I suspect many would certainly engage in sodomy.
The big difference in God and the law is that God knows all of the harmful things we do to each other, while the law only knows what someone complains about or is caught at.
God’s basic law: “You will reap whatsoever you sow,” is a powerful deterant to hurting others, and it does actually work.
Also with God, you are always personally responsible for all your actions and thoughts and words.
Religion is not spiritual in and of itself.
Spirituality is the same for all beings and is discovered on an individual basis.
I think the OP was trying to bring out this difference, and it is a very good point. We couldn’t exist on law alone.
The big difference in God and the law is that God knows all of the harmful things we do to each other, while the law only knows what someone complains about or is caught at.
God’s basic law: “You will reap whatsoever you sow,” is a powerful deterant to hurting others, and it does actually work.
Also with God, you are always personally responsible for all your actions and thoughts and words.
Religion is not spiritual in and of itself.
Spirituality is the same for all beings and is discovered on an individual basis.
I think the OP was trying to bring out this difference, and it is a very good point. We couldn’t exist on law alone. Knowing that God’s love is the goal we try to achieve here in the physical keeps us working toward that end, or at least most of us.
Love
Leroy
It works for those who believe in that particular god, which would be about one out of every three people.
However, everyone believes that the law will punish them, unless they have some sort of mental disorder that causes a disconnect with reality.
Thus, I submit that the law is a better deterrent to hurting others than is God, since more people believe in the law.
Sure we could. Quite a number of people do, in fact. Not everyone believes in God or spirituality, yet they manage to make it through life without torturing kittens and raping old ladies.
No, not most of us. About 1/3 of us, if you’re talking about the Christian God.
I don’t think you’re right. Most of us don’t do what we think is right because we consciously want to please God or share God’s love, and most of us don’t do what’s right because they’re afraid of the law. We keep working on doing what’s right just because we know it is right. Even if everyone in the world became atheists, we’d still say “This is right, and this is wrong”. We’d still have a system of morality.
The point of the OP was, I guess, to posit that minus God - moral relativism must rule the day.
No, we do not have ‘equality’ even under the law. The same laws are applied differently to those with money: they can afford not only better representation, but we all know of instances where ‘connections’ have made a difference in both charging and sentencing when the same laws are broken.
Moral relativism only protects those with the most power to impose THEIR views on society.
I can’t cite who wrote it, but at the time of the founding of this country someone wrote that without a populace who believed in God, government would be hard pressed to impose sanctions applicable to all equally - which would eventually insure collapse.
I’m saying this wrong. New at posting. I hope this makes it a bit clearer.
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Not even close.If you are defining moral relativism(as most fundies tend to) as “whatever’s good for me and f*ck everyone else!” then you could not be more off the mark.Statistically atheists are FAR, FAR less likely to end up in prison, commit violent crimes, steal etc…This would not be so if what you call “moral relativism” was the order of the day for non-believers.
Morals are rooted in natural selection & culture.We could not have survived without moral constructs(or it would have been much more difficult at least).
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True.In America a t least things could be MUCH better(start by doing away with the incredibly stupid “Double Jeopardy” clause).However if we had NO secular laws adn instead relied upon God/gods to dispense justice adn protect us, we would be on a fast track towards extinction.
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I aknowledge that morality is subjective but that is not at all the same as what you are talking about here.In any case most moral relativists are fundementalist christians(in America anyway) adn as they are the ones in power they are the ones who often abuse this power in the ways you describe, whether it be by inserting religious propaganda into our pledge, replacing our national motto, sentencing us to membership in religious fellowships(Alcoholics Anonymous), and a myriad of other civil rights violations.
Fundies often spout this quote they attribute to George Washington(IIRC) about a society without a religious foundation being doomed to something or otehr.Can’t remember it offhand and I do not remmebr if it is a legitimate quote or another Barton flasehood.
Even with religion there is moral relativism. Which set of laws do you observe? To get me to observe a certain god’s laws you need to demonstrate that this god exists, which has been notably hard to do. After all, you wouldn’t want us to be following the wrong set, right?
