Being an atheist is hard

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Depends on what your absolute morals are. If it includes not murdering (not killing aside from self-defense) then that would not happen. I still insist on my view that moral relativity makes no sense. But of course it happens since people can't agree on a fixed set of morals.

Shall I fix that and say that the adherents of religions don't always live according to the morals of their religion.

But your qualification of "aside from self-defense" makes the morality of not murdering a relative, and not a fixed moral. I suspect you probably have other exclusions to the murder rule - what about defense of others?

Your definition of self-defense is also going to be relative, based on your perceptions of what other options a person might have had and the relative risk. For example, someone who is being robbed may have their life at risk, or might be able to just hand over money to end the situation. You need to make a judgement about whether self-defense is justification in that PARTICULAR circumstance, which is what makes the morality relative.

In regard to the specific issue of the killing of rape victims - the only difference a fixed moral belief against murder would have in this instance is to change the punishment. The central issue of a rape victim being seen as immoral for having had sex outside of marriage will still be there, regardless of what the reaction to the breaking of the rule is.

one of my friends said it was annoying when he tried to go to rehab that wanted him in a faith based one, did you have the same troubles, I saw you were posting about drug abuse.

Well, I didn't look through the other 3 pages of this thread yet, but I guess I'll write this to the OP.

I'm Christian, well, at least I try to be. Most of my friends are atheists or agnostics, I have a few Muslim friends, I got friends from church, but some I doubt my friendship towards. Frankly, we debate and argue all the time. Like prolly once a week, or biweekly, we'll somehow, with each of my atheist friends, we'll get into a 1 hour long AIM debate battle discussion thing. It's fine. We discuss/debate or whatever, but we don't take it personally. In the people I come in contact with often, "nerds" it's more popular to be atheist imo, so my beliefs get questioned a lot, and to be fair, I question people's atheism a lot, too. I'm learning not to quite as much, as a lot of people just don't care at all despite what logic you can tell them, and at that point, you're as Jesus said, "Casting pearls before swine."

First off, try not to take their arguments towards you so personally. Even if they mean them personally, try not to take them that way. The other thing is, you believe in a polarizing noninclusive worldview, as I do. My worldview says you're wrong, your worldview says I'm wrong. Well, we can't both be right, right? A lot of people want it both ways, though, they want to stand on the fence on a particular issue. For God, they might say "I believe in...a higher power from the universe" or something like that, just so atheists might be like "oh well at least he doesn't believe in that Christian God whom I don't like the idea of very much" and so Christians will go "well at least he's not an atheist." You compromise. You could just lie to people. Lying to people is easy, to a point. People will not genuinely respect you, but they might not hate you strongly either. This is what most people go for. Politicians, salesmen, etc, make their lives often this way. You wanna be like them? I found this a terrible way to live life, so I stopped.

What you're going to have to do, is do what I did as a Christian, figure out why you exactly believe what you do, and be willing to give an account for it if people ask. The Bible tells us as Christians to do this, "Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect," Do that with atheism. Unfortunately, you're going to have to have lots of mental battles in figuring out the truth. But as with any strong belief, people are going to either just intellectually curiously debate you respectfully, or possibly personally attack you for them, so figure out why you believe that way so you can respond back accordingly. Some Christians spend hours a week trying to study Christian apologetics, I used to, so if you want to be on their level, you're going to have to study like them.

If you prefer to have your beliefs, without having to think about why you have them and have them open to debate or even attack by others, you're going to have to become more assertive. You're just going to have to firmly tell them, generally only when they ask, "This is what I believe, but I prefer not to talk about it, thanks." That requires courage, too, it requires the courage to NOT fight and try to maintain the peace of that.

Just by posting this thread, though, you can see what's going on. You posted your polarizing worldview, and yeah, you got 4 pages of debate now, that's just what happens. The same thing, or maybe even more pages would occur if I just moved the words around in your posts and made it Christians and belief in God. It's just the way things go, dude, don't take it personally.

God bless.

One of the key problems here is that the idea of killing in self defense makes murder a moral relative. Murder is never relative. Murder is the intentional, unprovoked taking of life for generally malicious reasons. Homicide is a broader term, and is only relative in terms of the situation. Willful homicide is what we term murder. At one time, my family and I had to deal with teenage vandals and ended up actually having to install IR cameras on our private residence. When we turned the kids in, the police officer who worked with us told us plainly that what the kids were doing was especially dangerous to themselves because we would have had every right to kill them for trespassing.

In order to show self defense, a person has to provide evidence that the person killed represented a danger to the killer, that the killer did everything within reason to warn the attacker, and that the would-be victim was left with no other option (like running away, etc.). If you compare with Biblical rules of self-defense, the Bible always demands an accounting for taking of life. In the case of self defense, the attacker is made responsible for his own life. It is just as well that he committed suicide, and the person who actually did the deed is no longer considered guilty.

