Do the Atheists have it right: Just Be Good for Goodness' Sake?

[grannymh]

In the potential inherit in all mankind to be Sons of God.

Dear chrisb,

Sounds good. Would you please expand that. Do you mean adopted children of God? I’ll read it in the morning. Thanks.

Blessings,
granny

 

[chrisb]

Dear chrisb,

Sounds good. Would you please expand that. Do you mean adopted children of God? I’ll read it in the morning. Thanks.

What He had by nature we have through adoption. Participation in the Divine Nature.

 

[Logos385]

Hey everyone, I have a few minutes to type out a reply, but one that I will not have time to debate over. Those here can feel free to ignore, trash, discuss or agree with anything I say, and I won’t respond due to time constraints, at least for a few days. This reply is mostly to warpspeed.

1.) You seem to believe that every member of the Nazi party was Atheist, and this is simply untrue. Many Christians and Catholics joined the ranks of the Nazis, and many also believed they were doing the work of God. Saying these societies were entirely composed of Atheists working together to destroy people is a simple statistical fallacy.

2.) On the one hand, you condemn Atheistic dictatorship, and thus say all atheistic morality must lead to the same end. On the other hand, you condemn monotheistic dictatorship, and say no one is calling for it… yet somehow this does not apply in the same way to overarching Catholic morality? You have presented no evidence that the day-to-day Atheist can’t be moral. You need look no further than me to find a moral Atheist.

3.) I will repeat that one last time, the atrocities committed by all of the terrible dictators you incessantly name were not caused by Atheism. The individuals leading these regimes were flawed in ways greater than I can even imagine. Yes, whole societies had to act in concert in order to support them, but the societies are composed of all classes of people, believers and non-believers alike. The fact that these societies acted in such a way is a testament to simple human gullibility, not the moral shortcomings of Atheism.

4.) Almost all Atheists I know and come into contact with are very moral, well-meaning people, and that in itself is evidence against your thesis that Atheistic morality is inherently destructive. More evidence against it: slate.com/id/2203614/

That’s all I have time for now. I appreciate the extremely interesting read of this discussion up 'till now… Keep up the candor : ).

Goodnight everyone!

 

[Fran65]

To those of you who seem (mistakenly) to believe that the Catholic Church seeks political power and dominion over the whole world I refer you to Article 2 of Chapter 2 in the Catechism. It is called Participation In Social Life. It is not long and will reward reading with a better understanding of the Catholic position regarding state institutions and political powers and parties. Here are a couple ofhighly pertinent paragraphs:

1904 “It is preferable that each power be balanced by other powers and by other spheres of responsibility which keep it within proper bounds. This is the principle of the ‘rule of law,’ in which the law is sovereign and not the arbitrary will of men.”

1901: If authority belongs to the order established by God, “the choice of the political regime and the appointment of rulers are left to the free decision of the citizens.”
The diversity of political regimes is morally acceptable, provided they serve the legitimate good of the communities that adopt them. Regimes whose nature is contrary to the natural law, to the public order, and to the fundamental rights of persons cannot achieve the common good of the nations on which they have been imposed.

It seems that many of you confuse the hope for conversion of all humanity with a desire for the Church to be the sole authority of the State. That is clearly not the case! What Catholics hope and vote for is a society that promotes the common good. It is all there in the Catechism if you take the time to read it!

 

[williamric]

Hey everyone, I have a few minutes to type out a reply, but one that I will not have time to debate over. Those here can feel free to ignore, trash, discuss or agree with anything I say, and I won’t respond due to time constraints, at least for a few days. This reply is mostly to warpspeed.

1.) You seem to believe that every member of the Nazi party was Atheist, and this is simply untrue. Many Christians and Catholics joined the ranks of the Nazis, and many also believed they were doing the work of God. Saying these societies were entirely composed of Atheists working together to destroy people is a simple statistical fallacy.

