It's a myth that moral decay exists in America - article (hell, quote)
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For the 113th time, jeffy - I'm not an atheist. Not that you're ever troubled by things like facts.
Jeff has a hard time understanding that most Christians don't believe half the propaganda he doles out on this forum. In Jeff's eyes if you're not an evangelical, you must be an atheist.
Jeff has a hard time understanding that most Christians don't believe half the propaganda he doles out on this forum. In Jeff's eyes if you're not an evangelical, you must be an atheist.
He has trouble with all sorts of facts. He keeps flogging the "atheists killed millions" BS and avoids consideration of the many correctives to that view for example.
The more basic problem with his thinking is that he believes that the success or failure of a society has to do with believing the correct dogma (which of course he defines) rather than being something that has to do with actual actions and the actual real world benefits and harms that arise from them. And to the extent these things can be measured (odds of dying in war today vs earlier periods, plummeting urban violence, rising life expectancies, falling incidence of slavery / indentured servitude, etc) he is not interested in facts and figures that run contrary to his dystopian narrative. Not only does he miss the real positives as a result, he misidentifies the real threats to civil society, which are not the wrath of god or the doctrines of demons, it is, as usual ... privileged asshats doing their thing without effective and mindful opposition.
Jeff has a hard time understanding that most Christians don't believe half the propaganda he doles out on this forum. In Jeff's eyes if you're not an evangelical, you must be an atheist.
My "propaganda" is aligned with some of the largest Christian denominations. Millions of Christians agree with me. In your little online bubble here, you can be king but that's not reality. There are plenty of atheists on this forum and when someone launches the exact same attacks against my faith, what am I suppose to think? Sure sounds atheistic to me. You know, you could show some freaking courtesy for a change and tell me upfront what you DO BELIEVE for a change.
He has trouble with all sorts of facts. He keeps flogging the "atheists killed millions" BS and avoids consideration of the many correctives to that view for example.
The more basic problem with his thinking is that he believes that the success or failure of a society has to do with believing the correct dogma (which of course he defines) rather than being something that has to do with actual actions and the actual real world benefits and harms that arise from them. And to the extent these things can be measured (odds of dying in war today vs earlier periods, plummeting urban violence, rising life expectancies, falling incidence of slavery / indentured servitude, etc) he is not interested in facts and figures that run contrary to his dystopian narrative. Not only does he miss the real positives as a result, he misidentifies the real threats to civil society, which are not the wrath of god or the doctrines of demons, it is, as usual ... privileged asshats doing their thing without effective and mindful opposition.
How ironic that you are doing the very thing that you accuse me of doing here. You carve out on your own perspective while ignoring facts about other aspects of society. The FACT is you can laser focus on a any period in time and find some segment of the population that got screwed. Ignore that the 1960s was a time of progress, economic wealth, and positive sentiment and just focus on the civil rights era and Vietnam. Then you can claim people in the 60s were immoral.
The claim that we are living in a morally superior modern period only shows me that atheists don't fully buy into their own garbage beliefs. In the atheist world, evolution gives us ALL the same brains and wiring. So people who owned slaves should have had the exact same internal ability to see right and wrong. So why couldn't they see the error of their ways? If you want to say it was the culture influence then fine. That means mr. morally superior atheist that if you lived in the 1800s, you would have owned slaves too.
All aspects need to be gauged and weighed. I can match your positive points with things like rising suicide rate, more extreme youth violence such as school shooting and murdering parents, online bullying, teachers having sex with students, rise in sexual crimes, child porn, more people and more people living off the government, and greater social isolation.
My "propaganda" is aligned with some of the largest Christian denominations. Millions of Christians agree with me. In your little online bubble here, you can be king but that's not reality. There are plenty of atheists on this forum and when someone launches the exact same attacks against my faith, what am I suppose to think? Sure sounds atheistic to me. You know, you could show some freaking courtesy for a change and tell me upfront what you DO BELIEVE for a change.
Ignore that the 1960s was a time of progress, economic wealth, and positive sentiment and just focus on the civil rights era and Vietnam. Then you can claim people in the 60s were immoral.
No, cherry picking negatives (many without supporting evidence) is what you do for 2016.
No one is claiming that the Bad Old Days were purely bad. Only that there are consistent trends such that important aspects of it were worse than 2016, rather than better.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
The claim that we are living in a morally superior modern period only shows me that atheists don't fully buy into their own garbage beliefs. In the atheist world, evolution gives us ALL the same brains and wiring. So people who owned slaves should have had the exact same internal ability to see right and wrong. So why couldn't they see the error of their ways? If you want to say it was the culture influence then fine. That means mr. morally superior atheist that if you lived in the 1800s, you would have owned slaves too.
I do not flatter myself to think that I would have been likely to rise above the moral tenor of any prior era. I might well have owned slaves if I had been born in the US South or in Britain before they abolished slavery. That is equally true of you, except that you would have twisted the scripture to "support" what you were doing.
We all had the same brains but that doesn't mean we knew / understood as much or had as much moral clarity. Humanity has been expanding its knowledge and experience base since the dawn of man.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
All aspects need to be gauged and weighed. I can match your positive points with things like rising suicide rate, more extreme youth violence such as school shooting and murdering parents, online bullying, teachers having sex with students, rise in sexual crimes, child porn, more people and more people living off the government, and greater social isolation.
I already addressed school shooting "in context" as you would say. Children murdering parents and the like are nothing new, only better reported and acknowledged. Online bullying couldn't have existed before the Internet but bullying of all kinds certainly did. I cited facts and figures about the probability of dying in wars and the relative significance of school shootings to child mortality. If you want to do the same then we can have a substantive conversation about the trends you are claiming and sure, you'll find some things that are worse that aren't just examples of confirmation bias. What I'm curious about is why you want and need to focus on those and support a dystopian narrative. It sounds like the same tired excuses we hear from politicians all the time about why needed change is too difficult or expensive or impractical.
What you characterize as "people living [subtext: 'mooching'] off the government paints it all as indolence and laziness and 100% bad. Do the socialist snowplows come and plow streets for free in the winter? Do the government police and firefighters respond when you summon them? Did you get a free K-12 public school education? If you die will your wife accept the standard token payout of $255 in survivor's benefits? When you retire will you "live off" Social Security, or gallantly turn it down rather than "live off the government"? So let's not even go down that road, claiming that agreeing as a society to take on some things as a group responsibility is somehow a creeping evil and that groping to hold onto what's yours and denying that you are your brother's keeper is not.
The claim that we are living in a morally superior modern period only shows me that atheists don't fully buy into their own garbage beliefs. In the atheist world, evolution gives us ALL the same brains and wiring. So people who owned slaves should have had the exact same internal ability to see right and wrong. So why couldn't they see the error of their ways? If you want to say it was the culture influence then fine. That means mr. morally superior atheist that if you lived in the 1800s, you would have owned slaves too.
Maybe you could ask an actual atheist before assuming the things you do. Because I would argue that the very evolution of morality is evidence against the existence of an objective morality from an unchanging god.
Police are the bad guys now. people telling other people that they have to pay for people's children that do not know how to raise children. People that think its ok for people to cross a boarder and then we have to support them and their family.
But morals? no, I think most people are good people.
rising suicide rate, more extreme youth violence such as school shooting and murdering parents, online bullying, teachers having sex with students, rise in sexual crimes, child porn, more people and more people living off the government, and greater social isolation.
So if atheists are a tiny, tiny minority.................................then it must be believers who are committing all the things that you listed above?
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