Please show me this supposide "Atheist Bible" which promotes such things. If you cannot, then you are grossly ignorant.
MORALITY and GOD
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Please show me this supposide "Atheist Bible" which promotes such things. If you cannot, then you are grossly ignorant.
If you are faithful to your wife ,that is an individual matter.Otherwise atheists do think"Porn is not immoral".
Cann't you see where porn industery is more prevalent?
Cann't you see where alcoholism is more prevalent ?
Cann't you see where AIDS is spreading like a wild fire ?
Cann't you see which societies have declared killing of human being (abortion) legal ?
1.Christian nations?
2.Christian nations?
3.African nations?
4.Secular nations? (thou this is definitional thus bunk)
So your saying secular folk (which does not mean atheist) are at least in part in favor of abortion. Christians like porn and alcohol, and black people spread AIDs.
I think I play your crazy game too.
Can;t you see which nations have the worst in-fighting?
Cant you see which nations have horrible human rights violations?
Cant you see which nations have high levels of violence?
Fun game you got here
Please do not blame the Christians.How is possible a person believes in God and has a moral code and commits such heinous crimes.They must be those who do not moral code.1.Christian nations?
2.Christian nations?
3.African nations?
4.Secular nations? (thou this is definitional thus bunk)
So your saying secular folk (which does not mean atheist) are at least in part in favor of abortion. Christians like porn and alcohol, and black people spread AIDs.
I think I play your crazy game too.
Can;t you see which nations have the worst in-fighting?
Cant you see which nations have horrible human rights violations?
Cant you see which nations have high levels of violence?
Fun game you got here
Even if some religious person does a bad thing at least recognizes that it is bad through his divine moral code but atheists say "Porn is not immoral "
Who is the culprit then ??
Secondly ,If you analyze the mental make-up of atheists ,those seem to be having very irrational thinking like "Design can appear without a designer'.Do you find any rationality in this rubbish idea?
So root evil existing in this world is this "irrational group"
I love your use of the 'No true Scottsman' arguement coupled with 4-5 other fallacies and top it off, dancing around the points I rebuttled and my points raised in turn. Your delusion seems so pertant that you refuse to see the glaring errors in your assumption that atheism is the root of evil, conveniantly ignoring the 8000yrs of human conflict all done to please some deity or another.
No matter, continue to fight your windmills dear Don Quixote
laying:A little extract from The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (Sorry if it's long, but it worth reading):
The Harvard biologist Marc Hauser, in his book
Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right
and Wrong, has enlarged upon a fruitful line of thought
experiments originally suggested by moral philosophers. Hauser's
study will serve the additional purpose of introducing the way
moral philosophers think. A hypothetical moral dilemma is posed,
and the difficulty we experience in answering it tells us something
about our sense of right and wrong.
Where Hauser goes beyond the
philosophers is that he actually does statistical surveys and psychological
experiments, using questionnaires on the Internet, for
example, to investigate the moral sense of real people. From the
present point of view, the interesting thing is that most people come
to the same decisions when faced with these dilemmas, and their
agreement over the decisions themselves is stronger than their
ability to articulate their reasons. This is what we should expect if
we have a moral sense which is built into our brains, like our sexual
instinct or our fear of heights or, as Hauser himself prefers to say,
like our capacity for language (the details vary from culture to
culture, but the underlying deep structure of grammar is universal).
As we shall see, the way people respond to these moral tests, and
their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent
of their religious beliefs or lack of them.
The message of Hauser's
book, to anticipate it in his own words, is this: 'Driving our moral
judgments is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of the mind that
evolved over millions of years to include a set of principles for
building a range of possible moral systems. As with language, the
principles that make up our moral grammar fly beneath the radar
of our awareness.'
Typical of Hauser's moral dilemmas are variations on the theme
of a runaway truck or 'trolley' on a railway line which threatens to
kill a number of people. The simplest story imagines a person,
Denise, standing by a set of points and in a position to divert the
trolley onto a siding, thereby saving the lives of five people trapped
on the main line ahead. Unfortunately there is a man trapped on the
siding. But since he is only one, outnumbered by the five people
trapped on the main track, most people agree that it is morally
permissible, if not obligatory, for Denise to throw the switch and
save the five by killing the one. We ignore hypothetical possibilities
such as that the one man on the siding might be Beethoven, or a
close friend.
Elaborations of the thought experiment present a series of
increasingly teasing moral conundrums. What if the trolley can be
stopped by dropping a large weight in its path from a bridge overhead?
That's easy: obviously we must drop the weight. But what if
the only large weight available is a very fat man sitting on the
bridge, admiring the sunset? Almost everybody agrees that it is
immoral to push the fat man off the bridge, even though, from one
point of view, the dilemma might seem parallel to Denise's, where
throwing the switch kills one to save five. Most of us have a strong
intuition that there is a crucial difference between the two cases,
though we may not be able to articulate what it is.