Whilst Christians and Catholics might have joined the Nazi party and might have believed that their actions were the will of G-d, they were in no way supported by Orthodox Christianity… The fact that they were Christians is irrelevant, there is no room for the atriocities they committed in Christian morality…

2.) On the one hand, you condemn Atheistic dictatorship, and thus say all atheistic morality must lead to the same end. On the other hand, you condemn monotheistic dictatorship, and say no one is calling for it… yet somehow this does not apply in the same way to overarching Catholic morality? You have presented no evidence that the day-to-day Atheist can’t be moral. You need look no further than me to find a moral Atheist.

I agree, there are many “moral” Atheists… Saying that Atheism is immoral because Stalin was immoral is like saying Christianity is immoral because many of the crusaders were immoral… Its un-fair…

3.) I will repeat that one last time, the atrocities committed by all of the terrible dictators you incessantly name were not caused by Atheism. The individuals leading these regimes were flawed in ways greater than I can even imagine. Yes, whole societies had to act in concert in order to support them, but the societies are composed of all classes of people, believers and non-believers alike. The fact that these societies acted in such a way is a testament to simple human gullibility, not the moral shortcomings of Atheism.

Well as I have stated numerous times in this thread, Atheism is (should be) a a-moral system (Note: Not immoral)… Of course an individual Atheist can always be a moral person, but the word “moral” only makes sense from a religious perspective… (Note: moral as in an objectively right or wrong, if moral is redefined as “whats good for society” or any of the plethora of new definitions people are trying to throw around, then this objection falls away)

4.) Almost all Atheists I know and come into contact with are very moral, well-meaning people, and that in itself is evidence against your thesis that Atheistic morality is inherently destructive. More evidence against it: slate.com/id/2203614/

I agree, I don’t think Atheism is inherently destructive. I think it is inherently neutral…

That’s all I have time for now. I appreciate the extremely interesting read of this discussion up 'till now… Keep up the candor : ).

Goodnight everyone!

I’m also quite busy so you don’t have to feel obliged to reply…

Note to others: I have not forgotten other comments to me either, I just don’t really have time right now to go through the thread and find those posts…

Good**MORNING **everyone

 

[warpspeedpetey]

1.) You seem to believe that every member of the Nazi party was Atheist, and this is simply untrue.

i dont believe thats true either, but they still cooperated. they still acted in that manner, so im not convinced that it matter what they said, what they did does.

words are cheap, action aint

Many Christians and Catholics joined the ranks of the Nazis, and many also believed they were doing the work of God.

really? please tell me how the Catholics thought they were doing G-ds work.

Saying these societies were entirely composed of Atheists working together to destroy people is a simple statistical fallacy.

you would be right if i had said that, but i didnt, i am saying that a great many cooperators, were necessary to enact these atrocities.

your assuming things i havent said and cant reasonably be inferred.

2.) On the one hand, you condemn Atheistic dictatorship, and thus say all atheistic morality must lead to the same end

.

when did i condemn atheistic dictatorships? i didnt. though i do so now on GP.

i didnt say that atheist morality must lead to atrocities, i said that in every case of applied atheism, it has led to such atrocities, history bears me out.

On the other hand, you condemn monotheistic dictatorship, and say no one is calling for it…

i might have said that but i think that was another poster

yet somehow this does not apply in the same way to overarching Catholic morality?

please point to the more than 100,000,000 that we have killed in the last century.

we havent. a few thousands over 2,000 years is a far cry from the atrocities of the last century.

the two can be compared no more than a bacteria, to an elephant.

You have presented no evidence that the day-to-day Atheist can’t be moral. You need look no further than me to find a moral Atheist.

someone claimed that atheists based their morality on the betterment of society, all these posts are refutation of that idea. the evidence is the historical fact that atheistic regimes are responsible for more than 100 million deaths in just the last century. their claim was also the betterment of society, so we can see that this idea has repeatedly failed as a moral basis

as to the individual morality, atheists can be just as moral as anyone else, they just have no motivation to be so.

what could your motivation be to behave in a moral way? there is no true logical reason to do so, that outways self interest.

apply economic principles to the situation, and you have the machiavellian nightmare, where everybody simply does what profits them the most, and costs them the least.

we know this to be a fact of human nature, because our economy works on the same basis.

