Reply to If you don’t believe in God, why are you mad at religious people or religion?

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Reply to "If you don’t believe in God, why are you mad at religious people or religion?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't mind if people are religious, as long as they keep it to themselves.  Meaning: stop making laws based on your holy book and not on basic human morality.  [/quote]

There is no “basic human morality” without the reference point people refer to as “God.”[/quote]

That is a claim you have to prove or it is easy to dismiss BS.

[/quote]

You’re not paying attention.

The very idea of “right,” “wrong,” “moral” and “immoral” require some authoritative reference point, some “lawgiver.”  Otherwise relativism takes over. What one person thinks is good (typically for them) someone else will decide is evil (typically because it has a negative effect on them).  All sorts of behaviors that present day people in the West disapprove of on grounds of “basic human morality” used to be thought of as perfectly OK in the West, and still are in other places. Likewise, all sorts of behaviors that present day people in the West think are fine used to be roundly condemned in the West and still are in much of the world.

[b]If history proves anything it is that human beings are very poor at coming up and living in accord with any sort of “universal morality.”
[/b]
It is a common philosophical error to blame some human-defined “god” for this or that. Philosophically, “God” is the label people have come up with for a being with a certain set of immutable attributes that exist independent of that label. What is right or wrong can only be measured by comparison to some objective perfection — one of the attributes of “God.”[/quote]

"Coming up with" is pretty easy,  but "[i]living with[/i]" is something completely different.  See the history of the Jews in the Old Testament for example. How many times dis they disobey God?  But they're only human, after all.  Created in God's image and all that, so what do you expect?[/quote]

Actually, the God’s image part is the good part. The darkening of the intellect  and the corruption and misuse of free will attributable to human choices is where problems arise. [/quote]

But God gave them free will and then punished them for using it.  That's always been a conundrum to me.[/quote]

“Allowed their freely chosen actions to have their natural consequences” is probably a better term than “punished,” I think. You have to recall (while bearing in mind the allegory involved) that [b]prior to the Fall, our first parents had perfect intellects and uncorrupted will.[/b][/quote]
This is a part of "the Fall" that never made any sense to me. If Adam and Eve had "perfect intellects and uncorrupted will" then how did the snake bend their wills to his and outsmart their intellect?[/quote]

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