Pushing the fat man off the bridge is reminiscent of another
dilemma considered by Hauser. Five patients in a hospital are
dying, each with a different organ failing. Each would be saved if a
donor could be found for their particular faulty organ, but none is
available. Then the surgeon notices that there is a healthy man in
the waiting-room, all five of whose organs are in good working
order and suitable for transplanting. In this case, almost nobody
can be found who is prepared to say that the moral act is to kill the
one to save the five.
As with the fat man on the bridge, the intuition that most of us
share is that an innocent bystander should not suddenly be dragged
into a bad situation and used for the sake of others without his
consent. Immanuel Kant famously articulated the principle that a
rational being should never be used as merely an unconsenting
means to an end, even the end of benefiting others. This seems to
provide the crucial difference between the case of the fat man on the
bridge (or the man in the hospital waiting-room) and the man on
Denise's siding. The fat man on the bridge is being positively used
as the means to stop the runaway trolley. This clearly violates the
Kantian principle. The person on the siding is not being used to
save the lives of the five people on the line. It is the siding that is
being used, and he just has the bad luck to be standing on it. But,
when you put the distinction like that, why does it satisfy us? For
Kant, it was a moral absolute. For Hauser it is built into us by our
evolution.
The hypothetical situations involving the runaway trolley
become increasingly ingenious, and the moral dilemmas correspondingly
tortuous. Hauser contrasts the dilemmas faced by
hypothetical individuals called Ned and Oscar. Ned is standing by
the railway track. Unlike Denise, who could divert the trolley onto
a siding, Ned's switch diverts it onto a side loop which joins the
main track again just before the five people. Simply switching
the points doesn't help: the trolley will plough into the five anyway
when the diversion rejoins the main track. However, as it happens,
there is an extremely fat man on the diversionary track who is
heavy enough to stop the trolley. Should Ned change the points and
divert the train? Most people's intuition is that he should not. But
what is the difference between Ned's dilemma, and Denise's?
Presumably people are intuitively applying Kant's principle. Denise
diverts the trolley from ploughing into the five people, and the
unfortunate casualty on the siding is 'collateral damage', to use
the charmingly Rumsfeldian phrase. He is not being used by Denise
to save the others. Ned is actually using the fat man to stop the
trolley, and most people (perhaps unthinkingly), along with Kant
(thinking it out in great detail), see this as a crucial difference.
The difference is brought out again by the dilemma of Oscar.
Oscar's situation is identical to Ned's, except that there is a large
iron weight on the diversionary loop of track, heavy enough to stop
the trolley. Clearly Oscar should have no problem deciding to pull
the points and divert the trolley. Except that there happens to be a
hiker walking in front of the iron weight. He will certainly be killed
if Oscar pulls the switch, just as surely as Ned's fat man. The
difference is that Oscar's hiker is not being used to stop the trolley:
he is collateral damage, as in Denise's dilemma. Like Hauser, and
like most of Hauser's experimental subjects, I feel that Oscar is
permitted to throw the switch but Ned is not. But I also find it quite
hard to justify my intuition. Hauser's point is that such moral
intuitions are often not well thought out but that we feel them
strongly anyway, because of our evolutionary heritage.
In an intriguing venture into anthropology, Hauser and his
colleagues adapted their moral experiments to the Kuna, a small
Central American tribe with little contact with Westerners and no
formal religion. The researchers changed the 'trolley on a line'
thought experiment to locally suitable equivalents, such as
crocodiles swimming towards canoes. With corresponding minor
differences, the Kuna show the same moral judgements as the rest
of us.
Of particular interest for this book, Hauser also wondered
whether religious people differ from atheists in their moral
intuitions. Surely, if we get our morality from religion, they should
differ. But it seems that they don't. Hauser, working with the moral
philosopher Peter Singer,87 focused on three hypothetical dilemmas
and compared the verdicts of atheists with those of religious people.
226 1 II K (< O l> I) T i 1 s i
In each case, the subjects were asked to choose whether a
hypothetical action is morally 'obligatory', 'permissible' or
'forbidden'. The three dilemmas were:
1 Denise's dilemma. Ninety per cent of people said it was
permissible to divert the trolley, killing the one to save the five.
2 You see a child drowning in a pond and there is no other help
in sight. You can save the child, but your trousers will be
ruined in the process. Ninety-seven per cent agreed that you
should save the child (amazingly, 3 per cent apparently would
prefer to save their trousers).
3 The organ transplant dilemma described above. Ninety-seven
per cent of subjects agreed that it is morally forbidden to seize
the healthy person in the waiting-room and kill him for his
organs, thereby saving five other people.
The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer's study was that there
is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious
believers in making these judgements. This seems compatible with
the view, which I and many others hold, that we do not need God
in order to be good - or evil.
