(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. Be honest with yourself (and us), if you had never heard of a "transcendent lawgiver" would you really be raping and pillaging your way across the country? Doubtful.
We actually know a great deal about past societies hopes, fears, cultural taboos. In every case one cares to look the god of BF Wherever was a whole hell of a lot like the people who believed in it. These little territorial grabs into morality fall flat on their face from the outset, because it isn't just the concept of morality, but even that of a lawgiver that is a subjective one. That's how we do it, there isn't anything else to it. You get enough people together and they work out terms. Thousands of years later you end up with statutes, cultural norms, etc. None of this is remotely mystical, and none of it has anything to do with whether or not the man in the sky told these people what was right or wrong. The people themselves, in every case, put words into a non-existent beings mouth to give them greater authority than "I said so", because long long ago we learned that no one gave a shit what any single one of us had to say. "I said so" doesn't even work on toddlers.
Your post, and the implications of your position, are insulting to the entire human race.
Your entire post seems to ignore the fact that the societies and our history is derived from a common theistic belief system, where is the evidence for any sucessful groups or societies of atheistic belief systems? Perhaps the success of the human race is based upon the moral systems derived from theistic beliefs, can you point to any historical evidence of successful atheistic based belief communities (acepting that theism is particular to humanity)? We have plenty of evidence that theistic communities survive, is there any evidence for the survival of atheistic communities?
