Commentary on Richard and GoodK's Debate

[_Bond James Bond]

Let's start with the trivial sense. Sure, atheism by itself has no means to stop someone from acting immorally. But neither does religion: it didn't stop the ancient Jews from pillaging and raping their enemies, it didn't stop the medieval Catholics from persecuting religious minorities, it didn't stop 19th century Southern Baptists from owning slaves, it didn't stop radical Muslims from flying planes into the World Trade Center, etc. (in fact, religion encouraged these immoralities, something atheism cannot do). You probably see something wrong with this statement: you'd say that you need to have the right kind of religion to be moral; that you'd have to conjoin belief in God to other purportedly-moral precepts, such as the Ten Commandments. Okay, great -- what's preventing an atheist from doing the same? Which brings me to my next point.

It is not true that there is nothing that could prevent an atheist from acting immorally. There are systems of moral thought that are available to atheists, and which have been for thousands of years. There were many ancient Greeks who either didn't believe in God, or who thought that the supernatural beings that did exist were wicked; they therefore derived morality from some other source. Today, the most popular systems of secular ethics are utilitarianism (which was hinted at in ancient Greece by the Epicureans, and was more fully grounded in the early 1800s by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) and deontology (which is a more recent invention, popularized by Immanuel Kant, who wrote in the late 1700s). If you conjoin atheism with one of these belief systems, then presto! you have an atheist that has an internal sanction to not act immorally.

Greetings JSM! Here's a thought I'd like to piggyback to your thought. I wrote this a while ago for another forum as my thoughts as to why atheists will act well despite having the "God-check" in their lives.

The issue at hand is that lack of God belief will mean that we atheists shall devolve into rapists and child molesters or whatever immoral beings. This will be because we lack of internal brake brought about because we fear God’s retribution. In reaction to the argument that no God means we lack morals, I would like to give my reasons that atheism will not lead to total lack of morality. The two main reasons for me deal with strong atheistic views of morality, and deal with every other person in society beyond ourselves.

First, strong atheism. Something that doesn’t occur to most people upon becoming atheist is the idea that God doesn’t exist, but never existed. That’s right sports fans. It’s a retroactive idea. A consequence of this is that instead of believing that everything came from God, we should instead conclude that nothing came from God. But where did it come from? Look in the mirror. Look at your forehead. Turn on your X-ray vision. If you don’t have X-ray vision [wuss] then instead imagine your brain. That’s right. It’s all a consequence of human thinking. We thought up all the cool crap we attribute to God. Why we can’t accept this and feel good about it is beyond me.

I think it probably goes back to authority and the ability of a select historic few [priests and Kings egotistical enough to claim direct Godhood] to convince people it all came for God, mostly so those same could keep economic and religious power which translated to political power, but I digress. Come on, humanity, feel good about yourself! You and your ancestors did it, not God. For this reason we can still give credit to those morals attributed to God. We thought up “love your neighbor”. We thought up “thou shalt not kill”. For that reason those morals are still valid, and son-of-a-gun we still follow them. They’re still valid because we agreed with them enough mentally to write them down, and those who read them agreed with them enough to live them. They’re still valid, not because God said so, but because we [HUMANS!] said so.

Alright, on to the other reason I mentioned, the external checks known as every other human on earth, basically a utilitarian argument in which people's behavior is coerced by society because they'd rather live free than live imprisoned or be dead.

This idea that humans without God will devolve into rapists and murderers or whatever is checked by every other human in society. We could check them directly [say shooting a burglar when he comes into our house] but we usually do it indirectly by creating institutions to coerce behavior. We create legal codes to govern behavior, and we create penalties and ways to punish those who break our legal codes. It’s that simple. People don’t not rob because they fear God. They rob because they fear prison. Those who decide to kill or whatever probably aren’t only atheists, so it’s not like God is really that much of an check. Or if he does exist and can coerce behavior, he’s doing a crap job at it. SImply put the reasons people commit crimes is that they are willing to chance not being caught or that they are willing to trade off the payoff [retribution or revenge in a murder or whatever gain from stealing or whatever, getting to work on time for speeding] with the penalty. People might indeed devolve into those amoral fiends if they lived in a vacuum with human beings who aren’t reactive, but they don’t. We are reactive. If someone commits a crime [especially preying on the weaker members of society such as women or children] in a just society we will do our darnedest to punish you. If you try to steal from me, well you just might get shot for your trouble. Your possible criminal is not standing over society with a magnifying glass ready to cook me like he would an ant. A man with an antfarm is God, a man attempting to do the same with his equals is likely to get swiftly brought down for his trouble. That is the check, the copacity of humans to reign in their fellow humans.

[_JohnStuartMill]

I agree that external sanctions, such as imprisonment or fines, can be effective tools to keep atheists in line. But I don't think they work as an effective rebuttal of dartagnan's assertion, which was that atheists with a lot of power would have no reason to not act immorally. For that, you'd need to reference some kind of internal sanction, such as a system of secular ethics. (This brings up another point I'd like to make: are theists actually moral if they only act morally because religion compels them to be? If you need a wrathful God and the prospect of an eternity in hell to keep you in line, are you really moral? I, for one, am extremely skeptical.)

[_dartagnan]

Let's start with the trivial sense. Sure, atheism by itself has no means to stop someone from acting immorally. But neither does religion:

Wrong. Virtually all religions have at their core a code of ethics or morality that is taught from childhood throughout adulthood. What you're doing now is conflating two different things. Just because diversions are set up, doesn't mean everyone will be diverted. Religions provide moral guidance wheres atheism provides nothing of the sort.

it didn't stop the ancient Jews from pillaging and raping their enemies

Again, you're referring to isolated instances where religious people behaved immorally. This doesn't change the fact that religion provides moral guidance. Just because the guidance is there, doesn't guarantee all will follow.

it didn't stop the medieval Catholics from persecuting religious minorities

And this took place in spite of Church teaching. Don't forget the Church repeatedly defended Jews. In fact only in Rome were the Jews to survive for more than seventeen centuries.

it didn't stop 19th century Southern Baptists from owning slaves

Morality has certainly changed over the centuries, but what you're missing is that modern moral standards are what they are thanks to Judeo-Christian civilization. Atheism offered nothing. By its very nature it couldn't. Without religion, how do you know our life today wouldn't be similar to that of the 6th century? The irony is that most atheist don't seem to reliaze how much they owe to religion.

it didn't stop radical Muslims from flying planes into the World Trade Center, etc. (in fact, religion encouraged these immoralities, something atheism cannot do).

Religion is not needed for war, this much is certain. Religion is only a convenient tool used by those who wish to wage wars. By its very nature religion is a social system that can be used for good or bad, the same as nationalism, tribalism, racism, OJ Simpson's fan club, etc. Only religion includes moral teachings, which is what humans require before becoming moral individuals.

You probably see something wrong with this statement: you'd say that you need to have the right kind of religion to be moral; that you'd have to conjoin belief in God to other purportedly-moral precepts, such as the Ten Commandments. Okay, great -- what's preventing an atheist from doing the same?

Nothing. But you are essentially making my point here. Religion by itself doesn't need to adopt some outside belief system in order to be moral. Atheism requires this, as you unwittingly concede.

It is not true that there is nothing that could prevent an atheist from acting immorally.

I didn't say that. Of course atheists act morally. But they do so because they borrow or develop their own moral compass.

There are systems of moral thought that are available to atheists, and which have been for thousands of years. There were many ancient Greeks who either didn't believe in God, or who thought that the supernatural beings that did exist were wicked; they therefore derived morality from some other source. Today, the most popular systems of secular ethics are utilitarianism (which was hinted at in ancient Greece by the Epicureans, and was more fully grounded in the early 1800s by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) and deontology (which is a more recent invention, popularized by Immanuel Kant, who wrote in the late 1700s). If you conjoin atheism with one of these belief systems, then presto! you have an atheist that has an internal sanction to not act immorally.

Exactly my point. With religion, you don't have to conjoin it with anything. Moral teachings are taken for granted. But in atheism, you better hope someone in power happens to be someone who was raised by moral parents, or decided to adopt their own system of morality like the ancient Greeks. Unfortunately, history shows that we haven't been so lucky. Atheistic rulers have generally ruled ruthlessly, and as a percentage, they overwhelm theistic dictators who did likewise.

No, the Crusades were an attempt to recapture the Holy Land from the heathen Mussulman and usurious Jew. There is no way to justify the Siege of Jerusalem by the Crusaders (which included a massacre of Jews and Muslims) as an act of self-defense. Sorry.

Well, you're choosing to follow an outdated, mythical version of the crusades. You need to update yourself on the matter. No historian worth his salt today would say the crusades were designed to do anything to the Jews. Where Jews were attacked, the Church was repulsed and sent bishops to the scene to stop the attacks. The crusades were a desperate, last ditch effort to salvage what was left of Christendom, and it all began when stories were spread about Christians being attacked during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

The latest Crusade historian Thomas F. Madden said,

The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West's belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world. While the Arabs were busy in the seventh through the tenth centuries winning an opulent and sophisticated empire, Europe was defending itself against outside invaders and then digging out from the mess they left behind. Only in the eleventh century were Europeans able to take much notice of the East. The event that led to the crusades was the Turkish conquest of most of Christian Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The Christian emperor in Constantinople, faced with the loss of half of his empire, appealed for help to the rude but energetic Europeans. He got it. More than he wanted, in fact.

Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095. Despite modern laments about medieval colonialism, the crusade's real purpose was to turn back Muslim conquests and restore formerly Christian lands to Christian control. The entire history of the crusades is one of Western reaction to Muslim advances. The crusades were no more offensive than was the American invasion of Normandy. -http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzhhODM1MDhkYWMxNTRiYmRjMzg2NmY2YjM3ZTRiZDQ=

Sorry, there is no way to justify your silly explanation for the crusades.

There's a big difference between Stalin and Western European liberal atheists. The latter almost unanimously believe in the right of free speech and free action (so long as it doesn't violate the harm principle); the former did not.

Funny how none of these mysterious moral atheists who cherish human rights, never managed to land themselves in office. How come?

As a recap, what I said and continue to argue, is that atheism offers nothing and atheismtic rulers are demonstrably more likely to commit genocide than religious ones. Atheism is nonbelief. It doesn't, nor can it, offer humans a path to morality. Religon can. In fact, more often than not, religion does.
What causes immorality is simply human nature, not atheism and not religion. Stalin didn't slaughter millions because of atheism.

He slaughtered millons because he was a man with that kind of power, who had no moral grounds to act otherwise. Without religon, he was more likely to be an immoral person. He acted on behalf of the state and he did what he thought would benefit the state. The same with Milosovic, Pol Pot, Lenin, etc.

