You’ve got God-death of first born sons, destruction of Sodom, the flood, and many more hits.
Do you want to reconsider this pissing match, or drop the false dichotomy?
I think it’s kind of silly to think of “Atheist Morals” as if they are some sort of separate variety of morals. I think it’s safe to say that Atheist Morals and Christian Morals, for example, mostly overlap.
In fact, that most famous of Christian morals, the golden rule, is the underlying theme of the moral structure of every single atheist that I have discussed this with, which is depressingly many, now that I think about it.
“Do unto others as you would have done unto you” is an inherently logical approach to morals and does not require any agreement on what happens after you die for us all to accept it.
Agreed. In fact, it is quite logical. If you treat the other guy badly, he is more than likely to return the favor.
I’d like to clarify this:
This is not meant to say that I am depressed at the number of atheists out there, but rather to indicate that I probably talk about this issue socially a bit too often.
I somehow suspect my reasoning was ignored, possibly because it was in brackets. An ethical standard is something we adhere to because without it, some will act without restraint, which forces everyone to act without restraint (lest they be victimized) which forces us to waste a lot of energy on pointless aggression and defense from pointless aggression. I’d call that a fairly substantial reason, in that I get to live my life without having to constantly think up new ways to screw others before they screw me. I don’t see the need to invoke an outside authority (i.e. God) to justify this. In fact, that can just make things a whole lot worse.
Wait, why does Madalyn Murray O’Hair belong on that list? Because she was annoying? I hardly think she qualifies (even if you’re thinking about the supposed hand-stabbing incident).
Except that they’re totally different.
To put it in non-religious terms, a person who votes for Republican candidates because he favors limited government or lower taxes or gun rights or family values is basing his decision on rational reasons. A person who votes for Republican candidates because his horoscope tells him to is basing his decision on irrational reasons. Both people might vote Republican year after year and appear to be steady supporters of the GOP. But the first guy’s vote is actually based on the real world and he’ll keep voting as long as the real world stays steady. The second guy on the other hand might switch parties at any time because his horoscope might change one day.
Atheists base their morals on principles like believing other people deserve the same consideration they want or thinking they shouldn’t break the law because it would encourage other people to follow their example and make society more unlawful or wanting to make the world a better place for their children. These are principles that they arrived at from within themselves and so they’re not likely to change from one day to another. Their morals are secure because they’re based on their own personality and people rarely lose themselves.
Believers on the other hand have externalized their morals. They believe in an outside entity like God who gives them moral instructions and tells them what’s right and wrong. But people can and do lose their faith in these external entities. And if your morality was based on your faith then you lose it along with your faith. Or, as I wrote above, they keep their faith and lose their morality by telling themselves that the outside entity they follow has given them new instructions.
You’ve also got Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda, Hamas, and the Taliban are all examples of what happens when a bunch of people decide God told them they’re supposed to kill people.
Actually, no. Certainly we must have equal faith that they are true. But we don’t need equal faith that they have the results we expect. A religious person doesn’t get to see the believed effects of their behaviour. An athiest often (not always) does. IOW, a religious person must not only have faith that their system is true, but that what they do is actually a part of that system. Religious person does good deeds - he sees the effects of that here, but he must take on faith that God is pleased. Atheist (again, some) does good deeds - he sees the effects and so needs no faith to know what he has done has actually accomplished what he hoped or not.
I think i’ve suggested this to you before, but I can’t remember what your reply was.
Serial killers
Jeffery Dahmer… Church of Christ
Miller…killed 11 girls and was carrying a bible when caught
Son of Sam …born again Christian
BTK …church elder and caught in church
Berwid…said bible told him to kill
The serial killer profile includes a religious background . There are many more.
I don’t think anyone has yet quoted this from the Wall Street Journal:
I lump Scientology and Mormonism together. They are both came lately type religions whose originators are able to be somewhat known. Both were goofy and how they were able to convince people they had insights with god is the real mystery of faith. Both have hooks with extraplanetary beings . How they convinced people of their pipeline to god I do not know.
Mormons have believed in women being subservient to men for over a hundred years. It has caused a lot of flack in the media and inside the faith. Mormons are claiming that they have softened their stance and women are more accepted as equals. Why is that? If it is a religion handed down by god and his holy servant then it can not be changed. It can not become evolved to a more acceptable PC stance. It is supposed to be from gods teaching through his chosen prophet. Who are they to change it.?
Unless of course it is a business trying to grow in a modern society .It is about money and power after all.
Mitt should provide his concept of the star system Kolob. That would be fun.
Mormonism is no different than any other religion, save that it has modern aspects. I’m not sure why believing that aliens from another planet are involved is any crazier than believing in a white-haired old man who’s also his own son, who sent his son down to die on a cross, which would supposedly save us in some fashion. Nor do I see how it’s any sillier than believing the Earth is only 6,000 years old, or that a man who lived to be 900 years old managed to pack 2 examples of every species on Earth into a big boat then floated around while worldwide floods of which we have no record wiped out every animal on the planet. Then he somehow managed to replace all the animals into their native habitat, where the two of each species managed to repopulate their entire species such that we have no record of them starting from scratch not long ago.
In fact, I find space aliens far easier to believe in.
Any fundamentalist Christian or Muslim who makes fun of Mormonism based on its ‘silly’ aspects had better take a long hard look in a mirror.
