1. In a recent thread, one of my usual opponents took the opportunity to explain how common sense is a far better guide to life than the Bible, as there are so many outdated ideas therein. Here, he explains: “…there are a whole bunch of Bible Rules you don't follow... You don't own slaves, stone your neighbors for working on the Sabbath, kill your gay neighbor, ask the town to help you stone your kids when they talk back, chop off body parts as punishment for crimes….I have a simpler approach. Does my action hurt someone? If not, there's nothing immoral about it. Does what you are doing effect me in any way? If not, it's none of my business. No sky pixies, no goofy verses about slaughtering animals to appease sky pixies, and so on.”
I'm glad you included my original statement, since you spend the next six paragraphs addressing just about everything else to avoid the point. .
2. The first thing that occurs to me, is that many with his views subscribe to views far more inimical to society. ‘The Left says of the Right, “You fools, it is demonstrable that dinosaurs lived one hundred million years ago, I can prove it to you, how can you say the earth was created in 4000BCE?” But this supposed intransigence on the part of the Religious Right is far less detrimental to the health of the body politic than the Left’s love affair with Marxism, Socialism, Racialism, the Command Economy, all of which have been proven via one hundred years of evidence shows only shortages, despotism and murder.’ David Mamet, “The Secret Knowledge.” a. So much for the idea that more intelligent folks oppose religion.
Nice quote for a stupid person... but what did that have to do with the original point about morality and religion? Incidently, ascribing everyone who thinks that the runaway crony corportism is a bad thing (demonstrated by the disaster that was 2008) is a Marxist is just lazy thinking. So your first crack at the topic, and you try to change the subject to something no one was actually discussing here.
Again, this wasn't the point. I know a lot of religious people who are nice folks, and a few athesists who are dicks. And vice versa. What did this have to do with my point?
The bible contains a lot of batshit insanity that the people of the time considered "MOral", but would get you thrown in prison today. So how can you claim the bible is the source of all morality.
I think you miss an important point here. Slavery can ONLY exist if society and law supports it. Otherwise, the slave could run away the first time he's asked to do something he doesn't like. Soceity for thousands of years condoned slavery.. until people- not religion, not a magic man in the sky- decided it was wrong.
No, murdering children is wrong because it harms a child and by extention his family. It's like you ignore my argument, or maybe you just didn't understand it.
"I have a simpler approach. Does my action hurt someone? If not, there's nothing immoral about it."
Wow. that was pretty simple, wasn't it? A moral standard that was pretty clear cut, without the need for a God.
Prager? Sowell? Can I give you a bit of advice. Expand your horizons, read opinions from both sides, and kind of make up your own mind.
the thing is, God did nothing about the Holocaust, and these were supposedly his "Chosen" people it was happening to. The people who carried out the Holocaust wore belt buckles that read "Gott Mit Uns" (God With Us) and God didn't object one little bit.
We are not a wonderful species. We are apes that like to eat meat and are a little too clever our own good. But believing in imaginary friends in the sky doesn't change that. And we are probably closer to that morality to day than the people who wrote the bible were.
Except this isn't really the case. Most of our common law and morality actually comes from the Pagans. Christianity itself is a weird melding of Judiasm, Zoroasterism and Greco-Roman theology that contains so many contradictions, you have had hundreds of years of people killing each other over whether wafers turn into Jesus or not.
a. What atheists who speak in terms of good and evil have done is
appropriated religious dialogue for themselves. They have kidnapped our way of speaking and said what was rooted in God doesn't need God any longer.
Can We Be Good without God
Only 2 billion of the world 7 billion people believe in the Christian God. Maybe three billion if you admit that Muslims worship the same God, but you guys don't go there. Most people are moral without that particular sky pixie. Most people would be moral with no sky pixies. Some people are immoral with them. God =/= Morality.
6. If there's no God - making ourselves the source of ethics for everybody, or declaring that nobody can be the source of ethics for anybody, and therefore morality is, again, purely subjective. Abortion may be legal, and a woman’s right….but this doesn’t it is ethically right. The Greeks believed in a version of same in which they placed deformed babies on the hillside. The reason I use the Greek example of ugly children is not because we do it today, but because they had reason on their side. Reason supports a lot of things, as for example, a very liberal position on abortion. If there is no God, "Love your neighbor as yourself" is just a good idea. That's why it is written, incidentally, in Leviticus, "Love your neighbor as yourself, I am God." I, God, tell you to be decent to other people.
Dennis Prager, a lecture.
The Greeks didn't expose ugly children, they exposed ones that were so deformed they weren't expected to live. Keep in mind, we are talking Iron Age medicine, and even up until the 18th century, the infant mortality rate was still pretty high.
People in that time period didn't get attached to babies the way we do today. It was too iffy of a proposition. Life in general was cheap in that time period, which is why the bible - which again, you argue is a source of "morality" - really didn't place a very high premium on it.
Ironically, for all your Ayn Randian spew, the Bible actually was more interested in the welfare of the tribe, which is why it proscribed such harsh punishments for things like marrying outside the tribe or disobedient children or even being gay.
