily punch at your friend.
Normally, such actions as running, yelling, and punching would be under your conscious jurisdiction, but in this case, it was not. It was completely automatic and involuntary. You had no choice in what you did, your body just did it. This is what happened in your brain (in a brief overview). Your senses have a large connection to your frontal lobe of your neocortex, which is where the brain does such things as analyzing and logistical thinking. The connection is large, so the frontal lobe receives a highly accurate and detailed report from your sense. However, the issue is that the connection and processing time for such information is slow (relatively speaking), and in life-or-death situations, waiting around for your frontal lobe to fully process the information its receiving and then deciding the best course of action can take way too long, you'll have probably died. The brain also has a quicker way to respond to incoming stimuli. There is also a direct connection from the senses to the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain. This connection is much faster than the one to the frontal lobes, but it sacrifices accuracy and detail for speed. It therefore can react very quickly to pressing stimuli, but can only make very broad, general reactions to the situation, nothing as precise or as fine-tuned as the frontal lobes can do.
Now, when your brain receives stimuli from the environment, the information gets sent along both of those path ways. The result is that your amygdala makes you feel an emotional response to stimuli before you've fully consciously understood and processed the information in your frontal lobes. That's why you react in such a way to your friend, particularly because you were already primed in a state of anxiety. Your amygdala, in its quick imprecision, realized that something was coming told you and made you react to it before you could fully realize what it was and how much of a threat it actually was to you. Generally, though, the amygdala does not force an action before the frontal lobes has fully processed and understood a situation, only in situations where speed is of the essence.
Due to the impreciseness of the amygdala, it can send out an emotional response that can be inappropriate for the situation, and that's where your frontal lobes come in. The frontal lobes have the ability to check on the emotional signals that the amygdala is sending out, and either let them continue on their way or suppress them. That's where the free will (or, rather, free won't) comes in. Your amygdala will send out emotional information on how you feel about a situation, but it's up to your frontal lobes to actually decide whether to enact upon that emotion or to ignore it and pursue another course of action.
To give an example of such a decision to not follow your initial emotional response is, say, seeing a homeless man on the street. You feel sympathy for him, and want to give him something, but you know you've spent a lot of money recently, so you have to save your cash. You then suppress and go against your original emotional response, and then decide not to give him money because you can't really afford to.
As for "good" and "bad", such things are so nebulously defined, but with our sense of empathy, we definitely have been able to call things as such.
If it doesn't then your arguement is already bunk because there would be no reason at all for believing or not believing in god, and trying to use logic in this context because basically both sides are just a product of reactions and no one can be held accountable
Yes, people can be held accountable, for reasons described above.
What you believe in it is still very much based in this same illogic as religion it must be or you don't believe in anything. people very much try to keep saying there beliefs are still the only logical route, which is very unscientific, anyone who knows anything about science realizes very early that the only thing science supports at all is nihilism, which no one is arguing.
this constant idea that religious people are stupider, more illogical, more violent than others is what I keep trying to address, and in my opinion still a very bigoted/ignorant way to perceive any religion. Its stupid, and the reasons people keep trying to find to separate it from other belief systems are ill founded and often times hypocritcal.
Ok, I have no idea where you got the idea that the only thing science supports is nihilism, and I've even gone all the way back to the post you first mentioned it in. We can formulate reasons to live, have morality, be empathetic, and we most definitely have a
consciousness all within scientific theory and bounds.
First off, I'd like to point out that Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Stephen Hawking, and Richard Dawkins, to name a few well-known scientists, all, I can safely say, know science better and much more extensively than you do, yet none of them are/were nihilists.
Second off, through evolutionary theory, it has been shown that it is profitable and best, if not inevitable, for species and organisms to learn and adapt to roles of cooperation, and in more complex creatures (such as mammals), learn and evolve such things as empathy, altruism, and morality. You can read more about that through these links.
http://64.233.169.132/search?q=cach...thy&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/
Also, I don't think I've ever, and I constantly try to avoid to (if I have failed at that, please tell me), called religious people "stupid". I don't come with the judgment that people are dumber than me. There could be people who're technically and have the potential to be smarter than I am, but they're simply filled or stunted by misinformation and ignorance. More illogical, on the other hand, yes they are, because they don't even have the evidence to explain any of the conclusions they come to about universe or the world. They just simply parrot (bad) information that was stuffed into them and told not to question (for the most part).
As for more violent, well it seems to be. From Sam Harris'
Letter to a Christian Nation, he quotes a statistical study correlating crime rates to politically conservative ("red") states, which are generally conservative for religious reasons, to politically liberal ("blue") states.
Of the twenty-five cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in “blue” states and 38 percent are in “red” states. Of the twenty-five most dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states, 24 percent in blue states. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the United States are in the pious state of Texas. The twelve states with the highest rate of burglary are red. Twenty-four of the twenty-nine states with the highest rate of theft are red. Of the twenty-two states with the highest rates of murder, seventeen are red.
Combine that with the potential unrestrained violence that religious beliefs can bring out in people (to, once again, cite things like suicide bombers, 9/11, and the Inquisition), yes, religious people seem to have a higher capacity for violence, or at least for a "rationality" that lets them act it out. It's not bigoted at all, it's the plain and simple truth, and sometimes it hurts. It would be bigoted if we had no evidence or reason to claim such things about them (something that religious people seem all too ready to do to homosexuals and atheists, or even other religions).
just because a person believes in god has nothing to do with how good/how scientific a person is:
Just because i believe in god either, has in no way stopped me from being a good person, and from studying mathematics as a fave subject- Its when people say that because i believe in god i MUST be stupid/wrong whatever that is pissing me off, because you shouldn't be able to just stereotype people like that because you believe morals arrived differently, or you believe the world runs in different ways.
I believe in god for many reasons, to have a basis for morality, to believe in something beyond life, to believe that the world around me has value to it, and that learning and gaining experiences about science also have value to them.... you can believe whatever you want, but these things help me live and be a good person in a world that is otherwise meaningless and mad scientifically. And you guys have no right saying that i'm stupider or more violent because of it... if anything it has helped me care more about the world around me, unselfishly even....
I respecet if you are atheist as well, I love diversity in peoples beliefs and I love being able to have these sorts of choices about beliefs when it doesn't concern violence.... its when people try to say that certain ways of thinking are stupid, or won't tolerate other beliefs is when it gets aggravating.... people should err on the side of tolerance and try to fight violent actions rather than trying to tie those actions to a set of larger beliefs....
I don't doubt that you are a good person, or try to be one, and I'm perfectly aware that most religious people aren't at all the kind of person who's going to strap a bomb to themselves, or go out and shoot a doctor for performing abortions, or that sort of stuff. But the fact is that by allowing religion to go unquestioned and uncriticized, giving it a sense of legitimacy gives the opportunity for such people that do such things to appear. The line between nonviolent, moderate religion (this is aimed in particular at the Judaic derived religions, but it could apply to more) and the fundamentalist and fanatical religion is a small and, if you really study it, painfully arbitrary divide. All it takes is one moderately religious person to start believing in those more violent, oppressive, and intolerant aspects of the bible/torah/koran, and, presto, you've got a fundamentalist.
Then you get things like Al-Qaeda,
dominionists, and jihadists. I would love to be tolerant of beliefs other than mine, but unfortunately, I cannot tolerate intolerance, which is one of the things that religion often imprints upon people, intolerance. Intolerance at people who have differing religious views, different sexual preferences, and even just plain racism.
http://adultthought.ucsd.edu/Culture_War/The_American_Taliban.html
edit: and as for you not believing in blind faith is simply not true, you must have faith that certain logical processes to work in order to have any faith in science, in order to believe in logic, if you believe people can be held accountable for their actions you must have faith that people have free will, when you were first born you had to have blind faith in order to start thinking critically, you had to accept without question some laws that you have no proof for, what you believe in in science even requires blind faith half the time because you need to be able to take other people's proofs to heart when you yourself can't prove them... you have to take their words, you have to because some of the common proofs you use in mathematics are over a hundred pages long, and finally you have to have blind faith to believe that your life actually means something... even to yourself
You seem to be mistaking "trust" as "blind faith". Faith, in pertinence to religion, generally means believing in a supernatural claim, or a claim of some sort of transcendent reality. Blind faith, in particular, means that you concentrate and believe solely and only in that belief, regardless of what the evidence says, where it leads you, and how internally conflicted it is. You believe in it no matter what.
I never was like that. Sure, I had to trust people or take people's word for it at some points or for some things in my life, but I never, ever had blind faith about anything. I always checked to make sure what I was told was true, always tried keeping up in the evidence. If the claim I took in or had went against the evidence or was proved to be false, I did not cling to it regardless, I would drop it, and pick up the new claim or theory instead that did have support of the evidence. Constantly and rigorously checking to make sure that my beliefs are as cohesive, consistent, and accurate as possible.
As for meaning in my life, I simply have to look at my friends, my family, and other people I've cared for, and see what affect I've had upon to see what meaning my life has had thus far. That didn't take any "blind faith", it simply took observation.
Well said, but how do you define omniscient? I would say there's a difference between knowing everything and what you choose to do based on the knowledge you have. You and I are fine examples. We both know about the theory of evolution, the big bang theory, physics, geology, biology, you name it, and yet I believe in God and you don't. While this is interesting, the logic fails because it assumes that it is impossible for God to sway from his decisions. He could if he wanted to, but the reason he does not is because the best way to proceed is the way he already does. There's no reason for him to make a more imperfect decision, but he could if he wanted to. Sometimes I think about jumping up on a desk in the middle of my history class and throwing things, but of course, I never do, because my knowledge of school and society makes it obvious that this would not be a good decision to make. I still could if I wanted to though.
