Do Athiests have morals?

[Mohammad Nur Syamsu]

Yes this is quite true. Psychopathy is often genetic--the part of the brain responsible for empathy is significantly smaller as shown by an mri. Transcranial magnetic stimulation can also disable this part of the brain leading to psychopathic tendencies. Assuming God created us and guided our development, God is clearly not an objectively moral entity by creating and allowing for psychopaths to exist. 1robin has also failed to show evidence of any kind that broken homes cause psychopathy, and since he made that argument he has the burden of proof, which is in addition to the fact that the argument doesnt stand up very well. I have

People who don't understand free will, shouldn't be doing science about people's behaviour.

 

[serp777]

People who don't understand free will, shouldn't be doing science about people's behaviour.

You don't understand free will. Nobody understands free will. Nobody can even definitively say that we have free will, or that we dont have a limited form of free will which only occurs sometimes. Either way just because people dont understand free will doesn't mean they shouldnt be doing behavioral psychology. There's no justification to get rid of something just because you dont understand the great power and benefits of the sciences which explore behavior. Empirical data can give great insights on free will by utilizing behavioral studies and science. I think you have made a very naive, baseless assertion that reflects a profound misunderstanding of science and psychology. So i will just say that they should be doing science like that to learn more while you should read up on the amazing and profound insights of behavioral sciences. Not to mention the vast benefits.

 

[Mohammad Nur Syamsu]

Either way just because people dont understand free will doesn't mean they shouldnt be doing behavioral psychology.

Ridiculous. Ever heared of elections and things where people choose? Psychology which ignores choosing is just pseudoscience.

 

[serp777]

Ridiculous. Ever heared of elections and things where people choose? Psychology which ignores choosing is just pseudoscience.

Clear you're quite ignorant of a great number of things about behavioral psychology. Behavioral psychology has lead to huge advances in election marketing. The biggest determinant in who gets voted into office now is how much money the politician spends on marketing. That's buying votes--thats not free will by any stretch.

Again, nobody understands free will. making a decision does not mean free will; you've made a huge fallacy . Even if you think you made a decision of free will, it was influenced by many factors like your friends and family, the ads you've seen, etc. Its very likely that free will is extremely limited.

Way to ignore the rest of my argument too.Finally, not understanding does not mean ignoring. Plus you have no authority to declare something as pseudo science or not clearly. You dont have a scientific background.

Also this isn't really relevant to anything, but is it cool to be named after your perfect messenger along with millions of other muslims? Its bizarre we dont have a lot of europeans named Jesus.

 

[Jean-Pierre Chatelaine]

Quick definitions for the unlearned:

Amoral: lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something.

Immoral: not conforming to accepted standards of morality.

Moral: concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character.

When someone claims that he/she is irreligious, does it give them justifications to negate teachings of religious communities. For example, thou not steal. Does it give someone who claims to be irreligious the right to steal?

Also, which of the above words excellently describes the life of an Athiest?

What a damn cheek making a suggestion like that.

Quick definitions for the unlearned:

Amoral: lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something.

Immoral: not conforming to accepted standards of morality.

Moral: concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character.

When someone claims that he/she is irreligious, does it give them justifications to negate teachings of religious communities. For example, thou not steal. Does it give someone who claims to be irreligious the right to steal?

Also, which of the above words excellently describes the life of an Athiest?

What a cheek suggesting that Atheists have no morals especially considering the following:

There is plenty of evil in “the Good Book,” but here are some highlights:

1. God drowns the whole earth.
In Genesis 7:21-23, God drowns the entire population of the earth: men, women, children, fetuses, and perhaps unicorns. Only a single family survives. In Matthew 24:37-42, gentle Jesus approves of this genocide and plans to repeat it when he returns.

2. God kills half a million people.
In 2 Chronicles 13:15-18, God helps the men of Judah kill 500,000 of their fellow Israelites.

