Morals and the existence of God...

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Why morals would matter if God exists?[/quote

The value of morality is that it sets standards for people living together whether or not an assumed deity constructed them.

It's pretty outrageous how permissible this sort of slanderous garbage is considered, as long as it's perpetrated against atheists. What else are you going to tell us - that we atheists secretly control the world, that we constitute a vast illuminati, that we harvest the blood of Christian children? Do we control the United Nations, too?

Seriously, go take yourself and Dinesh D'Souza under a rock somewhere and have illicit fantasies about Toynbee together. It'd be doing the world a favor.

that was Jesus' natural manly nature conflicting with his duties as the Lamb of God. If Sky Daddy were willing he would have settled down with Mary Magdelene and had lots of kids.

ruveyn

Well not really. I think it speaks volumes about God's love, that it required the devastation and humiliation of one third of the trinity. Where the impending toll was causing even the son to beg for a way out. There really is no greater sacrifice.

Ok, but 91, you are basically also going to end up saying that in order for "moral accountability" to exist, there must be a set of rewards and punishments to a degree where a "rational egoist" will do moral behavior. However, the problem is that rational egoists do not have good will or any other morally important traits.

So, I end up being very unsure as to the point. Reasons to be moral have to be moral reasons for the person who does that moral act to be considered moral. So, the lack of "accountability" doesn't seem ethically relevant at all. So, I still am incredibly unsure why your point on "moral accountability" is in any way solid. It seems rather absurd, and to base an apologetic on it just doesn't seem to make sense.

Eh, I take it as a sign that the Bible is a human book, and that trinitarian doctrine is in part a post-hoc rationalization. If the son is morally perfect, and the son knows that this toll is the best way to handle the situation, what is the point of the begging? It would be a useless gesture. And note: all of the issues with the human side of God end up leading to all sorts of intellectual problems, including the idea that if Christ is both fully man and fully God, not one or the other, wouldn't God himself have to be fully(or even just partially) man at this point given that Jesus is a part of the trinity?

And that's not even going into all of the problems with atonement theory. Mainstream Western Atonement theory basically makes the atonement, rather than loving, psychotic. God sacrifices his son to fulfill a rule that God invented, and even to fulfill it in a manner that seems ad hoc by the pre-existing rules.

Well no, we derive a moral action from what we 'ought' to do. Where does this 'ought' come from? It seems to me quite logically obvious that 'ought' implies both moral duty (which you seem to agree on) and accountability (which you seem to dispute). Without any accountability morality would naturally collide with our own self-interest and it would rob the moral choice of its special significant. If life ends when you die in a world with objective morality but no accountability, then it really makes no difference if one lives as Stalin or as a Saint. Some people here have argued that self interest is a perfect foundation for morality, but we all can imagine situations where our own interests run counter to morality. Historian Stewart C. Easton sums it up decently when he writes, "There is no objective reason why man should be moral, unless morality 'pays off' in his social life or makes him 'feel good.'

As to your statement relating to atonement, it certainly seems to be an area of Christian philosophy in need of a good deal of work. However anyone who has read 'A Tale of Two Cities' would not doubt the existence of substitutionary atonement.

Taking in all the recorded behavior of God in the Bible plus this extraordinary act of masochism involving the pseudodeath of Christ who is assumed to immediately pop into heaven and whatever bliss awaits him there, the only sensible conclusion is that God is totally insane and this universe is the plaything of a psychotic monster.

Well.... I don't even understand. The fact that morality conflicts with self-interest has historically been upheld as one of the attributes of morality. A Kantian will gladly leap up and say that when we act moral in conflict with our self-interest, we are being MORE moral. This intuition also is really common as well.

The reason to be moral is usually considered to be "moral reasons", which is a separate category from self-interested reasons, and it does tend to leave it as just that "feel good".

I have read the Tale of Two Cities(high school English class), even watched the Wishbone version on TV. The guy's apparent clone dying in his place does not make justice. Even further, part of the reason for this death was an injustice due to the extravagant nature of the French Revolution, where they just killed people. There is a complete analogy failure here. (Note: Maybe you are trying to argue for a specific of substitution that does not encompass what we know as substitutionary atonement from Christian theology)

^^^^

Substitutionary Atonement theology seems to be lacking from the attention of modern philosophers. Though many will make their name with it in the next decade. My own personal view holds that God made the world with a purpose and that his reason for doing so is justified, due to his own nature. That does not however absolve us of our own choices within that world. I also do not believe God did not actualize a world in which we do not have free will (due to the amount of evil). So therefor, I believe that we still are responsible for our own sins, or at least, the better part of them and that it was therefor necessary for God to cover them with grace.

As to Dickens, I find the poetry behind the sacrifice to be the existence proof I was talking about. It is a quite beautiful thing.

