Posted on 03/19/2010 1:04:09 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good. There is no celestial headmaster who is going to give you six (or six billion, billion, billion) of the best if you are bad. Morality is flimflam.
Does this mean that you can just go out and rape and pillage, behave like an ancient Roman grabbing Sabine women? Not at all. I said that there are no grounds for being good. It doesn't follow that you should be bad. Indeed, there are those – and I am one – who argue that only by recognising the death of God can we possibly do that which we should, and behave properly to our fellow humans and perhaps save the planet that we all share. We can give up all of that nonsense about women and gay people being inferior, about fertilised ova being human beings, and about the earth being ours to exploit and destroy.
Start with the fact that humans are naturally moral beings. We want to get along with our fellows. We care about our families. And we feel that we should put our hands in our pockets for the widows and orphans. This is not a matter of chance or even of culture primarily. Humans as animals have gone the route of sociality. We succeed, each of us individually, because we are part of a greater whole and that whole is a lot better at surviving and reproducing that most other animals.
On the one hand, we have suppressed all sorts of common mammalian features that disrupt harmonious living. Imagine trying to run a philosophy class if two or three of the members were in heat.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Silly Evolutionists, Morality that isn’t temporal and subject to convenience comes from our Creator.
This is joke post, right?
Please tell me how one might argue with Marquis DeSade, “Whatever is, is right”?
>> Start with the fact that humans are naturally moral beings.
That’s just ridiculous.
If we were naturally moral beings, one would not have to ask the question “God is dead, so why should I be good?” ... we’d as the question, “why do we need a God if humanity is already so moral?”.
If humanity were naturally moral, people would not struggle day-in-and-day-out with maintaining morality ... and people would not fail so spectacularly quite so often. Even people who are genuinely trying to be good struggle daily with suppressing instincts toward immorality ... which says nothing about those who couldn’t care less whether they were good or not.
Just stupid.
SnakeDoc
Ignorant at best. We all have a quiet still voice inside of us. Every honest person I have ever debated admits to this. It comes from God. It is instilled into us when we are conceived.
I might ask the author: Why do Christians advocate help for "the least of these," regardless of their genetic relationship to us, far more than people of any other faith?
The only way liberals can make a good argument is by, first, misrepresenting the positions of the other side. Worthless to read further.
There is no morality without God.
Maybe I missed it, did he establish the purpose of human life?
After reading this article, the following question begs an answer ===> WHAT THEN IS MORAL ?
What is moral? It isn’t enough to say that evolution can make us moral, we have to ask what is good morality.
Why should we consider murder to be wrong at a foundational level. As Ruse notes lion’s are often multiple murders so Darwinism doesn’t help us decide. Is morality just about social cooperation? In Hobbes state of nature every man is against every man, or with Darwinian filial affections, every tribe is against every tribe in a state of nature.
But that doesn’t stop tribes fighting, whether they be football supporters, Africans or Caucasians. In a state of nature how do we determine what is moral? Darwinism could lead to family or tribal cooperation in exterminating a rival tribe, but not to good morality. Morality has to transcend human emotions to be at all real.
The second question coming to my mind is this -— what of truth? A commitment to tell the truth is good morality. But if our genes have evolved to lie to us, then how can we know anything moral with confidence, or trust that what our genes are telling us really is the good?
These are the first two things that come to mind initially but there will be more as I digest what he’s trying to say...
Again, pure nonsense. He just needs to apply his own
rationales to his OWN arguments....as in the following:
If thoughts about “morality” are just illusions..
couldn’t thoughts about “facts” be illusions. Or do
the same illusions by others validate your own “illusions”
and make them correct?
So the torturer among torturers is correct. right?
How about the murderer of biological professors(See recent
story about bio professor killing her colleagues in Alabama)
in the presence of other murderers of biological
professors? Is that person morally correct?
Eventually you HAVE to believe if some type of final
nonrefutable fact on which all others get their
validity. He just happens to believe his
“illusions” are the right ones. But he tries to act
as if he is “non-religious” He just traded historical
Judaism, Christianity for his own epochs religion.
A completely parochial, and provincial position. And by
the way, by an organism(human,maybe) destined to be eaten by
those immoral bacteria, bugs, sea-creatures, and
eventually maybe by other beings. Maybe his illusion is
that his opinions will last forever, or that they can
influence humans.
Interesting ... let’s see.
Should we assume Turkey Morality and die in a rainstorm out of amazement? Or perhaps Polar Bear Morality and kill whatever we feel like, hungry or not.
Hyena Morality, so that we can “eat on the run” and “off the hoof”?
Or perhaps this is a dictate to wipe out all species who have not “evolved” our higher sense of what is right.
Temujin, Hitler and Stalin were great fans of natural selection, and they thought that it was only natural they should select who would be allowed to breed and survive.
Deep down in their heart of hearts, the socio/liberal/Communists in charge of our country know that we’re not evolved enough to make these choices, so they are busily setting up mechanisms to decide for us, optimizing our race.
They all have degrees awarded to them by idiots like this.
Honestly, I don’t think it takes a precise definition of “moral” to state outright that human beings are not naturally “moral” creatures ... and thus that the author is just wrong.
Take an issue of almost universal agreement on the (im)morality of the behavior — pedophilia and child abuse. There are millions upon millions of child victims of abuse and sexual exploitation the world over. New stories emerge virtually daily of these horrific and dispicable crimes. Dateline NBC put a decoy online for 72-hours and drew in 40 men willing to abuse a child.
If humanity were naturally moral ... this simply could not be.
SnakeDoc
Ask any parent of a 2-year old throwing a tanturm if people are naturally born good (or, er...me if I have to wait too long in line!!!). We have to really fight our own natures to be good, and no one can be good for a full 24-hours.
Yes, God is very real.
Except that in all history, humans have believed in God or in gods.
The "natural morality" he points to developed in human societies dominated by a belief in God or in gods.
He does not have any evidence to support his contention that morality developed in a Darwinian natural selection process.
Indeed, there is no evidence that some sort of "natural morality" would prevail in a society in which there was no belief in God, and in which the legacy of a belief in a God was gone.
People talk about the UK and Europe being a "post-Christian" society, but the key unacknowledged assumptions on which the society operates were bequeathed from a theistic belief system.
For example, the idea that all human life is of value and that all humans are of "one blood" as the Bible speaks. This underpins laws against murder and against discrimination against different races of humans.
The idea that Darwinian natural selection would evolve a morality against, say, slavery, to pick an example, is against everything historical about the abolition movement, which was first and foremost a Christian movement.
Natural selection and survival of the fittest (i.e., the continued development of those whose characteristics are most fitting to their environment) has given us...
...people the great majority of which believe in a Creator.
Think about it.
(Still alive, J & S! ;-) Looking to FR again this weekend, which is a good sign.)
Total garbage. Man is inherently cruel and selfish, the herd instinct controls that to a certain extent, but the herd instinct is not morality, its just behaving in a manner for the common good of the society. The common good of one society may be to completely obliterate or enslave another society, and this has happened countless times in human history.
Morality is about absolute good and evil regardless of the well being of any individual or society, and that CANNOT exist unless it exists in the foundation of the universe, in other words, in a Creator.
Are you trying to confess to something?
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