You mean Rambo-Kitty?

Yeah, I think you've missed something here.  I'm a pacifist.  Really.

Rambo-Kitty is a metaphor, you see.  You're familiar with the saying "Curiosity killed the cat," right?  Well, this curious cat kills irrationality through the power of science and reason.

Sorry, kiddo.  Read some of my posts.  I'm about as anti-violence as it gets, and I'm also about the most easy going person on the boards.  Show some imagination, ok?  It's like... you know... literary... and shit.

Uh. Is he also vulnerable to Kryptonite?

I think you may need to have a talk with your parents. Superman: Issue 237 is, perhaps contrary to what you told, not a canonical version of the Bible.

I'm glad to know that you do not consider yourselves violent, at least not yet.

But I am curious to know what code of moral law that you follow as an atheist that makes murder wrong, or that makes stealing wrong, or lying or cheating or deceiving wrong.

Are not your major tenants as follows?:

1. look out for number one

2. survival of the fittest

3. do unto others before they do unto you

4. live, eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die (live it up and fear not to face judgement for it)

5. lie, cheat, steal trick and deceive as long as you can get away with it, just dont hurt anyone that you don't want to.

6. people are just animals, so use them and treat them as such unless it benefits you to treat them better.

7. good and bad is reletive; therefore for me it will be whatever I make it.

It seems to me that any government baised upon such principals is doomed to failure and any society baised upon such would be unbearable to live in. Governments would constantly be overthrown and the people would have eachother to fear most of all. You can thank the forefathers of this nation that they built the laws of this country upon Biblical principals and morals.

Now back to the more critical thing to consider. Have you ever used your super intellegent reasoning skills to consider that there must be a creator who created the delecate, intricate, and interdependent life on earth? Don't overlook that word interdependent. From what I have heard of Charles Darwin he finally came to admit at the end of his life that the theory of evolution is proven false by such intricate and interdependent things as the human eye. You see, the human eye has many aspects that would have to have evolved at the exact same time in order to prevent natural selection from ruling it out. Tear ducts, optic nerve, retna, lens, cones, rods, etc all had to evolve at the exact same time or natural selection would rule out the mutation from continuing. The chances that all the aspects of the eye mutated into exhistance at the exact same time is astronimacally small. If you wish to reason and to consider more such evidences which prove that God created life on earth, then check into the Creation Research Institute.

Seek the Lord Jesus while He may be found, call upon Him while He is still near. He can be you saviour now or you judge at the Great White Throne judgement. Please consider these thins before its to late.

Isaiah 1:18  Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

I can see that you have not stopped to throughly consider the character, nature and claims of God.

If your're going to be rational, you have to consider all the claims that God has made and just what he would act like if they were all true.

He claims to be holy (pure from sin), just (executes perfect justice), gracious (gives to the unworthy), merciful (desires to withhold judgement), longsuffering (gives us time and space to repent), loving (cares for us so much that he was was willing to die in our place), etc.

Just from the handful of His atributes that I mentioned above, we could easily consider the following:

That His holiness demands punishment for sin. (The wages of sin is death.)

That His justice demands that the proper judgement be executed.

(Perhaps I should mention here that Hell was created for Lucifer (Satan) and for the angles that followed him in his rebellion in heaven to overthrow God. This was high treason since Lucifer was perhaps the highest ranking Cherub given the job of guarding over the holiness of God. Hell was not created for man. Nevertheless, it appears to me that man became worthy of the same punishment when he joined the rebellion through disobedience to God at Lucifer's advice.)

That His mercy would find a way for mankind (which was tricked into the rebellion) to find forgiveness and pardon.

Exactly as we might expect from a God with such wounderful attributes, God's justice demanded a perfect (someone without sin) blood sacrifice (the life of the flesh is in the blood, and so the flesh was not offically dead until the blood departed from it) to pay for the sins man has done.

All men being born sinners, only Jesus (God the Son) could meet the requirement of a perfect sacrifice. It does no good for a sinner to die for a sinner, only the death of the sinless can count for the sinner.

Since Jesus never sinned, death could not hold him and he arose from the dead and is now at the right hand of the Father speaking on behalf of his "sheep".

It is clear to me that only Jesus deserves to be "second in command". Only Jesus wil love his sheep, feed his sheep, die for his sheep and fight off the wolves. Who would you rather have, Lucifer?, Karl Heinrich Marx?

I am quite sure a few of the website members here are military or have been in the military.

AND

www.maaf.info

Just in case you think atheists dont protect their own, and your sorry butt as well too. But according to people like you only people who kill for Jesus are worthy of serving. The rest of us are mere token tax revinue for the IRS, as long as we sit quietly at the back of the bus.