Killing in self defense is NOT murder. And there are other special cases in which the loss of life might be incurred--accidental death, involuntary manslaughter--but are either not treated as or do not carry the same penalty as the deliberate, malicious attack on a person's life. The morality of killing is situational. The immorality of murder is never in question and never relative.

In wartime, killing IS justified. However, the intent of war is ultimately to gain an objective with minimum loss of life. It's only in recent history that this became realistic in the field. In the ancient world, the goal of a defensive/preemptive campaign was to protect the homeland even if it meant expending lives on a foreign battlefield. In other words, the preservation of a cultural identity and way of life was more important than one's own life. The principle of postmodern warfare is no different--better-developed nations merely have optimal means of hitting key targets and even individuals and thus minimizing the loss of life, both of those conducting the operation and of the enemy. So the question of wartime killing is not of whether it is right to kill in war, but rather of whether the nation that goes to war is justified in so doing.

One moral absolute is the loss of life is never desirable. The variable is the justification for it, whether killing the infidels is divinely sanctioned, whether it is protecting a nation from attack, defending the self against an attacker, or merely the premeditated and intentional killing of someone out of personal resentment. Even though moral absolutes exist, we can ignore them or rationalize or lie to ourselves in order to get out of conforming to them.

Ah, gotcha. I just needed clarification. But still, there are some cases of murders where I can say that what the person did is absolutely wrong. I believe that this makes morals absolute. Or what about rape? How is rape ever right? Maybe there are cases when you rape someone to save their life somehow I dunno. There are other cases where its more ambiguous, but I don't believe that it means that something could be both right and wrong. No, its never the case. People just don't agree to whether its right or wrong.

Well, I believe that the rapist is always wrong. Sorry, I didn't see that you posted about rape. I thought you were just talking about simple pre-marital sex.

The bold and capitalised FIXED is your empathises and not mine. It is an old argument that atheists are 'moral relativists' and the religiously faithful and 'moral absolutists'.

It is also a rubbish one because everyone and every religion has moral relatives. As we have been talking about murder lets look at that one single moral as an example.

Exodus 20:13: Thou shalt not kill.

Go ahead and look it up in your bible, fairly straight forward right? A commandment from god, an absolute statement forbidding you from killing. Hard to be relative about that right?

So how exactly do reconcile that moral absolute with Deuteronomy 3?



Go ahead and look up Deuteronomy 3, read it. Think about it. How are the faithful morally absolute when God is quite clear that 'thou shalt not kill' but then commands you to commit genocide?

This is not an aberration, these things happen rather a lot in the bible.

Joshua 6 - God destroys the walls of Jehrico and orders all the men, women, children and animals to be put to death.

1 Chrocicles 21 - God is annoyed that David has ordered a census of the people so God kills 70,000 people.

Judges 21 - Nice faithful people destroy the city of Jabeshgilead, killing all the men and all the 'women who had known a man'. The 400 virgins they found were abducted to be their wives but there were not enough virgins to go round, so they popped up the road to Shiloh, lay in wait and kidnapped young virgins so that all the good faithful men could have virgin brides.

2 Kings 10 - The followers of Baal are all ordered into their temple on pain of death, once inside they are murdered, the temple is destroyed and convert to a public toilet.

Hosea 13:16 - The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.

Deuteronomy 21:18-21 - "Suppose a man has a stubborn, rebellious son who will not obey his father or mother, even though they discipline him. In such cases, the father and mother must take the son before the leaders of the town. They must declare: 'This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious and refuses to obey. He is a worthless drunkard.' Then all the men of the town must stone him to death. In this way, you will cleanse this evil from among you, and all Israel will hear about it and be afraid."

Leviticus 20:13 - "If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives."






There are many, many more examples if you really want to get into this but suffice it to say the 'thou shalt not kill' doesn't count if god tells you to do it. Or if they are adulterers. Or if they are gay. Or if they are naughty children. Or if they are disobedient women. Or if they are living on a patch of land that god has promised to you. Or if god is doing it. Or if they are children and insulting you. Or if they worship another god. Or if they are your enemy. Or if they disobey god. Or if they are the son of a sinner...



You sure you want to take the bible as your source of moral absolutism or do I sense a 'yeah but' bit of moral relativism to come up with a creative answer?



Maybe you want to consider 1 Timothy 2 as well.

A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15 But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.


I take it as a 'moral absolutist' you would refuse a job offer where a woman would be senior to you? Of course, strictly speaking, you should also kill her and the man put her into a position of authority for sinning against your god...

I've already established that the command against killing refers specifically to murder. The justice of Torah understands that things like accidents happen and that someone might incur loss of life as the result of violent behavior. There is no law that says you cannot defend yourself.

