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Can You Be Good Without God?


betsy

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5 minutes ago, hot enough said:

All the best snake oil salesmen were preachers. Ain't nothin' changed there.

 

Not all of them.  Just like Jesus had warned.....you gotta watch out for the fake ones.   Don't get conned.

Heed His advice, hot enough.    Don't swallow the toilet tank your boss feeds you.  

Don't waste your life away.  Come to Christ.

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11 minutes ago, betsy said:

he: All the best snake oil salesmen were preachers. Ain't nothin' changed there.

Betsy: Not all of them. 

No, I agree, not all of them. The smarter ones knew that they could make a living just selling snake oil. The Billy Grahams found they needed a new and different dog and pony show.

 

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21 minutes ago, hot enough said:

You've larned the ways of snake oil salesmen right good, Miss Betsy. 

 

 

 
Quote

 

48 minutes ago, hot enough said:

All the best snake oil salesmen were preachers. Ain't nothin' changed there.

 

 

Quote

Betsy: Not all of them. 

 

 
Quote

 

33 minutes ago, hot enough said:

No, I agree, not all of them.

 

 

So, you admit I'm right, and your statement was false. Good.

Then, speak the truth! Stop giving fake information!

 

 

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On 2017-04-01 at 7:15 PM, betsy said:

 

I believe what the Bible says about the final judgement.  There is a final judgement!  There are those who'd be cast in hell, or eternal damnation, or the final death.  God had set the rules that we may have eternal life.  You think God is only kidding?  That His Commandments aren't to be taken seriously, because there are no consequences?   That's how Satan would try to deceive us.

I know you believe that. You have said so many times. Your claim to be a christian inherently implies that. I do not doubt that that is what you believe.  

 I think a punishing god is all bunk. God would never kid us about eternal damnation so it follows that your belief in eternal damnation is ungodly since eternal damnation is not something God would do, for eternal damnation would be an act contrary to the Goodness of God.   

But let me be clear: I am not trying to convert or subvert your beliefs. Your beliefs concerning god are yours and yours alone. My original reply was concerning your apparent belief that there would be no Good without God therefore God exists, I said why I did not think the OP video succeeded in showing that. 

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9 hours ago, Peter F said:

I know you believe that. You have said so many times. Your claim to be a christian inherently implies that. I do not doubt that that is what you believe.  

 I think a punishing god is all bunk. God would never kid us about eternal damnation so it follows that your belief in eternal damnation is ungodly since eternal damnation is not something God would do, for eternal damnation would be an act contrary to the Goodness of God.   

But let me be clear: I am not trying to convert or subvert your beliefs. Your beliefs concerning god are yours and yours alone. My original reply was concerning your apparent belief that there would be no Good without God therefore God exists, I said why I did not think the OP video succeeded in showing that. 

 

Why did God not create everyone good, for that matter?  Why are there bad people?  Why do we have to be given critical thinking, and have the responsibility to discern and make our choices?

 

Why would you think eternal judgement is unGodly, and not something good?  Why would removing the bad, be not good?  You see what happens when you mix rotten tomatoes with the good ones in the basket?

 

Furthermore, you're trying to impose your thinking as God's.  We don't have the capacity to understand His thoughts, and His ways. 

 

As for there being good without God - that can't be.  As explained, there wouldn't be any "good" and "bad" if we don't have a standard idea of what they are.  You're missing the point.

If we all have different ideas of what they mean, how can we have an objective standard?  That would be like having people set up their own  finish lines in races.  Would it still be a race, if we have varying finish lines? That's the analogy I could think of at the moment.

Edited by betsy
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Romans 2

12 All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. 13 For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.

14 (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.)

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On 3/31/2017 at 2:14 PM, betsy said:

You even quoted Dawkins - :lol: priceless, what a doober -  didn't you see him quoted in that cartoon?  Do your realize what he said implies?  And you talk about mess? 

 

Your video provided a snippet of Dawkins' comment. Here is the context:

Quote

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. [...] In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

Whether there is an all-knowing, all-loving creator or there isn't... the world we see works as if there isn't. The world is full of pain, suffering, injustice, fear, misery... delivered without compassion or discrimination. As you say, the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous.

