Guys: Would you ever rape and murder a girl?

[Alex K]

I still think this is a sock trying to backdoor the argument from morality.

In principle a great idea, but in this instance a bit too heavy-handed

[Losty]

I have no idea why I opened this thread. I made it to page 2 and I feel as if I've been bathing in the OP's filth. Disgusting. I'll go ahead and place you on ignore and then I need a shower.

[Aoi Magi]

Hmm, this calls for an experiment.
Call your cousins, and then rape and murder each other.
Once you are certain all of you have successfully and completely murdered each other, come back and post your and their opinions.

[Aractus]

Go fuck yourself.

It's a valid question no matter how distasteful you might feel it is. And especially so when you actually look at how common domestic violence is.

My answer is that I doubt I would ever rape or murder anyone.

But I'll also point out that religions like Christianity, and Judaism generally viewed domestic violence as an issue that shouldn't be talked about or addressed legalistically (even up until the early 20th century). Islam still views it that way, and still for example practises "honour killings" which most of us would define as outright murder (as would our courts). And Islam also teaches that women are expected to perform sexually for their husbands whether they want to or not.

Here is one such quote by Sir Matthew Hale in 1673 as Chief Justice:

“The husband cannot be guilty of a rape
committed by himself upon his lawful wife,
for by their mutual consent and contract
the wife hath given up herself in this kind
unto her husband, which she cannot retract.”

(Quote from Freedman, 2013, p.21).

Please note that Sir Matthew Hale was a devout Christian, he had studied to be a priest, and spent almost all of his spare time studying things related to his faith, and was said not to have missed a single Sunday church service in 36 straight years. So he didn't recognise marital-rape, and by extension domestic violence in general as a legal issue.

If you had asked this exact same question "would you ever rape/murder a woman" 200 years ago - as we understand "rape" and "murder" to mean today, your answers would be much less definitive than they are now. And I really doubt that atheists and Christians had significantly differing views at that time either; although do feel free to post any evidence to the contrary if you have it.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

What an asshole!

Look, Christian-pretending-to-be-an-atheist-because-he-thinks-we-won't-answer-a-Christian's-question-about-secular-morality, humans are moral animals. We have quite literally evolved a sense of morality based on the ability to empathize with our fellow human beings (and often, things that are not human, which is why we enjoy the company of pets and get sad when we see an animal suffering), unless that sense of natural moral feeling fails to develop... we call those people sociopaths, people incapable of feeling empathy for their fellow human being.

It's not all instinct, though. Children are born with a poor sense of empathy, and have to be carefully taught (and sometimes punished for choosing selfishness over others' feelings/safety) in order to develop this sense of moral feeling toward others, to place the worth of others as equal to their own, in the sense of not doing harm. If you were a parent, you'd already know that. Our brains are sponges for social coding, from language to behavior, and continue to develop until into early adulthood (~25 years old), so a person who may naturally be able to feel empathy can still do great harm if they are not taught to be good, social/moral creatures.

Again, this is how we evolved as a tribal, social species. People who disregard the lives of others (violent criminals, such as you describe) are no more likely to be atheists, and in fact prison studies have shown that more people in prison are religion than atheists by a wide margin. It is clear that being religious does not make a person more moral, and that being an atheist does not make a person likely to disregard the rights of others. In other words, check your premise at the door; it is flawed. The evidence speaks for itself.

It is deeply insulting to us that you would even ask why we're not sociopaths without God telling us we shouldn't do it in a Holy Book. We have a natural and perfectly-good set of reasons to treat our fellow humans well. Indeed, one of the most common philosophies of atheists is called Secular Humanism, which is entirely based on the equal worth/rights of all human beings.

So, since you fooled no one by your attempt to disguise yourself as "one of us" in order to ask the question your preachers have told you is "a problem for atheists", and you hopefully have read enough to realize that we do in fact have such a basis for morality, could you kindly stop acting like "because we feel empathy for others" is not an answer? Seriously, the first couple of pages of this thread reads a bit like:

"Why do you atheists eat food?"

"Because we get hungry."

"Yeah but other than hunger, why would you eat food if the Bible doesn't tell you to?"

It's really no different from that.

[Iroscato]

Well, there's my dose of stomach-turning revulsion sorted for the afternoon.

