Atheists and Accountability

[whatsthestoryinbalamorytoday]

Hi

My MIL is an athetist and I've had atheist friends in the past. They are the most morally corrupt people I've ever met.

People who believe in God or some form of higher being and an ultimate judgement day or reward (even through reincarnation) live by a certain set of rules e.g. 10 commandments. In a way it makes you aware of a higher being or that you will eventually be held accountible for your actions and should (in an ideal world) stop you doing bad things.

People like my MIL sleep around and do whatever they please regardless of who they hurt or how immoral the act is. As long as she's not breaking any laws of the land (and adultery is not one of them) she thinks it's fine to get away with it. Because she doesn't believe in God, she believes that she has in fact "got away with it".

What are your opinions on this? How do atheists enusre they don't do bad things? Whih set of rules/principles do you follow?

"tennent" ... tenet

I don't think we need to get into asking whether people celebrate xmas when they say they are not religious
we celebrate xmas and it has nothing to with jesus in our house, sorry to offend but that is what it is like.

My grandparents weren't religious either. On either side. Morals don't necessarily have to come from a religious doctrine. Morals are also somewhat flexible & subject to some interpretation (eg some religions practice polygamy and see it as morally OK, others abhor it)

Trinty-bit of a contradiction as the 10 commandments also teaches to serve 1 God.

Twiglett-very good point!!! In the amazon and tribes in Africa, it is celebrated (in some customs) when a member of another tribe is murdered-they actually go out of their way to do it as an initiation ritual. So yes, murder is more of a religious concept I think. Some cults make suicide pacts etc.

ok the nine commandments that are left, you know what I mean though

serve 1 God and yet Catholics have a holy Trinity?

twiglett

you're not being ignored-this isn't a playground for God's sake!!!

of course its a playground

I must admit my humanity falls down as I do covett my neighbours ass

she has a very fine ass if you ask me

oh dear balamory.

In one thread of comments you have summed up for me why religion is such a negative influence in the world, and why I am so glad not to have a part in any of it.

It is truly bizarre, bearing in mind your OP, that you have come across here as the least moral and most rude of any posters, and incredibly blinkered to boot.

It seems obvious that this is a deliberate attempt to wind people up, but I hope that you don't really believe in a religion, because believe me, you are doing it no favours.

Oh no.....

The "major" Christian religious festivals all kind of hijacked the paganistic solstice festivals. Hijacked is perhaps too strong a word - gradually coincided with is better - to encourage the pagans to follow Christianity (that and burning them of course, but that's nothing to do with you or modern Christianity).
Christmas was "Yule" - a celebration of Winter with feasts etc. The pagans, especially the Celts, decorated trees with painted stones to encourage Spring to come back and bring life etc.
Easter - the pagan spring festival of the goddess Oestre (as in Oestregen) celebrating the coming of the new life to the world (hence eggs, rabbits and the like).
Sooo - I don't actually celebtrate Christmas. I think it's become a commercially corrupt event. I would rather say I celebrated Yule.
I never celebrate Easter

Trinity a lot of families don't actually "celebrate" Xmas like they should-it's just a commercial event, an excuse to get pissed and buy loads of pressies!!!!

Kids are certainly not disinclined to hurt things, they have to be taught. That's why you have children who hit others in the nursery, they pick on each other, pull wings off flies etc.

Twiggy-Catholics have the Holy Trinity which makes up 1 God....they believe it's like a kinder egg. The egg is made up of the wrapper, the chocolate and the toy inside.

OP needs to learn to spell for a start. I love it when people assume that all the "rules" must have come from Christianity and been watered down over the generations, so even though people may not be religious they are still following "Christian principles". Suggest OP goes and reads up a bit on the history of organised religion and how much older traditions were completely hijacked and appropriated.

If you wanted to start a "debate" and seriously seek people's views then maybe you shouldn't have written such an inflammatory and nasty OP. So people should ideally be too terrified of divine retribution and punishment in the hereafter to "sleep around"? Sounds like progress to me.

Parp.

Balamory, you might be interested to know (with regard to your original question) that Richard Dawkins mounts a fairly convincing argument in 'The God Delusion' that even many religious people do not actually derive their morals from their religion but from the broader system of morals current in society at the time.
His arguments for this are that:

1. religious texts and instructions are actually full of rules that people ignore, so along the line someone has made the decision that, say, it's not important to forbid people from wearing clothes of different fabrics together (that one's somewhere in the Old Testament)
2. the morality people follow changes as society changes, even if the religious texts don't change. For example, many people in modern society, religious ones included, value tolerance highly, which has not always been the case.

Where do theories come from? People take what they have experienced from situations/circumstances and makes morals regarding them.

There is nothing new under the sun and morals from many different faiths or walks of life reflect one another. There is a hazy merge of many philosophies and belief systems these days, which personally I think is a good thing.

Kathy

Thanks for that. Do you have a website link?

And the 10 commandments were given to Moses - several thousand years before Christ, so can't technically be "claimed" by Christianity

The Dawkins book is here but you would probably need to get hold of it to get a full sense of his arguments - there may be a bit of a summary in one of the reviews but it would take a while to find.

Hmm a mixed response to that book. Unfortunately, being a biologist doesn't make such a strong argument that he actually knows what he's talking about. Would have been better him being a theologist or philosopher.

Do you believe in the big bang theory?

There have been some threads on the book in general, Balamory, including discussion of exactly the point you raise about whether you need to be a philosopher or theologian to discuss the existence of God.
However I mentioned it here not because of the general argument about whether or not God exists but purely because I think the point about morality not always being derived from religion is relevant to your question.

Oh, and your q about whether I believe in the Big Bang - yes, but I don't see why it's relevant here?

I suppose I think that a mathematician teaching home economics is not as credible as a home ec teacher teaching home ec. Doesn't mean that they won't come out with as good knowledge, but to have been educated in that field makes a difference to the credibility.

Big bang theory-was just interested to know

interesting because I think the opposite - he's coming at it from a scientific, analytical point of view based on observed behaviours not from the basis of review of texts and readings from people with a point of view/belief system to put across.

meowmix

from observations he wouldn't have got a true insight into any religion. From the way people act and follow the rulings of a religion(their interpretation of it)you can't judge a religion. E.g. Catholics, Protestants, Church of English, Pentecostal Church etc etc etc, they're all part of Christianity. To have followed just one or a few people, you can't get a real insight into what that religion teaches.

To make a proper judgement, you need to go to the root source of knowledge. The place where these people get their inspiration from, otherwise it's just Chinese Whispers because everyone has their own spin off idea as to what the religion teaches