One thing I would dispute from all of that: my usage of a calculator doesn't reduce my ability to reason mathematically. I can and do crunch fairly large numbers in my head for fun, but it's tediously slow. It also makes the unfortunate leap from "software" to "hardware" in analogy, which is dangerous.
That's what morality systems provide, which a lot of empirical atheists tend to miss. While we must hand-code our morality, they can run with the easy calculator. They can do so in a large part because it has been a quite functional system, up until fairly recently; not literally true, but nobody questions whether the internal variables in a program are true, either.
And for the atheist version of such a moral system, I find myself highly recommending Buddhism. Or the Church of the SubGenius, if the wild cult ride is more your style . . . ;-)
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Date: 2007-06-08 10:26 am (UTC)That's what morality systems provide, which a lot of empirical atheists tend to miss. While we must hand-code our morality, they can run with the easy calculator. They can do so in a large part because it has been a quite functional system, up until fairly recently; not literally true, but nobody questions whether the internal variables in a program are true, either.
And for the atheist version of such a moral system, I find myself highly recommending Buddhism. Or the Church of the SubGenius, if the wild cult ride is more your style . . . ;-)