The atheists best argument?

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Charlemagne_III said:
Quite so.

The difference is that the priests were in violation of their own ethics.

There is no ethical system to which atheists are bound.
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👍 Morality is an amoral universe is arbitrary and not compulsory! In technical terms it has no “categorical imperatives”…
 
goout said:
Both atheist and theist must admit, suffering and evil are simply part of life.
Joy and pleasure, success and prosperity are also part of life.
If life is taken as a realistic whole, all of this is part of our existence.

If the existence of suffering and death say something about God, then the good of existence itself should say something about God.
Not to mention pleasure, joy, material prosperity, etc…

What do these things say about God? Why is half of life chargeable to God, and half of it is not?
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Any form of existence has positive and negative aspects. Every advantage has a corresponding disadvantage…
 
Charlemagne_III said:
Analytic thinking can erode religious belief if the analytic thinking is not balanced by the emotional life of the subject. There’s nothing surprising about that. Certain professions (psychologists, philosophers, scientists) tend to stress analytic thinking at the expense of intuition, imagination, and the emotions, and these professions will almost certainly tend to produce atheistic thinking. Freud was notoriously atheistic.

Vitz’s argument (his documentation is impressive)is that the rise of modern atheism can be traced to the decline of paternal care for the offspring. What distinguishes our age from all previous ones is the popularity of divorce, by which the offspring are deprived of a holistic view of the world, and are exposed instead to the view that God is not our father because our human father is not even our father, or at best a weak or absentee or impotent father against whom we can rebel or whom we can hold in ultimate contempt.

I can confirm my own turn to atheism in my twenties as rooted in this same phenomenon. I became excessively analytic at precisely the same time that I was rebelling against two very inadequate father figures in my life. My later turn to faith was motivated, I do believe, by the desire to know the Father of us all. I met a holy priest, Father Bernard, whose nurturing role as “Father” helped me find my way to ultimate faith and conviction.
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Analysis without synthesis amounts to intellectual paralysis! It is regressive rather than progressive because it exalts the past and neglects the future.
 
tonyrey said:
Which has no rational basis in an irrational universe…
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Secular humanists appeal to science, reason, and experience to justify their ethical principles by evaluating the real-world consequences of moral decisions.
 
Tomdstone said:
Secular humanists appeal to science, reason, and experience to justify their ethical principles by evaluating the real-world consequences of moral decisions.
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What are those ethical principles you are justifying then?
 
goout said:
What are those ethical principles you are justifying then?
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they say that they “believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.” and that they “are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.”
 
Tomdstone said:
they say that they “believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.” and that they “are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.”
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What are those “normative standards”? It seems to me that we do not discover anything truly “together”, as evidenced by disagreement.

For instance, the Catholic Church observes that it is always and everywhere immoral to take innocent human life. Not everyone agrees with that. So is it normative?
And we propose that moral standard independent of one’s degree of rationality. That moral standard is also independent of results and popular opinion.

For instance, the consequence of the holocaust might have been prosperity for fair haired Europeans.
We would still hold it to be immoral, even though the perceived consequences seem “good”.

So what are the normative standards?
 
goout said:
For instance, the Catholic Church observes that it is always and everywhere immoral to take innocent human life. Not everyone agrees with that. So is it normative?
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A number of Catholics here have told me that’s not true. For example, they say it’s not immoral in a 9/11 situation to take the lives of passengers by shooting down an airliner which terrorists may use to kill others, and not immoral to take innocent human life as “collateral damage” in war.
 
inocente said:
A number of Catholics here have told me that’s not true. For example, they say it’s not immoral in a 9/11 situation to take the lives of passengers by shooting down an airliner which terrorists may use to kill others, and not immoral to take innocent human life as “collateral damage” in war.
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Principle of double effect has always been part of Catholic teaching.

What is it that Baptists believe? Is it permissible to take the lives of passengers by shooting down an airliner which terrorists may use to kill others?
 
PRmerger said:
Principle of double effect has always been part of Catholic teaching.

