Music Banter - View Single Post

sleepy jack · 12-01-2008, 12:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by streetwaves

I did know what you meant, but the problem with your argument is that it assumes that a god (or a higher power) is the reason we think of certain things as being "wrong" rather than just not doing them to watch out for ourselves. As I said before, much of the morality taught in the Bible was taught long before Jesus' time, when gods that are now considered "mythology" were believed in. If those gods were completely man made, the moral sense was as well. Whether we had a moral sense and then decided to explain it with the idea of a god or gods is irrelevant to the argument. Of course we explained what we did not know with what we imagined to be the case, but it doesn't change anything here on Earth. Living happily ever after is plenty enough justification for human beings to be good.

You may not realize it, but your argument does lead to the idea that without a belief in god, people wouldn't have any conception of what's right and what's wrong. Unfortunately that is incorrect, and I'm living proof of that. The fact that my parents or their parents were brought up Christian or not doesn't matter - I don't have a belief in any higher power to help ground my moral principles, and I have as good or better a moral sense than your average theist.

People will always choose what's right and what's wrong based on the situation. The Bible says we shouldn't kill, but that rule seems to be pretty flexible. As I've probably posted before, this quote pretty accurately summarizes my idea of religion's role in society:
“With or without [religion] you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”
I think you're making the idea of human morality much too complicated. Don't assume that we need a higher power to justify being good - there's plenty of evidence to show that's not the case.

It's a perfectly logical assumption whether you choose to believe it not. It's a fact religion has shaped world history and our culture and it still does. Besides the bible/Christianity is no different from mythology (in the sense its a man-made religion to explain the unexplainable and everything in there is man-made) it's just managed to stay around longer and still managed to be relevant enough to where its followers can delude themselves into believing it's still incredibly relevant. I don't agree that without religion there's no sense of morality but you can't deny its importance to shaping Western ideologies or that it justifies many people values and morals. If you took it away (mostly in America where agnostics/atheists are a very very tiny minority) you'd strip away alot of "good" in followers because they'd lose their sense of purpose and incentive to do any good.