3. God slaughters all Egyptian firstborn.
In Exodus 12:29, God the baby-killer slaughters all Egyptian firstborn children and cattle because their king was stubborn.

4. God kills 14,000 people for complaining that God keeps killing them.
In Numbers 16:41-49, the Israelites complain that God is killing too many of them. So, God sends a plague that kills 14,000 more of them.

5. Genocide after genocide after genocide.
In Joshua 6:20-21, God helps the Israelites destroy Jericho, killing “men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.” In Deuteronomy 2:32-35, God has the Israelites kill everyone in Heshbon, including children. In Deuteronomy 3:3-7, God has the Israelites do the same to the people of Bashan. In Numbers 31:7-18, the Israelites kill all the Midianites except for the virgins, whom they take as spoils of war. In 1 Samuel 15:1-9, God tells the Israelites to kill all the Amalekites – men, women, children, infants, and their cattle – for something the Amalekites’ ancestors had done 400 years earlier.

6. God kills 50,000 people for curiosity.
In 1 Samuel 6:19, God kills 50,000 men for peeking into the ark of the covenant. (Newer cosmetic translations count only 70 deaths, but their text notes admit that the best and earliest manuscripts put the number at 50,070.)

7. 3,000 Israelites killed for inventing a god.
In Exodus 32, Moses has climbed Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments. The Israelites are bored, so they invent a golden calf god. Moses comes back and God commands him: “Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.” About 3,000 people died.

8. The Amorites destroyed by sword and by God’s rocks.
In Joshua 10:10-11, God helps the Israelites slaughter the Amorites by sword, then finishes them off with rocks from the sky.

9. God burns two cities to death.
In Genesis 19:24, God kills everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah with fire from the sky. Then God kills Lot’s wife for looking back at her burning home.

10. God has 42 children mauled by bears.
In 2 Kings 2:23-24, some kids tease the prophet Elisha, and God sends bears to dismember them. (Newer cosmetic translations say the bears “maul” the children, but the original Hebrew, baqa, means “to tear apart.”)

11. A tribe slaughtered and their virgins raped for not showing up at roll call.
In Judges 21:1-23, a tribe of Israelites misses roll call, so the other Israelites kill them all except for the virgins, which they take for themselves. Still not happy, they hide in vineyards and pounce on dancing women from Shiloh to take them for themselves.

12. 3,000 crushed to death.
In Judges 16:27-30, God gives Samson strength to bring down a building to crush 3,000 members of a rival tribe.

13. A concubine raped and dismembered.
In Judges 19:22-29, a mob demands to rape a godly master’s guest. The master offers his daughter and a concubine to them instead. They take the concubine and gang-rape her all night. The master finds her on his doorstep in the morning, cuts her into 12 pieces, and ships the pieces around the country.

14. Child sacrifice.
In Judges 11:30-39, Jephthah burns his daughter alive as a sacrificial offering for God’s favor in killing the Ammonites.

15. God helps Samson kill 30 men because he lost a bet.
In Judges 14:11-19, Samson loses a bet for 30 sets of clothes. The spirit of God comes upon him and he kills 30 men to steal their clothes and pay off the debt.

16. God demands you kill your wife and children for worshiping other gods.
In Deuteronomy 13:6-10, God commands that you must kill your wife, children, brother, and friend if they worship other gods.

17. God incinerates 51 men to make a point.
In 2 Kings 1:9-10, Elijah gets God to burn 51 men with fire from heaven to prove he is God.

18. God kills a man for not impregnating his brother’s widow.
In Genesis 38:9-10, God kills a man for refusing to impregnate his brother’s widow.

19. God threatens forced cannibalism.
In Leviticus 26:27-29 and Jeremiah 19:9, God threatens to punish the Israelites by making them eat their own children.

20. The coming slaughter.
According to Revelation 9:7-19, God’s got more evil coming. God will make horse-like locusts with human heads and scorpion tails, who torture people for 5 months. Then some angels will kill a third of the earth’s population. If he came today, that would be 2 billion people

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Some one asked me to comment on this line of discussion. My computer was down yesterday. I have therefore backed up to the original post here and will do so.

