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Old 08-20-2014, 08:13 PM
 
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This falls in line with bearing false witness. What would you do in the face of a lie?
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Old 08-20-2014, 08:20 PM
 
Location: In a little house on the prairie - literally
10,202 posts, read 7,893,738 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pinacled View Post
This falls in line with bearing false witness. What would you do in the face of a lie?
Goes back to my construct:
  • If it feels good, do it.
  • If it harms you or someone else, don't.

Did the supervisor weigh the greater harm? Perhaps.

Did the supervisor choose not to betray a confidence. Perhaps.

Did the supervisor lie? Perhaps.

Did the accuser lie? Perhaps.

You see, whether you play by the OT's ten commandments, or by my construct, the results are the same. Somebody may well have done someone else some harm, and there for it is morally wrong.

My construct does away with any deity being involved.
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Old 08-20-2014, 08:41 PM
 
8,669 posts, read 4,785,881 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cupper3 View Post
Goes back to my construct:
  • If it feels good, do it.
  • If it harms you or someone else, don't.

Did the supervisor weigh the greater harm? Perhaps.

Did the supervisor choose not to betray a confidence. Perhaps.

Did the supervisor lie? Perhaps.

Did the accuser lie? Perhaps.

You see, whether you play by the OT's ten commandments, or by my construct, the results are the same. Somebody may well have done someone else some harm, and there for it is morally wrong.

My construct does away with any deity being involved.
There is no perhaps she admitted to lying.
So what was her motivation?
I know the Answer. But i would like to hear you judgement on the matter.
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Old 08-20-2014, 08:55 PM
 
8,669 posts, read 4,785,881 times
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I hope your not justifying a lie?
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Old 08-20-2014, 08:58 PM
 
8,669 posts, read 4,785,881 times
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If there is no truth. there is no foundation for memory.
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Old 08-20-2014, 10:53 PM
 
Location: In a little house on the prairie - literally
10,202 posts, read 7,893,738 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pinacled View Post
There is no perhaps she admitted to lying.
So what was her motivation?
I know the Answer. But i would like to hear you judgement on the matter.
OK, so she lied.

She did harm to someone else. From my construct:
  • If it harms you or someone esle, don't do it.

It's immoral.

The construct is applicable.

Last edited by cupper3; 08-20-2014 at 11:24 PM..
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Old 08-21-2014, 06:55 AM
 
6,324 posts, read 4,307,929 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DewDropInn View Post
Let's see.... who are some of the groups that took away people's opinions and told them they had to follow along and do as they were told? The fascists, the Nazis and the commies! I've thought for a long time that fundamentalists are very comfy using totalitarian tactics. So far nothing in this thread is dissuading me from that belief.
Don't forget Al Qaeda, ISIS, the IRA, the KKK and many others.

Yeah, I've been alerting people to the fascistic, anti-freedom nature of religion since I first logged in here, and before that, as well. Nice to know that some folks are getting it - especially if they are Christian. In fact, any changes will have to come from the Christian community. I just wish there were more people preaching freedom rather than de facto world conquest.
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Old 08-21-2014, 07:35 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40 View Post
No rubbish is thinking you can be an atheist and still believe that evil exists and there is some ingrained sense of morality that all humans can know without any influence from God.
You're making the mistake of assuming that, when I say "evil," I'm using the term in a supernatural sense. I'm not. Evil in my eyes is just a term used to describe the pinnacle of despicable human behavior. It has nothing to do with Christianity or religion, gods, sin, the Bible, or any of that.

Secondly, Christianity has only been around for 3,000 years, and that's being generous and counting Judaism, as well. What do you suppose everyone was doing for the previous 197,000 years since modern homosapiens evolved onto the world's stage? We would have sinned ourselves into extinction if there was no morality before the Bible.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40 View Post
There is no basis.
I just gave you one.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40 View Post
We are just randomly created bags of DNA and chemicals in your world. You live, you die, and someone else takes up your place consuming resources.
Yeah, pretty much. The universe does not owe humanity some romantic notion of our own exceptionalism. We are what we are - and whether love is some contrived magical spell granted to us by a god or whether it is chemical reactions in our brains - we still feel love and it is just as real no matter what causes it.

