Re: Would you like to be fried with that?
Again, apologies to The Register for the very long posts.
Oh dear. Where did you get these arguments? Christian Apologetics for Dummies?
Is that a poor attempt at an ad hominem?
Your comment reeks of contempt for those with a less religious world view.
Again, no. I just posed a question. Is that question so distressing as to make less-religious people angry? If so, then I apologise.
You also demonstrate a level of confidence which is both remarkable and ill advised in someone so ignorant of their basic argument.
The great thing about this argument, the argument from morality, is that it's such a simple argument to explain. Therefore, you're quite mistaken I'm afraid.
So, as you have been so disdainful of those with a rational world view, I won't make too much effort to be polite.
I won't reciprocate that impoliteness, thanks.
Before I get on to my main point, let me say that it's not the fault of others that you lack the imagination and intellect to understand how a sense of morality might evolve ...
Straw man. This goes to show that you misunderstood the question being asked.
It's not "why do we act morally", it's "why should we act morally?". As I said above, why should we "oblige" to our genes when we can "revolt" against them, and why should we cooperate nowadays?
The "do" can be explained in terms of evolution. The "should" can never be.
Situations that threaten our safety ... less protective of humans that aren't in our social group and/or don't look like us.
You're mixing up morality with people who have that morality.
People might eschew morality for whatever reason, but morality itself is unaffected, unchanged. There are pricks, but morality itself isn't affected by what pricks do.
Many Americans, as well as people around the world, felt angry, and vocally protested when watching leaked footage of American soldiers torturing detained Iraqis in prisons 5000 miles away.
Even though Iraqis are (a) of the stigmatised out-group and (b) the tormentor is of the in-group, it moved their sense of right and wrong.
Murder of an innocent is wrong, even if I absolutely abhor the murdered.
Also, your conflation of biology with politics is a nonsense ... Wishfull thinking, it's a bugger isn't it?
You might believe it's nonsense, but many totalitarian regimes didn't, and happily employed biology (and trash like craniometry as an "evolution meter").
Surpise! Empirical reality provides us with copious amounts of evidence to the contrary. Are you not familiar with the 1969 riots in Murray-Hill, Montreal
Thanks for the evidence backing me up ... that was nice! :-)
No religion (no accountability), no moral sense (so much for morality-not-based-on-religion) and no law and order ... evolution took its course. It was bound to happen. And what's more, materialistically, it can never be proven that what they did was "wrong" (not harmful, mind you, but wrong.)
Then there's the folks in New Orleans ... arrived to remind people of their "innate morality".
Thanks for the example. Again, we're from nothing, doomed to oblivion and the law is absent. Then on what grounds should they eschew their own survival (and pleasure)?
(Innate morality alone doesn't work. This is why you need religion to go with that innate morality. This is also why morality without religion is bound to fail.)
Clearly neither 'inherent morality' or any 'God' that could enforce it, was effective in preventing twisted leaders being above the law.
Because both innate morality and religious morality broke down at that point in time.
(And I've tackled the problem of evil in the other reply).
Tellingly many of the worst attrocities of recent times were committed by one religious group on another e.g. the Armenian and Greek genocides, or the religious massacres in the Punjab around the time of Indian partition. Was God on holiday?
I'm copying and pasting my reply from above: God or no God, humans are going to kill each other. More people have been killed in the two world wars (and under Pol Pot and Mao Zedong and, heck, North Korea's regime) than in all "religious" wars combined. And last time I checked, Mao Zedong was a strict Social Darwinist and atheist who did all his "cleansing" in the name of Darwinism.
To answer your main rhetorical question ... No-one.
That's the point I was driving at all day long. Not only they are unstoppable, they cannot even be proven to have done something objectively wrong! if we're born out of nothing, doomed to nothingness, then there's absolutely no reason why one shouldn't indulge in "pleasures" people deem to be demented.
Nobody can "prove" a psychopathic cannibal wrong. All we can do is try to stop him. But we can never "prove" that he had done anything wrong ... if religion isn't considered.
Some were religious, some not, but that ain't the point
No, it's a very important point. Actually, none of them were religious. Yes, even al-Baghdadi, whose acts definitely go against every single Islamic tenet. If I tell you I'm not a thief while I'm going through your pantry, would my words carry any weight?
If any of them were religious, they wouldn't have acted that way, and people who have been unjustly killed "in the name of God" are going to be avenged by all-fair God in the end.
no one was there to control them and 'God' Certainly didn't show up to fix things before they went out of control.
That assumes that they have done objective materialistic wrong.
On top of all that is the copious evidenence that the religiosity of a nation is correlated with many negative measures of societal health. Religious countries are more violent, poorer, less altruistic, less educated and less happy on average than non-religious countries.
Therefore, one would expect that every country that ditches religion would top the charts in all measures.
Liberia. Very liberal country, yet among the world's poorest.
North Korea. The people are very poor, despite the government's nukes.
I could go on. It's not religion, it's how the country is ruled and managed and how much per capita is spent on research.
Israel for example spends more on research than all the Arab countried combined ... while in Jordan, their next-door neighbors, the maximum amount for a scientific grant is $7000. That's why Israel is much more developed.
Speaking of topping the charts, "developed" countries top the charts for suicide and rape rates per country, while religious countries are at the bottom of these chart. So much for happiness.
And less altruistic? In Islam, every single adult has to pay 2.5% of their net worth per year to the poor. Even if that amount was forced to be taken.
2.5% of a $100000 = $2500 per year. And that's only the obligatory amount. Per adult. The bare minimum that makes you a Muslim.
Yet we still see poverty rates soaring in Muslim countries. This is because people don't bother with paying their obligatory alms.
It's said that in one early caliphate (that of Omar bin Abdulaziz), poverty was eradicated and alms were literally stacked with no takers, because everybody basically had enough. The extra money was used to procure birdseed which was sprinkled in the fields, so that "it wouldn't be said that a bird had gone hungry under Omar bin Abdulaziz."
The homicide rate of the 10 least religious countries is 1.01 per 100,000, that same stat for the most religious countries is 5.1
Do they also happen to be among the poorest of countries?
Did anybody bother to go and see what makes people do that? It might just be poverty (and being cross with God for not making them rich). You never know.
All you need to do is look at the most religious regimes. There have been and remain many, and ISIS is an excellent recent example. The abject brutality, cruelty and inhumanity of that regime are almost beyond description.
ISIS, or a bunch of thugs who just happened to call themselves religious.
Back to the example on the thief who rummages through the pantry while maintaining that he isn't a thief. Do his words carry any weight?
Similarly, when a bunch of thugs from God knows where shows up in 4K cinematography cameras, brand-spanking-new Toyota HiLuxes (as opposed to rusty old jobs used by all the other militias including the Syrian army) and lots upon lots of guns, then indiscriminately uses those guns upon everybody ... how's that different from any other "secular" criminal gang doing the same? Their acts speak louder than their words. In the very Islam which they claim to represent, there's a very special class of (present-life) punishment for these kinds of people.
But the truth remains that those scumbags ran their fiefdom in a way that was much closer to the letter and the spirit of the holy scriptures than any other Abrahamic religious regime of recent times.
Are you sure we follow the same man?
So WHO IS stopping them from being above the law? Again, no one.
Who's proving they've done any objective harm either? (Materialistically.)
If we're all products of evolution, then why should human life have any special status compared to that of bacteria?
And we commit genocide of unspeakable levels when we wash our hands.