\You posit a lack of willingness in today's society to take responsibility for one's own actions -- emphasis my own. \
Sorry the empasis wasnt on your own, I didnt mean it that way. Actually when I read back and see what I wrote, I sound like a bit of an old fogey. Its probable people have always been so desperate to get out of responsibility for their actions.

/So you are assuming the right to just go ahead and bloody well make them be "responsible" by your own standards?/
I never assume the right to do any such thing.

/You are willing to exercise coercive force of majority rule, or rule by fiat, to impose violent sanctions and violate the free will of these irresponsible louts (like your friend who got pregnant) because sex is obviously only for the sacred purpose of making babies, and anybody who dares to have sex for fun deserves punishment anyway./

Actually the majority rule comes onto your side, and the most vulnerable party of all is the one that loses its rigths. You know that I never proposed to punish anybody for making a very common mistake. One of my thoughts behind this thinking is that they will get so much joy and hapiness from having the child, if they embraced the responsibility. Despite the delinquent stats there are still many single mothers who have brought up wonderful children. And I am sure most of the single mothers who have problem children dont regret the choice of having their child. Also even if they did decide to hand the baby over for adoption, there is still the chance that the baby could grow up to be a great human being.

Here again we see reason why I keep suggesting that you check out TRW or some other intro to logic text: Arguing from extremes..

Since you dislike the points that rgb made, you accuse him/her of being pro-eugenics, though you have not one iota of evidence to support such an accusation. This is a form of guilt by association, a dishonest tactic used only by the desperate.

You conveniently overlook that eugenics requires assuming complete control over the lives of ACTUAL MORAL AGENTS.

As for being "selfless" your church and religion could perhaps try that for once.. demanding 10 percent of the income, and more of the lives, of all who fall under its sway is hardly selfless.. building huge palaces covered in gold and expensive art is hardly selfless.. demanding that others do as you say for your own benefit is hardly selfless..

But there I go again providing undeniable counter-evidence.. :)

<down syndrome kids.
I dont have any idea of how much suffering and work a downsyndrome child would give to a family. I understand they can get violent aswell. And I wont deny that the thought of having a downsyndrome child myself makes me uncomfortable.

My head tutor when I was a student volunteered in his spare time with down syndrome people, who lived in there own housing, they had jobs but still needed alot of support. He told me a bit about what he did for them. With the support of the commuinty and their families many of them could have a pretty high quality of life.

Do you think that people with disabilities play a role in bringing people together, inspiring people to be more loving more selfless, Or at least more understanding of people who are different to us?

So I assume you feel that eugenics is a rational course to take, if you say that only dogmatic theist would allow a child with this disability to be born. But there are still some people who are not religious who also choose to go ahead with the pregnancy.

2#Holy spirit is explained in the Bible, If you try to be close to God, love Him, obey him then you will be able to feel the holy spirit. This is hard to understand if you dont actually do it. But if you do it you will know it to be true.

3#'impersonal example' That should be the catch phrase for the prochoice. But i disagree it is anybodies choice to take the life of an unborn child.

The first is equivalent to saying "the Holy Spirit is a rush of Oxytocin and other hormones", because that is what actually causes that feeling on the organic level. It is left as an exercise for the studio audience to use reason to think of a few reasons that feeling expansive and loving and safe and secure and protected might just trigger the release of those hormones even when one isn't thinking about God.

Buddha had this very experience, by the way. He lived in it, more or less, by carefully tuning his mind. The difference is that he didn't ascribe anything supernatural to the sensation.

Regarding #3, obviously you are mistaken. It is somebody's choice, and people make it all the time. According to the site I linked previously, 43% of all American women will end up having at least one abortion. I'm sure that's why we're fighting in Iraq and filling our prisons, and drawing and quartering and snuffing old people is bound to be just around the bend.

But then, that's CLEARLY because we aren't Christian enough.

Or maybe it's just a bit more complex than that, and the solution isn't to assert an unbelievable mythology as the basis of your reasoning and expect to convert a whole lot of people. Even most of the people who profess to be Christian.

rgb

Simply if abortion is not wrong, nothing is wrong and that is true if you dont believe in the moral law.
Anything can be rationalised.

Stating this doesn't make it even close to true. If I say "If believing in an entirely mythical being and using that false belief as the basis of all of your decisions is terrifying, because you disconnect your reason when obeying the commandments of that being..." does my pronouncement of this make it true?

I can, and have, given you several specific instances where abortion by any sane measure could not be considered wrong even if we do consider things like genocidal murder of women and children who are prisoners of war wrong. However, you persist in using binary pronouncements that aren't even directly derived from your faith's primary legendary icon (who said not one word about abortion) because it is easy and then yammer on about how if a woman has an abortion, next thing you know we'll be hanging up people in the town square and half-hanging them, castrating them, disembowelling them, and then drawing and quartering them. Oops, sorry, forgot -- that was one of those medieval universal practices back when all of Europe was safely Catholic, wasn't it?

Let's try to use a bit of common sense, shall we?

rgb

And did I mention that Buddha was for all practical purposes an atheist?

So here you have a very concrete example of two things:

a) This goes a bit beyond Paul's there are moral people who aren't Christian. This little sermon demonstrates that quite independent of Christianity (by virtue of preceding it by centuries) humans had a sound ethical sense that was not derived from any sort of God or divine revelation. The Buddha openly preached something you have yet to figure out, which is that following the authority of the Bible is not "skilled" behavior that will lead you to enlightenment and true compassion, but is rather a false path that will leave you mired in greed, hatred, and ignorance (especially the latter).

You do not need the help of any god, or God, to come up with a working ethos. You need your own head, your own heart, and a desire to do so. This is a common theme in all major religions by the way. The Quakers believe pretty much the exact same thing. Christian Buddhists, as it were. I respect the Quakers. Sufis, in Islam. Vedantic saints in Hinduism. To be frank, good people are good people, as soon as they give up the idolatry of scripture, whether or not they choose to "believe in God".

b) This is a very serious reply to your original post. You wanted to know how atheists could have a serious, consistent, moral code. Well, Buddhism is a serious, consistent, atheistic moral code that predates Christianity by 500 years. Buddhists revere Buddha not as God, not as a son of God, not as an emissary of God, but as a man who taught that righteous living is really our own personal responsibility and not to be hurried or judged even by the Enlightened, as a very great, but very human, teacher. After 2500 years, it is not without its mystical component, and not without its myths and legends. But underneath it all, it is perfectly clear even today that Buddha was a very early social/psychological scientist, and that his ethic was an empirical ethic that made a formal rule out of turning away from falsehood and seeking out the truth, however painful or difficult that truth might be. He would have been absolutely down with the scientific method and all of the knowledge derived from it. And where that knowledge contradicted his own myth-derived beliefs, he would absolutely have accepted it and been glad of the correction, because for the Buddha one of the worst things imaginable was to cling to false beliefs as they would not lead you to happiness!

How can you base your life on a lie and expect to come up with the right reason to live, the right way to live, the right way to think? Atheism is nothing more than the Buddha's "right path". Belief in God, disbelief in God, isn't the issue. It just isn't important. If you ever open up your eyes and look around you and think about God -- especially a compassionate and loving God as you wish to imagine him -- you will see that it is not credible that this God produced something as full of deception, half truth, untruth, as the Bible, old or new testaments. You will see that the truth or falsehood of God cannot depend on any authority; it can only be derived from experience. You will see that this belief (either way) is irrelevant to our chore, as humans, of picking the right path in light of the constant flood of new things that we learn about the Universe from experience.

All primitive cultures were appallingly ignorant about the human body, the human brain (as opposed to mind -- Buddha knew quite a lot about the mind), the cycle of human development, the nature of evolution, the capacity of animals for "sentience". It is foolish to think that a morality derived then with the best of intentions will apply successfully today, any more than their cosmology works, their biology works, their mythology works. Nobody is suggesting that we throw out the good in any of these ancient religions and philosophies, only that we stop idolizing them, because they are false idols, deceptive idols, filled with mythology and legend and primitive tribal sociology and law that is horribly cruel and selfish by the standards of today. These people were ruled by kings, after all, and none of the religions said a word against it. Nowadays, we value our freedom enough to fight for it against any king or would be king in the world. Jesus missed that one too. Morality does change from experience, and wisdom is born, and refined, in every age.

rgb

I respect your clarity of thought, but I must persist in my search for truth. It remains clear to me that some truths we can gather about the universe can also be made through spiritual avenues that science can not teach us. And that theology is a valid and wholesome method.

Fair enough. And I have enjoyed your exchanges as well, for the most part, except where your church pushes you away from compassion and into dogma. For example, don't bother trying to justify "marriage by rape". It's ok. You can just say this was horrible and morally wrong! If you listen to that little voice inside of you, it knows that is true even if you don't.

Since you are still interested in pursuing theological truth, in the off chance that you aren't already completely mind-made-up about what theology it is worth while to study, I'm going to recommend a specific book to you. This is, after all, a book group.

Buddha (by Karen Armstrong)

This is a secular and compassionate retelling of the story of Gotama, who became the Buddha, carefully researched and extracted from e.g. the Pali canons and many other texts. You like ancient wisdom, and Armstrong has written comparable books on other faiths including Christianity and Islam.

Here is my retelling of her retelling of a story in this Book. The time is maybe 500 BCE, give or take. Buddha has attained enlightenment and is in middle age, wandering the eastern plains of India and preaching (often surrounded by tens of thousands of followers from all walks of life). At this time he is nearly alone, however, and he comes to the city of the Kalamans.

The Kalamans are in a turmoil. They are beset on all sides by warlike kings, and this is the age of the rise of the merchant class and industry in India (which is a very old culture, sorry) and the attendant human greed. The old agrarian society with its complex "secret mystery" Vedic rituals attended by a priest class of Brahmins is breaking down, the merchants are a new casteless addition to a society that was formerly structured into castes, and many people are revolted and shocked by the lack of values in the exploding society (which could be compared to the wild west with spears and arrows instead of pistols, or the many principalities in warlike Germany in the 1700's and 1800's, all of them pursuing hegemony and wealth and power at all costs).

One side effect of these troubling times is that the young people are revolting against membership in the corrupt game. They refuse to be good little proles, cogs in what they increasingly perceive as a machine, and instead hit the road to search for meaning, search for some sort of Answer to the perpetual What's is Life For question. On the road there are at this time literally mobs of itinerant mendicant preachers of various disciplines -- yogins who hold that Enlightenment comes from mortifying the flesh, Brahmins who teach the rituals of the three fires, all of them with their horde great or small of "apostles", all of them able to work miracles because of their strong ascetism, all of them claiming to possess the Truth. Kalaman has been subjected to a steady stream of these holy men, each of them preaching something different, and each of them giving a list of rules that must be followed to avoid irritating the gods, a list of consequences of disobedience, a set of claims that are presented as the "perfect, divinely inspired truth". The village elders meet Buddha at the gates.

At this point he has an enormous reputation, but (unlike Jesus) he makes no claims to divinity, and in fact claims to be quite unnecessary to his followers. The truth he preaches is an empirical truth, a kind of salvation to be obtained without the help of gods, indeed a salvation that the gods themselves need as much as men. This truth is not based on his authority, or any authority. If you hear it, you will either be called to it, try it, and discover that it works, or you won't. Your free will, your choice.

The elders beg him, "Please Buddha, we are so confused. We have been deluged by holy men, and everything that they tell us is contradictory. When we try their practices, we wake up just as miserable as when we went to bed before. We don't know what to believe. But you are said to be wise. Please help us! Tell us what to believe!"

The Buddha smiles gently and says "Come, Kalamans, do not be satisfied with hearsay or taking the truth on trust. You must make up your own minds. So tell me now, is greed good, or bad?"

"Bad, Lord."

"Have you noticed that when someone is consumed with desire for some object and determined to get it, they are more likely to steal, or to lie?"

"We have, Lord."

"Does this kind of behavior make the selfish person happy and popular?"

"No, Lord."

"And what about hatred, what about clinging to delusions (and this means you, Alex...:-) instead of trying to see things as they really are. Don't these emotions lead to pain and suffering?"

Step by step, the Buddha asks the Kalamans to draw upon their own experiences, their own moral sense of what is good and bad, and see that Buddha's triple whammy of greed, hatred, and ignorance is the cause of much unhappiness and suffering. In the end, the Kalamans discover that they know Buddha's Dhamma (path) already -- it is right their in their own hearts and minds, if they stop and listen to them.

