Can Atheists be Moral?
- Thread starter Mindful
- Start date
How you feel is worthless. Who you are is everything. Unfortunately for some, its still not worth half a shekel in the open market.
If a Creator of the Universe existed, which is neither proven n'or unproven, it may or may not have the ability to do anything the Universe's finite beings might find to be insane. No human knows the answer to the origins question.
So what.
When I read about God creating heaven and earth in the book of Genesis I understand that it is talking about something that happened no more than 6000 years ago. Humans already know a lot about what was going on back then. The symbolisms and metaphors are about as deep and mysterious as your grade school vernacular was.
You don't understand that that is what it's talking about - you understand now through science that it was far longer than 6, 000 years ago but you have nothing to indicate that the Biblical authors knew this, as well.
There's also no such place as "heaven" that anyone has established as existing to even discuss its creation date to begin with.
You misunderstood.
The creation of heaven and earth and the beginning of the universe are two entirely different subjects.
Light being spoken into existence into a world that was without shape or form and void is about the law coming into the world like a light to the nations. Light that separates the darkness by teaching people to distinguish between clean and unclean, right and wrong, true and false, good and evil, life and death.
Nothing whatever to do with the big bang 14 billion years ago.
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Heaven isn't an actually established thing.
The Earth is approximately 4 and a half billion years old.
The Age of the Universe in relation to the first speculative causal event is is approximately 13.7 billion years.
The Bible, allegorically or directly, depicts exactly none of this accurately.
Ugh..The law came into the world like a light no more than 6000 years ago.
The firmament, the basis of heaven is the law, stretched out above the earth like a vault.
You already know that there are angels and demons and everything in between. In scripture those mythological creatures and animals, everything from talking snakes to zombies, archangels and prophets, human beings, and all the wild beasts of the field are metaphors for human archetypes that reflect the heights and depths of human potential.
Extremely accurately.
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Decoder Ring Fallacy -
You could get away with describing much of scripture as metaphor, because it seems ridiculous and you necessarily have to.
What you're incapable of doing, is explaining why the Bible is internally contradictory when it simply names a City where something took place, or a Mountain, etc. and there's countless things it gets completely wrong. Not metaphorically wrong, but categorically wrong on its specifric claims regarding whereabouts and dates - also on direct scientific claims that were thought at the time by the Bronze-Aged thinkers as actual scientific explanations for things, i.e. not what they "metaphorically" thought but what they literally thought, and were later discredited visa-vie the scientific method.
Further, what you're really, reallllly not going to be able to answer, is what is means for a "Law" to "come into the world" and why that's any different from a Congressman scribbling onto a piece of paper and bringing it to a Vote.
Human archetypes are observed by living, not revealed in the Bible. The Bible talks fanciful shit for folks like you who imagine that we'd be lost somehow without the metaphors. Jordan Peterson was defeated on this exact notion, in debate.
p.s. - I do not know that there are such things as Angels and Demons in existence - I don't consider the characters used to depict human behaviors as magically, then, existing into the real world.
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I think they subscribe to the theory that if you teach a man to fish it's better than giving a man a fish. There is some truth to it. Let's not forget the poor are not easy to defend. It is their fault when you look at each individual person. Collectively it's not their fault. Capitalism needs ditch diggers. It needs the masses to be poor so the "makers" can exploit them to become rich.
Now Ding probably thinks unions are immoral but guess what? Without them there would be a very small middle class. Not the huge successful middle class the immoral new deal created. Immoral social security and medicare. Why are they immoral? Because they steal from the rich to give to the poor.
The same way Ding twists morality is the same way preachers spin Christianity. Any ******* way they want.
Pinocchio is a character written into existence to tell the story of learning not to lie.
Lying is a human behavior that, in most circumstances, is considered immoral in light of its consequences.
People lying aren't, then, Pinocchio and Pinocchio doesn't, then, magically exist.
He's a literary tool, not an actuality.
The same goes for angels and demons, etc.
Lying is a human behavior that, in most circumstances, is considered immoral in light of its consequences.
People lying aren't, then, Pinocchio and Pinocchio doesn't, then, magically exist.
He's a literary tool, not an actuality.
The same goes for angels and demons, etc.
Republicans would read this and say it is immoral
Democracy - Not "The Free Market" - Will Save America's Middle Class
lol... You might as well ask my why there is a talking puppet in Pinocchio when there is no such thing, why there is no archeological evidence for the town of the boy who cried wolf, how could three little pigs build houses.
