Maximizing Moral Virtue

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Well atheism (especially without any appeal to the history of communism) has the benefit of newness. It's a fairly new idea to be so widely adopted which is partially why I raised this topic to begin with. Nietzsche, for example, observed that humans have a tendency towards worship. He predicted that during this new rise of atheism (in the wake of men spending more time with machines that with nature) would lead to a mass movement towards government taking the place of God within the hearts and minds of it's subjects, and for the most part his predictions turned out to be true. He also predicted that this worship of government would lead to some thing like communism as well as a wide variety horrendous outcomes.

You guys can play the blame game all you want because for awhile theism was the only game in town. However, I posit that most wars were fought over territory, not religion. That just because the soldiers are religious it doesn't make the war a theistic war. In fact, it seems to me that only the Catholic Crusades have this distinction. If we ask the men why they are going to war they will likely say it is for "honor, glory, prosperity or protection." This is how most men justify their choice to kill another man, either he believes that his country is worth killing for because of its virtue, or at the very least, he wants to protect his land from being conquered by an even more tyrannical power. Religion is merely a tangential issue, and to assign all of the blame for the evils of war, genocide, mass rape and torture to theology I think is a necessary tactic to maintain your position that man is inherently neutral. Because if it turned out that man truly was a flawed being then your ideological crusade against God would be highly ill fated without some kind of appeal to a real morality.

If men are free to invent their own meaning and assign their own value to the words right and wrong what is stopping the gambler from telling his wife that gambling is good?
What will prevent the murderer from telling you that he is a more evolved being which has the right to naturally select his victims for death in the hopes of wiping out their gene pool?
What is stopping a corrupt mind from aiding the destruction of society?

You see I ask these questions because unlike you I believe that moral good takes effort, inspiration, and endurance. Sometimes you have to turn down offers of money, fame and sexual pleasure in order to withstand corruption. Especially if you want to be in a position of power or influence. Jesus spent most of his time in conflict with the religious authorities of his day and I consider the Catholic church to be the prime example of what it means to be a modern day Pharisee.

But as you said Nudger, you consider the Wiccans to be morally good though right? So does this mean that some religions are good?

As to your point about the prophets, yes at the time of the Old Covenant there was a law against pagan marriages. The reason for this is of course spiritual as generational curses may be passed down from either parent to their child. The evidence that this practice needed to stop was within the moral degradation of Jerusalem. The people of Israel weren't happy anymore but instead of throwing their Idols away they instead continued in stubbornness of heart, desiring to be more like the pagan religions surrounding them and less like the God which lead them out of Egypt.

Atheist points of view were espoused as far back as the Vedic Period. I don’t think this qualifies as ‘newness’.

Simply because Wiccans are good doesn’t mean some religions are good (although I’m happy to stipulate that some religions are less bad that others). Religion has precious little to do with whether someone is good.

Boru