Lack of fear and the complete absence of evidence in any kind of afterlife.
So all I have to do is to pay lip service to this all powerful, all knowing being and I’ll slide right into heaven? Are you sure he won’t be able to see through this cunning ruse?
But what if the Roman Catholics are right, and that’s the proper way to worship? You blew it.
The short and unacidic answer is that to an objective eye, there is not a causal relationship between “Jesus gets killed” and “Profit!”. It would be like if I grabbed a kid from a playground and punched him in the eye, and then told you to thank me for doing it because now, thanks to my punching the kid, it enables me to give you $100, which I actually had all along and always had it in my power to give you.
As for the morality of atheists, I have little to add to the discussion; I’m in the “following instructions for personal reward, to avoid eventual punishment, or even out of devotion to the person or organization dictating the instructions is not an exercise of positive morality” camp. That is, you cannot get ‘moral credit’ for doing good because you are told to do it. You do, however, accumulate ‘moral deficit’ if you fail to disobey an order that is bad or evil. So, the strongly religious are nigh-guaranteed to be less moral than the atheistic by my measure, because the atheistic are actively making both positive and negative moral choices, whereas the religious tend* toward a passive abdication of their moral choices, and thus can only make negative choices (by omission).
Jeff Harkin puts it like this in his book Grace plus Nothing Chapter 92 Emotions, When discussing about what are termed “New Ager’s and or Westerners” where feelings have become the proof of truth and reality, "If it feels good, do it!, Or, “If I don’t experience it, it isn’t true.”
Morality is self designed in these people. Could they be good people? I believe Yes, as they could very well have been influenced by very good parents and therefore know what is right. Then there are those who didn’t enjoy a decent upbringing. What is there basis of morality?
The best way I believe is to follow the bible. It is authored by God himself.
But Communism and Fascism as practised by Hitler were religion. Each had its principles, and its prophets liad out in its books of received wisdom. Each was brutal to heretics, and when events turned out to be contrary to expectation, pratitioners went back to the books and prophets to see what misinterpretations had led them astray. The only difference between them was the absence/presence of a word “god.” But from the viewpoint of influencing morality and the way someone lives his or her life, Communism and Fascism were identical to religion, and had very similar effects. Communist and Fascist leaders were outwardly extremely puritanical, and not uncommonly the reverse in private, just as it’s often found out to be the case with religious leaders today. Communists and Fascist peoples were encouraged to be very moral - for the people, for the vatterland, for God. It makes no difference. The morality was extremely similar, the techniques for encouraging/enforcing it were very similar (when compared to, say, earlier periods of Christianity) and the results were very similar.
Religion has always been a great tool for getting and maintaining power. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Marx and Hitler came up with ways of harnessing that without particularly getting God into the mix.
Cite.
No really. That is a merely a claim of the faithful, with no proof to back it up. The bible was authored by men. Period.
You are bordering on circular reasoning here.
Funny you should ask! After all, it’s clearly not based in “if it feels good, do it!”, so if all you have to go on is some moron who claims that that’s the basis, it’s very intelligent of you to ignore him and ask for correct information.
Of course, there’s no standard book on how to be moral, so different people come up with different schemes, but, for those people who look at morality consciously, I suspect most of them do it by the approach of estimating the effects of actions and determining what the costs and benefits of these actions are, semi-independently of arbitrary influences such are rules and laws. (That is, the laws themselves are not assumed to be moral or immoral, but they remain effective as part of the surroundings so the effect of law on people effects the morality of subjecting them to the law. If you get my drift.) For people concerned with morality the standard it us usually based on is harm. That is, the more harm you do, the less moral it is.
Now, there is admittedly some variance in the different weightings of harm assigned to different things by different people - does harm to animals count? Is death worse than prolonged pain? How harmful is lying, deception, or insult? How does harm to the self compare with harm to others? (In most moral systems (to be called moral systems) the self is not put higher than others, and often rates slightly lower.)
Of course, the above of course only applies in cases where morality is being applied consciously (although people will often incorporate moral behaviors as an automatic response as well, with practice, training, or being raised into it). For people who aren’t deliberately attempting to be moral, pragmatics comes into play. Here, the self is supreme. At the most primitive, childish level, this results in totally selfish and self-serving behavior. Here, laws and rules come into play directly, preventing gross infractions by threat of punishment (though that’s somewhat defeated by people doing (perhaps inaccurate) risk assement and trying to game the system). At best, even with the guiding effect of laws and consequences, this results in immature and childish behavior.
Eventually though, maturity sets in, and with it the realization that you live in a world with other people in it, and that you care about some of those people, and that even for the people you don’t really care about, you need to be aware that they remember and react to your actions. Thus, if you act like a jerk, you get treated like a jerk, reducing your quality of life. So, you try and act in ways to not only avoid immidiate harm and punishment, but also to avoid the delayed recriminations of those who might become aware of your actions. So, you become polite, caring, careful, gentle, helpful, and constructive. In practice this often leads to similar behavior to deliberate, considered morality; the obvious exception being cases where the majority populace and those whose opinions you value are immoral, such as the noted and continuing historical trend of the religious to oppress outsiders and deviants from their autocratically imposed standards. In those cases enlightened self-interest will lead to passive acceptance of the evil actions, and considered morality will lead to protesting and opposition. Aside from that, though, enlightened self-interest by and large tends to lead to what most would consider ‘moral’ behavior.