3.) I will repeat that one last time, the atrocities committed by all of the terrible dictators you incessantly name were not caused by Atheism.

then why is that the only common factor among some very disparate groups?

i can tell you. people only have intrinsic value when they are a creation of G-d. if you have no G-d then there is no reason to differentiate between one lump of particles and another, life becomes very cheap when it is just an accident of physics.

you can see this principle in action at any concetraion camp, gulag, reeducation camp, etc of those genocidal regimes

nor were they all dictatorships.

The individuals leading these regimes were flawed in ways greater than I can even imagine. Yes, whole societies had to act in concert in order to support them, but the societies are composed of all classes of people, believers and non-believers alike. The fact that these societies acted in such a way is a testament to simple human gullibility, not the moral shortcomings of Atheism

.

so billions of people were too gullible to understand the moral consequences of their actions? since i must assume that they were average people like every one else, i dont buy it

i think it much more likely, and the history bears it out, that these people believed they were acting rightly.

further, to join the political parties of many of these officially atheist regimes, one had to be an atheist.

so you can lay the fault entirely at atheisms door. it was after all the official position of state and party. you couldn’t be in the government, or any state sponsored structure, and not be an atheist.

4.) Almost all Atheists I know and come into contact with are very moral, well-meaning people, and that in itself is evidence against your thesis that Atheistic morality is inherently destructive

.

everyone thinks they are moral, but i only have your say so on that.

further its not my thesis, i am only pointing out the history of applied atheistic morals on the societal level

that whole being moral for ‘the betterment of society’ is belied by its own history

 

[iamme]

in science one tests a hypothesis, when one reaches a conclusion other people recreate the test to verify the results.

in this case the experiment of atheism has been done repeatedly on a societal level, and the results have been consistently verified, the result has repeatedly been mass murder.

how do you get that conclusion from the historical data? but isee once again you try to divert from the data, and make personal comments.

thats ok, that tells me you are running out of reasoned argument, and are now down to just not admitting the invalidity atheistic morals in light of their historical outcome

you really dont understand how wrong you are? you cant test people, in different part in the world, with different backgrounds, education, motivation, homelives and an untold number of different factors, and then throw them together to determine one thing, you just cant. thats why science never has and never would. your metaphor is an extremely faulty one.

basically, you believe what you want ot believe, despite logical conlcusions on my side, and i will believe what i want to believe, despite some logical conclusions on your side. the only difference between us is, i doubt you have any actual experience with atheist morality, first hand.

 

[iamme]

Good**MORNING **everyone

whats so good about it?!?!?

i just have an innate need to eb contrary, sorry

 

[Leela]

Hi William,

Well as I have stated numerous times in this thread, Atheism is (should be) a a-moral system (Note: Not immoral)…

More or less right. Atheism in itself does not have a moral philosophy because it is merely the lack of belief in dieties. But it is not an amoral system only because it is not a system.

Of course an individual Atheist can always be a moral person, but the word “moral” only makes sense from a religious perspective… (Note: moral as in an objectively right or wrong, if moral is redefined as “whats good for society” or any of the plethora of new definitions people are trying to throw around, then this objection falls away)

I don’t think anyone is throwing around any new definitions of morality. There is no such thing as a relativist since if nothing is better or worse than anything else then neither is relativism. We all agree that morality is the word we use to talk about questions of right and wrong actions.

To not believe in a single absolute standard for right and wrong that exists “out there” for human beings to conform to is not the same thing as saying that there aren’t better and worse ways for human beings to behave. Pragmatists just say that true and false and good and bad are understood relative to some human purpose and can only be understood in practice. This view is opposed to the theist view of Goodness as an essence, but both views are rightly called morality since they are concerned with right and wrong.

The issue that I’ve tried to bring out is that even if you believe that there is a single standard of human behavior that all humans need to conform to, how could we ever evaluate one person’s claim of knowledge of this standard with another’s claim of knowledge of this standard when the two people claim to know different things? I think we all know that this in not a mere hypothetical. This is the human condition.