[Aractus]

We have quite literally evolved a sense of morality based on the ability to empathize with our fellow human beings

We have? Then explain to me Hale's state of mind please.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

I'm not a troll. I've already stated that I'm an atheist. I fail to see evidence in a god.

Your god punishes liars by eternal slow-roasting, but he prefers his trolls boiled.

---

What an asshole!

Look, Christian-pretending-to-be-an-atheist-because-he-thinks-we-won't-answer-a-Christian's-question-about-secular-morality, humans are moral animals. We have quite literally evolved a sense of morality based on the ability to empathize with our fellow human beings (and often, things that are not human, which is why we enjoy the company of pets and get sad when we see an animal suffering), unless that sense of natural moral feeling fails to develop... we call those people sociopaths, people incapable of feeling empathy for their fellow human being.

It's not all instinct, though. Children are born with a poor sense of empathy, and have to be carefully taught (and sometimes punished for choosing selfishness over others' feelings/safety) in order to develop this sense of moral feeling toward others, to place the worth of others as equal to their own, in the sense of not doing harm. If you were a parent, you'd already know that. Our brains are sponges for social coding, from language to behavior, and continue to develop until into early adulthood (~25 years old), so a person who may naturally be able to feel empathy can still do great harm if they are not taught to be good, social/moral creatures.

Again, this is how we evolved as a tribal, social species. People who disregard the lives of others (violent criminals, such as you describe) are no more likely to be atheists, and in fact prison studies have shown that more people in prison are religion than atheists by a wide margin. It is clear that being religious does not make a person more moral, and that being an atheist does not make a person likely to disregard the rights of others. In other words, check your premise at the door; it is flawed. The evidence speaks for itself.

It is deeply insulting to us that you would even ask why we're not sociopaths without God telling us we shouldn't do it in a Holy Book. We have a natural and perfectly-good set of reasons to treat our fellow humans well. Indeed, one of the most common philosophies of atheists is called Secular Humanism, which is entirely based on the equal worth/rights of all human beings.

So, since you fooled no one by your attempt to disguise yourself as "one of us" in order to ask the question your preachers have told you is "a problem for atheists", and you hopefully have read enough to realize that we do in fact have such a basis for morality, could you kindly stop acting like "because we feel empathy for others" is not an answer? Seriously, the first couple of pages of this thread reads a bit like:

"Why do you atheists eat food?"

"Because we get hungry."

"Yeah but other than hunger, why would you eat food if the Bible doesn't tell you to?"

It's really no different from that.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Simple. Hale was taught (part of the programming his sponge-brain absorbed, as I described above) that what he was saying was morally right, that he was in fact empathizing with the women because it's what was really "best" for them. His programming overrode his natural sense of empathy. That's a part of our evolutionary heritage, as well; it how we're able to go to war with the tribe over the hill, because our social programming has said that those Others aren't really people like us, but a threat. Politicians still exploit this loophole by trying to make us see the Other (whichever nation has political opposition to our national objectives or natural resources we covet) as a threat with which we no longer need to empathize. It's why the use of the word "animal" was sufficient to reduce the empathy of the test subjects in the Milgram experiments.

There are two systems at work, here. It is a battle between our group-instinct (social programming) and our natural empathy. It's why it's so important to attack the religions that claim it's okay to do X to someone because God.

Hale, having been programmed by his religion to override empathy for the person because God Says This Is Right, wrote a defense of the "place" of the wife. I have little doubt that he would have, if asked, said that what he was doing was for the good of those women, not seeing it as rape as we do, today, because to him that would have defied the order he believed God had imposed on the marriage relationship (the woman becoming property... no doubt he would also have defended slavery, then, as Biblical). It was when people with stronger senses of empathy than senses of social propriety began to say, "Hey, wait a minute, these women say this is torture to them..." that we began to change those social rules. The same happened with slavery. Empathy won over a bad program. We do what we do here because we hope that we can show people that their programs are artificial, and that it's more important to see that "wrong people" (e.g. gays) per the program still should be empathized with enough to be left alone without harming them, that the religion provides insufficient justification for overriding that empathy.

If you'd like to know more, I suppose you could start with the references section to the Wiki article on the evolution of morality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_morality

[LastPoet]

I am perfectly happy having consenting sex with girls. So no.