[_JohnStuartMill]

Wrong. Virtually all religions have at their core a code of ethics or morality that is taught from childhood throughout adulthood. What you're doing now is conflating two different things. Just because diversions are set up, doesn't mean everyone will be diverted. Religions provide moral guidance wheres atheism provides nothing of the sort.

But my point is that they very often provide the wrong moral guidance, which is no better than no guidance at all, and is quite often much worse.

Again, you're referring to isolated instances where religious people behaved immorally. This doesn't change the fact that religion provides moral guidance. Just because the guidance is there, doesn't guarantee all will follow.

The ancient Jews followed the guidance in this situation. The "moral" guidance given by religion was to rape and pillage.

And this took place in spite of Church teaching. Don't forget the Church repeatedly defended Jews. In fact only in Rome were the Jews to survive for more than seventeen centuries.

I was thinking more along the lines of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (1517, upon looking it up -- actually more recent than medieval times), in which an estimated 5,000 French Protestants were killed. Upon hearing the news, Pope Gregory XIII celebrated -- clearly, the mass murder was not in opposition to Church teachings.

Morality has certainly changed over the centuries, but what you're missing is that modern moral standards are what they are thanks to Judeo-Christian civilization.

Absolutely not true. The people who helped found political liberty in America were the secularists of their day (i.e., Deists and Unitarians: David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams). Utilitarianism did far more for the advancement of women than did Judeo-Christian morality (the Bible treats women as inferiors in both the Old and New Testament). Many of the people who played the biggest roles in eliminating slavery in America (including Abraham Lincoln and John Stuart Mill) were not motivated by religious precepts.

Atheism offered nothing. By its very nature it couldn't. Without religion, how do you know our life today wouldn't be similar to that of the 6th century? The irony is that most atheist don't seem to reliaze how much they owe to religion.

Irreligion can't offer anything, because it is not a positive belief. But it provided room for secular ethics and theories of proper government to flourish.

Religion is not needed for war, this much is certain. Religion is only a convenient tool used by those who wish to wage wars. By its very nature religion is a social system that can be used for good or bad, the same as nationalism, tribalism, racism, OJ Simpson's fan club, etc. Only religion includes moral teachings, which is what humans require before becoming moral individuals.

Utter bilge. You disregard here a rich history of secular ethics that stretches back thousands of years.

Nothing. But you are essentially making my point here. Religion by itself doesn't need to adopt some outside belief system in order to be moral. Atheism requires this, as you unwittingly concede.

No, I wittingly concede this.

I didn't say that. Of course atheists act morally. But they do so because they borrow or develop their own moral compass.

But not necessarily from religion, I should add.

Exactly my point. With religion, you don't have to conjoin it with anything. Moral teachings are taken for granted.

Yes, in religion, moral teachings are often accepted as dead dogma, and are rarely examined for their validity. Very often, people accept indefensible moral codes for this reason.

But in atheism, you better hope someone in power happens to be someone who was raised by moral parents, or decided to adopt their own system of morality like the ancient Greeks. Unfortunately, history shows that we haven't been so lucky. Atheistic rulers have generally ruled ruthlessly, and as a percentage, they overwhelm theistic dictators who did likewise.

Actually, history only really shows us that Communist rulers ruled ruthlessly. Their atheism is in no way essential to their crimes.

Well, you're choosing to follow an outdated, mythical version of the crusades. You need to update yourself on the matter. No historian worth his salt today would say the crusades were designed to do anything to the Jews. Where Jews were attacked, the Church was repulsed and sent bishops to the scene to stop the attacks. The crusades were a desperate, last ditch effort to salvage what was left of Christendom, and it all began when stories were spread about Christians being attacked during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

The latest Crusade historian Thomas F. Madden said,

The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West's belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world. While the Arabs were busy in the seventh through the tenth centuries winning an opulent and sophisticated empire, Europe was defending itself against outside invaders and then digging out from the mess they left behind. Only in the eleventh century were Europeans able to take much notice of the East. The event that led to the crusades was the Turkish conquest of most of Christian Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The Christian emperor in Constantinople, faced with the loss of half of his empire, appealed for help to the rude but energetic Europeans. He got it. More than he wanted, in fact.

Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095. Despite modern laments about medieval colonialism, the crusade's real purpose was to turn back Muslim conquests and restore formerly Christian lands to Christian control. The entire history of the crusades is one of Western reaction to Muslim advances. The crusades were no more offensive than was the American invasion of Normandy. -http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzhhODM1MDhkYWMxNTRiYmRjMzg2NmY2YjM3ZTRiZDQ=

Sorry, there is no way to justify your silly explanation for the crusades.

The Crusades were absolutely in no way comparable to the invasion of Normandy. The Muslims captured Palestine three centuries before Europe retaliated. By this logic, Native Americans could still mount a "defensive war" against the American government if they took up arms today. Unless you would take up arms in a siege against Oklahoma City for the Sioux army, that's a pretty epic reductio ad absurdum.

Funny how none of these mysterious moral atheists who cherish human rights, never managed to land themselves in office. How come?

Bigotry against atheists in the West, for one: more Americans would vote for a gay person for public office than an atheist. It's not universally the case that secularists who cherish human rights have never made their way to public office, though: witness many of the Founding Fathers, and John Stuart Mill (Member of Parliament) as famous examples.

As a recap, what I said and continue to argue, is that atheism offers nothing and atheismtic rulers are demonstrably more likely to commit genocide than religious ones. Atheism is nonbelief. It doesn't, nor can it, offer humans a path to morality. Religon can. In fact, more often than not, religion does.

More often than not? This is a contestable claim.

What causes immorality is simply human nature, not atheism and not religion. Stalin didn't slaughter millions because of atheism.

I wholeheartedly agree.

He slaughtered millons because he was a man with that kind of power, who had no moral grounds to act otherwise. Without religon, he was more likely to be an immoral person. He acted on behalf of the state and he did what he thought would benefit the state. The same with Milosovic, Pol Pot, Lenin, etc.

I'm not sure that Stalin would have necessarily been more moral if he were religious. As I have argued in this thread, great moral crimes have been perpetrated by people who possessed religious belief. Religion can rationalize, justify, or even encourage a wide swath of moral evils.

[_dartagnan]

But my point is that they very often provide the wrong moral guidance, which is no better than no guidance at all, and is quite often much worse.

Hyperbole won't make your case. It simply is not true that religions "very often" provide the wrong moral guidance, at least not by comparison to how frequently they provide the right moral guidance. Take the extreme cases of radical Islam. Sure, Osama Bin Ladin invoked God as the catayst for his attacks, but this is really beside the point of his purposes. If you read his own words he tell us that he believes we are at war:

"What the United States tastes today is a very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens of years. Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years."

From his perspective the USA has been murdering Muslims in the Mid-East for decades. Would an atheist dictator wait decades before launching counter strikes? Not according to history.

And what about suicide bombings? What if I were to tell you that at the time of 9-11, most of these bombings were not from Muslims, but rather Marxists in Sir Lanka? Clearly religion need not be involved here. When people feel they are at war and are desperate enough, they will resort to things we cannot imagine. Religion can be used for comfort or persuasion purposes, but that doesn't make religion bad anymore than "belief" in general is bad. This is what the New Atheists like Dawkns and Hitchens refuse to understand.

In Alabama people get violent and even divorced over the Alabama-Auburn footbal game. Many deaths have resulted from violence at soccer stadiums in Europe. Using Dawkins' logic, sports should be done away with.

The ancient Jews followed the guidance in this situation. The "moral" guidance given by religion was to rape and pillage.

Do yo have any proof for this?

Your choice of example, some out of context scripture no doubt, just goes o show that the available examples are so scarce that you have to revert back thousands of years to find pertinent examples, and even in these cases, using a mythical book that you don't believe to be true history to begin with, while alluding to carefully dissected texts that most scholars today believe to be unoriginal. That's pretty pathetic.

I was thinking more along the lines of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (1517, upon looking it up -- actually more recent than medieval times)

This was in the context of political war. If Catholcism declared a doctrine of war against all non-Catholics, the wars would have been more frequent throughout the existence of Catholicism. Yet, in two thousand years you can only point to isolated cases, and then declare with bombastic certitude that this proves religon "provides the wrong moral guidance." This is absurd. The fact is these tragedies occurred because the Church had become a symbol for most state governments, and the state considered these heretics, threats to the system. The inquisition, for example; the crimes were crimes against the state, not the Church.

Absolutely not true. The people who helped found political liberty in America were the secularists of their day (i.e., Deists and Unitarians: David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams).

Secularism and atheism are not synonymous, and neither are ethics and morality. Thomas Jefferson's views as a deist were not created in a vacuum. They were products of the Christian civilization for which he was a part. The entire premise that humans are all created equal, is a Christian precept that the founding father’s took for granted because it was what most Americans believed and they used it in a political context. It was their exposure to Christianity that led them to this conclusion, not their rejection of it. Even Friedrich Nietzsche admitted it: “Another Christian concept, no less crazy: the concept of equality of souls before God. This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.”

Utilitarianism did far more for the advancement of women than did Judeo-Christian morality (the Bible treats women as inferiors in both the Old and New Testament).

You’re misinformed. Christianity marked a giant leap in the directon of women’s rights. In a society where women were considered inferior on every level, Jesus shocked his community by allowing women, particular of low social status, to accompany him in his travels. Women were given status in the Church for the first time. Christianity made adultery a crime among men as it had already been with women. Christianity made the rules for divorce the same with men as it already was with women. Bernard Lewis once said that in the late 19th century abmassadors from the East would travel to Europe, and they would be shocked to witness the respect women were given. Carriages would stop instantly if a woman on the side of the street appeared as though she were ready to cross. Men standing at the dinner table whenever a women enters the room or leaves the table, completely threw them off guard. What was the source for all of this? Lewis argued that it was the Christian society and its increasing respect for women that was rooted in the adoration of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
As far as the women’s rights issues that have been raised in modern times, there is nothing in Christian doctrine forbidding a woman to vote. There is nothing in Christian doctrine forbidding a woman to work and make the same salary as a man.

Many of the people who played the biggest roles in eliminating slavery in America (including Abraham Lincoln and John Stuart Mill) were not motivated by religious precepts.

But they were products of an overwhelmingly religious environment. The first anti-slavery movement was started by a Christian, who had little support, in Britain; Wlliam Wilberforce. Now what about the ancient Greeks and their so-called secular systems of morality? Aristotle said men express full reasoning, and that women have it but never use it. Infanticide was the norm in Greek cultures. Plato and Aristotle had no problem with slavery. It is an institution that has existed long before Christianity, but Christianity did take steps to abolishing it, however gradual. Christianity declared all human life sacred, something that was never before heard of or acepted in atheistic systems of morality. This is something unique to Christianity. So when atheists today claim to accept it, they are only borrowing something already established by Christianity.