These competing claims are either born out in human experience or not. These claims need to be justified to others in the same ways that we try to justify all our beliefs when we want our private beliefs about morality to become public projects. We need to get other people on board. How do we do that? In other words, the interesting question is not about whether we think our knowledge has an absolute foundation but how we can hope to justify our beliefs to others.

Even if you feel that you have a rock solid foundation for your beliefs, it simply isn’t the sort of foundation that is philosophically interesting because it can’t supply us with knock-down arguments in support of your positions.

So my question (a pragmatic one) for theists is, how could it possibly be helpful in any way to make the claim in the public sphere that your beliefs about morality come from God rather than from human experience? Aren’t you still going to need to justify your beliefs in terms of human experience when you want others who may disagree with you (which will include other believers with different beliefs) to join in with your project of creating the sort of world that you would like (or that you believe that God would like)?

How is it different in practice to say, “this is the sort of world that I think would be better for us for these reasons…” compared to “this is what God wants”? I think the answer is that the first question is useful and the second is completely useless. It is merely a conversation stopper. Someone can either agree or disagree with all the premises behind that claim, but the conversation can go no further because no one is thought to have the final say about what God wants. So God is really only relevant to private beliefs about morality and is completely irrelevant in a pluralistic society to getting others behind our public projects for creating the sort of world that we think is morally good. From the pragmatist perspective it is not that God talk is right or wrong so much as it is just unhelpful idle talk for our public moral purposes.

Best,
Leela

 

[williamric]

whats so good about it?!?!?

i just have an innate need to eb contrary, sorry

we noticed

lol…just kidding…

 

[williamric]

So my question (a pragmatic one) for theists is, how could it possibly be helpful in any way to make the claim in the public sphere that your beliefs about morality come from God rather than from human experience? Aren’t you still going to need to justify your beliefs in terms of human experience when you want others who may disagree with you (which will include other believers with different beliefs) to join in with your project of creating the sort of world that you would like (or that you believe that God would like)?

Absolutely… I wasn’t really trying to ignore this point… When I have time later, I’ll explain why I made the assumption that Christianity was true in some of my previous posts…

 

[iamme]

we noticed

lol…just kidding…

 

[warpspeedpetey]

you really dont understand how wrong you are?

do you have any evidence? because the historical evidence of my position is overwhelming.

you cant test people, in different part in the world, with different backgrounds, education, motivation, homelives and an untold number of different factors, and then throw them together to determine one thing, you just cant. thats why science never has and never would. your metaphor is an extremely faulty one.

1. that testing, of disparate people and situations, is exactly how statistical aggregation of data works, thats why so man organizations use it in pharmacuetical testing, engineering stress testing, the U.S. census, poltical polling, psychological standard models, and on and on.

so your idea that science does not, and never would use experiments under different conditions, to determine facts, is wrong. that is exactly what they do.

1. its not a metaphor, im pointing out that no matter the specific influences surrounding the atheistic regimes, they all led to genocide
2. you can keep saying i am wrong, but the historical evidence is all on my side. you havent even peresented any.

basically, you believe what you want ot believe, despite logical conlcusions on my side, and i will believe what i want to believe, despite some logical conclusions on your side. the only difference between us is

i believe what the historical evidence says and its logical conclusion.

you offer no evidence, so how can you offer a logical conclusion of nothing.

as to my experience with atheistic morality, its written in the history books.

atheistic morality, has been tried several times. i have listed many of them.

you cant ignore the historical outcome, even if you try, its only because you dont wish to be wrong, its not a matter of opinion.

it already happened

i doubt you have any actual experience with atheist morality, first hand.

 

[iamme]

do you have any evidence? because the historical evidence of my position is overwhelming.

no its not. history has never labeled any of the situations as atheist countries.

1. that testing, of disparate people and situations, is exactly how statistical aggregation of data works, thats why so man organizations use it in pharmacuetical testing, engineering stress testing, the U.S. census, poltical polling, psychological standard models, and on and on.

so your idea that science does not, and never would use experiments under different conditions, to determine facts, is wrong. that is exactly what they do.