In scripture any apparent contradiction or miracle that contradicts what every grade school kid already knows to be true about reality, animals can't talk, dead people stay dead, etc., is like a giant X on a treasure map marking the exact place where something of great value is buried and hidden just like any moral teaching of a fairy tale which is not explicitly revealed and requires some intelligent thought to grasp.
Why would I even try to answer a confused question in your mind?
First you try and dismiss scripture because science says something different about the beginning of the universe which is an entirely different subject as I have shown, and then you try to dismiss the fact that they were using metaphors to educate children as if that was too simple an explanation even though they were simple people which is why you know and I agreed they weren't speaking in scientific terms.
WTF.
How is a talking serpent anything other than a human archetype?
Who says they are not revealed in the bible exactly like they are revealed to any living grade school kid who calls someone a pig?
Human archetypes are observed by the living?
what kind of bullshit is that? Someone actually thought that was intelligent? Were the authors of scripture who wrote about what they observed not living? are the intended readers not living?
If you don't see human archetypes revealed in the Bible does that mean that you are not living?
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In actual fact, there is no such thing as a "free market." Markets are the creation of government.
Governments provide a stable currency to make markets possible. They provide a legal infrastructure and court systems to enforce the contracts that make markets possible. They provide educated workforces through public education, and those workers show up at their places of business after traveling on public roads, rails, or airways provided by government. Businesses that use the "free market" are protected by police and fire departments provided by government, and send their communications - from phone to fax to internet - over lines that follow public rights-of-way maintained and protected by government.
And, most important, the rules of the game of business are defined by government. Any sports fan can tell you that football, baseball, or hockey without rules and referees would be a mess. Similarly, business without rules won't work.
Which explains why conservative economics wiped out the middle class during the period from 1880 to 1932, and why, when Reagan again began applying conservative economics, the middle class again began to vanish in America in the 1980s - a process that has dramatically picked up steam under George W. Bush.
And why? Because things weren't "fair" for rich people. And Ding says it's immoral what us liberals were doing to rich people back then. LOL
Governments provide a stable currency to make markets possible. They provide a legal infrastructure and court systems to enforce the contracts that make markets possible. They provide educated workforces through public education, and those workers show up at their places of business after traveling on public roads, rails, or airways provided by government. Businesses that use the "free market" are protected by police and fire departments provided by government, and send their communications - from phone to fax to internet - over lines that follow public rights-of-way maintained and protected by government.
And, most important, the rules of the game of business are defined by government. Any sports fan can tell you that football, baseball, or hockey without rules and referees would be a mess. Similarly, business without rules won't work.
Which explains why conservative economics wiped out the middle class during the period from 1880 to 1932, and why, when Reagan again began applying conservative economics, the middle class again began to vanish in America in the 1980s - a process that has dramatically picked up steam under George W. Bush.
And why? Because things weren't "fair" for rich people. And Ding says it's immoral what us liberals were doing to rich people back then. LOL
The conservative mantra is "let the market decide." But there is no market independent of government, so what they're really saying is, "Stop corporations from defending workers and building a middle class, and let the corporations decide how much to pay for labor and how to trade." This is, at best, destructive to national and international economies, and, at worst, destructive to democracy itself.
Markets are a creation of government, just as corporations exist only by authorization of government. Governments set the rules of the market. And, since our government is of, by, and for We The People, those rules have historically been set to first maximize the public good resulting from people doing business.
If you want to play the game of business then you have to play in a way that both makes you money AND serves the public interest.
Which requires us to puncture the second balloon of popular belief. The "middle class" is not the natural result of freeing business to do whatever it wants, of "free and open markets," or of "free trade." The "middle class" is not a normal result of "free markets." Those policies will produce a small but powerful wealthy class, a small "middle" mercantilist class, and a huge and terrified worker class which have traditionally been called "serfs."
Markets are a creation of government, just as corporations exist only by authorization of government. Governments set the rules of the market. And, since our government is of, by, and for We The People, those rules have historically been set to first maximize the public good resulting from people doing business.
If you want to play the game of business then you have to play in a way that both makes you money AND serves the public interest.
Which requires us to puncture the second balloon of popular belief. The "middle class" is not the natural result of freeing business to do whatever it wants, of "free and open markets," or of "free trade." The "middle class" is not a normal result of "free markets." Those policies will produce a small but powerful wealthy class, a small "middle" mercantilist class, and a huge and terrified worker class which have traditionally been called "serfs."
The middle class is a new invention of liberal democracies, the direct result of governments defining the rules of the game of business. It is, quite simply, an artifact of government regulation of markets and tax laws.