The video attributes qualities like "equality" and "generosity" to God, but we don't see these qualities embodied in his creation. One baby can be born with a million-dollar trust-fund and loving parents... the next can be born with leukemia.  That bears more resemblance to the "pitiless indifference" Dr Dawkin describes than to Dr Craig's "equality and generosity".

On 3/31/2017 at 0:22 PM, betsy said:

This is about objective morality. 

   To put it simply, when we say "objective," it means it's the standard.  Without a standard, morality becomes subjective - everyone can have their own idea of right or wrong.

Everyone already has their own idea of right and wrong.

Even among Christians alone, the definition of right and wrong has been hotly debated constantly, for almost as long as Christianity has existed. Your video suggests that "equality", "generosity", and "sacrifice" are objectively as "good", and "greed", "abuse", and "discrimination" are objectively "evil".  And yet Christians have continuously debated and changed their ideas of all of these things over the centuries.  Dr Craig confidently proclaims that Abuse is objectively evil, and yet in centuries gone by, Christians have committed horrific acts of abuse in the belief that they were doing God's work. Torture and slaughter of witches and pagans and heretics, for example.   Equality?  Christians proudly note that Christians were leaders of the movement to abolish slavery in America.  They're not quite as proud that Christians were also leaders of the US movement to retain slavery, or that Christians were the ones who captured and kept the slaves in the first place.  Discrimination? Christians continue to debate which kinds of discrimination are and aren't acceptable, to this very day. Some Christians believed that the Bible supported segregation. Dr Craig says that discrimination is objectively evil, yet many different kinds of discrimination have been embraced by Christians over the ages, so clearly this is a subjective issue, not an objective one. Discrimination remains a hot-button issue in the United States right now as some Christians go to court to claim that their religion requires them to discriminate against others.  If Christians are tapped into an objective morality, how have Christian views on so many issues changed so dramatically over the ages?  One might suggest that there could still be an objective morality and we're just not able to agree on what it actually is... but is there any real difference between a subjective morality and an objective moral absolute that's continually being re-evaluated through ongoing subjective interpretation?  I'd suggest that there isn't.

Is a moral absolute even possible? Even the most clear-cut commandment-- thou shalt not kill-- isn't an absolute. We can all agree that there are situations where killing is necessary.  Trying to figure out if you're in such a situation is a matter of subjective judgment.  What about greed?  The video says that greed is evil, but people actually spend a lot of time and energy trying to rationalize or justify greed.  The video says that God is Love, and all of this objective morality flows from that principle, and that the objective morality it talks about stems from the commandment to "love thy neighbor as thyself".  And yet, people spend a lot of time and energy trying to find reasons to not love their neighbors. You yourself, betsy, recently posted a message explaining that you feel that this most central principle of the New Testament actually only applies to other Christians. 

The video includes an image of a newspaper with the headline "Man Kills Child" as something we universally recognize as wrong.  Yes, we do. And it's not just humans, either. Most types of animals feel the same way.  Every creature has some strategy for making sure its offspring survive.  For some types of animals, it's simply a matter of having so many offspring that the law of averages says enough survive to continue the species. For other types of animals-- mammals, birds-- care and nurturing are part of making sure their offspring survive. Most of us have seen some of the enchanting animal videos on the internet. One of my favorites is one where a big dog shows up in a yard and tries to grab a toddler... in a flash, a little house-cat attacks the dog like a fluffy little cyclone, chasing it away from the toddler. In another, a child falls down and hurts himself... mom arrives on the scene, but the family cat arrives too, thinks the woman has hurt the child, and makes her back away. A dog sees a girl swimming, and jumps into the lake, chomps a mouthful of her hair, and swims frantically to pull her to shore. A momma dog nursing an orphaned kitten along with her own puppies.  We see these videos and think it's cute or funny, but they also illustrate something much more important. They demonstrate how other animals, not just humans, are able to form bonds, even bonds that transcend species. And they illustrate the powerful instinct of protecting and nurturing their young. This is something that, as you say, is written in our hearts. And not just human hearts. It is transcendent.  If there were mammals that didn't have this instinct, they've gone extinct. If there are people born without the instinct to protect their young, they're not going to pass that gene on to future generations, because they aren't going to have descendants.  There might have been societies where there were no limits on killing, but those societies probably didn't last long.  Every human society has some minimum amount of principles to preserve order and unity and make sure the group survived. Every society that didn't have the minimum amount of principles to ensure its own survival died out.

