Do you believe in God? Why/Why not?

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Egann said:

LuccaCardoso1 said:

Oh, morality can only come from a god? That's not true at all. Take some things into consideration:

1. Morality is not exclusive to humans. Read this article. Other primates were shown to also have a sense of morality, and we don't see them reading the bible or praying, do we? Primates have morality because it helps to reproduce and move on your genes when you don't go around killing everyone from your group. Sharing food makes it more probable that more members of your group will survive, trying to save a member of your group (and saving it) will make it more likely that you can pass on your genes. Moral genes were passed on because it helps the species survive.

2. Morality is subjective. If morality really did come from a god, everyone would have the same morality, right? So how do you explain slavery being a moral thing until a few centuries ago? How do you explain possession of women being moral until a few decades ago (and still being moral in some cultures)?

 

finalrpgfantasy said:

Agree.  You don't have to believe in God to know that stealing, murdering or lying is wrong.  This is common sense.

I would actually say the epistemic problems are more damning because they will cause moral problems given time, but if you want to focus on morality, so be it.

I don't mean that morality cannot be exhibited in other places, but that these are spurious from a larger scale point of view.  The moralities you can derive from atheism and agnosticism do not function to build societies with. Atheists in particular tend to be free with stealing morality ideas from theists because a few of the theistic morals work quite well. This can appear sensible to an individual, but the morality and the worldview have fundamentally different presuppositions about the universe behind them and one or the other will eventually get rejected. It's almost always morality which gets rejected, too. People don't like being told what not to do.

And of course, the rejection process causes massive social upheaval and often death in the process. Accepting an idea your philosophy cannot actually support makes you morally culpable in what happens when it is inevitably rejected.

Can you define morality?