Originally posted by Suzianne
That's a lot of hoops to jump through just so you can sleep at night.
And yet, strangely, you consider yourself more free than Christians.
Originally posted by GoogleFudge
Well I don't have a 'wallot' so you can't steal it anyway.
What you are doing here is being intentionally thick.
I was talking about SIN which is an idiotic and perverse religious concept that involves committing
a crime against a god or gods.
These crimes can include things such as not believing in the aforementioned gods or failing to comply
with any instruction they give out on a whim. (despite their failing to actually convincingly demonstrate
their own existence or provide any clear means of determining what their will was)
This is entirely separate from concepts of morality and of concepts of law and justice.
If you ask if something is 'wrong' then you are asking a question of morals.
Which has nothing whatsoever to do with sin.
Theists often confuse the two ideas, claiming that it is immoral to commit a sin.
However that could only possibly be true if you come down on the wrong side of the Euthyphro dilemma.
Your god is not, and cannot be, the source of morality even if he did exist.
Thus following a particular command of god (or failing to do so) can be judged as moral or not independent
of the fact of god commanding it.
Sin or not makes no odds to moral or not.
And plenty of 'sins' are patently not immoral, and following many of gods commandments IS patently immoral.
And I have explained this many times on these forums, as well as talked at length about secular morality.
As a side note, Morality is about what you do and what consequence's those actions have.
If you cause me harm even without me knowing that you had done so then that is immoral, and
depending on the harm also possibly illegal as well.
[quote]Originally posted by Suzianne
That's a lot of hoops to jump through just so you can sleep at night.
And yet, strangely, you consider yourself more free than Christians.
[/quote]
This response puzzles me.
It doesn't bear any relation to my experience of life or reality, or bare any resemblance to my thoughts or
thought processes.
I think that what we have here is a failure to understand one another's view point.
I certainly don't have any trouble getting to sleep at night... At least not due to any moral quandaries or worrying
that I might be wrong about there not being a god and worrying about going to hell, I do get kept up by it being
too hot on occasions but that's not really what you meant.
There are too things that I think you are misunderstanding about me and how I think (and I suspect this applies
broadly to many if not most atheists).
First, I don't spend any time worrying if the bible god exists and whether I am going to hell in exactly the same
way that I don't spend any time worrying if Thor exists and whether or not I can go to Valhalla (which sounds a
damn site
more fun than your heaven does).
I have never believed in bible god, and I don't have in me the slightest remotest doubt as to that gods
non-existence.
Thus I do not care in the slightest what 'commandments' god has supposedly issued and also don't care in the
slightest about breaking those commandments (ie committing a sin).
I do however care about morality and doing good. (why is irrelevant for the moment I am just going to state
as fact for the purposes of this discussion that I do care about morality quite deeply)
I follow my moral code as closely as possible and where that moral code happens to agree with the so called
commandments of god then I will follow those commandments. Not because they are commandments of god,
but because my moral code indicates that this is the right and good course of action.
Where my moral code diverges from or contradicts the commandments of your god (or any other) I follow my
moral code and utterly ignore your commandments (this is assuming that I actually know what the commandment
is because I have in no way memorised all 613 of them).
Now I wouldn't consider it moral to follow the commandments of your god even if I did think you god existed, for
reasons I have explained any number of times, but that is irrelevant to how I feel and live generally because I
don't for one second actually think your god exists.
So I am not 'jumping through' any hoops to do anything.
Claiming that I am just doesn't make sense.
I don't believe in god (any gods). Why should I be even remotely interested in any way with what people claim
that these imaginary boogie men have commanded?
Whether you agree with my lack of belief in gods or not, you should be able to see that GIVEN that I don't believe
I am not going to give a damn what people claim a god has said or commanded.
The other thing that I think is a major stumbling block is that theists use theism as their starting point.
A theists religion is (allegedly) their source of morality, the meaning of their existence, often the explanation of
how everything came to be here, and sometimes even the source of all knowledge.
It is the source, the starting point, the beginning.
And so when a theist comes across an atheist, they see that in the place where the theist has the source of
everything they care about and the foundation of their world view, the atheist has a hole. A god shaped hole. 😉
Because atheism doesn't have any of that, atheism is simply the position that you don't have a belief in the
existence of gods.
There is no dogma, and not meaning of life or source of morality there.
Which is why theists often claim that atheists must have no morals or be evil or think that asking what the
meaning of life is as a 'gotcha question'.
But atheism isn't a starting point, it's an end point.
Atheism is the result of something else, which can vary from person to person.
But it usually results from one form of skepticism or another.
The things that provide things like a moral code and any meaning of life or anything else that a theist thinks
they get from their religion atheists get somewhere else. And it varies from atheist to atheist.
So when you try to make assumptions about how I or any other atheist 'gets to sleep at night' you need to
consider how we actually think and what we actually believe and not what you think we think or believe.
Which means actually asking us rather than assuming what you might think in our position.
We don't fear god wrath or judgement or heaven or hell because they simply don't exist.
We have no belief in any of them.
So when I explain that SIN is not a concept we have any truck with I am not contorting myself to try to justify my
position or point of view.
I am simply saying the blindingly obvious conclusion that nobody who doesn't believe in the existence of a god is
going to care what that god is supposed to have commanded.
As for considering myself 'more free' than a Christian...
I really don't know what you mean.
I am not required to believe anything without evidence, or do anything without a justifying reason.
However the bounds of reality and logic might be construed to be more constricting than whatever fantasies you
concoct.
I require my beliefs and actions to conform to reality and logic (as much as humanly possible) and I think my moral
code is far more strongly enforced than yours, because you can commit any crime you like bar one and be forgiven
and let into heaven.
The only 'SIN' you can't commit and get into heaven is not believe in god. It says so clearly in your very own bible.
There is no get out of jail free card in my moral system.
There is nothing I get to make up because I would prefer reality to be that way.
Reality is the way the evidence says it is. Period.
If you don't like that then it's just tough.
On the other hand your religion, like many others, unreasonably restricts behaviours that have no business being restricted.
Telling people who they can and can't love for no reason at all.
In that sense then I am more free.
I don't have these idiotic restrictions on me.
True Age of the Earth
26 Jun '12 15:46
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