I do not think that a false God based moral system is generally better than secular morality. Since both have no ultimate truth then I do not know how to say that either would be more removed from non-existent fact than the other. IOW they are both equally vacuous of actual objective moral truth. So the only way I could distinguish them is be taking each claim and comparing it to what I would prefer. Fro example Islam's prohibition against abortion would be better than secularism open door policy, but secularism's rules about respecting pluralism would be better than Islam's convert or die doctrines. So I can't make any general claim and could only take each precept as it appears. I would think I would rather go with secularism than a false religion in more cases than the other way around. So your characterization is not 100% wrong but it is more wrong than right.

So unless I misunderstand you it does come right back down to YOUR view of morality through your lense of god. It doesn't actually matter if its god based or not as it really only counts if its Christian based? If this is true then this falls back to it being merely your opinion.

BTW I had responded to your last long post when my server crashed so that reply will be coming at some point.

Meh. Respond or don't. I'm getting kinda bored of the old conversation and this one is a fresh start rather than going back through the complicated mess of things. If you really want to respond you can.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

I'm not sure where you've come up with that claim. I don't find that to be the case at all. In fact, from my study of psychotic serial killers, I've found that the
majority of them were raised in two parent homes, and in many cases they were homes where the parents stayed together but were frequently fighting and abusing each other and/or their children. Divorce probably would have been the better option for the emotional and mental well-being of the children involved. Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, Arthur Shawcross and Gary Ridgway come to mind.

Did your originally mis quote me? Because on my list of alerts it states you quoted me in this post but you clearly quoted 1robin.

 

[Shad]

What Does the Bible Say About Anti-slavery?

You should read what you link. Many of those verses are pro-slavery.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Did your originally mis quote me? Because on my list of alerts it states you quoted me in this post but you clearly quoted 1robin.

I think I included a part of your post to Robin in my reply to her so that she would know what I was talking about when I replied.

 

[1robin]

It came from the post you made that I am responding to.

My question was, and is, where in the bible does it say that slavery is wrong and/or immoral?

What post did I state that God considers slavery immoral and wrong? I doubt I did say that because it would not be something I would have thought would be able to back up. The bible gives principles by which freedom is valued greatly and oppressive systems condemned. It complicates this further by allowing a form of slavery for a nation for a period of time. I gave you a link to one hundred verses that lay out principles from which issues about slavery can be deduced. What more do you want? The bible contains principles which can be used to determine moral issues, it does not contain emphatic declarations for every moral principle we would ever encounter. A library would not hold a book that did so.

You expected the wrong thing then because I have posted no verses. I've asked you where the bible declares that slavery is wrong or immoral.

No you did not even bother with the wrong verses, you simply said the bible justifies slavery.

I have another question, and a better one, if you ask me. If god wanted us to know that slavery is wrong, why not just say so instead of going on at length about where to get slaves, how to deal with them, how long to keep them, how to mark them, etc.? He apparently had no problem declaring murder wrong (as in your example I was responding to), among hundreds of other things.

I do not think deep blue could hold all the possible moral clarifications we would require. There are potentially an infinite number of them required if we demand to know the absolute answer to every question we could ever have about morality. And it was simply absurd to think anything we had at a time before the printing press could have contained them and been mobile.

Your argument is another false optimality. If he said murder is wrong, then he must say slavery is wrong, the what tax rates to use, then what deductions we can take, then what words in all possible generations are allowed and which are not, ever circumstance in which war is justifiable, every one which it is not, etc..... The bible you would have produced would have not served any purpose for anyone. What you want is a magic eight ball the size of Jupiter, not moral principles and the Holy Spirit to derive moral truth as needed from. Not that even if we had had a bible with every possible moral event explained in detail it would have helped. He only gave us 10 commandments at one time, and we don't obey them. He says do not murder we say ok and kill ourselves in the womb by the millions, he said do not steal yet we steal billions worth each year, he said do not lie and our political system did the exact opposite, we can't obey 10 yet you demand 10 trillion.

