pop morality

[Drich]

In the parable it self Jesus said "Remove the plank from your own eye first, so that you may see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."

If you have a plank in your eye how can you then see the speck?

The parable is nothing more than an analogy.  What doesn't hold in the literal argument doesn't hold in an analogue, unless the analogy is a false one.  Which in this case it is.  Moral judgement isn't like vision in that it is not impaired by hypocrisy.  You may question the moral standing of the hypocrite, but that does not make his judgements false.  Only the falsity of the moral judgements makes them false.  You claim that relative morality has no standing in which to judge.  It has all the standing it needs as the only type of morality which exists.  Your God does not exist, so "His" morality is nonexistent.  You can't do better than the only kind of morality which exists.  If you disagree, the burden is on you to show that another kind of morality exists.

You are still arguing as is the burden to define 'morality' is mine or God's. Again It isn't. I do not claim nor assign morality to a given actions. I have said many times in this thread that our action have no intrinsic value to them "They are morally neutral." Your position says the opposite. That all acts have an intrinsic moral value. (that Killing some one is always wrong, that slavery is always wrong, that Rape is always wrong. etc) Therefore it is you who has to quantify the 'moral value' of a given act. Not me nor God.

That is why i have shown you the hypocrisy in pop morality. To claim "Slavery is always wrong" then set a standard of living that makes the whole world dependent on "slavery" (by another name of course) means the 'moral standard' you use to judge slavery as being wrong is at best incomplete, if not intentionally hypocritical. How then can society be "good" if it depends on slavery? If society is Good in it's practices of slavery then how can God be judged 'bad' for his endorsement of the very same practice?? At the very least those who use 'pop morality' to define right and wrong can not use that standard to judge others for doing the same acts they themselves do, but only by other name. Unless again they are hypocrites. If that's the case and you embrace the hypocrisy pop culture affords you, then their is nothing more i have to say.

Again I am not defending God's morality here, because "Morality" is not the standard in which God determines sin. That is why you need to first "remove the plank from your own eye" before you can rightfully judge another.

[Drich]

You may be incapable of determining right from wrong without "god" ...Drich.  Most of us aren't.  Maybe you should go talk to someone about that...and let me just mention that we aren't qualified to help you in that regard..this isn't the kind of place that will help you fix or find your moral compass.  Clearly, the bible hasn't helped you in that either.  Time to try something new, I'd say.

When did I say "I can't determine right from wrong without God?"

Is your bias so strong that it truly scews your perception of what i wrote, or did you intentionally build a strawman just to try and puff yourself up?

I would tend to think you were looking to 'puff yourself up' with your straw man because you did not quote the passage you took out of context.

So tell me again who is the self aggrandizing now?

[The Grand Nudger]

Am I getting this right. To Drich god cannot do bad things because god is by being god good and as god is the only arbiter of good allowed god can do what the fuck she wants and still be good. Is this it or is Drich less coherent than I thought?

What I am saying is 'we' with out God can not reliably identify Good or Bad. We see as 'good' to be something that benefits us. we see Bad as something harmful. However we can not see long term effects so we judge 'good and bad' on what we 'feel' the results of an action are right away. Rather than being to determine 'good or bad' on a larger long term scale.

You couldn't have forgotten so quickly...this was on the previous page. I think this is the part of the show where you grace us with pages and pages of further prevarication....driving us further from christ and solidfying your well earned, hard worked reputation as a bullshitter.

[Drich]

-and without realizing it, you validate my every opinion of you.  I've known competent preists, competent evangelicals, you're neither.  What you are is an egomaniacal loon who thinks he's on a mission from god to share his gift.