Irreligion can't offer anything, because it is not a positive belief.

Irreligion is not atheism. Many atheists are religious.

But it provided room for secular ethics and theories of proper government to flourish.

None of which has produced the amount of good as say, altruism, which is firmly grounded in Christian dogma. You see, an atheistic system is more focused on making the community than the individuals themselves. This is precisely why Stalin slaughtered tens of thousands of priests. He firmly believed that the community would be better off without them, therefore it didn’t offend his branch of “ethics.”

Utter bilge. You disregard here a rich history of secular ethics that stretches back thousands of years.

“Rich” … because you say so? Simply developing systems don’t make them moral, productive, better, etc. When did the atheists form a system of “ethics” that gave women rights in ancient times? When did the atheists form a system of “ethics” that declared all human life sacred and all human beings equal? Again, while the atheists in Greece were drowing their newborn daughters, simply because they wanted a son, Christianity was preaching against such activity.

Atheists in moderns times merely borrow from existing systems that which appeals to them, and discard all the religious baggage that doesn’t.

Actually, history only really shows us that Communist rulers ruled ruthlessly. Their atheism is in no way essential to their crimes.

You’re in denial here. Of course it is relevant to their crimes. When one operates in a worldview where no accountability and no judgment exists (an absolute ruler who believes in no higher authority), an such criminal activity is more likely to occur. This is why you’re stuck with this untenable position. You cannot explain why there is such an overwhelmingly high percentage of atheistic rulers who have commited genocide. You can't explain it by denying its significance.

The Crusades were absolutely in no way comparable to the invasion of Normandy.

A reputable scholar in the field disagrees with you. He bases his conclusion on materials you are not familiar with.

The Muslims captured Palestine three centuries before Europe retaliated. By this logic, Native Americans could still mount a "defensive war" against the American government if they took up arms today.

That is not his logic because the comparison is not parallel. If one third of North America was ruled by a native government, and they had endured centuries of gradual annihilation, then yes, their rights to defend their nation would be recognized as self defense. This is what the crusades were about. To say it was just a response to rumors of violence in Palestine, is like saying the United States of America had a civil war because Fort Sumter was attacked. Christianity felt the foot of Islam against its throat, pressing down for centuries. It never once issued a decree to form a "Christian army" to reclaim any of the conquered lands, until the crusades. And even then it had to rely on amateurs and volunteers because there was no such a thing as a Christian army at that time.

Bigotry against atheists in the West, for one:

I was referring to political figures in the East who almost always appear to be the worst kind of atheists. Why is that? How come none of these mysterious and benevolent atheists, who you say exist as the majority, managed to find political office in communist nations?

And if any bigotry exists towards atheists in America, it is not significant, especially when compared to that expressed towards theists.

more Americans would vote for a gay person for public office than an atheist.

And you think this is proof of bigotry? How many atheists and agonistics on this forum have expressed their refusal to vote for political candidates because of their religious views? It is in virtually every political thread here.

The reason it isn’t bigotry for a religious person to vote for another religious person is because so many religious issues are also political issues. Religion and politics are intertwined, not in authority, but it matters of socio-economics and culture. Why in the hell would I be inclined to vote for an atheist, when I am a religious person who shares the same values as his opponent? That doesn’t make me a bigot in any sense of the word. Voting for those who share your views is precisely what voters are supposed to be doing. Now if you are simply voting aginst someone, then that is another matter, and this is best exemplified on this forum as atheists come here left and right and proudly express their contempt for religious candidated, simply because they're religious.

It's not universally the case that secularists who cherish human rights have never made their way to public office, though: witness many of the Founding Fathers, and John Stuart Mill (Member of Parliament) as famous examples.

There you go again conflating secularism with atheism. Many theists are secularists as well.

More often than not? This is a contestable claim

Then contest it. I submit that the vast majority of the planet s religious, and yet less than one half of one percent actually engage in violence, using religion as a justification. Thus, religion more often than not, leads people to a path of morality that atheism cannot.

As I have argued in this thread, great moral crimes have been perpetrated by people who possessed religious belief.

And by comparison to atheists in power, they appear overwhelming benevolent, as a percentage.

Religion can rationalize, justify, or even encourage a wide swath of moral evils.

[/quote]
Religion does no such thing. People do these things. People choose to do good or evil, and no religion can or has forced anyone to choose good.

[_JohnStuartMill]

But my point is that they very often provide the wrong moral guidance, which is no better than no guidance at all, and is quite often much worse.

Hyperbole won't make your case. It simply is not true that religions "very often" provide the wrong moral guidance, at least not by comparison to how frequently they provide the right moral guidance. Take the extreme cases of radical Islam. Sure, Osama Bin Ladin invoked God as the catayst for his attacks, but this is really beside the point of his purposes. If you read his own words he tell us that he believes we are at war:

"What the United States tastes today is a very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens of years. Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years."

From his perspective the USA has been murdering Muslims in the Mid-East for decades. Would an atheist dictator wait decades before launching counter strikes? Not according to history.

And what about suicide bombings? What if I were to tell you that at the time of 9-11, most of these bombings were not from Muslims, but rather Marxists in Sir Lanka? Clearly religion need not be involved here. When people feel they are at war and are desperate enough, they will resort to things we cannot imagine. Religion can be used for comfort or persuasion purposes, but that doesn't make religion bad anymore than "belief" in general is bad. This is what the New Atheists like Dawkns and Hitchens refuse to understand.

You're rambling here, and never successfully refuted my statement that religion often gives bad moral advice. (You may say that the bad advice it gives is vastly outweighed by the good advice, but this doesn't speak to my argument, and I don't think it's true anyway.) Let me try to get us back the important questions:

Whence comes morality? Not religion, obviously, else it would have been moral for the ancient Israelites to rape and pillage (Judges 21:10-24). Where does morality come from, then? Shouldn't we be asking ourselves this question instead of assuming that it comes from something that is obviously not an inerrant source of morality? Secular ethics is much more useful for determining morality than is religion.

In Alabama people get violent and even divorced over the Alabama-Auburn footbal game. Many deaths have resulted from violence at soccer stadiums in Europe. Using Dawkins' logic, sports should be done away with.

If people can't control themselves, then sure, perhaps a case could be made that sports ought to be done away with. But the analogy isn't as close as you apparently think: the benefits of sports are tangible and observable, while the benefits of religion are seen through a glass darkly (figured I'd work in a Biblical phrase for you), and can't be wholly confirmed. Also, the most thuggish group of sports fans to ever exist has not posed an existential threat to humanity's existence, as radical Islam has. (I agree that bin Laden's casus belli is mostly political in nature, but he would have a much harder time hiring recruits to blow themselves up if the promise of 72 virgins in the afterlife were not dangling before them. Also, you apparently fail to consider the fundamentalist Christians who are aching for total war in the Holy Land, for the reason that the sooner Armageddon comes, the sooner they can get to heaven. Some of these people have the ear of our current President. If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will.)

The ancient Jews followed the guidance in this situation. The "moral" guidance given by religion was to rape and pillage.

Do yo have any proof for this?

Your choice of example, some out of context scripture no doubt, just goes o show that the available examples are so scarce that you have to revert back thousands of years to find pertinent examples, and even in these cases, using a mythical book that you don't believe to be true history to begin with, while alluding to carefully dissected texts that most scholars today believe to be unoriginal. That's pretty pathetic.

Actually, no. I could give evidence of Christians doing the ethically incorrect thing right now because of their religion (see Proposition 8 and other ballot-cudgels against the rights of gays and lesbians). I knew, however, that you probably wouldn't think of these as ethically incorrect because of your present state of moral myopia, so I went back through the Christian tradition (which includes ancient Judaism) to find something that I wagered you would find less palatable. I've provided my source for the Israelite's unconscionable, religion-approved acts above.

I was thinking more along the lines of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (1517, upon looking it up -- actually more recent than medieval times)

This was in the context of political war. If Catholcism declared a doctrine of war against all non-Catholics, the wars would have been more frequent throughout the existence of Catholicism. Yet, in two thousand years you can only point to isolated cases, and then declare with bombastic certitude that this proves religon "provides the wrong moral guidance." This is absurd. The fact is these tragedies occurred because the Church had become a symbol for most state governments, and the state considered these heretics, threats to the system. The inquisition, for example; the crimes were crimes against the state, not the Church.

And the punishments were justified or approved by the Church. These are clear examples of religion "providing the wrong moral guidance". You don't get to dismiss them as such because you find them uncomfortable to own up to.

Absolutely not true. The people who helped found political liberty in America were the secularists of their day (i.e., Deists and Unitarians: David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams).

Secularism and atheism are not synonymous, and neither are ethics and morality. Thomas Jefferson's views as a deist were not created in a vacuum. They were products of the Christian civilization for which he was a part. The entire premise that humans are all created equal, is a Christian precept that the founding father’s took for granted because it was what most Americans believed and they used it in a political context. It was their exposure to Christianity that led them to this conclusion, not their rejection of it. Even Friedrich Nietzsche admitted it: “Another Christian concept, no less crazy: the concept of equality of souls before God. This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.”

Nietzsche's "philosophy" is complete crap that rests almost entirely on fallacious arguments from philology. As such, modern secular ethicists (including myself) don't accept his pronouncements as Gospel. So, let's instead examine his claim dispassionately. I agree that Christians believe in the equality of souls before God in the spiritual sense, but this obviously doesn't necessarily translate into being in favor of political equality. Why did it take Christians almost two millennia to care about equal political rights if temporal equality was such a central part of their theology? You need to provide a convincing answer to this question if you want Nietzsche's quote to have any force. Good luck.

Also, Jefferson was NOT a theist. He believed in Deism, a cosmological stance he got from David Hume. Hume only believed in a Creator because he couldn't account for the origin of life on Earth -- if he had lived in our time, and had been privy to Darwinism and its amazing implications for biology and cosmology, he almost certainly would have been an atheist. Jefferson definitely would have followed suit -- as it was, he was allergic to religion, and mocked it in private whenever he got the chance.

Utilitarianism did far more for the advancement of women than did Judeo-Christian morality (the Bible treats women as inferiors in both the Old and New Testament).

You’re misinformed. Christianity marked a giant leap in the directon of women’s rights. In a society where women were considered inferior on every level, Jesus shocked his community by allowing women, particular of low social status, to accompany him in his travels. Women were given status in the Church for the first time. Christianity made adultery a crime among men as it had already been with women. Christianity made the rules for divorce the same with men as it already was with women. Bernard Lewis once said that in the late 19th century abmassadors from the East would travel to Europe, and they would be shocked to witness the respect women were given. Carriages would stop instantly if a woman on the side of the street appeared as though she were ready to cross. Men standing at the dinner table whenever a women enters the room or leaves the table, completely threw them off guard. What was the source for all of this? Lewis argued that it was the Christian society and its increasing respect for women that was rooted in the adoration of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
As far as the women’s rights issues that have been raised in modern times, there is nothing in Christian doctrine forbidding a woman to vote. There is nothing in Christian doctrine forbidding a woman to work and make the same salary as a man.

