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tonyrey
Guest
In other words they are not categorical imperatives but arbitrary rules that can be ignored when convenient…
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tonyrey
Guest
The question doesn’t arise because to reject God’s will is to choose hell.
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tonyrey
Guest
Then how do you explain the fact that many of the atheists who have visited this forum were once Christians? Is the decline in church-going a sheer coincidence?
And are all the atheists who have become Christians nitwits?
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Bradski
Guest
They found out more about it.
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Entwhistler
Guest
Work what out for themselves? Are you saying that individuals can create morality? Or are you saying that there are other moral authorities besides a god?
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tonyrey
Guest
No response.
Not sure whether your “strange freaks of nature” counts as unseemly truculence
"Strange freaks of nature"are the logical implications of atheism and they are directly relevant to the topic of the atheist’s best argument, notably the Problem of Evil.
These words are a glaring example of rank discourtesy for which there is no excuse whatsoever but it is doubtful whether you would ever apologise even though it is a flagrant violation of the forum rules.
The issue is not what I think but the reason why child abuse is wrong. You still haven’t explained why child abuse is wrong if we exist by chance. An emotional response is not an adequate reason as far as strange **purposeless **freaks of nature are concerned…
best argument…*.*Nope, that’s only the thread title. The OP is 221 words which speak of “child abductions, where children/people are held in basements and abused for years” and says “It seems God isn’t present in their lives and indeed did not try to intervene to give them a normal, reasonable life” and ends “it’s like I wish God to be real… but the suffering of others has made me question it”.Your standard argument reappears once again!
The topic is "The **atheist’s **
Sometimes I also have the same question, and I’ve never seen a good answer to the problem of evil. The formulation that God is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good doesn’t seem compatible with “child abductions, where children/people are held in basements and abused for years”. Do you have an answer for why God doesn’t intervene when any normal person, as soon as we knew of it, would move heaven and earth to stop the abuse?
You still haven’t given a reason why child abuse is wrong, a fact which disqualifies it as an objection to the existence of God. In the atheist’s scheme of things everything is permissible because the universe is valueless, purposeless and meaningless.
As for an answer to God’s apparent non-intervention it should be obvious that no one knows the extent to which God does intervene and prevents such atrocities. He probably does so very often but if He did so on every occasion it would defeat the purpose of giving us free will. Everyone would be compelled to believe there is a benevolent Power protecting children and we are being watched every moment of our lives. We would lose the most precious gifts we have: our capacity for unselfish love and our power to shape our own destiny.
Anyone who is a true Christian believes those who suffer in this life are more than compensated in heaven because on earth they share in the suffering of Jesus on the Cross whereas atheists have faith in the soul-destroying theory that nothing makes sense and everything leads to total extinction when we die regardless of whether we have committed atrocities or helped others to lead fulfilling lives.
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o_mlly
Guest
God keeps His word. Mankind may reject God’s will in heaven in the sense that mankind retains the moral authority to do so. However, in a mysterious manner in heaven God and mankind will be one. One cannot reject themselves.
CCC#460 The Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature”:78 "For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God."79 "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God."80 "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods."81
78 2 Pt 1:4.
79 St. Irenaeus, Adv. haeres. 3, 19, 1: PG 7/1, 939.
80 St. Athanasius, De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B.
81 St. Thomas Aquinas, Opusc. 57, 1-4.
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Nixbits
Guest
A moral framework.
I’m saying that individuals, singly or in groups, can devise a moral framework for themselves.
Persons can look to ‘authorities’ other than God to give them a system of morals, but they need not do so.
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Nixbits
Guest
They are not necessarily arbitrary. They can be ignored, as can all rules, but there are likely to be consequences of doing so.
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tonyrey
Guest
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Entwhistler
Guest
But doesn’t that mean that there is really no difference between moral frameworks? If that is the case, morality is just a construct of human beings and the only thing that makes it authoritative is the majority of people who uphold it.
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inocente
Guest
I never said that. Please don’t put my name on a quote which I never said.
I strongly object to you calling other posters freaks of nature. Terms of derision and derogatory remarks are prohibited.
I never said we exist by chance, and if you genuinely don’t know why sexually abusing children is evil then I strongly recommend you seek psychiatric help. I’m not going to play games justifying why child abuse is evil.
Arguing that the free will of a pedophile is more important than the free will of his victim is stunningly immoral.
By that argument, sadistic child abusers should be allowed to do whatever they please since their victims are compensated in heaven.
Sorry perhaps I’m reading you wrong but I do not want to talk to anyone who gives any justification for child abuse.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Well it’s quite obvious that if you are an atheist you will have to work them out for yourself, forever inventing the moral wheel that Christ got rolling 2,000 years ago.
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tonyrey
Guest
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Peter_Plato
Guest
I regret to inform you that your own non sequitur, above, is crying out for another long post.
The non sequitur committed by you occurs in your inference that believers can possibly only act morally if their belief in or fear of “god” controls their otherwise wayward desires.
What you don’t seem to comprehend are the implications that befall the universe and the moral landscape if God – as the only possible provider of ultimate moral purpose for the universe – does not exist.
The question relates to how the completely different set of metaphysical underpinnings of reality, held by atheists as opposed to theists, impact what can be reasonably proposed as expectations or obligations upon human behaviour. What “reasons” would anyone have for behaving morally if nothing really significant hangs upon what humans do? If behaving heinously or behaving in a scrupulously upright way made absolutely no difference in the final analysis, then a person would be exhibiting “mental health issues” if they insist upon reading into reality moral obligations that simply didn’t exist there. They would be suffering from delusions about morality and reality if it really didn’t matter whether this or that agglomeration of atoms survived or didn’t for any length of time.
