Vive la insurrection, modern Confucianism is essentially just extreme filial pietism: everyone in the family does what the father says, for a harmonious family, everyone in the country does what the Emperor/State says, for a harmonious society. Of course, the State has ‘obligations’ to its people too, but these can simply be discharged via propaganda, whereas an individual doesn’t have the same recourse to propaganda in convincing the State of his/her loyalty. Chinese Buddhism is not like philosophical/esoteric Buddhism, rather it’s worship your ancestors and your parents and do whatever you’re told Buddhism; it is to philosophical Buddhism as Roman Catholicism is to Unitarian Universalism. Source: living here. An anecdotal example to put it in perspective, there are people here who’ve converted to Christianity because they found joy in the freedom from guilt it brought compared to Chinese Buddhism. Considering the undesirability of guilt in philosophical Buddhism (i.e. it’s not a good thing to feel, along with fear, sadness, etc.), that should give you an idea of how warped Chinese Buddhism is compared to the more ‘pure’ form commonly encountered in the west. Essentially, the common form of Confucianism/Buddhism practiced here amounts to little more than a crude philosophical form of whatever your parents or teachers were thinking whenever they said “Do what I said, because I’m superior to you and I told you to!”
Aprioristic verification of God’s existence (where God is defined as the creator of everything):
Everything has a cause.
Each cause must have a cause.
A causal chain cannot continue backwards to infinity with no root.
There must be something at the start of the causal chain.
That something must be capable of causing itself.
That something caused everything (as everything followed from the first cause), hence fits the definition of God.
The argument’s over two millennia old; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument
John Ess
I am pleased to see a more sober response and retract the liar tag I attributed to you.
Whether I am religious or not is irrelevant to the question at hand. How could I have gotten these texts from a religious website if it was cited from Marxist.org, not known for its Christian views?
“I say poisoning the well, because you are attacking atheism indirectly (or ‘debunking’ it) through your own absurd methodology of truth: testing whether or not it can possibly lead to Marxism or come from a Marxist.”
Again that is not the point of my essay. The point was not “is atheism true?”, but is “atheism compatible with capitalism.”
I am pleased that you have made some arguments, but they miss the point. I am not claiming that Christianity, Judaism or Islam are more compatible with capitalism than atheism, only that atheism is not compatible with capitalism.
“ALL? Even Mises’s question about the nature of God?”
Agreed all might have been to strong a word, but I should say many.
“Can you aprioristically verify the existence of god for me? You seem to make the claim that if one believes that capitalism can be verified a priori, that god can to, so can you do it? If not why is it a contradiction to believe in the market and not in god? And also it makes no sense to argue that you’re not poisoning the well while calling everyone who’s an atheist a communist, you’ve got enough fallacies right there. At any rate, please address the bolded, that’s all I ask of you.”
In my first essay I did not say that the Mises atheists were consciously communists, but rather argued that they were aiding communists or might have imbibed certain Marxist concepts. Second I called my respondents Trotskyites because they reacted without any sense of sobriety or reason. If they had I would not have done so. I even retracted the liar tag I laid at John Ess’ feet.
That is not the point. The point I was making was that verificationism and a priori synthetic knowledge are mutually exclusive epistemologies. Either one must believe in one or the other. If one does believe in apriori synthetic knowledge then he must at the very least use very different arguments than verificationists against God, which I have not seen as of yet. Most arguments against the existence or rationality of God/Religion are based on verificationism and Mises believed capitalism was based on a priori synthetic knowledge. The claim was not “is God justifiable by a priori reason,” but since you asked read: Descartes’ Meditations and Anselm’s Proslogion, but this is neither here nor their. I must stress again I am not claiming that if you are a priori you must believe in the monotheistic God of Christianity, you might be a Buddhist, a Neo-Pagan or a Confucian. I am claiming that verificationism would, if accepted, destroy the Misean a priori synthetic view of capitalism and hence capitalism.
Furthermore it is not necessarily ‘name calling’ to claim that someone might or might not be a Trotskyite only a testable accusation.
The Trotskyite line was just for fun. I’ve seen religious people called worse. As Rothbard said on his lecture on Keynes first destroy the argument than the person.
This is not an argument over the existence of God, but “is atheism compatible with Capitalism.” Your post is just a red herring.
To better declare my argument here are some syllogisms. Granted this is a new argument.
- If libertarian atheists support abortion and infanticide; than they diminish the human population.
- If they diminish the future pool of human population; then they are destroying human capital.
- If libertarian atheists support abortion and infanticide then they are destroying human capital.
Premise one is true:
Rothbard on children’s rights” https://mises.org/daily/2568/
Walter Block on Abortion and Infanticide: https://mises.org/media/1479/Abortion
If one is true than two is obviously true less children less future human population. If one and two are true than three is true. This is a kind of ludditte behavior. Atheist libertarians would hopefully never smash their own capital goods (i.e., sowing machine, computer, steel mill etc.,), but they seem perfectly happy to destroy vast swaths of human capital. Given that human capital is the formation of all capital and the economy why do Atheist libertarians hold to such a permissive view on its destruction?
