“The ethical man knows what is right; the moral man does what is right.” – Anonymous
What the FUCK? Anyone who reads that paragraph fourteen times in a row is going to discover what it feels like to have their brain melt and dribble out their nose.
Here’s a hint: the ability to recognize bullshit arguments as bullshit is independent of religious belief or lack thereof. Therefore, your assumption that everyone calling out your bullshit are merely angry atheists is also bullshit.
As a side note, I would say that the culture in the USA has become MORE ethical over the past 50 years. The world in which I live today is significantly less racist and sexist than was the world into which I was born. We are much more aware of the impact of pollution upon the biosphere. We treat animals with greater respect, especially our pets. We are even capable of extending the categorization of ‘human’ to people in other countries.
I would ask that you refrain from replying to these posts with nothing other than your base assertions and opinions. They are rather useless since they appear to be founded in a fact-free zone of superstition and existential fear. You are not effectively promoting your own religious belief system here. You are, in fact, doing active harm to your religion by portraying it as the refuge of the weak-minded and happily ignorant. If I were a Christian, I would call you to task for besmirching the religion with your presence.
Fair enough. The religious right is off the wall. But these scientists, doctors, and engineers need to go beyond their professional ethics and start looking at ethics and morality for the general public.
LOL, just when this thread couldn’t get any better (or worse, depending on your sense of humor), Anonymous User quotes himself and then “corrects” his quote to word it better.
Said the lawyer. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
“That’s the most unbearably pompous thing I’ve seen on this board in ages. Shut the fuck up.” -Me
pchaos, I recommend you start looking into Socrates’s philosophy. He has some really great teachings that I go by. I use his quotes as my signature and I change my Socrates quote in my signature every month. He has some really great advice about how to live.
I’m learning a lot of great things through his philosophy and you don’t have to be fully committed to it. For example, you can be Christian, and a follower of Socrates’s teachings.
Why? They’re BUSY. Being ethical doctors, scientists, and engineers. I mean, hey, you said in your other thread, you’re too damn busy yourself to come up with your own personal philosophy, and you’re just a fake lawyer. Now you want all these people who are already contributing useful things to the world to be its spiritual leaders too?
Besides, if the scientists and doctors and all give us a philosophy to follow, won’t we all just be…what was the quote…“borrowing from other world views and philosophies instead of coming up with our own”?
Why do you need a coherent world view when you could just … You know … coherently view the world?
If Christians only do good because they fear God’s punishment, then they are not good people.
And far too many Christians knowingly do evil believing that God will forgive them.
I do not do good out of fear of punishment for doing otherwise. I do good because I know it is the right thing to do. When I do evil, I do not excuse it that I will be forgiven. I do it after having made my peace with the consequences of my intended actions.
Another thing ‘Christians’ do is pass the buck for their actions - especially bad ones
“The devil made me do it” - “I’m a sinner, I can’t control it” - bullshit.
I am not an atheist, but your assumptions about them are based on a poor generalization. Atheists, as a group, don’t have any more of a consistent philosophy and world view than theists as a whole do. In fact, really, the only thing that theists agree on is necessarily that God exists; similarly, the only thing that atheists agree on is necessarily that God doesn’t exist. The problem is you’re seeing your own views and the views of others like you as representative of theists as a whole, but in fact you’re not representative of theists or even Christians, and comparing them to a large and diverse group.
Moreso, this whole idea that science and religion are opposed to eachother is just silly. Science isn’t a means to determining ethics and morals. Science is just our best guess at how things are, there are absolutely zero moral or ethical implications from science directly. What science does do, if anything, is create situations that had previously not been explored and then we go into it trying to make ethical and moral rules based on our existing beliefs and morals and ethics.
For instance, look at the internet in the 90s. It was growing very fast but there were no established moral or ethical rules applied directly to how it was used and we spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. The whole Napster deal is a perfect case study for this. The technology of pier to pier file sharing doesn’t necessarily imply anything moral or ethical about what files can be shared or how. Socially, economically, and legally we had a debate about it and it’s more or less sorted itself out. All science did was say “hey, now you can do this new thing you couldn’t before.”
What religion does do, is it gives people a certain set of base values. For most Christians, that means the teachings of Jesus, the Ten Commandments, etc. But even those things have to be interpretted to fit our current circumstances. To relate to the file sharing example, Christians still have to make a logical argument about whether file share constitutes stealing. For atheists, they don’t appeal to God for their values, but because they’re a large group, they could get them from anywhere. Maybe they attach to a particular philosopher’s views, maybe they just accept the values they were raised with or the values of their peers or the values of society and don’t really question them, maybe they do their own philosophy. Still, they too, in the end, have to have a logical argument to translate their values to fit into a given circumstance.
Either way, ethics and morals have changed, considerably even, in the last 50 years. And a lot of that is because we’ve been exposed to new things because of new scientific discoveries, or the circumstances have changed because of science. You may not like all of those changes, I don’t think anyone likes every change in the moral fabric of society, but it’s also not reasonable to expect that all of society will exactly share your values and work toward the same goals you do. Regardless, if we look at all of human history, not just 50 years, but hundreds and thousands of years, we may see some dips and bumps in morality, but there’s a very clear and definite trend upward.
Heh. Thanks.
The NT is my coherent philosophy. I’m just waiting to see if atheists can come up with something, so far very little. Socrates is well-known for developing the Socratic Method, perhaps atheists can use his teachings as the basis for a world view.
Sometimes I wish that I had never practiced law and in a couple more years I may be in a different business.
“Quoting oneself is fun.” -Some douchebag on the internet
I think this wish has been granted.
The NT is not a coherent philosophy.
don’t wait - go get that job as a greeter at walmart! they like special people like you.
Thing is, We. Have. It. All.
For some definitions of “all”.