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Benadam
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I can imagine the law being recognized as an instinct by atheists
I can’t think of a reason why that would be wrong either.
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I can’t think of a reason why that would be wrong either.
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AnAtheist
Guest
If you expect a personalised authority, then you will wait forever. You can’t something other than a natural explanation from an atheist. That leaves instinct, evolution (and perhaps common sense).
Yes, why not. We’ll (me and my wife) take the opportunity to visit our family and friends
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Carl
Guest
Gratias Grace
Thanks for your interesting contribution.
*The christian conscience and the atheists consience are formed in the same way, *but ** the matter of substance will not be the same in aeraes relevant to God as the center of life.
That’s a huge “but.” Since for the atheist God is excluded, the conscience will tend to deny the most important part of its work … to honor the Creator’s will as expressed through the natural law, part of which is the natural urge, found in every culture, to give tribute to a Higher Power. That this is the most important part of its work is indicated by the fact that it is summed up in the first three of the Ten Commandments delivered by Moses and the first of the two great commandments given by Jesus.
Thanks for your interesting contribution.
*The christian conscience and the atheists consience are formed in the same way, *but ** the matter of substance will not be the same in aeraes relevant to God as the center of life.
That’s a huge “but.” Since for the atheist God is excluded, the conscience will tend to deny the most important part of its work … to honor the Creator’s will as expressed through the natural law, part of which is the natural urge, found in every culture, to give tribute to a Higher Power. That this is the most important part of its work is indicated by the fact that it is summed up in the first three of the Ten Commandments delivered by Moses and the first of the two great commandments given by Jesus.
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Carl
Guest
AnAtheist
If you expect a personalised authority, then you will wait forever.
But how can a final authority be other than personal? What authority comes to us that has come other than by a person(s)?
If you expect a personalised authority, then you will wait forever.
But how can a final authority be other than personal? What authority comes to us that has come other than by a person(s)?
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buffalo
Guest
The atheist enjoys the same gifts of heart God puts in all men at their conception. The atheist is loved by God the same as any other and has this infused knowledge of his creator God at the very beginning. The atheist turns away form his Creator, but cannot completely do so, because like it or not he is still lives in God’s creation with all the trappings.
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AnAtheist
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Why must there be a creator (of the universe, of morals, of life)?
Why can’t those things just exist for no reason or purpose? Why can’t the universe itself be prima causa?
When searching for answers one has to climp an endless ladder, you just stop at a different step.
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buffalo
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You will find your answer in the question “why does evil exist?” Look very very deeply.
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Carl
Guest
Benadam
You have presented an intreresting hypothetical.
*The USA would not even exist, if all Americans would have followed the christian heritage *
I’d like to know what other heritage was dominant at the time of the Revolution. Which of the founding fathers renounced the Christian heritage. Not Washington and Jefferson, certainly the two most prominent leaders of the Revolution.
Nobody can answer that they were desists, not Christians. Their writings are replete with praise for Christ and his influence on their own thinking. Atheists should read Jefferson in detail. He had enormous praise for the teachings of Christ.
As you say, this is a construct with no basis in fact. It has been manufactured by modern day atheists/agnostics to slam the influence of Christ on early Americans. After all, if Christianity had not already preached that all are equal and deserving of the Creator’s love, from whence would they have been able to derive and persuade anaybody of the notion that all had been created “by their Creator with certain inaliable rights”?
As De Toqueville, that astute student of democracy in America pointed out not so long after the Revolution, “Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts – the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims.”
You have presented an intreresting hypothetical.
*The USA would not even exist, if all Americans would have followed the christian heritage *
I’d like to know what other heritage was dominant at the time of the Revolution. Which of the founding fathers renounced the Christian heritage. Not Washington and Jefferson, certainly the two most prominent leaders of the Revolution.
Nobody can answer that they were desists, not Christians. Their writings are replete with praise for Christ and his influence on their own thinking. Atheists should read Jefferson in detail. He had enormous praise for the teachings of Christ.
As you say, this is a construct with no basis in fact. It has been manufactured by modern day atheists/agnostics to slam the influence of Christ on early Americans. After all, if Christianity had not already preached that all are equal and deserving of the Creator’s love, from whence would they have been able to derive and persuade anaybody of the notion that all had been created “by their Creator with certain inaliable rights”?
As De Toqueville, that astute student of democracy in America pointed out not so long after the Revolution, “Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts – the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims.”