Actually, since you're the one claiming the moral high ground, I'd like you to back-up your moral system first:

 - My distant ancestor (Eve) commits a transgression.

 - God is so displeased at the transgression that he visits retribution upon Eve, as well as decides to judge everyone yet to even exist in Eve's lineage as 'sinners', effectively faulting the entire human race forever for one person's mistake.

 - God eventually decides that he'll forgive us, but only if he gets to visit unimaginable torture on one of us first, and even after that reserves his forgiveness only for those who pledge to praise him endlessly for all eternity afterward.

How does this create a system of 'perfect morality'?

The answer is , Yes!

I have risked my life on several occasions to save and protect not only atheist but Christians, without offer of heaven.  Now I must question the authenticity of your compassion.. Do you only offer this pseudo-compassion on basis of reward in heaven?

If you knew you weren't going to heaven would you still be willing to sacrifice your life for your fellow man? I doubt it and that's perhaps why you struggle with accepting there are those that would.

You don't understand compassion at all, you simply understand commidity.

Let's not forget our Buddhist/Atheist brethren.. Thich Quang Duc.

 Actually, "fitness" means something different in evolution than it does in everyday life.  "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase that needs to be consigned to File 86.  For one thing, as far as natural selection goes, it's reproductive fitness that matters, and the lifespan of an existing organism is irrelevant, even compared to its peers.  In other words, a critter that lives for one year and produces twenty offspring is more reproductively fit than a critter that lives for five years and produces ten offspring.

For another thing, "Survival of the Fittest" has often produced various theses suggesting ways in which people killing other people is part of "nature's design," and other such nonsense.  As I said, natural selection is concerned with reproductive fitness.  It doesn't care if you kill the other males.  It cares if you produce more offspring than them.

Though it's kind of counter-intuitive, you could actually have an organism that used less resources but used them more efficiently, thus reproducing more, and it would be more fit, and its genes would survive better.

In short, there is absolutely NOTHING that can be derived from evolution that dictates a particular moral paradigm.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha! You officially have zero ability to think critically. Congratulations, you're probably very good at being religious.

 Hey guys, check this out.  I'm going to post a link to an article that explains the origins of morality.  Our interlocutor is not going to read it, or having read it, is not going to understand it.  He's going to ignore it completely.

Here it is:

What Does Sugar Have To Do With Murder?!

I already answered this from an evolutionary standpoint.  If "survival of the fittest" has any scientific meaning, it is referring to genes, not organisms.  The fittest genes are the ones that produce organisms that reproduce the most effectively.  That's it.  Period.  End of story.

"Survival of the fittest" has nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to do with politics, eugenics, morality, or anything else at the level of social organization.

In natural selection, there are things called "fitness indicators."  The peacock's tail is one of the best known examples.  Unfortunately, people get things a little bit confused.  The tail is the result of a rather complicated set of interacting and opposing forces.  In function, it's a lie detector.  If a peacock has managed to survive to adulthood carrying that gaudy predator-magnet around, there's a good chance that its offspring will also have a good chance of surviving to adulthood.

This is all well and good, and most people get it, but what they don't get is that the peacock's tail doesn't necessarily have anything to do with his own life, or his ability to get food, or to compete with other males, or anything else.  Somewhere tens of thousands of generations back, peahens began selecting males for the gaudiness of their tails.  It could have been anything else, like bands of color on their legs or spots around their eyes.  The actual fitness indicator doesn't indicate survival fitness directly.  It indicates enough resources to keep the indicator long enough to reproduce.  In the example of a peacock, if a male is devoured by a predator ten minutes after copulation, and it was a direct result of having that big-ass tail, then from an individual survival point of view, the tail was a hindrance.  From a reproductive point of view, it has done its job.

Well, not exactly.  Society is a filter through which our moral instincts are honed and refined, but without society, we still have these instincts.  Have you read my essay on this subject?

What Does Sugar Have To Do With Murder?!

Funny... I've written an article about this, too...

Free Will: Why we don't have it, and why that's a good thing.

And another one...

For New Atheists: Is This Really All There Is?

In that first essay, I address human empathy towards animals.  You really should give it a look.

 No worries, Yaerav.  I definitely wrote those for readers who are highly proficient in English.

My main issue is that "survival of the fittest" is ONLY about evolution.  As I mentioned, it simply doesn't mean what most people think it means.  I wish people who know what it means would only use it in the proper context.  If so, maybe we'd stop hearing about how evolution was the basis for Hitler's ideas.

Admittedly, I get my panties in a bunch over a few words and phrases, but as you've probably noticed, I'm more of a stickler for definitions than most people.  I believe most of  the disagreements in the world have at least something to do with a misunderstanding of definitions.