If you truly knew 'competent priests and or evangelicals' then you also knew Priests and evangelicals who were on the same exact mission. If they are who you claim them to be, all you need do to verify is ask them, for we share the same "great commission." (mission from God)

What may separate us is our approach. They both may think the best way to God is their given doctrine and a large measure of blind faith. Mine is the opposite. I am a man of little faith and have a great need to 'see proof.' I am, and always will be, a doubting thomas. As such people like me/Thomas are not shunned from God. They Like Thomas are given what they need to establish and maintain belief. (They may only have a mustard seed of faith, so they are given much attention to establish and maintain their belief.) However apart of that deal is that they are faithful to what they have been given. In that they must readily share what God has done and extend the offer to other who may need or seek the same 'proof' they themselves have been given. Putting the focus on God's gift, and not because they earned or deserved what they got.

That is what I have done here. I have freely and openly shared aspects of my life business, wife's problems, (cancer scare a couple of years ago) when my wife and you people, were the only other people besides my doctor that knew. This went on for almost a year before i told friends and family. Why? because whatever happened i thought it important to show be example how God works in a believers life day by day.

 Your brothers in christ -declined- your services and so we here at AF now get to suffer them.

IDK what you are talking about.. i came here because the Christian forum that I was apart of for 5+ years at the time just eliminated their Atheist Questions sub forum because too many of you 'good people' were causing problems. At the time i was really doing very well with this one guy, and it all went away. So I went out to the various atheist forums looking for him, but found you all instead.

I am still a very welcome member at CF.com and am asked back from time to time or asked for input on questions every once in a while.

As far as my actual church life i was asked to help 'preach' at a satellite church, but declined the offer to work one on one with a friend who is having a tough go. So again, maybe the mythos you all work up for me far exceeds what I am actually all about.

Look, I don't care to dispute that with you...assuming you were on such a mission...possessed of such a gift, do you not see how badly you're failing at that mission, and why is this gift so ineffective?

IDK you seem pretty engauged. When someone is failing truly failing and you don't have any stake in them personally or better yet you want them to fail, you don't try and discourage what they are doing. Rather if they are truly failing you encourage the failing behavior! Only those who tell you your failing bad when it is in their interest for you to fail, only tell you your failing when you are actually effective. Otherwise why waist the sales pitch? why waist the time if your goal is to get me to stop? Would all out failure do that for you? if all out failure in on the horizon then why warn me of it so I can change direction? Sorry sport, i have been doing this almost 9 years now. It's going to take a little more than "you suck" to get me to move on.

 You, yourself, might have something to do with that....-particularly- if your little fairy tale is true....which I honestly couldn't care less for regardless.  If you think that we need god, perhaps you should get yourself out of the way?

Think about that for a moment. If all that I have ever shared is indeed true... then wouldn't someone who has walked the path you are currently facing be an asset? It's not all roses and gumdrops.. In order for God to save you from something like 'cancer' first you must have it... If God is to 'set you up in business' you can't have another Job.. If God is to save your marriage or child first you must be indanger of loosing them. That is the "wind and rain" of the parable of the wise and foolish builders. Those trials of life are what test your faith/what you have built. Would it not be smart to at least ask to see how someone who has weathered a storm or two have built their 'house?' After all it has been my experience that 'those trials' are the very reason most of you are here as Atheists.

God let the wind and rains hit your house/faith, and it all came down around you. So rather than assume you 'got it so wrong God could not support you' you wrongfully assumed that He does not exist. thinking your inital try was the only 'right way' to God. Not understanding that inorder to receive 'proof' of God one must first and foremost be humble. Nothing humbles a man like having his whole world crash down around him. If and when you had rebuilt, you would have experienced 'help' beyond your means or scope/ability to help yourself.

And so on it generally goes. God gives you a little to work with, and if your faithful he will give you more...

[The Grand Nudger]

Those I've known would be insulted to be lumped in with you or your mission. I was told to look out for loons like you....cultural catholic, remember?

If your stories are an example of how god works in a believers life...is it any surprise that I reject your faith?    

It would be too much to ask for you to remember every detail of every lie you've ever told for christ, obviously.  

I don't want you to stop, numbskull......has that escaped you entirely?  I'm just a decent enough guy to tell another guy when he's making a fool of himself and his cause. There comes a point where amusement gives way to pity. You're well beyond that point.

