Theists are forever claiming themselves to be the guardians of "true morality" claiming that if belief in god wanes, morality goes out the window. Many of them build these strawman arguments with bogus "evidence" citing supposed "moral decay" of the last half century or so. They think without the threat of eternal punishment with a set of rigorous moral demands (I wont go into the problems involving the myriad ways of interpreting the moral demands), society will have no moral compass and no incentive to be moral.

Do people really need a belief in a supernatural parent who can dish out eternal punishment to be moral?Do they really need to have commandments spelled out in stone in order to know right from wrong? I think the answer lies in what motivates folks to abstain from an evil act. Say your coworker leaves a 20 dollar bill on his desk after he leaves for the day. Is the person who doesn't take it because he fears he's being watched morally different from the person who doesn't take the bill because he KNOWS in his heart that it's wrong, thinks about how his coworker might need that 20 dollar bill and knows that he couldn't enjoy the ill gotten gain for feeling guilty? Does it really take something supernatural to make a person behave like a decent human being?

Originally posted here, please bookmark, follow, etc. my blog.

Before I get into this, I'd like to ask you to forward this [as in, the link up top] to any christian you know who might be able to refute this somehow, and send it to other atheists to use in online debates if you think it's a good argument against christianity. I mean, I implicitly ask you to send every blog post to your friends just by posting it, but here I'm explicitly asking because I want real discussion here.

I discuss religion with christians a lot. In reality, I sort of miss religion, and would almost like to be convinced the religion I was brought up in is true. One of the biggest hurdles to overcome in order to reach that point is theodicy, as in "the problem of evil" not the epic Greek poem (that joke works better if you're reading this out loud, and are aware of The Odyssey). The Problem of Evil, from a christian standpoint, is that the world has a lot of evil in it, yet the christian god is portrayed in the bible as all-loving, all-powerful and benevolent. As Epicurus said:

(Yet another version of the same old Mabus crap - deleted. -Mod)

So I was thinking about the whole religion and behaviour arguments I've seen and then came across this BBC article.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14199078

Basically some guy shot a store clerk for being Muslim [also killed two others], was put on death row, and now the survivor is advocating that he not get the death penalty and be an "educator against ignorance."

So how far should forgiveness go? Should he be forgiven and be "an educator against ignorance" or just be executed?

I would like to note, that I don't think "forgiven" means released from jail.

What motivates people to forgive [the victim] and change [the shooter]?

This is my latest blog entry, but since nobody reads my blog, I might as well post it here to see what other atheists think.

There are a lot of fundie jerks on the internet, youtube in particular. About 3 months ago I happened on one who has a ridiculous video entitled "Evolution THEORY™ is Religion -- not Science"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XMbEmxKpuQ4

All hearsay.

The jerk who did the video is  1GodOnlyOne. I wrote a reply that this must be a joke right and he replied

I wrote a reply and was willing to engage him in a discussion but when I hit post it said I was blocked. I tracked him to his youtube channel and read stuff on his page including this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRk_TitdQ2o

Do you think that if we discovered extraterrestrial life elsewhere in the universe, be it intelligent life, or even microorganisms, that it would deconvert a lot of theists?

How could theists try and grapple with that, with any intellectual honesty?

How would apologists attempt to reconcile this with scripture?

Do you think they could even find something in scripture to support an idea that their 'God' could have created life elsewhere?

We eventually evolved 5 senses to help us survive. But trapped as we are, in our position in the universe, how can we sense things that we have not evolved to sense?

This is the question that sprung into my mind at the age of 8, at that time I was raised in the catholic religion, it was an independent thought that seemed to make logic of the existence of god. and it ended up perpetuating my faith for a few more years.

Later I began to see the inaccuracies and myths of the bible, the christian faith , and most organized religions. and slowly over time I associated more with an atheist view.

But this original question will not go away. and has led me to other questions, like:

In a study reported in the February 26 issue of Nature (Vol. 391, pp. 871-874), researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have now conducted a highly controlled experiment demonstrating how a beam of electrons is affected by the act of being observed. The experiment revealed that the greater the amount of "watching," the greater the observer's influence on what actually takes place.

I am quite confident that the Bible and most of judo christian, and Islamic literature is incorrect, and dangerous to the betterment of mankind. 

However:

These are my questions:

what came first the material world, or consciousness....and why?

Why are we as atheists, so certain that there is no god or higher power, when that certainty is so close to religious faith itself?

The End of Christianity: Book Review

by Matt DeStefano on July 10, 2011

I recently received John Loftus’ The End of Christianity, an anthology of some of the most profound atheist writers that delivers a variety of convincing arguments for the abandonment of the Christian faith. In lieu of new content, I decided to go ahead and write up a detailed review for his book. There are 14 chapters, and while I want to avoid summarizing each and every one of them I’d like to call attention to what I feel are some of the more noteworthy arguments.