Even within a religion, the laws seem to change over time, following, it seems, the ethical growth of the culture with the religion.
I assume that you admit that religiously administered laws are just as open to corruption as secularly administered laws, right? The only pure justice is that administered by the deity - but that, it seems, happens only after the grave. It is not much of a preventer of crime, since even cultures where everyone believes have crime. I don’t know if prisons are effective cures for criminals, but they at least keep them away from society for a while. I’d rather not wait for god to strike down a murderer, which means we need to isolate him, which means that people have to be involved, which means that there are all the problems you state.
Well, that’s not moral relativism…that’s just corruption, which exists in every country and every society. Moral relativism is just a philosophical viewpoint about the origin and universality of moral laws. It has interesting implications about things like the extent of tolerance, but moral relativism itself doesn’t neccesarily lead to corruption or a class system.
Your figures are off considerable, but I really don’t want to argue the point. There are several countries that have tried to stamp out religion, Russia, China, Cuba to name a few and according to your way of thinking these countries should be pillows of honesty and fairness.
Men, and women will never be fair and loving with each other without a higher intelligence, a higher authority, real or imagined. Those who make the laws, slant them towards helping themselves, etc., etc.
Our country was founded on freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.
When the teacher leaves the room the biggest bully rules.
Skeptics can be the most gullible of all groups, in my opinion.
http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/atheist4.htm
Love
Leroy
According to Adherents.com, 33% of the world’s population are Christian. Since religions tend to me mutually exclusive, that is the highest number of people you’re going to find who follow the moral codes of any particular god.
Where’d you pull that one from? I said that fear of the law is more motivating to the masses than fear of God, since, statistically speaking, more people believe in the existance of the law than believe in the existance of any god (or all gods combined).
Just because laws exist doesn’t mean that I expect a country with laws to be pillars (not pillows) of honesty and fairness. That’s a whole 'nother can of worms, there.
Cite, please. I have known many atheists who were more fair and loving than the average person, and many Christians who were not.
That’s pretty cynical of you. In a country such as the United States, it is in the lawmakers’ best interests to make laws that benefit their constituants. So, while laws are never completely fair, they’re still pretty good.
Compare that to the “laws” of God, which can be broken as much as you want with no obvious punishment. If we rid ourselves of all “human” laws and just let your hypothetical god sort things out, we’d probably regress into a state of anarchy.
So I’ll throw my lot in with laws that I can actually observe being enforced.
However, freedom of religion means that I should be free from religion if I so choose.
That’s because kids are immature. If a bully tried to pull something like that is a college classroom, he’d be lucky to get out of it without considerable consequences.
Oh no, I don’t believe in things that can’t be shown to exist, I must be reeeeal gullible.
Please try backing up some of you assertions. Especially, “Men, and women will never be fair and loving with each other without a higher intelligence, a higher authority, real or imagined.” I want to know what you’re basing that assertion on.
What was I supposed to get out of that link?
But where is the argument? To make this argument, you must first explain how the existence of God has any effect on what is or is not moral. I’m not sure “God is big and powerful and will smack you up something awful if you are bad” has any moral content at all. But that seems to be what most arguments boil down to.
Justifying a particular morality is one of the most difficult intellectual tasks there is. I’m simply not sure that the addition or subtraction of God adds anything to that discussion, aside from an all-knowing God potentially being a source of fast insight into what morality is.
Yes, many of the founders were elitist snobs of a sort, in that they believed that the commoners needed the crutches of more superstitious and simple religious belief to control their base urges. They, the educated men, didn’t need such props, being able to discern natural law directly. Were they wrong, were they right? I dunno: doesn’t have much to do with the viability of moral relativism in various god-states.
Did Lekatt just pull that old “No freedom <i>from</i> religion” chestnut?LOL!How would you enforce this Lekatt?Sicne we cannot choose what we believe and don’t believe, you are in effect proposing that there be a mandate that we lie about any doubts we have concerning God’s/gods’ existence!?How would your “thought police” enforce this?