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Carl
Guest
AnAtheist
When searching for answers one has to climp an endless ladder, you just stop at a different step.
That is your assumption, but it goes without proof.
In all our affairs, we naturally look for someone who has the final authority to determine what is right and wrong. That’s why we have a Supreme Court. The buck stops there, supposedly. They get the last word. But do they? For example, is there not an appeal to a higher authority than the Supreme Court to argue that abortion is an abomination. Is the Supreme Being not a higher authority than the Supreme Court?
I know of at least one prominant atheist, Chester Dolan, who has argued against Roe v Wade as an evil and disgrace. But he cannot cite a higher authority than his own conscience. How then can he change the Supreme Court’s mind other than by appeal to reason? But the Supreme Court has already defended its authority on the basis of reason. Read Roe v Wade. Human reason, not God, is the highest authority. Now if the atheist cannot appeal to God as the higher authority, what other argument can he use when reason itself fails?
Atheism locks itself into stopping at a step on the ladder lower than the Christian should stop. The Christian must, if he has a Christian conscience, climb higher … all the way to God, beyond which there can be no higher authority.
When searching for answers one has to climp an endless ladder, you just stop at a different step.
That is your assumption, but it goes without proof.
In all our affairs, we naturally look for someone who has the final authority to determine what is right and wrong. That’s why we have a Supreme Court. The buck stops there, supposedly. They get the last word. But do they? For example, is there not an appeal to a higher authority than the Supreme Court to argue that abortion is an abomination. Is the Supreme Being not a higher authority than the Supreme Court?
I know of at least one prominant atheist, Chester Dolan, who has argued against Roe v Wade as an evil and disgrace. But he cannot cite a higher authority than his own conscience. How then can he change the Supreme Court’s mind other than by appeal to reason? But the Supreme Court has already defended its authority on the basis of reason. Read Roe v Wade. Human reason, not God, is the highest authority. Now if the atheist cannot appeal to God as the higher authority, what other argument can he use when reason itself fails?
Atheism locks itself into stopping at a step on the ladder lower than the Christian should stop. The Christian must, if he has a Christian conscience, climb higher … all the way to God, beyond which there can be no higher authority.
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AnAtheist
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I am sorry, but I can’t follow you. Evil exists for the very same reason as anything else. In my world it has evolved like anything else, and in yours because your God has created it along with anything else.
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mlchance
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God did not create evil. As is often the case, atheism’s characterizations of Christianity are little more than strawmen.
– Mark L. Chance.
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WhatIf
Guest
I agree. And also saved! Isn’t that awesome?
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WhatIf
Guest
I see your point. We do say God created everything. There is more to it, though. I’d like for you to consider this. If Remington creates a pistol and someone commits a crime with it, did Remington create crime? No. Here is another example, you may have a baby (your wife?) and it may grow up and murder someone. So did you create a murderer? I don’t think so and you certainly didn’t create murder.
I think it is a similar situation with evil. God did not create evil, however people use His creation for evil purposes.
Also, I agree that things have evolved, but to go back to the very beginning, what ever it was, I have come to believe that God created it. Lets say the Big Bang did occur, what caused it? Perhaps God. Lets say chemical reactions caused it or whatever, then what created the chemicals. You see, too many Christians try to tell an Atheist that they know how the world was created. They do not know the details any better than you do, as I understand it. Some miss the big point in Genesis, in my opinion. The big point is God created in the beginning and it was Good and when we have faith in Him, we do good. I know that is an over simplification, but some people try to turn Genesis into a science book and it is not about science. It is fine to believe in Evolution. That doesn’t prevent anyone from being Christian or at least a Catholic Christian. Some “fundamentalist” may strongly disagree and so will some Catholics, but study up on it, if you haven’t and you will see that believing in evolution does not prevent you from believing in God as “Our Creator” because we don’t really know what he started with other than he created something from nothing. Evolution never explains how something came from nothing, does it? We may be off topic here, but God did not create evil, but permits it through our free will to choose it.
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buffalo
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See this thread
You will see Revelation has told us something about it. Since science will never be able to explain our origins, our knowledge came through Revelation. In other words God told us about it.
And 2,000 years of Catholic teaching on the subject shouldn’t be called fundamentalism.
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Benadam
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your questions betray a prejudice that I’m not sure you would deny.
before I would answer I would need to ask you the same question from my side of the fence.
Why can’t there be a creator (of the universe, of morals, of life)?
Why can’t those things just exist for a reason or a purpose? Why does the universe itself have to be prima causa?
