Atheists: Is stealing wrong? If so, explain why.

Post Reply New Topic

haha great derailment

when the opposite happens its called capitalism

I have a very strange dog. This dog ravenously loves to eat. However, inevitably, the food eventually disappears. Presumably, you and I would reason, because the dog has eaten it. However, my dog is far too smart for this. She knows that, in fact, the recycling bin took the food, and with great regularity attacks it to punish its evil-doing. Unfortunately, the recycling bin has a carapace made of hard plastic which a dog is quite incapable of penetrating. Instead, she must make due with the occasional molitov cocktail, biding her time in the hope that some day a canine Guevara will rise up and take back the food from the bourgeois recycling bin and bring equality for all.

Curious question, wasn't the US founded by stealing the land from the natives, did they give it back, and then being called a christian nation?

the us, canada, australia, new zealand, many more i'm sure. stolen land.

You see, THIS is why I'm an athiest. Because Christians make no sense half the time. And I'm grounded in logic. And plus, we as a "Christian nation" adhere to this simple philosophy:

It's not what your country can do for you, but what your country can steal from other countries.

So who's the thief here? Christians or atheists? Churches steal peoples freedom of thought by telling them what to think.

Do Christians consider it "wrong" that this country was stolen from the Indians and Mexicans? Or, do they find some means of considering this not to have been "stealing?" I don't think that American Christians feel that anything bad happened. They still sleep at night, say their evening prayers, and imagine themselves into Heaven.

Yes, they're inconsistent.


The reason why they go to church is because they wish not to think to think. Unless they've gone to church since childhood, then I'd see it as a bit destructive for encouraging them not to think in the first place. But honestly, I'm amazed that most Christians do not find at least one thing incredibly strange about what they believe. That there has to be complete delusion.

An interesting hypothesis. As an atheist and biology graduate I am inclined to subscribe to Darwinian evolution. 'Stealing' could be considered a form of parasitism whereby one organism benefits at the cost of another. Indeed such arrangements are ubiquitous in the natural world (e.g. fleas, tics and certain worm sp. are common parasites) and such traits have enjoyed a selective advantage as evidenced by their existance. In humans however only a small proportion of the population steal and as such these individuals do not have a selective advantage. It would seem that humans (at least at the community level) benefit more through cooperation than explicit competition at the expense of one another. If stealing could be justified then surely the human race would largely consist of remorsless sociopaths. As this is not the case I would assert that stealing cannot be easily justified at least amongst current humans.

Humans are social beings. How could society exist if theft were wide spread and general. No one would create value added assets or improve property if they could not be sure of enjoying the fruits of their efforts. People would live short time from hand to mouth. There would be little or no culture.

Read -Leviathan- by Thomas Hobbes.

If theft and and violence were general then the life of man would indeed by nasty brutish and short.

ruveyn

All good, moral people (religious or not) will not stealing.
Immoral people (religious or not) will steal.

eating what you did not earn is parasitic.
living from what you do not naturally deserve is devolutional.

mosquitos are true thieves. and all true thieves are like mosquitos.

As an atheist I think stealing is wrong because people have IMO the right to have posessions and property. It's a matter of having respect for people. I don't want people to steal from me, so why should I do that exact thing to them? What you don't want yourself to happen, don't do that to another. It's as simple as that.

Furthermore, stealing causes anger and disruption. So when you do this, you cause harm to yourself, tohers and maybe society. When stealing and other crimes wouldn't be wrong, you'd have some kind of an anarchy.

All well and good. But you haven't explained why you respect people. "Because you should" is not an explanation.
I have respect for people because I believe they are children of God. That's respect grounded in logic, rather than in a feeling.



I'm not sure if by stealing I cause harm to myself -- that is, if I'm thinking atheistically, as in: there being no spiritual dimension to my actions, and only the material world exists. On the contrary, I would do myself quite a great service through theft, materially, because I'd be making and proving myself fitter to survive than the less-aware person I stole from.
Stealing causes harm to others? Definitely, at the beginning. But if it forces them to adapt to a higher level of awareness, one could argue that it's doing them a favor by increasing their survival skills, albeit through forced necessity -- which is the usual way to aquire survival skills anyway. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all, so you could argue that stealing breeds general human progress as a trickle-down effect: The positive reaction against stealing amounts to more than the theft itself, thus a "small wrongness" is eventually outweighed by the "large rightness" it caused. Our society already steals as a whole, in both legal and non-legal ways. (For example, if you're in debt and delinquent in the debt, you're a thief, and can be sued. There was once even "debtors' prison", where they simply threw you in jail until you paid off your money debt.)


Well, there are already many legal types of stealing, and, if anything, we have a too-powerful government, not anarchy.

Last edited by Ragtime on 07 Jan 2009, 3:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

From what I get from Cocodrile's post, if I'm correct, it's a matter of action and reaction, if you harm someone, that someone would harm you back, or to put it in this way, you harm someone you make a new enemy, you help someone and you might make a new friend, of course is not something as simple as that, but that could be a principle, so to speak, and I could add, empathy/sympathy to it as well. "I understand what if feels so I won't do it to anyone else", but then, I suppose not many would find this that argumentative, considering it wouldn't always work like that.

In Immanuel Kant's book Perpetual Peace, he says something like respecting and recognizing the right of others as a mean for perpetual peace.


I believe that argument would be flawed, if it's made by someone who steals, if he turns out the victim at a given time, then that person would not adhere to that argument in his case, most likely, and it seems more like an excuse for such behaviour in that case.

I haven't heard anyone making an argument for stealing being benefitial to humanity as a whole, that would be a big stretch if someone does, and it should consider other factors such as order and the repercusions of humanity to live by that.

Although I can get that some could argue that being Robin Hood to be a good thing rather than bad.


You're right here, there is also the issue about what is actually stealing and what is not, something that not everyone would agree on this.

Really??? Is the underwear you have on jointly owned?

ruveyn