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Author | Topic: Atheism Cannot Rationally Explain Morals. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
And my point has been that what YOU call morality is exactly the same.
Right and this has been my point all along, that what you call morality is nothing more than more biological processes with no real meaning. Dawn Bertot writes:
Exactly. In different circumstances a completely different morality might be appropriate.
And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if it's just what's made up in you heads or anybody head, then, just the opposite of anything you call good would be acceptable. Dawn Bertot writes:
Morality doesn't have to be either sense or nonsense. It just has to work.
Hence you demonstrate your morality to be utter nonsense Dawm Bertot writes:
We can certainly discuss it. You can start by citing wherever the Bible says that, "God is infinite and thus his morality is absolute as a result of that."
ringo writes: It's a logical conclusion the likes of which are irresistible and irrefutable. We can discuss that if you think otherwise Dawn Bertot writes: That's not an instruction at all. It's just a vague empty statement that isn't even in the Bible. The first specific instruction I have is that God is infinite and thus his morality is absolute as a result of that.
Dawn Bertot writes:
That's just it. You "know" it instinctively, not rationally.
Even if I didn't know these things instinctively.... Dawn Bertot writes:
We can certainly discuss your so-called "evidence" in an appropriate thread.
Now if you could get rid of all the evidence that clearly supports the existence of God and the Bible as his Word, your task is complete
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
Huh? Of course the word subjective is relative. Subjective MEANS different for each person - i.e. relative to the subject.
The word subjective is given a relative meaning by humans, which in reality has no meaning. Dawn Bertot writes:
That doesn't follow at all. We non-Nazis agree collectively that some of the things they did were wrong. Collective agreement is as close to objectivity as we can get.
If my feelings or opinions are different than the Nazis, then it follows logically that no one could say they were guilty of anything. Dawn Bertot writes:
Remember the social contract? Child molesting is a breach of the social contract. One person can not have a contract with himself so one person does not have his own private morality.
If what works for a child molester, works for them, it's ok. Dawn Bertot writes:
It worked until the rest of us intervened. It was a clash of different moralities. So if what worked for the Nazis worked for them, it's good to go?. Take slavery as another example. It worked just fine for centuries. It was supported by Christians, based on an "absolute morality" that came from the same source as your "absolute morality".
Dawn Bertot writes:
You're right back to the same problem that you haven't addressed: If there exists a being outside the universe that is all knowing and absolute in its morality, then YOU still don't know what that absolute morality is. YOU are not omniscient. And the fact that there are thousands of different sects with thousands of different ideas of "absolute morality" means that you don't even have a collective approximation of objectivity.
Now if there exists a being outside the universe that is all knowing and absolute in its morality, then the words start to make sense. Dawn Bertot writes:
None of that says anything about morality. ringo writes: You can start by citing wherever the Bible says that, "God is infinite and thus his morality is absolute as a result of that." "Great is our Lord and abundant in strength; His understanding is infinite." Psalms 147:5 "Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth Does not become weary or tired His understanding is inscrutable." Isa 40:28 "Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!. Romans 11:33 Also, Romans 11 says that God's judgements are unsearchable and unfathomable - i.e. YOU have no way of knowing absolutely what they are.
Dawn Bertot writes:
No, it means impossible to understand or interpret. The Bible is shooting you in the foot.
I believe inscrutable means non contestable, due to his being infinte in wisdom
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Phat writes:
Why would one make that claim?
If one claims that the object of all morality is God.... Phat writes:
That believer would be contradicting his own Bible. Look at Dawn Bertot's own quotes. God is beyond our understanding.
The believer would argue that as a child of God they have access to and awareness OF the moral absolutes. Phat writes:
That's common behaviour of people who are proven wrong.
Telling them that even their Bible is subjective merely frustrates and stiffens their resolve to be absolutely right---
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
That's right. Morality is not a thing like a banana. It's made up in human minds. It's an agreement between humans to make living together in society easier. Like any contract, the specific provisions vary to suit the situation.
Which of course means you don't actually have a thing called morality. Dawn Bertot writes:
Your morality is the same. You've made it up. The only difference is that you've fooled yourself into thinking that God whispered it in your ear.
