Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
Remember the story of the scorpion and the frog?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
From an animal kingdom perspective, the scorpion is only doing what it does according to its own kind. Some animals are agressive, some are passive. Some animals even attack their own children, some are nurturing. Some animals will fight and kill each other. Some animals work together in groups.
Yet there is one thing I see in common here. No one looks at those actions and says, wow those creatures sure are immoral. Atheists want me to believe that we are nothing more than another creation, born out of time and chance. We are just another link in evolution, another branch on the giant tree of evolution. And yet if we did any of those things, we would be see as evil, grossly immoral and cruel. So the atheist tries to convince me that I am an animal because we share so many similarities with other species and they point to things like how dogs express real human emotions. We are animals because animals are like us.
I recently watched a documentary about illegal gambling in the US. It took a look into the dark world of dog fighting. In one scene, the trainers take what appears to be a gentle dog wagging his tail and place him in front of his mother. So messed up. They use some tactics to agitate the dog and suddenly they turn on each other. Killing machines going after their own family. So much for being human like. Man's best friend can be manipulated and programmed into something entirely different. Because animals don't view actions in terms of morality like we do. They don't weigh consequences even though we do have some fairly intelligent species out there.
You can't have it both ways. If we are animals then we should be acting like animals. Behaving according to our preprogrammed nature and instinct, not conflicted in areas of morality. |
This is just a dumb premise all around so I'm not going to waste a lot of time responding to it.
Plus, the idea of atheist morality has been done to death and I'm still waiting for someone to even challenge my arguments much less refute them.
What I will bother saying about this is as follows:
Whether we believe in your Bronze Age desert tribal wargod of the Hebrews or not, we still have to live in this world - and we'd rather not have to live in some apocalyptic Mad Max world with roving rape gangs, wanton murder and violence, and a constant, never-ending fear that you're going to end up geeked or your stuff stolen.
Morality is simply beneficial for society and civilization. Even if we were to assume that animals do not have morals - which I actually don't agree with - notice how animals don't have civilizations?
I know people like you are trying so very hard to hijack and then kidnap morality like religion does with everything else.
But I'm still waiting for someone to tell me why authoritarian morality is better than secular morality? Why is it better for an entity that is not a part of our society to tell us what our morality should be? Or, put another way, do you think it would be beneficial to your life if the mayor of your town set the rules for your household? Would it help you if the mayor told you what your bedtime was, what to have for breakfast and when to have it and how long you have to eat it? If the mayor tells you what furniture to buy, what pictures to hang on your wall, what you and your wife are allowed to do on date night - including setting rules about your sexual habits? He'll tell you how to raise your children and what values to teach them, what televison shows you can watch, the temperature of your thermostat, how much health insurance to buy ... yeah, you get the idea, right?
Now, authoritarian morality might seem like an awesome way to go so long as the mayor's morality and rules correspond with what you already want.
But what if you have to be at work at 7am, but the mayor says you can't go to bed until 3am? What if you're allergic to eggs, but the mayor says it is immoral to eat anything other than eggs at breakfast? What if the mayor demands that you raise your kids to be atheists instead of Christians? What if the mayor says you're only allowed to hang pictures of Kim Jung-un and Stalin on your wall?
Well, hopefully by now you're beginning to see the problem with authoritarian morality - especially when that authoritarian dictator doesn't actually live within your society. Oh, I know what you're going to say: "But God is, well, God and he doesn't have to be a part of our society to know and understand it!"
Sure - except God has proven time and time again that he has no understanding of human society. For instance, instead of simply declaring slavery a sin and stamping it out completely in the Bible, he instead opted for a big list of complicated rules regarding slaves which, of course, favored Hebrews above everyone else making the rules exceedingly racist on top of being flagrantly immoral.
By the same token, God never bothered to declare such things as torture, pedophilia, and other heinous acts a sin, either. Nor did he grant women equality with men which resulted in further awful immoral rules such as forcing a rape victim to marry her rapist whether she wants to or not.
