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it's very interesting to me that losing faith in God is accompanied by losing faith in Goodness is believing in the reality of value equivalent in some sense to believing in God? can you be an atheist but also believe that love and goodness are objectively real?

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@QiaochuYuan

Jun 12, 2020

ideological deconversion can be worse than that! i know a lot of ex-evangelicals, the kind who really believed. they'll tell you losing faith is like the world is ending. like there isn't goodness in the world anymore. like your parents never loved you because love isn't real

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Atheist: biological and cultural adaptive value hierarchies driving multigenerational reproductive success abstracted into transcendent objects. Theist: God

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maybe I'm misreading you, but the atheist doesn't *really* believe in value in that case... they're just using it as a word for "behavioral phenomena that promotes reproductive success"

Arran Rogerson

@arranrogerson

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@mattdiamond

The atheist has to go through a very difficult process of ‘reinventing the wheel’ i.e. recreating what belief in God achieves more efficiently. Ultimately they must still rely on a kind of ‘faith’ to assert higher order value structures, which they resist, hence valuelessness.

2:50 AM · Jun 13, 2020Twitter for iPhone

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JBP makes a good case for it imo. Something like transcendence is being able to play and thrive in the set of all games. ie the perfect being in all situations. Can't sacrifice transcendence in any one game because people will stop playing ALL games with you

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Coexisting continuously into the future with other people is a necessity. It is in some sense an absolute, unless you don't want to be a part of society.

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So do they believe in value? I’d say yes and no. Some are reducing value into it’s supposed material components in order to substantiate it empirically (like what science does), but possibly failing to build it back up into something ‘real’—deconstruction without reconstruction.

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Anyways, that is my overly abstract convoluted response to your tweet. I find this stuff interesting! Thanks for sharing 🤪