[/quote]
I grant that Jesus himself seems to have held an extremely liberal view of the role of women for his time (although there are some instances in which he seems to be pretty disrespectful of individual women, like his mother), but the New Testament features plenty of places in which women are seen as inferiors. The apostle Paul, for instance, who wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else, seems to have had a particular prejudice against women, and commanded them to not speak in church, and to wear their heads uncovered, etc.

Many of the people who played the biggest roles in eliminating slavery in America (including Abraham Lincoln and John Stuart Mill) were not motivated by religious precepts.

But they were products of an overwhelmingly religious environment. The first anti-slavery movement was started by a Christian, who had little support, in Britain; Wlliam Wilberforce. Now what about the ancient Greeks and their so-called secular systems of morality? Aristotle said men express full reasoning, and that women have it but never use it. Infanticide was the norm in Greek cultures. Plato and Aristotle had no problem with slavery. It is an institution that has existed long before Christianity, but Christianity did take steps to abolishing it, however gradual. Christianity declared all human life sacred, something that was never before heard of or acepted in atheistic systems of morality. This is something unique to Christianity. So when atheists today claim to accept it, they are only borrowing something already established by Christianity.

Actually, this reverence for all human life was not originated by Christianity. Jesus didn't say anything about reverence for life in CE 30 that the Buddhists hadn't believed for 400 years prior. (Moreover, Buddhism can properly be thought of as a secular ethical tradition with some spiritual elements. There is no Buddhist dogma -- the statement "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense," is attributed to the Buddha -- so it can't properly be classed as a religion.)

Irreligion can't offer anything, because it is not a positive belief.

Irreligion is not atheism. Many atheists are religious.

I don't know about you, but my dictionary defines "irreligion" as "absence of religion", which is identical to atheism.

But it provided room for secular ethics and theories of proper government to flourish.

None of which has produced the amount of good as say, altruism, which is firmly grounded in Christian dogma. You see, an atheistic system is more focused on making the community than the individuals themselves. This is precisely why Stalin slaughtered tens of thousands of priests. He firmly believed that the community would be better off without them, therefore it didn’t offend his branch of “ethics.”

I don't grant that an atheistic system is necessarily more communistic (small-c, in the sense that it favors the collective over the whole) than individualistic. You reveal here your ignorance of John Stuart Mill and his masterpiece On Liberty.

Utter bilge. You disregard here a rich history of secular ethics that stretches back thousands of years.

“Rich” … because you say so? Simply developing systems don’t make them moral, productive, better, etc. When did the atheists form a system of “ethics” that gave women rights in ancient times?

Actually, Socrates was pretty radically in favor of women's rights in his time. We all know what the religionists of his day did to him for his impiety, though.

When did the atheists form a system of “ethics” that declared all human life sacred and all human beings equal? Again, while the atheists in Greece were drowing their newborn daughters, simply because they wanted a son, Christianity was preaching against such activity.

I think you're confusing the polytheists in ancient Greece with the moral philosophers, but whatever. My point is not and has never been that the ancient Greek philosophers were morally superior to Christians in every instance; my position is that logic and reason are better sources of morality than religion. The fact that some ancient Greeks got their facts and reasoning wrong regarding infanticide doesn't cut against this idea.

Atheists in moderns times merely borrow from existing systems that which appeals to them, and discard all the religious baggage that doesn’t.

What's wrong with preserving the good aspects of something and discarding the bad? I say, nothing.

Actually, history only really shows us that Communist rulers ruled ruthlessly. Their atheism is in no way essential to their crimes.

You’re in denial here. Of course it is relevant to their crimes. When one operates in a worldview where no accountability and no judgment exists (an absolute ruler who believes in no higher authority), an such criminal activity is more likely to occur. This is why you’re stuck with this untenable position. You cannot explain why there is such an overwhelmingly high percentage of atheistic rulers who have commited genocide. You can't explain it by denying its significance.

Stalin got his morality wrong. He was dogmatically bound to an (erroneous) interpretation of Marx's economic writings. His atheism may not have by itself prevented Stalin from murdering millions of people, but it didn't cause it, either, as you have already repeatedly admitted. This is in contrast to religion, which has commanded people to commit all kinds of unspeakable evil in the past, and which continues to retard moral progress today.

The Crusades were absolutely in no way comparable to the invasion of Normandy.

A reputable scholar in the field disagrees with you. He bases his conclusion on materials you are not familiar with.

I'm familiar with the basic history of the Crusades -- that is enough for me to make my argument (which, I point out, you have not adequately engaged).

The Muslims captured Palestine three centuries before Europe retaliated. By this logic, Native Americans could still mount a "defensive war" against the American government if they took up arms today.

That is not his logic because the comparison is not parallel. If one third of North America was ruled by a native government, and they had endured centuries of gradual annihilation, then yes, their rights to defend their nation would be recognized as self defense. This is what the crusades were about. To say it was just a response to rumors of violence in Palestine, is like saying the United States of America had a civil war because Fort Sumter was attacked. Christianity felt the foot of Islam against its throat, pressing down for centuries. It never once issued a decree to form a "Christian army" to reclaim any of the conquered lands, until the crusades. And even then it had to rely on amateurs and volunteers because there was no such a thing as a Christian army at that time.

So, the only reason a Native American assault on European-Americans is not justified is that the latter did such a good job of eradicating the former that rule by native government was no longer feasible? That is transparently atrocious moral reasoning, and you should be ashamed of it.

Bigotry against atheists in the West, for one:

I was referring to political figures in the East who almost always appear to be the worst kind of atheists. Why is that? How come none of these mysterious and benevolent atheists, who you say exist as the majority, managed to find political office in communist nations?

Which nations turned Communist, and why? Answer this question, and you'll have answered the one you posed to me. Russia, China, etc. were backwards societies ruled by autocrats before the Commies came around. When these regimes fell, power vacuums were created, of the kind that is not very amenable to respect for human rights or political institutions. When you mix political unrest with economic collapse and civil war, all in areas of the globe that had very little experience with democracy or human rights (and you can thank the Orthodox Russian czars and the Chinese emperors with their own "divine right of kings" for that), what kind of leader would you expect to succeed to power?

And if any bigotry exists towards atheists in America, it is not significant, especially when compared to that expressed towards theists.

Which is, of course, why all three branches of American government are dominated by theists, and why a candidate's atheism would be largely be considered to be a disqualification for office.

more Americans would vote for a gay person for public office than an atheist.

And you think this is proof of bigotry? How many atheists and agonistics on this forum have expressed their refusal to vote for political candidates because of their religious views? It is in virtually every political thread here.

What does this have to do with anything?

The reason it isn’t bigotry for a religious person to vote for another religious person is because so many religious issues are also political issues. Religion and politics are intertwined, not in authority, but it matters of socio-economics and culture. Why in the hell would I be inclined to vote for an atheist, when I am a religious person who shares the same values as his opponent? That doesn’t make me a bigot in any sense of the word. Voting for those who share your views is precisely what voters are supposed to be doing. Now if you are simply voting aginst someone, then that is another matter, and this is best exemplified on this forum as atheists come here left and right and proudly express their contempt for religious candidated, simply because they're religious.

The studies to which I refer explicitly control for this factor.

It's not universally the case that secularists who cherish human rights have never made their way to public office, though: witness many of the Founding Fathers, and John Stuart Mill (Member of Parliament) as famous examples.

There you go again conflating secularism with atheism. Many theists are secularists as well.

Jefferson was not a theist. Madison was not a theist. You don't get to make up your own facts.

More often than not? This is a contestable claim

Then contest it. I submit that the vast majority of the planet s religious, and yet less than one half of one percent actually engage in violence, using religion as a justification. Thus, religion more often than not, leads people to a path of morality that atheism cannot.

You've already seen the sketches of my opposition to your claim: the religious are significantly less likely, for example, to favor equal rights for gays and lesbians. In addition, the Judeo-Christian moral code rationalizes the unjustifiable slaughter of billions of animals every year, a practice which is very difficult to reconcile with any ratiocinative system of ethics.

As I have argued in this thread, great moral crimes have been perpetrated by people who possessed religious belief.

And by comparison to atheists in power, they appear overwhelming benevolent, as a percentage.

Even if you want to shoehorn doctrinaire Marxism in with the atheists (which I'm not yet convinced totally works, given that such a system has much more in common with organized religion than with simple lack of belief in gods), this isn't an effective rebuttal to my statement. Religion has led people to commit unspeakable crimes; it can therefore claim no more special moral authority than atheism can. That's my point.

Religion can rationalize, justify, or even encourage a wide swath of moral evils.

Religion does no such thing. People do these things. People choose to do good or evil, and no religion can or has forced anyone to choose good.

You seem to be contradicting yourself here. Do people do good things because of religion, or not? If they do, then people also do bad things because of religion, and religion has no special moral claim for itself above atheism. If people don't do good things because of religion, then religion has no special moral claim for itself, either. Either way, religion has no special moral claim for itself. It should therefore be abandoned.

[_dartagnan]

You're rambling here, and never successfully refuted my statement that religion often gives bad moral advice.

But I never denied religions have given bad advice, and in fact I have argued on several forums, including this one, that religous organizatons have done precisely that. What I contest is your use of the word "often." It is misleading, although technically correct. For example, if I were to say doctors "often" cause the premature deaths of individuals, I would technically be correct. But the fact is doctors are responsible for saving lives more than they are responsible for ending them. By your logic doctors have no authority on medical matters since medical knowledge has led some doctors to murder and surgically remove organs and sell them on the black market, etc.

(You may say that the bad advice it gives is vastly outweighed by the good advice, but this doesn't speak to my argument, and I don't think it's true anyway.)

Your argument is misleading because it ignores the percentage perspective. Billions of religious people on the planet and you can only point to a tiny fraction who use it to harm, whereas I can point to the vast majority, billons in fact, who use it to do good. Humans are essentially a moral species because we are essentially a religious species. You don't seem to care about the fact that religon can be used as a tool for mischief and immorality, but that this doesn' justify throwing out religion all together, as Dawkins and his band of new atheists would prefer.

Let me try to get us back the important questions: Whence comes morality? Not religion, obviously, else it would have been moral for the ancient Israelites to rape and pillage (Judges 21:10-24).