You can't get close to objective or subjective or Wrong or Right, because these are things that absolutely cannot exist in your purely naturalistic existence. You have made them up. Dawn Bertot writes:
You didn't need to demonstrate that. It's what I've been saying all along. Social animals have their own social contracts just like ours.
I have demonstrated that your actions and existence is no different than that of the animal kingdom. Dawn Bertot writes:
Subjectivity exists because perceptions and imaginations are not real things. Everybody has different perceptions and imaginations. That's what subjectivity means. What did you think it meant?
You would need to demonstrate that subjectivity even exists. But how in the world will you do that. Perceptions and imaginations are not real things Dawn Bertot writes:
There is no "actual" meaning. There's only the meaning that we assign. The same applies to you. The only "meaning" in the Bible is what you imagine.
Ringo, assigning a name to something in reality, cannot give it more ACTUAL meaning. Dawn Bertot writes:
The Bible says you can't understand God. You quoted it yourself.
Certainly, if there exists such a being that is all knowing, he would be able to communicate to me his will. If there exists enough evidence to support that he exists, why wouldn't I be able to know his morality is absolute. Dawn Bertot writes:
Those verses don't say anything about God's character either. They say that He is infinite and that you can't understand Him.
Of course those verses say something about morality, God's character is his morality. Dawn Bertot writes:
And if you don't understand Him completely, you can't understand His morality absolutely. You have to make it up just like the rest of us.
Therefore I can know he's absolute without understanding him completely
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Dawn Bertot writes:
The only way "good" or "bad" has to exist in reality is by way of the person's behaviour. He imagines that his behaviour is "good" or "bad". There is no need for an absolute standard of "good" or "bad" to exist.
So if one wants to imagine he actually has a thing called called morality, he would need to demonstrate that something called good or bad in a moral sense actually exists in reality. Dawn Bertot writes:
Once again your own citation disagrees with you:
Fortunately, what we see as conscience in humans conforms more to Theism than it does to naturalism. Naturalism has no hope of explaining it. Theism and Judeo-Christianiny explain what we see hear and feel. Romans 2:11-14.quote:The Gentiles do by nature the things contained in the law. Dawn Bertot writes:
The imaginations and perceptions of what IS real are all we have, all of us, including you. Your imagination and perception of God is as close to real as God can get. Your imagination and perception of morality is as close to real as morality can get. Now your starting to get it, subjective can't exist because the imaginations and perceptions are not real, AS YOU CLEARLY ADMIT. Your imagination and perception of a two-by-four is "more real" in the sense that you can compare your own imagination and perception with those of other people to form an approximation of an objective view of the object.
Dawn Bertot writes:
You can also understand the concept of flight without being able to fly. You can understand the concept of unicorns whether unicorns exist in reality or not. The concept is nothing but imagination and perception. It doesn't have to have any basis in reality.
But I can understand the reality and concept of infinte in knowledge, without understanding all it all, correct
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
Exactly. According to the Bible, it's written on everybody's heart at birth. So it isn't something we figure out rationally, not for atheists and not for theists either.
Except for the fact that you forgot to quote the part that says, "For that which may be KNOWN of God, is manifest In Them, for God hath SHOWN it unto them". It's written in and on thier hearts at birth. Dawn Bertot writes:
Indeed. The Bible authors knew something about reality and they don't agree with you. James 1:13-16 refers to every man, not just believers.
Well see thats the beauty of the word of God, it conforms to what we know about morality in reality.
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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The verses that you quoted, including James, don't set theists apart from atheists. You claim that you have special insight into God's "absolute morality" but nothing you have quoted from the Bible supports that claim.
As I have said all along, your morality is no more "accurate" than an atheist's. It's made up just like the atheist's. Yours may have religious influences where the atheist's has only social influences but the fact remains that both are equally made up.
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
I've asked you more than once to tell us the absolute meaning of, "Thou shalt not kill." If there are exceptions, how is it absolute? Thats assuming you aren't the only one that gets to answer questions You're free to answer that one.
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
GDR writes:
That's what Dawn Bertot said, more or less, but he says it IS absolute.
