Morality without god

Well, that certainly is a comfort. And so very compassionate. Especially toward a behavior that might very well be proven to have a biological, genetic basis, rather than being a matter of "personal choice" or "free will." In effect, God is saying, "All humans are born into the world as wicked, evil sinners, but some more so than others!" His manipulations of our genes at conception provide some people with extra hurdles to overcome on their path to salvation - mysterious ways, to be sure.It's very much like saying that "people of color" are morally inferior to white people. In fact, that's another attitude that found support in numerous espousals of Christian doctrine. The religious stance on this issue has been changing, of course - indeed, the Mormons received new revelations from God just a few decades ago, to let them know that black people were entitled to do (almost) everything that white people could do in the Mormon church! But I gather you would say the Mormons are wrong on this point, because it would imply that God has actually changed His mind a bit.Your stated assessment of homosexuality, I think, goes beyond being Christian. It's downright Islamic! You might want to look a little more closely at how the Bible is interpreted by those Christian sects that allow lesbians to serve as pastors...As for the applicability of your God's "law" about the Sabbath to people who view your God as a figment of imagination, well... if you can provide firm, sensible, objective reasons - based on evidence rather than supernatural claims - for requiring everyone to set aside one day out of seven as "downtime", I'll have no problem with that.It actually sounds like an idea that would have merit as a "strong recommendation" (AbE: heck, why not go for 2 days out of 7?), but requiring it by law seems overly coercive. (AbE: Then again, making this a requirement for employers yields a net reduction of coercion.)(AbE: Faith, regardless of what you might think or assert you meant by your "worthy of death" comment, I feel compelled to say that I view this type of comment as complicit in and culpable for every occurrence of suicide by homosexual youths. You have made a hateful, despicable statement - you should be ashamed, and you deserve all the shaming you receive, for having made that statement. You were wrong to say it. This is not a negotiable matter.)Edited by Otto Tellick, : (I couldn't let Faith off with just mild ridicule.)Edited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.Edited by Otto Tellick, : (Had to rethink the notion of "coercion" relative to "resting".)

But you are responsible for your acceptance of the Bible's claims as "truth," and when its statements are demonstrably unethical, your deliberate support of those statements makes your acceptance and promulgation of them unethical as well. You are among the many "faithful Christians" who are to blame for the abominable rate of suicide among teenagers who happen to be homosexual. Let that sink in.I don't expect this to sink in, but it has to be said: the Bible contains unethical statements - they appear in abundance in Leviticus. By attributing these statements to an "omni-benevolent" God, the authors of the Bible were not simply creating an irreconcilable self-contradiction. They were lying. Naturally, you are entitled by your "free will" to choose to believe them. You are not entitled to respectful consent from others for making that choice. The Mormons were just the most obvious example - we don't have to go back but a few more decades to find "mainstream" Protestants using "The Real Bible" to justify racism, just as many are using it today to sustain a morally bankrupt prejudice against homosexuals. Sure, the Bible was used by both sides of the slavery/abolition and Jim Crow / Civil Rights debate - all that shows is that the Bible alone is woefully inadequate as a foundation for moral guidance. I would agree that the number of homosexuals in the world (not just in the West) has increased. But the author(s) of Romans were clueless, and what they said is irrelevant, quite apart from whether or not there's any truth at all in the claims being made there.It's really quite simple: so far as we can tell, at any given time, there's a particular probability that a child will be born with hormonal components that lead to homosexual attraction. This means that in any given generation, a particular percentage of children will become homosexual. As the population increases, the number of homosexuals will likewise increase.When I was born, the U.S. population was somewhere in the neighborhood of 160 million people. Today, it's pretty close to 320 million. So I would expect there are about twice as many homosexual people in the U.S. today relative to when I was born. Doubling in a little less than 60 years is a big increase. It has nothing to do with predictions of "end times" or other myths about decline. On the contrary, it's a correlate of continuous growth, a sign of general prosperity. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this (apart from increased rates of pollution, greenhouse gases, depletion of farmable land and fresh water, etc).AbE: I forgot to mention... How about just letting them be, allowing them to live their lives in a manner commensurate with how you live your own life, with the same rights and protections under law? How much effort would it cost you to simply stop vilifying them, stop referring to them as "demon-possessed", and stop trying to "cure" them? That would be a far better solution to the problem, in so many ways.It is certainly not incumbent on you to "help" them by forcing constraints on their behavior, especially when the main thing they have to "struggle with" is the prejudicial and demeaning treatment they get from people who share your beliefs.Edited by Otto Tellick, : (added content as noted)Edited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.

