(April 15, 2014 at 8:44 pm)Beccs Wrote: They always seem to forget that the average human is far more moral than their deity.Their deity isn't moral at all, because he doesn't have to be. He makes no bones about it, either; his words and actions remind us that he's the boss and he can fuck you up eight ways to Sunday if he's in the mood for it.
The Christian's morality has a single component: what does god command? That is why some of them refer to absolute or objective morals. Whatever god commands is moral. Whatever he does not command is immoral. No action is intrinsically right or wrong, good or bad. If a Christian man walked over to his neighbor's house and slaughtered the parents, pets, and sons and took the virgin daughters home today, he has committed an atrocious and immoral act... because god did not command it. Not because killing, kidnapping, or rape is wrong in and of itself, but because he was not acting under god's orders.
So if Rev is asking where we get our morals, he's really asking who it is we blindly obey. He feels that without god, we have no one to blindly obey, and therefore we cannot have morals. Because that is what morals mean to him.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould