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RE: Challenge regarding Christian morality
January 29, 2015 at 2:59 pm
Drich is right, atheism is intellectually lazy. I can't imagine how hard I would have to work to make myself believe all these atrocities are actually somehow "good". My brain would crack open, I don't know how they do it.
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RE: Challenge regarding Christian morality
January 29, 2015 at 3:01 pm
The mental gymnastics are incredible.
In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson
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RE: Challenge regarding Christian morality
January 29, 2015 at 3:03 pm
These quotes sum up the idea of theistic morality quite nicely.
Anyone who believes that the Bible offers the best guidance we have on questions of morality has some very strange ideas about either guidance or morality.
...religion allows people to imagine their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral...This explains why Christians [like yourself] expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide.
If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulty than killing a human blastocyst.
~ Sam Harris
"Never trust a fox. Looks like a dog, behaves like a cat."
~ Erin Hunter
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RE: Challenge regarding Christian morality
January 29, 2015 at 3:14 pm
(January 29, 2015 at 2:47 pm)YGninja Wrote: The law isn't to force the rape victim to marry the rapist. What biblical context can you possibly ground that interpretation on? The law is to ensure the victim is provided for. The rapist cannot leave the woman, but it does not say the woman cannot leave the rapist, it is assumed however that the woman would not want to leave the rapist, because she would not have been able to find another man willing to take on someone elses kid in that culture and period of history.
"The law doesn't force the rape victim to marry her rapist! It just puts her in a position where she has no choice but to stay with him forever out of pragmatic concern, rather than free choice, in a system that god allowed to happen! It's fine!"
If that kind of sophistry is appealing to you, then you're welcome to it. But don't expect the rest of us to play along with your desperate contortions.
Quote:No, i don't think God changes over time, but civilization changes. It would be no good sacrificing lambs to absolve our sins today, as no one has any, whereas during the time of the Mosaic law, the entire culture was based on sheep herding.
So if god doesn't change over time, then what set of morals most closely conforms with his beliefs: the morals of today, or the morals of the old testament?
"YOU take the hard look in the mirror. You are everything that is wrong with this world. The only thing important to you, is you." - ronedee
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RE: Challenge regarding Christian morality
January 29, 2015 at 3:17 pm
(This post was last modified: January 29, 2015 at 3:17 pm by FatAndFaithless.)
(not to mention the Bible says that a woman must remain with her husband anyway, so it's not like she could just 'walk away' from her new rapist husband-by-force)
In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson
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RE: Challenge regarding Christian morality
January 29, 2015 at 3:19 pm
I don't accept the idea that god was unable or unwilling to straighten out ancient attitudes and ideas, and instead codified them to make it easier to be a douchebag to women, or to gays, or to people who wanted to start a campfire on a Saturday.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
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RE: Challenge regarding Christian morality
January 30, 2015 at 6:10 am
(This post was last modified: January 30, 2015 at 6:10 am by robvalue.)
The conclusion of these bizarre arguments is that the bible was possibly useful as a moral guide in the time it was written, but is now irrelevant as a moral guide as it hasn't evolved along with society.
I'm happy with that.
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RE: Challenge regarding Christian morality
February 10, 2015 at 10:33 pm
(January 28, 2015 at 9:05 pm)YGninja Wrote: The importance isn't in the rules themselves, it is in knowing that the rules are set by God. The law is in your hearts, this is why it seems obvious to you, but you can easily override the laws, as i am sure we have all done many hundreds of times in our lives. The important thing is the realization that they are Gods laws.
So, if there is no god, morals are unimportant? Morals are not god's laws. No god has ever been proven, much less a particular god or what that particular god's rules are. I don't believe in god, but I do believe in morality. And most people can agree on it's fundamentals. It's when we use holy texts to interpret morals that we end up tying ourselves up in knots of twisted logic justifying the immoral things gods of one sort or another have required.
If there is a god, I want to believe that there is a god. If there is not a god, I want to believe that there is no god.
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RE: Challenge regarding Christian morality
February 12, 2015 at 3:32 pm
(January 22, 2015 at 6:14 am)robvalue Wrote: Can anyone name a single Christian moral teaching (moral meaning helpful for the wellbeing of individuals and society) that is not reasonably obvious to any well balanced atheist?
If you ask a fundie, I can tell you what they'll say, because they've said it to me more than once.
"Objective morality comes from God. Without God, there is no morality and nothing matters. Atheists who behave morally are stealing from Christian morality and are not consistent in their world view. Stop stealing from us."
Yes, I was actually, point-blank accused of stealing Christian morality, and that was the only reason I was behaving myself.
TL;DR: fundies will accuse atheists of not being well balanced and that they're just imitating Christians. Srsly.
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RE: Challenge regarding Christian morality
February 12, 2015 at 3:34 pm
Haha. Yeah that's pathetic.
Steve Shives nailed it thought. If God decides morality, then it's subjective. It's gods point of view. So that is not objective morality anyway. It's just having a third party set the rules he likes instead of deciding ourself.
I'd forgotten about this thread. I think someone actually admitted there was nothing, which impressed me.
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