They have learned more -- that it is not enough to simply avoid greed, hatred and suffering, but one must deliberately cultivate their opposite in one's own character, one must become compassionate and detached (not a paradox although to us it might sound like one) in order to achieve a state of enlightenment that transcends suffering, in order, in fact, to become truly happy.

The Buddha, one must carefully note, had an enormous impact on anyone who came upon him, not because of his awesome godlike powers but because he was completely, totally, himself and utterly selfless at the same time, because he was happy. Anyone who met him immediately felt that they'd found at least a friend, and usually (but not always) a teacher.

The Buddha was a consummate teacher, like his near-contemporary Socrates.

If you want your students to ignore you, lecture at them. Preach at them. Tout your authority. Tout the authority of your own teachers and the secret mysteries you are passing on.

If you want to teach them, you must make them figure things out, because true knowledge is not derived from authority, but from common sense and experience. Buddha was a rational empiricist and master psychologist and probably the greatest ethicist the world has yet known. His life (as recorded in legend and myth, make no mistake, no more reliable than the life of Jesus if it comes to that but few doubt that there is a real man behind the myth at this point) is not perfect or without contradiction. He was far more tolerant of women than Jesus and preached to ordinary people as much as to the aristocracy, but he was still comparatively blind to women as fully human equals of men, just as you are now if you ascribe to a male-ruled church. And he was caught up in the prevailing mythology of his age and didn't break free of it.

He, however, at least tried. At the time, belief in rebirth was universal, and Nibbana was supposed to liberate you from Samsara, the cycle of rebirth. But Buddha was open to the possibility that this was false. It did not matter! The right way to live is the right way to live, no matter what your cosmology or mythology is. That is his empirical truth.

So you might consider giving it a look.

rgb

I notice you say 'any reason,' this makes me think about the lack of willingness in todays society for people to take responsibility for their actions. Because lets be frank here, the majority of people who get knocked up are not rape victims but are women who were having fun with boyfriends or random strangers and created life by having sex. But because sex is no longer a sacred act for most people the product - life is also no longer sacred.

Oh, my! I don't even know where to begin, here. First of all, am I to assume that you then are prepared to support a woman's right to an abortion in case of rape, which is hardly a "sacred act" even if it is openly condoned in the Bible? Somehow, I doubt it.

So we then have to look more deeply at this statement, as I think it will reveal your real agenda in this whole discussion. You posit a lack of willingness in today's society to take responsibility for one's own actions -- emphasis my own. Subtext being that yesterday's society people were so willing (the entire history of the human race notwithstanding as a counterexample). So you are assuming the right to just go ahead and bloody well make them be "responsible" by your own standards? You are willing to exercise coercive force of majority rule, or rule by fiat, to impose violent sanctions and violate the free will of these irresponsible louts (like your friend who got pregnant) because sex is obviously only for the sacred purpose of making babies, and anybody who dares to have sex for fun deserves punishment anyway. Pregnancy is just God's way of getting even. Is that why the Church forbids birth control that might prevent unwanted pregnancies?

I've got some more news for you. Life is precisely as sacred as we choose to make it. This is partly because "sacredness" is a product of our own imaginations. This is especially apparent in US politics these days, where entire books and constitutional amendments are devoted to protecting the "sacred" symbol of the United States -- the flag, I mean, not the dollar -- from "desecration", a thing that can only be done if something is sacred. Talk about idolatry!

Making a false idol out of life itself is no more sensible than making one out of clay or gold. If God considered life "sacred", don't you think that he would have arranged to be a little bit less bloody and violent? Wiping out all the animals and people on the planet was OK, cursing them with death in the first place is OK, killing off all those firstborn Egyptians is OK, performing a mix of pre- and post-natal abortions on all the innocent Midianites was downright praiseworthy, the entire list of violent acts attributable to God in the SAB are all expressions of His Perfect Love, but we are supposed to consider life sacred? Now I get it! I'm enlightened! You've finally converted me. It all makes sense now.

I mean, what had all of those animals done to Him? Or for that matter, all of those babies?

Maybe, just maybe, we can try to view those young women who seek abortions with a tiny bit of compassion.

Some of them are indeed victims of rape, and I would be very interested in seeing any sort of statistical study that justifies the statement that "most of them are women who are having fun with boyfriends or random strangers". Let's see, hmmm, how about:

http://www.abortionno.org/Resources/fast...

Oooo, looks like 68.8% of all women in the US who have abortions are Christian -- or claim to be -- with a solid 31.3% of them Catholic (which is roughly twice the percentage of the population that is Catholic, meaning that they have abortions and significantly greater than the national average rate). Why is that, one supposes? Could it be the triple whammy of a patriarchal church that places an abnormal value on "virginity", the direct religious prohibition of birth control, and the exaggerated social stigma associated with pregnancy out of wedlock in the Catholic Church? D'ya think?

But you'll fix 'em, by golly. You'll make those apple-eating, pleasure seeking, fallen Eves bear the consequences of their own partial disobedience of the Church's divinely compassionate orders from its male-only leadership, and while you're at it, you'll impose the exact same mythology on all the non-Catholics as well. Come on, let's really humiliate them, and maybe throw them in jail or make them wear red letters while we're at it! Or we can brand them, just like prostitutes were branded by the Inquisition.

Or maybe, if you find this even a bit revolting, we can keep out of the way and let these women come to terms with their own beliefs and desires and needs, no matter how they came to be pregnant and who they are and what the basis is for their decision. Maybe we men can actually, for once, keep our collective mouths shut and not insist that we know what is best, and what is best is that you shut up you whore and bear that child and raise it no matter how and who begot it upon you, no matter what it does to your life.

If you want to preach to women not to choose to have an abortion, play right through. That is your right and privilege. If you want to put your whole life where your mouth is and adopt a few of the babies of the women who choose to go ahead and have them instead of having an abortion, I'd have even more respect for your position. If you really want my respect -- and want to earn it the hardest of ways -- try adopting and caring for children with serious birth defects, who are mentally retarded, who will basically suck up your life to the point where you and I cannot exchange these long replies. The only problem then is that you won't have time to preach then, because you'll actually be struggling with the reality that you seem to want to ignore, and I suspect you'd be a bit less inclined to cast all of those first stones at the women who choose not to bear these children when the abnormalities can be detected by amniocentesis by the end of the first trimester and the pregnancy quietly terminated.

Traumatic? Sure. But it sure as hell isn't as traumatic as the alternative.

That would make me so happy in the abortion debate. If every single person who vehemently opposed abortion a) supported universal sex education and access to birth control; b) vehemently removed all social stigma attached to out of wedlock children; c) adopted one or more of the unwanted babies that are born anyway, from all over this sorry planet, then I'd have a lot more respect for them. I'd still disagree with making it a law, because that violates the rights of the woman to make many hard decisions that only she is entitled to make, but at least then the argument would be ethically consistent.

But that's not the way it is, is it? The dirty whores! Having sex for fun instead of as the "sacred" act God intended. Let's arrange it so that they won't find it fun any more, heh heh.

rgb

Alex wrote: "rgb wrote: "Quite a list...

...and quite irrelevant.

not irrelevant, I was showing that there is some evidence that organised religion does not destroy peoples individuality."

Did you hear somebody make that claim? I did not. I thought, in the context of the discussion, that you were arguing that Christians have made ethical and scientific contributions to society (although frankly there were a few names on that list where the "ethical" part is subject to discussion and debate, e.g. Werner Heisenberg, Hitler's favorite "Aryan Science" stooge in WW II however brilliant a physicist he might have been).

If I am mistaken, I apologize. We will take it as stipulated that Christianity and organized religion do not automatically remove one's individuality, especially not when it is our own organized religion. It is only "Muslims" that we can safely generalize about, or "atheist Chinese", or "Hindus", or "Buddhists" -- all of whom you have generalized in a way that removes their individuality in our long and extended discussion at one time or another, your own words quoted back to you on request.

I certainly concede your own individuality. Seriously;-) Don't give it another thought...:-)

rgb

By your ethical judgement if it is morally correct to kill a feotus because it is before the brain activity starts, then if the laws were changed in the future it is conceivable that we will have a human pound or extermination facility, maybe we will call it the Big Sleep Clinic.

We might well indeed. We certainly have in the past, many many times. They called them "concentration camps". Concentration camps were invented, by the way, by the British, a nice Christian nation. They were refined by the Germans and the command of Adolph Hitler, a man who was raised Catholic (and who undoubtedly learned his antisemitism straight from the Gospel of John) and who was even supported in his early rise to power by the Catholic church. The Soviet Union -- a collection of countries that were Eastern Orthodox Christian -- carried them to new heights.

The point being, that it isn't religion -- presence or absence thereof -- that defines moral behavior or prevents immoral behavior. It is the individual choices of individuals.

Suggesting that it is a small step from giving a woman control over her own body (including whether or not she will be the involuntary host of an unwanted fetus) to mass murder, death camps, Brave New World and so on, is clearly pure rhetoric. Most of the cultures that have committed mass genocide strictly opposed abortion within their own culture. It's one of the really amusing things about religious belief -- many "Christians" in this country -- Sarah Palin, for a very public, very obnoxious example -- now are all for fighting in Iraq, capital punishment, carrying guns and being "tough on crime", but when it comes to abortion, oh no! That's just murder. We should put the abortionist and the mother both into prison where they can rot, or better yet, execute them.

Right. Post-natal abortion is no problem for them, because it is all connected to their ability to wield power. And by opposing the pre-natal sort, they gain power over women, the power to impose their version (your version) of morality on others by main force.

You admit above that you helped a friend have an abortion. I won't even ask if it was a friend that you had had sex with or gotten pregnant -- it doesn't matter to me either way. But why is it that now you no longer seem to be able to empathize with her plight? Do you think that she didn't know her own mind, that you somehow know it better for her? Do you arrogate yourself to the position where you would be willing to impose legal sanctions against her for choosing to terminate her pregnancy whatever the reason she had for doing so?

We will take those old people who have lost all trace of their former selves through alziemers or what ever and put them to sleep. Heck we dont even need to end the life we can just bury them in their grave in their unconscieous state.

Whether or not you can intellectually or ethically understand it, if they are brain dead they are dead. Burying the husk of a body that once held them living or not, killing that husk, removing that husk from life support, euthanizing that husk -- there could not possibly be any moral guilt associated with doing any of these per se because they are dead and they aren't coming back no matter how much you pray over them.

What does matter is the dignity of feelings of the living that they leave behind. The mother who lets go of her brain dead son who rode his motorcycle without a helmet into a tree and sustained a subdural hemotoma that extinguished his life but not the life of his body, and gives up his organs so several other children might live, is doing a rational and praiseworthy thing. The same mother who insists on spending millions of dollars of your money and mine to keep that empty husk alive because she cannot give up her attachment to the meat that once held her son is doing an irrational and unworthy thing. Burying the bodies of old people who are brain dead (or young ones that are brain dead) alive is an absurd proposition that is raised for purely polemical purposes. It is in no way equivalent to the discussion about abortion.

And those feral children, they are also too much trouble why not put them in a heshin sack with a few bricks and throw them into the closest dam.

Again, nobody is suggesting this, so this is just pure rhetoric without substance. For one thing, they are not brain dead, merely brain damaged -- damaged by a lack of development. For another, it is almost impossible to judge a feral child's history and hence have any idea of what sort of outcome caring for it would have -- if it learned any language at all before being abandoned it might well come back to a state of humanity. Also, may so-called feral children are merely autistic or have some other disorder that is treatable or that leaves one quite human (given that there is a large range of "quite human"). Nor would I recommend euthanizing e.g. Down's syndrome children. Birth is a good time to draw the line and define provisional personhood and the conferrence of the first human "rights" by society.

You are reacting purely emotionally, and even the emotion is narrow and distorted. What about "brain dead" do you not understand?

My wife is a physician. She spends her life ushering humans through all of the travails and joys and sorrow and pains of life, and yes, through their death. We have made our wishes crystal clear to each other and to our children. Not only do we agree that it is utterly pointless to sustain "life" in brain dead body, neither one of us has any wish whatsoever to be trapped in a paralyzed body, crippled by a stroke or accident, unable to communicate or care for ourselves, condemned to slow years of the greatest suffering either of us can imagine until our bodies finally wind down enough to allow us to die. And frankly, this is something you should think about as well, whatever the "Church" teaches you. Strokes happen. So do accidents.