Oh yeah…almost forgot:They will recruit psychics like John Edward to become “Skeptic-hunters” or part of a unit called “P.I.S.S.”(Psychic Investigations and Skeptic Surveilence) to root out doubters and either incarcerate them for life or execute them(since they cannot ever be released as they will just go right out doubting God again or not joining a religion!) or perhaps “reprogram” them to erase doubts!
You would think that even incredibly dumb people would have some sort of built in warning system that kicked in when they were about to say or post something incredibly stupid!
You said, “Statistically atheists are FAR,FAR less likely to end up in prison, commit violet crimes, steal, etc…”
WOW! Where in the world did you find the research for that statistic?
Intriguing…
Huh? “real or imagined”
Let’s suppose there is no God, and that this higher authority is “imagined”; you conclude that people will only behave decently if they subscribe to this imaginary God?
That’s twisted, do you know that?
Hey, Laurie, when I cite comes back re: atheists under-represented in prison, are you going to convert? Us atheists have much better coffee mornings…
a cite not I cite…
Dump a load of new-born babies on an island. Ensure they have enough food and water not to starve. They are then left for years with absolutely no education or moral or spiritual guidance from the outside world. Do we think they’d develop “intrinsic” human values? Or do we think (as I do) that as they grew up they’d indulge in the worst excesses of humanity - theft, violence, rape, murder?
I am running short on time but this ought to help you a bit(you can actually contact the bureu of federal prisons and obtain all of this info also.
http://www.skeptictank.org/hs/gp017.htm
Here is the most relevent portion of that page:
*The Federal Bureau of Prisons does have statistics on religious affiliations of inmates. The
following are total number of inmates per religion category:
Adventist 621
American Indian 2408
Atheist 156
Bahai 9
Buddhist 882
Catholic 29267
Church of Christ 1303
Hindu 119
Jehovah Witness 665
Jewish 1325
Krishna 7
Moorish 1066
Mormon 298
Muslim 5435
Nation 1734
No Preference 13878
Orthodox 375
Pentecostal 1093
Protestant 26162
Rasta 1485
Santeria 117
Scientology 190
Sikh 14
Unknown 4503
Total 96,968*
They will either survive or die.If they do not survive an outsider investigating the matter would do well to ask why they did not survive(murdered one another until there were to few left to form a strong enough social bond to aid each other in constructing shelters, warding off predators etc. perhaps?) and if they do survive then the outsider would do well to ask why they survived(likely they quickly realized that 12 people working together to build a fort/shelter is much more efficient than throwing rocks at one another while the storm/tiger/headhunters approach.
Biologists adn the like who have examined dinosaur bones have discovered that dinos often had recieved and completely healed broken legs and such which would have killed them if not for the care of the pack.Instead they survived to eventually die from old age or some other cause.This shows that not only did morals not start with religion but they didn’t even start with humans!
In short, the hypothetical batch of newborns may act as you assume but if so they would not likely survive so that their great grandchildren are able to sit around wondering how they developed their system of morality.
I hate to be the one to burst your bubble, but even with 1/3 of the world’s population believing in one sort of God or another, moral relatism still exists. God tells some people that it is perfectly OK to kill non-believers. God tells other people that it is perfectly OK to let your child die from malnutrition and/or other easily preventable diseases rather than seek out medical care. God tells other people that it is OK to hate homosexuals. God tells other people that plural marriage is a divine commandment.
What’s that? You don’t believe that God was really the one who said those things? Perhaps you think that it’s just man misinterpreting the word of God or making it up entirely? Well, guess what – once you start picking and choosing what you want to accept and disregarding anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, you’ve got moral relativism.
God can certainly be used as a motivation to do good works. He can also, however, be used as an excuse to commit atrocities. Without an innate sense of morality, wholly apart from religous dogma, no believer in God can claim to be moral.
Regards,
Barry