What an absurd argument. By this logic, something cannot produce morality unless it produces all forms of morality for all future civilizations, and remains unpolluted by opportunists. The fact is moral standards are changing. What might appear moral now wasn't necessarily considered moral two hundred years ago. Much of the stuff you use to prove religon causes immorality, is actually a perfect example of morality during that time. For example, the inquisition was considered an enlightened system to most Europeans.

And I noticed you completely dodged my point that you're relying on a text you don't believe to represent true history anyway. That remains pathetic.

Where does morality come from, then? Shouldn't we be asking ourselves this question instead of assuming that it comes from something that is obviously not an inerrant source of morality?

You're talking about the inerrancy of a mythical book, which I am not.

Secular ethics is much more useful for determining morality than is religion.

Says who? Why would you even begin to think secular ethics derive from an inerrant source? Do you really think there aren't problems with Utilitarianism?

If people can't control themselves, then sure, perhaps a case could be made that sports ought to be done away with.

Well, is that your argument? That sports should be removed by a secular government? At what point would you enforce this? How many people need to be injured first? Who gets to decide that number?

But the analogy isn't as close as you apparently think: the benefits of sports are tangible and observable, while the benefits of religion are seen through a glass darkly (figured I'd work in a Biblical phrase for you), and can't be wholly confirmed.

Nonsense. The benefits of religion are ubiquitous and well known by psychologists and medical professonals alike, but atheist critics refuse to acknolwedge them. It is said that happiness in society can be measured by the rate of procreation, and yet as Europe becomes more secular, their birthrates begin to drop dramatically, in some cases falling into the negtive. Religious people are generally happier people. This should be self evident.

Also, the most thuggish group of sports fans to ever exist has not posed an existential threat to humanity's existence, as radical Islam has.

Islam has never posed a threat to the existence of humanity, get real. My example was made to show you that religon is just a convenient tool used by the poltical opportunists. It is a social mechanism used to unite people under a common cause, the same as the alumni are at football games. There are extremes in passion in every social mechanism, and no moral system is immune to it.

(I agree that bin Laden's casus belli is mostly political in nature, but he would have a much harder time hiring recruits to blow themselves up if the promise of 72 virgins in the afterlife were not dangling before them

True, but he would have carried out his mission anyway, and who knows, if the middle east was run by atheists, maybe our 9-11 would have come much sooner. We saw Marxists in Sir Lanka blowing themselves up in record numbers long before the Muslims took the lead.

Also, you apparently fail to consider the fundamentalist Christians who are aching for total war in the Holy Land, for the reason that the sooner Armageddon comes, the sooner they can get to heaven. Some of these people have the ear of our current President. If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will.

This is horse manure, and no serious Church is taking this position. I keep hearing about these mysterious Christians who hold this belief, but in a country of more than 100 million Christians, you'd think you'd be able to provide a significant list of names. A list would show just how insiginificant these nimrods are. The only people giving them any attention are the atheists who keep shining the spotlight on them while trying to represent them as mainstream.

Actually, no. I could give evidence of Christians doing the ethically incorrect thing right now because of their religion (see Proposition 8 and other ballot-cudgels against the rights of gays and lesbians).

But the morality of this is a moot point. Really, is this the best you have to offer for recent examples of immorality in relgious teaching? So religious people want to protect the religious concept of marriage as it has been understood in religious and social contexts for thousands of years. How immoral of them! Nobody is trying to take away their rights to fornicate, commit sodomy, live together as married couples do, etc.

I knew, however, that you probably wouldn't think of these as ethically incorrect because of your present state of moral myopia, so I went back through the Christian tradition (which includes ancient Judaism) to find something that I wagered you would find less palatable. I've provided my source for the Israelite's unconscionable, religion-approved acts above.

And yet you base this on myth, which hasn't seemed to have had any proven effect of the religious people who accept the text as inspired. Where are these Jews who have decided to rape and pillage because they considered it "religion approved"? Simply pointing to ancient snippets from disputed texts isn't a good way to prove religion approves of immorality. Again, you're referring to something that most certainly never happened., but that doesn't see to matter to you. What we should be askng ourselves is this. Do Jews today interpret the text as you do? Do they use it to justify immoral behavior today? Only if they did would you even begin to make a case, but they don't, so you don't.

And the punishments were justified or approved by the Church. These are clear examples of religion "providing the wrong moral guidance". You don't get to dismiss them as such because you find them uncomfortable to own up to.

I simply reject the notion that you have the faintest clue what you're talking about. There is nothing for me to dismiss, since you clearly don't know your history. The inquisition was at its worst when the secular authorities were arbitrarily killing anyone they felt was a threat to the state. The Church bent over backwards trying to stop these injustices. In fact, that is why the inquisition was organized to begin with. According to Madden,

The medieval Inquisition began in 1184 when Pope Lucius III sent a list of heresies to Europe's bishops and commanded them to take an active role in determining whether those accused of heresy were, in fact, guilty. Rather than relying on secular courts, local lords, or just mobs, bishops were to see to it that accused heretics in their dioceses were examined by knowledgeable churchmen using Roman laws of evidence. In other words, they were to "inquire" thus, the term "inquisition."

From the perspective of secular authorities, heretics were traitors to God and king and therefore deserved death. From the perspective of the Church, however, heretics were lost sheep that had strayed from the flock. As shepherds, the pope and bishops had a duty to bring those sheep back into the fold, just as the Good Shepherd had commanded them. So, while medieval secular leaders were trying to safeguard their kingdoms, the Church was trying to save souls. The Inquisition provided a means for heretics to escape death and return to the community.
Most people accused of heresy by the medieval Inquisition were either acquitted or their sentence suspended. Those found guilty of grave error were allowed to confess their sin, do penance, and be restored to the Body of Christ. The underlying assumption of the Inquisition was that, like lost sheep, heretics had simply strayed. If, however, an inquisitor determined that a particular sheep had purposely departed out of hostility to the flock, there was nothing more that could be done. Unrepentant or obstinate heretics were excommunicated and given over to the secular authorities. Despite popular myth, the Church did not burn heretics. It was the secular authorities that held heresy to be a capital offense. The simple fact is that the medieval Inquisition saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.

Now here is the part, I guess, where you simply say you know more than this historian.

Nietzsche's "philosophy" is complete crap that rests almost entirely on fallacious arguments from philology. As such, modern secular ethicists (including myself) don't accept his pronouncements as Gospel.

I mentioned him so you cannot claim this is just something apologetic theists conjured up on their own. The fact that a militant atheist like Nietzsche could admit this obvious historical truth, is significant on many levels.

I agree that Christians believe in the equality of souls before God in the spiritual sense, but this obviously doesn't necessarily translate into being in favor of political equality.

So you're more interested in politics than actual equality as humans. That figures. And you think theists are the ones to be feared in the political sphere? Your frustration, as it is with other atheists like EAllusion, is that there aren't enough atheists in politics. The fact is Christians believe all human life is sacred, whereas your ancient atheists in Greece condoned the murder of innocent children simply because they didn't like their looks or gender. Where was the great atheistic system of ethics back then?

Why did it take Christians almost two millennia to care about equal political rights if temporal equality was such a central part of their theology? You need to provide a convincing answer to this question if you want Nietzsche's quote to have any force. Good luck.

You are under the delusion that "Christianity" cares about politics at all. Christianity at its core teaches love towards all humans, which is why Christians do charity work in al countries, no matter what the dominant religion, race or political view might be. Jesus made the division between Church and state quite profound. It was the state, in the mid third century, that adopted the Christian Church as its symbol, not vice versa.

Also, Jefferson was NOT a theist. He believed in Deism, a cosmological stance he got from David Hume.

Deism is much closer to theism than atheism. Both theism and deism acknolwedge the existence of a divine creator. And you still haven't come to grips with the fact that Jefferson's views were not created in a vacuum. He was a product of a Christian civilization, and like many theists, deists and even atheists, he took from it what he liked and rejected that which he didn't. Jefferson despised the way the Christians had perverted the religion, but he was an admirer of Jesus.

Hume only believed in a Creator because he couldn't account for the origin of life on Earth -- if he had lived in our time, and had been privy to Darwinism and its amazing implications for biology and cosmology, he almost certainly would have been an atheist.

Nonsense. He would have been more exposed to more cosmological evidences for the existence of a creator, which was his entire rationale for believing it to begin with. Biological fantasies about how life originated are just fantasies. Darwinism only tells us how life evolved, not how it originated. You're deluded if you think biological science today has disproved God.

Jefferson definitely would have followed suit -- as it was, he was allergic to religion, and mocked it in private whenever he got the chance.

Yes, but mocking organized religions and believing in a divine creator are two different things.

I grant that Jesus himself seems to have held an extremely liberal view of the role of women for his time

And Jesus represents the pinnacle of Christian authority, period.

but the New Testament features plenty of places in which women are seen as inferiors.

Yes, and in that day and age, women were inferiors. This was true for all societies, even the secular.What Christianity brought was more rights for women, not less.

The apostle Paul, for instance, who wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else, seems to have had a particular prejudice against women, and commanded them to not speak in church, and to wear their heads uncovered, etc.

And what modern Church interprets these passages as commandments for modern behavior? They are generally understood as an expression of that particular culture, by a man who was just a man. Do we see women today refusing to speak in Church while covering their heads? No, in fact we see precisely the opposite. So your examples of New Testament prejudice towards women will not hold water unless you can connect them to modern practice.

Actually, Christianity did not originate this reverence for all human life. Jesus didn't say anything about reverence for life in CE 30 that the Buddhists hadn't believed for 400 years prior.

You're skirting the point. Western society was primarily a Christian society. It wasn't Buddhism that influenced Christian civilization, it was the teachings of Jesus. Equal rights in the west were not inspired by Eastern philosophies, and they sure as hel were not inspired by any atheistic system of ethics.

I don't know about you, but my dictionary defines "irreligion" as "absence of religion", which is identical to atheism.

The problem isn't with your understanding of irreligion, your problem is with your misunderstanding of religion. Relgion is a social construct that doesn't necessarily involve theistic beliefs. Indeed, Dawkins says that he is a "deeply religious person."

I don't grant that an atheistic system is necessarily more communistic (small-c) than individualistic. You reveal here your ignorance of John Stuart Mill and his masterpiece On Liberty.

I thought we were discussing Utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham was the first modern Utilitarian, was he not?

I think you're confusing the polytheists in ancient Greece with the moral philosophers, but whatever.

I'm not at all. Plato and Aristotle both would be considered immoral bigots if they lived n our society.

My point is not and has never been that the ancient Greek philosophers were morally superior to Christians in every instance; my position is that logic and reason are better sources of morality than religion.

Unfortunately, there is no evidence for this. Logic, reason and science was championed by the Darwinistic Soviet dictators who saw no problems massacring millions of their own people for the good of the community. Why is it that atheistic systems of morality have no success stories? You're assuming they are superior when they haven't passed the litmus test.