The point, which seems to be continually missed or denied by many atheists, is that without an ultimate purpose to the universe, grounded in the inherent nature of the very act of being itself (AKA God,) it wouldn’t matter in the end whether a person acted “morally” or did not. Nothing would hang on it and nothing significant would be won or lost by holding to or abandoning any particular morality.
If shooting a best friend was simply the act of rearranging atoms and chemicals, the fallout from which would be to bring to an end an epiphenomenon (an emerging attribute) that has no real inherent value nor any autonomous existence to begin with, then doing so would be no worse nor any more significant than a volcano blowing the top off a mountain or a meteorite striking and realigning the surface of the Earth
The only reason that atheists continue to insist on the moral significance of persons is because they themselves cannot face the implications of their own logic – the loss of morality itself as an idea.
If matter is all that exists, then matter is all that exists and human society/intelligence/awareness is inconsequential, a cherished whimsy without substance or reality.
In other words, the reason belief in God is significant for a thoughtful theist is not because God is required to “keep them from acting immorally,” but because the existence of God is the only logical possibility that could possibly provide the kind of meaning and significance at the deepest level of reality – at the ground of existence and reality itself – that properly warrants or underwrites morality in a rationally satisfactory manner.
Without God, you have a very shallow and supercilious layering of transient human values and morality, by human beings, as a tenuous function of our delusive desires, upon a reality which simply carries no trace of them – nor cares an iota about them. With God, purpose, meaning and significance flow from the profound depth of existence itself and underwrite morality at the most basic level of reality.
Properly understood, thoughtful theists are moral, not because they fear God or punishment, but because they have a deep and rich fundamental warrant for being moral which atheists lack, no matter how much atheists protest that they can be moral without God.
Sure they can be, but they have no compelling rational warrant for being moral precisely because they have kicked out from under their own feet any strong reasons they might have for being moral in the first place – that the universe is imbued with intention, purpose, meaning and significance.
If you disagree, please provide whatever reasons you can muster for an atheist to act morally, besides from the need to deny that atheism carries with it the implication that morality is rendered meaningless by its own metaphysical assumptions.
Recall that the implications from atheistic metaphysics lead to the necessary conclusion that cause-effect dictates all outcomes, including human behaviour. The conclusion from that is no choice or autonomy, in terms of authentic moral agency, can exist, so moral responsibility is effectively impossible. If atheism is true, nothing in the universe can act or be moral to any significant degree since choices, judgements, decisions, intentions, actions and the like are purely fictional chimeras.
Sure atheists can be “moral,” but only following the necessary implication that “moral” is a meaningless concept and whether a person is “moral” or not – in the sense left over after the atheist is done deconstructing the word – is a completely vacuous way of existing.
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JapaneseKappa
Guest
I would like to thank you for this clear statement of the hedonism inherent in Christian morality. “There can be no right or wrong unless there are rewards and punishments!” declares the Christian moralist. “If there is no guarantee of eternal pleasure, then how can I be compelled to do what is right? If there is no guarantee of eternal suffering, then why should I avoid what is wrong? Truly, there are no possible answers other than God’s heaven and hell system!”
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Tomdstone
Guest
Unfortunately, we have atheists today that argue for the reverse. they claim that humanistic secularism provides a solid basis for ethical behavior and that religion has been responsible for terrible injustice done to innocent people such as the Inquisition and torture chambers, the Crusades, slaves bought and sold by clergy, burning at the stake of heretics, beheadings of infidels, terrorism in places such as northern Ireland, etc.
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Tomdstone
Guest
But if it is the case that mankind and God will be one in heaven, and yet man may still have free will, why did not God create the earth that way so that man would have free will, and yet always choose the good, seeing that it is most pleasing to God.
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Aloysium
Guest
Your words are lifeless statues, harking to some ideal, imaginary existence, less real the Olympus itself. The statement that pretends to be a question targets what is the obvious quality permeating this world in which we here are meeting virtually - evil. Some of us can throw it out there, transformed into nightly news stories, that creep into our homes. But, it’s not out there, trying to get in. The snake in our garden, whispers to us and we follow.
What have we become?
Why did God create such a being as myself?
It usually starts pretty innocently, sometimes even magnificently, but it doesn’t take long before sin takes hold. Whether the lust is for power, for possessions, to be thought of highly, for pleasure, it grows with the feeding. At best temporarily sated, it gnaws away inside. Why so many wondrous things, never to be mine. I would swallow the universe. But, hey that’s me I guess. I would not suggest that worm would be anywhere else. The look that peers into the soul deserves the gangster’s gun. “Pop, pop, pop, fool!” The emptiness, the meaningless millions of dazzling lights, being controlled by everything but ourselves, it all ends this way, down that path that leads to me and what I want.
Don’t take that wide, well travelled road that leads away from where we’re from, away from home, eternal. You see, we come into existence through an act of love. And, we become who we truly are, when we love. Give it all away, and we have what is ours, being at the point where God meets mankind, bringing us all into existence. God makes us good, we individually and as one humanity have chosen to be otherwise. We can change; that is why time exists.
So, why the choice? Because it generates all this wonder! :twocents:
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o_mlly
Guest
He did.
Then man would not have free will.
To be saints, one must also have the ability to be a sinner. If in this life one freely chooses God then in eternity one will be with God. If one rejects God in this life then God still keeps His word and one will reject God for all eternity…
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