Humanity will not find peace untill the idea of "blood cults" based on the worship of the state or god, become dead memes.

There are no chosen people. There is no master race. Their is no magical day or month deity that magically gives a dictator or president power. The janitor, cleric, Pope, President, fry cook, will all eventually die.

Quit crossing your fingers with the false 4 leaf clover books of antique myths. Don't blindly worship a politicain or celebrity or religious figure. Dont seek a fascist utopia via force of government. Don't expect all 6 billion people to be a clone of you or your religion or your nation.

We are all the same species. We all want love. We all want a home. We all want shelter. We all want a means to survive and a voice. Unless we stop treating detractors as being of a different species, we will always have the ability to commit the cruelist of acts.

Good deeds are not magical nor do they require one day to do them. We can all do something small every day to let our neighbors know that we are all in the same boat with one planet to live on.

What I'm apparently not conveying well is that "survival of the fittest" is part of evolution, but it only works with reproductive fitness.  If we try to use any other meaning of "fit" in the evolutionary principle, it is unworkable.  The popular notion of "survival of the fittest" is attributed to Darwin, so if someone is using fit in another way, they're just spouting nonsense.

So, when someone talks about survival of the fittest, they mean one of two things:

1) Evolutionary survival of the most reproductively fit

2) Something with no basis in fact.

I have yet to see anyone make a meaningful analogy between genes and memes.  For that matter, I have yet to see a coherent definition of a meme that includes a unit of reproduction.  

If we just take the word "fitness" out of the equation, we can do this a lot better.  I call it the law of "survival of the best able to survive."  This broad (and almost tautological) statement basically just asserts that in any system in which some things survive and others don't, the ones that are best equipped to survive (in whatever way) tend to survive.

There are still problems, though, because the definition has to be so broad as to be nonsensical for it to work. 

You're making my case quite well.  Survival of the fittest doesn't apply at the level of personal fulfillment or happiness.  That's what I've been saying all along.  I don't have any children, and I've been surgically altered such that I won't be having any.  My genetic line is going to die out, so I am unfit.  Curiously, I'm quite good at personal survival and happiness.  I'm also a shrewd businessman.  Go figure.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I don't mean to separate society form individuals.  I mean to say that whatever society we happen to be a part of is the filter through which our individual instincts and morals are shaped.  A feral human alone in the woods has the same moral instincts as you or me, but he does not have the benefit of socialization, so he will be closer to what we could call "instinctively moral" than someone raised in a society.

Yes, our moral instincts evolved as our social nature evolved.

First off atheists don't start fights or wars we don't even hold meetings you don't see any atheist channels on tv do you yet their are an enormous amount of religious channels spoiling good tv.We are a brotherhood of social realists that know that a god does not exist yet we are socially responsible people. If dying meant something like maybe a trip around the universe i might consider it but we all know dying only makes you insect food with no 40 virgins or living a second life in heaven,so whats the sense in shortening your life any more than this planet allows.So lets all be good for goodness sake and throw all this nonsense about gods out the window. BE HAPPY,DON'T WORRY

How did I miss this topic? Grr.

Just so you know, our violence is likely to increase with the violence of theists. So if we ever do go around killing people, you can blame yourself for starting it.

There's no such thing as a moral law. Morality is subjective. What is good and right for me is evil and wrong for you, and vice versa.

No. Those are not tenets of atheist morals. There's no such thing as a list of atheist morals. Everyone has their own morality.

Ironically, it is the theist government that most closely approximates the morals you suggested above. So you're arguing against yourself here. Congrats on a job well done.

Sarcasm is unbecoming.

There's nothing delicate about life on earth. Life is the strongest force we are aware of short of a gamma ray or supernova. Life has survived impact after impact, catastrophe after catastrophe, and it's still covering the entire surface.

Any life forms that are interdependant with others have evolved that way, it had nothing to do with your invisible friend.

As for intracacy, that just shows how your god is unlikely, not the reverse. A god with infinate power could have created a stable system out of simplicity. Complexity argues against a creator.

I blasted it away. There's nothing left to look at.

In other words you've only been listening to idiots like Michael Behe. You don't know the first thing about evolution.

False. I'd let you go on, but I've heard this drivel far too many times to read through it again. Irreducible complexity has been proven wrong, ad absurdum. Look at the talk origins website for the debunking of everything else you said here.

*Snort*

Try going to a real school or institute for once. Not that pathetic example of believing in magic.

Yada yada yada. You have no idea how old and tired this crap is.

I can see that you have not stopped to thoroughly consider the fact that your god doesn't exist, does not have character, and does not have a nature.

