Morality Challenge for Theists.

Post Reply New Topic

I heard this challenge from a famous personality (I won't say who) and I'd like to throw this question out to you wrongplaneteers to see if you can come up with an answer.

Try to name an act or statement of moral kindess and altruism, that could not have been done or said by a non-believer (of any religion)

Can you name just one??

Now can you answer the corollary... name an act of malevolent evil that could ONLY have been done by a person of religious faith (something an atheist would consider unthinkable).

How many can you name??

9/11, witch burnings, genital mutilation, forcing women to dress in a burka, raping young girls because it's illegal under your religious laws to kill virgins, etc........


So who is more moral?? Atheists, or believers of blind faith??

Act of moral altruism with no connection to religion - teaching a man to fish so he can eat for a lifetime.

Act of non-religious evil - Pol Pot executing all the college educated people in Cambodia. Basically anything that Chairman Mao did.

Thank you very much, but that wasn't the question.....

I can think of one for the first, a non-believer hasn't ever opened the gates to heaven for someone, had them find Jesus ect

I'm personally a nihilistic misanthrope so I don't really believe in morality in general let alone if a religious man or an atheist is more moral, personally I think both cold do both great things and horrible things, it just depends on the individual.

Last edited by egodeus59 on 26 Nov 2007, 2:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

Both have their pluses and minuses. Believers can address certain types of problems that atheists can't just because for one they can see certain things for what they are in terms of international issues without having political correctness precalculate what they're allowed to think. Also, a lot of atheists seem to have reality pegged as so subjective that its like they have a tough time committing themselves to much of anything that's hard, painful or necessary in the long run - its like the demoralization that comes about from not being sure whether your a man dreaming to be a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming to be a man and have to spend the better half of the day, if you believe there's any point, trying to convince yourself that you know your arse from a hole in the ground.

Theists of course, you probably know the issues they have quite well - its really the fact that, while the 10 commandments and a lot of religious laws are just good guides to living in the sense that "if you do this, it spares the world a bit more negativity and bad drama'. However when you get a church and organize things its taught differently, the sense that was originally intended in the advice gets lost as the context ends up being stripped of it and people start getting reactionary to issues more in the sense of calling them sins, seeing the sins laid out in something like the ten commandments on an almost iconic level, and that's how things end up getting warped.

While I used to really wonder if there was something up, it amazed me that hardcore believers seemed to get world politics and what was going on more than atheists (which blew my mind) I understand now that its really just something more fundamental on where who's distortions are at - atheists, IMO, have social agendas that they take to the same sort of fanaticism quite often that some believers take the rules of religion. So the end result being - Atheists are good for at least chipping away at the dogmatic buzz of certain words and phrases, the areas where tradition for traditions sake is infringing on people's rights to do what they will in a free country. A lot of at least more intelligent Christians as well seem to understand cause and effect dynamics WAY better than most atheists - and I'll explain what I think that is with atheists in a minute, for those Christians I think its their drive or feeling of duty to see the truth, figure out what's going on in situations - whether local politics or world issues, and do something proactive by taking a stance and talking about it.

Other than that though, I have a hard time finding that many atheists who aren't far left leaning and while I always found that really bizzare I think its largely on the grounds of, with no afterlife, needing to see human nature through rose colored glasses to a degree, thinking they have nothing to learn from the perspectives Christians have on things, and in the end work so hard on building a social utopia that wherever they see something they don't want to in terms of our reality they tend to just skip over it and try to pretend it doesn't exist (ie. more the people who think the US should dismantle our military, that if we were weaker the world would like us, or particularly when geographic distance seems to make it almost impossible to really compare the magnitude of actions or intents between various groups - not even just talking about the middle east situation, I mean a lot of other things as well). The distortions of world view, again, I think come from the fact that while atheists in general could understand cause and effect they still do a lot to brush things under the carpet that they don't want to see, thus end up working with a rather broken cause and effect model a lot of times.

Its sad to say but most people seem to need a higher power just to have one, let aside the people who feel they're really seen proof - they're situation is a bit different. However, with most people who do abandon theism they feel the need to replace it with something, that has them putting blind faith into world dynamics in the same way that some people put blind faith into gods. Cause and effect however, is a very scientific sort of thing, every action does have a rather definite consequence or at least many consequences with different probabilities depending on other factors. That said, when agenda overpowers truth and your willing to bend truth for the sake of the message you have - you lose just as much as the group who's opinion your trying to negate.