1. its not a metaphor, im pointing out that no matter the specific influences surrounding the atheistic regimes, they all led to genocide

1. you can keep saying i am wrong, but the historical evidence is all on my side. you havent even peresented any.

1. 83% of statistics are accurate 93% of the time.
2. none of those were atheistic regimes, the majority were communistic regimes, led by tyrants.
3. i will keep saying youre wrong, and i have no evidence of a history where society was ruled by catholocism, because thankfully, there hasnt been any, and any time the church has held a massive amount of power, it was abused. now, if we want to look into regions where religion is the prevailing factor in their society, just look at the middle east and what peaceful oasis the presence of god has made it.

i believe what the historical evidence says and its logical conclusion.

you offer no evidence, so how can you offer a logical conclusion of nothing.

as to my experience with atheistic morality, its written in the history books.

atheistic morality, has been tried several times. i have listed many of them.

you cant ignore the historical outcome, even if you try, its only because you dont wish to be wrong, its not a matter of opinion.

it already happened

in other words, you read a book, so youre right. you dont have any experience with atheistic morals, dont feel like actually learning of any, but you read a book that said some bad things about communism.

how can i argue with that?

 

[PRmerger]

in other words, you read a book, so youre right. you dont have any experience with atheistic morals, dont feel like actually learning of any, but you read a book that said some bad things about communism.

how can i argue with that?

Iam, what exactly do you mean “experience with atheistic morals”?

Do you mean that we must have been atheists first in order to reject atheism?

 

[warpspeedpetey]

no its not. history has never labeled any of the situations as atheist countries.

they called themselves atheists, it was their official position.

1. none of those were atheistic regimes, the majority were communistic regimes, led by tyrants.

evidence? the fellow with a russian father told you about it last night. they were atheists, i can post links of you want to be proven wrong publicly…again

the nazis werent communists.

tyrants dont act alone, those atrocities require the cooperation of millions

1. i will keep saying youre wrong,

you can say what you want, that doesnt change the historical evidence, that applied atheistic morality, has alway resulted in mass murder.

say it all you like, every time you do you lose a little more credibility. like above where you claim communist regimes were not atheist. you might as well try to convince us the sky is orange

and i have no evidence of a history where society was ruled by catholocism, because thankfully, there hasnt been any

,

then you should attend a history class, Catholicism has had varying amounts of secular power until the 1800’s. we still have our own country at that

and any time the church has held a massive amount of power, it was abused.

which is it? the church has never been in charge, or it has and it abused it.

please provide some evidence.

now, if we want to look into regions where religion is the prevailing factor in their society, just look at the middle east and what peaceful oasis the presence of god has made it.

those people arent catholic are they? they practice an entirely different religion with different morals, now dont they.

in other words, you read a book, so youre right.

i lived through some of it, i read many books on it, and i wrote some papers on it in university. so yes, i may know something about it.

you dont have any experience with atheistic morals, dont feel like actually learning of any, but you read a book that said some bad things about communism.

i was an atheist at one time, i already know it from the inside, and i know actual communists.

how can i argue with that?

so far you havent been able to, you havent presented any evidence, you just keep saying i am wrong. with no proof

you arent arguing against me you are arguing against the historical evidence that applied atheism has always led to genocide.

you earlier said that you like to be contrary, how can you expect any one here to take you seriously then? you are admitting that no evidence could change your mind.

 

[iamme]

Iam, what exactly do you mean “experience with atheistic morals”?

Do you mean that we must have been atheists first in order to reject atheism?

no more than i have to be christian to reject chirstianity.
i cant say everyone knows an atheist, but i would suppose most people would, and some would know more than one. to say that one rule fits all is irresponsible, as it doesnt represent everyone, or all that can be. if i want ot play that way, all priests can be pedophiles, so we shouldnt let priest around children, because some priests have molested children. its in books, its a fact, its been in the papers. all it will lead to is more molested children.
does that sound logical at all?