Brian Peacock wrote:
Seth wrote:Brian Peacock wrote:Now, if you think that morality is the preserve of religion then you're likely to assume that atheists are going to be lacking some necessary moral component that only religion can provide, and as a result you may feel that atheism is open to the charge of immorality.
I don't, so we can dispense with this argument.
OK. So you don't think atheism is open to the charge of immorality. Good, we agree on that. Oh hang on...
No, I don't think morality is the preserve of religion, which is the strawman premise upon which you base the rest of your argument.
Brian Peacock wrote:
...but you also declare religion (and here one presumes that means any and all religions regardless of content) is beneficial to society 'by a substantial margin' because rejecting religious claims and assertions leads to a position which is 'filled up with ignorance, bias, intolerance, bigotry, hate and immorality
One presumes incorrectly and therefore your second strawman premise is fallacious.
Brian Peacock wrote:
You can't have it both ways here; one one hand agreeing that disbelieving god-claims is nothing to do with morality while on the other berate those who disbelieve god-claims for their 'ignorance, bias, intolerance, bigotry, hate and immorality'.
Your argument is a fallacious conclusion based upon two fallacious strawman premises and is therefore non sequitur.
Atheism isn't a replacement for religion
On this we agree wholeheartedly. Atheism isn't a replacement for religion,
it is a religion, at least as far as self-professed and vocal Atheists who wield it like the Sword of Justice are concerned.
--as if religiosity is the default state of humanity--it's merely a response to religious claims, assertions and insistences.
Well, religiosity is pretty much the default state of humanity. So sayeth at least 80 percent of the planetary population, and I would argue that number is actually quite close to 100 percent of adults. However, what you just wrote proves my thesis that Atheism is a religion. It is the religion of denial of theism, not merely "a lack of belief in god or gods." In other words, self-professed atheism is what is known as
"explicit atheism", which is defined as "the absence of theistic belief due to a conscious rejection of it."
Brian Peacock wrote:
While you continue to talk up the virtues of religion in the round and of how religion provides a moral compass or brake then you continue to affirm that religiosity consists within a state of default rectitude.
And why should I not do so?
You make no reference to which religion has a valid claim to moral truth of course, you just go on as if being religious is enough and that being non-religious just isn't good enough. You also affirm the notion that religiosity embodies some default state of moral rectitude whenever you insist that religious people who do bad things no longer qualify as properly religious. Hence, it would seem, that being good and doing good things is all about religion and being religious.
No, you've erected yet another strawman argument. I'm saying that being religious is the most frequently used and most effective source of guidance for those who wish to be good and do good things. Yes, it is a generalization and we can obviously see that there are differences in the definition of "good" and "morality" among different forms of religion, but it is hard to deny that religion is a pervasive influence in human culture and society and has been since the beginning of mankind. There is no reason to believe that something that has persisted for so many millennia in so many different forms is inherently "bad" for humanity. Simple evolutionary logic would seem to destroy any such presumption.
The real question you seem to be intimating at is whether "religion" means "one universal set of beliefs that is always beneficial, never harmful and never harmfully distorted." It doesn't. Part of the problem of arguing religion with atheists is that they persist in misunderstanding and misusing the relevant terms. I've pointed this out innumerable times here, but I'll do it again: Religion is not
what you believe, it is
how you go about practicing what you believe in your life.
Atheists almost always lump every sort of belief other than their own (whatever those may be) into the false definition that holds that "religion" means "belief in god or gods." Doing so is intellectual sloth and weakness precisely because there are so many different kinds of religion and sets of beliefs and practices that comprise "religion" as religion is defined.
But Atheists don't want to be selective and argue specifics. They don't want to, for example, criticize only Catholic opposition to abortion and leave out the Catholic church's dedication to charitable works worldwide, they just want to bash Catholicism and Catholics wholesale because they deride the fundamental premise of Catholicism, which is that God exists. Atheists consistently throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.
Contrary to your false claim "you just go on as if being religious is enough and that being non-religious just isn't good enough," which is not at all true, I have never argued that religion (by which you almost certainly mean "theism") has a lock on moral truth. What I DO claim is that atheism provides NO moral guidance or truth at all.
Brian Peacock wrote:Again, you are criticising an absence of belief because you assume it should entail a replacement for (any and/or all) religion; that an atheistic perspective should, at the very least, comprise a specific moral alternative to (any and/or all) religion.
