I just saw Ringo's new reply to this, so I'll contribute on one of your claims:
You claim a "get out of responsibility" card because you don't believe that Jesus is real or can help you.
You escape responsibility for placing yourself under God's authority because you are not a believer.
Perhaps the single stupidest and most counterproductive Christian conceits is that atheists are only trying to escape responsibility for their actions, are seeking to be able to sin without guilt. Completely and utterly false in addition to being yet another BizarroWorld reversal of reality: it is the believer who is trying to escape resonsibility for the consequences of his actions by assigning that responsibility to God.
In the development of moral reasoning, we go through different states of development as we do with other abilities (refer to developmental psychology, including classic Piagetian Stages of Development). Basically, we all go through the earlier states of development but then grow out of them as we move on to later stages; eg,
conservation which is the ability to watch the same amount of something be transfered to a different container or shape and realize that it's still the same amount (pour liquid into a short fat glass, then pour that into a tall skinny glass -- a young child who hasn't developed conservation yet will say that the tall glass contains more).
In the development of moral reasoning, the earlier stage is
rules-based morality in which an authority (eg, your parent, your Kindergarten teacher) gives you rules to follow and everybody's responsibility is to follow those rules. Right and wrong is determined solely by whether it agrees with or conflicts with those rules. But an important aspect of rules-based morality is that
if any harm comes to someone because of following those rules, then it is the rules-giver who is responsible, not you.
For example, let's say that your teacher, the authority figure, has given you the rule that you do not interrupt the class. You see a classmate, maybe even your friend, start to have a medical emergency (eg, allergic reaction to that snack you just had). What do you do? Any of us (except maybe a Christian) would interrupt the class to bring this emergency to the teacher's attention so that she (almost all my elementary grade teachers were women) could deal with it. But rules-based morality requires that your responsibility is to
follow the rules. Let's say that your friend dies because of your inaction (though serious hospitalization is also possible). What is your responsibility for that? As per rules-based morality,
none. After all,
you did the "right thing" throughout the entire incident. The fault was in the rule itself; it was a bad rule for not taking every possible contingent into account. And since it was the teacher who had made that rule, the teacher was responsible (which just happens to be the case in the real world too, but for entirely different reasons).
A classic example is the infamous
Milgram experiments:
quote:
The Milgram experiment(s) on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, men in the age range of 20 to 50 from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.
The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly. ...
The experiments began in July 1961, in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to explain the psychology of genocide and answer the popular contemporary question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" The experiment was repeated many times around the globe, with fairly consistent results.
The experimenter wore a lab coat and kept notes on a clipboard. In some instances, when the subject couldn't go any further for fear of the possibly having just killed the "student", when the experimenter responded with "I accept full responsibility. Please continue the experiment." the subject would then continue. Refer to a low-budget film about Milgram,
Experimenter: The Stanley Milgram Story (2015), which is no longer on Netflix -- note that nobody ever mentions the elephant in the hallway.
Normal development of moral reasoning progresses on to starting to evaluate motives (classically presented as the
Les Misérables scenario of a poor man being hunted his entire life as a criminal because he had stolen a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, though the bread is often substituted with medicine that would cure his dying wife). Further development of moral reasoning leads to consideration of the consequences
to ourselves and to others of our actions and shifting the evaluation of right and wrong to how our actions affects others. Hence, our responsibility is no longer to some arbitrary authority, but rather to each other.
Believers who rail about atheists "rejecting God in order to escape responsibility" are trapped by their religious teachings in the rules-based morality stage that most grow out of in their first decade of life. And yet
they are the ones seeking to escape personal responsibility for the harm that they do by "being responsible to God". Like the parents whose young child dies because they withheld life-saving medication that God did not want them to use (eg, antibiotics to treatment meningitis, an actual court case). Or shooting abortion doctors and bombing abortion clinics because that's what God wanted them to do. Or discriminating against groups they don't like because God doesn't like them either -- even until killing them because that's what God demanded in the Bible.
They aren't responsible for those actions, but rather
God is (and everything that God does, no matter how atrocious, is Good; like Nixon's and Alan Dershowitz' (in Trump's first impeachment trial) declaration of "if the President does it, then it's not illegal").
In contrast, atheists have been freed from that stunted growth and have developed moral reasoning which stunted believers have never been allowed to learn (which is a booby trap awaiting them when they do leave the faith -- I have quite literally had believers insist that if not for God they'd be hedonist atheists running naked down the street or else an axe murderer).
It becomes counter-productive when it creates a gaping legalistic loophole for believers who want so desperately to sin without guilt. Indeed, most of those cries of "the only reason you're an atheist is to you can escape responsibility and feel free to sin" is just them projecting their own deepest desires.
A prime example is Bill Morgan, a local YEC activist who claims that he used to be an atheist, and even blames evolution in the schools for having turned him into an atheist in the first place. That despite his own autobiography in which he describes his "bubbling hormones" making him want to sin, so he used evolution as an excuse to pretend to become an atheist (note his unspoken assumption that equates evolution with atheism) so that he could sin away -- I say "pretend" because he admitted to without realizing it that throughout his "atheism" he continued to believe in God and prayed to God every night. I've quoted from his autobiographic account a few times on this forum in the past, so I'll just pull out a short quote:
quote:
Question! Why in 6th grade did I think the drawings [DWise1: the classic Time-Life graphic of a sequence of human evolution which has been reproduced and parodied so many times since c. 1960] were ridiculous, but in 9th grade I believed them?
Was it because I was more intellectual? No. Was it because the Biology teacher explained it so convincingly? Not really. The real reason for my becoming an atheist in 9th grade can be summed up in one word...hormones. In 6th grade I did not have much temptation in my life. Perhaps my biggest sins were a lie here and there, throwing snowballs at the school bus and riding my minibike where I shouldn't.
But in 9th grade a whole new world opened up to me. The temptation of drinking, drugs and premarital sex presented themselves to me at exactly the same time I was being taught evolution. I knew the Bible said that being drunk and having sex outside of marriage was wrong, but here is my science teacher, telling me the origin of man is completely contradictory to what the Bible taught as the origin of man. I felt excited.....and decided the Theory of Evolution was for me, after all the Bible was scientifically wrong on the very first page!! I considered myself to be an atheist. As an atheist I no longer had to abide by any rules but my own. If I wanted to get drunk, no problem, if I wanted to try to have premarital sex no problem, I now belonged to the evolution "religion" (religion meaning a system of beliefs built on faith) that allowed me to sin without guilt.
It was not the data that made me an atheist, it was the conclusion, a belief that made me the judge of right and wrong. Those cartoon drawings of ape men did look sharp, but I wanted to believe them emotionally, more than I really believed them intellectually.
And yet, in any discussion with him of how one had become an atheist (as for me, I started reading the Bible and found I just could not believe it, like many others) he always insisted that the only reason for becoming an atheist is to escape responisiblity. He would claim to know that because "he had been an atheist himself", even though he had never actually been but rather just pretended to be one in order to exploit that legalistic loophole (ie, "if I pretend to be an atheist, then I can avoid responsibility"). It became a brick wall that was impossible to break through.
So basically, please stop spouting this stupid nonsense of "you're just trying to avoid responsibility."
You are the one trying to avoid your own responsiblity by piling it all onto your own private Jesus.
I mean, what good is any invisibile friend who wouldn't do that for you? Show me someone with an invisible friend who doesn't like him and I'll show you someone with some very serious problems.
™ Version 4.2
(1)