Western culture is so obsessed with life, in spite of the empirical fact that life is fleeting, life is short, and life can easily become purified, undiluted suffering. Jesus is often held up as an example of pure suffering, but let's be frank. His travail (if the Gospels are perfectly accurate) lasted what, a whole day? Less? He apparently died so quickly on the cross that Pilate couldn't believe he was dead already, a strong young guy like him (and perhaps he wasn't, of course -- a bribe to the guards, a bit of legerdemain). The world is absolutely full of examples of people whose suffering absolutely dwarfs this, many of them children, many of them suffering in this way as we speak. His was nothing special, to be honest, and he pretty much asked for it (just or unjust). And yeah, there have been deaths that were a lot crueller and more unjust. All one has to do is read Numbers 31, or read Wiesel's Night, or read about slavery.

Death will happen to us all, my friend. And when it comes, it will be the failure of the brain, not the body, because we "are" a complicated dynamical process that occurs primarily in the brain and nervous systems of our bodies. If the brain dies, we die. If the body dies, the brain dies, but the opposite is not true. We may choose to idolize the empty shell that once held a person and worship it or cling to it, but it is, after all, just a pile of chemicals engaged in a very complex reaction once the spirit has fled, whether one is an atheist or the most devout believer.

rgb

Alex,

One point you keep conveniently avoiding, is that a fertilized egg is not a thinking, rational, aware entity. That it happens to share a roughly similar* dna to a particular species is entirely irrelevant.

*You don't want to claim near identity because that will bring in apes and other primates which with them not being christians, I am sure you will decree are not moral agents much less morally worthy.

As has already been noted, the corpse which met all of your previously stated criteria also shares that roughly similar dna, meaning necessarily by your own criteria that the corpse is "human" thus morally protected and morally responsible. Since there is no life in the corpse, we know through REASON, that necessarily your premises must be false or your argument invalid.

Or to put it very succinctly: You have yet to demonstrate that non-thinking, non-rational, non-independent, non-aware entities are moral agents. Once you can demonstrate that they are indeed moral agents then you have the problem of all of the various entities you have now introduced as moral agents, such as trees, non-human animals, rocks, and pretty well every other entity we can possibly know, but especially the offspring of nearly every other species of animal which are to a great extent indistinguishable from human zygotes, except by that trivial and irrelevant dna.



And before you again rely upon it, stipulation is NOT proof nor demonstration.

Recently I actually did some research and I realise how simple it is. From the very spark of conception human life is formed. It matters not what stage it is at, it is human life from begining to end and thus has a right to fulfil its full potential. Who can decide the quality of a humans life and declare a standard by which it is not worth living. Is it the mothers right to choose to kill her feotus?

It is only simple to the simplistic. I do not mean that as an insult, only that perhaps because of the complexity of the issue, you seem to want to reduce it to something binary so you don't have to actually struggle with any of the real moral and physical dilemmas.

So right back at you:

Is it right for society to dictate that the mother must sacrifice her life for her fetus? For some women, that is for all intents and purposes the choice.

Is it right for society to dictate that the mother must risk her life and permanently damage her body (because yeah, childbirth damages a woman's body wanted baby or not) to bring her rapist's child into the world?

Is it right for society to demand that a thirteen year old girl who got pregnant bear the child and sacrifice her own prospects for anything like a normal life, an education, wealth, status in society, for a child she does not want?

Is it right for society to demand that a pregnant woman who has just learned that the baby she carries has any one of the myriad of horrific or fatal birth defects to carry the child to term, bear it, and watch it die, spending as much as a million dollars in the process to support its all-precious "life" with the certain knowledge that it will not live, it cannot live, and that if it lives caring for it will be like caring for a very expensive, all consuming plant? If you think that this scenario is impossible, look again, think again. It is actually relatively common.

As for who has the right to decide -- that one is relatively easy. The one whose life and health is at risk: the mother.

Society is more than welcome to create an ethic that frowns on abortion under frivolous circumstances, but truthfully, the number of women who seek frivolous abortions is very small. For most women it is a traumatic decision at best either way. They do not need a heaping helping of guilt or legal sanction blocking them from choosing what they think is the right decision for them without you and others like you threatening them with prison, ostracism, or worse -- simply forcing them to bear the unwanted child against their will.

Think of that as the very worst sort of psychic patriarchal rape -- that would be very close to correct. Of course, rape was sanctioned by the Old Testament, and you've managed to (incredibly enough) defend it "in context" because your morality is far more flexible than that of the "moral relativists" on this list, who I think would fairly universally say that marriage by rape is repulsive and reprehensible as is any society that deems virginity as a necessary prior for a woman to be married as "undamaged goods".

In fact, valuing virginity at all is a crock. It's akin to "valuing" the time our children believe in Santa Claus even though we all know it is a complex lie, only we impose it on increasingly adult persons and once again, shovel on the guilt should they dare to actually choose to join the ranks of the other adults on the planet.

Try valuing honesty, instead. Honesty is the best policy. Sex between adult humans ranges from a fairly impersonal exchange of mutual or one-sided pleasure to the highly complicated (but rewarding) long term sexual relationship of marriage. "Chastity" is far less important than mere honesty throughout this process, including the honesty to live up to your marriage contract be it civil or religious vows.

That's really the thing that annoys me about divorced persons and adulterers. It isn't the act itself, which may well be reasonable -- in the case of battered spouses, spouses of child molesters or alcoholics or murderers divorce may be a simple matter of personal survival (whatever "Jesus" might say about it), and even adultery is understandable under some circumstances. It is the dishonesty involved -- somebody who would lie, or break a contract, is certainly less to be trusted than somebody who doesn't.

Anyway, try to see the world as it really is, not in an oversimplified black and white. There are edge cases. There are extreme cases. Your "simple" prescription isn't even correct for a fetus with a sufficiently extreme mutation, as they may well not have the genetic complement that defines "human". Human judgement is vastly superior to a simplistic and cruel "rule" in nearly all cases. In fact, that's what human judgement is for!

rgb

It is horrific that you deem a downsyndrome child as less valuable then a normal child, or as having less legal rights because of its disability.

No, what is horrific is people knowing that their child will have a disability that will prevent it from ever being fully human, and then bringing it into the world. I should point out (in case I didn't already on another thread) that my next-oldest brother has Down's syndrome. I grew up with Down's syndrome close enough to reach out and touch it. I have seen it in a way that I very much doubt that you have.

While I love my brother, for my brother's own sake, the sake of my parents, and the sake of the entire family I absolutely, positively wish that he had never been born. And if you think otherwise you are simply insane. Nobody wishes for a mentally retarded child, and only a cruel and dogmatic theist would deliberately bring one into the world.

rgb

If it is only mans will that makes moral laws then they are as easily changeable as the rules of a game. If we make the rules we can change them and unmake them. Destroy religion and you destroy morality.

God's moral laws are no more immutable than humans'. God sometimes thinks genocide is okay, rape is okay, slavery is okay, etc., and sometimes he doesn't. According to you, God can make one set of rules for one place in time (e.g. the Israelites) that is not permanent and universal but can change. This plasticity of morality is what you claim is so bad about human-made moral law, but this is the exact same thing that God does.

Again, you assert that morality derives from religion or from God, but you ignore the obvious point that we as humans are able to objectively judge things such as the Bible to separate their morality from their immorality. So we obviously have a moral sense that derives from somewhere other than religion.

Your description of a good christian is terribly incomplete.

I never claimed to offer a "complete" description of a "good Christian." In fact, such a description would be impossible, since if you put ten Christians in a room you'll get eleven descriptions of what a "good Christian" is.

My point, which you seem to have missed, was that you are equivocating "good Christian" with "good person." The two are not the same; you can be one, the other, both, or neither. There are certain elements of Christianity, certain things that a Christian has to do, that have nothing to do with being a good person. The Ten Commandments are an example of this. The point of my post was to point out a flaw in your argument. You are basing your entire argument on a faulty premise: that your definition of a moral law (including things like "worship the Christian god and not God but the Christian god") is the universal moral law. If you're going to make this claim, please back it up.

Alex wrote: "Am I the only person cherrypicking on this discussion board?
"

By the meaning of the phrase, yes you are at least in this thread. Remember your claims are universals, which means that there cannot be ANY exceptions to your claims. Others offer up instances from your own "holy" text which clearly refute your universals. These are counter-examples, not cherry picking.

To be perfectly clear, since again this is a simple point of logic, for these offerings of counter-examples to be cherry picking, the claims which they are being used to prove would themselves have to be universals, along the lines of "Nothing ever remotely good ever appears in any aspect of christianity." No one is making that claim, merely refuting your own universals in your claims about christianity.

Speaking of which, why is it that though you are the one touting the greatness of the immorality of christianity, when called on the nature of christianity you never offer actual citations, instead respond with "Uh huh.. is too in the bible" but unlike those offering the refutations, you offer no citation? To refute the existential claim you need only cite one instance, so it seems perfectly reasonable that you would offer that instance if it existed rather than emoting. Right?

BTW here is a clear and infinitely more likely explanation of "that feeling" which you claim that "everyone" has with regard to terminating a pregnancy: simple recognition of the passing of time and the choosing of one path which closes off another. I have made many choices in my life which at the time I has a bit of sadness about, even while I was excited about the new path. Your simplistic appeal to emotion, as well as being a logical fallacy, simply fails to even remotely come close to the mark.

Oh, and no faith has nothing to teach. Teaching implies knowledge and learning. Both of these require critical thought, which faith denounces by necessity. As Mark Twain put it, "Faith is believing what you know ain't true."

Or if you prefer we could use the original sin from your own religion as evidence that religion and faith are antagonistic to teaching and knowledge, after all the original sin was seeking and attaining knowledge!

<Brian I am not ignoring you, just havent got round to replying.

Nicole wrote: ""The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion" Take a look
Hi Nicole
Well that was insightful. If the quotes are reliable this painfully shows the social pressures that so many women have to struggle under.

I emphasise with any woman who has to go through this regardless of their background. And I can see how they could come to this decisicion, they have to deal with so much judgement from society and there is also there own selfish reasons. A year ago I was leaning towards prochoice precisely because of various books and movies that dealt with women who had to do have an abortion under terrible circumstances. But I have recently seen the error of this stance.

It is uncomfortable to have to read those accounts of the picketers and so forth doing it and being so blind towards the feelings of other women who also think that they have no other choice.
Thats the problem, even if it is illegal some women will still feel that they have to do it. As Luke said and I agree with him, 'we should do all we can to make it unnecessary.' But now that it is legal, it has become acceptable for many people, and indeed a far more necessary option in most womens minds, so women will be making the choice so much easier as they are unaware of the serious moral error they are making.

If you want to look at it coldly, those Christian women or their parents who pressured them, were deciding that their 'face' in society was more important then the sin of murder. And there are many reasons that are put forward by millions of women, and obviously they convince themselves long enough to do the deed. But it is still clear to me that there is no good reason to justify Abortion.

Continuing callout 1. I dont think they are cruel, but I do think that they are making a horrible mistake in their rationalising of ending the life of unborn children.
Simply if abortion is not wrong, nothing is wrong and that is true if you dont believe in the moral law.
Anything can be rationalised.

2#Holy spirit is explained in the Bible, If you try to be close to God, love Him, obey him then you will be able to feel the holy spirit. This is hard to understand if you dont actually do it. But if you do it you will know it to be true.

3#'impersonal example' That should be the catch phrase for the prochoice. But i disagree it is anybodies choice to take the life of an unborn child.


/Abortion is not something that people take lightly, especially those people that are in favor of it as an option for women... Know that there is an ideal society we agree on, and the actual reality on which we do not...we should do all we can to make it unnecessary./
So you agree that it is not the same as removing excess cells, that there is something morally wrong with it, but that doing this evil is a worth the good of saving possible evils later in society when the embryo grows up a bit? Small evil to ensure possible future good, a good end does not justify an intrinsically evil means.

/yes people do look back with something akin to regret and wonder what their child would have turned out like. Abortion is a sad, sad thing that is not taken lightly by anyone who chooses to do it. It's not something anyone wants to do/

Why would you have this feeling if it wasnt morally wrong. Peoples natural intuition tells them that is wrong.

"The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion" Take a look

http://mypage.direct.ca/w/writer/anti-ta...

Am I the only person cherrypicking on this discussion board?

Dont worry you dont come across as angry.

callout 1;
If we are to take the stand that the embryo or feotus is human life in its early stages, then terminating the person out of concern for the environment is culling...
Shit I got a go, finnish in a moment.

\ when did sex stop being "sacred?"\
It still is sacred for those who consider themselves to be a married couple, with recognition of the possibility of life being created through the act, and without purposefully changing the act through artificial means to prevent this possibility of life. When the both totally give of themself to their partner.