Except that I've lived a good, happy life..................and never had any faith to test in the first place.  Don't let that get in the way of your bullshit though...nothing but an inconvenient fact, after all.  

How many times do I have to tell you that I don't -care- whether or not your god exists? I couldn't be a christian either way, I think it's a disgusting religion. You, however, do seem to care...and if you do, you're going to have to confront what you're doing to it here, sooner or later....or you'll just keep doing it.

[Drich]

What I am saying is 'we' with out God can not reliably identify Good or Bad. We see as 'good' to be something that benefits us. we see Bad as something harmful. However we can not see long term effects so we judge 'good and bad' on what we 'feel' the results of an action are right away. Rather than being to determine 'good or bad' on a larger long term scale.

You couldn't have forgotten so quickly...this was on the previous page.  I think this is the part of the show where you grace us with pages and pages of further prevarication....driving us further from christ and solidfying your well earned, hard worked reputation as a bullshitter.

try reading it again... maybe this time something different might pop out at cha..

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't have that problem, Drich.  You seem to be afflicted, though...which is perplexing...since you "have god". The two appear to be related in your case, to me.....I don't think we'd have ever had to watch you extoll the virtues of slavery, for example, had you not needed to account for it in your magic book. You know better. You know what popped out at me....bullshit, as predicted.

[Drich]

I don't have that problem, Drich.  You seem to be afflicted, though...which is perplexing...since you "have god".  The two appear to be related in your case, to me.....I don't think we'd have ever had to watch you extoll the virtues of slavery, for example, had you not needed to account for it in your magic book.  You know better.  You know what popped out at me....bullshit, as predicted.

 Some of my very first memories are of my Grandfather working in another man's field. Him working the land to bring in a harvest of whatever, lining up buyers making a Larger Roll of cash, counting it all out into three stacks and giving the two big ones away to the land owner(s) (a guy who maybe once a year fired up a old tractor and cut in the garden rows my grand father worked.) while he kept the smaller one. When I first found out about slavery i asked my teacher what was the difference, and she like most of you said it was because G-pa got some money.. then I asked what was the threshold or what was the limit one could take and still be a slave? A penny, nickle Dime for every hour worked? what if he got a quarter per hour would he not then be a slave? No one could give me a good answer for a long time.

i later discovered that the answer is a livable wage. One had to make enough to live on, in relation to a resaonable work week.

So then the question has become, why don't we call slaves slaves any more if so many in this country work for less than what it takes to live on?

The bottom line is the whole economic structure we use is built like an inverted pyramid where those at the bottom (the majority of the people have little to no money) while the people on top retain most of it. If we flip the pyramid the money becomes worthless. it becomes liter. (there is a really good Duck tales episode that explains this with bottle caps and the people of Shangri-la)

Money only has value because it is hard to come by. If everyone has it then the value of it goes down, and one needs more to represent the same value.
For instance they say the value of Gold has remained static since it was used as the back bone of our economy. the reason the price changes is because when our money gains value the price goes down, or it is devalued when the price goes up. If you ever want to see how devalued our money has become, or if you ever want to truly measure a given president's economic impact look at the price of gold when he took office verse the price of gold when he left.

I say all of that to say, because our economic structure is dependent on having the majority of the money controlled by as few of the people as possible, or in the case of communism or socialism controlled or held by the government. the lower classes will have to be subsidized as their access to said money will be more limited.

What we have done in the west is to elevate the middle class, and further more have been successful at putting more people in the middle classes, by playing with the global markets rather than limiting ourselves to domestic ones. This means in those select countries, the majority of the population belongs to the middle class/A consumer class of people.

Which allows the global economy to tap 3rd world countries to become the bottom of that inverted pyramid. Which is not an all a bad thing. Because their cost of living is so much lower, we could potentially create a very beneficial symbiotic relationship, in that we get the very cheap hourly/subsidized labor needed for our economic systems to work, and we get to bring up the standard of living in our western countries as well as the third world nations, as they would only need to provide a fraction of the labor costs needed to produce any given product in their country verse this one.
allowing them a semi livable wage with subsidized living expenses and or housing. That's if and only if everyone stays on the up and up and everything gets properly regulated. (which by the way is still slavery).