What is it that Baptists believe? Is it permissible to take the lives of passengers by shooting down an airliner which terrorists may use to kill others?
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Well, here’s one of those Catholics now :).

I can’t speak for all Baptists, most I guess would agree, including me, although there may be some who adhere to Kant’s rule that it’s always categorically wrong to use another as an object.
 
inocente said:
Well, here’s one of those Catholics now :).

I can’t speak for all Baptists, most I guess would agree, including me, although there may be some who adhere to Kant’s rule that it’s always categorically wrong to use another as an object.
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Oh, yes. That’s very Catholic: never use another as an object.

(Shooting down a plane would not be using another human person as an object, BTW)

So you would let the terrorists take 2000 lives?
 
Tomdstone said:
Secular humanists appeal to science, reason, and experience to justify their ethical principles by evaluating the real-world consequences of moral decisions.
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Christians appeal to an objective ethical system that cannot be subjected to the vagaries and relativism of secular humanism. Christians don’t get to invent their personal morality, then call it objective because it is rooted in science and reason and experience, which as we all know varies from one person to the next.
 
PRmerger said:
Oh, yes. That’s very Catholic: never use another as an object.

(Shooting down a plane would not be using another human person as an object, BTW)

So you would let the terrorists take 2000 lives?
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The Kantian rule is we should never act in such a way that “we treat humanity, in ourselves or in others, as a means only, but always as an end in itself”. The German Constitution is based in Kantian ethics, and I think it originally forbid the shooting down of an airliner because it would use the passengers’ lives as a means, but that it has now been amended.

Personally, I think it’s something for which no one should hypothesize general rules, and can only be decided in a specific situation when no other option remains.
 
inocente said:
The Kantian rule is we should never act in such a way that “we treat humanity, in ourselves or in others, as a means only, but always as an end in itself”.
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Very Catholic, this. 👍

That is, if I understand it correctly without the “never”: Kantian rule is always treat people with the dignity they deserve as human persons.

Or: never use a person as a means to an end.
Personally, I think it’s something for which no one should hypothesize general rules, and can only be decided in a specific situation when no other option remains.
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I disagree. This is exactly what we should be doing, and this is exactly the place we should be doing this, if not just as an exercise in expressing one’s moral muscles.

It does no harm to “hypothesize general rules”, provided that they are, of course, steeped in reality.
 
Charlemagne_III said:
Christians appeal to an objective ethical system that cannot be subjected to the vagaries and relativism of secular humanism. Christians don’t get to invent their personal morality, then call it objective because it is rooted in science and reason and experience, which as we all know varies from one person to the next.
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Suppose someone disagrees with an aspect of your religion. Is burning him alive at the stake right or wrong from a Christian POV?
 
Tomdstone said:
Suppose someone disagrees with an aspect of your religion. Is burning him alive at the stake right or wrong from a Christian POV?
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Wrong.
🤷

Be careful not mix up the behavior and practices of individuals, peoples, countries, with the moral teaching they are subject to, or with the label they subscribe to.
We could call that “the Stalin factor”.

We are asking (still) what are the normative moral precepts you are espousing.
 
goout said:
For instance, the Catholic Church observes that it is always and everywhere immoral to take innocent human life.
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AFAIK, the Catholic Church teaches the theory of the just war. In any war, just or not, innocent life is taken as collateral damage. It is taught that a just war is not immoral. In fact, the Roman Catholic Pope, Urban II, in a speech delivered at the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095, launched the First Crusade. As a result of this speech, many innocent Jews were murdered even in France and Germany. An army led by a Roman Catholic priest, Father Folkmar attacked Jewish civilians in Bohemia. As the Crusaders attacked Jerusalem, they massacred Jews and Muslims. According to the Muslim chronicle of Ibn al-Qalanisi, Jews hid in their synagogues and the Crusaders burned them all down while these innocent people were inside. Estimates vary but many, perhaps 100,000, innocent people died as a result of the First Crusade.
Jehovah’s Witnesses will refuse to take active part in any war since they realize that innocent life will be taken. Perhaps it will be an unintended consequence in many cases, but still, the end result will be that innocent human life will be taken.
 
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