You have to understand that in OT times, during the conquest of Canaan and during the kingdom period, what had apparently happened was that many Canaanite tribes had come to worship other gods and were guilty of some really horrible things themselves such as child sacrifice. If you read the Bible, you'll note there was a whole string of things these people did. The short answer is they offended God and had been offending God for a LONG time, and God saw fit to finally punish them. They'd reached a sort of "point of no return," their behavior was so ingrained into their culture and society that there wasn't really any redeeming qualities. It was no secret that the Israelites were coming back to Canaan in force. The Canaanite leaders knew well in advance they were on their way. And they were well aware of their intentions. All they had to do was pack up and leave. That's all. Just go. But they chose to stay and fight. And it wasn't outright genocide because many did escape to surrounding areas when the Israelites showed up.

In Deuteronomy 3, Moses is recounting the progress the Israelites made on the way to Transjordan. They encountered many enemies in the east. Their intentions were to wipe out the Israelites or gain control of them. These people came out to wage war against the Israelites. As such, they were not just enemies of Israel, but enemies of God (see above) just as the Canaanites were. So...there was about to be bloodshed anyway. Og essentially declared war on Israel.

So exactly what was Israel supposed to do? Just let the armies from Bashan kill or capture them? No. Bashan had declared war, and Israel was prepared to fight. And since Bashan had acted as such an affront to God, and since Israel was God's people, it sent a bigger message to the surrounding peoples about God's power to completely wipe out any remaining threat. Besides, if many survivors had been left, they could have launched retaliatory strikes against Israel once they settled Canaan. Given the historical context, they didn't really have many viable options other than genocide.

I think we today are a bit more sensitive to that kind of thing, but only because we don't really get a good understanding of the harshness of ancient reality. I guess you just had to have been there!

Anyway...the point is that there ARE moral absolutes, and comparing "You must not commit murder" to wartime killing to make that point is really ineffective. Murder and wartime killing are not the same thing. In war, the rule is "kill or be killed," though we have ways of fighting and winning battles that minimize the unnecessary loss of life. There are no moral relatives here because we aren't even talking about the same thing.

Thank you for proving my point, that is moral relativism.



Wow.

I'm almost speechless. Nah, only kidding I'll play.

By the same logic the existence of the state of Israel is offensive in the eyes of Muslims, I take it you would be happy to justify a genocide if the Iranian army invaded Israel and murdered every man, woman and child they could find because Allah was offended by them and they should have left?

After all, as long as a few Jews run away, it wouldn't count as proper genocide would it?

I suppose it gets Hitler off the hook for the holocaust because he didn't manage to kill all the Jews...

No, it isn't. Murder is a specific form or reason for killing. Killing in wartime is a consequence of war. It can't be helped or avoided. Mitigated somewhat as civilizations mature or as technology specifically aimed at so doing, sure. But that is not the same as murder, an unjustified act, at the hands of individuals. You should learn the difference. Absolute: Murder=wrong. Absolute: Wartime killing=justified.


Ah, but I'm an American who is friendly to the Israeli cause. I wouldn't side with the Iranians, anyway.

HOWEVER... For the sake of argument, let's say I DID side with the Iranians. Yes, I'd probably be in favor of genocide against the Israelis. How would I be able to justify that? Holy war. We would be in a condition of spiritual and physical warfare against our enemies. Wartime killing is not the same as murder. It is justified.

The moral absolute is UNJUSTIFIED killing is wrong. Find a way to justify it, and you won't feel that it is wrong. This is still not relative.

There is such a thing a "justifiable homicide," and it's usually an act of self-defense or a preventative measure to keep harm from coming to others. Police actions, for instance. So the argument isn't really whether homicide is ever justifiable. The argument is whether every situation in which justification is claimed is really justified, for example when you get into "right to life" issues in civil rights--someone is killed for standing up for their civil rights within a jurisdiction and is killed in the process. Looking back on that, we might conclude that it wasn't really justified and thus the guilty person is in violation of civil rights or is a murderer outright.

So, getting back to Iran, the question is really whether what they did or do in the name of Allah is really justified. If so, then nobody should have a problem with them waging a genocidal war against Israel. But I'm sure many outside Iran would not see that as justified. There are those who would disagree that Israel's actions in the OT were not justified and what they did to the Canaanites was wrong. I would argue that it WAS justified in that they were obeying God in so doing, among other social and military reasons.


Godwin!! !