Seeing as you deny the moral law and I propose that it does exist we have no base to work from. So there is not much point in argueing about points within the bible.

I must also say that although I have had a good laugh from many of your posts, and learnt some intersting things, over all I get the feeling that you are trying to spread an intolerance for faith that is just as dangerous as those evangelical fanatics that so many athiests are afraid of.

/I am doing my best to figure out the truth of all things, beginning at the beginning by trying to figure out how to discern truth. I can hardly be blamed for not knowing everything a priori. /


I respect your clarity of thought, but I must persist in my search for truth. It remains clear to me that some truths we can gather about the universe can also be made through spiritual avenues that science can not teach us. And that theology is a valid and wholesome method.

Alex said "...this makes me think about the lack of willingness in todays society for people to take responsibility for their actions. Because lets be frank here, the majority of people who get knocked up are not rape victims but are women who were having fun with boyfriends or random strangers and created life by having sex. But because sex is no longer a sacred act for most people the product - life is also no longer sacred."

Hey Alex, along with the define-the-Holy-Spirit question, I have another zinger: when did sex stop being "sacred?"


"I wonder if the women who do this regret it in the future. If they wonder what could their child have turned out like."

Speaking from experience, yes people do look back with something akin to regret and wonder what their child would have turned out like. Abortion is a sad, sad thing that is not taken lightly by anyone who chooses to do it. It's not something anyone wants to do. But, again, the fact of the matter is it is legal, there is reasonable grounding for it's legality (as RG laid out very nicely), and if it were not legal it would still happen and, in a way be discriminating against the poor.

Alex wrote: "But because sex is no longer a sacred act for most people the product - life is also no longer sacred. "

Then if we apply a single, rather than a double standard, "god" has never valued life since "it" was the original abortionist... (and mass murderer, but that is another topic..)

Every single miscarriage must make you hate the supreme abortionist all the more.. :)

Alex,

Please really do check out The Reasonable Woman, or some other intro to logic text. Stipulation, rhetoric, spin, propaganda are not evidence.

Furthermore, even if you could find a single example of actual evidence that someone other than the powers that be, benefited from being subjected to religion, this would STILL not prove your universal claims. Jumping to universals from instances is a logical fallacy. Doing so without even those instances borders on irrationality from the wrong side of the border...

I asked before and as with all questions asked of you, it went ignored, but I will ask again: Is there anything which even in theory could possibly count against your claims or positions in your own mind?

Do you even allow for the possibility of falsification of your claims and positions?

Or to put the same question yet another way, do you allow that you could ever be mistaken?

This is not asked to be snide, but as a serious question since so far you have asserted that christianity is X and when faced with exactly quotes and specific citations from the central text of christianity which stated Not X, you have denied a problem or that these can even possibly refute your claims. Similar scenarios have occurred in other subjects, including but not limited to your claims about pregnancy and the issues surrounding this.

So would you be so kind as to answer the questions? Perhaps, explaining what, in theory of course, could possibly count as counter-evidence, counter-example, or other form of falsification of your claims?

I suspect that such an exploration (by you) of these answers would resolve the entire matter quickly and simply.

rgb wrote: "Quite a list...

...and quite irrelevant.

not irrelevant, I was showing that there is some evidence that organised religion does not destroy peoples individuality.

That was fascinating about feral children and unconsciousness.
By your ethical judgement if it is morally correct to kill a feotus because it is before the brain activity starts, then if the laws were changed in the future it is conceivable that we will have a human pound or extermination facility, maybe we will call it the Big Sleep Clinic. We will take those old people who have lost all trace of their former selves through alziemers or what ever and put them to sleep. Heck we dont even need to end the life we can just bury them in their grave in their unconscieous state.
And those feral children, they are also too much trouble why not put them in a heshin sack with a few bricks and throw them into the closest dam.

/If that female, for any reason or none at all, is not up to the enormous amount of work and commitment needed to raise a happy, healthy, and loved child, she needs to have the right to terminate the pregnancy. If her health is at risk, she has the right to refuse the risk /

I agree this isnt a question of science but of politics, but I must disagree that it is morally rigth for the mothers to have the legal right to kill the child in her body.
I wonder if the women who do this regret it in the future. If they wonder what could their child have turned out like.

I notice you say 'any reason,' this makes me think about the lack of willingness in todays society for people to take responsibility for their actions. Because lets be frank here, the majority of people who get knocked up are not rape victims but are women who were having fun with boyfriends or random strangers and created life by having sex. But because sex is no longer a sacred act for most people the product - life is also no longer sacred.

Alex,

You are cherry picking within sentences and putting words into people's mouths.

I'm going to call you out, propose a question, and try to give some perspective.

Call out 1:
You reduced one of the pro-choice arguments to a chilling paraphrase "culling humans for the environment."
Yes that's part of it, but you even quote the rest of the original argument in your response: "...the production of children who are unlikely to be loved or wanted by the mother or raised in poverty by a mother...." on and on. You make pro-choicers out to be these calloused, calculating people. As much as you'd like to, we're not. Tisk tisk.

Call out #2:
One of the responders is misinformed about the holy spirit.
As a former Catholic, I came to the conclusion that everyone sounds misinformed about the holy spirit because it is impossible to be informed on it. At least, that's my opinion. This is an honest question: isn't it odd that you can propose what the Holy Spirit is willy nilly, considering it's one of the biggest no-nos to deny its existence? Can you find a clear definition in the bible? Or can you even find a clear distinction btwn God and the Spirit?

Call out #3
From my review of the writing, RBG was not saying people with downs are less valuable or having less legal rights. He was simply listing off reasons to abort with a impersonal example: "If the fetus is unwanted -- the result of a rape, an accident, not the right time, known to have Down's syndrome, known to have far worse genetic conditions that make it impossible for the child to live a vaguely normal and human life -- it's her call."

A question:
Where is the catholic church's concern for life on their contraceptive policy? If contraceptives were embraced and encouraged by the church there would be less pregnancies, less abortions, and a decrease in the spread of AIDS.

Perspective:
Abortion is not something that people take lightly, especially those people that are in favor of it as an option for women. Yet when we try to argue clearly and thoroughly on the matter, the tendency is for religiously minded people to belittle this tactic as cold and calculating. Know that there is an ideal society we agree on, and the actual reality on which we do not. If abortion is illegal we'll have what we have had in the past: rich people traveling to where it is legal and poor people doing it themselves with a good chance for catastrophe. Abortion should not be made illegal, we should do all we can to make it unnecessary. And I personally believe that we should not go about it by drawing from a holy book written 2000 years ago, but through a careful empirical look at the facts and an objective-as-possible interpretation of our recent history.

I really don't like when people get all angry on internet discussions, so I hope I didn't come across that way here.

Respectfully,

Luke

/we have come to view not being pregnant as a fundamental right of a human being. No human can be forced to have a child against their will. Males, (of course) get this right from nature, and females can never be the equals of males in law or practical society without this right as well./
This doesnt take into account that man and women have different physical make ups. Its not about equality of the sexes because sexes have different make ups, saying that a man has a right a woman doesnt because of his natural sex is ridiculous.

/Finally, from an absolutely pragmatic point of view, the planet is vastly overcrowded as it is, and we have many reasons to not wish to encourage the production of children who are unlikely to be loved or wanted by the mother or raised in poverty by a mother in the absence of a father or raised by society at enormous human and economic cost in the event that the fetus is genetically defective so that they can never become fully human even if they are carried to term and granted legal status as human/
This is why the Catholic Church is so important in present society. From my point of view you are promoting culling humans for the environment. But seeing as you believ they are not human I guess this is acceptable to you.
Then you are judging that the quality of the human life will not be worth living because society, mum doesnt want it. Here you admit the precious possibility of a future person and dismiss its life because you judge it is not worthy.
It is horrific that you deem a downsyndrome child as less valuable then a normal child, or as having less legal rights because of its disability.

I am well aware of the science of conception, but you are misinformed about the holy spirit. At no time have I proposed that the holy spirit comes into humans at conception. I just propose that it is a human life.

Luke you pretty well describe morality as it is and why it actually exists. It has nothing to do with religion, but is the natural consequence from being rational (broadly understood as thinking) beings that are aware of our surroundings (others exist, others feel pain, I will be harmed if I harm others, etc), and are vulnerable.

This description of actual morality, the only real effort to describe rather than proscribe the nature of morality was first presented by Bernard Gert in his decades long work on morality, which culminated in Morality: Its Nature and Justification.

Unfortunately the religious try to lend weight to their meaningless faith by usurping the word "morality" while they themselves are seeking to violate many if not all of the actual obligations of morality.

rgb,

Nice detailed responses, unfortunately as we have seen Alex is not exactly into details.. especially details like evidence, refutation, and sound arguments.

One correction that I believe is worth noting is that in the eyes of the law, you are not a person until at the very least maybe 21 (in the US).

You cannot make decisions for yourself in the matter of contracts until you are at least 18 (except for contracts for future military service.. ) because you are not a person in the eyes of the rulers.

You cannot choose to partake of tobacco until you are 18. Again because you are not a person in the eyes of the law.

You cannot choose to operate a vehicle until 15-16 and even then only under restrictions, because you are not a person...

You cannot choose even the most natural things to do with your own body until the state decrees that you are a person and thus allowed to "consent" because before that arbitrary age (which differs in states from 13 to 19) because before that arbitrary date you are not a person in the eyes of the law.

Alcohol consumption is perhaps the most well known as that is restricted until you are 21 when in the eyes of the law you magically become a person..

Of course you are not person enough to dictate how others may lead their peaceful lives, at least not from the Oval Office until you are 35.. (not that ANYONE ever has the moral right to make such decisions, but that is another topic)

And we are never person enough to determine what drugs to take or not, what life to lead or not, who to associate with or not, and now of course it is relevant to note that we are not recognized as persons with regard to our health... Nope, we are still children that must have our lives dictated by the only "persons" (aka politicians and bureaucrats)

Long winded way to get to it, but you are right that in this discussion it is a political issue, and one that becomes absurd the moment we look at it closely given that the laws and what are necessitated by them are perhaps even more convoluted, contradictory, and self defeating in nearly the same manner as christianity and its texts.

rgb
I would argue that you are wilfull and deliberatly blind to the goodness of the Bible that is evident if you actually search for God and dont satarise the search by making purile jokes about asking God to have a cup of tea.

The world as we know it and God as the creator of the universe could be compared to a house and an architect, we should not expect to be able to see the architect in the walls or chimney of the house, likewise we should not expect to see God as one of the physical facts inside the universe. But we can see God in ourselves as an influence or a command telling us to do things in a certain way. And that is exactly what we find in the moral law. And agape. Agape is inexplicable in evolutionary terms.

Sorry about doing these out of order backwards, but that's the way the scroll bar rolls..;-)

I'm not wilfully blind to the goodness of the Bible. That's not at issue. The Bible contains plenty of good things. Here, I'll provide a list of them (accumulated by somebody else, but you won't get much argument from me about them):

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/go...

It's not even a terribly short list, until you consider how long the document its drawn from is.

But don't forget these lists, as well:

Cruelty and violence in the Bible (presented as "good")

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/cr...

Contradictions in the Bible -- places where it says one thing, then says the opposite somewhere else. Bear in mind that you can prove anything from a contradiction. If you don't see how, I'd be happy to show you. Simple symbolic logic, absolutely valid.

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/co...

Errors in science and history (as we now know them) in the Bible:

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/sc...

Simple absurdity. Things that are in the Bible that violate our common sense and all of our experience. This one is enormously long. Persevere.

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/ab...

Injustice in the Bible, much of it inflicted by or commanded by God.

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/in...

Oops. It is even longer.

And one of my favorites. Failed prophecies of the Bible. Hmmm, nobody ever seems to talk about this one, do they?

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/pr...

I especially like Isaiah's mad ravings about dragons and satyrs dancing in Babylonian palaces. Right. Mythical beasts 101. Isaiah would really like World of Warcraft and other fictional games of today...

Now, back to your basic premise, that I'm satirizing the search for God by suggesting that he stop in for a cup of tea. You don't seem to understand. I'm dead serious!

Why is this so unlikely? What is contradictory about this? What is evil, or wrong-headed? I'm a concrete kind of guy. I need reasons to believe something. Not just reasons, but consistent reasons, reasons that fit in with the sum total of my learning and experience. So let us apply reason to the problem.

a) (Proposition) God exists.
b) (Proposition) God is omniscient and omnipotent.
c) (Proposition) God loves me and wants me to understand Him and His Moral Code and His Purpose for Me. Oops, lower case me, sorry.