It should provide some alternative for moral guidance if it proposes to deconstruct the moral guidance structure that has existed and functioned reasonably well for many thousands of years, yes.
Brian Peacock wrote:
You're certainly not happy with the fact that atheists are free to come to their own moral conclusions about things - what atheism must entail, you imply, is some blind spot or lack of understanding as to the proper bounds of good and bad because religion isn't there to point one in the right direction.
The evidence of history shows that Atheists cannot be trusted to concoct their own independent moral code and that doing so leads to death and destruction. At least one hundred million people in the last century alone were killed by Atheists and their self-made moral codes. Now, you are certainly going to argue that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the other Atheists of Marxism didn't kill all those people "in the name of atheism," but you'd be wrong up front because that's exactly what they did, and you'd be wrong all the rest of the way through because it was their atheism, their rejection of existing religiously-based morality, that allowed them to create their own moral code that they used to justify the slaughter of a hundred million people and counting. Venezuelans are starving to death today because of Marxist Atheist moral depravity.
So, demonstrably Atheism is not an acceptable substitute for pretty much ANY religion on the face of the earth now or which ever has been because Atheism has provably killed more people in the last century that every religion on earth has killed in all of history.
So yeah, I'm not satisfied to let Atheists do whatever the hell they please and make up any moral code that suits them, in large part because one of the problems with Atheists is that they have one principle religious tenet: attack and destroy the religious beliefs of others. They have no tenets or constraints on their philosophy or actions that keeps them from doing what Stalin did and I see whispers of that sort of terror in this and other Atheist fora all the time.
At least the secular humanists have a philosophy and tenets that they try to adhere to and that they announce to the world. Atheists make stuff up as they go, individually, and then try to morally justify their morally reprehensible actions by claiming that they are entitled to do such things because some religionist did something similar a thousand, or two thousand years ago.
Atheism, as a philosophy, is as I have said, an empty vessel that any Atheist can fill with whatever bile...or morally acceptable...behavior it suits him to fill it with, without any sort of constraint or moral guidance. As I've also said, even the secular humanists who announce a theme of moral guidance draw DIRECTLY from Christian theology in doing so. But not Atheists, and therefore, having demonstrated how untrustworthy they are, are not to be trusted.
Brian Peacock wrote: Now, every religion cannot be morally equal or equivalent to every other religion can it(?) - so again this clearly implies that merely counting yourself among the religious acts as some sort of pre-condition to moral rectitude and, therefore, being non-religious predisposes one to moral laxity or turpitude. Whichever way you try and dress it up you continue to assume that being religious is a more morally beneficial, benign or superior position to being non-religious
Religion is only a 'pre-condition" to moral rectitude insofar as the existence of religions, and their belief/practice sets, has been of proven social value for many thousands of years. Some particular belief/practice sets, such as Christianity and yes, even Islam, have longer records of social value (yes, even Islam is socially beneficial to Muslims, though not so much to non-Muslims) than others, which is why they have dominant positions in the spectrum of belief/practice sets of religion.
One is not inherently immoral
because one does not believe in god or gods, but history proves that those who do not subscribe to some sort of time-tested belief/practice set that provides a generally acceptable moral structure are highly likely to violate the norms of human morality because they have not been so guided or because they have consciously rejected that guidance. Such people are extremely dangerous and are generally defined as being sociopathic. Humanity prefers that individuals are provided moral guidance early on in order to reduce the potential for antisocial behavior and religion is the very best way to provide both the moral guidance and the "carrot" that induces proper moral behavior.
If you believe that God will be disappointed, or that you will lose out on a heavenly afterlife, or will be punished by God if you violate the societal moral code you are much more likely to adhere to moral strictures and thus not be a danger to society than if you believe that your own autonomy and decisions are supreme and superior to any others and that nobody can tell you what you can or cannot do. And societies have a perfect right to do everything they can to prevent members of the community from acting on those narcissistic presumptions. Religion is generally speaking both a good way to induce proper social behavior and a good way to educate on what that proper social behavior is. That's why it persists in human society.
You would not argue that children should not be taught science and mathematics because doing so interferes with their free will to be ignorant would you?
Seth wrote:As for what Atheists do in the name of Atheism, there are plenty of examples of Atheists acting exactly like the religious zealots many of them actually are and using Atheism as a weapon against their enemies. That happens here on an almost daily basis. Of course not all atheists are Atheists, and some Atheists are more religiously zealous than others.