Why you insist on having everything explained by supernatural forces, who can really know but you. I just wish our human brains would get past this obsession with the paranormal - because it is debilitating to our species.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40 View Post
You have a remarkable of twisting the truth and light of the gospel into something dark and foul.
The Bible says what it says. I haven't made up or invented even one single word when I have made my accusations. Everything is right there in the Bible staring us both in the face. The difference is that I don't look for ways to turn evil into good - to turn atrocity into justice - to turn wanton murder into God's "light and truth." What you see as dark and foul is your own brain starting to pick up on how incredibly sick and twisted the God you worship is actually portrayed.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40 View Post
The number one characteristic of sin is that it destroys.
Except the fundamentalist doesn't focus on the sins that actually destroy. They don't wage cultural wars against domestic violence, economic inequality, drug addiction, our lousy healthcare system, or anything that is actually important. The Catholic Church won't even defrock their kiddie fiddlers much less hand them over to the police. But ohhh, being gay, yeah, that's what REALLY matters. I suppose that's why the Council of Bishops sent a letter to all American nuns chastizing them for spending too much time helping the poor and sick and not enough time condemning homosexuality.

What I see are individual Christians doing good things because they are good people. They would be good people with or without your religion or your god. In fact, much of the good they do is done in contravention of your fundamentalist notions of right and wrong.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40 View Post
And if you believe that the Bible teaches subjugation of women to men then you need to study the Bible better and stop taking the easy surface reading definition.
I'll stop taking the easy surface definition the moment you do the same when it comes to verses dealing with "a man lying with a man as he would a woman." Practice what you preach, my friend.

In any event, I never once said the Bible teaches men to subjugate women. What I said is that men have used the Bible as justification to subjugate them regardless of what the Bible actually teaches. God laid out the punishment for eating the fruit quite clearly - that women will submit to their husbands. That was awesome news to misogynistic men the world over.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40 View Post
If Christians approached the Bible the way that you do, we wouldn't need preachers to teach the Word.
And we don't. We only ever needed preachers because most people couldn't read for many a century. Those days are behind us now.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40 View Post
But you will cherry pick a single verse and ignore verses like Galatians 3:26-29 which teaches that we are ALL equals in Christ.
I'm not the one who is ignoring Galatians. That fault lies squarely on the shoulders of our patriarchal society. I'm merely pointing it out.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40 View Post
But they seemed quite capable of creating an elaborate fiction spanning centuries, keeping the message consistent and including countless details of other cultures and interactions. Pretty impressive for a group of ignorant sheep herders huh?
No, not really ... given that the message hasn't been consistent. Not at all. In fact, the religion of Abraham has gone through several major modifications that drastically changed the nature of the religion. Judaism to Christianity. Christianity to Islam. Then there was the Mormon offshoot. Not to mention the Protestant Reformation, the Amish and the Menonites, and on and on.

But more to the point - Hinduism is a thousand years older than Judao-Christianity. Why isn't it getting the same kudos for doing the same thing you claim Christianity has done, but over a longer stretch of time?

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Originally Posted by jeffbase40 View Post
So they are either creative geniuses or their writings are carefully preserved historical facts. Either way, you're wrong. You have no proof, none whatsoever that God is a creation of man.
Why aren't the authors of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana creative geniuses? How about the authors of Gilgamesh? The Odyssey? The Iliad?

Literary genius does not automatically mean every word they pen is unilaterally true.
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Old 08-21-2014, 08:46 AM
 
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Originally Posted by Vizio View Post
So you think it's good because it works? I demonstrated how your system doesn't always work. Yet...you have no answer for it.