No, it’s not. Fortunately, you are at exactly the right place to read and learn who actually did author it!
Who wrote the Bible? (Part 1)
Who wrote the Bible? (Part 2)
Who wrote the Bible? (Part 3)
Who wrote the Bible? (Part 4)
Who wrote the Bible? (Part 5)
You’ll note that at every single step of the process, it’s a human handiwork.
At the core, Buddhism is an atheistic religion, but not all Buddhists are atheists(I’d go so far as saying most Buddhists aren’t). For instance, the Pure Land sects are devotional of an essentially deified Amida Buddha, and not atheistic, IMO. That takes care of a lot of Chinese and Japanese Buddhists right there.
And you know what ? It’s just wasted time. It also amounts to a scathing criticism of God, since it implies that he could help prevent all the suffering and evil on Earth, but chooses not to. And no, he doesn’t get a pass if it’s according to some plan of his; that just makes him more evil.
As I’ve said for years; this is what religion is about. It eats people’s personalities, their humanity and turns them into puppets. Turning your moral and other judgements over to an infectious delusion isn’t the way to behave morally. If “Jesus” told you to do something horrible, no doubt you’d do it, because “Jesus” is in control of your life. The question is, is the source of “Jesus’s” commands your own religious delusions or some preacher who is telling you what “Jesus” wants.
Nonsense. God can do as he choose, or could if he existed. And why should it matter if it was done “according to scripture” ? It was still evil and pointless.
Then how do you know he’s worth following ? You can’t have it both ways; if he’s comprehensible enough for us to know he’s worth following, then he’s comprehensible enough for us to judge. And if he’s too incomprehensible for us to judge, then he’s too incomprehensible for us to know if following him is a good idea. Or to say much about at all.
The believers want to attribute a very selective comprehensibility to God, I’ve noted.
Because it doesn’t exist.
Because that’s what all the evidence indicates. All the evidence shows that we are processes in the brain, and when the brain dies we are gone. There is NO evidence for any afterlife. There is NO evidence that an afterlife is even possible. You and your fellow believers simply self indulgently, arrogantly assert that it exists and that the universe has to comply with your assertions.
An example of just how twisted Christianity is. God allowed his son to be tortured to death for something that he could have granted at a whim.
It was authored by a bunch of dead barbarians. It is not remotely useful as a moral guide. Civilized behavior largely begins with rejecting religion in all it’s forms, even if one pays lip service to it. In not killing the unbelievers, in sparing the rod, in not killing women for wearing red or men for being gay, in not sacrificing your son when “God” tells you to. In acting as if this world, the real world is what matters; not God or the soul or religious purity. If you want to be moral, the first thing you should do is toss the Bible aside; it’s a collection of barbarism and ignorance.
You can’t be moral if you are basing your actions on delusions; you won’t be able to judge the cause and effects of your actions well enough. That’s while religion and morality are near oxymorons.
Der Trihs, I would have to disagree to some extent. I too am an atheist. But I think that most religions at their core share some fundamental rules for living that are also core rules for living in a society: Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t rape (all possibly excepted under ritualized circumstances, but in general outlawed). Most religions, not all, have limits on personal vengeance, basically leaving that function to the god or the afterlife or whatever. Those are all good things for civilization.
As I said above, religion has been a great tool for getting and maintaining power. I will add to that that it has been a great tool for organizing societies. But that has terrible implications as well as great virtues. If you have two societies, you are going to have competition, and where there is competition, there is likely to be exclusion, denigration, demonization, and ultimately war. Religion aids that as readily as it does the formation of the society in the first place.
Ultimately, I think religion becomes morally neutral. It is left as an exercise for the reader in each individual situation. It has lead to the greatest cathedrals and most glorious music and art in history, and the most appalling massacres and cruelty in history as well. People will act like people with or without religion. They’ll be better organized about it with religion.
Sir with all due respect, you are as well as I am the result of Adam & Eve The Fall of Man, Knowing good and evil.
As for who wrote the Bible,
I will still credit God as that is to me the same thing as, “divinely inspired”.
Remember the time line just for the 1st 5 books. Moses couldn’t have wrote that without the help of God.
What did Elbert Einstein say about God? Those of you that have been enlighten may want to listen to him;)
Gaudere is an atheist and I understand she’s pretty stacked. About 8 years ago she made mention of a picture in a black string bikini as a cite for this.
Never did post it, though.
But it all turns to disaster, because it’s based on self indulgent delusions. And because it’s all based on the arbitrary commands of a religion, which can be changed at any time without need for justification. And because it’s worldview that the real world is secondary to an afterlife or god(s) or whatever breeds a lack of compassion, and utter ruthlessness.