The fact that some ancient Greeks got their facts and reasoning wrong regarding infanticide doesn't cut against this idea.

It underpins the point that infanticide as promoted among atheists in ancient times as abortion is promoted by atheists in modern times. How long before the atheistic ethic comes around to seeing the value of human life?

What's wrong with preserving the good aspects of something and discarding the bad? I say, nothing.

\
As do I. However, give proper credit where credt is due. that's my point. Atheistic morals are not created from whole cloth. They are borrowed or tweaked to serve atheistic purposes.

Stalin got his morality wrong. He was dogmatically bound to an (erroneous) interpretation of Marx's economic writings.

And a blind devotion to Darwinism.

His atheism may not have by itself prevented Stalin from murdering millions of people, but it didn't cause it, either, as you have already repeatedly admitted.

No, it merely enabled him to act on his natural self. He rejected religion, which probably would have prevented him from acting as he did (I say probably because most religious persons in power do not act accordingly). Humans in positions of power will naturally take advantage of it. Only those who have reasons to act morally, will consider acting morally.What reasons does an atheistic dictator have to act morally? None.

This is in contrast to religion, which has commanded people to commit all kinds of unspeakable evil in the past, and which continues to retard moral progress today

You're hilarious. Religion has pretty much provided you with all the morality you have, and those ethics it didn't provide, you try to pass off as morality when it fact it is just your own personl political viewpoint (i.e. proposition 8).

I'm familiar with the basic history of the Crusades -- that is enough for me to make my argument (which, I point out, you have not adequately engaged).

Oh, is that your delusion? I presented a reputable historian on the matter who unequivocally contradicts you, and all you can do is assert otherwise while now claiming I haven't adequately engaged you? Are you actually trying to be funny here? The problem is that your knowledge on the crusades is merely basic. And worse, it is outdated, which the scholar above refers to it as refuted myth.

So, the only reason a Native American assault on European-Americans is not justified is that the latter did such a good job of eradicating the former that rule by native government was no longer feasible? That is transparently atrocious moral reasoning, and you should be ashamed of it.

You're the one making absurd analogies while twisting meanings as a diversion from the fact that you're knowledge of the crusadesis strictly "basic." Just deal with the fact that the crusades were a massive attempt at self defense. This is what the latest historians, based on the latest information, have concluded. Christendom watched two thirds of its civilization get wiped out and did nothing for so long precisely because Christainity is not a violent religion. There was no Church army precisely because Christianity is not a violent religion.

What does this have to do with anything?

I just think it is funny listening to an atheist whine about bigotry against them, simply because religious majorities don't vote for them during elections. It is funny because atheists generally act exactly as they assume the theists are acting, and they don't even realize it. They essentially prove their own bigotry by suggesting it is bigotry not to vote for someone because of their beliefs. The rule on this forum for atheists is simple. Vote for the least religious candidate. Is that bigotry or not? How does your atheistic system of ethics handle hypocrisy?

Jefferson was not a theist. Madison was not a theist. You don't get to make up your own facts.

They believed in a creator of the universe, which is as far apart from atheism as theism. To your dismay, the line between deism and theism is so thin as to be irrelevant in this discussion. And making up your own facts would be like your repeated attempts to conflate secularism with atheism.

You've already seen the sketches of my opposition to your claim: the religious are significantly less likely, for example, to favor equal rights for gays and lesbians.

Well it depends on what rights you're referring to, and it also depends on whether the right is really a right, and whether that right determines whether its support is moral or immoral.

In addition, the Judeo-Christian moral code rationalizes the unjustifiable slaughter of billions of animals every year, a practice which is very difficult to reconcile with any ratiocinative system of ethics.

So not it is immoral to eat steak? Says who? I guess it is easy to call religion immoral when you're inventing your own standards of morality, and designing them with an anti-religious agenda in mind. This is essentially teh motive behind most utilitarian thinkers, including Epicurus. But the irony here is overwhelming. Vegetarianism sounds like something a Seventh-Day Adventist could appreciate. Your atheism is resembling common religion more and more.

Religion has led people to commit unspeakable crimes; it can therefore claim no more special moral authority than atheism can. That's my point.

And it is a fallacious point, logically speaking. For you it seems to be an all or nothing. Doctors cannot save lives if they have ended lives. Religion cannot produce or cause moral behavior if it can also cause immoral behavior.

Do yourself a favor and go look up the word religion. Then open your mind and drink in the possibility that not all religions are equal. Utilitarianism as a belief is essentially a religion. Atheism in academia has all the hallmarks of traditional religion.

If Utilitarianism was the adopted system of any given country, and its leader commited genocide because he or she felt it was for the good of the whole community, then would that make the "atheistic system of ethic" a nonauthority on morality?

It is astonishing that someone could sweep under the carpet thousands of years of moral religious accomplishment, based on the fact that some people have managed to use religion for their own purposes. This is not only arrogance, but it is nothing short of idiotic. This is precisely the attitude that has turned many atheists away from people like Dawkins.

You seem to be contradicting yourself here. Do people do good things because of religion, or not? If they do, then people also do bad things because of religion, and religion has no special moral claim for itself above atheism.

Religion is a social construct as I sad before. To suggest getting rid of religion, is like trying to get rid of all beliefs, including militant atheism (which believes strongly that nothing greater exists than ourselves). How do you propose to argue the morality of forcing people to abandon belief in general?

If people don't do good things because of religion, then religion has no special moral claim for itself, either.

But people do do good things because of religion. This is a demonstrable fact. But as an atheist with an agenda, your job is to downplay any moral accomplishment by religion, or moral behavior by the theist acting on his religious convictions.

Either way, religion has no special moral claim for itself. It should therefore be abandoned.

Sure, as soon as you abandon your utilitarianism. It can be used by selfish individuals to commit genocide just as easily as any theistic religion can; therefore proving your case if pure bunk - atheistic systems have no moral authority whatsoever. The reason you don't see examples of this is because it isn't a system that has been adopted by any atheistic ruler. But I could easily see how it would do precisely that. I mean you're a utilitarian right? Just listen to yourself. You're using your own utilitarian beliefs for divisive purposes in order to rid the world of 90% of its beliefs. Now if that doesn't scare anyone here, then I don't know what will. I'm just glad you're not ruling a country with a military force.

[_JohnStuartMill]

But I never denied religions have given bad advice, and in fact I have argued on several forums, including this one, that religous organizatons have done precisely that. What I contest is your use of the word "often." It is misleading, although technically correct. For example, if I were to say doctors "often" cause the premature deaths of individuals, I would technically be correct. But the fact is doctors are responsible for saving lives more than they are responsible for ending them. By your logic doctors have no authority on medical matters since medical knowledge has led some doctors to murder and surgically remove organs and sell them on the black market, etc.

No, you're misunderstanding my argument. I'm saying that just because something is religious in nature, doesn't mean it's moral, not that anything that comes from religion must be bad. I then go on to say that religion's methods for determining morality are inaccurate, and inimical to the process of discovering moral truth, because it discourages clear-headed inquiry and favors baseless superstition. I'm making a procedural argument, I guess.

You're drawing the incorrect analogy here, anyway. Doctors are revered not just because they happen to save lives, but because they have the knowledge necessary to do a good job of it. Doctors, then, are like reason-based ethicists: even though secular ethics and medicine get things wrong sometimes, they are at least based on a valid epistemology and can be discussed rationally, and improved through criticism. Religion-based morality doesn't have this feature; it's less like medicine and more like homeopathy: in both cases, the practice isn't based on logic and empirical fact, but rather on adherence to tradition and mysticism. As a result, both get things wrong quite often, and there's no good way to fix it when they do.

Your argument is misleading because it ignores the percentage perspective. Billions of religious people on the planet and you can only point to a tiny fraction who use it to harm, whereas I can point to the vast majority, billons in fact, who use it to do good. Humans are essentially a moral species because we are essentially a religious species. You don't seem to care about the fact that religon can be used as a tool for mischief and immorality, but that this doesn' justify throwing out religion all together, as Dawkins and his band of new atheists would prefer.

Let me try to get us back the important questions: Whence comes morality? Not religion, obviously, else it would have been moral for the ancient Israelites to rape and pillage (Judges 21:10-24).

What an absurd argument. By this logic, something cannot produce morality unless it produces all forms of morality for all future civilizations, and remains unpolluted by opportunists. The fact is moral standards are changing. What might appear moral now wasn't necessarily considered moral two hundred years ago. Much of the stuff you use to prove religon causes immorality, is actually a perfect example of morality during that time. For example, the inquisition was considered an enlightened system to most Europeans.

I suppose I should have been more clear here. When I say "the source of morality", I mean "the standard by which practices are considered to be moral or immoral". I'm not denying that there are moral truths in religion (I don't think any atheist would dispute that); I'm saying that moral truths which claim to be from religion shouldn't be spared from reasoned scrutiny. Once you start scrutinizing moral principles with a rational, critical eye, you're engaging in secular ethics.

And I noticed you completely dodged my point that you're relying on a text you don't believe to represent true history anyway. That remains pathetic.

I, along with the rest of the vast majority of atheists, think that most of the non-supernatural stories in the Bible are true. Archaeological evidence and writings from their historical contemporaries speak in favor of ancient existence of the Israelites and their basic history.

You're talking about the inerrancy of a mythical book, which I am not.

Inerrancy is crucial, wouldn't you say? If the Bible is not inerrant, why should we treat any differently as a source for morals than we do any other text? Why shouldn't we be as careful with the book of Romans as we are with As I Lay Dying?

Secular ethics is much more useful for determining morality than is religion.

Says who? Why would you even begin to think secular ethics derive from an inerrant source? Do you really think there aren't problems with Utilitarianism?

I think there are (although not nearly as many problems as in Christianity), but the important advantage to utilitarianism over religious morality is that it can be criticized, reasoned about, and made better. There's no opportunity for improvement with religious morality, even though there is very often a dire need for it.

Well, is that your argument? That sports should be removed by a secular government? At what point would you enforce this? How many people need to be injured first? Who gets to decide that number?

This isn't as silly as you might think. I'm not going to get into the nuts and bolts of things here; it should suffice to say that the same kind of reasoning would be employed here as with potential requirements that automobile passengers wear seat belts. (Also notice that I'm not concluding that we should definitely ban sports.)

Nonsense. The benefits of religion are ubiquitous and well known by psychologists and medical professonals alike, but atheist critics refuse to acknolwedge them. It is said that happiness in society can be measured by the rate of procreation, and yet as Europe becomes more secular, their birthrates begin to drop dramatically, in some cases falling into the negtive. Religious people are generally happier people. This should be self evident.

I have nowhere denied that there are benefits to religion; I have merely questioned if these are not outweighed by its costs.