However the opposite is true. We pretend slavery is all but gone, and we hide our eyes to all but the worst of the worst examples, allowing the companies that provide us with the things we buy the freedom to regulate themselves.

Bottom line we need slaves, and they need us so long as we both use money as some sort of our primary means to trade with. It provides us/west with the ability to expand humanity's horizons (Technology, Going to Mars, ect.. maybe even some day create cylons to be humanities slaves so all of humanity can live in the 'middle class.'/can't see a down side to that one.) And they right now need the jobs we create as consumers to live a better life than what was there before the big companies moved in. (to bring them into at least 20th century living)

None of this has anything to do with God. This is just how the world you/we live in works. God is only ever brought into the picture when one of you self righteous d-bags believes his own hype. In that you are a supremely 'moral' person and all slavery is wrong no matter what. Just because you are so sort sighted you can not see the very life you live has been provided by slaves.

From the first time i ever heard about slavery I knew it never went anywhere. I saw slavery daily and it took a long time for me to see how and why it must be. I personally saw that even though the division of money was not always fair, that our family needed what was grown in the field as much as the land owner needed that money to pay who he had to pay. that without each other both families/people suffered. then it stopped being about effort/work put in and came about responsibility. what each of us owes in relation to what we have been put in charge of. But that is a lesson for another time.

In the end, my view of slavery was not developed because i needed to reconcile God. My view of slavery was needed to keep me from blowing up at self righteous people who pretend that all slavery was bad all the time no matter what. Or it kept me in check when far flung descendants of slaves, talked about being owed something personally done to a relative they did not even know the name of. While the picture of the strips on my grandfathers back went through my head, or the stories my mother and grandmother told of my lost aunts and uncles who were smothered as babies when they cried as all the women and children had to hide from imperial soldiers.. And it was the baby had to die, or the whole group would suffer...

My view on slavery is much much older than my argument that supports what God says of it. I always held that we own slaves everything, and in this debt we should never minimize their contributions to all the great things society can in fact now do because of what slaves provide us with (economic stability) needed to presue things like Space travel, Technology, and robotics that otherwise would not be possible. To minimize this Modern contribution is beyond evil/Immoral just because a modern slave does not fit a old profile the self righteous use to hoist their worthless asses on their high moral horses!

[The Grand Nudger]

[Simon Moon]

I don't have that problem, Drich.  You seem to be afflicted, though...which is perplexing...since you "have god".  The two appear to be related in your case, to me.....I don't think we'd have ever had to watch you extoll the virtues of slavery, for example, had you not needed to account for it in your magic book.  You know better.  You know what popped out at me....bullshit, as predicted.

 Some of my very first memories are of my Grandfather working in another man's field. Him working the land to bring in a harvest of whatever, lining up buyers making a Larger Roll of cash, counting it all out into three stacks and giving the two big ones away to the land owner(s) (a guy who maybe once a year fired up a old tractor and cut in the garden rows my grand father worked.) while he kept the smaller one. When I first found out about slavery i asked my teacher what was the difference, and she like most of you said it was because G-pa got some money.. then I asked what was the threshold or what was the limit one could take and still be a slave? A penny, nickle Dime for every hour worked? what if he got a quarter per hour would he not then be a slave? No one could give me a good answer for a long time.

i later discovered that the answer is a livable wage. One had to make enough to live on, in relation to a resaonable work week.

So then the question has become, why don't we call slaves slaves any more if so many in this country work for less than what it takes to live on?

