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Exactly. A much better fate that living in willful ignorance and slavery.If God doesn't exist, we are nothing more than sacks of meat, water and bones.
That view is this new category Im gunna try to stipulate...religious nihilism, or something.If God exists, then each of us are eternal beings, with rights endowed by God, amongst these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
If God doesn't exist, we are nothing more than sacks of meat, water and bones.
All of us are slaves to something. It's an artifact of compulsion. It is literally hardwired into us.Exactly. A much better fate that living in willful ignorance and slavery.If God doesn't exist, we are nothing more than sacks of meat, water and bones.
A less objectionable statement is..If God exists, then each of us are eternal beings, with rights endowed by God, amongst these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
If God doesn't exist, we are nothing more than sacks of meat, water and bones.
That statement is equally objectionable. Rights can be elucidated rationally - and if there's no actual God they in fact have been.A less objectionable statement is..If God exists, then each of us are eternal beings, with rights endowed by God, amongst these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
If God doesn't exist, we are nothing more than sacks of meat, water and bones.
If God exists, then we are creatures with inalienable rights.
If God doesn't exist, then we are creatures with no inalienable rights.
It is man's behavior which demonstrates his unyielding belief that he has inalienable rights that led me to ponder the origin questions.
That's super short-sighted and can only pass muster without deliberate cross-examination. Fairness is a function of cause and effect between two humans - expectation of fairness is a product of being sentient pack animals. That explains it right there, not even very challenging at all. It's all SUPER easily explicable without any deity necessary, and that any "thinker" - be it non-theist OR THEIST!!! proclaims to not be able to imagine how - is super scary but also super relevant to the psychology of how easily they're convinced by bad arguments.If the universe were created through natural process and we are an accidental happenstance of matter and energy doing what matter and energy do, then there should be no expectation for absolute morals. Morals can be anything we want them to be. The problem is that nature does have a preference for an outcome. Societies and people which behave with virtue experience order and harmony. Societies and people which behave without virtue experience disorder and chaos. So we can see from the outcomes that not all behaviors have equal outcomes. That some behaviors have better outcomes and some behaviors have worse outcomes. This is the moral law at work. If the universe was created by spirit for the express purpose of creating beings that know and create we would expect that we would receive feedback on how we behave. The problem is that violating moral laws are not like violating physical laws. When we violate a physical law the consequences are immediate. If you try to defy gravity by jumping off a roof you will fall. Whereas the consequences for violating a moral law are more probabilistic in nature; many times we get away with it.
Morals are effectively standards. For any given thing there exists a standard which is the highest possible standard. This standard exists independent of anything else. It is in effect a universal standard. It exists for a reason. When we deviate from this standard and normalize our deviance from the standard, eventually the reason the standard exists will be discovered. The reason this happens is because error cannot stand. Eventually error will fail and the truth will be discovered. Thus proving that morals cannot be anything we want them to be but are indeed based upon some universal code of common decency that is independent of man.
So the question that naturally begs to be asked is if there is a universal code of common decency that is independent of man how come we all don't behave the same way when it comes to right and wrong? The reason man doesn't behave the same way is because of subjectivity. The difference between being objective and being subjective is bias. Bias is eliminated when there is no preference for an outcome. To eliminate a preference for an outcome one must have no thought of the consequences to one's self. If one does not practice this they will see subjective truth instead of objective truth. Subjective truth leads to moral relativism. Where consequences to self and preferences for an outcome leads to rationalizations of right and wrong.
Man does know right from wrong and when he violates it rather than abandoning the concept of right and wrong he rationalizes he did not violate it. You can see this behavior in almost all quarrels and disagreements. At the heart of every quarrel and disagreement is a belief in a universal right and wrong. So even though each side believes right to be different each side expects the other to believe their side should be universally known and accepted. It is this behavior which tells us there is an expectation for an absolute truth.
If there were never a universal truth that existed man would never have an expectation of fairness to begin with because fairness would have no meaning. The fact that each of us has an expectation of fairness and that we expect everyone else to follow ought to raise our suspicion on the origin of that expectation.
Whether they are God given or not, they have been given, taken, violated...and shat upon. That's why "affirming the consequence," as an argument, does not work, Ding.The definition of inalienable is "unable to be taken away from or given away by the possessor. without consent"
If there is no God then rights can be anything man says they are. Which means they can be given and taken away by men without their consent. Which means they are not inalienable.
That's also affirming the consequence. It's men declaring something as the basis for their rights - it's not an empirical establishment of that thing and so it has no bearing on the discussion whatsoever. It's men saying something, news at 11 - type thing. So what? We either agree or do not agree that the rights are immutable and can debate why - that's all easy to do without invoking a deity.The Declaration of Independence also speaks about unalienable rights. It says that that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." These rights cannot be bartered away, or given away, or taken away except in punishment of crime. Governments are instituted to “secure," not grant or create, these rights.
All that that requires, is for reality to be real. voila, absolute truth! Which is actually redundant. Both words aren't needed...but adding them together is something apologists have done to conflate things. When you're wholly incapable at playing devil's advocate and positing an argument from both sides of an issue, you become as loosey goosy a slogan spewing and vacuous thinker as you've become, Ding. I mean, you assert that you know what pre big bang cosmology looks like as though it's an established fact. That's grossly outside of the scope of science and critical thinking. Nobody knows that, ding...honestly plays an important role in knowledge seeking and you don't even have it with yourself. You just like to "have arguments," and "be right."Only if there is an absolute truth.