I stumbled over this site doing some research so I won’t be able to read a response if one is posted but yes of course morality changes with time. Some theists have this horrible tendency to belittle humanity and its progressiveness. I don’t find it at all useful to be blindly submissive and so the ‘good’ lord is not my moral guide. Terrible acts have been permitted in the name of every leading religion and who are you to say you have the right interpretation?
I know what is bad because i know what is harmful to others. that i avoid. Like I instinctively know a lot of things. This is not great conundrum but a predictable consequence of productive symbiotic social evolution. I take it you aren’t militantly carrying out everything the bible commands since you aren’t behind bars. Don’t worry, I’m sure you make your invisible slave master very proud.

You make this argument, I guess, not because you really care about morals or ethics, but just to argue for your faith. Your attempt to pose a cosmic problem of morals is simply a way to justify the need for God. From my perspective, you’re a coward–a quivering, sniveling, coward. Rather than face the fact that you are the master of your destiny, you hide behind silly myths that comfort you with a heavenly father-figure that has your best interests in his mind. I don’t condemn you for being a coward–not everyone is strong–but please, don’t try to disguise your cowardice with religious double-talk. That is contemptible.

Well, I do care about morals. And there’s nothing strong about pretending to be “master of my destiny”. How could anyone be? I didn’t control the time and place I was born, who my parents were, what my upbringing was, and I can’t control a thousand external circumstances or the time and place of my death. I would suggest that your desire to be master of your destiny is blinding you to reason. You aren’t master of your destiny, whether you want to be or not – because again, there are a thousand external circumstances you meet every day that you can’t control. Perhaps the cowardly thing is to hold on to the fantasy that you are in control. Incidentally, if atheism/materialism is true, why should I ascribe any more significance to “your perspective” than to a block of wood (and I’m asking sincerely, not sarcastically)?

Regardless of whether you think atheists should be moral, or have any reason to be moral, the fact remains that we are moral. As moral as believers, anyway. There is no evidence that atheists lie, steal, kill, rape, or commit any other ethical violations any more often than theists.

Again, beside the point.

You denigrate “molecules and energy.” That’s an ignorant and arrogant thing to do. You owe your existence to “molecules and energy.” If you’re a Christian, you’re disparaging God’s creation, which he called “good.”

I just said that if atheism/materialism is true, morals have no significance beyond molecules and energy. That’s not denigrating.

It’s not just that the “without God, morality is meaningless” trope is illogical.

It’s that it contradicts the evidence.

Regardless of whether you think atheists should be moral, or have any reason to be moral, the fact remains that we are moral. As moral as believers, anyway. There is no evidence that atheists lie, steal, kill, rape, or commit any other ethical violations any more often than theists.

In fact, countries with high levels of atheism and agnosticism (such as Norway and Holland) often have a heightened sense of social responsibility, a greater-than-usual belief that people in a society have an obligation to take care of each other.

I’m not saying that atheism is what causes this sense of social responsibility. But the “eat, drink, and be merry/ lie, steal, and kill” picture that theists often paint of what an atheist world would be like is in sharp contrast to reality. Any theist who thinks morality must be rooted in religion to be meaningful needs to come up with an explanation for that reality.

November 19, 2007 at 6:22 pm

In reference to your reply refer to.

JeffN said,

November 19, 2007 at 5:09 pm.

November 19, 2007 at 10:02 pm

JeffN,
I was actually responding to Greta about the material universe – thanks for the reply anyway though.

Oops. Sorry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTidEsrjPyg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHJcrepS2Kg

My point is not that it makes ethics complicated and messy and unclear – my point is that it makes them utterly meaningless. I’m assuming you believe in nothing more than the material universe of atoms and energy (correct me if I’m wrong) – such a universe/conception of reality cannot account for the existence of “ought” and “should”. 300 years ago people’s internal moral compass and community consensus said that slavery was ok. Was it? Was it ok then, but not now? What if we change our minds and decide 100 years from now that it’s ok again?

Slavery is the one example that you should not have brought up in your effort to make your point. 300 years ago? Try 150. In 1857, throughout the American South, people’s internal moral compasses and community consensus said that slavery was OK. For the purposes of the present discussion, however, the important thing to note is that the vast majority of those people were Bible-thumping fundamentalists who found nothing in the Bibles they thumped to convince them that slavery was not OK — and it was that that was instrumental in shaping both personal moral compasses and community standards. There was a vast outpouring of controversial literature on both sides of the slavery issue, most of it written by committed Christians, but when it came to citing scripture in defense of their positions, the pro-slavery Christians were able to give at least as good as they got. How could there have been pro-slavery Christians according to the “word of God” theory of morality?