Anyway I gave you a link to one hundred verses that can be used to comment on slavery. You can start there.

 

[1robin]

You should read what you link. Many of those verses are pro-slavery.

I did not say it was a list of verses that prohibited slavery. I pointed out specifically that slavery is a complex issue. It is not put into a wrong and right category by the bible. God reluctantly allowed slavery because we were sinful (I have posted massive explanations of OT slavery, so you can search for it if you want. Anyway because of our own faults God allowed one nation to have slaves, it was almost exclusively debt slavery and voluntary, and was governed by the most benevolent laws in the entire ANE concerning servitude. So yes you will find verses allowing for slavery, what you will not find are verses promoting it, and when Christ came those ancient laws were made null and void. That is where you will start finding the verses that promote freedom, liberty, and none that even allow for slavery. You have to be able to take verses in context and so I think you should read a little deeper.

BTW I do not know all those verses by heart but I will bet:
1. None of them are promoting slavery, none record's God's desire for slavery, none claim slavery is good or other than the unfortunate state of the world as we had made it at that time.
2. None validate slavery as some kind of preferred state of affairs, but only serve to spell out the most benevolent rules governing an institution we had created.
3. Many verses which do promote God's desire concerning slavery validate freedom, equality, and Christ's sacrifice and intention to provide.

 

[1robin]

I would bet it doesn't hold true, and I've given some examples to back that up. I've spent a great deal of time in my life studying psychotics and serial killers and such from a psychological standpoint, which is why I was able to find fault with your claim. The people I listed above came from homes that were not "broken," as per your claim. Rather, their parents were married - a complete family unit, which you are advocating in favour of. (In fact you are stating that divorce and the break up of the family unit are immoral things.) Many were abusive homes for sure, as I stated above. But the fact that as children these people were subjected to emotional, physical and mental abuse wasn't dependent upon them growing up in a "broken home" - they actually grew up in unbroken homes. These people probably would have been much better off from a psychological standpoint had their parents been divorced.

Psychopathy is a very technical term. I did not intend to use it technically so as to only apply to medical psychopaths. As I said I wrote it a supporting statement, not to stand critical analysis on it's own. I used the term psychopath to refer to abnormally immoral actions committed by people. That is the claim I think will stand up. The strict category of psychopath is relatively narrow and I have no idea what it's main causes are. I meant it in a much broader sense as to include extremely depraved actions. IOW where you find horrific and habitual moral behavior you often find a family dysfunction.

I'm sorry but your argument doesn't appear to hold up very well. If what you say is actually true, we should have a lot more psychotics on our hands, given the high divorce rates we currently have.

Forget the technical term psychopath. I was in a hurry and used a narrow term instead of a broad one. I know psychopaths are a peculiar group and brain development has a lot to do with it. I meant that people who often commit great immoral actions have family problems in their back ground. I had already clarified this, why are you not operating under the clarification? It is such a universally granted idea that broken families, child abuse, and sexual abuse, etc..... often accompanies immorality, that I am not sure what your point is.

 

[1robin]

Agreed.

He does Proselytize a bit much

Repeatedly making claims like this is a violation of at least two forum rules.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Psychopathy is a very technical term. I did not intend to use it technically so as to only apply to medical psychopaths. As I said I wrote it a supporting statement, not to stand critical analysis on it's own. I used the term psychopath to refer to abnormally immoral actions committed by people. That is the claim I think will stand up. The strict category of psychopath is relatively narrow and I have no idea what it's main causes are. I meant it in a much broader sense as to include extremely depraved actions. IOW where you find horrific and habitual moral behavior you often find a family dysfunction.
.

