(June 16, 2023 at 2:25 am)Nishant Xavier Wrote: Some misguided Christians may indeed have wrongly believed that Christianity permitted slavery, but better informed Christians refuted and ultimately completely overcame them.

You are either ignorant of your holy book or plain lying. Which one is it?

@Nishant Xavier

Quote:And of the Catholic Church, someone said, "When Black People couldn't yet sit on a Bus (in common with Whites), the Catholic Church had already made them Cardinals".

This is, at best, disingenuous. The 'black section' on public transport was a uniquely American thing. The first Black American Cardinal was elevated in 2020.

Boru

Lying for Jesus is OK because it's for Jesus and Jesus approves of lying if it's for him.

"...the quote circulating on social media has been taken out of context from a letter in which she was describing a perception she wanted to avoid."

https://www.reuters.com/article/factchec...SL2N2X11YN

(June 15, 2023 at 3:47 pm)Nishant Xavier Wrote: Lol, I love Atheists. Sherlock Holmes (albeit fictional) is literally like the most famous deductive reasoner of all time, being after all an investigative detective. How does one be a Detective without Deductive Reasoning? Deductive reasoning is the process of forming premises (based e.g. on data) and then building a conclusion from those premises; both detectives and those interested in the question of whether God exists or not definitely have to make use of it.

Being fictional, Holmes was no better a deductive reasoner than his author, Arthur Conan Doyle, who famoulsy fell for the Cottingly Fairies hoax. Maybe you should stick to taking Margaret Sanger out of context, at least she was a real person.

Quote:Some misguided Christians may indeed have wrongly believed that Christianity permitted slavery, but better informed Christians refuted and ultimately completely overcame them.

That simply isn't true the bible makes it consistently clear in both the old and new testament that slavery was moral. Apologists have tried for decades to weasel around this fact. But a fact it remains.

(June 15, 2023 at 3:47 pm)Nishant Xavier Wrote: Lol, I love Atheists. Sherlock Holmes (albeit fictional) is literally like the most famous deductive reasoner of all time, being after all an investigative detective. How does one be a Detective without Deductive Reasoning? Deductive reasoning is the process of forming premises (based e.g. on data) and then building a conclusion from those premises; both detectives and those interested in the question of whether God exists or not definitely have to make use of it. I'll start a thread on Design Detection subsequently, and how detectives and others use it, and why Intelligent Design, especially after the scientific discovery of DNA and the Genetic Code (ref. Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell), and Fine-Tuning, is based on a sound premise. 

(Snipped the bits I’m not replying to.)

As explained earlier, Holmes was not a deductive reasoner, but an abductive one. He was originally described that way in the mini-biographies Watson wrote, but Arthur Conan Doyle (Watson’s literary agent) convinced him to substitute ‘deductive’ as a term that would be more familiar to his readers.

Boru

(June 15, 2023 at 6:44 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote:

(June 15, 2023 at 2:12 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: There are plenty of refutations of the moral argument. If you choose not to avail yourself of them, that’s your own lookout.

Boru

Sorry for the lack of clarity. My reply was directed at the assertion by @Angrboda that nothing about atheism precludes objective morality. Technically, that is true in only of very trivial definition of atheism...the lack of belief one that I consider entirely disingenuoius. Be that as it may, Freidrich Nietzsche and  Fyodor Dostoevsky pretty much nailed it IMHO. If God is dead, everything is permissable.

Well, at least you are in famous company with your incorrectness.

Humans are social animals, that evolved in small groups of 50-150 members. Things like: cooperation, empathy, reciprocity, etc were necessary for survival.

If individuals of those groups behaved like Nietzsche or Dostoevsky claimed they would (without the belief in gods), they would be ejected from the group, to almost certain death.

Those 100's of thousand of years of evolved traits, are still with us.

Just exactly which god do Bonobo chimps believe in, that causes them to: protect weaker members of their group even if it puts their own lives at stake, share food with other group members even when food is short supply, adopt orphans of dead group members, punish violent members of their group?

Do you really believe that if you stopped believing in a god, you'd instantly become a thieving, murdering, raping maniac?

I actually rape and murder exactly as much as I want to. Which is zero.

(June 16, 2023 at 5:52 pm)Simon Moon Wrote:

(June 15, 2023 at 6:44 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Sorry for the lack of clarity. My reply was directed at the assertion by @Angrboda that nothing about atheism precludes objective morality. Technically, that is true in only of very trivial definition of atheism...the lack of belief one that I consider entirely disingenuoius. Be that as it may, Freidrich Nietzsche and  Fyodor Dostoevsky pretty much nailed it IMHO. If God is dead, everything is permissable.

Well, at least you are in famous company with your incorrectness.

Humans are social animals, that evolved in small groups of 50-150 members. Things like: cooperation, empathy, reciprocity, etc were necessary for survival.

If individuals of those groups behaved like Nietzsche or Dostoevsky claimed they would (without the belief in gods), they would be ejected from the group, to almost certain death.