Wrong. If you're going to be rational, you have to accept that you cannot prove gods existance. You're going to have to study logic. And you're going to have to divorce yourself from the false religion you follow.

Self contradictory and literally impossible. You fail. Try again.

Sin is a creation of religion. It does not exist, except as a fictional tool for the use of a theist.

Perhaps I should mention that lucifer was a creation of the church hundreds of years after the church existed? That your satan is just as fictional as your god? As your heaven and hell?

Amazing how solidly you believe in a story. I recommend to you Star Wars. It has a better story, better moral teachings, and is a shitload more entertaining to boot.

*Skims through the standard bs to any meat remaining..*

Damn. No meat left. Next post....

Damn. No more posts left to ridicule in this topic. On to the next....

Precisely. You're just a tourist, but I actually live here. So stop trying to tell me where the best pizza joint is.

They cant because, while theists and atheists agree that the species are just a "tourist", the reason they cant stop promoting the "best pizza joint" is because it is one they think we have to die to get to. The fact remains that the only pizza joints that exist are the ones that are real.

Which gives me pause to advise callers ordering pizza on a busy Friday night. Having worked at a major pizza chain, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF THOR, DO NOT CALL US UP AND THEN SPEND 20 MINS ASKING EVERYONE ELSE IN THE BACKGROUND WHAT FUCKING TOPPINGS THEY WANT ON THEIR PIZZA!

I have hung up on your asses and would advise any pizza joint to do the same. MAKE UP YOUR FUCKING MIND BEFORE YOU CALL US!

If I may address this one.

Yes. We are in foxholes and we are the best.

If you want cool, calm, decision making that avoids civillian casualties and completes the mission. You want atheist soldiers.

If you want crazy, unstable, unpredictable, freaked out, soldiers that believe they are magically protected by god, and are motivated by righteous religious blood thirsty hate. You want religious soldiers.

First hand experience here.

Actually there are no atheists in foxholes, as they intelligently prefer a mobile defence and are conducting a flanking attack on the enemy forces instead of praying in fox holes.

Best leave the religious soldiers behind. The enemies children tend to not get slaughtered in the media as much.

No atheists in fox holes indeed.

Hi spring_rain, 

In the Bible I read that God has massive mood swings from humble and loving to homicidal and narcissistic. Read your Bible carefully (the whole thing, not just the happy-pill parts) and try to explain the "justice" in the mass murders that he has either carried out directly or instructed his followers to carry out. Many people who de-convert from Christianity do so after reading the immoral activity that was previously unknown to them. 

Jesus' sacrifice is meaningless, it's not even a sacrifice. God essentially "sacrificed" himself to himself to create a loophole in the laws that he created. His incarnation suffers a little while and then gets to go to his Playboy Mansion in the sky and be God. Oh, and Jesus is both God and God's son at the same time. Yeah, that makes lots of logistical sense. (Sarcasm.)

An atheist would perhaps die for someone they care about, it is possible. However, self-sacrifice has nothing to do with what religious affiliation you have. Atheists and other freethinkers know that this lifetime is their only definite lifetime and they want to live it to the fullest instead of wasting it "preparing" for a hypothetical afterlife. 

You also assume that all atheists think only about themselves and are evolution-worshippers. We don't worship evolution. We don't worship anything. I know that this can be a bit hard for some people to wrap their minds around, but worship is not essential to human existence. Now that that's over with, you should also know that atheists are just as charitable as theists. Atheists give money to charity just as much as theists do - but we prefer to give our money to charities where we can be certain it's going to be used for good and not just to help a televangelist buy a new Ferrari. 

The "survival of the fittest" rule you speak of has nothing to do with natural selection. Natural selection shows that organisms unsuited to their environment will die out while organisms that are more suited to their environment will survive and produce more offspring. Atheists don't adhere by this as a dogma; it is a scientific fact. 

In addition, you claim that atheists live in a world of sorrow, sadness, depression, etc. How do you know this? I'm an atheist and I'm happy with my life. I am definitely not depressed. Also, what gives you the authority to say that certain people are feeling certain ways? Death is not a big deal for me; I don't want it to come prematurely but I don't fear it either. Studies show that if anything, theists are more afraid of death than atheists are. 

If all of the Bible's claims were true, then we'd be Christians already. The fact that we're not proves that we've found flaws in your dogma. 

No finite "crime" deserves infinite punishment. This is unethical and cruel, and hardly constitutes as justice. In fact, Hell is the sheer opposite of it. Would you burn a loved child or pet in fire for all eternity if it bit you? 

Think for yourself, question everything. 

Sincerely, 

SevenScarletSharks