When searching for answers one doesn’t have to climp an endless ladder, you just stop at the first step
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otm
Guest
And the point is???
The point I was trying to make was that all people are instilled with a conscience, whether or not they have any contact whatsoever with Judaeo-Christian heritage. So an atheist has a conscience to begin with; it is further formed by the “Golden Rule” as they gain experience and maturity.
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Benadam
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Carl
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otm
The point I was trying to make was that all people are instilled with a conscience, whether or not they have any contact whatsoever with Judaeo-Christian heritage. So an atheist has a conscience to begin with; it is further formed by the “Golden Rule” as they gain experience and maturity.
We agree.
The point I was trying to make, and apparently I haven’t made it clearly enough, is that the conscience of an atheist inescapably is fashioned at least in part by the natural law and by the Golden Rule, both of which are distinctly CAtholic beliefs promulgated for many centuries. Atheists are not born into a moral vacuum. They absorb this Judeo-Christian heritage from childhood onward even when they are not aware of it. They absorb it even when they are aware of it and are fighting it. The atheists in these forums are absorbing concepts distinctly Christian, even as they oppose and try to logically dismantle them.
If they are not careful, they may be reformed. They may become the very thing they oppose.
Deo gratias!
The point I was trying to make was that all people are instilled with a conscience, whether or not they have any contact whatsoever with Judaeo-Christian heritage. So an atheist has a conscience to begin with; it is further formed by the “Golden Rule” as they gain experience and maturity.
We agree.
The point I was trying to make, and apparently I haven’t made it clearly enough, is that the conscience of an atheist inescapably is fashioned at least in part by the natural law and by the Golden Rule, both of which are distinctly CAtholic beliefs promulgated for many centuries. Atheists are not born into a moral vacuum. They absorb this Judeo-Christian heritage from childhood onward even when they are not aware of it. They absorb it even when they are aware of it and are fighting it. The atheists in these forums are absorbing concepts distinctly Christian, even as they oppose and try to logically dismantle them.
If they are not careful, they may be reformed. They may become the very thing they oppose.
Deo gratias!
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caroljm36
Guest
My background is much like Lisa’s, though I lived with my mother only and she called herself an agnostic. I was called at an early age but didn’t join the Church until I was 44.
Mom believed in the Golden Rule and but did not articulate much more than that. She was very nice, a real lady. Other values came from TV and sappy Disney movies like Bambi. She was the granddaughter of Methodist missionaries and she said she hated being “preached” to.
Basically, like Carl I think nonbelievers are coasting along on generations of residual Christianity, which dilutes over time. They don’t understand what they’re tossing out when they reject religion. It’s just a hassle for them and they think they’ll be judged. And it leaves them no real language or authority for teaching morals. They think it’s all “common sense” but don’t realize how easy it is for a truculent kid to just reject it out of hand at some point. If your creed is basically to just “be nice,” then any snarky kid can say why the hell should I be nice if I don’t want to?? It’s just a normal intergenerational dialogue. The richer the moral heritage, the richer the dialogue IMO.
Seems to me from my past readings in philosophy, trying to find a non-religious basis for morality has been the primary project of philosophers since the Enlightenment. You can see how much success they have had in making Kant’s Categorical Imperative or Rawl’s Theory of Justice readily accessible to parents…not.
Mom believed in the Golden Rule and but did not articulate much more than that. She was very nice, a real lady. Other values came from TV and sappy Disney movies like Bambi. She was the granddaughter of Methodist missionaries and she said she hated being “preached” to.
Basically, like Carl I think nonbelievers are coasting along on generations of residual Christianity, which dilutes over time. They don’t understand what they’re tossing out when they reject religion. It’s just a hassle for them and they think they’ll be judged. And it leaves them no real language or authority for teaching morals. They think it’s all “common sense” but don’t realize how easy it is for a truculent kid to just reject it out of hand at some point. If your creed is basically to just “be nice,” then any snarky kid can say why the hell should I be nice if I don’t want to?? It’s just a normal intergenerational dialogue. The richer the moral heritage, the richer the dialogue IMO.
Seems to me from my past readings in philosophy, trying to find a non-religious basis for morality has been the primary project of philosophers since the Enlightenment. You can see how much success they have had in making Kant’s Categorical Imperative or Rawl’s Theory of Justice readily accessible to parents…not.
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wolpertinger
Guest
That’s perhaps because philosophy is not the place to look for answers? Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate is a better starting point.
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