Do you WANT there to be a God?

Last I checked, @John_Harshman didn’t have a “made up, utterly baseless and arbitrary” morality. But it’s unclear why the moralities of any of the gods would be considered to be any less “made up, utterly baseless and arbitrary” than his.

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I have to agree with Puck here.

It would seem obvious that in order to have “animosity” towards God you first need to have a reasonable degree of belief in God. You cannot have animosity towards something you don’t believe exists (yes Set, Loki, etc are really nasty gods – but I feel no more animosity towards them than towards a villain in a novel I’m reading) – so this would by definition exclude atheists. It’s a bit more blurry for agnostics, but would suspect that they likewise lack sufficient belief to get angry.

At some stage in the lives of many people that were raised as Christians, they encounter something that rubs their noses in the fact that the world they live in doesn’t match what they were taught in Sunday School. The obvious, and largely mutually-exclusive, choices are to stop believing in God or to get angry with God. They are largely mutually exclusive as it makes little sense to get angry at something you don’t believe exists. Those who stop believing become atheists or agnostics. Those who get angry, I suspect, have sufficient belief that they remain in their faith – though perhaps with their belief shaken, and their doubts awakening.

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Agreed.

Besides the fact that such things are only immoral in a universe I believe we live in (and would not be evil in the universe you claim to live in), I never said no evil was ever done in the name of religion or that there have never been negative consequences of religious belief. The very idea that you are arguing that such things are evil at all proves my point about the vast goodness that resulted from belief in God, particularly in the West. It is to a large degree a consequence of the widespread belief in the Christian God that you deem all these things evil in the first place.

It is plainly obvious to anyone who can look at the world objectively, with even a minimal understanding of history, that all our modern notions of human rights, equality, tolerance, moral responsibilities - even the development of science itself - is largely the result of Christianity. Might science have eventually been developed somewhere else in the world? Eventually, perhaps, but in the world we actually do inhabit, the fact is that it developed in one place, not in the Far East, not in the Middle East, not in the New World. It was developed in that part of the world once called Christendom. Did other societies come up with inventions, such as gun powder? Sure, but none developed science (as anything close to how we define it today) except the Christian West. Where there ever conflicts between Christians and the religious powers-that-be? Sure, but virtually all the early scientists were devout Christians.

The same could be said for capitalism. There was no “Dark Age” of Medieval Europe. You can argue all day long about whether the Europeans who explored the New World were evil conquerors or not…but the reason they were the ones doing the exploring and conquering (vs. the other way around) is because they were more technologically advanced than the rest of the globe, and you can’t just chalk it up to ancient Greek philosophy and the Roman culture that died centuries earlier.

There are times when I want to “complain to management” about the terrible way they run things. It’s pretty much the same as just “being angry” with or without “at God” following.

@jmk00001, as an atheist, I find your repeated denial of the existence of Secular Morality to be inaccurate (and more than a little personally offensive). This topic has already been discussed on this forum, most recently here, where @John_Harshman provides a good summary of potential non-religious sources of morality:

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My prior responses and the discussion overall seems to have, indeed, shifted off the original topic. To bring it home:

The reason I started this topic is that I was interested, as I mentioned, in how other atheists could or could not relate to Thomas Nagel’s statement that he didn’t want to live in universe where there is a God. The reason is that I believe, in the end, we all either choose to believe, or we don’t, and for many that choice boils down to the fact that they just don’t want there to be a God.

There are sufficient reasons and evidence to believe, if one wants to believe. Is there mathematical certitude? No. There is always room to dismiss such evidence if, like Nagel, one simply doesn’t want there to be a God. Most human decisions are made for emotional reasons…only later does the mind rationalize it’s way to some sort of reasonable or evidentiary justification for the decision. Of course, most will at once exclaim, “While this is true for most of you peons, it isn’t at all true for me!. I am purely rational and base my beliefs only on the soundest of foundations!” Sound familiar?

Being the skeptic is always the easy route. It is immeasurably harder to make a case for anything, than it is to critique said case. The atheist can sit back and say, "Go on, believer! Amuse me with your ‘evidence’ and ‘reasons’! They can sit back and wait for any deficiency in knowledge, any flaw in a premise, any wiggle room in an explanation, and claim all such arguments fall short of their lofty, lofty standards. The truth is, none of us know for certain whether God exists. There is a leap of faith in either direction, because there is not sufficient evidence in either direction to say with ontological certitude one way or the other.

In Christianity, though, there is moral culpability in the decision we make. We either accept God, or we reject him, and there is moral culpability in that choice for all of us. So, the evidence, I think by design, is not absolutely overwhelming. You can always find the evidence was “just too scant for me” or the Christians were just “too ignorant or hypocritical” or the world was just “too filled with evil and suffering” for there to be a God. In the end, it comes down to a personal, moral choice we all must make. As Blaise Pascal said:

In faith, there is enough light for those who want to believe, and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

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Claiming that a person or persons are generally incapable of human feelings and responses is offensive. Let’s not have that - please use flags if it comes up again.

[not intended to exclude discussion of morality, but to exclude that some are incapable of it]

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I think it’s clear enough that a person who insists he’s purely rational isn’t. But that doesn’t mean that people who don’t insist they are purely rational aren’t doing a good job of reasoning. Nor does it mean that everyone is involved in motivated reasoning. And many of us lack motives in that direction anyhow. I really don’t care which of the gods are real and which aren’t, or whether all or none are real, as such. What I care about is finding out what the true facts of the matter are.

Sure.

No, there isn’t. Most atheists don’t claim to know there are not any gods. They just don’t believe in any of them in particular. No leap of faith required.

That doctrine, of course, is pernicious and evil. That a person should be condemned for making an honest judgment upon incomplete evidence is insane.

