Scratch an atheist and you will find a skeptic!

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PRmerger said:
The more I think about this meme, the more I think: WHUT??

On what planet does any rational person believe that we should read* any *document in the manner of a programmed robot?
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That’s what struck me. It’s like something a 4 year old would come up with.

But it’s also consistent with atheism. A human being is simply a collection of molecules with programming (created via random unintelligent pathways).

In the atheist view, it is difficult to explain the difference between a robot and a human. If evolution, by randomness and natural selection, could create conscious beings, why not intelligent computer programmers and robotics?
 
reggieM said:
That’s what struck me. It’s like something a 4 year old would come up with.

But it’s also consistent with atheism. A human being is simply a collection of molecules with programming (created via random unintelligent pathways).

In the atheist view, it is difficult to explain the difference between a robot and a human. If evolution, by randomness and natural selection, could create conscious beings, why not intelligent computer programmers and robotics?
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Yep–I hadn’t about that–

It is, indeed, no wonder that an atheist came up with this meme. It’s a natural consequence of the paradigm that we are just a collection of programs.

I’ve heard it argued by atheists that the concept of free will is an illusion.

So, yeah, if we read the Bible as preprogrammed robots devoid of free will, I would reject the Bible as well.

Er…that is, if I were programmed to know that killing all pregnant unmarried women is wrong.

[SIGN]
SAAFAF[/SIGN]

😉
 
reggieM said:
That seems clear. There is no reason for the kind of outrage that Bradski offers here given that atheism posits that morality is subjective. Rapists want to rape - so it is good for them to do that. Or will the atheist say that rape is universally wrong? If so, you cannot derive a universal moral norm like that from materialist evolution which looks only to the survival and reproductive success of the species.
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Actually wasn’t Rome started by the rape of the Sabine women? Rape and plunder is how the world was civilized!
 
CHRISTINE77 said:
Actually wasn’t Rome started by the rape of the Sabine women? Rape and plunder is how the world was civilized!
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Thankfully, Our Blessed Lord reminded us about how evil such things are and what kind of eternal suffering the men who do them (and don’t repent) will endure.

Materialist-atheist-evolution will never get us that far – it will have to say that that “civilizing” activity was good for the human species.
 
reggieM said:
Thankfully, Our Blessed Lord reminded us about how evil such things are and what kind of eternal suffering the men who do them (and don’t repent) will endure.

Materialist-atheist-evolution will never get us that far – it will have to say that that “civilizing” activity was good for the human species.
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They seem to want to have it both ways!😉
 
reggieM said:
Russell admits moral absolutes also. He just says that they come from evolution, not from God.
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That doesn’t sound logical.

How can something be a moral absolute in one generation, but it wasn’t a moral absolute in another generation (because they had yet to “evolve” in to that type of moral advancement)?

So if in the time of the ancient Romans it was perfectly licit to leave an unwanted baby out in the cold to die, if that’s what the parents wished…then it was, indeed, perfectly moral…until we evolved to the present day concept that it’s GROSS and HORRIFIC to leave an unwanted baby out in the elements to die?

So the same act is moral in ancient Rome and immoral today?

That’s Russell’s POV?
 
PRmerger said:
That doesn’t sound logical.

How can something be a moral absolute in one generation, but it wasn’t a moral absolute in another generation (because they had yet to “evolve” in to that type of moral advancement)?

So if in the time of the ancient Romans it was perfectly licit to leave an unwanted baby out in the cold to die, if that’s what the parents wished…then it was, indeed, perfectly moral…until we evolved to the present day concept that it’s GROSS and HORRIFIC to leave an unwanted baby out in the elements to die?

So the same act is moral in ancient Rome and immoral today?

That’s Russell’s POV?
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That’s a good question and it’s kind of complicated.a
Yes, I think he would agree with what you said there. He would say that moral norms evolved and they are universal in human society now today - and they were in Roman times also. So, it’s not really moral absolutes - I shouldn’t have used that word. It’s more like “universal moral norms”. That would mean for him “moral rules that everybody in society accepts”. But that’s different than “absolutes” which are norms that have always been the same.

So, he will look at things like rape and say “yes, rape has been good for the human species and evolution preserved it, but now we are evolving to get rid of rape because we are smarter now and we know it is bad”.

So, he’s saying that society will all agree on the moral norms, but evolution creates and changes the norms for each generation of humans, as needed for survival and reproductive success (evolution’s goals).

If we said, “killing an unwanted baby is an immoral act that has always been a wrong thing to do”-- I think that’s where he would disagree and say that evolution caused that act to be morally good for a while, and then later it wasn’t good.

He tends to look at what people are doing and believing now, and then say “this shows that everybody agrees on moral rules because evolution made it that way”.

He says, basically, a person can believe that God created moral norms, but that’s not any different than saying evolution created them.

But I tried to show that there is a huge difference between those two views.

🤷
 
Just posted today by Mark Shea:

“Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist” while not true of all atheists, is amazingly true of many of them. It’s an enduring puzzle.It was fellow atheist Phil Plait who once was compelled to give the rather obvious advice “Don’t be a d***” to his colleagues in a famous talk that was shouted down.

If only atheists could be persuaded to read the Bible as they would read any other book from a radically different culture. But the impulse to search for ammo instead of trying some empathy generally overwhelms the project. And things are also gummed up by an odd doublethink in which God is both denied to exist and also demanded to do magic (“Why did a tiny sect of persecuted Christians not abolish slavery in the Roman Empire?”) or wonders that never happened are denounced for happening (“Why did the flood that never happened commit genocide?”) When you begin the project of reading any text with a hardened will that you are seeking to nail the guilty bastard by any means necessary it makes for an impoverished literary experience. Atheists reading the Bible and Muslim-haters searching the Koran for beloved hand grenades they can hurl at the Enemy sound indistinguishable to me. It’s exhausting."
 
PRmerger said:
Just posted today by Mark Shea:

“Atheists reading the Bible and Muslim-haters searching the Koran for beloved hand grenades they can hurl at the Enemy sound indistinguishable to me. It’s exhausting.”
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#truth
 
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