Not to tare on people, sadly we as human beings all seem to have busted mental cogs, just in different places and to different degrees. That said we'll probably all see a lot of this, just that as a society I think even just a secular science of cause and effect and maybe teaching it to kids as early as elementary school would actually do far better for our society. We pulled God out of schools, that's all well and good being it is government and not everyone's of the same religion. Yet, the issue is it's got to be replaced by something worthwhile that gets the same things across, with maybe even more precision.

exclusively theistic altruism:

putting money in the collection basket

theistic assholism:

terror attacks
dowry system
the holocaust
witch burnings

I think those mostly stem from the detachment that some theists have from their own true nature as human animals. Terrorism and religious fervor ends up coming from people who, when they feel like life is pointless, monotone, or boring, need to fill that gap with something - that sort of theism is extremely seductive to them just because it puts life into this grandiose context of being this epic battle between good and evil, where they have a chance to be heroes to their own people. Of course that's also setting cultural coercion and early indoctrination aside.

Witch burning, I tend to agree with the guy who wrote the Crucible on what the intentions were there - coveting neighbors possessions, wives, husbands, and having a trigger they could pull that short-circuited other people's logic and phrased things so they could get exactly what they wanted from those people without fear of reprisal because if you questioned they're logic - they'd be more than happy to work on you next.

As for the holocaust though, that ones tricky. I'd need to read a bit more on Nazi Germany to understand exactly what Hitler was using, aside from just hate messages, to get people rallied and twisted up enough to where they could let that slide. On one side it seems like he did such a good job of hiding the concentration camps from his own people that few of the citizens knew they were there and, since he provided economic prosperity, the vague rumors they may have heard of them were things they quickly wrote off. Although back in the Crusades Christians did do a lot of horrible things to Jews as much as Muslims, it really doesn't seem that normative Christianity of the time was culpable - true there was a great deal of antisemitism in Europe even from the 1800's still resonating (mostly over the fact that people just hated those who did better than they did), Hitler may have been able to play on that a little bit but it seemed like Nazi Germany tended to push secularism and be almost as anti-religion as Stalin was.

I have observed the same thing. Not so much on world issues, but with many interpersonal and intrapersonal issues.



There's me! And... uh.... it's lonely here.


...I'm coming back to this post later. It's quite unique and perceptive and I'm too sleepy to do it justice.

This question is, in my opinion, not a valid one, at least not if you're trying to prove that atheists are more moral than theists. Many theists have commited acts of moral kindness and/or altruism. So, the question is, not whether these acts could have been commited by an atheist, but whether, in that specific situation, that specific person would have commited the act if they were not a theist. The answer to that question is going to be different in every case.

Teach a man to fish and he'll decimate the species.

You clearly misunderstood the question.

Name something good that a theist has done that an atheist couldn't (I have yet to hear a legitimate answer)

Name something bad that theist has done that an atheist couldn't (I've named a few and people have named even more)

For those of you not smart enough to figure this one out, the point I'm trying to make here is this:

The main purpose of religion isn't to get bad people to do good things, (even though it occasionally does) the main purpose of religion is to get good people to do bad things that they wouldn't ordinarily do, by telling them that it's god's will that they do it.

Last edited by jfrmeister on 26 Nov 2007, 10:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

You mean donating money?

WRONG ANSWER TRY AGAIN!! !!



It's interesting that you mention the hohlcaust. People forget just how many Nazis were Roman Catholic.

According to what I have heard on the definition of theism, it may be more accurate to say that we are considering what religious people who follow the book might do that atheists (who don't have a code to follow) would not normally do. Apparently, theists are free to choose which morals from the book they wish to keep and which ones they don't want to keep. So this might only be a comparison between what "the bible" allows people to do that atheists would not do.

The genital mutilation is not religious, it's cultural, having much the same function as the burka. And in Stalin's Soviet Union, the idea of counterrevolutionary had the same function in official ideology as the idea of witch after the reformation or the Nazi's conception of Jews: they were supposed to be guilty of everything, making a handy scapegoat. Only the details differ, the principle is the same.

If you want to argue that the idea of reward in the afterlife makes suicide attacks easier, remember that the attackers consider their acts to be altruistic, and the same belief should make it possible for them to sacrifice their lives for the common good without killing anyone.

I will be surprised if anyone can find something either positive or negative that is only possible for religious believers and is different in principle, not just in the details.

Cultural/casual Catholics maybe? Roughly three million Polish Catholics were killed in the Holocaust. Clergy were targeted specifically.

As for the original question, only a faithful Catholic priest can administer the Sacraments in honesty. You might not think that's a good deed, but in the view of devout Catholics, it certainly is.

I'm just playing the game though. I'm not a believer.

I think I do understand your question. So, let me ask you one:

Can you name one act or statement of moral kindness and altruism that could not have been done or said by a theist?