The term itself would be wrong then. But moving on from that did you mean criminal activity is higher in those individuals that grew up in broken homes rather than those from unbroken homes? Though this trend is actually not true. The trend is actually with those in lower income and single parent homes tend to be lower income. That is the correlation rather than causation of the linke between broken home and crime.

 

[Shad]

I did not say it was a list of verses that prohibited slavery. I pointed out specifically that slavery is a complex issue. It is not put into a wrong and right category by the bible. God reluctantly allowed slavery because we were sinful (I have posted massive explanations of OT slavery, so you can search for it if you want. Anyway because of our own faults God allowed one nation to have slaves, it was almost exclusively debt slavery and voluntary, and was governed by the most benevolent laws in the entire ANE concerning servitude. So yes you will find verses allowing for slavery, what you will not find are verses promoting it, and when Christ came those ancient laws were made null and void. That is where you will start finding the verses that promote freedom, liberty, and none that even allow for slavery. You have to be able to take verses in context and so I think you should read a little deeper.

BTW I do not know all those verses by heart but I will bet:
1. None of them are promoting slavery, none record's God's desire for slavery, none claim slavery is good or other than the unfortunate state of the world as we had made it at that time.
2. None validate slavery as some kind of preferred state of affairs, but only serve to spell out the most benevolent rules governing an institution we had created.
3. Many verses which do promote God's desire concerning slavery validate freedom, equality, and Christ's sacrifice and intention to provide.

You are back tracking. Your link was formatted as Anti-slavery, the page says anti-slavery. You claimed the link was about anti-slavery. You are only fooling yourself with your denial. Many of these verses include no parameters of the type of slavery one is under.

3. Here are 100 verses against allowing any kind of generalized slavery.
What Does the Bible Say About Anti-slavery?

The OT slavery rules only applied to Hebrews not to non-Hebrews. This is favoritism which is standard when a group of people think they are better than everyone else. Your own link contains evidence of this hence you should read what you link.

1. This is false as by providing standards for masters and in what way people can become slaves is an endorsement of slavery.
2. By having laws regarding slavery it is a state of affairs where it is preferred to death punishment, debt payments and part of war booty.
3. Nope as per the 3rd verse in your link there is an example of NT. What is worse is if one looks at the verse in context, you omitted the context. It only encourages the slave to buy their freedom if possible yet there is nothing about the telling the master they should not have slaves. Other verse only promote good treatment, none condemn slavery at all.

17 Only let each person lead the lifec]">[c] that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches. 18 Was anyone at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was anyone at the time of his call uncircumcised? Let him not seek circumcision. 19 For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but keeping the commandments of God. 20 Each one should remain in the condition in which he was called. 21 Were you a bondservantd]">[d] when called? Do not be concerned about it. (But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.) 22 For he who was called in the Lord as a bondservant is a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a bondservant of Christ. 23 You were bought with a price; do not become bondservantse]">[e] of men. 24 So, brothers,f]">[f] in whatever condition each was called, there let him remain with God.

 

[SkepticThinker]

What post did I state that God considers slavery immoral and wrong?

Oh, so he doesn’t then?

I doubt I did say that because it would not be something I would have thought would be able to back up.

You went on at length about how mass numbers of Christians worked so hard to end slavery. What was the point of that then?

The bible gives principles by which freedom is valued greatly and oppressive systems condemned. It complicates this further by allowing a form of slavery for a nation for a period of time. I gave you a link to one hundred verses that lay out principles from which issues about slavery can be deduced. What more do you want? The bible contains principles which can be used to determine moral issues, it does not contain emphatic declarations for every moral principle we would ever encounter. A library would not hold a book that did so.

So does this god not detest slavery as much as he detests murder then? I mean, why in the latter case outright declare it wrong, but in the former case, not only NOT declare it wrong and/or immoral but instead lay out rules to govern it’s practice? He didn’t lay out rules governing the practice of murder, did he? It was easy enough for this god to just outright declare murder wrong but “he” couldn’t do the same for slavery? Well maybe he doesn’t have much of a problem with it after all.