Depends on whose eyes you're looking through. Again, the moral absolute is that UNJUSTIFIED killing is murder and wrong. Hitler and the Nazis believed they had just cause for their actions. Obviously the rest of us in the western world disagree. But the only thing that really is relative is a person's perspective. However, perspective is only a view of a bigger picture from a narrower angle. We all really see parts of the same thing. And thus where Hitler saw himself justified, we, from the outside looking in and understanding Hitler's actions only from the aftermath of WWII, can see that any justification for what Hitler did stemmed from a distorted perspective. Hitler only had the influence he had from the fallout of WWI, and the way Germany was treated afterwards by the world community was probably excessively harsh. Hitler could have, say, told the rest of the world "screw you," built up a powerful, defensive military, and regained some lost territory and have been done with it. He didn't stop there, though. It was only his aggression against other powerful European countries and the aggression of the unified Axis powers that forced the hands of the UK and US into becoming involved in the war.

We did NOT go over there to rescue the Jews. Nor have we ever come to their rescue in Russia or elsewhere. So as far as international policies go, what a nation does with its own people is its own business. The extermination of the Jews was also something kept somewhat hidden from German citizenry and thus the rest of the world. Intervening in genocide is a recent development, and only after carefully ascertaining whether it is right to do so. It's only in retrospect that we look at Hitler's actions and come to the conclusion that Hitler was mistaken and was not justified in his treatment of the Jews. Even the Germans would come to admit there were no real good reasons for what they did and it was just a game of follow the leader.

Now, one moral absolute IS that killing for any reason is to be avoided if at all possible. Even if you kill someone in self-defense, you can still be convicted on homicide charges if it can be shown that you had alternatives and didn't seek them--like running away, calling the police, warning your attacker that you're carrying a deadly weapon, or if you chase off an intruder and kill him anywhere off your property. We might intervene in genocide to end racially motivated killing. Or we might fight a war if we feel that a few casualties are worth saving the lives of many more. And if we have the means to use weapons that pinpoint specific threats rather than, say, nuking entire cities, we can save more lives by directly targeting those who pose the greatest threat. Or we can utilize rules of engagement.

So the question isn't really of whether killing is absolute or relative because we can establish that murder and any other unjustified killing is absolutely wrong. It's rather whether the reasons used to justify killing really are good reasons.

If these really were relatives, though, we'd actually be worse off. It might be ok, for example, for YOU to oppose murder for yourself. Well, that's good for you. But that doesn't mean it isn't ok for someone else to commit murder if it's good for them. By that reasoning, you would have to say that it's right for Hitler to invade all those countries and it's none of our business because Hitler has to do what is right for himself. We should rather be ashamed of ourselves, because who are we to judge? It's difficult to take moral relativity seriously because there really isn't any right or wrong. The minute someone harms you in some way, you might naturally be inclined to think that their actions in harming you were unfair. In so doing, you imply that what that person did was wrong. You have taken an absolute stand, rather than validating that what that person did was right. So if you think that what happened to you is wrong, that means you don't really believe that is relative.

I've een through thism y whole life, what you must consider is how religious in the country you're living in, or how people perceive atheist, sometimes it is best to just don't state your religion, so you won't see much prejudice over it.

you can't logically argue with a religious person. you can't disprove that which has never been proven!
Many people who claim to be religious people are unrespectable, but that shouldn't make them unacceptable.
As an atheist you don't have anything at stake- no reason to debate. But if a debate does ensue you wont be in conflict if you have no intent or expectations.
And if you offend someone don't be offended that they were offended!
Oh, and try not to be humoured by the fact that it only offends them even more.

Logical proofs for the existence of God do exist. If one is biased from the outset against the existence of God (without conclusive, physical proof that God does NOT exist), then there is no physical argument for the existence of God since bias will automatically rule out physical existence as evidence of God's existence.

Moreover, as it is often pointed out, the point of scientific work never has been to "prove" anything, since further study might reveal better explanations than those which are currently accepted. Happens all the time. Ptolemy's theory STILL makes accurate predictions, even though Copernicus' description actually works better given discoveries made since Galileo. We've certainly ruled out an earth-centered universe. Science seeks to explain the PHYSICAL universe, not anything beyond that. Science just isn't equipped to "prove" whether God exists or not. What we CAN say, though, is that the apparent organized structure of the universe together with the unlikely spontaneous appearance of life IS evidence of a pre-existing intelligent being. Thus that we have physical existence at all is evidence of a supernatural creator.

Purlease! You have no evidence that there isn't a chocolate teapot orbiting the sun therefore this logically proves that the chocolate teapot exists.

If you want physical 'evidence' before you accept the chocolate teapot exists you are obviously biased against the chocolate teapot and going to hell for your lack of faith.

Do you have any evidence that Santa does NOT exist?

Easter Bunny?
Thor?
Odin?
Zeus?
Athena?
Shiva?
Baal?
etc etc etc

I assume you believe in every single god that has ever been worshipped because you don't have proof that they do NOT exist?

Even if logical proofs seem valid, they are not material evidence. You can argue your point until your opposition is worn down with word, but the lack of any material evidence means that your words are both empty and without true validity.

While absence of material evidence is not evidence of material absence, it is still sufficient cause for reasonable doubt.