Originally posted by Scrimshaw
Yes, if atheism is true, an objective, absolute, empirical "right" and "wrong" would not exist. And any moral judgments you make are arbitrary and imaginary. I find it amusing that you atheists will not believe in an "imaginary" god, but you have no problems believing in imaginary morals! Such duplicity and hypocrisy proves that atheism is a dishonest belief system.
If you state that, unless you are a christian, one does not have knowledge about morals, I can tell you
that i take this as a personal insult on all those atheists and communists and others, that offered real resistance against injustice, terror, fascism and oppression, and did what they had to do, even offering their lives if they had to.
You are obviously talking to the wrong person here!
Stating that you do not believe in any morals, if they would not be based on the imaginary God, then you state in fact we should not have ANY morals at all. ABSOLUTE morality meets ABSOLUTE AMORALITY.
Is it perhaps THAT what you want to tell us? Amorality, packed as "absolute morality"?
Well, if we reseach that throughout history, your point obviously right, cause apart from a few good christians, they do obviously not do what they preach. And as a grand example of this, look into the history of the Catholic church, one of the major christian institutions, and esp. look up what the behaviour of this institution was regarding the nazi regime.
Morality is something that one needs to proof at the basis of evidence, and not on some theoretical standard. It matters only what one does, not how one thinks or bases one actions on.
I will investigate that later.
Matter began to exist in the past. All the evidence points in that direction. The fact that matter could not have BEGUN by the laws of physics simply proves that it's beginning was not caused by the laws of physics, but by something OUTSIDE of the laws of physics. (a.ka., a supernatural Creator)
There is no such thing as a "begin of matter". And you do damn well know that. Despite the popular belief in a begin of time, there never has or never can be such an event, neither is there in reality a physical theory about a begin of time.
I am working on a thread with this subject. I will give arguments as to why all of this popular beliefs in such a "begin of time" are fanasies, and not reality. You can look at it
here (it's not finished by the way, I just started to explain the basics).
Look at it this way. We can form in our head all kinds of possible theoretical models, which could indicate as to what could happen.
If you worked out such a model, and if it indicates a major contradiction, to such an extent as that the world could not possible exist, you have two options:
Either, assume that the world is impossible, and does not exist. We would all live in a "grand dillusion" then.
OR, assume that somewhere, you just have made a mistake, and it's your model of reality that is impossible, not reality itself
Go figure that out for yourself!
Wrong. What has been observed in the large scale homogeneity and isotopes of the universe sets the critical density to less than 1, which makes it a *closed* universe, and also shows the temps to be 2.73 kelvins, less than a third of that which was "predicted" by the Big Bang theory.
All observations I am aware of sets the critical value of omega near to 1, and in such a range that it is realy impossible to say wether or not it is bigger, equal or less then 1.
Usuable energy exists in closed systems, so I don't understand your argument. The existence of the sun does not prove the universe is an open system. Just because all the usuable energy has not already dissipated does not mean the universe is an open system.
Tell me how large is the box you would need to have to fit the universe in, to conceive it as a closed system.
You obviously don't have an understanding as what a closed system is, since you apply models of a closed system (which are finite systems as a part of the whole, which do not have thermal interaction with the rest) to the universe, which you obviously can't do.
The term "open" or "closed" refer to the fact wether or not the system has thermal contact with that what is outside, and it always means the system is finite.
Therefore the terms "open" or "closed" loose their meaning in the contect of the universe.
A closed system is only something theoretical. In practice there are no closed systems, even when the amount of thermal interaction is unmeasurable.
The second law is built on finite systems only, and can therefore not be applied to the universe as a whole.
And it's appearent that it's a kind of misuse of science to try to proof on the basis of the second law that the first law is invalid!
If the second law would have more importance over the first law, it would have been called the first law, not the second law.
Wrong, you fallaciously left out a third option:
3) A supernatural Creator exists that has the ability to create and suspend natural laws.
Just for your information, by only offering two options and neglecting the third, you committed what is called the "Fallacy of Exclusion". Go here to learn about it:
http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/exclus.htm
That is some strange paradox. The theistic argument base themselves on physical law, to proof that physical law could not even exist! How strange!
But all that you can do, in your "proof" that the world could not exist, is just showing, that you don't actually understand in what way the world realy does exist.
It's not the world itself that is impossible, since I can state that it does exist, but it's your theistic reflections on it that don't make sense!
Wrong? How was my statement wrong? Are you saying that atheistic morality (morality in an atheistic universe) would NOT be arbitrary? Are you saying that atheistic morality would NOT be imaginary, but real? I don't see how you can possibly call my statement wrong. If there is no God, no external source of morality, then all human ideas of morality would be arbitrary and illusory.
You obviously don't have an idea as to what morality in fact is, and where it came from.
Some work for you to do then!
Theism and absolute morality could be true even if Christianity is not.....so you question here is inherently flawed.
I see no way in which they could be true.
