(July 2, 2024 at 4:13 pm)Ferrocyanide Wrote: I think a couple of callers on the Atheist Experience have said that. A few have said it to me via chat.
They have said that atheists secretly believe that the jewish god is real but since they want to sin, atheists claim that he doesn't exist.
My counter argument-nonsense-crapola was:
"I believe that you don't believe in the jewish god and that you want to continually commit crime and that you want to put on a facade that you are a good guy so that they release you from prison early."
Ha, this reminded me a few years ago I got into some conversation online with a Catholic who claimed that atheists are hypocrites who don't want to admit they believe in god because if they didn’t, they would be killing and raping people.
But let's talk about this supposed wonderful Christian sexual morality before the so called "new atheism", and even before the dreaded "sexual revolution" that destroyed the morality of the western society.
Let's go to the 17th century in England, London. The status of poorer women was so low that the only business they could have was usually as a house maid. They would work in a household were they were nothing more than property, and were subjected to daily abuses, and sexual exploitation. One such example was Elizabeth Balleans who, in 1609, left her parents home to work in such household, and in the same year she got impregnated by the master of the house. And, following the established convention, she was fired and turned out to the streets.
Such women were not only an inconvenience, but potentially a source of great scandal; henceforth she was shamed as a "bastard bearer", and a "whore". Women such as Elizabeth were despised creatures who existed outside the accepted models of womanhood: not a maid, a married mother nor a widow.
So they had to beg for money or were forced to rely upon the charity of the local parish, but such aid came at a high price. There was a law which decreed that all mothers of bastard children supported by the parish were to be imprisoned in the house of correction for one year. Other punishments for unmarried pregnant women and mothers included ritual acts of public humiliation and corporal punishment. They were dressed in white sheets and made to stand in church before the whole congregation, holding a candle or other sign proclaiming their sin.
Elizabeth remained became known because she gave birth to a dead child, and when she wanted to get it baptized, she was accused of infant murder.
And this is the wonderful and functional Christian world of "morality" before the New Atheism and before the sexual revolution. Despicable.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"