Then it seems fairly obvious to me that God is fully aware of my sincere desire to learn the truth about the Universe and God and everything, because he exists and is omniscient.

God loves me, and wants me to learn how to be ideally moral and to live according to his purpose for me. Maybe my understanding of these things (however imperfectly it was formed) is in fact perfect and there is nothing to forgive, nothing to correct, in which case nothing happens. God is content. However, let us imagine that my understanding of God is imperfect and my moral beliefs are incorrect and that I am not living my life according to His purpose for me.

Then hey, all he has to do is appear before me and tell me!

After all, he's omnipotent! Magic is therefore effortless for him. He doesn't even have to do anything now -- he knew before the beginning of time that I would one day be in this situation, and could have arranged the initial conditions of the Universe in the moderately unlikely state required for the appearance of a physical body to coalesce out of available matter and free energy in front of me, hold the conversation he forsaw that we would have, and then vanish, leaving me vastly wiser and happier and far more likely to live according to His wishes, morality, purpose. Nothing is impossible for Him, and nothing can even take any effort -- to think is to do, for an all powerful being. His will be done isn't a wish that it be so, it is a theorem of the axioms above.

So why, exactly, is it unreasonable for him to do this? According to the Bible, Jesus did in fact appear to "hundreds" of people. Many of them weren't asking for him to appear (as I am) -- Paul was moseying along feeling downright hostile! Why do you (and Christians in general) argue that this isn't a reasonable thing to ask, not to test God but just to find out the truth of all things in a way that cannot be easily mistaken? Wasn't one of the many things Jesus told his disciples that all they had to do is ask for something and he'd do it for them? Isn't that in at least two or three of the Gospels somewhere or the other?

So why exactly is this a bad, or unreasonable thing to ask? Wouldn't it really solve our little problem, resolve our debate? Jesus appears to me, says "You lose", and I then cheerfully admit it and concede our little discussion...

The real reason you belittle my sincere suggestion and request is because you know that Jesus lied when he said he'd do anything for you if asked. This is another thing that is only "metaphorically" true, or "symbolically" true, or however else you want to rename a lie so it doesn't sound quite as much like "a lie". You also know as well as I do that whether or not Jesus ever even said this -- it could be yet another insertion, fiction, but not an actual accurately recorded statement of Jesus, after all and not be a "lie" -- it will never happen!

You know that Jesus will not appear to me just because I ask him to. He will not do it even though he loves me. He will not do it even though he has to damn me to hell later if he doesn't, and could effortlessly save me. With infinite energy and power to draw on, Jesus could save me with less effort than I take to punch a single key in this very long reply, and if Jesus truly loves me he wants to save me, and yet he doesn't.

A contradiction, hmmm. Just one more variant of the problem of evil, but a very, very simple one. I guess Jesus doesn't really love me. Or he cannot actually appear before me. Or he isn't really God. Or Jesus, as God, really is happy with me just the way I am, and is proud of my life errors and all and wouldn't change a thing about it, because he has perfect understanding of it all and doesn't blame me from being what I was predestined to be from the beginning of time, yadda yadda.

You choose.

Finally, your metaphor about the architect is delightful. I accept. The thing about the architect of a house is that they exist. If you invite the architect over to have a cup of tea, only an arrogant ass-hole who didn't want your business would refuse. Most architects would be thrilled to talk to the people living in their houses -- unless they did a shoddy job and were ashamed of them. Of course I wouldn't see an architect in a chimney -- only an imaginary architect would be in a chimney.

A real one would happily share a cup of tea.

rgb

I'm reluctant to comment b/c everyone seems so educated and well spoken (kudos rgb, that was an excellent little piece you wrote above).

I just wanted to chime in on a point brought up earlier.

In my humble opinion the bible doesn't do much for the morality of our country. I believe that morals are innate and natural; automatic. Of course, some teaching is necessary, but for the most part our morality is learned through being a social being in a social setting.

From an early age children develop the ability to think about thoughts (metacognition) and around that time children develop the ability to sympathize, empathize, and relate to other people. Through social interaction we learn that to be well liked and successful in the group you shouldn't hit, steal, kill, or otherwise do something you wouldn't want done to you. Although sometimes hard for us to follow, I'd argue the Golden Rule is not something picked up on Sunday mornings, but it is a lesson profoundly learned being a human child, doing human things. It is a lesson well absorbed by any developmentally healthy human. You guys can write pages arguing semantics on the finer points of moral morasses, but to me just look to the simple answer: we're social beings and it makes no sense to be such and to engage in socially destructive behavior.

To add an interesting bit of info into the debate I'd like to talk a bit about On Killing by David Grossman. Grossman is an army psychologist, a veteran and a professor at Westpoint. His book is subtitled The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society. When I first read it I was astounded. "In WWII, only 15 to 20 percent of combat infantry were willing to fire there rifles." Among those who actually fired their rifles, the majority were likely posturing (aiming above the enemy, which is easy to do convincingly). Another very interesting point: pre-combat, WWII cadets guessed that their biggest combat fear would be their own death; post-combat soldiers reported that their biggest and most profound fear was not doing something to stop the death of a comrade. The author goes on to say that of the 15-20% in WWII, many probably fired because their fear of not doing something to save OTHERS had overcome their aversion to killing another human.

To me morality is more easily (and empirically) explained by the fact that we are social animals and we-- for the most part-- behave in socially mindful ways because it's good for the society, it's good for us, and... being a good person plain feels good; we are literally designed for it. I have serious doubts that 80-85% of WWII infantry did not fire at their own peril because of Sunday learning. It was from their innate morality.

BTW: Animals are also often averse to killing their own kind. Cobras and other poisonous snakes forgo any biting and wrestle when disputing territory.

I also would recommend people checking out the show on morality done by Radiolab www.wnyc.org/radiolab.

Luke

The Catholic church has had a good run despite its few mistakes that everybody loves to focus on.

Which is, again, irrelevant.

Catholicism could be as overtly moral as Buddhism (which it is not, and never has been) and it still wouldn't make its fundamental premise -- that Jesus is the Son of God yadda yadda -- correct. Nor would it prove that morality devolves only from being Christian, which is patently false anyway, see remark on it not being as clearly moral as Buddhism, because like it or not it does come with the baggage of the entire Old Testament, and for most of its history that baggage has dominated its worldview and not been suppressed by inconvenient facts.

rgb

Quite a list...

...and quite irrelevant.

rgb

Both Dostoyevsky and Paul are right. Because if God the first cause of the moral law did not exist than an objective real and universally binding moral law would not exist either. Paul is also right in that you can know the
moral law without knowing the lawgiver. But we can not know the moral law aswell without knowing the Lawgiver and his character.

How about neither one of them are right. God isn't the "first cause" of anything at all -- you are simply asserting that without a single shred of objective evidence that this is the case, completely ignoring all of the evidence that suggest otherwise. There is no evidence for a "first cause", for starters, and such a thing makes no logical sense (after one has bought into an entire raft of observation-based axioms required to start talking about causality in the first place).

Also, there is no such thing as an objectively real and universally binding moral law. Please, Alex. Are we speaking the same language? Sometimes I despair of it. Objective reality is something that one can know only by studying it. There is no objectively real moral code visible in all of nature. There is just one code visible in all of nature -- it is called "the laws of physics" plus the information content that encodes the specific state of the Universe. Morality is a human invention; even animals that exhibit moral behavior don't do so according to rules, they just do it. Rules are high level semantic symbolic constructs. Similarly, what the hell does "universally binding" mean? Moral law cannot be broken is obviously false. Universal moral law is obviously false as different societies have different moralities. Basically your first two sentences are semantically meaningless falsehoods, assertions without foundation.

As far as Paul is concerned, look, Paul pretty much made up most of what you call "Christianity". Not Jesus. When Paul didn't like one thing or another thing in the Gospels (to the almost infinitesimal extent that there is any evidence that he was aware of the Gospels, which of course hadn't been written when he wrote most of the rest of the NT) he simply threw it out and made up whatever he liked. Sometimes it was truly absurd stuff -- telling women to cover their heads and shut up in Church. Other times it was fantastic -- blaming good old Adam and Eve for original sin and establishing the false basis for salvation. A rather large chunk of it was directly contradictory of Jesus's words in the Gospels, such as when he tells us that Jesus didn't really mean it when he said that we were to stick to the OT law, only that we were supposed to stick to the rules but not the punishments.

Talk about absolute moral law! All of Christianity is pretty much moral vapor! You cannot even decide what is actually moral, because the Bible says one thing, then another, then yet another. And you always have an answer! It was moral for Moses to kill old women for "being witches" even though we know now that there is no such thing as a real witch. It was peachy for Moses to kill women, children, babies, and fetuses in situ then but now it isn't. I really enjoyed your attempt to justify marriage by rape as being morally justified then. Are you completely daft? What about "not considering virginity as a prior requirement for marrying a woman"? Especially given that it wasn't for a man, then or now?

You know why virginity of women is important? Because of evolution in a patriarchal society. Men want to be certain that those babies are theirs and not cuckoos in their nest (hence the term "cuckold"). You're so lost in a wicked morality that you defend the indefensible with what is after all the only defense you can give it. Moses didn't ever talk to God, because God would have almost certainly said "Why do you consider women to be second class citizens?" God would have said "Don't kill the small children, the babies, the mothers with babes at arms; I'll do a bit of God-voodoo on their heads that they may be spared." God would have said "Why on earth are you killing all of those animals and spattering their blood all over those rocks? Are you nuts? Do you think that I like that?"

All you really need to do, Alex, is wake up and smell the coffee. You've been in a millenial sleep all of your life. No sane conception of God could ever have God grooving on people waving ribs ripped out of a still twitching baby lamb at the sky as if God were somewhere "overhead" on a spherical planet.

You want to see universal morality? Watch fish eat another wounded fish alive. Watch a tiger pull down an antelope. Watch a documentary on Viet Nam, with good Christian Americans dumping napalm on villages and babies burning alive before your film-mediated eyes.

I'll take plain old human born, reason based morality any time.

Gods supernatural revelation clarifies the knowledge of morality we have by natural reason and corrects our errors. Fallen mans moral knowledge of natural reason is not infallible, but God revelation is.

Piffle. There is no supernatural revelation. There is no such thing as the supernatural. And for the last time, man is not fallen. What a horrible, lying concept! There was no garden of eden, we never were created perfect, our imperfection is not our fault, we ARE NOT FALLEN. This is the worst, the most evil of the many evil conceptions of Christianity, because it doles out universal guilt to add to its already enormous burden and threat of extortion, damnation and eternal torment.

Let me help you. I was not present at Eden, because there was no such thing. At no place, at no time, did Eden exist. It is a mythological fantasy with a wicked message used to exploit people and extract their political power and give it to old men dressed in funny suits who claim that they can intercede for you with an extortionist God.

Even if Eden existed, I was not there, and committed no crime there. I do not inherit universal guilt from a place that never existed for an event that never occurred, any more than I am responsible for slavery in the mid-1800 USA or Hitler's persecution of the Jews. Christianity (as a much longer lived institution) is at least partially responsible for both.

I am not "fallen" because there is no place, no state that I fell from. I personally was never perfect, and do not claim to be perfect today. I am doing my best to figure out the truth of all things, beginning at the beginning by trying to figure out how to discern truth. I can hardly be blamed for not knowing everything a priori. Nor can I be blamed for doubting the many absurdities you toss out, without evidence, as if I should consider them to be true just because some people long ago who knew far less than I do said them, especially when a cursory glance at them reveals them to be ludicrously inconsistent with what I do know, on far better grounds than authority.

I do not claim that my knowledge is infallible. You are the only one making claims of preternatural moral infallibility -- for Jesus (and Paul, and whoever else says something you want to invoke infallibility in support of.

The basis of my knowledge is very simple. It is what I can doubt the least, trying to doubt very hard, based on my direct and indirect experience of the real world. Yours, on the other hand appears to be knowledge on the basis of maximum credulity. If something is fantastic and contradicted by all mundane experience, it must be true.

Hmmmm.

rgb

(cont)

Language, as it turns out, is enormously important to what makes us human. If one takes a human child and isolates it from all exposure to language until it is somewhat past the age of two, it becomes a feral child. Feral children are unfortunate but actual occurrences -- children have been discovered that literally have been raised by wolves, because of that pesky interspecies altruism thing that confounds that particular argument for altruism being a gift of the Holy Spirit. More children have been discovered who have been abused as children by what amounts to imprisonment in isolation from all love or opportunities to learn language. And of course, there are the eternal birth defects that cause children to be born deaf and dumb and blind and thereby incapable of learning language (Helen Keller, one should carefully note, had already learned language before she lost the use of 3/5 of her senses, or she would never have learned to communicate).

