Honestly the whole “if there’s no god then how do you know right from wrong” argument is astounding to me, I don’t know how someone can say that with a straight face.
“So what you’re saying is that the threat of Hell is the sole reason you’re not a murdering rapist pedophile?”
Without the [holy book], how would morality exist?
Maybe we need to thank religion for saving us from some literal sociopaths…
I feel like this question is often pulled up in these conversations and it’s rather disingenuous.
Or rather it is taken disingenuously.
This question is not meant to say that if you didn’t have Jesus you would be a sadistic cannibal sociopath.
This question comes from the idea that what is God is good, and therefore if you don’t have God, you can’t possibly know what is good in a true and eternal fundamental sense, far beyond simple right and wrong.
Because if you think about it, if there is a God, then the universe and everything in it belongs to them, right?
And whatever they decide is good for their universe is the absolute barometric truth of what is good, right?
But far too often people are not able to encapsulate that thought and communicate it effectively when talking to people who are outside of their circles and areas of specialized knowledge, and therefore something gets lost in the translation even though the language stays the same.
This is a common issue in any field that gets excessively specialized, and it is typically exacerbated by the people who are inside the field, but not so far advanced into the field that they are aware of those pitfalls and how to navigate them.
So yeah, they’re not saying if it wasn’t for God they would rape and murder and kill and exploit. They’re saying that because of God they have a concept of something that is eternally true regardless of your individual impression of it, And if there was no God, there would be no thing like that in existence.
Honestly, I think it is disingenuous, and the argument is loaded. Namely, if a believer does effectively communicate the notion that God has some universal, eternally-true standard of morality, then the person making the argument can spring the trap:
If that standard of morality exists, we don’t know it. God hasn’t told us. The Bible is very definitely, historically the word of mankind. The standards it espouses have been relentlessly fought over by different religious factions with their own interpretations, and what’s more, they’re internally self-contradictory.
The idea that religious people need the threat of hellfire to behave just doesn’t stand to scrutiny, since so many of them have no problems professing an interpretation of God’s morality to justify whatever behavior they want.
The sad thing is, all of the nuance aside, the answer is very simple.
If there is a good place, the good people will go there. If there is a bad place, the bad people will go there. If there is no place, we all will go there.
Even a child can understand, right?
“The Kingdom of heaven is within you.” So the Kingdom of hell, too. “Ye shall tell a tree by the fruit it bear” so maybe what is manifest is what the collective sub/consciousness has created within them. Plus, things in theory seldom look exactly like what we envision. We are humans, we forget it don’t know about every single variable that either already exists or can arise.
But this is largely based on the kabbalist understanding of God, and I’m just beginning to scratch beyond the surface layer of wax, which is thick for reasons. Watching things play out around me also makes me understand how and why things became occulted (hidden).
Otoh, “free will” runs smack into constraints, natural and imposed. But that’s not much different than cells in a petri dish or in a human host, maybe.
Idk it’s early and I’m just waking up.
I remember a YouTuber explained that since watches work and had a maker, that humans are immensely more complex, so that’s evidence of a maker of the human.
Phones are more complex than watches. Phones are made by Jesus confirmed.
JC Mobile - Unlimited Data, Eternal Life.
Pascal’s Wager
My friend once told me he had heard this very convincing argument on why he should believe…
I told him the usual “gimme your wallet, I’m your god or whatever”, and he relented that maybe it’s not so simple.
Then a few years later, there he goes bringing it up again…
Holy shit that’s a good rebuttal.
The Bible. Never understood how anyone could read that and believe. The answer I leaned much later on is that they don’t read it.
‘If God isn’t real, why do you say oh my God?’
That was from the deputy head of my school…
Holy shit
Godly excrement exists. QED.
Fucking hell
Proof it’s getting hot in here
Cowabunga
… I’m not really sure about that one, never mind.
I had one guy who told me that he believed that God made the white people.
And that the black people evolved from monkeys.
And the people like me who are Native American and the Indians and Chinese and whatnot are all products of miscegenation between the white people who have souls and the black people who do not.
Surprisingly, being told that i am the proud possessor of some undefinable fraction of a human soul was not enough to get me to participate in their religion.
This really makes me rethink a lot of my core beliefs. I used to believe that racism is an ancient problem that we will one day overcome, but after reading this, I believe new types of racism can still be invented, and we have to fight those too.
That sounds very american.
So god copied an existing product, changed superficial details, and added his holy trademark?
Confirmed Bill Gates is God
All of them.
They’re all stupid.
If there were no god wed all have no morals.
If violently abusive rapist psycopath threatening to torture you is your only reason for being nice, maybe you’re a pos to begin with?
“It’s not a cult.” Wake up Karen, it’s a cult.
How would anything have been able to form, i.e. make more order, without decreasing entropy?
Of course there are multiple errors in that thought.
- Entropy does not mean an actual grade of (dis-)order or organization. It’s one model to grasp certain processes through that concept. Outside of these the model doesn’t hold.
- The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy cannot decrease in a CLOSED system (i.e. mass, energy, information flow at the boundary = 0). It doesn’t mean that within that system there can’t be local imbalances. For example: For a plant to be able to “order” - to use this term - its molecules to cells, Hydrogen atoms had to have been fused to Helium in our fusion reactor 150 million km away that we call sun which increases local entropy.
Of course there’s more wrong with it, but those would be the blatant ones for me.
I believe in God but found the arguments in The Brothers Karamazov (and yes I read the book) to be misguided. There’s a part in particular where a quasi-villainous character loses faith in God and suddenly goes right to murdering other characters who have been getting on his nerves. The whole thing takes Nietzsche to a whole new level. We aren’t the sum of our schools of thought; in fact, in my faith, God doesn’t really care about faith as much as he cares about how good we are. I’ve never met anyone before who doesn’t have at least some innate sense of some kind of boundaries.
“how else would you know the right thing to do?”
queried by a zealot at a picnic table in the park.
The weirdest to me are variations of, “If God didn’t exist it would make me feel bad.” Uhh???
This is like the best and most honest reason.
The sun rose today.
Mountains exist.