Religions promote and excuse killing all the time, as long as it’s useful for the religion or it’s proponents ( how often have we heard the excuse that the First Commandment forbids murder and not killing, and fill-in-the-blank “isn’t murder” ? ). They can promote and excuse rape, because God demands women submit to men. They can excuse vengeance, because God demands it. They excuse lie, both by claiming that anything, anything at all is justified in defense of the faith, and because of the disdain for objective reality which is at the heart of religion. It justifies theft by letting people claim they are God’s chosen and have the right to steal whatever they want ( an excuse for any number of evils right there ).
Religion does NOT promote morality, and never has. It’s advocates simply state that it does, and we are all supposed to take their claim seriously and not demand proof.
None of which happened.
Prove that Moses did.
I have a question. If we require an outside source in order to know what is right - be that very good parents or the Bible - can we truly say that those who did not are bad? After all, if they haven’t been shown or know what is right and what is wrong, then they aren’t choosing between the two.
A question two; surely, yourself being a Christian, you have not experienced the situation of being an atheist, or having reasons for being so. Wouldn’t that also include you in “If I don’t experience it, it isn’t true”?
Surprise. Adam and Eve never existed.
As for Jesus being predicted by the Bible, oddly enough the very people who wrote the Bible was totally unimpressed. The Scriptures contain incidents supposed to show the fulfillment of prophecy (like the virgin birth) which are actually based on mistranslations. Plus, the concept that God cannot save people, and must go through Jesus, is an insult to the power of your hypothetical God.
And here is another insult. The Bible is full of self-contradictions, historical inaccuracies, scientific howlers, and illogic. Saying God was responsible for that is yet another insult to him.
Lets.
From here.
And the lies about Einstein’s beliefs are an example of why I say that religion doesn’t promote morality. Supposedly, lying is forbidden - but if it helps them use someone famous as a propaganda tool, the believers will lie shameless and systematically. For all their high sounding claims about morality, the only real “morality” they have is “Anything whatsoever that preserves and promotes the One True Faith is justified”.
Can we debate the actual damned topic and put the witnessing in some other thread?
There is only so far we can go without data. The only data I know of is that now very old Federal prison study. You’d need a significant effort to collect data on the criminal records of atheists vs theists, you’d have to correct for education and intelligence, as has been mentioned, and you’d have to correct for the possibly correct perception that a jury will be more willing to acquit someone who is seen as churchgoing.
Besides that, I don’t have a lot. You might think that believers would be more moral, but just as religious scientists can compartmentalize their brains to exclude God from their work, religious criminals can do the same.
Sir, with all due respect, if you and I were*, so was Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Charles Manson. Which proves pretty difinitively that if the fall of man* imparts knowledge of good and evil*, then that knowledge has nothing whatsoever to do with an inclination towards moral deeds - making it completely irrelevent to the discussion.
My large post, which you dismissed with this one tiny comment, is relevent to the discussion - it describes how humans can, and do, construct morality despite the fact that there is nothing inside of humans that imparts it naturally. I don’t care if you don’t like that humans can do that without some bearded sky fairy holding their hand; it happens nonetheless.
Of course he could. Just like Tolkein wrote Lord of the Rings without the help of God. Or, more accurately, how the Grimm Brothers managed to compile all those fairy tales without the help of god. It’s not too hard to write down the stupid myths and stories floating around, after all.
That God doesn’t play dice with the universe. And he doesn’t. It’s hard to play dice if you don’t exist.
As an Atheist, I do not believe in any type of murder,
especially in support of a myth. Even capital punishment
I can not abide by.
Knowing that there is no god, no afterlife of any type,
I realize this is my ONLY life. It is my time to do good
unto others, no matter what they believe. No segregation needed.
One request: I am quite sick of people saying
Hitler was an Atheist. Hitler was Christian.
Please read Mein Kampf if you need confirmation.
Best to all… and I really mean all.
That is a good start sir, giving credit to God for his unselfish act of giving his only begotten son.
Exactly, That is why we are in the position we are in. Sinners each and every one of us. Take the Apostle Paul. He was a killer also. He was also saved by “GRACE”, and Yes Der Trihs Grace is real. If it wasn’t for “Grace” there would be no Christianity!
I am very unprepared to argue anything with unbelievers, However you are giving me strength and I do appreciate that.
I do apologize, This wasn’t suppose to go this far. Its just that every word I posted was criticized. However I don’t think it will scar me.
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Revenant Threshold p[osted
A question two; surely, yourself being a Christian, you have not experienced the situation of being an atheist, or having reasons for being so. Wouldn’t that also include you in “If I don’t experience it, it isn’t true”?
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First of all I am a Re-Born Christian. In my very limited understanding/Belief, I was a non-believer until I professed my belief in my salvation through my Lord and savior Jesus Christ. I truly hope that I don’t offend anyone with that statement.
Now my parents “had me” baptized while i was an infant. Two years ago “I” “Me, Myself” Proclaimed that I believe in the Cross and all it stands for. That is what makes me a Christian.