Absolute morality can exist regardless of whether or not it is followed by all theists and/or atheists. The argument at hand deals with the BASIS for holding a moral position. Theists have a logical basis for believing in the inherent meaning of morality, but atheists DO NOT. In an atheist universe, there would be nothing that is inherently right or wrong. Morality would have no objective basis. In an atheist universe, every moral judgment would be nothing but the whimsical, subjective by-product of each person's imagination. Therefore, you would have no right to tell someone else not to murder or rape little children. The rapists' morality that believes it is "good" to rape children would be just as *valid* as your moral that doing such is "evil". If all morals are subjective and inherently imaginary, no one has the right to tell anyone else how to behave.
Morality does not exist apart from and outside of real events, circumstances and real people.
Besided morality is also usable for other species. Also animals have codes and standards for behaviour, in which certain things are "wrong" or "right".
I have not seen any ape or lion testify that they have such moral codes from God, or have any awareness about God.
Which makes your story a phantasy.
Again, atheism undermines morality. It is a fact; not a prejudice.
This is taken as an INSULT.
You will hear more from this, I am not finished with you!
I am ashamed of many humans and how they have behaved, including so-called Christians. But human behavior does not dictate the truth of a belief system. Millions of people were killed by Joseph Stalin, your fellow ATHEIST. Does that necessarily make atheism false? No. Because the truth of a belief system is not determined by the actions of individuals. But let's turn the car around now..... - are you ashamed of your murderous, atheist buddy Joseph Stalin? Hmmmm?
No, not in the way as you depict this.
What is something else, is that I can confirm that in the early period of the Soviet-Union misjudgements were certainly made, and innocent people have been murdered. That is a tragic fact.
It was noone less but Stalin himself, who corrected this, and put the murderers for trial.
And a further remark on this, is that if you want to make any judgements on this, you realy need to do historic research to find out what actually happened or did not happen. The current adopted belief that 'Stalin was all wrong' is not a historic judgement itself, but is very politicaly inspired, and widely spread.
It seems you like military intervention as long as the Jews were in danger, but you don't seem to mind Saddam killing millions of Iraqis??? If you were consistent with your own logic, you'd be saying that we did the right thing by intervening in Iraq and stopping the slaughter that was taking was place under Saddam's regime. Do you only favor preemptive military action when it's the Jews who are in danger?
I am not pro-Jewish or anti-Jewish, and of course saving an oppressed group is something right to do, which would indicate in the present situation that the oppression of Palestines and occupation of their land and rights should be ended.
As to the principle, I can call on more occasions in which this should be used, it should have been used already when the Franco fasicst dictatorship took over in Spain, which was the start of World War II, but the western nations would not want to make a deal with Stalin at that time.
And to confront you with arguments to the contrary, the way the western governments have dealed with the issue of Yugoslavia, in which Germany pro-actively mixed into internal affairs there (acknowledging Croatia, for example) was one of the reasons a civil ware broke out there. Hadn't they not done that, perhaps this would have determined the conflict in a less bloodily way.
Right, but you don't seem to mind Saddam's facism?
Did the US mind that Saddam went into a war with Iran?
No, they didn't.
It just shows that this argument is purely hypocritical.
Wow, so you mean that the new "Roman Empire" controls the media of every single country?
They undoubtly do. Go count the number of press-agencies for instance. It shows that only a small amount of press-agencies
Of course. It was easy to protest a war that looked preemptive. But the thing that these protesting morons failed to understand is that preemption is the only way to prevent terrorism. You can't fight terrorists in a normal method of war. Terrorists hide, and attack out the blue with no warning or consideration of fairness, or respect for civilian life. And they would love nothing more than to get their hands on WMD. Eliminating threatening regimes that would sell WMD to terrorists was the first step in fighting terrorism. Saddam's disgusting regime has been sitting there festering in the middle of a terrorist hotbed part of the world. Saddam was given 12 years to comply with the UN, and instead of complying, he gave us 12 years of lies and 17 UN resolution violations. Something had to be done to fix the problem, and the diplomatic approach had 12 years of failure proving it would not work.
Terrorism as in sponsoring terrorist attacks on Cuba, promoting hijacking planes and boats and taking hostages, assacination attempts on the Cuban leader, invasion attempts, etc.
And that form of terrorism is promoted, sponsored, financed and stimulated by the US.
Besides the Iraqi regime has been accused of having sponsored or armed Al Quada, but none of those links were ever proved.
The link between "terrorism" and the Irawi regime, like also the weapons of mass destruction (not yet found) and buying of uraniium, were all false claims.
it shows that the mass public opinion has been fooled completely!
That's even more reason why the US should have been responsible for cleaning up the mess!! If you give a child a glass of milk and the child spills it, it's your responsiblity to clean it up.
And what is the misuse of weapons during the 12 years after the first Gulf war by the Iraqi regime?
Tell me.
Because we don't use them on our own people, nor have we ever used them maliciously against other nations.
You claim here that the US has the moral right to have and use niuclear weapons and other weapons of mass-destruction, while other nations and countries don't have that right.
About malicious use of weapons, let us dig up some history for you.
- Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (the war would have been ended even despite that, it only shortened the war, at the cost of hundred thousands of innocent citizins!)
- Napalm used on large scale in Vietnam
- usage of low radioactive uranium granates in 1-st Gulf war and in Yugoslavia
- CIA backed up coup of Pinochet against Allende
- CIA coup attempt against the legal president of Venezuala
etc. etc.
