He’s making a simple error in logic. He’s saying that if A then B, then if B then A. However, it’s actually if A then B, then Not B then Not A.
So what he should have said is, "Freedom requires religion, just as no religion requires no freedom. " (q.v. Soviet Union, China).
Someone needs to ask him if he would allow atheists to serve in the military, and if so, how he can justify that when he says ‘freedom requires religion.’
If soldiers fight for freedom, atheist soldiers surely must do it wrong.
It doesn’t. Nor does “happiness is better than death”.
It isn’t, which is why I didn’t write it.
This is mere invective, until you can demonstrate that empathy can be verified as valid.
That doesn’t follow logically, until you demonstrate that oblivion is a bad thing.
The evidence you mention is only evidence that actions further some moral standard (nice vs. hostile). You have presented no evidence that nice is good in and of itself.
I have evidence that the Holocaust made Nazis happy. Therefore a moral standard that says “Jews must die” is a valid moral standard.
:shrugs:
I have already mentioned that this is something I have never said, let alone insisted. If you choose not to read what’s in front of you…
I leave it to other readers as to who is making shit up, when it is you claiming I said you had no morals after I mentioned
That’s the good part about debating atheists - they are much more comfortable on the attack than defense, and they tend to skip over arguments they don’t have a canned response to.
Like I said, it’s hard to say. I can only go by my own experience, but I am a member of the Religious Right (that is to say, I am both Christian and conservative) and I wouldn’t care. I think Jefferson was a great American despite his Deism (same for Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin), I could see myself voting for Joe Liebermann, Reagan rarely went to church. The election is for a President, not a pastor.
The trouble in my case is that atheist politicians are more likely to be liberals than believers are, at least historically, so the usual hypothetical of “could you support an atheist for President if you agreed with him otherwise” hasn’t come up. All the avowed atheists are leftists.
I got the feeling that Jesus was the sticking point because that is what most evangelical Christians asked him, when questions of faith came up. Maybe Pat Robertson spent a lot of time talking with Mitt about Jesus, and Romney feels that this is the major issue with the voters.
ISTM to be like Roman Catholics for President. The Roman church has lots of stuff that I disagree with almost as much as stuff in the LDS. LDS accepts the Book of Mormon; the Protestant branches don’t. The Roman church accepts the Apocrypha; Protestants don’t. LDS teaches stuff about God used to be a man and eternal marriage and such; the Roman church teaches stuff about the authority of the Pope and veneration of the saints and the BVM; I think this often shades off into idolatry.
But I could still vote for some reasonable Catholic for President, and simply agree to disagree about stuff that won’t affect his role as President. I think Romney’s Mormon faith has pushed him to be a better and more moral person. I can value that without accepting the faith behind it.
All this is based on my experience. I read a long article in Time magazine on Romney, where they seemed to be pushing his Mormonism pretty hard, possibly in an attempt to drive a wedge between him and the evangelicals that Time thinks dominate the Republican party. Without knowing it, the article made me more likely to support Romney (I haven’t decided for sure). He has business experience, organizational experience, political leadership experience (as a Republican in a largely liberal state, he is used to dealing with a Democratic legislature). He sounds like a good candidate, and what underwear he puts on in the morning doesn’t interest me any more than Clinton or Dole and the “boxers or briefs” trivialities.
John Dean, Howard Dean, John Kerry - I can’t keep all these Bible scholars apart. 
Regards,
Shodan
I’m not Dana, but I’d like to point out that the middle term in your syllogism is non-distributed. This makes the syllogism invalid.
Since neither atheists (who interpret value according to their understanding of human reason) nor theists (who interpret value according to their interpretations of what God wants) assert that anything has an innate value, I fail to see the relevance of whatever point you are attempting to make.
Surely you can’t be suggesting that because one event is considered to have a different value than another, at least one of the events must have a supernatural component. By this reasoning, the statement “A plane landing at its destination is better than a plane crashing into a skyscraper” implies that planes are kept aloft by air sprites.
Thanks for pointing that out. I’d offer that what may have looked like a “syllogism” was actually a separate rhetorical construction known colloquially as a “joke”. An understandable confusion, since often “jokes” are designed to cause temporary confusion as to their provenance. This makes the criticism invalid, though interesting.
Many atheists worry about people who believe things like this. They see religious beliefs as fundamentally irrational - faith being the belief in something despite the lack of evidence to support that belief - and they worry about morals that are based on an irrational foundation.
They see faith based morality as the equivalent of “The invisible man who lives in my head told me I shouldn’t rob or rape or kill people because if I do he’ll set my brain on fire. I don’t want my brain to be set on fire so I never commit robbery or rape or murder. Some people say they don’t have invisible men in their heads. I can’t understand why they aren’t out stealing or raping or killing.”