A while back, in an online discussion, I asked a fundamentalist Lutheran minister flat out whether holding another person in slavery was a sin. He dodged around the question as best he could, but in the end conceded that, while (for some reason he never explained) he was personally glad that slavery no longer existed, he could find nothing in the Bible to convince him that slavery was sinful. That was not 300 years ago. It was not 150 years ago. It was less than two years ago.

Now, I tend to agree with the general thrust of your argument against moral relativism. I merely wish to point out here that reliance on “the word of God” by both sides scarcely settled the debate over the morality of slavery. I would also ask whether moral relativism doesn’t lie at the very heart of certain doctrines of certain Christian sects. Why (to refer to my earlier example) if it was not wrong to stone a man to death for gathering wood on the Sabbath in Moses’ day, would it be wrong to do so today?

My point is that in an atheistic/materialistic system, you have no ground on which to condemn people for things like intolerance, except that you and others have a feeling (based in molecules and energy) of aversion towards it, and have concluded that results follow which you are displeased with

In a moral system based on the so-called word of God, have you any ground to condemn people for doing something other than an indication, often rather ambiguous and contradictory, that God has commanded them not to do it? Why has he commanded them not to do it? Divine personal preference? It seems to me that your entire argument is built on quicksand here.

My point is not that it makes ethics complicated and messy and unclear – my point is that it makes them utterly meaningless. I’m assuming you believe in nothing more than the material universe of atoms and energy (correct me if I’m wrong) – such a universe/conception of reality cannot account for the existence of “ought” and “should”.

Daniel, your “point” is dull and passé. Hello–news flash: the latest research has shown “ought” and “should” to be human inventions. I’ll let you in on a little secret: humans are very imaginative. We have the capacity to imagine things that have no existence. We can even construct systems of thought around imaginary things. That’s our genius. That’s also our flaw.

300 years ago people’s internal moral compass and community consensus said that slavery was ok. Was it? Was it ok then, but not now? What if we change our minds and decide 100 years from now that it’s ok again?

Daniel, slavery was justified by Christians in the southern states at one time. Preachers there taught that the Bible condoned slavery. Other Christians elsewhere understood the Bible to condemn slavery. Which side was correct? From my point of view both sides were in error when they looked to the Bible for direction. But, as to the question of slavery, like any other question of ethics, only people can decide what is right and what is wrong. I like the golden rule: do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. I don’t want to be a slave, so I won’t enslave anyone. Jesus didn’t originate that idea–it’s a human idea with a distant genesis.

My point is that in an atheistic/materialistic system, you have no ground on which to condemn people for things like intolerance, except that you and others have a feeling (based in molecules and energy) of aversion towards it, and have concluded that results follow which you are displeased with.

You denigrate “molecules and energy.” That’s an ignorant and arrogant thing to do. You owe your existence to “molecules and energy.” If you’re a Christian, you’re disparaging God’s creation, which he called “good.”

You make this argument, I guess, not because you really care about morals or ethics, but just to argue for your faith. Your attempt to pose a cosmic problem of morals is simply a way to justify the need for God. From my perspective, you’re a coward–a quivering, sniveling, coward. Rather than face the fact that you are the master of your destiny, you hide behind silly myths that comfort you with a heavenly father-figure that has your best interests in his mind. I don’t condemn you for being a coward–not everyone is strong–but please, don’t try to disguise your cowardice with religious double-talk. That is contemptible.

When it comes to making moral decisions, believers do exactly the same thing as non-believers. They still use their own community standards, and their own internal moral guide, to decide how to interpret the moral teachings of the Bible.

How do we know this? Because different sects — and different people within those different sects — interpret the Bible’s moral teachings so radically differently. Including the choices they make about which Biblical teachings to accept and which ones to reject. And the interpretation of the Bible has changed dramatically through history.

Example: There are any number of moral teachings in the Bible that almost all Christians today reject; either because they’re morally repugnant (such as genocide, infanticide, the stoning to death of adulterers), or simply irrelevant and silly (such as not wearing mixed fabrics, or not charging interest on loans). I’m actually a little surprised that you used slavery as an example of a moral absolute — since the Bible explicitly condones it in several places.

And, of course, different Christian sects today take radically different positions on homosexuality, divorce, abortion, war, etc. And they all claim that their position is the one God agrees with, the ones that’s supported by scripture. The idea that religion somehow provides clear moral absolutes is flatly absurd.

You seem to think that without the final moral authority of God, morals are meaningless. But how do you know that God is good? On what basis are you deciding that God is good? Is God good just by definition? Then how is that any different from saying that creating joy and alleviating suffering are good just by definition?

“Incidentally, did anyone else think that Westboro was the parody and Landover was serious at the first glances at their websites?”

The one thing I respect about extreme fundamentalists is that they actually say what they believe. Although, thats the only thing I respect about them. They do a better job of spoofing fundamentalism than Landover.

If you want another chuckle, check out the spoof at godhatesshrimp