Why Secular Morality is Superior

[John V]

Your position is illogical. If god's omniscience means that our every thought and action are predetermined, then we're not autonomous beings with any rights at all. No one calls Stephen King evil because his characters suffer.

Your concept of god is illogical. If god already knows that we will do something at the age of 30 or 40 that is so bad that he is justified killing us, as he did to tons of little ones in the OT, as babies, where are we free to decide to act differently?

God knows everything, right?

So he knows what you are going to do on next Friday morning. He knows it for a fact. And he's known it before he even created humanity.

So go ahead and decide to do something differently. You can't. God knew you were going to do that 13.7 billion years ago.

No free will. Nothing you have ever done was something that surprised god ever. He knew you were going to do that exact thing at that exact moment 13.7 billion years ago.

Are you starting to understand the problem? When you say my view of your fictional god is jacked, this should be a light bulb popping up in your head, that I'm just pointing out the logical conclusions of this god concept that are completely illogical.

Resolve those retarded logical conclusions to yourself, make sense of it, and then come back to us and debate.

You want to know something? No Christian has EVER resolved those things and come back to debate with any atheist anywhere.

Why?

Because they fucking became an atheist trying to resolve them.

You are compartmentalizing. Read up on it. All Christians do this. Heck, all theists do this. You are holding mutually incompatible concepts in your head at the same time.

You're not following my argument.

I haven't contested that god's omniscience precludes free will. That argument can be made in a number of ways, and is how this discussion usually goes. But I haven't done that. I'm granting you that omniscience precludes free will for this discussion.

My question is, who/what has a right not to suffer?

Does a character in a book have a right not to suffer? Sounds ridiculous, right? However, you appear to be using omniscience to reduce us to nothing more than characters in a very complex story.

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By nature, religions do these things. Even the Amish, your example, are highly controlling of their followers. Pointing out some unusual anomalous examples really doesn't refute my point about the general nature of religion.

You haven’t established that these are anomalous. Your point is a bare assertion. You’ve done nothing to support it, and I’ve shown counter-examples.

Did you miss the part about "victimless crimes" and "useless activities promoted as virtues"?

No, I missed the point where you showed that such features are inferior. Must an action have a victim to be immoral? For instance, public nudity causes no intrinsic harm to others, yet most societies consider it immoral.

The fact is that the Bible goes beyond GOdWillsIt and gives the same explanation for morality that you gave yourself. This refutes your point that religion does not offer explanations for morality.

I never said that. I said "GodWillsIt" is useless to understand morality. If you agree, let's move on.

You said: “Saying, for example, that slavery is wrong because it violates the rights of others and we would not wish to be treated this way is far more elucidating than "cause big daddy in sky says so".”

The implication was clearly that religion offers no other explanation than god wills it. Otherwise, what was your point with this statement?

So your god evaluates our moral actions as a judge does and therefore morality exists outside of your god and therefore your god is not necessary to determine what is moral or what morality is?

A king can be a judge and not be bound by an external moral code. While judges in our time generally apply law they didn’t create, that is not a necessary condition for judgment.

How so?

You do the same thing as those you criticize, but don’t criticize yourself.

So you disagree? If so, your twisted sense of morality is noted.

Your opinion is again noted. You don’t seem to have much beside opinion and bare assertion.

Denial and defense is a symptom of the battered wife syndrome. I stand by my analogy.

It’s clearly wrong. In this analogy, the spouse isn’t battered, and the battered party isn’t a spouse.

I'm highly skeptical of your claim that sex slavery openly exists in Western Society and "nothing is being done about it" but let that go.

I’m not letting it go. Here’s a link to the article I mentioned
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germ...02533.html

My point was never that secular morals have created a perfect paradise where no one ever commits crimes anymore and no one ever wrongs another anymore. Yes, crimes still do happen. Yes, we're not perfect. Yes, bad people still do bad things. Completely beside the point.

My point is that secular morals have evolved to where we say that slavery, rape and genocide are bad. Our own country no longer defends the institution of slavery on a political level like factions of it did 150 some-odd years ago. We've stopped evaluating whether or not these practices are morally defensible. We're now at the stage of struggling to stamp them out.

Not much of a struggle in Germany.

Compare this to the Bible with all its genocide at the orders of your god,

Again, god is judge. Capital punishment is not murder.

rape at the orders of your god

Where?

and rules that regulate the practice of slavery.

Regulation is a step in the right direction. Jesus said plainly that the law contained compromise due to the hardness of Israel’s heart.

Special pleading? How so? Am I now responsible for defending every non-religious ideology?

As you just said “secular” in the OP, for now, yes, you are responsible for that. I noted some time ago that you were overly broad in just saying religious and secular and suggested you limit your scope.

My Tu Quoque reference was over your claim that "oh yeah, well, other destructive ideologies are bad too, so it's all a wash". The abuses of other bad ideologies, which I don't partake in, do not justify the abuses of religion.

No, they don’t, but they refute your claim that secular morality is superior to religious morality.

You're using the same Reducto Ad Absurdum tactic that you've used elsewhere in this debate. My claim that secular morality is superior to religious-based morality should not be taken to mean that every non-religious ideology that has ever existed has been perfect or that there have never been any bad non-religious people.

As noted, you set the scope, and I even suggested that you limit it. You didn’t. It’s poor form to now blame me for your own error.

What the hell are you talking about?

I’m talking about your charge that religion could lead to the killing of someone in order to prevent their corrupting others, and noting that secular morality can do the same thing.

It's a classic ad hominem. You're attacking the person and not the argument or the findings.

Where did I attack the person?