This is the kind of sick and twisted society one gets when that society allows a dictator to declare what its morals will be. What's more is that one never knows from one day to the next if that moral code will stay the same. On a whim, the celestial dictator can change his mind and decide murdering non-believers is perfectly fine ... and why not. God already has rules that would result in the death of 95% of modern Western people. Once you murder everyone who has committed adultery, worked on the Sabbath, and spent their adolescence rebelling against their parents, you'd have practically no one left.
The bottom line is pretty simple: Every society must find the moral compass that is right for themselves. Ideally, this morality would hinge upon the concept of human well-being. Now, do I think there is an objective morality? Yes, in fact, I do, but which moral ideals or objective is rather narrow in scope.
This comes from the fact that, regardless of society, time period, culture, religion, or nation, everyone is still human. As such, there are a number of things that ALL humans do not want to have happen to them. Those things include, but are not limited to, murder, rape, torture, wrongful imprisonment, being lied to, being betrayed, having pain of any kind inflicted upon them, etc.
In most cases, the committal of those acts can be considered objectively immoral regardless of what a society things is right for themselves. This is because, in almost all cases, the inflicting of immoral acts within a society is limited to a specific minority group living within that society rather than those acts applying to society as a whole. In other words, it might be fine to kill Jews in Nazi Germany, but that doesn't mean you can just murder your next door Aryan neighbor because you want his radio.
And finally, as if I haven't beaten this dead horse enough, if all you're doing is following orders, then you're not actually being moral. You're just ... following orders. I cannot believe how many times I have heard Christians do mental gymnastics trying to defend indefensible positions because their arbitrary celestial dictator MUST be correct even though he isnt.
I have even heard African American Christians defend slavery because it's allowed in the Bible. I have heard people openly admit that they'd kill their own children if God ordered them to do it. And the list goes on. It just goes to show you indubitably just how immoral and disgustingly sociopathic authoritarian "morality" can cause one to be.
A society or civilization is just like any organism - it intuitively knows what it needs to survive. Granted, intuition is not always correct such as the case of Nazi Germany or Pol Pot's Cambodia. But intuition has gotten it right far more than it has gotten it wrong - which is why no society on earth has ever condoned free-for-all murder, theft, rape, and other such things.
Why does morality matter even if we're animals? Well, because we are thinking animals. We aren't ruled by instinct. We are able to puzzle out what is moral and what is not which is precisely why morality has gotten steadily better over the centuries, not worse (despite the occassional slippage in some areas of the world).
There was a time, for instance, when simply stealing a slice of bread to prevent starvation could land you on a table in the town square where priests - yes, priests - would rip the criminal open and remove organs one at a time until the poor sod died. What's worse is that the entire town would turn out to watch this horror take place, with fathers putting their sons on their shoulders so their 4 and 5 year-olds could get a better view of a man being torn apart while still alive.
These days? We fret about fake violence on a television set and wonder how it affects children. And this is usually "clean" violence. Someone getting shot or beaten up. You're likely not going to see the kind of horrific torture that occurred a thousand yearsa ago being recreated on television. Now imagine today exposing your children to someone - criminal or not - being brutally tortured, savaged, and ripped apart slowly. The horrible screaming. The stench of blood. The puke-inducing smell of an open intestine. The sound of skin ripping open. Yeah, I bet you're just itching to have your 5 year-old watch that - live and in person with the victim being a real human being and not an actor with fake blood on his shirt.
As you can plainly see, morality has gotten better over the years - and this is in spite of religion, not because of it. We've had to move away from the barbarism of ancient holy books in order to reach this stage of morality. Otherwise, as I said, there would hardly be anyone left alive anywhere. Just the priests who were always above the law.
Hence why the entire premise is ridiculous prima facie. I really don't understand why you people keep bringing this up. I know every now and then you'll run across some new tidbit of information that you think you can build a "gotchya" argument around.
But it just never pans out for you, does it.
Nope.
So how about you give up the idea of trying to prove that non-believers are immoral or ammoral because we don't have a celestial dictator telling us what our moral compass ought to be. Because the only way Christians can co-exist in modern society is to ignore most of the morality found in the Bible. Therefore appealing to it as some kind of guide to morality is just insane. Barking mad.
Get it yet?
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