Morality Does Not Require God

The often repeated theme that atheists have no reason to be moral without a god is probably the most popular and repeated myth made about atheism.  The claims come in a variety of forms but they are all based on the assumption that the ONLY source of morality is from a God on high, a religion…and preferably only the Christian one.  Therefore, without Christianity humans cannot live moral lives.  This of course automatically deprecates all other religions on this planet.

The thing I find most amazing is that Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindu’s, and the myriad other denominations, sects, and cults in the world have been trying for maybe three plus millennia to prove that there IS a God…and they have ALL totally, completely, entirely failed. They all have stories that depend on magic…that envisions demons, devils, ghosts, angels, etc., and they all were formed a few thousand years ago when mankind was going through a huge god-making period in our history…conveniently forgetting that humans have been roaming around  the earth for 200,000 years or so without a need for really invasive gods.

So anyway, there is no god or gods, therefore all this morality the Christians talk about is just made up by some goat herder desert dwellers a few thousand years ago.  In other words morals come from mankind.  Wars and kindness comes from man.  Good and evil comes from man.  We are ultimately responsible for ALL that goes on in our history, culture, and civilizations…a non-existent god cannot be blamed for our shortcomings or our triumphs.
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Logical Religion

Among all the religions that have contradictory Gods…only One or None can be right.  It is just as likely that none are right or that some other god with entirely different characteristics or that multiple gods with different characteristics exists. We have no irrefutable proofs of any kind that any proposed god exists.  All we have (or have ever had) is personal anecdotal attestations of belief.  As far as the Abrahamic religions go, two thirds of the world doesn’t think this  God exists.

Muslims believe in a god who is utterly transcendent, non-anthropomorphic, and to whom we humans are required to submit in total obedience.  The Christian god, however is partially transcendent, three persons in one, anthropomorphic, and whom we are supposed to show love.  The Jewish God is less transcendent, has a special role for the Jewish tribes, and they are singled out from all of humanity.  The Hindu God or gods are so alien to my Western way of thought that I can’t even go there yet.

All religions except possibly some small sects in India do not account for all the proven hundreds of thousands of years man has been on earth. Most all Jews, Christians and Muslims (the Abrahamic religions) believe life began on earth 10,000 years ago, or less, and this is despite all the fundamentalists’ claims provably false.  Some of the Christian denominations of late are recognizing that science is actually right on the long ages, and evolution and accepting this, but have so-far not fully integrated these facts into their dogma.  If you are a fundamentalist; Where do you think this god was for 190,000 +- years?

How is it rational for anyone to believe in something with logically contradictory characteristics?  It is not rational to believe in something that is defined one way…when the alleged same thing is defined in a different way down the street in another Temple/Church/Synagogue.

Christians maintain that serving their God is what gives them purpose and that all their morality comes from this God, seemingly disregarding the fact that billions of other people can find purpose to living and loving and can act with morality, all without belief in a transcendent being.

Albert Einstein denied the existence of the traditional monotheistic God and refused to believe that said God could even be moral if He and the religionist’s claims about Him were true.  If this God was omniscient and omnipresent as Christianity claims, He would be ultimately responsible for all of the suffering of humanity down through the ages.  Gods that reflect human frailty are not moral or real gods.

Some Christian sects/denominations define God as being so powerful that free-will is nonexistent, that who we are and what we do is entirely up to Gods interference.  Others will define god as one who gives us tremendous freedoms/free-will and hardly ever, or never, interferes.

A person looking at all these differences would be justified in just staying away from all of them.  After all only one or none of them could possibly be right, and us mere humans could not possibly pick the right one…if there even was a right one.

“While 40 million people died of starvation in the last decade, churches spent $10 billion on campuses.” Steve McSwain
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Intelligent Design and Science

Interesting find while surfing this morning. The ID people keep claiming they’re all about science, but the never reveal any.

ISSR Statement on the Concept of ‘Intelligent Design’

The authors of this statement constitute a group set up for the purpose by the Executive Committee of the International Society for Science and Religion. Through a process involving consultation with all members of the Society, the statement has now been accepted by the Executive Committee for publication as a statement made on behalf of the Society.

The International Society for Science and Religion is a scholarly society devoted to ongoing dialogue between the sciences and the community of world faiths.  It was established in 2002 for the purpose of promoting education through the support of interdisciplinary learning and research in the fields of science and religion, conducted where possible in an international and multi-faith context.

The society greatly values modern science, while deploring efforts to drive a wedge between science and religion. Science operates with a common set of methodological approaches that gives freedom to scientists from a range of religious backgrounds to unite in a common endeavor. This approach does not deny the existence of a metaphysical realm but rather opens up the natural world to a range of explorations that have been incredibly productive, especially over the last 400 years or so.

The intelligent-design (ID) movement began in the late 1980s as a challenge to the perceived secularization of the scientific community, which leaders of the movement maintained had been coloured with the philosophy of atheistic naturalism. ID theorists have focused their critique primarily on biological evolution and the neo-Darwinian paradigm. They claim that because certain biological features appear to be “irreducibly complex” and thus incapable of evolving incrementally by natural selection, they must have been created by the intervention of an intelligent designer. Despite this focus on evolution, intelligent design should not be confused with biblical or “scientific” creationism, which relies on a particular interpretation of the Genesis account of creation.

