How does he know this, especially in matters of ethics and morality?
Regards,
Shodan
The bolded part is so blindingly obvious that I can’t imagine why you would need to ask that question.
You seem to be asking: If you don’t believe in Santa Claus, do you accept presents?
Uhm, yeah, I “accept” presents from my family and friends, but I don’t think some man in a red suite came down my chimney to put them under a tree.
You are making this waaaaaaaaaay more complicated than it needs to be. Hence the confusion. The Bible exists, and so I “accept” it. Do I think it is the word of God? Well, how could I, if I don’t fucking believe in God in the first place???
Well, I suppose he would say that those are different issues. I don’t think he is promoting replacing faith with morals or ethics, but in just pointing out that faith does not lead to good decision making.
Having faith doesn’t make one moral or ethical. Not having faith does not make one more or ethical, either. But having faith adds a level of complexity to issues of morals and ethics that can lead one to false conclusions.
He has asked: “If God asked you to kill all left handed people, and you were absolutely positive it was God, should you do so? Would you do so?”
Sorry, I thought this was the thread about Street Episiotomies.
How would you answer this question, and why?
There’s more to it than that. There are thousands of writings that are claimed to be divinely inspired, and yet pretty much each of them contradicts all of the others.
So, if you’re defending the Bible, you have to tell me why you reject all the others. What makes one privileged over the others?
It isn’t only an argument from first principles, but also one from real-world circumstances. Again, the Pope rejects Hesiod’s Theogony and the Word of Zeus. Why does he get to do this?
“Reject” is a strange word. I reject the existence of God and reject the divinity of the Bible just as much as I reject the existence of Santa Claus and reject the historicity of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. That is to say, I noticed that they were fictional works and treat them as so, just as I would treat L. Ron Hubbard’s sci-fi novels and his religious novels the same: fiction, written by a conman who succeeded in fooling some folks and failed with others. And I do and will continue to feel sorry for children who are taught to believe this stuff while their minds are still developing.
One presumes that you are rejecting the truth of these:
Abenaki mythology
Anishinaabe
Blackfoot mythology
Cherokee mythology
Chickasaw mythology
Choctaw mythology
Creek mythology
Crow mythology
Ghost Dance
Guarani mythology
Haida mythology
Ho-Chunk mythology
Hopi mythology
Inca mythology
Indian Shaker Church
Inuit mythology
Iroquois mythology
Keetoowah Nighthawk Society
Kuksu
Kwakiutl mythology
Lakota mythology
Leni Lenape mythology
Longhouse religion
Mapuche mythology
Midewiwin
Miwok
Navajo mythology
Nootka mythology
Ohlone mythology
Olmec mythology
Pomo mythology
Pawnee mythology
Salish mythology
Selk'nam religion
Seneca mythology
Tsimshian mythology
Urarina
Ute mythology
Wyandot religion
Zuni mythology
Berber mythology
Egyptian mythology
Cushitic mythology
Bantu mythology
Bushongo mythology
Lugbara mythology
Baluba mythology
Mbuti mythology
Dinka mythology
Lotuko mythology
Bantu mythology
Akamba mythology
Maasai mythology
Bantu mythology
Lozi mythology
Tumbuka mythology
Zulu mythology
Khoisan mythology
Akan mythology
Fon and Ewe mythology
Efik mythology
Igbo mythology
Serer mythology
Yoruba mythology
If your parents had been Urarina and you had grown up among the Urarina people, what religion do you think you would follow today?
Different religion traditions offer different rules for what constitutes ethical and moral behavior. If ethics and morality could be determined through faith, people of faith would agree on ethics and morals. QED, faith is not a good guide to ethical or moral behavior.
I don’t think this argument is valid. If you and I both use calculators to evaluate some arithmetic expression, and we get different answers, does that prove that the value of an arithmetical expression can’t be determined with a calculator?
That said, I still don’t know what it means to determine something “through faith.”
I think it means that, through hours of dedicated praying, you’ve swung your deity around to your way of thinking.
Ethics does not need faith. Ethics works by logical arguments.
But, how does faith inform moral choices? I can think of two ways:
- Faith in some code of morality and thus in the author of that code.
- Faith in a moral statement directly.
For 1. Sage Rat has already listed a whole bunch of sources of morality. By faith alone, how do you argue yours is superior? I can throw in the Communist Manifesto and the writings if Lenin also. If you start giving logical reasons why the morality inspired by your faith is superior, you have moved into ethics and away from faith.
For 2. we can easily believe by faith that murder is wrong, and not have much argument, but we can also believe that eating shellfish is wrong, and get a lot of argument. How do you defend either by faith alone?
I owe you a drink.
It means “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”.
Generally no? There is no god but he wrote a contradictory Bible?
If I hear of an atheist who thinks that God inspired the Bible, I’m going to confiscate his anti-Rapture helmet and expel him from the Evil Atheist Conspiracy.
Shun him! Excommunicate him! Heathen!!
A general answer is the more reasonable one (especially in the context of the thread at that point). Just one Nutbar exception will prove you wrong if you state “absolutely not”.
Exactly. Definitions should take into account… erm… statistical outliers.
That’s kind of like Einstein talking about God playing dice. Great metaphor.
So is an “agnostic atheist” like, some guy in a box and you don’t know if he’s an agnostic or an atheist until the cat dies?