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When they are on the edge of death, let us hear the cries... “I’m good enough without God”.
bttt
So I guess at the end of the day it might make a difference if you live in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood with him in charge, or if you live in Mister Adolph Hitlers' Neighborhood with Hitlers' moral code in place.
...hmmm, sounds like it's time to post my "Darwin meets Jesus in our public schools...and the American Atheists love it that way" because survival of the fittest and natural selection doesn't work real well for the weak or the outnumbered....
Why doesn’t he just say “Atheists, get out of the country?”
Nietzsche is dead. - God
G.K. Chesterton, a devout Catholic, once wrote a poem he called “The Song of the Strange Ascetic”. All stanzas except the last began, “If I had been a heathen...”
According to the poem, he would have -
“praised the purple vine/My slaves should dig the vineyard/And I would drink the wine”
“I’d have crowned Neaera’s curls/And filled my life with love affairs,/My house with dancing girls”
“I’d have sent my armies forth,/And dragged behind my chariots/The Chieftains of the North”
“I’d have piled my pyre on high,/And in a great red whirlwind/Gone roaring to the sky”
At the end, Chesterton laments the strange ascetic, the “poor old sinner” who “sins without delight”, who does “not have the faith, and will not have the fun”.
They already did. It was called the Soviet Union. Oh, and let us not forget North Korea.
If I were to use any god as a source for my beliefs, I would defiantly not use the Christian god, or at least take the Xtian god in a literal sense.
Here’s why.
Biblegod has slaughtered the firstborn children of the Egyptian nation.
Joshua 7:15
He kills all the living beings on earth except for a few.
Genesis 6:7, 17
He sends 2 virgins to get raped by a mob.
19:7-8
And many more brutal things done by this Biblegod can be read in Genesis. I would say more, but I have to go buy some groceries in a few minutes.
One does not need to be Jewish or Christian or a member of any other religion to follow the Golden Rule.
Here is something to think about from the Wikipedia article on the Ethic of Reciprocity (Golden Rule):
"Ethics of reciprocity is fundamental to Buddhism. This is partly due to the fact that Buddhism, unlike theistic religions, does not rely on divine revelation. Therefore, in Buddhism, all aspects of teaching are regarded as wisdom rather than supernaturally derived and are to be undertaken voluntarily rather than as "commandments."
Nietsche (1888): God is dead!
God (1900): Neitsche is dead.
Much of what the bible states is true of other religions and moral codes. I don't need a bible to tell me it's wrong to steal or murder. I already know that and our laws serve to reiterate it. But I also don't need the bible to tell me it's wrong to sleep with my girlfriend. There's no law against that and I certainly never lost any sleep over it (no pun intended).
Well, it’s a good rant, but on the whole we’re all better off if the atheists steal the crums from the Judaeo-Christian table than if they all conduct themselves like little Nietzsches.
Even spilt religion is better than none.
Without the constant, eternal, revealed word of God, what is a moral code? What is the foundation of morality? Without God there is no moral code. Or more accurately, there are many moral codes. If fact, with no God there are as many moral codes as there are people on the world at any given time. Without the fixed constant of God, Hitler was just as "moral" as Mother Theresa.
Anyway, back on topic, non-theists should recognize the many benefits derived from the Judeo-Christian moral code organically passed down over generations. The West did not expand and science did not blossom IN SPITE of this morality, but BECAUSE of this morality. Whether rooted in myth or true divinity, these morals have proven wildly successful in propagating the human species, and strengthening its dominion over nature. History was not shaped by one culture marching unopposed through time - history consisted of hundreds of cultures bickering and slaughtering eachother, suffering through disease and genocide, fighting tugs of war between liberty and authority, between order and anarchy, between abundance and poverty.
Through all that, cultures based upon the Judeo-Christian ethic emerged in front. Why? Whether the fount of this moral code is divine or profane, it is asinine to assume that it can be supplanted wholesale (or even blindly in part) without disastrous profane consequences. Memes, like genes, do not get continuously passed down by accident. There is a strong selective process at work that ferrets out the projections of these memes along different incarnations of fitness, iterated over thousands of years in a variety of conditions, throughout a sensual dance with genetics.
There are secular reasons to respect the traditions of success, and to endorse, at most, local gradual deviation from this tradition from generation to generation (allowing the fruit of that deviation to be used to judge the merit of the deviation itself, with local adoption of any deviation accorded organically, not centrally). This (the essence of classical conservatism) is in contrast to the mechanics of progressivism - where the non-immediate consequences of deviation are not taken into account. Under non-welfare state conditions, the vast majority of those endorsing such extreme deviations will not persist; in the welfare-state, those that conserve successful tradition are forced to insulate those making these inevitably poor decisions from negative consequences. Recognizing this should provide justification to even non-theists to not denigrate, and perhaps even to actively promote, explicit Judeo-Christian tradition.
Who says the Bible is archaic? If one takes away only one thing from reading it, it’s how remarkably little human personalities have changed in (at minimum) the last couple of thousand years.
I am an atheist, and am not at all bothered by what other’s say about atheists, or about me—ever. But for Christians, I am ashamed that this smut-mouthed pile of hubris, Giles, is tolerated for moment as a representative of Christianity. I would not allow anyone to us the kind of language and expressions used by this vile writer around anyone in my family.
I spend a lot of time defending Christianity, for example these two recently:
http://theautonomist.com/aaphp/articles/article80.php
http://theautonomist.com/aaphp/articles/article89.php
If this slime-ball represents Christianty, maybe I’ve made a mistake. Why aren’t any Christians saying this?
I normally would not bother to address the content of his disgusting tripe, but there is a philosophical issue that has been raised which is important. The fact is, moral codes are bad things—they actually discourage morality. I’ve explained exactly why this is the case and what is wrong with the 10 commandments, here:
http://theautonomist.com/autonomist/articles6/religion_ten.html
Even that is very sympathetic to the Christians and their views.
Since most people will not be interested enough in their morality or questions of import to read that, I’ll pose a question here.
Would murder, theft, and fornication be perfectly OK if God had not said they weren’t? If you could know that it would be wrong to murder, steal, and be sexually promiscuous even if God did not say so, there must be some objective reason why they are wrong. If there is no Objective reason they are wrong, then they are only wrong because of God’s whim, so are not absolute laws at all.
If you cannot say what is wrong with these things, than your so called “morality” is just blind obedience. The question is, what other things are you obeying blindly? The fact is, I think most people do understand what is wrong with these things, and why people who have never heard of or been influenced by any religion frequently live by these principles.
Hank
bump