The bottom line is the whole economic structure we use is built like an inverted pyramid where those at the bottom (the majority of the people have little to no money) while the people on top retain most of it. If we flip the pyramid the money becomes worthless. it becomes liter. (there is a really good Duck tales episode that explains this with bottle caps and the people of Shangri-la)

Money only has value because it is hard to come by. If everyone has it then the value of it goes down, and one needs more to represent the same value.
For instance they say the value of Gold has remained static since it was used as the back bone of our economy. the reason the price changes is because when our money gains value the price goes down, or it is devalued when the price goes up. If you ever want to see how devalued our money has become, or if you ever want to truly measure a given president's economic impact look at the price of gold when he took office verse the price of gold when he left.

I say all of that to say, because our economic structure is dependent on having the majority of the money controlled by as few of the people as possible, or in the case of communism or socialism controlled or held by the government. the lower classes will have to be subsidized as their access to said money will be more limited.

What we have done in the west is to elevate the middle class, and further more have been successful at putting more people in the middle classes, by playing with the global markets rather than limiting ourselves to domestic ones. This means in those select countries, the majority of the population belongs to the middle class/A consumer class of people.

Which allows the global economy to tap 3rd world countries to become the bottom of that inverted pyramid. Which is not an all a bad thing. Because their cost of living is so much lower, we could potentially create a very beneficial symbiotic relationship, in that we get the very cheap hourly/subsidized labor needed for our economic systems to work, and we get to bring up the standard of living in our western countries as well as the third world nations, as they would only need to provide a fraction of the labor costs needed to produce any given product in their country verse this one.
allowing them a semi livable wage with subsidized living expenses and or housing. That's if and only if everyone stays on the up and up and everything gets properly regulated. (which by the way is still slavery).

However the opposite is true. We pretend slavery is all but gone, and we hide our eyes to all but the worst of the worst examples, allowing the companies that provide us with the things we buy the freedom to regulate themselves.

Bottom line we need slaves, and they need us so long as we both use money as some sort of our primary means to trade with. It provides us/west with the ability to expand humanity's horizons (Technology, Going to Mars, ect.. maybe even some day create cylons to be humanities slaves so all of humanity can live in the 'middle class.'/can't see a down side to that one.) And they right now need the jobs we create as consumers to live a better life than what was there before the big companies moved in. (to bring them into at least 20th century living)

None of this has anything to do with God. This is just how the world you/we live in works. God is only ever brought into the picture when one of you self righteous d-bags believes his own hype. In that you are a supremely 'moral' person and all slavery is wrong no matter what. Just because you are so sort sighted you can not see the very life you live has been provided by slaves.

From the first time i ever heard about slavery I knew it never went anywhere. I saw slavery daily and it took a long time for me to see how and why it must be. I personally saw that even though the division of money was not always fair, that our family needed what was grown in the field as much as the land owner needed that money to pay who he had to pay. that without each other both families/people suffered. then it stopped being about effort/work put in and came about responsibility. what each of us owes in relation to what we have been put in charge of. But that is a lesson for another time.

In the end, my view of slavery was not developed because i needed to reconcile God. My view of slavery was needed to keep me from blowing up at self righteous people who pretend that all slavery was bad all the time no matter what. Or it kept me in check when far flung descendants of slaves, talked about being owed something personally done to a relative they did not even know the name of. While the picture of the strips on my grandfathers back went through my head, or the stories my mother and grandmother told of my lost aunts and uncles who were smothered as babies when they cried as all the women and children had to hide from imperial soldiers.. And it was the baby had to die, or the whole group would suffer...

My view on slavery is much much older than my argument that supports what God says of it. I always held that we own slaves everything, and in this debt we should never minimize their contributions to all the great things society can in fact now do because of what slaves provide us with (economic stability) needed to presue things like Space travel, Technology, and robotics that otherwise would not be possible. To minimize this Modern contribution is beyond evil/Immoral just because a modern slave does not fit a old profile the self righteous use to hoist their worthless asses on their high moral horses!

All this to redefine slavery, so you can attempt to justify low income workers as slaves, so you can further justify your god condoning slavery in your magic book.

I believe deep down, when it comes the Biblical slavery issue, most Christians are more moral than the god that condones it. Which is the reason they have to twist themselves into knots trying to explain why a moral god would condone slavery.

You, I'm not so sure...