I never said all atheists have no morals. In fact if you'd actually read the thread, you'll find I said the exact opposite.
Yes you did, you merely edited that post following the outrage it inspired.
No, that was a genuine mistake. The 'outrage' of VNers is hardly going to change my opnion on something. Not to mention that changing my views based on outrage would be more than a bit hypocritical, given the topic of this argument.
I also never said all religious people are 'upright moral people'. Again, if you read the thread you'd have seen that.
No, but my interpretation of your arguments is that you are suggesting that the only valid morals are fixed morals, and the only fixed morals come from religion.
Therefore, the only true morals (as you appear to dismiss the validity of non-religious morals) come from religion.
Therefore, only those who are religious have true morals.
If this is wrong, then I fail to understand the point of your argument.
My argument is actually very simple, and I seem to have been misunderstood. I do not claim that only religious morals are valid, any 'good' moral is valid.
All I'm saying is, without a religious reason for a person's morals, they are liable to change, and I would rather not have a PM who might change her mind on moral issues.
Why is that? Because the 'progression' of morality is moving in a direction I don't like, with things like abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage and more, now either legally acceptable or close to it.
And yes, I do think that only people with religious morals have true morals. This is because morals which are derived purely from intellectual understanding and/or conscience are open to change, and hence are not 'true' according to that meaning of the word.
I feel this argument is going in circles now, might be a good time to end it.
It is comforting to have a rule book, isn't it? To be able to look at a scenario, go to the relevant part of your instructional book and say "Ah! This is what I'm supposed to do!"
For those who do not take the word of "god" as gospel, and critically analyse what is put in front of them, it is easy to see that the bible is/was a wonderful means of controlling the masses. This is because it was a wonderful source of comfort and closure. Anthropologically speaking, religion was an almost perfect counter-balance to the anarchy of uncertainty plaguing humanity.
The questions which underscore our existence are "where do we come from? why are we here? what is our purpose?"
In our early days, we had absolutely no clue how to even start looking for this answer - we only now have some small ideas. So the obvious solution by those wise heads who could deal with the truth that there was no real answer, was to invent a fake answer for those who couldn't. And hence, religion was born.
To placate those who could not deal with the nihilistic/existential reality that we have no idea why we are here. Religion had to be steadfast, and faultless. If it was to provide unyielding certainty to the uncertain, there had to be fixed morals, and there had to be fixed rules which could not waver.
But over time, humanity has greatly evolved intellectually. And as we have evolved we began to say "well hang on, I don't agree with this... I want to get divorced!" and so Catholicism lost a breakaway sect to Anglicanism. And then some Jews said "well I don't agree that women shouldn't allowed to read from the torah at shule!" and so formed Reform Judaism.
And so we see that religious morals are not so fixed. They are fixed to the level of certainty required by its uncertain congregants. The warm glow of comfort afforded by "it's all okay, god will take care of you and tell you how to live and what is right" is so appealing.
But many now realise that uncertainty is not such a bad thing. Why is it so important to know where we come from? Why can't we just enjoy being here? (Existentialism and modern agnosticism is born). And now, we who value reason and logic are ready to take the fight up to the religious zealots.
If you want to comfort yourself with god, then fine, go for it. That's your choice. You can live by whatever lifestyle you choose. But when you start trying to influence others with "No
I dont' want society progressing to abortion rights and euthanasia rights
" when the rest of society clearly wants it, then we have a problem, and the gloves come off. Because you are attempting to force an archaic belief on others without any reason or evidence, and that is highly vulgar. "It's written in the bible" is NOT a logical argument. And nobody who takes seriously the values of equality and liberty will allow liberty to be curtailed on the basis of a piece of religious literature.
Under religion, terrible atrocities have been committed. It is absolutely clear that morals MUST be debated and formulated based on reason. You can make an extremely logical argument for the rights of man and of citizen, based on freedom to do what we want to up until we infringe on others.
That logical argument alone counts for every moral we see in civilised society today. We have done away with the passages in the bible condoning selling our daughters into slavery, and stoning people for not following the sabbath (for Yitzi, sure, jews need a special Sanhedrin, but Christians don't and can do it on the authority of their priest. Yet they don't. Why? Because they learnt that people don't like that and accordingly CHANGED their morals).
And yet we have the religious right hollering about infringement of their rights. Nobody's telling you to get euthanised. Nobody's telling you to get an abortion. It's YOUR choice, but why would you prevent those who do not follow what you follow from pursuing their own courses of action?
The answer is simple. When society deviates from your beliefs, it's a rejection of your religion. If enough people do it, it significantly weakens the foundations of your religion. You are so scared of the acts becoming commonplace and "infecting" your congregation and converting your followers to logic and reason, that any of these "threats" must be stamped out.
And so we get the Yitzi's of the world talking about "true" morals.
But let me tell you now, the only CORRECT moral is the one which infringes nobody. A correct moral is one in which nobody's freedoms are curtailed. We don't live in a perfect world, and so a completely correct set of morals does not exist. The reason why we debate and change our morals is to achieve as great a harmony as possible with as many people as possible. You can think of it as a graph. When Christianity was at the peak of its powers, a significant amount of people suffered absurd hardships. Need I remind everyone of how many thousands of people were tortured in the name of "heresy"? So as we evolved our systems of governments, we started (and continue) to put freedoms back in the hands of people. And this is happening on the back of intelligent discussion and debate.
The fluidity of morals is what absolutely allows us to improve the standard of living for as many people as possible. If we never allowed our morals to change, then we'd still have slaves.
All religion does is prevent society from moving forwards. Keep your beliefs to yourselves and stop flailing your arms in the way of progress. In public policy and debate, logic and reason must take precedence. Please stop hindering society, for the love of god.
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