Founding Fathers read the Koran

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either i'm doing a terrible job of explaining it and you should consider clicking that link or you're not interested in understanding how morality could exist without religion. worse, without this specific religion?
your brother doesn't need to be a higher moral authority to know when something you do affects him negatively. i certainly don't base my morality on christian beliefs. i don't think women should be subservient to their husbands. i don't think slavery is ok. i don't think genocide is ok. i don't think stoning people for holding contradictory beliefs than me.

it's really not fair, in this kind of discussion, to bring up countless examples of immorality on the part of notable christians and christian regimes. my previous examples are biblical. the next thing you know, that book will be telling you not to wear shirts that are made from more than one material....

"do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" is a really great start to morality. leaving out sadomasochists, this should be enough of a framework to live your life, morally, without religion. i find no small amount of humor in the monopoly so many christians think they have on morality. but, of course, at reading the common english form of "the golden rule" and having likely only understood the concept as a christian concept, you may be surprised to learn that the ethic of reciprocity is common to many religions and cultures. i could thank collective christianity for spreading the notion but there's absolutely no reason to think christians or even their jewish predecessors were the originators of the ethic.

i do apologize for being so rambly. i think i might have an easier way of helping you see what i'm saying:

taking our brother's candybar is unfavorable from the perspective of your brother. it is, to him, similar to how it would be, for you, if he were to take your own candybar. if you can understand that, there is no need for "daddy" to tell you it's wrong.

are you honestly telling me that, lacking christian faith, you would have no good reason not to rape, murder, and steal?

of course, if you want to hold the opinion that the ethic of reciprocity is native to christianity, i would implore you to read the rest of the book it's in. FFS the very next thing after "love your neighbor as yourself" is "don't crossbreed animals, plant more than one kind of crop in a field, or wear clothes made from more than one kind of material." followed by an explanation of what to do if someone has sex with a slave girl who hasn't been ransomed yet. (kill a ram and it's cool.)

leviticus is NOT a source of moral guidance. leviticus IS a guide on how to be a superstitious slave trader with sweet facial hair. (same chapter tells you not to cut your sideburns or the edges of your beard.)

I'm sorry about not clicking the link... again I'm obsessive-compulsive and generally stay away from sites when I don't know what's goign to be on them.

of the list of things n your first paragraph, only one could you actually make a case for being Christian doctrine, and even that's highly disputed.

But WHY do on to others as you would have them do unto you". If you have no scientific evidence saying that you should, you are holding a religious belief.

Even if you're making your brother feel bad, who's to say it's wrong to do so? Even if you wouldn't want it done to you, who's to say you can't do it to others? Do I hold such beliefs? no. But there are plenty of people out there who do.

Would I find a reason not to rape and murder if I wasn't a Christian? Well, if I wasn't a Christian I'd probably be a deist, so yeah, but for many of the same reasons.

And we're not discussing leviticus here. Besides, just because the book has rules on slaves doesn't mean God condones slavery... Jesus would later say many of the rules where added not because God approved of X, but because he knew they where going to do X if he approved of it or not (an thus put some regulations in place).

no. i'm sorry, but if you're going to claim the religion as a basis of morality, i'm going to bring up acts encouraged by your god as referenced in your sacred text. when your god tells you to kill everyone except virgin girls (to keep for yourselves) in a city, that's immoral. when your god tells you to stone unruly children to death instead of giving worthwhile parenting advice, that's immoral.

if you're concerned about browser security, i use mcafee and it gives me the semblance of security with websites that have enough traffic. the name of the man i keep referencing is Sam Harris. if you have a spare 20 minutes or so you can look up his talk at TED for a good introduction to his idea of science based morality.



i think we're having a misunderstanding, here. i'm not saying there's nothing moral about christian doctrine nor am i saying there's nothing moral about religious doctrines, in general. i think i probably come off as saying something at least similar to that because i'm so tired of people seeing me share an ideal with a religion and inferring that i couldn't have come to that position without said religion. i should also be more clear on just how far i think science can go in deciding morality.

perhaps i could be more clear with the candybar example. "right" and "wrong" are conclusions that can be reached through situational evaluation. we agree that our brother experiences this in an "unfavorable" way. the fact that i have acquired a candybar that i didn't have before can be seen as "favorable" and so, to make a moral judgment, we need something more. your position, as i understand it so far, is that our moral view of this is based on faith/religion. my position is that we, as humans, can understand complex ideas like "community."