When government sets the rules of the game of business in such a way that working people must receive a living wage, labor has the power to organize into unions just as capital can organize into corporations, and domestic industries are protected from overseas competition, a middle class will emerge. When government gives up these functions, the middle class vanishes and we return to the Dickens-era "normal" form of totally free market conservative economics where the rich get richer while the working poor are kept in a constant state of fear and anxiety so the cost of their labor will always be cheap.
When government sets the rules of the game of business in such a way that working people must receive a living wage, labor has the power to organize into unions just as capital can organize into corporations, and domestic industries are protected from overseas competition, a middle class will emerge. When government gives up these functions, the middle class vanishes and we return to the Dickens-era "normal" form of totally free market conservative economics where the rich get richer while the working poor are kept in a constant state of fear and anxiety so the cost of their labor will always be cheap.
Of course, there were conservatives (like Hamilton and Adams) in Jefferson's time, too, who took exception, thinking that the trickle-down theory that had dominated feudal Europe for ten centuries was a stable and healthy form of governance. Jefferson took exception, in an 1809 letter to members of his Democratic Republican Party (now called the Democratic Party): "The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government."
But, conservatives say, government is the problem, not the solution.
Of course, they can't explain how it was that the repeated series of huge tax cuts for the wealthy by the Herbert Hoover administration brought us the Great Depression, while raising taxes to provide for an active and interventionist government to protect the rights of labor to organize throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s led us to the Golden Age of the American Middle Class. (The top tax rate in 1930 under Hoover was 25 percent, and even that was only paid by about a fifth of wealthy Americans. Thirty years later, the top tax rate was 91 percent, and held at 70 percent until Reagan began dismantling the middle class. As the top rate dropped, so did the middle class it helped create.)
But, conservatives say, government is the problem, not the solution.
Of course, they can't explain how it was that the repeated series of huge tax cuts for the wealthy by the Herbert Hoover administration brought us the Great Depression, while raising taxes to provide for an active and interventionist government to protect the rights of labor to organize throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s led us to the Golden Age of the American Middle Class. (The top tax rate in 1930 under Hoover was 25 percent, and even that was only paid by about a fifth of wealthy Americans. Thirty years later, the top tax rate was 91 percent, and held at 70 percent until Reagan began dismantling the middle class. As the top rate dropped, so did the middle class it helped create.)
This is completely fallacious - they wrote factually contradictory statements to give you a treasure map to describe an overtly obvious human archetype?
And you're their #1 fan, it seems.
THAT'S as magically wishful thinking as thinking Jesus is in some wine and crackers - you think that view is BETTER?
LOLLLLlllll!!!!
Hopefully you knew that Historians can point to specific Geo-Political reasons that the Bible was written as a propoganda piece.
No, you were unaware of these things and thought it was enlightening philosophy and a treasure map? LOL
They used it to bring people to literal arms, and thought it was for the biblical god they thought had actually sent jesus christ to die in the name of. They claim to have eye-witnesses. That's testimony, real or fake, not an attempt at metaphor.
Propaganda.
Newsflash, magical thinker: The folks that existed at the TIME the Bible was written weren't using it in the way you're apologetically describing here now, as a fictional story book to describe human behavior...
Um, they actually thought it was literal and were much closer to the situation than you were.
But conservative economics - the return of ancient feudalism - rose up after Lincoln's death and reigned through the Gilded Age, creating both great wealth and a huge population of what today we call the "working poor." American reaction to these disparities gave birth to the Populist, Progressive, and modern Labor movements. Two generations later, Franklin Roosevelt brought us out of Herbert Hoover's conservative-economics-produced Great Depression and bequeathed us with more than a half-century of prosperity.
But now the conservatives are back in the driver's seat, and heading us back toward feudalism and serfdom (and possibly another Great Depression).
Only a return to liberal economic policies - a return to We The People again setting and enforcing the rules of the game of business - will reverse this dangerous trend. We've done it before, with tariffs, anti-trust legislation, and worker protections ranging from enforcing the rights of organized labor to restricting American companies' access to cheap foreign labor through visas and tariffs. The result was the production of something never before seen in history: a strong and vibrant middle class.
But now the conservatives are back in the driver's seat, and heading us back toward feudalism and serfdom (and possibly another Great Depression).
Only a return to liberal economic policies - a return to We The People again setting and enforcing the rules of the game of business - will reverse this dangerous trend. We've done it before, with tariffs, anti-trust legislation, and worker protections ranging from enforcing the rights of organized labor to restricting American companies' access to cheap foreign labor through visas and tariffs. The result was the production of something never before seen in history: a strong and vibrant middle class.
danielpalos
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i usually do when arguing. i am no longer fifteen years old.
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