Further on the issue of "Man Kills Child", we can look at two examples from the Bible in which God explicitly tells men to kill children.  One of them is when the Israelites massacred the Amalekites. God instructed the Israelites to kill every last man, woman, and child, even infants, even their farm animals. Everything. Nothing was to be left. If one supposes the killing of children to be an objective evil, this has to be pretty tough to reconcile with the notion of God as the definition of good. But Dr Craig tries anyway... he wrote an essay on the subject. "Obviously this sounds pretty bad, but..."    Ultimately, the fact that Dr Craig can attempt to rationalize such a horrific event as "not actually evil" demonstrates that no matter how black and white a case of "objective morality" appears, there's subjective wiggle-room.

A second example of God killing a man to kill a child is when God told Abraham to kill his own son.  Luckily for Isaac, God stopped him at the last minute, once he had seen that Abraham really did intend to go through with it. What was the point of this?  To make Abraham prove that his obedience to God was absolute... that he'd do what God told him, no matter how wrong it seemed. What's the message here?  The message is don't trust your instincts, that morality that is "written in our hearts".  The message is, don't listen to that innate sense of right and wrong that we possess... obey your religion instead.  But if God is the source of this "objective morality" we all supposedly possess, why would religion come into conflict with it?  And yet we see this in our world today. We see parents who believe in faith-healing ignoring their childrens' suffering because they think God wants them to. Like modern versions of Abraham, they're sacrificing their children because they believe God requires it.  Surely this would fall under Dr Craig's notion of "objectively evil", and yet here we are in 2017 with children dying from easily treatable diseases because parents are convinced that God wants it that way.

-k

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9 hours ago, kimmy said:

 

Your video provided a snippet of Dawkins' comment. Here is the context:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. [...] In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

 

Whether there is an all-knowing, all-loving creator or there isn't... the world we see works as if there isn't. The world is full of pain, suffering, injustice, fear, misery... delivered without compassion or discrimination.

 

 

Dawkins' and your observation(s) about the world just proved the point of the video!

And Dawkins had unwittingly provided a support for Craig's argument.   You're not indifferent to what you deem as, "pain, suffering, injustice, fear, misery... delivered without compassion or discrimination."  You both reacted to what you see.  I feel empathy in your tone....that's not what I'd call "blind, pitiless  indifference."

The fact that you and Dawkins,  both, recognize them as obviously wrong or bad things being done to others, is the point. 

 

As to the discussion of the world having purpose and design....that's best left for another thread.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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7 hours ago, kimmy said:

 

Everyone already has their own idea of right and wrong.

 

Yes, there is a universal idea of what's right and wrong - like murder is considered wrong - because of objective moral values.

There wouldn't be any "right" or "wrong" if there isn't an objective point of reference for such.

As an example, if there is no objective reference point, we wouldn't know what is "up,"  or what is "down."

 


 

Quote

 

Is a moral absolute even possible? Even the most clear-cut commandment-- thou shalt not kill-- isn't an absolute. We can all agree that there are situations where killing is necessary.  Trying to figure out if you're in such a situation is a matter of subjective judgment.  What about greed?  The video says that greed is evil, but people actually spend a lot of time and energy trying to rationalize or justify greed. 


 

 

We can all agree that murder, the unlawful, premeditated killing of another person - is wrong.

Rationalizing falls into subjective moral values.  Some people can rationalize why there's nothing wrong with stealing, or adultery.  That's a person's own viewpoint, which is no more valid than another person's viewpoint.

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12 minutes ago, betsy said:

 The fact that you recognize them as obviously wrong or bad things being done to others, is the point. 

It seems then, that agnostics like me can substitute "humanistic empathy" for "God" and it's win-win-win.  Sorry, I guess win-win.

Actually I like the idea that a collective human ideal of ourselves, more perfect and empathetic and self-knowing, is "god" whether you believe or not.