Obviously, feral children have been carefully studied. The general conclusion is that they cannot be taught a language, cannot be socialized, and in fact behave pretty much like animals -- smart animals, but animals. They are some of the saddest accidents that occur on this sad planet -- humans that lack anything that science or humanity might call a soul. Only the church thinks that they still have that invisible something, but that invisible something is indetectable in terms of their behavior, which may well be less moral and "human" than a bright and well-taught chimpanzee who has been loved and given the opportunity all the language a chimpanzee brain can manage.

The connection between the brain, its function, and one's self-awareness and humanity is empirically discernible to each of us on an individual basis as well. I don't know if you've ever had real surgery, surgery involving a long period of general anesthesia, but if you have then you have very likely experienced the timelessness of unconsciousness. One second you are counting backwards as they give you your first shot to knock you out; the next second you wake up and it is many hours later -- even days later -- and no subjective time has elapsed.

This is horribly disorienting. The world still existed and time still passed, but you were dead while you were truly unconscious. If you had in truth died while unconscious, you wouldn't have even noticed because all that made you you was suspended, not functioning. That something isn't your soul, it is your brain, and the reason "you" stopped is that your brain's function was stopped. Many people experience this in greater or lesser degrees using drugs and alcohol as well; less fatal "small deaths" that depress or alter brain function in well-understood biochemical electroneurophysiological ways. We are our brains, and as our brains are altered so are we. Those unfortunate individuals who have had strokes or cerebral accidents and lost brain function permanently understand this all too well. Those of us who have had grandparents descend all of the way from being functionally human to being a burned out husk of a body without the slightest remnant of a "soul", no flicker of intelligence or memory or awareness, to brain death as directly measurable by electronic means understand this all too well and are horrified by it.

When the brain dies, we die. When the brain stops, we stop. When the brain is damaged, we are damaged. When we are alive and functioning, our perceptions and activity are accompanied by corresponding activity in the brain in a well organized and understandable manner. It is possible to remove the human heart and keep the brain and body alive by artificial means and preserve the identity of the individual in question even after a transpant or prosthetic implant. If one removes the human brain and destroys it, everybody knows that that person is dead!

You know the person is dead. The Church knows the person is dead. Brain death is dead, because the soul (lower case) exists solely as a process of material physical interaction on a material substrate called the brain, and our brains and animal brains are absolutely identical except for language and organization, differences that are easily understandable in terms of our evolution. At no time is any Holy Spirit visible, or is there any process observed that cannot be understood without hypothesizing something supernatural.

With that all clear, then it is equally clear that the brain of a fetus is not possessed of an innate soul. It is clear that that which we call a soul -- the ability to be self-aware, to cognitively function at a "human" level rather than a "merely" animal level (where we shouldn't be too quick to judge the differences!) -- is almost completely absent at the time of birth, although it rapidly develops after birth as that still unfinished baby brain is exposed to a complex and fascinating world, as it learns language, as it finishes wiring. It isn't even "complete" in terms of its general structure for long after birth, because in order to support human brain function and still pass an infant skull through a woman's birth canal, babies had to be born with brains that are far from finished developing. It is pure evolution in action.

A newborn baby, like a not-yet born but mostly developed fetus, has no language, no real memory, no sense of self or other, no higher level cognitive function. It is pretty much a tabula rasa. Any parent who has raised babies knows that however cuddly the little babies are, there isn't much there until they reach maybe three months of age and start responding to you, and in the first month or two they are basically biological engines for turning milk into poop (and keeping you up all hours of the day or night managing one end or the other of this process. Then they very slowly, very gradually, "wake up".

We are biologically strongly and emotionally attached to babies in general. And a good thing, too -- otherwise we would probably die out as a species, because babies are a pain in the ass in reality until they get to be fun and eventually become absolutely wonderful. We need something to tide us over that first few months when all we want to do is have the crying stop so we can go to sleep ourselves. At that point in time, yeah, we need a strong social moral code and legal code protecting a little human and frowning on those that choose to drown them and get some sleep instead of caring for them. Or worse -- I'm not really kidding here. I personally want 100% of those babies loved and cared for, because unloved children become partly feral, and this is a big problem for everybody later on.

Before they are born and become legally human, IMO they are a part of their female parent's body. If that female, for any reason or none at all, is not up to the enormous amount of work and commitment needed to raise a happy, healthy, and loved child, she needs to have the right to terminate the pregnancy. If her health is at risk, she has the right to refuse the risk (it is her life, not yours). If the fetus is unwanted -- the result of a rape, an accident, not the right time, known to have Down's syndrome, known to have far worse genetic conditions that make it impossible for the child to live a vaguely normal and human life -- it's her call. Not mine. Not yours. Especially not yours because you have a complex fantasy of something called a Soul infused in a magical but completely indetectable way into a single cell that completely lacks a brain and is absolutely not cognitively human in any way that counts.

rgb

I think your main error is in thinking that unborn children are not humans. 'This is a serious factual and scientific error.
Before 'Roe v. Wade' legalised abortion, all science texts taught the biological truism that the life of any individual of any species begins at conception., when sperm and ovum unite to create a new being with its own complete and unique genetic code, distinct from mother and father. All growth and development from then on are matters of degree, a gradual unfolding of what is already there.

Consider the errors in your own thinking. The first, and largest of your two errors is that this is a scientific question. It is not. It is a political and social one. Legally, becoming a "person" in the eyes of the state has always occurred at precisely the moment of birth and life independent of the mother. This has been true throughout the ages of man, across all societies, for excellent reasons. In the common law of the united states, we do not get to take tax write-offs for fetuses. Fetuses do not have social security numbers. They cannot collect social security benefits. They have no human rights, because they are not yet legally humans. The rights the do have (let's call them "pre-human" rights) are precisely what we, as a society, choose them to be, which is actually true of human rights in general as well, as any student of Hobbes, Locke, and Thomas Jefferson should be fully aware. Human rights are asserted most vocally by invoking Deity and so on, but in truth the only rights we have are those granted by nature -- to live an ugly, nasty, brutish and short existence except to the extent that we agree on common axioms of communal social existence and implement them in law and enforce them.

So politically and socially your reasoning is entirely fallacious. Fetuses have the rights in society that we wish to give them. They are not, by tradition and in common law, human; or rather they are human in posse but not yet in esse. They become human in law when the law says they do and not before, and in a democratic society we the people establish the law. This is not the trivialized human problem you wish to make it, because the "rights" of the not-yet-legally-human fetus and the fully human mother can quite easily come into conflict. Because we no longer live in the patriarchal genetics-dominated misogynistic society that is encoded in most of the Bible, we have come to view not being pregnant as a fundamental right of a human being. No human can be forced to have a child against their will. Males, (of course) get this right from nature, and females can never be the equals of males in law or practical society without this right as well. Finally, from an absolutely pragmatic point of view, the planet is vastly overcrowded as it is, and we have many reasons to not wish to encourage the production of children who are unlikely to be loved or wanted by the mother or raised in poverty by a mother in the absence of a father or raised by society at enormous human and economic cost in the event that the fetus is genetically defective so that they can never become fully human even if they are carried to term and granted legal status as human.

Then let us consider the scientific issue. You believe as a matter of faith that God "magically" infuses each and every fetus with a special something that you call the Holy Spirit. I'm guessing that you believe that animals such as e.g. dogs, dolphins, chimpanzees don't get that special something, that it is only humans, and that something is what makes us "human" and capable of good and evil actions.

You believe it as a matter of faith, because there isn't the tiniest shred of evidence that any such thing happens. This Holy Spirit is invisible. It is (by church teaching) completely immaterial, and hence indetectable by material means. When eggs (human or otherwise) are fertilized in vitro, there is no detectable energy signature or difference in what happens for humans or dogs or chimpanzees. In all cases Mr. Sperm swims up, knocks Ms. Egg's membrane, gets in, and releases its genetic load. Ms. Egg toughens the membrane (so no more sperm can get in, usually), the DNA lines up and completes the genetic complement of one normal animal (one hopes, although often this fails and e.g. a trisomy of chromosome 13 occurs, leading to a Down's syndrome zygote, or any of a host of other things goes wrong, leading to anything from immediate death of the zygote without even the hint of a tax write-off to non-fatal mutations or variations major and minor. I repeat, there is no difference at any stage in development of human and animal/mammal embryos that is not completely explained and well understood in terms of genetics and biophysics and biochemistry. There is no visible "magical moment" when "something" is infused into the zygote that cannot be explained by pure, mechanical, material science. If you've been taught otherwise, you've been taught a lie.

This zygote (if sufficiently normal) in time becomes an embryonic fetus. As I said above, there is nothing in this fetus that strongly differentiates it from a dog fetus, and it is even less differentiated from a chimpanzee fetus, until well along in its development. If there is a holy spirit lurking, it is completely indetectable.

So is anything that might conceivably pass for rational, self-aware thought.

Here is another place where your mystical beliefs differ from the conclusions of science. Science considers the study of awareness and brain function and thought to be a legitimate part of its realm of discourse. One can observe animals of all sorts, including humans, and study how their behavior (including higher level cognitive behavior) is related to their biology and the physics of their environment and body. One can form hypotheses and look for evidence to support or refute these hypotheses.

The conclusions of science to date are the following. Make of them what you will. The consciousness of all animals appears to be directly connected to a highly evolved mass of tissue called "the brain". The brain is an entirely material object (just like the heart, just like the lungs) and the brains of nearly all animals have strong evolutionary correspondances -- their hearts have very similar structure with similar organization, and so do their brains.

If you damage the brain of any organism that has one, you directly damage their cognitive function. One can map damage in different parts of the brain to particular deficits in cognitive function, allowing scientists to build a functional map of the brain. One can study how cognitive functions in many animals are related to cognitive functions in humans on the basis of similarities in their brain's tissue and organization and functional differentiation. People are doing and have been doing these studies for many years now. My wife went to gradaute school in neurophysiology for four years before medical school and I typed all of her papers; I assure you that this is very real science and I am not making this up.

There is no place in the human brain for the "holy spirit" to reside. There is no cognitive structure, no organic structure with which it could be associated. The sole difference between the human brain and e.g. the chimpanzee brain or gorilla brain is a matter of size, and the evolutionary development of speech centers as humans developed language. Basically, we have more neural connections, and they are organized for the development of language.

(cont)

Paul explains the Gospel Message and its relation to the OT law.

Or rather, Paul, calling on his own vision of Good and Evil makes stuff up that directly contradicts the words of Jesus pronouncing on the issue. I agree! That's how it works! You, too, can do it! And amazingly enough, you too can do it by contradicting the imperfect words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels!

Which makes you exactly what? A moral relativist? That would be yes. A creator of your own personal religion? Absolutely. If you want to call it Christianity, who can stop you? There are some 38,000 heresies currently known as "Christianity". And if you want to adopt some, but not all, of the Christian or JCM myths in your own personal version of Christianity, please do. Just don't argue that you aren't a moral relativist, making it up as you go along and please don't continue to justify your beliefs by using this line where it pleases you (ignoring that one).

You do see, I hope, how it makes any sort of rational treatment of the subject impossible? I propose a line that contradicts one of your absurd assertions. You find another line that supports it. I find two more lines that refute your refutation. You find still another that refutes my refutation of your refutation.

What does this really demonstrate?

My repeated assertion that the book itself is full of inconsistencies, and that in logic one can prove anything one likes from a contradiction. Which really means that you can prove nothing at all from an inconsistent theory! Not anything at all, not whatever you like, but nothing at all, because all conclusions are rationally possible and hence are all ultimately irrational. The Bible is not a reliable guide to anything at all. Its science and morality and law is pretty much what some human made up, with no more divine inspiration than you or I possess! And where they had the substantial disadvantage of a damn sight less prior information about how things really work both physically and morally in this world...

You constantly want to suggest that their wisdom, because it is ancient wisdom, is more reliable. But that contradicts common sense and everyday experience and the known facts. You know that this isn't true. You have a brain. You have instant access to an enormous amount of factual information about the real world. You can sit in judgement of the Bible, and of course you are every time you choose to believe this passage, not believe that one. Give it up. The existence of a single contradiction demonstrates that the basis of the Bible as a perfect document is false. At that point, you're stuck with critical thinking and reason with no perfect authoritative guide.

rgb

Alex,

I strongly recommend The Reasonable Woman: A Guide to Intellectual Survival by Wendy McElroy. This wonderful book will introduce you to some of the most basic concepts in reasoning and intellectual discussion in a manner which is easy to understand and written for the person who perhaps has no background in logic and reason. It is not a book on Atheism, but rather one on intellectual discussion and reasoning.

