Comments on: Those Offensive Atheist Billboards

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 17:06:38 +0000

true faith only occurs AFTER you are knowledgable and open minded to all other ideas and beliefs out there. To be offended is to have no faith in the strength or validity of your own beliefs.

–Ignorance is The ENEMY.

By: keddaw

keddaw — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:06:31 +0000

Without a source of morality outside of man…

How about one inside man, just for a change?

How about an intellectual morality that would end all discussions about morality being the province of religion, about each man being a moral island.

If it is at all possible to objectify any part of morality, and I’m not sure it is, then it will come from the intellect, not from the paranormal.

If I am right and morality is purely subjective, different for each person then you are completely wrong to equate Mother Theresa and Hitler. They may well both have been following their internal moral principles, but they most certainly weren’t following mine. Thus I can say which one I consider more moral as can you and everyone else on the planet. Why is that so hard for the religious to get? And why is it when their own morality collides with Church morality most are happy to ignore Church teachings? If they truly believe their Church is right then how is it possible that the two moralities are not aligned?

Incidentally Mother Theresa may have contributed indirectly to more deaths than Hitler thanks to her work in not allowing the promotion of birth control of any form in India as per current Catholic doctrine.

By: Carol

Carol — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:20:14 +0000

Without a source of morality outside of man, there can be no moral distinction between Mother Theresa and Adolph Hitler. Both followed their convictions. Think about it.

Morality is not “following your convictions.”

By: lewis

lewis — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:04:14 +0000

Defender: that is a ridiculous and absurd statement. There is no requirement for anything ‘outside man’. You might as well say “Without the Easter Bunny there can be no morality.”

By: Siamang

Siamang — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:12:42 +0000

Ray Comfort clone is obvious!

By: defender

defender — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:09:00 +0000

Without a source of morality outside of man, there can be no moral distinction between Mother Theresa and Adolph Hitler. Both followed their convictions. Think about it.

By: Joseph Dunnam

Joseph Dunnam — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:58:59 +0000

Hermant would you consider yourself to be a good person?

By: heironymous

heironymous — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:05:33 +0000

We should save our passion for specific issues (church-in-state, faith healing, gay marriage) not an outreach campaign.

Personally, I agree with passion about church-in-state and gay marriage whole-heartedly.

But I also feel we should attempt to take the moral high ground away from the theists.

That definitely includes “spreading the good news” that Millions of us are Good without God. I personally pondered how I was going to raise my children to be good ethical human beings without the benefit of the church I grew up with (a good liberal Roman Catholic Church) After much pondering, I arrived at the following conclusion:
Equating morality to religion is equivalent to equating law to monarchy.

By: IvanS

IvanS — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:10:37 +0000

@David Keen.
Actually I’m in the UK myself, so I recognise what you say but there’s still an undercurrent of this kind of thinking. It isn’t voiced so openly because this is a country that doesn’t really care about religion but there is always an implication from Christians that to be truly moral you must have some kind of belief, which is why so many of them bang on about atheism being a faith too. Oddly, some of the worst offenders here are the apophatic types like Karen Armstrong who are forever striving to show that religion is an inevitable human trait which must be devoid of literal belief but full of right actions. They seem convinced that you can’t be moral without some sort of background faith thingy, although they can never quite put their fingers on what that may be.

By: J. J. Ramsey

J. J. Ramsey — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:25:02 +0000

IMHO, part of the usefulness of the billboards is that they offend certain Christians while not being all that offensive in and of themselves. Any damn fool can offend theists by saying some variant of “TEH THIESTS IZ STOOPID,” and theists who are offended by that look justified. To offend one’s opposition by saying something innocuous, on the other hand, highlights the irrationality of the opposition.