Zone1 If I had not been raised Catholic... it would have been a disaster

[ding]

I don't rationalize any of my behavior because I don't have to.

And not everyone prefers good over evil and not to the same degree because good and evil are subjective

Sure you do. You act like an asshole most of the time and you have rationalized the people you do that to deserved it. That's a prime example of not abandoning the concept of good and evil even when you violate it.

As for the rest, no one does evil for the sake of evil. They do evil for the sake of their own good.

 

[Blues Man]

Sure you do. You act like an asshole most of the time and you have rationalized the people you do that to deserved it. That's a prime example of not abandoning the concept of good and evil even when you violate it.

As for the rest, no one does evil for the sake of evil. They do evil for the sake of their own good.

You have no idea how I act or with whom I interact.

You don't like my opinions on things so you call me an asshole.

And people do good for their own sake too no one does good just to do good. They do it because it makes them feel better about themselves.

 

[ding]

You have no idea how I act or with whom I interact.

You don't like my opinions on things so you call me an asshole.

I've interacted with you enough times to have a pretty good idea of you. You couldn't be more anti-religion. That's a far cry from live and let live.

And I said you ACT like an asshole most of the time. You couldn't quote me accurately if your life depended upon it.

 

[ding]

And people do good for their own sake too no one does good just to do good. They do it because it makes them feel better about themselves.

Then the converse must be true as well. Thank you for proving my point.

 

[Blues Man]

I've interacted with you enough times to have a pretty good idea of you. You couldn't be more anti-religion. That's a far cry from live and let live.

No you haven't. We've traded a few posts and disagreed on most things you take it personally. I don't.

And so what if I'm not a fan of religion? That has no bearing on how I treat other people and in fact live and let live is one of my ,major personal tenets.

You forget that I went vegan so the lives of sentient animals are not on my conscience. In fact you even agreed with me that veganism is a righteous ethical position but you refuse to adopt it.

So it seems you are not live and let live even though you are a religious zealot.

 

[ding]

No you haven't. We've traded a few posts and disagreed on most things you take it personally. I don't.

And so what if I'm not a fan of religion? That has no bearing on how I treat other people and in fact live and let live is one of my ,major personal tenets.

You forget that I went vegan so the lives of sentient animals are not on my conscience. In fact you even agreed with me that veganism is a righteous ethical position but you refuse to adopt it.

So it seems you are not live and let live even though you are a religious zealot.

I think you are rationalizing. So thanks again for proving my point.

 

[Blues Man]

Then the converse must be true as well. Thank you for proving my point.

I never said it wasn't. You're making shit up again attributing it to me and then arguing against it because you have some pathological need to say you win arguments on the internet.

 

[ding]

Adam, did you eat the apple?

The woman YOU made gave it to me.

Are we learning yet?

 

[Blues Man]

I think you are rationalizing. So thanks again for proving my point.

Nope. There you go again having to say you win on the internet. It's a little sad

Tell me how many months have I ignored your responses? It's been a while since I traded posts with you hasn't it?

I have not mistreated you in anyway that I need to rationalize. Arguing on the internet is neither good nor evil it is simply a way to waste time

 

[Blues Man]

Adam, did you eat the apple?

The woman YOU made gave it to me.

Are we learning yet?

Since that never happened there is nothing to learn from it.

 

[nomadic5]

Since that never happened there is nothing to learn from it.

Moses wrote the book of Genesis and he walked closely with God and spoke w/ Him

But I guess you don't like Moses either. You'll believe some BS in a history book if it's written by a liberal

But you won't believe what has for centuries been purported to be the Word of God. And some of us know it is... and No, I can't prove it to YOU. But that doesn't mean it hasn't been proven to yours truly.

 

[buttercup]

You can choose to be a good person no matter what.

Well maybe you can't unless you're living under threat of eternal punishment.

"Good" means different things to different people.

You are borrowing from theism when you even use language like "good" or "evil" because the atheistic worldview does not even account for an objective moral standard. That's why so many atheists or agnostics claim that morality is subjective. They know their worldview cannot account for it.

You have it so wrong, when it comes to believers. I don't know any Christians who are good out of "threat of eternal punishment." But I'm not going to take the time to try to explain it all to you. It would take too long, and it would be off topic.

 

[buttercup]

No it's not.

It's my choice.

You can't have it both ways and say there is divinely given free will at the same time you say a god has preprogrammed my behavior.

Just one more religious contradiction that you seem comfortable with

I don't want to speak for ding, but I don't think he was saying that we don't have free will. But that there's something in us that causes us to intuitively know that we should do good rather than evil.

It's because we were created with a conscience. It doesn't matter if you're a believer or unbeliever, everyone has a conscience, and it comes from God. (It's possible to damage or "deaden" one's conscience, and of course when that happens to a person, pretty much anything goes, but I digress.)