I suggest this because of the numerous and very basic logical errors you continue to repeat here. You make absolute and universal statements, which by their very nature need only one example to disprove. You have been given several such counter-examples, but still you repeatedly claim that because you personally feel good about the evils of the christian bible or the christian church, then it must necessarily be good, and worse yet all good at that.

You still overlook the fact that stipulating that your claims are right does not in fact make them right. Truth is correspondence to reality, not correspondence to what you desire. This is the only manner in which we can gain knowledge, by allowing reality to determine what is true.

Appealing to "that was then" as to making something morally right is a fallacy. I can just as easily say that about any action at any time and stipulate as you do, that it must then be morally right, be that action rape, murder, theft, or any clear wrongdoing. You yourself claimed that morality is immutable, thus the countless examples of child rape, murder, theft, and other attrocities which constitute the bulk of the christian bible are examples of morally wrong commandments and actions, or christianity is simply not as you describe it. You logically cannot have it both ways. Murder is wrong whether done in your "god's" name or done for any other reason.

Face your contradictions and learn from them. Drop one or the other position and recognize that reason trumps wishful feeling.

As for what jebus said was moral, recall again the passages quoted to you where "he" clearly states that ALL of the laws will always hold, none of them passing or changing with "his" coming. This means the laws on killing anyone who uses their mind, the laws on raping young girls, the laws on committing theft, the laws ordering genocide, the laws denying individual worth. You cannot claim that this is not the case and pretend that it is all peace and love as you seem to want to do. Your own texts have been quoted directly providing clear and undeniable examples which prove that in fact christianity in theory and in practice are NOT as you characterize them. To make your case you would have to show that these passages do not exist, and that you cannot do, well not honestly anyway.

As for square circles and potential persons, I make no such error as you claim. Nothing I have said so much as hints at that strawman you present. Rather I simply point out the basic logical errors you have embraced as the sum total of your argument. Here again this is why I recommend TRW as the best intro to sound reasoning I have come across. Being "human" is insufficient stipulation for the reasons already given and wholly ignored by you. Your argument leads to known false conclusions, again as shown conclusively, thus we know that either a premise is wrong or the argument is invalid in form. In this case both. There is no difference in your stipulations about potential persons and a stipulation that all and only white people are worthy of moral protection (are "human") (Which unsurprisingly has also been a position in your religion).

What constitutes a person is not mere DNA sequencing (humanness) but rather other important elements such as vulnerability, rationality (broadly understood), awareness of self and surroundings, and the like. Even your own church once claimed that infants were not people, forget about the multi-celled globs..

Honestly, if you are going to try to argue for a point you have to know what it means to prove a point. Read TRW... or barring that any intro to logic text.

The texts that omit this part of John 7:53-8:11 are called the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, both 4th century manuscripts. They are older but not more reliable. There is abundant evidence in support of the authenticity of the story of this woman taken in adultery.

Piffle. Older is more reliable, by the simple virtue of diffusive drift in the process of copying manuscripts, and older times two more reliable still. Not that these manuscripts themselves are reliable because they are already copies of copies of copies of copies, most of which (prior to 325 CE) were made by the ignorant near-illiterates of the early church, which did not flourish in the educated segment of Roman society.

Read Ehrman's book, Misquoting Jesus. That will be another eye opener for you. Ehrman's personal journey from being a born-again serious Christian -- one so Christian he literally devoted his life to studying the Bible just so he could learn what it really says as the Word of God -- to his reluctant conclusion that we do not know, and will not ever know, what it really said, Ehrman is currently an agnostic, not just because of his rejection of the Bible as not divinely inspired truth (even moral truth) because if God cared enough to send his Word, he might have cared enough to ensure that that Word was correctly preserved, and he manifestly didn't, but because of the problem of evil that you steadfastly refuse to address except by mumbling the usual bits about "God's plan".

My five year old son had more insight when he asked about it in the car, as the whole problem is with God's plan, and how it involves the death of many, many more infants and morulas and fetuses and small children and older children and grown up children and adults and old people, often painfully, often from silly little "acts of God" like hurricanes, earthquakes, genetic accidents, or (in two cases in Durham last week) by trees falling on the people involved. Guess it was part of God's plan for them. So if God really wants people to stop performing abortions, maybe he could do something about creating fetuses with Down's syndrome, spina bifida, and a host of other horrible teratogenic mutations. Perhaps he could work on zapping rapists with lightning bolts (or just arranging for their penises to drop off) so that women don't have to bear their unwanted child and propagate their equally unwanted genes. Perhaps he could send the Pope a Visitation pointing out that contraception is good because it significantly increases the chances that a woman will get pregnant only when she wishes, not by accident, and will get pregnant without getting HIV from her partner (including her partner her husband). Oh, and because there are 6 going on 7 billion people on this sorry planet, and we really don't need for Catholicism to "win" by outbreeding Islam or Hinduism, evolutionarily sound as it might be.

God is a notorious child, baby, and infant murderer. In Numbers 31, he orders Moses to order his troops to kill all of the Midianite children except f**kable young girls, and all the Midianite women including those that are pregnant. Gee, just abortion, or abortion and femicide, infanticide, homocide, genocide? But as an omniscient, omnipotent deity, God bears the final responsibility for the whole thing.

A Western/Abrahamic God as dualistic Creator fails the test of evil. It fails this test even allowing for Jesus as the "participant", God experiencing his own evil creation and thereby justifying it, because Jesus is still a dual manifestation and Jesus isn't me, suffering what I suffer, because Jesus certainly isn't the little babies who die not because mean old sinful humans hurt them but because God ordained them to suffer and die without enough time on the planet to even understand the simpler words in a dispassionate discussion on how their suffering is somehow justified, too bad mate, bad luck, Jesus will make it all better later, somehow. The Eastern conception of Atman/Brahman Vedantic Hinduism does work, because God is everything, and experiences all things. There is no good but worked by God, their is no evil but worked by God, and the Universe is God evolving according to God's will (as apparently expressed in the laws of physics -- God is a stickler for Law and nothing ever violates it! It doesn't mean that suffering doesn't happen, but the suffering becomes a kind of illusion, the "suffering" of our skin cells when we scrape them with a fingernail, a thing that doesn't matter as long as the Uber-sentient being, Brahman, remains, eternal. The Universe itself has a point, because the state of unified perfect being is eternally, infinitely boring; to be "alive" one requires entropy, a lack of knowledge fo all things, so that there may be discovery (yet another point illustrated clearly in my book The Book of Lilith. So God splits Its unified Self up into many to forget his true unified nature and thereby be able to enjoy and suffer and experience the gift of time, even though Its true nature is (rather obviously) timeless.

This actually does solve the problem of evil -- evil itself is an illusion, one that we can, if we try, see through. Suffering is not evil, it is just the inverse of pleasure, and one cannot have one without the other. The lack of suffering and pleasure is called "death", if you prefer. One cannot have unbroken pleasure, not even in heaven (a thing you might meditate upon) because unbroken pleasure becomes a kind of suffering itself, even in one lifetime, and eternity is infinitely much more than one lifetime, isn't it?

This in no way "proves" Hinduism or Monism, by the way -- just suggests that as models of God go it is consistent where JCM religions are fundamentally and deeply inconsistent in the way that they focus on sin and retribution without providing any insight or reason to be good beyond wishing to avoid pain and seek pleasure, the extortionate carrot and stick of a mafia-thug God that is no universal participant in Its creation but rather Other.

Having gotten the sense of your beliefs from your many posts, I suspect that this vision of a Unified God is very close to your own, somewhat Gnostic, inclination -- much of what you say would have had you branded as a heretic in 375 to 400 CE when the nascent Church was trying to stamp out gnosticism with fire and sword. I can almost predict that you will reply that Jesus is a "sufficient" participant in Creation and try to somehow hang on to a dualism that isn't really dualism, maybe one-and-a-halfism, or trinitarianism where the HG is the monistic God-in-all-things, the Father is the gruff and angry creator, and Jesus is the participant Son that justifies evil. Or any other unnecessarily silly and complex thing that you make up, as none of these things are really consistent even as an implausible hypothesis.

rgb

/Christianity is unnecessary/

Dostoyevsky wrote 'If God doesnt exist, everything is possible.' If it is only mans will that makes moral laws then they are as easily changeable as the rules of a game. If we make the rules we can change them and unmake them. Destroy religion and you destroy morality.
I previously quoted Paul as saying that morality can exist in places without religion.

Both Dostoyevsky and Paul are right. Because if God the first cause of the moral law did not exist than an objective real and universally binding moral law would not exist either. Paul is also right in that you can know the moral law without knowing the lawgiver. But we can not know the moral law aswell without knowing the Lawgiver and his character.
Gods supernatural revelation clarifies the knowledge of morality we have by natural reason and corrects our errors. Fallen mans moral knowledge of natural reason is not infallible, but God revelation is.


/You are equivocating being a "good person" with being a "good Christian." A good Christian, for example, goes to church on Sunday, doesn't take the Lord's name in vain, doesn't have sex out of wedlock, doesn't work on the Sabbath, etc. /

Your description of a good christian is terribly incomplete.
Being a good Christian is being like Christ, becoming 'a new creation'. If we read what the saints say about charity or what Jesus says in the Beatitudes, you will see how different this morality is from what your concept stated above of Christian morality is.
How high and holy and beautiful and full of joy it actually is.
It is an amazingly joyful adventure to try and follow Christ, this is what Christians should aspire to.

\By your reasoning, it is immoral to kill a corpse/

Im sorry but I dont know what your talking about.

\However you also still have yet to face the example from others that skin cells and the like are also human, throwing yet another absurd conclusion into your position that being that it is murder to naturally shed skin cells.. \
I thought I covered this
Abortion is not a complex issue.

Skin cells have the potential to develope into skin...
They are part of an individual human.

But the embryo or fetus is a whole living human who relys on the mother for its survival in its early stages. It is a person, it is not its mothers dead skin cells it is a human life.
Human life should be respected and protected from the moment of conception.

You think by saying that a human embryo, a human life in its early stages is the same as dead skin you can take away its human right. Living humans have rights, corpses dont,(except maybe the right to a proper burial)...

It is esentially the philosophy of power, of 'might makes right.' Those in power -doctors, parents, legislators, adults- decree the right to kill those who lack the power to defend themselves. The smallest, most vulnerable, and most innocent of human beings.

I think your main error is in thinking that unborn children are not humans. 'This is a serious factual and scientific error.
Before 'Roe v. Wade' legalised abortion, all science texts taught the biological truism that the life of any individual of any species begins at conception., when sperm and ovum unite to create a new being with its own complete and unique genetic code, distinct from mother and father. All growth and development from then on are matters of degree, a gradual unfolding of what is already there.

There is no specific or distinct point in our development when we become human. What were we before that? Birds?
Only when abortion became legal did the science text books change their language and cease teaching this truism- not because of any new science but because of politics.
Catholic Christianity.

Pontifical Academy of Sciences: From Wiki

'Work of the Academy
Since the Academy and its membership is not influenced by factors of a national, political, or religious character it represents a valuable source of objective scientific information which is made available to the Holy See and to the international scientific community. Today the work of the Academy covers six main areas:

(a) fundamental science,
(b) the science and technology of global questions and issues,
(c) science in favor of the problems of the Third World,
(d) the ethics and politics of science,
(e) bioethics,
(f) epistemology.
The disciplines involved are sub-divided into nine fields: the disciplines of physics and related disciplines; astronomy; chemistry; the earth and environmental sciences; the life sciences (botany, agronomy, zoology, genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, the neurosciences, surgery); mathematics; the applied sciences; and the philosophy and history of sciences.