Yeah? What’s his position? Last time I checked, he was not one of the General Authorities. Those are the guys who are officials of the LDS church.
I think that is too broad a brush. Have you ever attended any “services” of either group?
I have. Mormonism as practiced isn’t much different from most protestant religions. The Bible is a major component. The weirdness of the church’s origin is downplayed if not ignored altogether.
But scientology, besides not having worship services like most of Christianity, spends a considerable amount of time studying the works of L. Ron Hubbard and its derivatives. The Bible isn’t part of the equation at all. Scientology resembles self-help cults much more closely than it does mainstream religion.
I equate Romney’s “apology” with Kennedy’s. I don’t feel Mormonism is any farther from the Christian center than Catholicism is.
So you believe that Genesis is literally true? I didn’t know you were a fundamentalist.
Which takes it for granted that “other people acting without restraint” is a demonstrable reason for acting. But it is no more demonstrable than “God hates f*gs” or “for the sake of the Revolution” or “save the earth by killing humans” or “the Red Sox rule!”
It’s an axiom, taken on faith.
It’s mostly true, but also irrelevant.
Hitler could see that the results of the death camps was in line with his moral system - millions of Jews died long before he did. But that doesn’t make his moral system “rational” except in the sense of “derived logically from first principles”. Those first principles need to be taken on faith, which is what I am talking about.
I don’t think you can argue “this moral system is valid because I can see the results”. Stalin, Pol Pot, and so on, all saw that their moral system brought about results.
Again, that doesn’t help unless you can demonstrate that the principles from which atheists derive their morality are any better than any others.
Maybe it is true that atheists never change their mind no matter what. (My experience on the SDMB is that this is true 
so I won’t ask for a cite.) So? Hitler died in the full belief that his principles were just fine, but that he had been betrayed by the German people,
Besides, I thought all you atheists were the ones arguing that religious people would never change their minds and become atheists regardless of the arguments. So I doubt that there is all that much danger of theists losing their faith and then going berserk.
To balance off Phred Phelps as “a complete ass hole who is on my side”.
Regards,
Shodan
The difference is Mormonism and Scientology are recent. Hearing voices is for most people a psychological disorder. For a priest it is a positive. When someone tells me they know what god wants and he talks to him, I am suspect. I think they need help or drugs.
If Mormonism is mainstream ,let me out of the pool. Magic underwear, Indians being the lost tribe of Israelites. How much bullshit does there have to be for a religion to be dismissed as crazy.They are way past my thresh hold.They should be ridiculed in public.
I couldn’t agree with you more in a theoretical sense. The source beliefs are absurd.
But so are the source beliefs of most religions. It’s what sets them apart from science – irrational beliefs.
My personal experience with Mormonism comes from having been recruited as a teenager. I went to some services and attended a few functions. (I did the same for many other religions and cults, including Scientology, and rejected them all. Let’s just say I was searching for something to believe in and I found them all wanting, or to put it more technically, they all sucked The Big One.)
At the Mormon meetings/services I attended, none of those weird things were brought up. The belief in Jesus Christ as a personal Saviour was paramount, not the kind of underwear they had on. The Mormons I knew were the epitome of family-ness; Dad was a pillar of the community, Mom volunteered for stuff, the kids were clean-cut and got good grades, they were friendly to all who were interested and never shrunk from confronting hard questions. If Presbyterians and Methodists are protestants, Mormons are super-protestants, hardly the stuff of paranoid cults barracading themselves on the mountaintop, waiting for The Rapture.
In my life, I have had friendly discussions with priests, rabbis, ministers and missionaries of all faiths from Catholic to Nichiren Shoshu. In the cases I can remember, if I were to bring up some of the more ridiculous claims of their particular sect, they would brush it off. "Sure, it’s not supportable, but it’s unimportant. " What really mattered was the underlying ambience; the accumulation of followers with a similar faith and belief, and that belief was pretty mild compared to their deep, dark secrets.
So if you concentrate on the deep, dark, unsupportable claims, I don’t think that is a fair comparison with Mormonism in a practical sense.
I don’t think “faith” is intended to hold the same meaning in the statement “Morality is faith-based.” that it holds when George Bush says there will be a “Faith-based initiative.”
The point is, any moral or moral choice is not based on statistics or science, it’s based on an idea of good and bad (also not meant in a religious sense). And the ideas of good and bad are arbitrary and without logical backing, thus taking faith to have morals.
Killing someone is a bad thing, we all agree. But there is no logical (dare I say mathematical?) grounding to prove it bad. It’s like the how inductive reasoning can only be proven using inductive reasoning, making 99% of science based on a logical fallacy. All I’m saying is it takes a tiny bit of “taking for granted” at the core to get anything justified.
signed,
agnostic existentialist
It’s just like the All About Mormonism episode of South Park. Yeah, they got some crazy beliefs, but who cares? They have great lives and are friendly with everyone. Good for them and bad on you if you don’t like it.
On the other hand, dark beliefs might matter as President of America. And in my experience growing up in a 50% Mormon population, they are friendly but still hold much tighter to other LDS. The “friendly” can trick you, because although it seems like they are dissolved completely into society, but the fact is they take people in, but do their best to never let people out.
The silly historical quirks are meaningless, the “dark secrets” of a religion like Mormonism is that you will be completely excommunicated from your family, and many friends, if you ever stop believing. That is one part that LDS are not given a choice on at all; you leave, you are damned to eternal hell and your family is leaving you behind.