The laws pointed us in the right direction but Jesus told, and showed us, that the only absolute is the law of love. It is all about our hearts. Paul got it right in his first letter to the Corinthians when he says that ultimately God will judge the motives of our hearts.
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Dawn Bertot writes:
The question isn't whether absolute morality can or does exist. The question is whether theistic morality an be differentiated from atheistic morality. Since you admit that you don't know everything, it doesn't matter whether or not God has absolute standards because you don't know exactly what those standards are. So I don't need to know everything to know that absolute morality can and does exist. You can know that brain surgery exists without knowing how to do brain surgery. Similarly, you can "know" that absolute morality exists without knowing how to do absolute morality. So the question remains, how is your theistic morality different from anybody else's morality? You have to guess at what God wants while the atheist at least gets to rationally decide what is best for society. Your morality is less rational, not more.
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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~1.6 writes:
It's only fairly recently that rape has become a crime against women. It used to be a crime against the husband, much like using his lawnmower without permission. It was about keeping track of whose offspring belonged to whom.
It is my belief that there is such a thing as universal taboos. I used a example of a Neanderthal stalking a female and copulating with her by force.
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Phat writes:
There's individual morality and there's collective morality. Our society can agree that slavery is a bad thing while individuals like Faith can argue that homosexuality is worse than slavery because that's what the Bible sez. At best, an individual can live up to his own standards approximately. And sometimes individual standards conflict with community standards.
Is your best the same as my best? Is Faiths best different from both of us? Can Tangle quantify what his best should be? Phat writes:
That's a nice bowl of cherries. While you're at it, you can conveniently ignore any examples of Jesus' immorality that you don't like.
Even if we can behave better than the God of the Bible, what about Jesus? (Some argue that He personifies the God of the Bible better than the OT stories....)
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
I didn't say that. I said that it doesn't matter whether or not absolute morality exists - because neither you nor anybody else has any way of knowing what that absolute morality would be. The Bible verses that YOU quoted confirm that NONE of us can understand the mind of God fully.
It does matter whether subjective morality does or does not exist. Dawn Bertot writes:
That's exactly what I've been saying. There is no such thing as morality except in imaginations. The same applies to your own morality.
There is no such thing as Atheistic morality except in imaginations. Dawn Bertot writes:
You really don't seem to understand what "subjective" means. Can you explain it in one sentence?
Subjective morality can't exist it a logical contradiction.
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Dawn Bertot writes:
It isn't rocket science. You may know that brain surgery exists but you don't know how to do it. You may know that rocket science exists but you don't know how to do it. You may know that absolute morality exists but you don't know how to do it. Not understanding why you think, it's necessary to understand all the facets of absolute morality, without knowing that it can exist. What we're talking about here is not knowing that something exists. We're talking about knowing how to do it. We're talking about rationally figuring out what is moral and what is not. If you DID know all the facets of absolute morality, you wouldn't be figuring anything out rationally. You'd only be following orders, which requires no rational thought at all.
Dawn Bertot writes:
Not at all. To say that God is wrong from our perspective is no different from saying that the Nazis were wrong from our perspective. God and the Nazis are right from their own perspective but not necessarily from ours. Unless you know EXACTLY what God's perspective is, you can't rationally conclude that it is "right". You're only taking his word for it, which is not rational.
For example, if an atheist accuses God of immoral behavior, he or she is implying that God is not Good or God is Wrong. He or she is indirectly implying that they KNOW , what Good or BAD actually are or are not. Dawn Bertot writes:
You continue to demonstrate that you don't know what "subjective" means. Kindly explain in simple terms what YOU think it means and then I can point out why you don't understand what I'm saying.
Even if I granted that there was such a thing as subjective morality, then it would be incumbent on you to show what is absolutely Right and absolutely Wrong. For if you could not, then it would follow that subjective morality does NOT actually exist.
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dredge writes:
Of course not. Why would it? Aerodynamics doesn't impose any morality on us either.
But this "science" places no compulsion on a human being to conform to any moral code... Dredge writes:
No. Morality is whatever society wants it to be, whatever works to help us live together in relative harmony.
... and morality can be literally anything you want it to be.
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