(September 16, 2011 at 5:12 pm)Rhythm Wrote: You're lucky you got a single thoughtful response. The OP is bullshit. We've heard it before, it always come from christians, it's not a thoughtful discussion, and you aren't blowing back the "veil of ignorance" you and your folks must absolutely believe atheists suffer under. We all go about making those moral decisions individually, even when we do believe in faeries (notice the number of christian and muslim inmates). Had you been born a Hindu you'd be arguing that we had no basis for morality because we ate beef. End of.
What you seem to be stuck on, Crux, is that despite not swallowing the koolaid you so readily guzzled down, we manage to be decent people. It's unsettling isn't it, when sinners just aren't as evil as you want them to be. Atheists are as moral (or immoral) as anyone else, they base those morals on the same thing as everyone else (think really really hard about that and it might come to you). The idea that people were wandering around raping their sisters and killing their brothers at the drop of a dime is not something that we have any evidence for whatsoever. We have been social animals for hundreds of thousands of years, decended from animals that were highly social for millions of years, and all of our current relatives are still social, even though they went a different route in most other ways. I understand that you (and the rest of the faithful) cannot abide by the thought, but by and large human beings are decent creatures. Our worst nature gets the best of us at times, but if it were the dominant force in our minds, as you folks are so fond of insisting, it's unlikely that we would even be here to have this conversation right now.
My apologies, i'm obviously not explaining myself very well, as you're not understanding the question under discussion. It has nothing to do with any particular religion of faith, or the bahavior of any group of individuals. The discussion is about finding a basis for moral concensus, the actions of atheists or people of faith have no relevance to the discussion. Many people have never questioned the basis of their moral beliefs, "it comes naturally" or "its just common sense" are commonly used terms by such people. It doesn't! humans can be brutal uncaring and ruthless with no moral conditioning.
