ZenMode
Well-known member
I'm pointing out what any one of us today, and Jesus (who is actually the same being that murdered all the children on Passover), recognize as immoral.
If God were real, you wouldn’t need a book
- Thread starter domer76
- Start date
You're smuggling in the ethos of the New Testament and calling it your own.
As an atheist you shouldn't even be smuggling in an absolute objective standard of right and wrong and claiming you are the final arbiter of moral truth. In a world of nothing but matter and energy, objective moral standards are an illusion.
ZenMode
Well-known member
The question of an objective basis for morality is separate from the current topic.
Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
Militant atheists over 30 have some serious trauma going on upstairs. It would take a therapist to draw it out of them.
As I recall, you were the one to bring up the claim your morality is superior to Christians, so you really don't have a reason to dodge justifying your moral relativism or explaining where you are getting this standard of absolute right and wrong.
ZenMode
Well-known member
My morality IS better because it doesn’t include genocide of children.
Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
Stalin and Mao were atheists and they murdered millions of people including children.
Why do you hate Christianity so much? Childhood trauma of being forced to go to Sunday school?
Nietzsche went mad, Schopenhauer was a clinically depressed nihilist, and Jean Paul Sartre had a deathbed conversion!
There is no objective morality if the world is nothing but matter and energy. In your atheist worldview objective morality is a delusion.
Genocide, child sacrifice and female infanticide were perfectly accepted practices 3000 years ago. You wouldn't have complained about them at all if you grew up in those cultures. It's only because you grew up in the Christian West and smuggled a New Testament ethos into your worldview that you believe there is an absolute right and wrong.
ZenMode
Well-known member
A lot of terrible things have been done in the name of God(s).
It seems unlikely people do terrible things in the name of no gods.
Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
Agreed. Human beings are very nasty creatures. Our history is written in blood, including human blood. No one religion, culture, nation or other group of human beings has a monopoly on that. Some were worse than others, but they are all guilty. Including your fellow atheists, Joseph and Mao.
Science and scientists have been responsible for mass death well, as soldiers coughing up their lungs in the WW1 trench gas wars could attest, or incinerated Japanese children in Hiroshima affirm. I never understood the attempt to hold out religion as a particularly and uniquely fertile ground for evil and violence.
The thing about the Bible is that it is a collection of books with different literary styles, very little of which was actually analytical history or modern biography.
There are a lot of stories, parables, poems, literature in the Bible that have only a passing relationship to true historical narrative.
There is no archeological evidence of mass destruction and genocide of the Cannanites or Amalekites in the late Bronze Age.
The data just ain't there to support it.
We have to allow authors of literature to use hyperbole and literary licence. What actually probably happened were skirmishes between the Israelites and their neighbors, but not wholesale destruction and mass genocide.