Brian Peacock wrote:The thing is mate, if you going to declare by fiat that religious people who do bad things in the name of their religion are not really, truly, actually, properly religious then I can just as easily dismiss the atheists who do bad things in the name of atheism as not really, truly, actually, properly atheist.
Except you can't, because whereas religious belief/practice sets have rules about proper social behavior (moral codes) and those who violate the strictures of a particular belief/practice set can easily be characterized as "apostates" or non-believers as a result of the rejection of those teachings, Atheists have no moral code to begin with because atheism provides no moral code or anything else at all. Therefore, an Atheist cannot violate atheistic moral strictures because Atheism has no moral strictures to begin with. And therein lies the problem with Atheists and their religion. They get to do whatever they want and still be Atheists. That being the case, then it's perfectly logical and rational to point out that Atheist religious zealots (zealous explicit atheists) can and do do evil things in the name of their religion and are therefore representatives of that religion...to the same degree that you would argue that a KKK member who lynches a black person isn't not a KKK member just because the KKK has no actual written commandment telling members to go out and lynch blacks. Or, to put it a different way, the argument used by Atheists like pErvin and others when they attack and disparage Catholics because a thousand years ago some deviant Catholic priests in Spain tortured people during the Inquisition is doing exactly the same thing that you accuse me of doing: using a broad-brush generalization applied to large groups of people based on the behavior of a few deviants.
Brian Peacock wrote:
If an atheist does a bad thing then the responsibility for that lies with them, just as it does when a religious person does a bad thing. Yes, some atheists have done some very, very bad things, but then again so have some religious people
That's not an argument, that is the fallacy of "Two wrongs make a right."
Brian Peacock wrote: - the main difference here is that the non-religious don't have the opportunity to justify or excuse extreme turpitude on the basis that it was the bidding of the figurehead of their mythology, nor indeed do the non-religious get to argue that the really bad thing they actually did was really a good thing because it was religiously inspired, endorsed, or authorised.
Or, as I say above, they argue that the really bad thing they did, like killing a hundred million people, was a really good thing because it wasn't religiously inhibited and they were free to make up whatever moral code suited their deviant objectives...and did. Stalin didn't try to justify his genocide using religion, he justified it using atheism.
Seth wrote:Brian Peacock wrote: In other words, you're effectively saying that good can only be verified and validated in terms of religion and that atheists must therefore be bad for rejecting religion.
No, that's not what I'm saying
at all. And that is why the rest of your argument is essentially a strawman, but I'll address it anyway.
Brian Peacock wrote:You have, you are, and you continue to do so.
No, I do not.
Brian Peacock wrote: The evidence of which is in your own words below when you assert that one's moral outlook should be enhanced by understanding religion and choosing which "religion's beliefs and moral guidance are likely to be useful to you." This clearly implies that morality is best verified and validated in terms of religion.
Er, saying that morality is
best verified and validated in terms of religion is entirely different from saying "
can only be verified and validated in terms of religion
and that atheists must therefore be bad for rejecting religion." That I have NEVER said. That is a concoction of yours which you have repeatedly falsely attributed to me in the form of a strawman argument.
Seth wrote:Nobody said religious faith was easy...
Brian Peacock wrote:I certainly didn't say that.
I know, I said "nobody said..." The point however is that the canon of moral teachings provided by all the world's religions throughout all of humanity's history is not something that wise people simply reject out of hand because they dispute the existence of the putative deity who either authored it or upon whom it is based. But this is exactly what Atheists do, they reject all moral teachings based in theology simply and only
because they don't believe in the root-proposition of the existence of deity. They reject it all and castigate and demean those who obey those moral strictures merely because those people believe in the deity. They don't look at any of the good that such belief/practice sets provide, or the good that the individuals who believe do, or the benefits to society that such beliefs provide as a result of what may be a false, but still useful and beneficial belief. They ridicule believers and would deny those people the solace and comfort they obtain from those beliefs, and that is the cruelest and most evil thing of all that Atheists do to other people they don't even know. They wish to extirpate theistic practices from society, regardless of the emotional and social costs of doing so for no better reason than they think that believers are "delusional" and they don't want to have to look at or hear any expressions of religious faith anywhere. I see it all the time here where the intolerant bigots of Atheism demand that religious practice be restricted to one's private home and that ANY public display of religion ought to be outlawed. And those are the arguments of Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot, three of the most brutal, murderous and evil human beings in human history. That's the company that such Atheists associate with and I find that to be despicable and abhorrent behavior whenever it rears its ugly head. And that sort of rhetoric is proof absolute of everything I claim about the absence of moral rectitude Atheism supports and justifies.