I don't accept your claim that religious people are happier as "self-evident" either, because, for one thing, the idea runs contrary to my personal experience. Also, I have no reason to believe your procreation=happiness metric, which is crude to the point of irrelevance. For example, birth rates are higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in Ireland, but nobody in their right mind would suggest that the former are happier than the latter.

Islam has never posed a threat to the existence of humanity, get real. My example was made to show you that religon is just a convenient tool used by the poltical opportunists. It is a social mechanism used to unite people under a common cause, the same as the alumni are at football games. There are extremes in passion in every social mechanism, and no moral system is immune to it.

Okay, are you defining 'religion' here as "a social mechanism to unite people under a common cause"? Because if you are, I don't agree to that definition. Also, you're wrong to say that radical Islam has never posed a threat to the existence of humanity. Ever heard of a little thing called "nuclear terrorism"?

I agree, though, that some of the same elements that make religion unattractive exist in other organizations. But I think we should work against these other tendencies as well.

(I agree that bin Laden's casus belli is mostly political in nature, but he would have a much harder time hiring recruits to blow themselves up if the promise of 72 virgins in the afterlife were not dangling before them

True, but he would have carried out his mission anyway, and who knows, if the middle east was run by atheists, maybe our 9-11 would have come much sooner. We saw Marxists in Sir Lanka blowing themselves up in record numbers long before the Muslims took the lead.

Do you have any examples for bad atheists besides militant Marxists? If you don't, then your case against atheism in all its forms is extremely weak.

Also, you apparently fail to consider the fundamentalist Christians who are aching for total war in the Holy Land, for the reason that the sooner Armageddon comes, the sooner they can get to heaven. Some of these people have the ear of our current President. If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will.

This is horse manure, and no serious Church is taking this position. I keep hearing about these mysterious Christians who hold this belief, but in a country of more than 100 million Christians, you'd think you'd be able to provide a significant list of names. A list would show just how insiginificant these nimrods are. The only people giving them any attention are the atheists who keep shining the spotlight on them while trying to represent them as mainstream.

No, these views are frighteningly mainstream:

[O]ver one-third of those Americans who support Israel report that they do so because they believe the Bible teaches that the Jews must possess their own country in the Holy Land before Jesus can return.

http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christi ... eddon.aspx

You remember what the Bible says about Jesus' return, right? It's not exactly a pretty sight.

But the morality of this is a moot point. Really, is this the best you have to offer for recent examples of immorality in relgious teaching? So religious people want to protect the religious concept of marriage as it has been understood in religious and social contexts for thousands of years. How immoral of them! Nobody is trying to take away their rights to fornicate, commit sodomy, live together as married couples do, etc.

Actually, plenty of people have been trying to take away their rights to "fornicate and commit sodomy" -- do you know how recently Lawrence vs. Texas was decided? Also, I don't think you know the definition of sodomy if you're throwing the word around pejoratively like that, because there is a 98% chance (at least) that you yourself have committed it. (Sodomy includes oral sex and masturbation, in case you were wondering.)

And yet you base this on myth, which hasn't seemed to have had any proven effect of the religious people who accept the text as inspired. Where are these Jews who have decided to rape and pillage because they considered it "religion approved"? Simply pointing to ancient snippets from disputed texts isn't a good way to prove religion approves of immorality. Again, you're referring to something that most certainly never happened., but that doesn't see to matter to you. What we should be askng ourselves is this. Do Jews today interpret the text as you do? Do they use it to justify immoral behavior today? Only if they did would you even begin to make a case, but they don't, so you don't.

I don't know of anyone, atheist or not, who disputes most of the violent history of ancient Israel given in the Old Testament. And yes, some Jews today (a very, very small number) justify immoral behavior using these passages. There are groups in Israel that don't think they're bound to agreements with their neighbors because those people are supposedly enemies of God and His chosen people, for instance.

I simply reject the notion that you have the faintest clue what you're talking about. There is nothing for me to dismiss, since you clearly don't know your history. The inquisition was at its worst when the secular authorities were arbitrarily killing anyone they felt was a threat to the state. The Church bent over backwards trying to stop these injustices. In fact, that is why the inquisition was organized to begin with. According to Madden,

The medieval Inquisition began in 1184 when Pope Lucius III sent a list of heresies to Europe's bishops and commanded them to take an active role in determining whether those accused of heresy were, in fact, guilty. Rather than relying on secular courts, local lords, or just mobs, bishops were to see to it that accused heretics in their dioceses were examined by knowledgeable churchmen using Roman laws of evidence. In other words, they were to "inquire" thus, the term "inquisition."

From the perspective of secular authorities, heretics were traitors to God and king and therefore deserved death. From the perspective of the Church, however, heretics were lost sheep that had strayed from the flock. As shepherds, the pope and bishops had a duty to bring those sheep back into the fold, just as the Good Shepherd had commanded them. So, while medieval secular leaders were trying to safeguard their kingdoms, the Church was trying to save souls. The Inquisition provided a means for heretics to escape death and return to the community. Most people accused of heresy by the medieval Inquisition were either acquitted or their sentence suspended. Those found guilty of grave error were allowed to confess their sin, do penance, and be restored to the Body of Christ. The underlying assumption of the Inquisition was that, like lost sheep, heretics had simply strayed. If, however, an inquisitor determined that a particular sheep had purposely departed out of hostility to the flock, there was nothing more that could be done. Unrepentant or obstinate heretics were excommunicated and given over to the secular authorities. Despite popular myth, the Church did not burn heretics. It was the secular authorities that held heresy to be a capital offense. The simple fact is that the medieval Inquisition saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.

Now here is the part, I guess, where you simply say you know more than this historian.

Why are you still talking about the Inquisition? I don't remember saying a damn thing about it. You're reverse-straw-manning me.

I mentioned him so you cannot claim this is just something apologetic theists conjured up on their own. The fact that a militant atheist like Nietzsche could admit this obvious historical truth, is significant on many levels.

Nietzsche didn't "admit" anything here, because you can't "admit" something that isn't true. I've already explained why I think Nietzsche is wrong; you should engage my reasoning instead of demanding that I think of this lunatic's thoughts as valid.

I agree that Christians believe in the equality of souls before God in the spiritual sense, but this obviously doesn't necessarily translate into being in favor of political equality.

So you're more interested in politics than actual equality as humans. That figures. And you think theists are the ones to be feared in the political sphere? Your frustration, as it is with other atheists like EAllusion, is that there aren't enough atheists in politics. The fact is Christians believe all human life is sacred, whereas your ancient atheists in Greece condoned the murder of innocent children simply because they didn't like their looks or gender. Where was the great atheistic system of ethics back then?

First off, I'm not defending the conclusions of every secular system of ethics; I'm merely defending the enterprise in general. Secondly: huh? How is any of this an actual response to my point that "theological equality is not identical to political equality", i.e., just because we're theoretically equal in the afterlife doesn't mean that people should all be treated equally on Earth. Also, what "actual equality" is there other than political equality?

Why did it take Christians almost two millennia to care about equal political rights if temporal equality was such a central part of their theology? You need to provide a convincing answer to this question if you want Nietzsche's quote to have any force. Good luck.

You are under the delusion that "Christianity" cares about politics at all. Christianity at its core teaches love towards all humans, which is why Christians do charity work in al countries, no matter what the dominant religion, race or political view might be. Jesus made the division between Church and state quite profound. It was the state, in the mid third century, that adopted the Christian Church as its symbol, not vice versa.

What's your explanation for the fact that societies predominantly composed of Christians had no apparent problem with slavery until the 16th and 17th centuries, or later? My point was that this fact works very powerfully against Nietzsche's equation of Christianity with egalitarianism.

Deism is much closer to theism than atheism. Both theism and deism acknolwedge the existence of a divine creator. And you still haven't come to grips with the fact that Jefferson's views were not created in a vacuum. He was a product of a Christian civilization, and like many theists, deists and even atheists, he took from it what he liked and rejected that which he didn't. Jefferson despised the way the Christians had perverted the religion, but he was an admirer of Jesus.

Dawkins is an admirer of Jesus, too, but he bases his admiration of Jesus on a reflective consideration of his words and actions, and not on any kind of dogmatic religious precept. This was Jefferson's position as well, because as a deist, he held reason supreme as a method of determining moral truths (God doesn't decree moral truths at all in a deist system). Thus, deism is like secular ethics in the relevant aspect: its morality doesn't rely on supernaturalism, but rather on the reasoned application of knowledge about the natural world. I'm perfectly comfortable with Jefferson taking cues from religion; my point is that he didn't accept moral precepts for religious reasons.

Nonsense. He would have been more exposed to more cosmological evidences for the existence of a creator, which was his entire rationale for believing it to begin with. Biological fantasies about how life originated are just fantasies. Darwinism only tells us how life evolved, not how it originated. You're deluded if you think biological science today has disproved God.

I don't think, and never said, that modern biology disproves all possible conceptions of God. My point was that there was a very specific reason that Jefferson chose deism over atheism, and that the advent of Darwinism removed this obstacle.

Jefferson definitely would have followed suit -- as it was, he was allergic to religion, and mocked it in private whenever he got the chance.

Yes, but mocking organized religions and believing in a divine creator are two different things.

I agree that they're different, but I don't think this distinction is very important to the question of whether Jefferson was a theist. Jefferson tried to determine the nature of the Creator (I hesitate to use that term, because Jefferson's Creator is very different from the Judeo-Christian Creator) through reason and observation, not by lapping up descriptions from a Holy Book. He would have had no problem with the "Creator" being simply the laws of physics, something to which modern-day atheists could agree. Jefferson's "Creator" was certainly not an anthropomorphic tablet-scribbler in the vein of The Ten Commandments.

And Jesus represents the pinnacle of Christian authority, period.

[...] Yes, and in that day and age, women were inferiors. This was true for all societies, even the secular.What Christianity brought was more rights for women, not less.

[...]And what modern Church interprets these passages as commandments for modern behavior? They are generally understood as an expression of that particular culture, by a man who was just a man. Do we see women today refusing to speak in Church while covering their heads? No, in fact we see precisely the opposite. So your examples of New Testament prejudice towards women will not hold water unless you can connect them to modern practice.

Then you'd agree that there's nothing immoral about homosexuality, correct? After all, Jesus himself never said anything about the practice. The only admonitions against it came from Paul, that same guy who said that women need to shut the hell up in church and who thought that long hair was evil (on women, at least -- his apparent tolerance for mullets is not a point in favor of his inspiredness). So, what do you think of the idea interpreting Biblical aspersions against homosexuality as "an expression of that particular culture, by a man who was just a man"? You should be gung-ho for it, if you care at all about being consistent with yourself.