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9 minutes ago, betsy said:

 

Yes, there is a universal idea of what's right and wrong - like murder is considered wrong - because of objective moral values.

There wouldn't be any "right" or "wrong" if there isn't an objective point of reference for such.

As an example, if there is no objective reference point, we wouldn't know what is "up,"  or what is "down."

 

Morality is necessarily subjective.  "Up" and "Down" is subjective too: if means something on earth but nothing in a universal framework.  Murderers could see themselves justified in killing.

But you don't need mathematical or scientific proof for something to be generally agreed on as "good".  

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7 hours ago, kimmy said:

 

The video attributes qualities like "equality" and "generosity" to God, but we don't see these qualities embodied in his creation. One baby can be born with a million-dollar trust-fund and loving parents... the next can be born with leukemia.  That bears more resemblance to the "pitiless indifference" Dr Dawkin describes than to Dr Craig's "equality and generosity".

 

To a Christian, the reason for suffering is

 

Romans 5

Faith Triumphs in Trouble

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have[a] peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope. Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

 

I just watched the testimony of an English couple in their 50's who left for Pakistan to do mission works.  The living condition  is really tough they say........but like the Pakistani Christians who've been living in it, they truly are dependent on God (something that's harder to do at home due to all the amenities of comfort).

The message in the Bible is really heavy on trust and dependence on God.

 

 

 

 

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13 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:

It seems then, that agnostics like me can substitute "humanistic empathy" for "God" and it's win-win-win.  Sorry, I guess win-win.

Actually I like the idea that a collective human ideal of ourselves, more perfect and empathetic and self-knowing, is "god" whether you believe or not.

Can you be good without believing in God?  Of course, you can.

The question is, can you be good without God?

 

 

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7 hours ago, kimmy said:

 

Even among Christians alone, the definition of right and wrong has been hotly debated constantly, for almost as long as Christianity has existed. Your video suggests that "equality", "generosity", and "sacrifice" are objectively as "good", and "greed", "abuse", and "discrimination" are objectively "evil".  And yet Christians have continuously debated and changed their ideas of all of these things over the centuries.  Dr Craig confidently proclaims that Abuse is objectively evil, and yet in centuries gone by, Christians have committed horrific acts of abuse in the belief that they were doing God's work. Torture and slaughter of witches and pagans and heretics, for example.   Equality?  Christians proudly note that Christians were leaders of the movement to abolish slavery in America.  They're not quite as proud that Christians were also leaders of the US movement to retain slavery, or that Christians were the ones who captured and kept the slaves in the first place.  Discrimination? Christians continue to debate which kinds of discrimination are and aren't acceptable, to this very day. Some Christians believed that the Bible supported segregation. Dr Craig says that discrimination is objectively evil, yet many different kinds of discrimination have been embraced by Christians over the ages, so clearly this is a subjective issue, not an objective one. Discrimination remains a hot-button issue in the United States right now as some Christians go to court to claim that their religion requires them to discriminate against others.  If Christians are tapped into an objective morality, how have Christian views on so many issues changed so dramatically over the ages?  One might suggest that there could still be an objective morality and we're just not able to agree on what it actually is... but is there any real difference between a subjective morality and an objective moral absolute that's continually being re-evaluated through ongoing subjective interpretation?  I'd suggest that there isn't.

 

No one says  Christians don't do bad things.  The Scriptures had been abused and used to rationalize doing bad things.  No one says there are no relativists among Christians, either.

Stick to the issue, please.

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7 hours ago, kimmy said:

 

 

Is a moral absolute even possible? Even the most clear-cut commandment-- thou shalt not kill-- isn't an absolute.

 

Exodus 20

13 “You shall not murder.

 

 

 

Matthew 19

17 So He said to him, “Why do you call Me good?[f] No one is good but One, that is, God.[g] But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.”

18 He said to Him, “Which ones?”

Jesus said, “‘You shall not murder,

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7 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:

If you define 'good' as following God's way, or somesuch, then obviously no.  If there were no God, though, what is 'good' ?  What is this behaviour we're trying to engage in ?

Watch the video, Michael.

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