Originally posted by: Scipionix
Originally posted by: apoppin
Actually, Hitler was a Roman Catholic to the day he died. He was never censured or excommunicated from the church.
Ridiculous. I do not remember off hand if he was baptized, but he was never a believing Christian of any kind. He was never censured by the Church because he established a de facto detente with a pope looking only to save his own skin. For all practical purposes, you are completely wrong.
well he did go to catholic school for a bit where he supposedly did very well and was happy.
May liberalism expand and fluorish until none of us are responsible for anything we do. Big Brother will birth you, raise you, educate you, support you, tax you of course, and bury you.
which has nothing to do with this thread.
Actually you're wrong, they did not. The closest they came was believing in "Providence" or "fate" and "destiny," which is a far cry from actual belief in God.
not really. many believed that they were decendents of a fallen master race which were the sons of God. interbreeding with inferior races cost them their powers etc. they thought there were runes for their master race to reaquire their powers etc. holy grail... gothic names for jesus..mythical teutonic knights, its all very convoluted.
Oh please, you know damn well what an atheist is. Theism = belief in God. Atheism = absence of belief in God. Mytholgy and worship and ceremony are totally discrete from belief in God. Communists had a mythology but the were certainly atheists.
yes, by literal definition it is a lack of belief in God. and yes mythology etc, any religion without a God would fall under the technical definition of Athiest. so being an Athiest isn't a religion. i was just saying that communism with hits harsh dogma was more religion then anything else.
i mean think about it. didn't the ussr tolerate the church? i think they did.
Explain to me how atheism has any rational explanation please
i was refering to the all encompassing common/popular use of the term athiest, one that doesn't believe in religions/things on faith. a person who questions things. this is entirely incompatible with dogma.
Democracy is independent of religious conviction, but liberalism is not. As I've said before, it is impossible to have inalienable rights without theism. I was also not talking about the effectiveness of communism as a political system, I was merely arguing that organized atheists are responsible for at least as much evil as organized theists. I would further argue that the atheists were much worse because they brought none of the redeeming qualities of religion. The Nazis tried to destroy religion and replace it with belief in the mythology of the Herrenvolk and the Communists tried to destroy religion and replace it with belief in the dialectic. Again, they may have been cultists with myths and ceremonies, but they were decidedly atheist.
really? well the nazi's rounded up and killed liberals along with the Jews. go figure eh?
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it is possible to have human rights without theism. after all, who really has a proven direct link with god to know which rights are unalienable? oh because you say so... or your holy book, oh thats proof enough
😛 does the bible serve as a guide to which rights are unalienable? very very poor example. it practically justifies slavery. etc etc etc. as for your examples of athiests, they were all athiests under religion of some sort. so that doesn't paint religion in a very good light eh? last time i checked even the Nazi's were into traditional conservative family values
😛 they just got a little nutz in other places
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but still, no examples of the popular/common athiest doing horrific things. why? because we don't create/accept mythology/dogma etc.
Obviously. Atheist zealots and religious zealots can cause lots of problems when they gain absolute control of a state and there is no separation of church and state. I don't think we disagree.
nope both were religious zealots. as i said above, for athiesm to become evil it requires a religious component. mythology/cults etc.
Here I am simply making a judgment that religion has brought us the Judeo-Christian moral principles on which our society is built. I believe that having those principles is a reedeming quality of religion, as is our belief in them. The great atheistic political movements of the 20th century did not bring such a moral foundation. I was making a comparison of historical outcomes, not suggesting that we shop for ideologies based on which accessories and body colors they come with. I generally agree with the latter part, which is why we keep the state separate from established religion. However the state need not cross the "wall" of separation to emphasize morals whose origins are religious in nature.
again, the atheistic political movements were religious movements that happened to be athiestic.
when the religious zealousness dies down that is when progress is made in either case.
I don't see how it is weak. For rights to be inalienable they must have come from somewhere other than Man or constructs of Man. That pretty much leaves God, the Great Spirit, the Force, etc.
which always comes down to the problem of how do you know which rights are not the constructs of man. unprovable, unknowable, and thus heavily abusable.