We believe that intelligent design is neither sound science nor good theology. Although the boundaries of science are open to change, allowing supernatural explanations to count as science undercuts the very purpose of science, which is to explain the workings of nature without recourse to religious language.  Attributing complexity to the interruption of natural law by a divine designer is, as some critics have claimed, a science stopper. Besides, ID has not yet opened up a new research program. In the opinion of the overwhelming majority of research biologists, it has not provided examples of “irreducible complexity” in biological evolution that could not be explained as well by normal scientifically understood processes. Students of nature once considered the vertebrate eye to be too complex to explain naturally, but subsequent research has led to the conclusion that this remarkable structure can be readily understood as a product of natural selection. This shows that what may appear to be “irreducibly complex” today may be explained naturalistically tomorrow.

Scientific explanations are always incomplete. We grant that a comprehensive account of evolutionary natural history remains open to complementary philosophical, metaphysical, and religious dimensions. Darwinian natural history does preempt certain accounts of creation, leading, for example, to the contemporary creationist and ID controversies. However, in most instances, biology and religion operate at different and non-competing levels.  In many religious traditions, such as some found in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, the notion of intelligent design is irrelevant. We recognize that natural theology may be a legitimate enterprise in its own right, but we resist the insistence of intelligent-design advocates that their enterprise be taken as genuine science – just as we oppose efforts of others to elevate science into a comprehensive world view (so-called scientism). See the website: Here

Intelligent design is nearly universally condemned as science and as a concept. Most people recognize it for what it really is; a wedge devise to sneak WASP religion into our school systems. The only support for it is from evangelical fundamentalists, Young Earth Creationist (YEC), and some Old Earth Creationist (OEC).

Now proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) are using ‘Stealth Candidates’ who are running for positions on local and state school boards without declaring or admitting that they will advocate teaching ID in schools when elected. They just don’t get it…and they will try anything, including dishonesty, to achieve their goals. That they would use dishonesty in the furtherance of their religious sect speaks volumes about the true value of their faith.

Most people don’t analyze this battle enough, and don’t seem to realize that the ultimate goal of the religious right is to take over our country and remake it into a religious society; kind of like the Dark Ages in Europe when the Catholics ruled, and the strength and direction of your belief…decided whether you lived or died.  A lot of people don’t realize that the religious right has taken control of the Republican Party.

Cognite tute-think about it/use your head.

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Where DID Cain get his wife?

So not to long after Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden they have that long awaited and dreamt about sexual contact…it must have been driving Adam crazy seeing Eve all naked while they were in God’s good graces and keeping the gardening up and all. I wonder how long they were both running around naked? The Book of Jubilees (late 2^nd. Century BCE) says Adam and Eve were kicked out about 8 years after being created. (Jubilees 3:33)

Anyway, after they were kicked out, they had the worlds first human sex and not long after Eve delivered a baby boy …Cain. Then she got pregnant again and had Abel. Now the Bible doesn’t say how long after the great ‘Kick Out’ she gave birth, but it seems like it was shortly after their expulsion.

Now, some time later…again Bible doesn’t say, but it was probably after Abel was at least 16-18 years old, after all he was the chief sheep-herder for the only 4 inhabitants of the earth.

So at some point when Able was young, after all God was visiting them for the first time, Cain got insanely mad at Abel, because he was smarter than Cain, and he killed his younger brother. We all kinda know what happened next. God confronted Cain and Cain asks God if he was his brother’s keeper…and so on. So Cain was kicked out of the clan of Adam and Eve the gardeners.

He leaves Eden (after packing up his other suit and toiletries), and lo and behold, he marries his wife.

Now we have all probably thought of this discrepancy at some point, and there is a whole line of apocryphal texts that have attempted to solve this problem by writing new Scripture, and claiming that he had sisters that were not mentioned at the time. Some have gone so far as to come up with the sisters names. Trouble with these documents is they seem to have all been written looong after the Pentateuch was written or transcribed or redacted (700 to 400BCE). So one should maybe not put to much stock in them.

Three people left on earth; Adam, Eve, and Cain. The official Protestant and Catholic Churches and the many sects, that seems to keep growing in number all the time, deny that the Apocrypha is true. Cain takes a wife.

After Cain and Able; Adam and Eve, the progenitors of the whole human race have no more children until Adam (and I assume Eve) is 130. Then they (Adam and Eve) have Seth. Then they have more sons, and finally…daughters.

While Adam and Eve are waiting until they are 130 years old to have more children…Cain takes a wife, and builds a city.

So to recap; Adam and Eve have Cain and Abel right after leaving Eden, where they had spent 8 years. Cain kills Abel. Only 3 people left on Earth. No more children for about a hundred or so years, but Cain takes a wife and builds a city.

Do you suppose Eve visited her grandchildren before Seth was born? Maybe skinned a few rabbits to provide clothing for the little ones?

Something is missing here. If you are purporting to write the history of the human race, as given to you by divine revelation from God, you really need to have your stories make more sense.

We know that the people of the time were very intelligent, after all the Egyptians had already built a civilization and were contemplating building the Pyramids :-), and the people of Babylonia were building cities (and Plains Indians of the Southwestern US were chasing and killing Mammoths).

You would think the scribes could put together a more believable and internally consistent story. Or, God would know his people were not dummies and tell them the true story.

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