The Harvard biologist Marc Hauser, in his book
Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right
and Wrong, has enlarged upon a fruitful line of thought
experiments originally suggested by moral philosophers. Hauser's
study will serve the additional purpose of introducing the way
moral philosophers think. A hypothetical moral dilemma is posed,
and the difficulty we experience in answering it tells us something
about our sense of right and wrong.
Where Hauser goes beyond the
philosophers is that he actually does statistical surveys and psychological
experiments, using questionnaires on the Internet, for
example, to investigate the moral sense of real people. From the
present point of view, the interesting thing is that most people come
to the same decisions when faced with these dilemmas, and their
agreement over the decisions themselves is stronger than their
ability to articulate their reasons. This is what we should expect if
we have a moral sense which is built into our brains, like our sexual
instinct or our fear of heights or, as Hauser himself prefers to say,
like our capacity for language (the details vary from culture to
culture, but the underlying deep structure of grammar is universal).
As we shall see, the way people respond to these moral tests, and
their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent
of their religious beliefs or lack of them.
The message of Hauser's
book, to anticipate it in his own words, is this: 'Driving our moral
judgments is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of the mind that
evolved over millions of years to include a set of principles for
building a range of possible moral systems. As with language, the
principles that make up our moral grammar fly beneath the radar
of our awareness.'
Typical of Hauser's moral dilemmas are variations on the theme
of a runaway truck or 'trolley' on a railway line which threatens to
kill a number of people. The simplest story imagines a person,
Denise, standing by a set of points and in a position to divert the
trolley onto a siding, thereby saving the lives of five people trapped
on the main line ahead. Unfortunately there is a man trapped on the
siding. But since he is only one, outnumbered by the five people
trapped on the main track, most people agree that it is morally
permissible, if not obligatory, for Denise to throw the switch and
save the five by killing the one. We ignore hypothetical possibilities
such as that the one man on the siding might be Beethoven, or a
close friend.
Elaborations of the thought experiment present a series of
increasingly teasing moral conundrums. What if the trolley can be
stopped by dropping a large weight in its path from a bridge overhead?
That's easy: obviously we must drop the weight. But what if
the only large weight available is a very fat man sitting on the
bridge, admiring the sunset? Almost everybody agrees that it is
immoral to push the fat man off the bridge, even though, from one
point of view, the dilemma might seem parallel to Denise's, where
throwing the switch kills one to save five. Most of us have a strong
intuition that there is a crucial difference between the two cases,
though we may not be able to articulate what it is.
Pushing the fat man off the bridge is reminiscent of another
dilemma considered by Hauser. Five patients in a hospital are
dying, each with a different organ failing. Each would be saved if a
donor could be found for their particular faulty organ, but none is
available. Then the surgeon notices that there is a healthy man in
the waiting-room, all five of whose organs are in good working
order and suitable for transplanting. In this case, almost nobody
can be found who is prepared to say that the moral act is to kill the
one to save the five.
As with the fat man on the bridge, the intuition that most of us
share is that an innocent bystander should not suddenly be dragged
into a bad situation and used for the sake of others without his
consent. Immanuel Kant famously articulated the principle that a
rational being should never be used as merely an unconsenting
means to an end, even the end of benefiting others. This seems to
provide the crucial difference between the case of the fat man on the
bridge (or the man in the hospital waiting-room) and the man on
Denise's siding. The fat man on the bridge is being positively used
as the means to stop the runaway trolley. This clearly violates the
Kantian principle. The person on the siding is not being used to
save the lives of the five people on the line. It is the siding that is
being used, and he just has the bad luck to be standing on it. But,
when you put the distinction like that, why does it satisfy us? For
Kant, it was a moral absolute. For Hauser it is built into us by our
evolution.
The hypothetical situations involving the runaway trolley
become increasingly ingenious, and the moral dilemmas correspondingly
tortuous. Hauser contrasts the dilemmas faced by
hypothetical individuals called Ned and Oscar. Ned is standing by
the railway track. Unlike Denise, who could divert the trolley onto
a siding, Ned's switch diverts it onto a side loop which joins the
main track again just before the five people. Simply switching
the points doesn't help: the trolley will plough into the five anyway
when the diversion rejoins the main track. However, as it happens,
there is an extremely fat man on the diversionary track who is
heavy enough to stop the trolley. Should Ned change the points and
divert the train? Most people's intuition is that he should not. But
what is the difference between Ned's dilemma, and Denise's?
Presumably people are intuitively applying Kant's principle. Denise
diverts the trolley from ploughing into the five people, and the
unfortunate casualty on the siding is 'collateral damage', to use
the charmingly Rumsfeldian phrase. He is not being used by Denise
to save the others. Ned is actually using the fat man to stop the
trolley, and most people (perhaps unthinkingly), along with Kant
(thinking it out in great detail), see this as a crucial difference.