- If militant atheist libertarians support the ideological elimination of religion, then they aid in creating a social system that is godless.
- If a godless social system is a necessary condition for the socialist state; then they are inadvertently supporting communism.
- If militant atheist libertarians support the ideological elimination of religion; then they are inadvertently supporting communism.
This is my initial argument restated. The communist citations were meant to support premises 1 and 2.
- If verficationism is true; then knowledge prior to existence that concerns the real world is false.
- If knowledge prior to existence that concerns the real world is false; than praxeology is false.
- If verficationism is true; than praxeology is false.
Conversely
- If praxeology is true, then a priori knowledge that concerns the real world is true.
- If a priori knowledge that concerns the real world is true; then verificationism is false.
- If praxeology is true, then verificationism is false.
I have my own philosophy of atheism that is compatible with capitalism and libertarianism.
There are SO many flaws in that attempt at logic. It’s actually tiring to think of responding to them all. Let me focus only on one of them. Atheism does not require that the atheist support the elimination of religion. In fact, a number of religions are still open to the atheist, such as my own. Religion and theism are not the same thing. So the only thing you’re saying in terms of atheism itself, is that an atheist who actually wants to get rid of all religions in the world would be lying if they called themselves a libertarian.
That something must be capable of causing itself.
Anyone see a flaw there?
That something caused everything (as everything followed from the first cause), hence fits the definition of God.
Of course, it may be the Devil or Satan who did it all, or some unsentient being, or a Big Bang, or some physical thing. What if at the root of it all lies a gas. Should we all pray to ammonia molecules? In other words, the usual attributes of God don’t follow.
Keep that helmet on, cause you are hereby challenged to a joust.
What?
The existence of god is an empirical fact. Praxeology is a science dealing with the necessary implications of human action. Mises never said that only a priori knowledge was correct, just under certain circumstances. Most athiests know only too well that you cannot disprove the existence of god in his apparent absence, but you can’t disprove the existence of unicorns by their apparent absence, the belief in something for which there is no evidence, but merely no evidence refuting it, is nonsensical.
I distinctly thought I heard a “guard yourself for true” coming from RobinHood awhile back. Nothing?
I can’t say I agree with Neo about the nonsense thing. Faith and hunches and so on move a lot of ground worldwide…if it does no harm and it creates happiness or inspires lines of thinking for art, literature, music, or even empirical research, it’s not nonsense. The whole realm of the imagination above and beyond the strictly true dimension of human life is what adds color to our experiences.
I distinctly thought I heard a “guard yourself for true” coming from RobinHood awhile back.
Thou didst, indeed.
Hokay…out with it, then. Where’s the argument? En garde!
First of all, how could you let “God exists is an empirical fact” just slip by unchallenged?
Aren’t you supposed to send away the court jesters?
So, you’re criticizing me for not criticizing another member??
Empirical: information gathered by means of experimentation or observation. Either God (presumably a monotheistic creator-god, based on the conversation) exists, or he doesn’t. Wouldn’t that make it a matter that could be empirically verified?
Verily, I spoke too soon. Nothing against the honorable other member.
But to the heart of the idea being discussed, what experiment would verify the existence of God? What has been observed that shows His existence?
Full disclosure: I believe in God. But not because of a repeatable experiment.
“I can’t say I agree with Neo about the nonsense thing. Faith and hunches and so on move a lot of ground worldwide…if it does no harm and it creates happiness or inspires lines of thinking for art, literature, music, or even empirical research, it’s not nonsense. The whole realm of the imagination above and beyond the strictly true dimension of human life is what adds color to our experiences.”
I understand what you mean. Let me restate this: It makes no sense to believe in god and to call other people fools because they don’t believe in him when you have no reason to believe he exists beyond a hunch. If we based all our beliefs in this way at least three fourths of the world’s population would be dead. A personal belief, sure, but when it becomes a political belief it is nonesense.
Also, standards for empirical verification are more complex then you might think. Everything around us could be an empirical verification of god. What sucks from the standpoint of empirically verifying/disproving god is that the fact that in order to be effective a hypothesis must be disprovable. Because god is omnipotent, then if he doesn’t want us to perceive him he is unperceivable and therefore his existence is impossible to prove while at the same time he is impossible to disprove because with this same knowledge we know that he could just not want to be perceived. Even if we drop the omnipotence claim, we still have no idea exactly what would verify or falsify our results, although your right that if we were ourselves omnipotent then we could verify or falsify the existence of god through experimentation and observation, but until we reach that state… Technically Impossible 
All we can prove is that there’s not an omnipotent god who’s trying to be perceived by humankind.
Well stated, Neo, thank you. I didn’t really want to write a novel on the subject. I’m not all that versed in philosophy of religion, because most of the issues it deals with are specific to the All Powerful All Loving Monotheistic Creator God type of theology. That worldview has too many contradictions to attract me.
Atheism and anti-theism are not synonyms. Atheism is about the lack of particular belief, anti-theism is about fighting other beliefs, sometimes with force. Capitalism is MO of nature. It’s not a system.