maybe i'm being too abstract. i really do seem to be terrible at getting ideas across, sometimes.
if it's ok for me to steal his candybar, it's ok for him to steal my candybar. if this is the system we live in, our options as to what to do about having our candybars stolen are to A) get over it and just get better at stealing/protecting candybars or B) make it not ok to steal candybars.
it's not hard to see which option is better. if you're stuck in system A), you're forced to waste valuable candybar producing time protecting your candybars from being stolen. system B) is great but i left it pretty vague as to "how?"

i feel that the religious answer to "how do we make it not ok?" is to oversimplify. the conclusion of "it's not ok" is there but, like my math tests always had written on them in red ink, "you didn't show your work."
if it were just me and our brother and one candybar, it might be difficult to figure out but the world is much larger than that. we cooperate in small groups and massive multi-civilization coalitions and the best way to make these cooperative efforts work is to work from a basis of individual equality. if i believe that our brother is my equal, his feelings are equally valid. his property rights are equally valid. if i don't stand up for his right to keep that candybar, i have less reason to believe he would stand up for my right to keep anything. i don't need to rely on a list of "this is ok because i say so" and "this is forbidden because i say so" advice. all i need to do is decide that cooperation is more favorable than isolation (i don't always like interacting with people, but i love the crap out of electricity, grocery stores, pants i didn't make myself, etc.). understanding this, we can work to establish rules to define acceptable/unacceptable behavior to encourage more effective cooperation.

it's not about "right" vs "wrong." it's about "better" vs "worse."

i hope all my rambling has been more effective than the short answer of "if religion is man made, as is assumed by atheists, all morals contained therein, whether good or bad, are man made and therefore not actually based on religion."

I have a problem when people look at things that happened a long time ago and wag their fingers and shake their heads without looking at the context. Different situations require different approaches. What where the invading Hebrews to do, let all the Canannites live so that they could organize a resiestince and kill all the Hebrews? Live in the deasert forever? It's easy for you to say "tsk tsk" when you have a house that isn't surrounded by a bunch of human sacrificing, prostitution worshipping barbarians who want to kill you.

Personal experience suggests that humans are incapable of understanding community.

Just because it's ok for you to steal his candybar wouldn't make it ok for him to take yours. a lot of ideologies have surfaced over the years that are about enpowering one individual at the expense of all other living things. In the absense of an absolute moral authority, who is to say that such ideologies are wrong?

Let's say you and your brother form a candybar coalition. But someone contests your coalition's belief that candy theft is wrong. You try to explain the coalition's position to him, but he would rather defend his candy than give up his right to steal candy. What do you do? Do you have the moral authority to punish this person for candy theft? Do you have the understaing of morality to say that this person's views are wrong and yours are right? furthermore, say there is someone outside your candy coalition who's views you don't know and he refuses to share them with you. Should you trust this person to not steal the coalition's candy? is it alright to steal this person's candy as they are not in the coalition, and are refusing to join?

Why is your brother your equal? It is possible to cooperate with someone and still believe you are superior to them, and many civilizations have held such beliefs in the past, bolth on individual and national levels. What happens if you and your brother have a disagreement? If you are both equal, who decides who is right and who is wrong?

"There are not good people and bad perople, only better people and worse people" Is a quote I intend to put in a story someday. but that aside, saying "the world isn't black in white, it's shades of gray" is just pointing out a technicality. A world of light gray and dark gray isn't functionally any different from a black and white one... another quote I hope to put in a story someday.

surely, you can see which ideologies work better. that's the point. we both accept this but we differ on how we interpret how.

i'm not wagging my finger at the acts, we still had a long way to go in moral invention/innovation. i'm wagging my finger at anyone who thinks the god that told them to do it is a good source of morality. as the supreme being, you'd think he'd know better.

look to israel/palestine now. leaving aside the fact that it's not going to happen, wouldn't it be better if they took their morality from a neutral source? of course it's much more complicated than that with so much history of violence. "sorry i killed your people" doesn't cut it but killing more people isn't helping.

you seem to be a big fan of the idea that a lot of christians misinterpret or otherwise fail to adhere to the morality presented in the bible but you, yourself, pick and choose what aspects are and are not morally acceptable. you reinterpret offensive material with explanations of context, ignoring the context in which you propose christian morality be taken: that the bible and the god it reveals are an immutable source of moral guidance, without which morality is unimaginable.

if someone truly refuse to accept anyone who doesn't interpret the bible exactly as they do as christian, they should probably call them self something else, as "christian" is already taken.