Thank you for refocusing the discussion, Doctor, and please excuse my excursions. I fully share your concerns on the question of gathering sticks on Saturday. (Or should it be Sunday, now that Christ has done something to change everything without changing anything?)Actually, I think I may have heard at least one self-reported Christian express the notion that God could in fact alter the morality of picking up sticks on the Sabbath (whichever day that might be), but I may have misunderstood, and in any case I have no way to tell whether it was a "true" Christian presenting this view...Still, there was a particular term used in the explanation: "progressive revelation" - yes, I'm pretty sure that was the term. (There seems to be a relevant wikipedia page for it.) Has anyone else heard of this? If I understand it properly (and there's plenty of room for doubt on that point), it would seem to be relevant to the current thread. Of course, it also raises "certain difficulties."(Maybe it has already been mentioned somewhere in the previous 1000 messages? If so, please accept my apologies - I've been absent from the forum for some time, so I might have missed it.)

Spoken like a true fascist. That's the kind of certainty that causes people to kill other people "for God." (It's yet another point illustrating an "Islamic fervor" in your practice of Christianity.) Another thing you didn't say - or provide - was "evidence". If there is evidence of an increasing proportion of homosexuals in the population (I don't know whether or not this is the case - it's not impossible), the real explanation will be found in genetic drift - a gradual shift in the mixing of alleles.Looking for demons as causal agents (let alone trying to alter their influence) isn't going to get you anywhere - except perhaps into much-needed psychiatric help to address your delusions.

This reveals a couple points:(1) You have admitted -- PRAISE GOD! -- your own knowledge on matters of biblically defined morality is incomplete. At last, a glimmer of humility. Keep up the good work.(2) As any atheist would reliably predict, there is reasonable disagreement among intelligent theists on the matter of picking up sticks on the Sabbath. Observant Jews do in fact still avoid this practice, along with turning on any electrical device, driving any self-powered vehicle, lighting any fire (even to smoke a cigarette), etc.That said, it's not entirely clear to me, in terms of biblical authority and exegesis, why those same Jews are not killing the homosexuals, adulterers and disrespectful children in their midst. Presumably, they have come to a consensus that obeying the biblical instructions on how to acquire, keep, inherit and beat slaves is something they should forego, in the interest of avoiding arrest and imprisonment under secular systems of law, and the same rationale may apply to imposing the death penalty on various behaviors as prescribed by Leviticus 20 - even though this prescription is attributed to the direct speech of God Himself.I actually wonder whether today's observant Jews might look at Leviticus as a case of someone in a distant, brutal past putting words into the mouth of their God - in effect, using a sock-puppet (and calling it "God") to give voice to the virulent pronouncements of a typical human bigot. This seems like the most likely explanation to me.Or maybe today's Jews have some other rationale for ignoring these things that have somehow become part of the canonical Christian Bible. Whatever. The point is: why should Christians give it any more credence or allegiance than Jews do? Why is Leviticus 20 still part of the biblical canon? What possible good does that do?

So... as various researchers - many of them faithful Christians - began (and continue) to assert that diseases like measles, small pox, bubonic plague, polio, etc, are spread by bacterial or viral infection, rather than by demons, this has actually been part of a strategy foisted on humanity by demons, intended to make us think that demons don't exist. Is that what you're saying?I ask because the common understanding among the original authors of the NT was that the various diseases were the work of demons, and that Christ was casting out demons when he reportedly healed the sick.Your stated preference for attributing undesirable consequences in our lives to demonic agency is clearly a bad strategy, and there is a clearly better alternative: look for natural causation, and address the natural causes. The NT authors, having had no access to objective knowledge about natural causation, make a very poor resource for addressing real-world problems.If you personally never arrive at that realization, please at least stay out of the way of those who are trying to improve the quality of life in general, including yours.Edited by Otto Tellick, : (changed "bacteria" to "bacterial or viral infection", just to be nit-picky)

Right - we read about it, and we hear about it almost daily from people who say things like "God saved me from dying in that accident / attack / disaster / ..." (where the event in question killed other people, who may well have been equally faithful and deserving of "providential protection"). It smacks of narcissism: "God has some special plan in mind for me, because He didn't kill me!"You'll say one of two things about the people not kept alive by His "intervention" in such cases: either they were actually free-will sinners ("worthy of death" as Faith would put it), despite all outward appearances that they were no different from the ones He chose to keep alive, or their death was an unavoidable cost incurred by the "greater good of His divine plan."Either way, the end result, if attributed to divine will, is indistinguishable from capriciousness.(AbE: The various polytheistic religions of old at least had the honesty to describe their various gods as capricious, thereby providing an account of supernatural causation that reconciles real-world observation with our "common sense" about intelligent agents. I think it's enlightening to consider why this option is not available to monotheists: it seems that a predisposition toward optimism is predominant in human nature. Could it be that pessimists are less likely to survive and propagate?) That was about tall tales meant to entertain the children, just like the whole global flood story, and the whole Tower of Babel story, and the Samson story and the Jonah/fish story and the Adam & Eve story, and ...Edited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.