During its various decades of activity, the Academy has had a number of Nobel Prize winners amongst its members, many of whom were appointed Academicians before they received this prestigious international award. These include:

Ernest Rutherford (Chemistry, 1908)
Guglielmo Marconi (Physics, 1909)
Alexis Carrel (Physiology, 1912)
Max von Laue (Physics, 1914)
Max Planck (Physics, 1918)
Niels Bohr (Physics, 1922)
Werner Heisenberg (Physics, 1932)
Paul Dirac (Physics, 1933)
Erwin Schrödinger (Physics, 1933)
Peter J.W. Debye (Chemistry, 1936)
Otto Hahn (Chemistry, 1944)
Sir Alexander Fleming (Physiology, 1945)
Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee (Physics, 1957)
Joshua Lederberg (Physiology, 1958)
Rudolf Mössbauer (Physics, 1961)
Max F. Perutz (Chemistry, 1962)
John Carew Eccles (Physiology, 1963)
Charles H. Townes (Physics, 1964)
Manfred Eigen and George Porter (Chemistry, 1967)
Har Gobind Khorana and Marshall W. Nirenberg (Physiology, 1968)
Christian de Duve (Physiology, 1974)
George Emil Palade (Physiology, 1974)
David Baltimore (Physiology, 1975)
Aage Bohr (Physics, 1975)
Abdus Salam (Physics, 1979)
Paul Berg (Chemistry, 1980)
Kai Siegbahn (Physics, 1981)
Sune Bergstrom (Physiology, 1982)
Carlo Rubbia (Physics, 1984)
Klaus von Klitzing (Physics, 1985)
Rita Levi-Montalcini (Physiology, 1986)
John C. Polanyi (Chemistry, 1986)
Yuan Tseh Lee (Chemistry, 1986)
Jean-Marie Lehn (Chemistry, 1987)
Joseph E. Murray (Physiology, 1990)
Gary S. Becker (Economics, 1992)
Paul J. Crutzen and Mario J. Molina (Chemistry, 1995)
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (Physics, 1997)
Ahmed H. Zewail (Chemistry, 1999)
Günter Blobel (Physiology, 1999)
Ryoji Noyori (Chemistry, 2001)
Aaron Ciechanover (Chemistry, 2004) '

Quite a list...

The Catholic church has had a good run despite its few mistakes that everybody loves to focus on.

The influence of the Catholic Church :From Wiki

'The influence of the Catholic Church on world culture and society has been vast, first and foremost in the development of European civilization from Greco-Roman times to the modern era.[32:] The church campaigned against and helped end practices such as human sacrifice, slavery,[note 6:] infanticide, and polygamy in evangelized cultures throughout the world, beginning with the Roman Empire. In addition, the Church played a significant role in moderating some of the excesses of the colonial era.[210:][211:][212:][213:][214:]

Christianity affected the status of women in evangelized cultures such as the Roman Empire by condemning infanticide (female infanticide was more common), divorce, incest, polygamy and counting the marital infidelity of men as equally sinful to that of women.[210:][211:][215:] However, "the critics of Christian tradition" say Church teachings have perpetuated a notion that female inferiority was divinely ordained[216:] even though official Church teaching[217:] considers women and men to be equal, different, and complementary.


The School of Salamanca during Counter-Reformation period Spain produced many theologians.Catholic universities and many priests including Copernicus, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Nicholas Steno, Francesco Grimaldi, Giambattista Riccioli, Roger Boscovich, Athanasius Kircher, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître and others, were responsible for many important scientific discoveries. The Jesuits produced the large majority of priest-scientists, who contributed to worldwide cultural exchange by spreading their developments in knowledge to Asia, Africa, and the Americas.[218:][219:] Most research took place in Catholic universities that were staffed by members of religious orders who had the education and means to conduct scientific investigation.[218:] The 1633 Church condemnation of Galileo Galilei restricted scientific development in some European countries and created the perception of antagonism between the Church and science of that era.[218:] In part because of lessons learned from the Galilei affair, the Church created the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a scientific organization that essentially began in 1603 but developed over time to reach its present form by 1936.[220:]

The Catholic Church was the dominant influence on the development of Western art, at least up to the Protestant Reformation. Important contributions include its consistent opposition to Byzantine iconoclasm, its cultivation and patronage of individual artists, as well as development of the Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance styles of art and architecture.[221:] Renaissance artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, were among a multitude of innovative virtuosos sponsored by the Church.[222:] In music, Catholic monks developed the first forms of modern Western musical notation in order to standardize liturgy throughout the worldwide Church,[223:] and an enormous body of religious music has been composed for it through the ages. This led directly to the emergence and development of European classical music, and its many derivatives. The Baroque style, which encompassed music, art, and architecture, was particularly encouraged by the post-Reformation Catholic Church as such forms offered a means of religious expression that was stirring and emotional, intended to stimulate religious fervor.[224:]'


-- I am sure it will continue to have a positive effect on humanity.

/If you can dismiss the bible by saying that it does not apply because we did not live back then, so why can't we in exactly the same manner dismiss all of christianity because we "didn't live back then?"/

Who is dismissing the bible? I just said that you cannot judge an entire ancient nation who was trying to hold to the moral law. Yes they did have very strict punishments, but at least they were trying to hold true to goodness. You dont know what life was like back then so your judgement is irellevant.

Regarding Deut. 22:28-29 ---

'If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl's father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.'

Of this, a critic finds much that is unfair. But knowing the social context does a world of good.

First, our subject objects that the victim may not want to marry the rapist. In modern times this would be a sensible objection; but for the ancients, this was a highly viable and indeed merciful solution. The victim would no longer regarded as marriageable and would therefore lose means of interdependent support. The rapist is here being required to provide that support for the rest of the girls life.

The above about rape was a cut and paste job, and the explanation is a good example of the different cultural conditions back then that lead to a law that present day seems strange but was actually just under the circumstances of the society.

/Religion is about controlling others, seeking power over others, and seeking personal gain. Religion denies the worth of all individuals/

Religion is an organised approach to human spirituality. It is also a way of life, Christianity in particular allows one to live life to the fullest. I do not weild any power over others, I am also not controlled by the Cathlic Church. I am guided and 'saved' by the Catholic Church. I do not look down on you or any athiests, I wouldnt be here if I didnt think I could learn something from the people involved in the discussion. I do not throw my weight around like Nathan and try and belittle others for a different world view or lack of knowledge or understanding in certain areas.

Why dont you look up some positive influences that the Catholic church has on present day society, you would be suprised the good they do.

rgb
I would argue that you are wilfull and deliberatly blind to the goodness of the Bible that is evident if you actually search for God and dont satarise the search by making purile jokes about asking God to have a cup of tea.

The world as we know it and God as the creator of the universe could be compared to a house and an architect, we should not expect to be able to see the architect in the walls or chimney of the house, likewise we should not expect to see God as one of the physical facts inside the universe. But we can see God in ourselves as an influence or a command telling us to do things in a certain way. And that is exactly what we find in the moral law. And agape. Agape is inexplicable in evolutionary terms.

\This once again seems to completely acknowledge that Christianity is not necessary to morality, \

It is to follow the moral law to its perfection or to at least aspire to it we need Christianity. By the model of Jesus we can try to be like Christ. This is truly living.

It is not wasting ones life it is living to the fullest. Exploring searching for God in all things, science art and so on. Taking risks is also part of the message, using what we have been given to make the most of a virtuous life.

/Oh, dear. Now you've gone and done it. You've quoted one of the many Bible passages that are great favori..."</i>/

The texts that omit this part of John 7:53-8:11 are called the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, both 4th century manuscripts. They are older but not more reliable. There is abundant evidence in support of the authenticity of the story of this woman taken in adultery.

So as usual you offer up another misleading example as fact when it is far from fact. You seem to cherrypick your 'facts' and offer them up as devastating shut downs. But the RPG is using dud rockets;)

\Everybody must follow the OT law to the last line of it.\

The natural law is made up of principles that we discover. The path of history and the work of the church clarifies protects and builds on our understanding of the moral law.

The Jewish religious leaders have done likewise, so I think you should be saying, that Christians should follow the Torah.

But again this is not necessary. There is the law of Moses and the traditons of judaism or there is the Gospel of the messiah and the message of his love. You can choose either of the two but not both.
Paul explains the Gospel Message and its relation to the OT law.
1. Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth?
2. For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.
3. So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man.
4. Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.

-----------

If you are strictly meaning that Christians should follow the old testament laws, then this is also unnecessary. This comes down to the Moral law again. There are two categories 1)The Universal Moral Law- dont kill steal and so on and there are 2) Cultural Universals. Laws geared to Isreals ancient culture but have a moral law behind them.

A believer in Jesus will indeed follow the dictates of the law - the universal morals, of course, not the cultural particulars, because they want to try and be obediant to Christ.

Also in Deuteronomy the ancient covenant between the Jews and God, they agreed to the penalties listed within. We now have a new covenant with Jesus and the individual and the believer Matt. 26:28.
'This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.'

"remission" is also used instead of "forgiveness." It means, to send off, or away. And this, throughout Scripture, is the one fundamental meaning of forgiveness--to separate the sin from the sinner.

This is not cherrypicking by the way it is central to the Gospel message, Jesus died for our sins.

The new covenant does not contain specifics for enforcement and punishment.

Many Christians believe that witchcraft and homosexuality is immoral because although they are not party to the contract of the early Jews they still recognise that the contract holds the values of God.

So I think it is clear that God gave up his son in order for us to be clear of the penalty of sin and death.

Faith gives life and forgiveness. Furthermore Paul explains the Message of the Gospels and its relation to the law.

'Galatians 3:21-26
21 Is the law then against the promises of God? God forbid: for if there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law. 22 But the scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe. 23 But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed. 24 Wherefore the law was our guardian to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. 25 But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a guardian. 26 For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.'

I have explained the Message of the gospel, and I have quoted Paul explaining its relevance to the OT law. These are basic understanding of all Christians. Do you think it is still fair for you tall call me a cherry picker, when you cherry pick ancient Jewish punishments link them to quotes by Jesus in your effort to discredit Jesus and the Bible.

The basic message is again seen in the very earliest of the fathers when it says of Abraham Rom 1:13
'It was not through law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise that he would be heir of the world, but through the righteousness that comes by faith.'

Alex,

If our values are not derived from Christianity (a point on which you and seem to agree), then Christianity is unnecessary. Throughout history, before during and after Jesus' time, and all over the world, people have been coming to the same moral conclusions: love one another, do unto others, don't kill, don't steal, etc. There is no reason to believe that they won't be able to do this in a world without Christianity. If you're going to claim that moral behavior requires Christianity, then prove it. Since there are moral non-believers all over the world, and there are immoral Christians all over the world, proving the moral necessity of Christianity would be some feat.

Furthermore, some of your examples of the "essential" moral code in your first post have nothing to do with morality, or are at the very least highly subjective. For example, the Ten Commandments. These have less to do with morality than with perpetuating religion. This is why so many of the commandments have to do with following God rather than being a good person. A moral code that prioritizes worshipping a deity so highly over not killing people is, in my opinion, not a very useful moral code.

You are equivocating being a "good person" with being a "good Christian." A good Christian, for example, goes to church on Sunday, doesn't take the Lord's name in vain, doesn't have sex out of wedlock, doesn't work on the Sabbath, etc. None of these things have anything to do with morality. So, what you're really asking is, "Without Christianity, how will people be good Christians? Without Christianity, who will enforce the Christian law?" The answers are, obviously, "they won't" and "nobody," but this doesn't have anything to do with how moral people will be.

Alex,

Are you aware that stipulating that the counterexamples that others offer don't apply in no way removes those counterexamples? Seriously why not use reason and evidence?

If you can dismiss the bible by saying that it does not apply because we did not live back then, so why can't we in exactly the same manner dismiss all of christianity because we "didn't live back then?"

How too do you reconcile this claim with your later claim that morality, which presumably you are erroneously using to mean christian teachings, is immutable?

I notice that you ignore all of the examples of christianity teaching that which we know is evil, such as child rape, murder, and the like.. too inconvenient?

The tired old "that was the Old Testament, jebus did away with it" line just does not play with anyone familiar with christianity.. Here again is something you have yet to offer DIRECT EVIDENCE:

“For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:18-19 )

Clearly the Old Testament is to be abided by until the end of human existence itself. None other then Jesus said so.

This is far from the only such clear and indisputable reference.

Morality exists outside of religion, and necessarily so. Religion is about controlling others, seeking power over others, and seeking personal gain. Morality is about justified action and the recognition of the basic worth of others. Religion denies the worth of all individuals, morality asserts that worth. The two are at odds.

BTW you did not comment upon your religious duty to seek out and kill every reasonable person. This is what your religion, your man made religion, declares is morally obligatory.

Oh, and you did not stress human LIFE, but rather mere humanness. The counter example still holds. By your reasoning, it is immoral to kill a corpse.. However you also still have yet to face the example from others that skin cells and the like are also human, throwing yet another absurd conclusion into your position that being that it is murder to naturally shed skin cells..

Look up argumentum ad absurdum.