No you did not even bother with the wrong verses, you simply said the bible justifies slavery.

What do you call it when the rules for the practice of slavery are clearly laid out in writing? So it doesn’t say anywhere that slavery is immoral, is that what you’re telling me?


My question was actually a very simple one. All these mental gymnastics aren’t necessary, unless of course you HAVE to make the bible say something it doesn’t in order to support the belief that your god is perfectly moral despite the apparent immorality present in his holy book.

I do not think deep blue could hold all the possible moral clarifications we would require. There are potentially an infinite number of them required if we demand to know the absolute answer to every question we could ever have about morality. And it was simply absurd to think anything we had at a time before the printing press could have contained them and been mobile.

Well that was a tricky way to avoid answering the question. You just made the Bible useless.

There is less discussion about homosexuality in the Bible then there is about slavery but you clearly believe that homosexuality is sinful and immoral. Nothing ambiguous there. God apparently only gets ambiguous when he’s talking about owning human beings as property.

Your argument is another false optimality. If he said murder is wrong, then he must say slavery is wrong, the what tax rates to use, then what deductions we can take, then what words in all possible generations are allowed and which are not, ever circumstance in which war is justifiable, every one which it is not, etc.....

No. But if you’re going to declare that the Bible doesn’t support slavery and that god doesn’t like it, despite the fact that the Bible not only doesn’t condemn it or command against it, but instead lays out rules for its practice, then I’m going to wonder what you’re talking about. It was easy enough for your god to lay out over 600 commandments but he forgot to through “don’t’ own slaves” into the mix? I guess it’s not all that important to him then.


If I’m reading through the Bible and it says “don’t lie,” “don’t murder”, “don’t steal” etc. then I read on and it starts telling me where to get slaves, how to treat them, how to beat them, etc. how on earth am I coming to the conclusion that slavery is wrong, sinful or immoral?

The bible you would have produced would have not served any purpose for anyone. What you want is a magic eight ball the size of Jupiter, not moral principles and the Holy Spirit to derive moral truth as needed from. Not that even if we had had a bible with every possible moral event explained in detail it would have helped. He only gave us 10 commandments at one time, and we don't obey them. He says do not murder we say ok and kill ourselves in the womb by the millions, he said do not steal yet we steal billions worth each year, he said do not lie and our political system did the exact opposite, we can't obey 10 yet you demand 10 trillion.

Well, your god apparently laid out about 613 commandments in this Bible, did he get tired or something? The owning of another person as property was less important to condemn than eating shellfish? Really?

Anyway I gave you a link to one hundred verses that can be used to comment on slavery. You can start there.

As already pointed out by another poster, your link contains many verses in support of slavery.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Psychopathy is a very technical term. I did not intend to use it technically so as to only apply to medical psychopaths. As I said I wrote it a supporting statement, not to stand critical analysis on it's own. I used the term psychopath to refer to abnormally immoral actions committed by people. That is the claim I think will stand up. The strict category of psychopath is relatively narrow and I have no idea what it's main causes are. I meant it in a much broader sense as to include extremely depraved actions. IOW where you find horrific and habitual moral behavior you often find a family dysfunction.


Forget the technical term psychopath. I was in a hurry and used a narrow term instead of a broad one. I know psychopaths are a peculiar group and brain development has a lot to do with it. I meant that people who often commit great immoral actions have family problems in their back ground. I had already clarified this, why are you not operating under the clarification? It is such a universally granted idea that broken families, child abuse, and sexual abuse, etc..... often accompanies immorality, that I am not sure what your point is.

Then you’ve completely backtracked and changed what you originally had said.


Your whole point was about people becoming immoral as a result of being brought up in BROKEN homes.

“I am not picking on any single case but the destruction of the family unit in general is not progress. Countless studies show the negative influence of broken families yet you whistle while Rome burns and point out that a single fire can provide warmth. Almost every psychopath comes from a broken home.”