Those 100's of thousand of years of evolved traits, are still with us.

Just exactly which god do Bonobo chimps believe in, that causes them to: protect weaker members of their group even if it puts their own lives at stake, share food with other group members even when food is short supply, adopt orphans of dead group members, punish violent members of their group?

Do you really believe that if you stopped believing in a god, you'd instantly become a thieving, murdering, raping maniac?

I actually rape and murder exactly as much as I want to. Which is zero.

He doesn’t really believe it, but he pretends it is an unavoidable thing that must be believed when he talking to others because he thinks that act coats him with paste of what he conceived to be a facsimile of the wisdom of ages.

(June 16, 2023 at 5:52 pm)Simon Moon Wrote: Humans are social animals, that evolved in small groups of 50-150 members. Things like: cooperation, empathy, reciprocity, etc were necessary for survival.

If individuals of those groups behaved like Nietzsche or Dostoevsky claimed they would (without the belief in gods), they would be ejected from the group, to almost certain death.

Those 100's of thousand of years of evolved traits, are still with us.

Just exactly which god do Bonobo chimps believe in, that causes them to: protect weaker members of their group even if it puts their own lives at stake, share food with other group members even when food is short supply, adopt orphans of dead group members, punish violent members of their group?

Do you really believe that if you stopped believing in a god, you'd instantly become a thieving, murdering, raping maniac?

I actually rape and murder exactly as much as I want to. Which is zero.

It sort of looks to me as if evolution hasn't made us all that peaceful.

Like maybe it's true that we want to be nice and friendly with the other 50-150 in our immediate group. But then history shows that we have no trouble going over and massacring the 50-150 people in the next valley over, if we happen to want their resources. 

Then if we're saying that humans are like other primates, don't some of those guys decide their leader through combat? Like the alpha male becomes alpha by beating up the old alpha? And then the new alpha has sex rights over the girls? 

So there are a couple of things I think we'd want to resolve before adopting your view of things. 

First, just because we evolved with a trait doesn't make it moral or ethical. Maybe our reason and ethical sense says we should overcome traits we evolved with. We wouldn't want to slip into a naturalistic fallacy. 

Second, I see no reason to believe that evolution has made us peaceful. Or cooperative beyond a very limited scope. 

It's admirable that you don't want to rape or murder anyone. But there sure has been a lot of rape and murder in history, which leads me to think that it remains a natural trait.

Quote:It sort of looks to me as if evolution hasn't made us all that peaceful.

It's made us peaceful not pacifistic. There is a difference  

Quote:Like maybe it's true that we want to be nice and friendly with the other 50-150 in our immediate group.

Considering humans have an adept ability to be able to integrate encountered groups into their own group (This is how nations form) this seems a lot more universal than you are letting on.

Quote:But then history shows that we have no trouble going over and massacring the 50-150 people in the next valley over, if we happen to want their resources. 

History shows a mix of intertribal mixing and integration and violence. And history shows that wars were rarely casual affairs and often had build-ups that were sometimes years in the making before getting to a full-blown slaughter. It's rarely a case of a bunch of humans waking up one day and deciding to just slaughter the tribe one valley over and take their stuff. 

Quote:Then if we're saying that humans are like other primates, don't some of those guys decide their leader through combat?

Note the word "some" and remember most modern primates have diverged from us significantly. Primate behavior is quite varied. 

Quote: Like the alpha male becomes alpha by beating up the old alpha? And then the new alpha has sex rights over the girls? 

See above 

Quote:So there are a couple of things I think we'd want to resolve before adopting your view of things. 

So far you have not really brought up any. 

Quote:First, just because we evolved with a trait doesn't make it moral or ethical.

Why not if it's the reason why morals and ethics exist period 

Quote: Maybe our reason and ethical sense says we should overcome traits we evolved with. We wouldn't want to slip into a naturalistic fallacy. 

Is it a naturalistic fallacy though? As he's not arguing its good because it's natural he's arguing the only reason there is any conception of good is that we evolved any concern for morality, to begin with, and without such a concept the word or idea of good is as meaningless as the term Wurplewoozle. Hell even if god were real and had put goodness in our hearts that would be meaningless without a care for it to begin with. 

Quote:Second, I see no reason to believe that evolution has made us peaceful. Or cooperative beyond a very limited scope.

 Well, the reason seems pretty clear it made us peaceful just not pacifistic were willing to use violence were just not totally sociopathic about it. 

Quote:It's admirable that you don't want to rape or murder anyone. But there sure has been a lot of rape and murder in history, which leads me to think that it remains a natural trait.

There is little evidence that it's a natural trait if it were natural why do militaries need to train men not just how to kill but make them want to kill someone they have never met and who has done them no harm? If rape were natural why do humans seem to have such a strong negative reaction to it? this can't merely be cultural indoctrination as even in cultures where there were few written rules in rape there seemed to be a disgust for the act.