Atheism and morality

[GameOver22]

kowhoho said:

GameOver22 said:

kowhoho said:

You have no basis for the underlined. It isn't "wrong" to use statistics to predict the character of a person. Please explain to me how these statistics are anything but "good, accurate and unbiased." Without any reasoning behind that comment it sounds like you're just trying to find details that will support your argument and ignore anything that doesn't.

"Good" is also a subjective term. My "good" is likely to be very different from your "good." It is not an objective term to be used for definition.

And how do you know how God sees things? It's wonderful that you think that you share a kind of "holy vision" with him/her/it, but where do you get this statement from? Please don't use the word bible in your answer. >_>

The point being made is that in order to be a Christian, a person must follow Christian doctrine. In terms of crime, the obvious example here is the Ten Commandments . I would not go so far as to say a person is a bad Christian if they committ a crime because humans are not perfect, but a Christian does need to generally avoid breaking the law in order to be in compliance with Christian doctrine. If someone told me they were a Christian and then proceeded to habitually steal from others, I would question their Christianity because their actions are in direct conflict with Christian teachings. I am not saying that general adherence to Christian doctrine is a suffiecient condition for saying someone is a Christian, but it is a necessary one.

Just as another note, while Christian denominations and sects disagree on some things, I think you will find that they are in agreement with each other on the major issues. For example, they will believe that God created the universe, that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and they will agree on the Ten Commandments. Also, asking pizzahut to present God's view without referring to the Bible is asking a bit too much. Without the Bible, he would just be making up his own vision or alludicating someone else's vision. I am not an expert on the Bible, but I think most Christians consider the Bible to be the best source for interpreting God's intentions and God's vision of the world.

You do have a good point, but I still don't think there is a singular definition for "christian," and I find it hypocritical of a religion to have any differentiation in beliefs at all. If it's your belief system then that's it. There's no haggling with religion. Either it's the truth or it isn't, there's no in-between.

For instance I don't think the majority of Christians would agree with the Baptist's condemnation of gays and picketing of funerals. At least I really hope not.

Ironic, that's what the disciples did.

I would agree there is no definitive definition of a Christian, but there are a lot of generalized terms that are similar in this way. This was one of the important things that Wittgenstein recognzied with his idea of family resemblence. When we have generalized terms like science and religion, we usually find they do not have definitive definitions that allow us to delineate between what falls into a category and what does not. Rather, we develop a list of general traits, and something must possess some of these traits in order to fall into each category. The obvious example of a scientific characteristic is repeatibility. While this is a general trait defining all branches of science, it is not considered to be necessary trait. If it was, macro-level evolution would not be considered science because it relies on historical investigation and cannot be repeated. However, we still consider macro-level evolution to be a science because it has many other traits we generally attribute to science.The main point is that many general terms lack clear, definitive definitions and rely on general characteristics for classification. You can also find other examples when looking at the debates about what qualifies as a religions and what demarcates science from pseudoscience.

I do not know what you mean when you say it is hypocritical of a religion to have different beliefs. All different beliefs mean is that separate Christian denominations hold different things to be true. You will find this to be true in most all disciplines. Generally speaking, if someone has written something influential, you can also bet someone has witten something else criticizing it. I would not classify the condemnation of gays and the picketing of funerals as an essential characteristic of Christians. If someone asked me to explain a Christian to them, condemnation of homosexuals would not be one of the defining characteristics I attributed to them. As I said, my knowledge of the Bible is limited, but I think theologians would not agree that the disciples just made up the contents of the Bible. This just seems like too much of a straw man argument to me.