Seth wrote:... The place to start, I suppose, is by carefully educating yourself in the fine points of various religions so you can intelligently decide whether or not any particular religion's beliefs and moral guidance are likely to be useful to you. Willful ignorance of religions of the world using the specious excuse that you don't want to be polluted by religiosity is the last refuge of the inferior mind.
As I prove, it is possible to know and understand a religion quite well without, as Aristotle put it "accepting the idea."
Brian Peacock wrote:Again, to assume that the rejection of religious authority and doctrine entails an abandonment of moral reasoning, because the non-religious 'don't want to be polluted by religiosity', is to assume that a conclusion about a specific species of claim does, should, or must entails a particular moral outlook or code. All one can say about an atheists values is that they are not defined or authorised by this-or-that religion.
[/quote]
Indeed, and therein lies the entirety of the problem with Atheist values. They have none. What values they have they not only either form sua sponte or they draw from other sources,
but not from sources defined or authorized by this-or-that religion. In other words, they reject the canon of moral teaching created over millennia by all of the religions of the world and which to one degree or another are the basis of the moral codes of at least 80 percent of the human population of the planet
simply because those moral commandments originate in theistic philosophy. A more irrational rejection of tens of thousands of years of human learning and evolution I cannot imagine.
So where do Atheists find their values and morals? Who knows? We know it's not from religion, or so you claim, and therefore we must conclude that their morals have no objection to murder, theft, or any of the other moral wrongs human religious moral codes have deemed morally unacceptable. So what's left? Narcissism, nihilism, anarchism and sociopathy I suppose.
So you see why Atheists are not trusted. They have no stated source of morality that others can examine to see if their moral code is a socially acceptable one. They can just make it up as they go and do whatever it pleases them to do because they reject all religiously-based moral codes and make up their own "secular" moral codes.
And you think anybody else should trust them or grant them political power? Didn't work out so well for Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot's victims now did it?
Seth wrote:But the one thing that Atheists are notorious for is their gross and deliberate willful ignorance of the religions and people they attack and claim moral and intellectual superiority over. And nowhere is that more true than here.
What you ignoring of course is that great many atheists are not ignorant of religion, having previously been fully paid up, educated members of religious groups and communities.
My empirical observation is that if this is the case, then the vast majority of them are as intellectually dishonest as it's possible to be because with the very, very rare exception they blatantly and obviously falsify, lie and mischaracterize, in particular, Christian theology. They build armies of strawmen and misquote the bible with abandon. So no, I don't believe you.
Brian Peacock wrote:For my part I was brought up and educated as a Catholic,
Which doesn't explain your often false statements about Christian theology.
Brian Peacock wrote:
others here were active members of evangelical communities, etc,
There's no one quite so willing to lie about religion than a person who's rejected the faith.
Brian Peacock wrote:
and some were never true believers in the first place of course.
Indeed.
Brian Peacock wrote:Nonetheless, it is far too easy, far too simple, and far too self serving to discount and discredit what atheists might have to say about religion on the basis that atheists are wilfully ignorant of religion, religions, religious practices, or the nature of religious obligations. In effect it is exactly like saying that one must first be religious in order to legitimately critique, challenge, discuss, or object to religious claims and assertions.
No, one must be
educated about a religion in order to
rationally, logically and eruditely debate it.
As I believe I clearly said, education
about religion is not at all the same thing as being a believer
in that religion, and I am the perfect example of that fact. I am not a Catholic, or a Christian for that matter. I'm just much better educated than most of the people in this forum are
about Christianity because I chose to educate and inform myself before undertaking debate from that side of the issue.
It is my observation that there are some here who are indeed willfully ignorant about Christianity precisely because I've been debating here so long, and have imparted so much true information only to see the same lies, calumnies, falsities and mischaracterizations repeated time and time and time again that there is simply no other conclusion to draw other than willful ignorance or deliberate lies as provocation (trolling), which I know to be the case with more than a few members of this forum.
This unwillingness to engage in honest debate, and the unadulterated intellectual dishonesty and frankly cruel and irredeemable slurs hurled by Atheists here is proof absolute of my claims of the potential for moral depravity flowing from atheism and they vindicate the position held by many that Atheists should never be allowed anywhere near the seats of power in any society because they cannot be trusted.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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