Again....why should we accept your opinion as a basis for morality? I'm sorry if that tires you...when you either admit you have no answer, or you answer it, I'll stop.
I'll be the first to admit that no, our system doesn't always work. That's why we need police, courts, and jails. No system works absolutely and if a system must work 100% effectively in order for it to be valid, well, I guess that means we can chuck the Bible into the trash right along with Secular Humanism.

Religious morality, however, doesn't reach those who don't believe in your religion. Therein lies its greatest weakness. That doesn't mean non-beleivers are bad people, but it DOES mean that they do not respond well to your dictatorial fascism. Being told to obey orders because some fictional supernatural entity from the Bronze Age tells us we have to or else is only going to be met with laughter and disdain - as well it should be.

Secular Humanism focuses on the idea of being moral because it ultimately makes the world a better place; it tells us that we should be moral because we want to be. It doesn't attempt to browbeat, threaten, and intimidate us into submission the way religion does, what, with it's threats of hellfire and its pronouncements of sin.

Religious morality is all about pleasing and placating God. It has very little to do with helping our fellow humans or trying to create a world in which all of us can co-exist. A lot of Christians lose sight of this reality because, here and there, the goals of Secular Humanism and the goals of Christianity converge.

But because the goal of religious morality is to please God, it allows (way too often) immorality to creep into the Christian rubric. It means we please God even if it means harming others - which is why some Christians can so easily rationalize away the atrocities in the Old Testament. Religious morality is not based on not doing harm to our fellow human beings. It is based on making sure God doesn't get mad.

The ultimate result of this kind of misguided morality is a system where our priorities are all out of whack. It is why the Mormons can spend $47 million on trying to prevent gay marriage in one specific state instead of using that money to pay for medical care for the poor - people who have no insurance yet need an operation or expensive treatment. After all, letting the poor suffer without adequate medical treatment won't anger God, but whoa boy, homosexuality certainly does.

Secular Humanism is superior precisely because there is no God in the equation. Sure, we're going to make mistakes and our morality won't always be as good as it ought to be. But over the centuries we have gotten a lot better at it ... and we've gotten better at it in spite of religion, not because of it. In fact, the majority of our immorality was caused by fanatical religious belief. Today, we gasp in horror at the idea of ISIS beheading that American journalist - but just a few hundred years ago, such a punishment was routine for blasphemy, heresy, and apostasy.

We've had to overcome religious zealotry and superstitious fear caused by imaginery gods in order to gradually become a better society. No, I don't want to hear about the bad things in society. We already know that there are bad people doing horrible things. But we shouldn't judge our society based on what the outliers do ... because our society doesn't tolerate those bad people doing horrible things. We arrest them, try them, and if found guilty, we imprison them. Some states will even execute them. It's not the criminal element that defines a society. Rather, it is how that society handles the criminal element that should be analyzed.

Not that long ago, the Christian leadership WAS the criminal element - at least they were by today's standards. Only through secular law have we been able to put a stop to state-sanctioned torture and executions based on violations of religious law; only secular law protects atheists, gays, feminists, and other groups who defy the will of the dominant religion. Our secular government had to abolish slavery in spite of the Bible.

Today, the big danger is the loss of our freedoms. Given the penchant for religious morality to insist upon censorship, bans, the limiting of choices, and this arrogant idea that the clergy should decide for us what we can do and see, morality has gone off the rails. Once again, it's all about pleasing God and not about making our world a better place to live in - and it goes without saying that those two goals are quite often NOT compatible.
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Old 08-21-2014, 12:59 PM
 
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD View Post
Ah but I DO have an answer. Morality comes from our Creator's purpose for our existence. It is our purpose that defines morality. Everything that is constructive to our purpose is moral. Everything that is destructive to our purpose is immoral. Simple. We either have a purpose for existing or we don't. If we do . . . IT MUST determine morality. I believe we do. You probably believe we do. This eliminates all the caprice in the silly idea that it is God's whim that decides what is or is not moral. All we need to do is determine WHAT our purpose for existing IS and we have all the authority we need for determining what is or is not moral.
So then you think the source of morality is God?
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