Morality without god

Ants, termites, bee etc altruistic behaviour is obviously not moral behaviour but it is an example how evolution can create behaviours that benefit the group at the expense of the individual.Morality - or our sense of it - is in fact programmed into us in a robotic way in that the feeling of empathy for others is not something we have control over. Unless you're a psycho or socipath, we are affected by the suffering of others.Of course, given our intellect, we can overide those feelings to greater or lesser degrees, but there's no avoiding the default conditioning which often compels people to do self-sacrificing actions.

A while back you argued for absolute morality and here you are congratulating god for his pragmatic stance on relative morality.Care to explain?

Absolute morality is, by definition, independent of circumstances.

Fantastic, so I can, after all, own a Canadian then?

Don't you think that your God could have found a more peruasive way of convincing people than to get the weird guy up the hill who's building an enormous boat in a desert to give the message?(How do you think he told the people not in his immediate vicinity, Facebook?)Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

"Hey Marg, John down the plantation just got back from Mesopotamia and he said that there's a salty old sea dog there that heard that there's a guy in the desert building this damn big boat. He say's that the world is going to flood. What do you think we should do about it?""I don't know George, what did he say we should do?""Oh, he didn't really say, something about sodomy I think. What's for dinner?"I still think Facebook would have been a better idea.

Nor me - and you can change 'may' to 'will'.There's a few reasons why that kind of language will not persuade a rationalist.Firstly its just contentless rhetoric. Those of us that have noticed that the emperor has no clothes will never be convinced of his dress sense until we see some actual trousers - what his taylor is saying about it is irrelevant because we can see that he's lying.Secondly, that particular kind of grovelling, pious, irrational gibberish tells us that the person using it is, to be polite, rather deluded.It works from the pulpit when directed at those that already believe it - to anybody else it's just embarrassing.

You're just preaching to each other.It's how belief systems work, you need to reinforce each other with rhetoric because you don't have any facts or evidence to fall back on for real support.It's one of those often repeated truisms that religion is the only mental delusion that is considered nomal, simply because so many people suffer from it.

I can't speak for everyone, but I seriously doubt it.The nearest analogy I can't think of is that it's like being told something trivial that a child finds really important; you just have to try not to laugh.

I keep bringing up the child analogy because believing a myth is childish.I don't link it to lack of intelligence, it's plain to me that neither you nor Faith lack intelligence. The way you both in your different ways manipulate fact to suit your conclusions show that you are indeed smart.No, it's not intelligence that's the problem, it's delusion. You're missing the point. There's no rebellion, there can't be. You can't rebel against something that doesn't exist. There is no one 'to do it better than' - the whole idea of god and religious belief is just plain silly.It's really hard to get this point across - believers seem to think that atheism is some kind of rebellion against an established structure. It isn't, it's simply a realisation that the God concept is an error.I can also tell you that in most of Northern Europe at least, the concept of rebellion is laughable because religion has lapsed so far behind society that it's become a form of rebellion to get yourself saved.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

The next step is:Good is therefore the absence of evil.
And wouldn't it therefore make sense for god to simply absent evil?Job done.

Well obviously the the bloke that kills three people unnecessarily is guilty of murder. His actions were grossly disproportionate.We use the term 'biblical' to describe an act of disproportionate violence for a reason.

Are you sure you want to bring science into this? In my world, my fridge needs power to make things cold.But let's not mess about with non-sequiturs - there's no correlation between hot and cold, light and dark and good and evil.Good and evil don't exist outside our own definitions. A cat torturing a mouse is not evil, a man killing a mosquito is not evil, a man killing a chicken to eat is not evil, but a man torturing a chicken is quite possibly evil and a man killing many men without cause is definitely evil. The phrase works exactly the same in reverse and no amount of fallacious analogies prevent it.Evil is the source and the absence of evil is good.

You said that the that " the husband rains down his "angel of death" (5 time black belt) on all three of them" and you said it in the context of God killing everything on earth. If you meant that not to mean killing tham, then fine.My serious point - which you are avoiding - is one of proportionality. In law, people are allowed to use reasonable force to defend themselves, they are not allowed to go further than that.They are also not allowed to use violence if they are not threatened with violence themselves. Your god kills over and over in floods, famines and plagues simply because he's pissed off with people. That's murder and genocide.

Illustration, analagy, call it what you will, there is still no correlation between them and what you're attempting to say.Fyi correlation: A mutual relationship or connection between two or more things.You want to say that the relationship between good and evil is like that of heat and cold. I'm saying that there is no connection between the two ideas. The illustration fails.Heat is an objective, measurable thing; you can add or remove heat from an object - cold and hot are simply human descriptions of two extremes on the range.Good and evil don't objectively exist - they're man made description of human only behaviour. Removing good or evil is not a concept that means anything in the real world because it's an idea, not a thing.Your phrase "good is the source and the absence of good is evil" can equally be used in reverse and you haven't provided a reason why it can't be - all you've done is give us a fallacious analogy.