Morality without god

As a matter of actual fact, whatever may be said about the CAPACITY to have a relationship with God, the Popes tend to talk about praying to MARY and not to GOD.What's wrong with YOU?

Please show instances of this so I can look at them and reach my own opinion on this.

I've never claimed that there is no morality without God. Clearly we are born with a conscience.The reason for the disparities across the world is that the human race is fallen.We have some remnant of the image of God in our conscience, but it is easily distorted by our propensity to sin.You disagree of course, and there is nothing more to say about it.

This is an impression from many reports on the Popes and from Christian observers over the years. Everything I've said on this subject is to my knowledge the truth gathered from many sources over many years, it's not something I arrived at from some peculiar attitude of my own. I do not have the energy or the motivation to find evidence for someone who would only spit it in my face anyway.

Here's a page of references on the subject of Popes praying to Mary and even recommending it to the faithful.Oh, and somebody needs to squash that pesky dragonfly.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

...and you also realize that normal people don't feel any empathy for someone they see recieving a punishment they believe they justly deserve... right? Not a lot of people crying at a leathal injection being carried out.

Except that when you read the Bible you manage to suppress it. Do you have a criterion for where you would draw the line? How many innocent deaths would the Bible have to lay at the feet of the God of the Bible before you decided that he wasn't a very nice person? If, for example, all the death tolls in the Bible were multiplied by 2, would that make you recoil in horror? By 3? ... can you honestly say that there is somewhere where you'd draw the line and say: "No, that's too much, that's sickening"? I think not. Once you've accepted in principle that you should worship a stupid genocidal lunatic, mere quantitative considerations hardly seem likely to touch you.Similarly with the Problem of Evil and the Problem of Pain. Apparently you find the suffering and injustice in the world compatible with it being ruled by an omnipotent being who "is love". So, if there was twice as much injustice and suffering in the world as there is now, would that change your mind? Again, I think not. If the universe has an omnipotent ruler, he is obviously a vicious deranged sadist, and you've already got over that hump.Correct me if I'm wrong, but there seems to be no limit to the quantity of wickedness you'll condone so long as you can attribute it to the God whom you have decided a priori to regard as good.

Consider for a moment this question GS. Can an all powerful creative being create a perfectly round square?And here's my point to asking this. Words have meanings and we define what we mean by those words. We define a square as any shape with four straight equal sides all at right angles to eachother. So the question of creating a perfectly "round" square defies the logical meaning of what it is to be "round" and what it is to be "square." This means God cannot do anything contrary to logic. An all powerful God can not create a rock too big for Him to lift, nor can a good God declare an evil act to be moral.

I think my point was that we haven't determined that a single "innocent" life was lost at the "feet of God." In fact consider this. When an Al quada terrorist straps a bomb onto a child and orders him or her to march into a US army base, and a US soldier has to shoot the child to make him stop, who is responsible for the death of that innocent child? Are you going to blame the soldier or are you going to blame the terrorist?

Would you hold a gun to your wifes head and demand she tells you she loves you? And if you would then what real meaning would those words have? You want God to interviene but where do you draw the line? If he stops mass murders, then shouldn't he also stop murderes? And if he stops them shouldn't he stop rapists? What about wife beaters? What about thieves? And to what dollar amount should he stop a thief? A thousand a hundred, or a dollar? And what about liars... should he stop them? What about people who just think bad thoughts?My point here is that love and free will go hand in hand and if you force people to do something against their free will then how can you have true love? If God turned us all into robots that merely run programs then we could not truly feel or express love. But if he wants to create a people with the ability to love, he has to also allow for the ability for us "not love" as well. But if he does that then he must allow for us to make really bad choices as well as good ones.

I'd blame the terrorist. But I'd hold the soldier equally to blame if he was omnipotent, 'cos then he'd have had other options which he could have exercised more easily than I can snap my fingers, and killing the child would be an entirely gratuitous act of murder.Perhaps you should think of another metaphor. Or talk about the thing itself, of course.

Of course not, I'd just torture her for all eternity if she didn't ...... wait, no I wouldn't. I'm not a monster. Well this is the sort of thing that gives the slippery slope fallacy a bad name.Do you really think that it's wrong to prevent mass murder? Wouldn't you, if you could?It is not always easy to draw the line between right and wrong, but I would certainly put preventing mass murder on the "right" side of the line. If you can't unhesitatingly agree with that, then I would again suggest that your effort to be a Christian is requiring you to suspend your innate sense of morality.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, many religious folk maintain that the morality or immorality of an act does not inhere in the act but in what God thinks of it. Certainly it is hard to see otherwise why a man should be stoned to death for picking up sticks on a Saturday.If you don't believe this, then do you maintain that right and wrong exist independently of God?

The other thing that's wrong with what I think of as the Free Will Defense is that it can hardly be offered up (without hypocrisy) by a Bible-believing Christian. The Bible portrays God as being willing to intervene at the slightest provocation. Youths being cheeky to Elijah? He has them all eaten by bears. So much for their "free will". So why should he allow greater latitude to, for example, Pol Pot? Where were the bears then?

Were the first born of Egypt not innocent? They were children and not the people who were in fact enslaving the Jews - seems freaking barbaric to me!