What they worry is that this irrational belief might change into an equally irrational but less benign belief. Like maybe “The invisible man told me that if I say the alphabet backwards right after I commit a crime he’ll forgive me and not set my brain on fire. Finally, I’m free to go out and commit crimes without fear of punishment.” or “The invisble man says he wants me to go blow up an elementary school or he’ll set my brain on fire. Well, I guess I’d better keep doing whatever he tells me to do.” or even “Hooray, the invisible man is dead! I killed him by sticking a toothpick in my ear. I’m free to do anything I want without having to live in fear of my brain being set on fire. I can be just like all those people I’ve been envying and I can go out out and commit all the crimes I want to.”
the problem with answering this is that theres no context that tells me what it means so it’s confusing what to really say. Does he mean “freedom requires religion” as a way of saying something like, “freedom requires being able to regard religions (fredom of religion)” or does he mean something like, “freedom cannot exist in a system without it accepting god and its savior, Christ”? These are two completely different interpritations of the same quote as you can see, so context is important I’m assuming it either Romney meant or you interprited it as the second possibility (the more strict fundimentalist one) or else there wouldn’t really be a debate at all, am I right?
Ok, so assuming that, I think religion can have customs that promote freedom, I’m not arguing against that, but I don’t think its absolutely necessary and a must for a law to be partisan to religion to necessarily give freedom, simply because there are very smart and tolerant people who accept free speech values who are not religious.
I’m flashing on a bit from a George Carlin record – George is doing a guy who is running for public office:
INTERVIEWER: Do you think your religion will be a major obstacle?
GC: Yes, I do, Bob. I think bigotry is going to be really important in the coming years, bigotry and fear.
INTERVIEWER: And what are you going to do about it?
GC: Well, the only thing I can do, Bob. I’ve renounced my religion.
INTERVIEWER: You have?
GC: Yeah. Let’s face it, the Rosicrucians ain’t gonna miss me! I never went to the meetings, I never bought the candles . . . I answered the ad out of a dirty magazine!
Romney’s speech was god–awful. He kowtowed to the religious right instead of the Constitution.
Romney should reread American history and remember why he is free to practice Mormonism. Secularism is not a religion and deserves the same respect he is afforded from secularists to practice his faith.
The Constitution doesn’t vote. Christian conservatives do.
Are you stating that belief in god/religion is a basis for objective truth and morality? Because if you’re saying that begbert can’t prove his morality is objectively better than anyone else’s (a claim I don’t think he even made) than neither can you prove that religion is an objective basis for morality so what’s the point?
And anyway the Romney statement wasn’t about faith in the semantically solipsistic manner that you’re employing it, he said religion.
As far as axiomatic beliefs go, all of them including religion begin with a premise. You can call that faith if you wish, but it’s not the same as the word religion. Secularists simply point out that the starting premise needn’t be divine in origin. Whether or not it’s objectively better or more valid than others is moot.
By that standard, I’m comfortable accepting that morals are meaningless. I just fall back on ethics (i.e. I’m not cruel to people reasoning that this invites them to be cruel to me in return).
I suppose I could get all knee-jerk about the implication I lack morals, but in addition to being an atheist, I’m lazy. Very very lazy.
Why anyone worries about Romney’s religion and how it would make him a worse president, we just have to look at the present “Good Christian” who leads the country now, and ask if his being so religious has made the country a better place.
I thought it was illegal to ask a person it’s religion before giving them a job. Does that not apply to a president?
Why are some Christians so worried if everyone doesn’t believe as they do? There are many so called Good Christians in jail for various reasons. The truly Good Christians I know do not worry about the fact that some one does not share their beliefs . They just trust that their God will handle things.
Monavis
No, it doesn’t.
It’s unconstitutional to impose a “religious test” as a basic eligibility requiremnt for office, but any voters are allowed to use whatever criteria they feel appropriate for casting their votes.
I’m disappointed, but hardly surprised afer living through his performance as MA Governor, to see Romney pandering to a constituency he depends on. He may well have some success diffusing the evangelical turnout in a nonrepresentative-procedure state, but it only reinforces his bigger problem of having no apparent political principles.
It’s a strategic blunder for him, anyway - Pat Robertson wasn’t a real threat to win the 1988 nomination despite getting enough churchgoers to the Iowa caucuses to finish second there, and Huckabee is different only in being less well known. But that will change if it needs to.
Which is why atheists resist so strongly the nearly inevitable conclusion that they are in the same boat. Atheist morals are also based on an irrational foundation, since they can no more be justified than any other kind.
Or “the dictatorship of the proletariat says we need to eliminate the kulaks as a class, so I will starve millions of people to death” or “kill everyone who wears eyeglasses, because they can read and will thus resist the new and glorious revolution” or things like that.
Which is fine, but not fundamentally different. Ethics are as unsubstantiatable as morals.
Essentially an ethical system based on a preference for something is also meaningless if I don’t care about your preferences. And if I don’t, there is no sustainable basis for you to argue that I should.
Regards,
Shodan
Make you a deal, Shodan. If you quit referring to Communist regimes whenever you talk about atheism, we’ll quit referring to the Inquisition when we talk about Christianity, o.k.?
No thanks.
I realize it bothers atheists to have it pointed out that many or most of the greatest mass murderers in the twentieth century were atheists, but it is a legitimate point. I got Fred Phelps and Torquemada; you get Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-tung and O’Hair.
We all have our crosses to bear.
Regards,
Shodan
Hmm, this list seems somehow incomplete. I wonder why you excluded the most famous one?