Thy Plague Doctor

michael17 wrote:
Reg. God uses poets and minstrels to allude to the truth, thanks for sharing.

Yes. The greatest genius to ever exist, decides to teach his puny little children his wisdom through hundreds of metaphorical poems that result in anything but knowledge but boundless confusion, conjecture, opinions and an utter mess of claims,…[Read more]

Hi Kenneth, welcome to Atheist Zone!

@davis I think urban legends are probably closest to a modern day equivalent

According to Christianity the priest goes to Heaven but the unbelieving victim of his “sins” goes to Hell.

God seems to forgive just about anything except a lack of blind belief. But then, we puny humans with our feeble minds cannot possibly comprehend the moral perfection of the bearded man in the sky.

@gerardwood I like that.  I think it gets easier to put aside negative things as you get older.  I can’t remember the last time I was consumed with anger.

I don’t think its the best way to look at things. I think the failure should be placed inversely. There has been so much lingering doubt by so many Christians all peppered throughout  religious history. The insane amount of literary and philosophical works (and trickery) to justify God’s even existence again and again, and why a word-for-word ap…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:
There are reasons why people choose or value certain values. Most people value cooperative thriving. Adolf Hitler, or Isis, value(d) wholesale murder. Both sets of values are chosen for different reasons.

You’re doing it again Simon. When you say most people you really mean “within a family unit or close community” and you’re…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:

Davis wrote:
some values are obviously derrived from facts.

And this is an arbitrary assumption: other values could equally have been derived from those facts.

No. That’s totally false. In some moral systems there is a logical answer to many moral problems, especially in deontological ones and consequentialism. If the…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:
If we say that the values derived from facts are “obvious”, then we are already assuming values.

Sorry Simon but you are mixing up two different things. First the axioms that ground a moral system. These are incredibly subjective and while someone may put some rational thought into it…they all remain statements which are…[Read more]

A society can bestow rights, whether it be by consensus or legislation.  No human is born with inbuilt rights. They may be born with needs, but unless their social environment chooses to address these, they will not have those needs fulfilled.

The human basic animal may have urges to ‘thrive’ but the human mind often quashes some of those urges.…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Values cannot be derived from sets of facts.

Of course they can. Values have always come from a hybrid of assumed axioms (highly conceptual moral frameworks and/or dictated norms) along with facts. The first is almost but not entirely exclusive of facts) the second can use facts to various degrees and various use of logic). The…[Read more]