You're skirting the point. Western society was primarily a Christian society. It wasn't Buddhism that influenced Christian civilization, it was the teachings of Jesus. Equal rights in the west were not inspired by Eastern philosophies, and they sure as hel were not inspired by any atheistic system of ethics.

1) How do you know this is the case? There's at least a decade of Jesus' history that isn't accounted for in the Gospels; how do you know he didn't go hang out with the Buddhists for a few years? 2) You seem to be saying that Christianity is superior because, by historical accident, it happened to influence Western civilization more directly than Buddhism did. That's a very silly argument. 3) Whatever the merits of Jesus' own life, his teachings obviously didn't stick. You still haven't addressed the problem of why modern Christendom had no problem whatsoever with slavery for 1000+ years, and why the idea of equal rights for women didn't even occur to it until after the Enlightenment.

I don't know about you, but my dictionary defines "irreligion" as "absence of religion", which is identical to atheism.

The problem isn't with your understanding of irreligion, your problem is with your misunderstanding of religion. Relgion is a social construct that doesn't necessarily involve theistic beliefs. Indeed, Dawkins says that he is a "deeply religious person."

In that sense, I'm deeply religious as well, and we have nothing to argue about.

Do you really share Dawkins' stance on God, or are you just equivocating because you feel the argument slipping away? You know what my guess is.

I don't grant that an atheistic system is necessarily more communistic (small-c) than individualistic. You reveal here your ignorance of John Stuart Mill and his masterpiece On Liberty.

I thought we were discussing Utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham was the first modern Utilitarian, was he not?

He was, and his crude utilitarianism was given a sophisticated revamping by yours truly. Incidentally, do you have a clue as to what the word "necessarily" means?

I'm not at all. Plato and Aristotle both would be considered immoral bigots if they lived n our society.[...]
Unfortunately, there is no evidence for this. Logic, reason and science was championed by the Darwinistic Soviet dictators who saw no problems massacring millions of their own people for the good of the community. Why is it that atheistic systems of morality have no success stories? You're assuming they are superior when they haven't passed the litmus test.

"Darwinistic" Soviet dictators who championed science? Your history is confused -- the Soviets championed anti-scientific, illogical Lysenkoism because they thought it fit better with their Marxist dogma. Try again.

The fact that some ancient Greeks got their facts and reasoning wrong regarding infanticide doesn't cut against this idea.

It underpins the point that infanticide as promoted among atheists in ancient times as abortion is promoted by atheists in modern times. How long before the atheistic ethic comes around to seeing the value of human life?

Err, the vast majority of secular ethical systems already have come around, and at least one of those systems has been sitting pretty for 2500 years.

What's wrong with preserving the good aspects of something and discarding the bad? I say, nothing.

\
As do I. However, give proper credit where credt is due. that's my point. Atheistic morals are not created from whole cloth. They are borrowed or tweaked to serve atheistic purposes.

I thought we agreed that atheism, being a strictly negative belief, could have no morals? I'll continue here as if you had said "secular morals".

Yes, secular morality often borrows from nonsecular traditions. But it originates an awful lot of stuff, too, and retains a distinct advantage over religious morality: the possibility for improvement.

Stalin got his morality wrong. He was dogmatically bound to an (erroneous) interpretation of Marx's economic writings.

And a blind devotion to Darwinism.

No, your history is laughably wrong here. Read up on Trofim Lysenko and the history of Soviet agronomy, learn that Stalin repressed the Darwinist scientists of his day, and get back to me.

His atheism may not have by itself prevented Stalin from murdering millions of people, but it didn't cause it, either, as you have already repeatedly admitted.

No, it merely enabled him to act on his natural self. He rejected religion, which probably would have prevented him from acting as he did (I say probably because most religious persons in power do not act accordingly).

Most religious persons in power now, in the West, maybe. But Ivan the Terrible, a theist, wasn't exactly a cuddly little lamb, either, nor were the czars that immediately preceded the Russian Revolution.

Humans in positions of power will naturally take advantage of it. Only those who have reasons to act morally, will consider acting morally.What reasons does an atheistic dictator have to act morally? None.

No, an atheistic leader could have plenty of reasons to act morally. We've been over this already.

This is in contrast to religion, which has commanded people to commit all kinds of unspeakable evil in the past, and which continues to retard moral progress today

You're hilarious. Religion has pretty much provided you with all the morality you have, and those ethics it didn't provide, you try to pass off as morality when it fact it is just your own personl political viewpoint (i.e. proposition 8).

You have given no basis for the allegation that religion has given me all the morality I have. Substantiate, or retract.

Oh, is that your delusion? I presented a reputable historian on the matter who unequivocally contradicts you, and all you can do is assert otherwise while now claiming I haven't adequately engaged you? Are you actually trying to be funny here? The problem is that your knowledge on the crusades is merely basic. And worse, it is outdated, which the scholar above refers to it as refuted myth.

So, the only reason a Native American assault on European-Americans is not justified is that the latter did such a good job of eradicating the former that rule by native government was no longer feasible? That is transparently atrocious moral reasoning, and you should be ashamed of it.

You're the one making absurd analogies while twisting meanings as a diversion from the fact that you're knowledge of the crusadesis strictly "basic." Just deal with the fact that the crusades were a massive attempt at self defense. This is what the latest historians, based on the latest information, have concluded. Christendom watched two thirds of its civilization get wiped out and did nothing for so long precisely because Christainity is not a violent religion. There was no Church army precisely because Christianity is not a violent religion.

Demonstrate how my analogy was "absurd" -- it's quite apt, actually. Do you think a Native American recapture of Nebraska would be justified? Why, or why not? Do you think a Mexican incursion against southern Texas would be justified? Why, or why not?

I just think it is funny listening to an atheist whine about bigotry against them, simply because religious majorities don't vote for them during elections. It is funny because atheists generally act exactly as they assume the theists are acting, and they don't even realize it. They essentially prove their own bigotry by suggesting it is bigotry not to vote for someone because of their beliefs. The rule on this forum for atheists is simple. Vote for the least religious candidate. Is that bigotry or not? How does your atheistic system of ethics handle hypocrisy?

I'm in no way required to defend atheists who don't vote for theists because of their religion. I myself vote for theists all the time -- hell, I've even volunteered 90-hour workweeks for candidates who believe in God.

Well it depends on what rights you're referring to, and it also depends on whether the right is really a right, and whether that right determines whether its support is moral or immoral.

In addition, the Judeo-Christian moral code rationalizes the unjustifiable slaughter of billions of animals every year, a practice which is very difficult to reconcile with any ratiocinative system of ethics.

So not it is immoral to eat steak? Says who? I guess it is easy to call religion immoral when you're inventing your own standards of morality, and designing them with an anti-religious agenda in mind. This is essentially the motive behind most utilitarian thinkers, including Epicurus. But the irony here is overwhelming. Vegetarianism sounds like something a Seventh-Day Adventist could appreciate. Your atheism is resembling common religion more and more.

It's not a lack of vegetarianism per se in Judeo-Christianity that I find unethical, but rather the idea that human beings have unbridled dominion over animals. (Sigh -- there was a reason I didn't bring this one up at first. I'd really rather not talk about it here, as it deserves a debate of its own, and doesn't do much for this one except cause confusion.)

Do yourself a favor and go look up the word religion. Then open your mind and drink in the possibility that not all religions are equal. Utilitarianism as a belief is essentially a religion. Atheism in academia has all the hallmarks of traditional religion.

I agree that not all religions are equal. Some have a great deal more moral truth than others. My objection to religion, though, is in its process -- it doesn't discover moral truths through mere observation and reason, so the likelihood that a religion will adopt, sustain, or compel a false moral precept is unjustifiably high.

If Utilitarianism was the adopted system of any given country, and its leader commited genocide because he or she felt it was for the good of the whole community, then would that make the "atheistic system of ethic" a nonauthority on morality?

No, because utilitarianism's epistemology is very different from the epistemology of religious morality. If you base morality on observation and reason, then someone could mess up their logic or evidence, and this wouldn't discount the moral ideas that came from good logic and evidence. If you base morality on a mere religious grounding, though, you have no proper method to analogously discriminate between a bad religious moral precept and a good one. (This is evinced by your failure to recognize the ancient Jews' barbarisms as both grossly immoral and motivated by religion, when they are clearly both.)

You seem to be contradicting yourself here. Do people do good things because of religion, or not? If they do, then people also do bad things because of religion, and religion has no special moral claim for itself above atheism.

Religion is a social construct as I sad before. To suggest getting rid of religion, is like trying to get rid of all beliefs, including militant atheism (which believes strongly that nothing greater exists than ourselves). How do you propose to argue the morality of forcing people to abandon belief in general?

Neither I nor any other atheist I know of is proposing that we force people to abandon all belief. I'm saying that we should abandon belief that is not properly grounded in good evidence, and I don't advocate any kind of force against religious people just because they're religious.

If people don't do good things because of religion, then religion has no special moral claim for itself, either.

But people do do good things because of religion. This is a demonstrable fact. But as an atheist with an agenda, your job is to downplay any moral accomplishment by religion, or moral behavior by the theist acting on his religious convictions.

Again, I don't deny that people do good things because of religion; I only question whether the negatives of religion don't outweigh the positives.

Sure, as soon as you abandon your utilitarianism. It can be used by selfish individuals to commit genocide just as easily as any theistic religion can; therefore proving your case if pure bunk - atheistic systems have no moral authority whatsoever. The reason you don't see examples of this is because it isn't a system that has been adopted by any atheistic ruler. But I could easily see how it would do precisely that. I mean you're a utilitarian right? Just listen to yourself. You're using your own utilitarian beliefs for divisive purposes in order to rid the world of 90% of its beliefs. Now if that doesn't scare anyone here, then I don't know what will. I'm just glad you're not ruling a country with a military force.

I refer you to the differences I explicated above regarding the epistemologies of religious and secular morals.

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JohnStuartMill wrote: "I'm saying that just because something is religious in nature, doesn't mean it's moral, not that anything that comes from religion must be bad. I then go on to say that religion's methods for determining morality are inaccurate, and inimical to the process of discovering moral truth, because it discourages clear-headed inquiry and favors baseless superstition."

An awesome post you wrote, I tried to quote exactly your words in my sig but had to shorten it to make no more than 200 characters.

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Dart writes: "You don't seem to care about the fact that religon can be used as a tool for mischief and immorality, but that this doesn' justify throwing out religion all together, as Dawkins and his band of new atheists would prefer."


Just because someone gives a critical argument against something, such as "Dawkins and his band of new atheists against religion, does not mean they expect or even necessarily want to throw out religion, but certainly they wish to raise awareness on what they are critical of and certain aspects of religion "fundamentalism"they may wish the world was rid of. It is a strawman argument against them to argue as if their goal is to rid the world of religion.