"An established set of morals," as you say, requires establishment by someone. Are not the morals of most atheists in the Western world simply Judeo-Christian morals? Anyway, the problem is that you can't say something like "murder is wrong" without theism. You could say that it is cruel, that it is selfish, but can you say that it is wrong? You could say that it is an irrevocable violation of inalienable rights, but to have inalienable rights you need theism. To say simply that murder is wrong, you must have some external authority.
murder is wrong? why do we have the death penalty? we kill people in war. we have collateral damage. we justify murder all the time. do other religions/ideologies allow freedom to murder as one wishes? no! human beings exist in societies. a society that encourages m
"An established set of morals," as you say, requires establishment by someone. Are not the morals of most atheists in the Western world simply Judeo-Christian morals? Anyway, the problem is that you can't say something like "murder is wrong" without theism. You could say that it is cruel, that it is selfish, but can you say that it is wrong? You could say that it is an irrevocable violation of inalienable rights, but to have inalienable rights you need theism. To say simply that murder is wrong, you must have some external authority.
again, state these wonderful christian morals from the bible that our government is baesd on. eye for an eye? worship no other religion then christianity like it says in the 10 commandments? very little if much at all. even the greeks/romans/ancient chinese etc thought about ethics u know. there are philophers that explore these ideas, even if people sometimes don't listen to them at the time. its not as if a holy book was beamed down to complete heathens bent on killing each other all the time at any whim etc etc etc.
you might ask yourself why most dolphins don't grow up to kill their parents and siblings like psychopaths. after all, they aren't blessed with judeo christian values, yet they live in reasonbly complex societies and work together to hunt/protect their young. according to some peoples reasoning they would be eating their children from the start, and therefore be extinct
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But we are human, and saying that something is inalienable because it is in our nature seems very weak to me. That universal rule is far less universal than you might think, and there is a difference between believing that something is a good idea and believing that something truly has moral authority.
see above. weak? you see it in nature.
I think that one would trust God-given rights more than the capacity of man to live together in harmony, wouldn't you? This is why I think morality is a redeeming quality of religion.
god given rights which have not been recognized until america was founded, 2000 years after christ? erm ok, these rights arent' so self evident apparently. and even then many of these god given rights were questionable. slavery anyone?
😛 yes slavery is justified by the bible, yet we started with it, and got rid of it. both defying the bible and what many would consider to be a basic human right. we can pick and choose from these inalienable rights as we see fit apparently. in fact these inalienable rights are picked by the judgement of man and you cannot deny it without uncontrivertible proof that you in fact know the will of God. this idea alone is easy to abuse, and has been through out history. a great way to create suffering indeed.
Simple. Our state is allowed to emphasize the morals that its founders held and incorporated into our Constitution and body of common laws. Other states can emphasize whatever rules they see fit, but they may be standards of conduct that are wrong. I am quite comfortable, for example, saying that the ethical standards of fundamentalist Islamic countries are immoral and offensive to the dignity of Man.
it is a living document first of all. 2nd of all, i bring up injustices that were built in from the start, womens rights, slavery etc. all must be seen as the founders morals if you are honest about it.
as for your opinion of islamic fundamentalist countries, they have their faith and base their government on it. far more so then we do. in fact they are the way they are because of their heavy reliance on their religion to form/guide their government. there is no way you can argue your religion is more real or better then theirs either.
That's complete garbage. It is NOT ingrained in Man that murder is wrong. As much as Western atheists hate to admit it, our morals ARE Judeo-Christin in origin. If our morality were truly intuitive, then would we not find that all cultures place a similar value on human life? We are reminded every day that this is not true, so I do not for a second believe that any morality is intrinsic to Man save the survival instinct, which is hardly a system of right and wrong.
Thats the kind of arrogance/ignorance you get from religious fundamentalists. no one else but us has morals, there were no morals before us
😛 not ingrained 100% in any, but murder is frowned upon in successful societies. take two groups of people. one endorses murder. the other one doesn't. which society will become strong and endure? yes the one that doesn't endorse murder for any reason. murder weakens society, and well you know about the "cycle of violence" eh?
😛 we aren't 100% against murder as i've said. we justify murder in war and executions easily, as do all societies.
i'd bring up the dolphins and sh*t again but well, its up there
😛 generally more intelligent animals nurture their young. a "mothers love" eh? some birds mate for life, many species have males protect females. many live in groups for protection of each other/young. little soldier ants will give their lives to protect the queen. judeo christian animal values? i think not.
I cannot understand moral relativism because I must believe that certain things are absolutely wrong, such as flying planes into the skyscrapers of a nation at peace. The difficulty of these issues is that ultimately they boil down to things that cannot be decided by reason alone. In the end, or more accurately at the beginning, there is a choice to believe or not to believe.
must bring up slavery/womens rights etc again? apparently god given rights evolve over time
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I suppose I simply cannot place any faith in social contracts formed entirely between groups of human beings. I think history would side with me. As always, the fundamental problem is that what Man creates, Man can destroy.
um ok that makes no sense. so say God says hey, don't murder each other. we still murder each other, so what? did it matter where the rule came from? apparently not. plus, from a rational point of view, one could say that Man made religion
😛 everything that is known about religion is filtered through men. therefore it already has been destroyed
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but I choose to believe because the alternative, that there is nothing greater than or separate from Man, is frightening.
fear is a poor reason to believe something