PanoramaIsland, no reason to get personal. My comment condemn political leaders who pretend to be religious leaders. I was talking about many of the Popes, Holy Roman Emperors, caliphs, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bin Laden, etc. These "religious" persons were the same as openly atheist leaders like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc.
Though I question atheism as an effective moral compass, I have not been impressed by religion's track history on morals.
No need to accuse me of conspiring with D'Souza and Toynbee as plotting against Atheists. I do not believe Atheists are planning to harvest Christian children's blood. Their fellow Christians may harvest their blood before the Atheists make it to the feast.

Your point is that religion is merely one of the factors, ad a very minor one, in the strategies of someone seeking and using power. Stalin opposed religion as a force attacking his power as is the case now in China. Truman had no qualms in summarily executing hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese to demonstrate the power of his atomic weapons for no military reasons whatsoever since the wr was already won. It's all about power. Morality quickly steps aside when power is in question. The current useless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have nothing to do with terrorism since they have made terrorists more, not less frequent and the current regimes there are all full of crooks and thugs enriching themselves out of US budgets. It's about US domination of the area and has nothing to do with freedom or human decency.

You continue to accuse atheists of being immoral, and of people you consider immoral of being "secretly atheists." In so doing, you are personally attacking every atheist, accusing us of amorality, and comparing us to Ayatollah Khomeini, Bin Laden, Stalin and Mao. Don't get personal? You already got personal.

I am glad that his "reason for doing so is justified due to his own nature"... , but this tells us basically nothing. We end up with a God that is half-empty and yet declared as entirely full of meaning.

Even further, given that free will does not exist as an empirical matter, the same way that 6 day creationism is known to be false, and so on and so forth, I don't really see the point of saying "Well, it must exist to explain evil". My contention is that free will does not exist, and that if you look at the workings of psychology, the most you can muster is the Dennett-ian idea of free will as the cleverness to avoid, which is not strong enough to work as a satisfactory notion. Compatibilism alone, without even getting into the uber-deconstructed Dennett version of compatibilism, is probably not even sufficient to play the theodicy role you need for free will. So, I think you are barking up the wrong tree, as even the philosophical problems with libertarian free will end up being large, as it is hard to assign blame for a decision that is ultimately arbitrary.

And you can't even say that this position is outright crazy. There are a number of major and knowledgeable figures who have outright rejected free will in the past:
Neuroscientist Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania rejects free will and admits her colleagues do the same:
"I don’t think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don’t need neuroscience to reject it — any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will! Most thoughtful neuroscientists I know have replaced the concept of free will with the concept of rationality — that we select our actions based on a kind of practical reasoning."
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/ ... e-will-an/

PZ Myers, a notable atheist, called free will "philosophical bullsh**"
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010 ... _demon.php

John Humbach, a legal scholar, actually argues that free will does not exist, therefore retributionism has no legs:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? ... wnload=yes This is not the kind of conclusion one arrives at from a position of fundamental uncertainty, an issue you've already recognized and criticized me for, as you claimed that I really lacked grounds for knowing whether free will existed or not. (And, well, I really do believe that while we cannot exhaustively debunk the concept, everything we know about reality makes free will not only ad hoc, but contradictory to very very well tested beliefs)

Even further, objections just on the grounds of the theological structure you have being compatible with free will already do exist. For instance, Dean Zimmerman has a paper on the possibility of God manipulating human behavior and through this manipulation denying mankind actual ability to choose, as any possible choice we make could easily not have been made in another possible world, and if God gets to choose what world he wants to actualize, he gets to specify pretty much any choice we end up making, especially if free will is libertarian, as there without causal chain, the only thing needed for a world to have different choices is just for it to be a different world. And if God chooses all of the decisions I ever make before I even exist, then in a very real sense, he is also the being most capable for taking responsibility for who or what I am, because my very choices are causally dependent upon what God wants more than any attribute about myself.


Right..... um.... the problem is that the poetry fails. The french aren't a supposedly just and loving God, and the substitution is actually a deception, not a matter of fulfilling the requirements of any notion of justice. The analogy failure is complete and total, as the objection isn't to sacrificing one's life to save the life of another or of many others, but the objection is really an objection to the need for the sacrifice in the first place, and of the validity of the sacrifice that is made.

PanaramIsland, I don't trust so-called religious or Christian leaders any more than Atheists. An atheist who is not a politician is less a threat than any religious person in power. As far as my comment that Khomeini and Bin Laden were Atheists is based on the fact that neither of them were examples of virtue, modesty, or morality.
Sand, I agree. I do not agree with the US invasion of Iraq either. The whole War on Error is a gigantic fraud. I agree. I may not compare Bush to Hitler or Stalin. Only because Bush, like Obama, is a corporate schill. Stalin and Hitler were much more meglomaniac and were willing to slaughter for the sake of their egos. Bush simply did it to enrich his corporate interests. Any deaths were simply collateral damage.
In Afghanistan, Bush at least had a provocation to invade. The Taliban refused to hand over the accused leader of the 9-11 attack. Of course, no mention that the US had been allies with both Bin Laden and the Taliban.

See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oc ... terrorism5