But in addition to our conscience, we also have our free will and human nature, which is prone to doing what we want to do.

So it's not a contradiction, it's that we have two things within us that are often at odds with each other. Our human nature, which is prone to selfishness...AND our conscience which is an inner knowledge of a real standard of right and wrong....whether we follow that standard or not.

Since we're talking about this, I want to share an excerpt from the book Mere Christianity, by C.S Lewis.

Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: "How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?"—"That's my seat, I was there first"—"Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm"— "Why should you shove in first?"—"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"—"Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.​

​

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: "To hell with your standard." Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise.​

​

It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.​

 

[Blues Man]

Moses wrote the book of Genesis and he walked closely with God and spoke w/ Him

But I guess you don't like Moses either. You'll believe some BS in a history book if it's written by a liberal

But you won't believe what has for centuries been purported to be the Word of God. And some of us know it is... and No, I can't prove it to YOU. But that doesn't mean it hasn't been proven to yours truly.

So you say. I have seen nothing to convince me.

And I don't see what this has to do with politics. I have read hundreds of history books and I doubt all of them have been written by "liberals" means to you.

 

[Blues Man]

"Good" means different things to different people.

You are borrowing from theism when you even use language like "good" or "evil" because the atheistic worldview does not even account for an objective moral standard. That's why so many atheists or agnostics claim that morality is subjective. They know their worldview cannot account for it.

You have it so wrong, when it comes to believers. I don't know any Christians who are good out of "threat of eternal punishment." But I'm not going to take the time to try to explain it all to you. It would take too long, and it would be off topic.

Theism did not invent the concepts of good and evil. And if the terms good and bad mean different things to different people then morality is indeed relative.

 

[Blues Man]

I don't want to speak for ding, but I don't think he was saying that we don't have free will. But that there's something in us that causes us to intuitively know that we should do good rather than evil.

It's because we were created with a conscience. It doesn't matter if you're a believer or unbeliever, everyone has a conscience, and it comes from God. (It's possible to damage or "deaden" one's conscience, and of course when that happens to a person, pretty much anything goes, but I digress.)

But in addition to our conscience, we also have our free will and human nature, which is prone to doing what we want to do.

So it's not a contradiction, it's that we have two things within us that are often at odds with each other. Our human nature, which is prone to selfishness...AND our conscience which is an inner knowledge of a real standard of right and wrong....whether we follow that standard or not.

Since we're talking about this, I want to share an excerpt from the book Mere Christianity, by C.S Lewis.

Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: "How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?"—"That's my seat, I was there first"—"Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm"— "Why should you shove in first?"—"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"—"Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.​

​

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: "To hell with your standard." Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise.​

​

It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.​

If you say a god created all humans then human nature is created by that same god and if that human nature influences what you do then you have no free will because at least part of your decision making processes were programmed by a god.

And it's my positions that Lewis' standards of behavior are nothing but behaviors that have evolved as humans started living together in large groups. When humans were living in small tribal and familial bands the standards were different. Morality was different. What was considered good and evil were different than they were a couple thousand years after humans started living in large settlements together.

People often ignore the power of society on human behaviors

 

[Cellblock2429]

So you think if you had been born to a Jewish family, you would have been a bad person?

/----/ Oye vey.

 

[Lisa558]

/----/ Oye vey.
View attachment 832094

Why oye vey? The OP said if he hadn’t been born Catholic, he would have been a bad person. That means he thinks if he had been born into any other religion, he would have been bad.

 

[Meriweather]

The OP said if he hadn’t been born Catholic, he would have been a bad person. That means he thinks if he had been born into any other religion, he would have been bad.

It is something on which we can all reflect. I would make it more general. Has there been a point in life where whatever faith/denomination we were born into made a huge difference, a life changing or life affirming difference? Yes, it happened to me.

Had I been born into a non-Catholic Christian denomination, this would not have happened, because these denominations scoff at a particular Catholic teaching. Ironically Judaism is the other faith where this could have happened. The question becomes, could God have reached me some other way had I been born into another Christian denomination or into no faith at all?

Due to the Catholic faith a vital moment occurred in my life. To even things out, there was another moment in my life where I made a decision--equally vital to my life today--that had nothing at all to do with God or any faith.

These indispensable moments mostly likely come to people of any faith, any denomination. When it comes due to the faith one is practicing, it does make that faith too precious to forget or give up.

 

[ding]

Nope. There you go again having to say you win on the internet. It's a little sad

Tell me how many months have I ignored your responses? It's been a while since I traded posts with you hasn't it?

I have not mistreated you in anyway that I need to rationalize. Arguing on the internet is neither good nor evil it is simply a way to waste time

You want to ignore reality, be my guest. Man knows right from wrong and when he violates it rather than abandoning good he rationalizes what he did was good.