The difference is brought out again by the dilemma of Oscar.
Oscar's situation is identical to Ned's, except that there is a large
iron weight on the diversionary loop of track, heavy enough to stop
the trolley. Clearly Oscar should have no problem deciding to pull
the points and divert the trolley. Except that there happens to be a
hiker walking in front of the iron weight. He will certainly be killed
if Oscar pulls the switch, just as surely as Ned's fat man. The
difference is that Oscar's hiker is not being used to stop the trolley:
he is collateral damage, as in Denise's dilemma. Like Hauser, and
like most of Hauser's experimental subjects, I feel that Oscar is
permitted to throw the switch but Ned is not. But I also find it quite
hard to justify my intuition. Hauser's point is that such moral
intuitions are often not well thought out but that we feel them
strongly anyway, because of our evolutionary heritage.
In an intriguing venture into anthropology, Hauser and his
colleagues adapted their moral experiments to the Kuna, a small
Central American tribe with little contact with Westerners and no
formal religion. The researchers changed the 'trolley on a line'
thought experiment to locally suitable equivalents, such as
crocodiles swimming towards canoes. With corresponding minor
differences, the Kuna show the same moral judgements as the rest
of us.
Of particular interest for this book, Hauser also wondered
whether religious people differ from atheists in their moral
intuitions. Surely, if we get our morality from religion, they should
differ. But it seems that they don't. Hauser, working with the moral
philosopher Peter Singer,87 focused on three hypothetical dilemmas
and compared the verdicts of atheists with those of religious people.
226 1 II K (< O l> I) T i 1 s i
In each case, the subjects were asked to choose whether a
hypothetical action is morally 'obligatory', 'permissible' or
'forbidden'. The three dilemmas were:
1 Denise's dilemma. Ninety per cent of people said it was
permissible to divert the trolley, killing the one to save the five.
2 You see a child drowning in a pond and there is no other help
in sight. You can save the child, but your trousers will be
ruined in the process. Ninety-seven per cent agreed that you
should save the child (amazingly, 3 per cent apparently would
prefer to save their trousers).
3 The organ transplant dilemma described above. Ninety-seven
per cent of subjects agreed that it is morally forbidden to seize
the healthy person in the waiting-room and kill him for his
organs, thereby saving five other people.
The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer's study was that there
is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious
believers in making these judgements. This seems compatible with
the view, which I and many others hold, that we do not need God
in order to be good - or evil.
You see, morality doesn't come from religion, even if religion sometime include morality (but most of the time religion hijack morality).
From my point of view (As an atheist, but I'm not talking for them. We're like a bunch of cats, it's really hard to make a coherent group with us), If others atheist disagree, please tell me; morality is based on the effect of our choice. So, an immoral action will cause sufferance and a moral action will cause good (and we always aim for the lesser evil).
So saying that rape is wrong (in a normal case, forget something like: If you don't do it, 6 billion human will die only because you didn't do it) is based on the fact that it's causing sufferance.
So when we apply the same rule to porn (as mentionned earlier):
Does pornography cause sufferance?
Well, if you show it to a 4 years old kid, it may cause psychological damage. But that's why it is reserved to +18.
Same thing for homosexuality: Does what happen between 2 consenting adult in a bed cause sufferance? No.
It's simple as that.
From my point of view (As an atheist, but I'm not talking for them. We're like a bunch of cats, it's really hard to make a coherent group with us), If others atheist disagree, please tell me; morality is based on the effect of our choice. So, an immoral action will cause sufferance and a moral action will cause good (and we always aim for the lesser evil).
So saying that rape is wrong (in a normal case, forget something like: If you don't do it, 6 billion human will die only because you didn't do it) is based on the fact that it's causing sufferance.
So when we apply the same rule to porn (as mentionned earlier):
Does pornography cause sufferance?
Well, if you show it to a 4 years old kid, it may cause psychological damage. But that's why it is reserved to +18.
Same thing for homosexuality: Does what happen between 2 consenting adult in a bed cause sufferance? No.
It's simple as that.
Trumble
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The trouble with all that is that it rather dodges the essential point. You do not have to believe in a God to need one to to supply a sense of morality, or indeed anything else. All Dawkins is demonstrating is that belief doesn't necessarily make believers any more moral, and there is certainly plenty of empirical evidence to support that. None of the 'believers' here - or at least those with any sense - would deny that atheists can be just as 'moral' as they are when it comes to such decisions.
The far more interesting question is where that moral sense actually comes from whether the person concerned believes in God or not. Does it originate in reason and experience (both immediate and collectively over many generations) or is it an inherent part of our nature, made part of that nature by God? I believe there is a very strong case for the former, but our muslim and Christian friends would obviously disagree.
