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To: Senator Bedfellow
Nonsense. The only way that even remotely makes sense is if your next sentence is to claim that our perceptions tell us nothing about actual reality.

I am not a solipsist. Whose actual reality would that be; yours or mine? You are able to assert actual reality because you (rightly) assume that truth is objective. But objective truth and morality cannot be validly derived from the premises of your materialist worldview, if all you've got is the motion of irrational physical forces. If the random collection of atoms called Dawkins says that religious instruction is child abuse and some other random collection of atoms called Diamond says it is not, so what? On the premise of atheism, what difference does it make? Are there good and bad atoms? Objective and universal standards of truth and morality cannot exist in your purely material world. That is the problem, which as far as I know, has never been successfully answered by atheists.

Cordially,

241 posted on 01/10/2006 8:10:23 AM PST by Diamond
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To: Diamond
But objective truth and morality cannot be validly derived from the premises of your materialist worldview, if all you've got is the motion of irrational physical forces.

And? The point is that you really cannot derive "objective" morality from any worldview. Some claim otherwise, but those claims never seem to stand up to serious scrutiny.

If the random collection of atoms called Dawkins says that religious instruction is child abuse and some other random collection of atoms called Diamond says it is not, so what?

It matters because we have to live with the consequences either way, obviously. I'm sure that if it turned out that morality wasn't handed to us by some external third party, some might waste away from despair, but I suspect that most might turn out to be a bit hardier.

244 posted on 01/10/2006 9:21:19 AM PST by Senator Bedfellow
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