Whoever says: “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted,” has got to be a greedy, selfish, rotten idiot who never learned to appreciate his natural capacity to look at our troubled world with courage, understanding, love, or compassion. Poch Suzara
3 comments:
Courage, Understanding, Love- all come from God! Without God's clear moral guidelines for right and wrong, the Earth has no reason to exist. Without God there is chaos! That's why we have ghettoes and slums and crime, and terrorism. The refusal of God brings utter ruin.
You see, if there is no God, we humans are all that exist. If it's just us in the universe, we make the rules. If we make the rules...
I could just walk into a crowded mall and start shooting people! When I'm taken to court, I could just say, "It's MY viewpoint that it's right to kill people. By punishing me, you're being intolerant!" Without God, I'd be let free! How silly is that?
Because God has given us moral guidelines to live by, we can have confidence that we are truly pleasing to our God and Father!
Wow, you poor little man with a boyish mentality.
Just as Christianity must destroy reason before it can introduce faith, so it must destroy happiness before it can introduce salvation.
When, if at all, will you ever take notice that Christinaity has a vested interest in human misery and poverty - especially of the worst kind - the poverty of the mind? Poch Suzara
I'm puzzled by Concerned's argument. I don't see how the xian deity and the xian religion can claim a monopoly on ethics/morality. Some reasons:
Circa 18th century BCE, predating Mosaic law by some 4 centuries, there was already the code of Hammurabi, a set of laws/rules that tell us that the Babylonians had an ethical and legal sense.
In Jesus' time the Essenes already considered slavery abhorent. But, as even Xian ministers confess, there is not a single passage in the bible that condemns slavery. The deity in the bible even prescribes how to trade slaves and how to deal with them. And Jesus himself is silent on this matter. It was only some two millennia later that Xianity finally condemned slavery. (Note that to say slavery was permissible then but not now is to subsribe to relativistic ethics or cultural relativism).
The bible is replete with stories of its deity either committing or commanding atrocious acts of murder, genocide, infanticide, rape, pillage, etc. For one thing you won't find any of these in Buddhism and its texts. Non-violence is among the cornerstones of that religion. It boggles the mind how a deity who is supposedly all-wise and all-loving, is the fount of morality, and who demands that humans be moral/ethical/loving could commit and command such heinous crimes. At the very least that deity sets a very poor example. There is also have a word for such behavior: hypocrisy.
In 1991 during a large meeting in Santa Barbara, California, the Dalai Lama declared, "We Buddhists are atheists." Need it be said that the Dalai Lama is probably the epitome of nonviolence and ethical behavior. He did not win the Nobel Peace Prize for being a man of decadence. And there are of course atheists around the world including those in such countries as Switzerland (where the majority are nonreligious) who are upright men and women. You don't see nonXian countries or nontheistic communities becoming depraved. There is no correlation between lack of religion and lack of ethical behavior or even barbarism.
Given the above alone, one cannot accept that the deity of the Judeo-Xian tradition nor that tradition can claim moral superiority or to be the source of ethics, nor claim that without it and its deity there can be no ethics. Facts don't bear this out.
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