No, he’s a mis-guided soul … an atheist has no god. He may or may not have repented. Only the Lord knows what is in his heart., but he did ask or prayer and intercession and forgiveness … that’s a good step in the right direction.
If he wasn’t an atheist, why did you bring him up?
So he’s apparently gay and not an atheist. That pretty much answers your original question, doesn’t it?
You’re assuming that Mr Qatro believes that being gay is an innate orientation rather than simply being disobedient to God.
Maybe he’s only attracted to junior pastors.
Naah, it’s merely primatology.
Name one ethical system that meets your criteria.
The only one I know of is the null ethical system.
Christianity certainly doesn’t meet it, so why should any other system meet it? All ethical systems require careful thought and deliberation to apply ideal principles to a complex reality.
Heh. Using de Waal’s research on primates to argue that human moral thought must pre-date human religious thought is just compounding wishful speculation with anthropomorphization.
Yes, human beings have instinctive tendencies to do some things that we regard as “good”, and instinctive tendencies to do some things that we regard as “bad”, as well as instinctive tendencies to imagine or believe in some things that we regard as “supernatural”/“mystic”/not empirically grounded. All of these tendencies appear to be inextricably entangled in human societies as far back as human societies go.
Again, I’m not claiming that individuals can’t be moral independently of any personal belief in something supernatural. I’m not even claiming that an intelligent species couldn’t possibly evolve moral thought independently of any belief in something supernatural. I’m just pointing out that there’s no known historical or scientific reason whatsoever to think that humans as a species did evolve moral thought independently of our beliefs in the supernatural.
And any atheists who try to claim that hypothesis as fact, postulating some imaginary prehistoric human society somehow devoid of unempirical beliefs, are simply telling themselves fairy stories that they wish were true. It’s the atheist version of the natural human impulse to imagine “golden age” or “Garden of Eden” stories, about a vague prelapsarian era of purity before our forefathers had become corrupted.
There isn’t one. Which is my point. All morality is a complex and highly contingent jumble of rational consistency, individual emotions, and historical societal constructs.
Consequently, all belligerently anti-religious atheists patting themselves on the back for having a personal morality free from the contamination of religious thought are simply ignoring (or ignorant of) the extent to which their personal moral convictions are grounded in the historical social development of moral thought, which in turn is firmly enmeshed with the historical social development of religious thought.
Kimstu, do you also credit altruism in non human animals with a belief in the divine?
Since I don’t know what any nonhuman animals “believe” or even if they can be said to “believe” anything, no, I don’t. But I also don’t conflate instances of altruistic behavior with the concepts of “moral thought” or “moral principles”.
Pre-human and proto-human primates may well have displayed altruistic behavior without having any cognitive constructs of the sort that I termed “unempirical beliefs” (and which you coarsely mischaracterized as “belief in the divine”), just as present-day non-human primates seem to do. But that’s not the same thing as participating in the human social phenomena that we call “moral principles” or “moral codes”.
So anyway after six pages have we come to a conclusion as to whether or not gays are more likely to be atheists.
I find that unlikely since in my own experience while in the throes of passion gays are just as likely to shout out “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!”
If I’m not mistaken, initially you made the positive claim that modern secularists were “free-riding on historically religious-based societal moral codes.” Can you back that up, or is it just your opinion?
Wrong, science has often demonstrated “morals” in Monkeys, birds and many mammals.
Or are you seriously arguing that they also believe in and pass down myths about make believe friends?
“Morals” and concepts of fairness are trivially common among social animals.
But the belief in the “supernatural” can tell people in certain cultures that it is “good” to do something that other cultures regard as horribly evil. It made the Aztecs murder hundreds of thousands because their supernatural beliefs told them it was good. Around the same time Europeans were burning alive thousands of accused witches and heretics because their supernatural beliefs told them that was good. Today we regard both those things as extremely immoral. So the belief in the supernatural doesn’t have any necessary connection to any objective morality or good.
So in other words you are going to duck the question and punt to a semi related but undefined term?
What are “moral principles” or “moral codes” ? Molding your behavior out of fear of punishment? Well dogs and even horses do that?
Is it concern and reverence for the dead?..happens in Elephants.
Unless you can come back and say what would meet your “claim” it is useless to discuss.
But then again you think I am not moral because I think people should be able to do things they enjoy and spend time with those they love as long as it doesn’t hurt a 3rd party.
Do I lack a “moral code?”
You’re mistaken. I accused you personally of “free-riding on historically religious-based societal moral codes”. I still cherish the hope that most of my fellow atheists aren’t naive enough to indulge in that kind of ahistorical self-delusion about the “purity” of their ethical belief systems.
Only if you unscientifically and ahistorically conflate altruistic behaviors (which can evolve as advantageous strategies in many species with no self-awareness at all) with actual moral principles, which involve conscious social and cognitive phenomena that, as far as we know, only humans experience.
The evidence that altruistic behavior can provide evolutionary advantages even among species without any consciously conceived system of moral constructs is indeed very interesting and thought-provoking, and deserves further study and discussion. But to long-jump from that evidence to the thoroughly speculative conclusion “Wow, this must mean that human beings’ consciously conceived systems of moral constructs have evolved in our species completely independently of any religious/superstitious/unempirical thinking!! Take THAT, theistic moralizers! Ha HAAA!!” is completely unjustified, and embarrassingly irrational.
No indeed, and I never claimed it did. I’m just pointing out that according to all the known evidence, by the time the human species reached the stage in its development where it possessed any concept as cognitively sophisticated as “moral principles”, it also possessed a well-established tendency to imagine and believe supernatural/mystical/unempirical suppositions.
I don’t buy the theistic dogma that supernatural/mystical/unempirical suppositions (or at least, the particular subset of them believed by the particular theist expounding that dogma) necessarily provide reliable moral guidance. But I also don’t buy the atheist “Garden of Eden” fable assuming that “original” human morality was somehow “pure” and uncontaminated by supernatural/mystical/unempirical suppositions until those nasty nasty priests showed up and ruined everything.
As far as we can tell, the human mind has harbored imagination, speculation and irrationality of various kinds for pretty much as long as the human mind has been human. I don’t claim that prehistoric humans’ superstition was the original cause of morality: I’m just noting that there’s no evidence to indicate that morality, or any other complex mental construct, ever existed unaccompanied by superstition.
Cite?
Where has Kimstu said that?
The “logic” seems to be that “if you aren’t rampaging through the street you are acting according to religious values”.
Of course in reality, if I was acting according to religious values I’d murder my brother and then kill myself, since we’re both atheists. That’s what “historically religious-based societal moral codes” are actually like.
Sure…you historicaly conflate human evolution with religion please, AFIK the first evidence of “religion” is so recent as to preclude it effecting our evolution at all.
If you claim that evidence exists please provide it.
Plus this is all moot, you are already saying that you, and religion is making humans “good” because of the fear of angering your god. This means you are acting out of an expectation of reciprocity, a very common trait in mammals.
The rest is a strawman argument, I have not offered my opinion at all but I would I would venture to guess that canines don’t tend to do scientific tests…so unless you can explain what this yet undefined “morality” is I have no way to even debate where it came from. But many many mammals show empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity. So unless you come back with an actual concrete claim I will say yes, there is empirical evidence that a common ancestor had all of those traits and their offspring exhibit those traits with no obvious belief in the supernatural. Although many of they do also have the same hyper active agency detection behaviors which may have lead to our own tendency to believe in mythical parent figures.