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I would point out that this is a claim that all atheists would dispute. When you base your understanding of atheists on such Christian presuppositions you cannot help but gain a very biased view of atheist thinking.

Tell that to the atheists in Muslim contries who are liable to be executed for their apostasy.

I have to ask, are you here to sincerely inquire what Atheists really think, or to simply look for confirmation of your prior conclusions about them, and to preach at them?

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Sorry, I do not mean to offend. As I mentioned before…I actually believe you have the same moral foundation as I do (one of us just doesn’t recognize it as such). I just mean to point out that any such inborn tendencies as you describe above could not ultimately be deemed a foundation for any absolute morality. If for instance, if some person were to be born without one or more of those tendencies, and acts accordingly, did they do something evil in any real sense? Or someone who determines a course of action that, while frowned upon by his peers, would not result in the collapse of his society, and would, for him at least, be more beneficial than detrimental. Did he do something evil in any real sense? I’ve heard such arguments made for these alternate systems of morality, but I just don’t see, in the end, how they could really amount to any individual specific act being immoral. Would it only become immoral if sufficient numbers of people in society began doing it and society started to show noticeable deleterious effects? If so, how many people must “go against the grain” and generate sufficient “damage” to society for something to be deemed immoral? If everyone else stops at the four-way stop intersection, but I pass on through, is society really harmed? It seems to me, as long as everyone else stops (and thereby do not collide with me), no harm done!

Again, sorry if all this is now off-topic. That is why I tried to sum up and bring things back to topic in my earlier post. Just wanted to clarify my earlier comment since you took offense.

Of course, just as there are sufficient reasons and evidence to support that the earth is flat for people sufficiently motivated to believe it.

I fail to see what you think is interesting or important about that observation.

Anyway, since I and others have openly and clearly stated that we would like the god you describe to exist, your thesis that atheism is just an emotionally based belief does not seem to be supported. So, great! You have learned one of your arguments is lousy and won’t use it anymore! That’s a good thing.

There is not enough evidence to say much of anything with “ontological certainty” (which is what I think you meant to say, rather than “certitude.”) I can’t say with absolute certainty that the moon is smaller than the sun. Maybe there is a trickster god who just wants us to think that? Could be, if we are expected to remain open to the possibility that your nice god exists.

Well, that’s a really weird position. How is coming to a conclusion that you feel is best supported by reason and evidence an immoral act? You are going to have to connect the dots for me on that one.

Yup, which is why faith is at best useless, and not uncommonly actually dangerous. I try to avoid that crap as best I can.

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Of course, I actually don’t believe his morality is made up, utterly baseless and arbitrary. He, like all of us, have been given an inner sense of morality founded in the identity, character, and personhood of God. My point is that without that God, you have only a completely manmade morality that must, in the end, be arbitrary and made up - a list of personal preferences and nothing more. And, evolutionarily speaking, I don’t believe there is anything good or evil in blind evolutionary forces. Something isn’t good or evil, it just is.

Closing Topic temporarily. One person is currently submitting a comment so I will let that one in.

Comments open again. The pause was useful, moderation-wise.

Then you have just refuted your claim that morality can only based on God’s nature. Do you need me to explain why?

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I do not think that holding to the arbitrary, personal preference argument (while demanding that people acknowledge this law of God in their hearts caveat) is great.

It is clear that you have not dealt with secular morality. You can even make cases based on sound logic and quantifiable positions.

All it takes is for someone then to point out the cultural influence or flaws in biblical morality (you might claim that they do not exist).

Slavery always immoral (even from a secular perspective) yet was divinely sanctioned. Please do not take the whole biblical slavery != chattel. It is still terrible.

Having a specific test for female unfaithfulness and a resulting abortion is immoral.

Murdering populations in constant tribal warfare and taking sex slaves (or I mean wives that you married in a bit based on horrific and inaccurate virginity tests) is immoral. Is continuation of bullshit, the best that could be done in that time?

Eternal torture for finite sin, tolerance of prejudice/racism in “feeding widows”, second class dressed up status of women, the romanization of biblical standards in Paul’s writing over time, even the use of textual communication in an ancient language is pretty suspect.

While a common apologetics position, the whole “my morality is objective/better/true” is tired, ineffective, and not well supported.

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That’s only true if the “explanation” actually makes sense. If I, for example, told you that square circles must exist because horses are purple, that would not prevent a square circle from being a logical contradiction. All you have here is an imaginary purple horse.

Tell that to the people who face but do not overcome adversity. I guess they’re all just unavoidable collateral damage from your heroic story.

But it isn’t possible.

Why would that be? Are you familiar with the Euthyphro dilemma?

While there is no ultimate or entirely objective basis for morality, there is a basis in human attitudes and social goods. Thus we consider genocide to be a bad thing, and it’s a bad thing whether perpetrated by Nazis or YHWH. You disagree?

I wouldn’t. I’d say that the divine attributes defined and derived from the bible all arise from his actions. But that’s a digression irrelevant to this discussion.

You don’t? You’re OK with killing off all life not on the Ark, killing all the firstborn of Egypt, condemning a substantial majority of the human population to eternal torture, and so on?

It may be made up, but it’s not baseless or arbitrary. What, though, is the basis of your morality? How do you know it isn’t arbitrary?

I’m afraid none of your comment reveals a great deal of thought.

Then why did you mention it?

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That’s perfectly fine. I, along with many (but not all) other atheists, don’t believe that “absolute morality”/“objective morality” exists in any case. So I have no objection to be told that I lack something that I don’t believe exists.

My evaluation of morality tends to be more practical than epistemological. I see no evidence (from, for example, demographic data) that Christians live objectively better lives than atheists do, so I discount the claim that Christian morality is superior – with or without an “absolute” basis.

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