Moral responsibility. (page 12)

Drearyweather

Millions of babies every year are killed before they are born. Is God responsible for that too?

cofty

No ... and?

Is your defence of god something like, 'humans do bad stuff too'

You wouldn't have thought there'd be any controversy over the original post. To save a child or through your wilful inaction allow it to die. In a sane and moral universe this would be a pointless question.

But put religious ideology into the mix and everything gets fucked up. Religion is like giving prescription glasses to someone with perfect vision.

slimboyfat

As stated in the original post it is fairly easy to say the right thing to do is save the child. Even so, it’s certainly possible to dream up scenarios where the answer is not so simple: if the child will grow up to be Hitler; if there’s a hostage situation with other children going on; or whatever else we can dream up. You might say that’s farfetched and the situation is simple. But life is complicated and strange scenarios can happen. And if the situation is an allegory for life in general then its capacity for complexity is infinitely multiplied. If there is anything we can say about life with certainty then it’s probably the fact that we don’t understand it. To me the brave thing to do in stepping away from a JW mindset is not to swap one set of absolutes for another, and go proselytising the new ‘faith’, but to recognise the uncertainty in our perception of reality and be ready to listen to the perspectives of others.

Sea Breeze

The only way to avoid this (sinning) would be to have our free will stripped away, to become someone -or something- that we are not.

@Tonus

If, out of our own free-will we ask God to give us the new nature he promises, one that cannot sin; how is that violating our God-given free will? Would not that be free wills' ultimate expression?

So, I will either spend eternity incapable of independent thought/action, or I will spend eternity suffering because I invariably broke a rule or crossed a line.

The removal of the sin nature doesn't make sin impossible or render us incapable of independent thought or action. It does however make us adoptable by God, sharers of his nature & heirs of everything he owns - capable of receiving his pure love and returning it without fear or hesitation of any kind.

This is the primary purpose of man - to love God; it is why we are here. It is why there is anything at all. The second purpose is to love our neighbor as ourself.

You mean a moral code that everyone, everywhere will agree with? Assuming such a thing is possible, you get there by trial and error. You experience things, you learn, you adjust.

So, you think that the origin of morality is a convention? I appreciate you presenting possibilities. It's a very important topic.

A convention is something that we all agree to do... like driving on the right side of the road. If we all agree - it works. But we are not talking about getting morality to work. We all know that it works. How we got it is the question. If morality is a simple artifact of convention, then drivers in Britian who drive on the left side of the road are just as correct as those who drive on the right side of the road. This does not account for the existence of universal morality.

I once asked DJW on this forumn if I put a gun to his head and threatened to pull the trigger, would there be anything objectively wrong with that? He could not bring himself to admit that it would be universally morally wrong for me to shoot him in the head.

we now have the ability to reason. And that means we can make determinations

But this is at the heart of Christian criticism of atheism. We know atheists have the ability to reason, be moral, employ logic etc. The problem is that the atheist cannot account for it with his stated worldview. It violates his own presuppositions of chaos, happenstance, copying mistakes and chemical accidents. If the atheist really believed these conditions are what created him, to be consistent he would not be able to "know" anything at all.

cofty

This is the primary purpose of man - to love God; it is why we are here. It is why there is anything at all. The second purpose is to love our neighbor as ourself

Which apparently can include slavery and infanticide. Awkward!

Morality is not about convention. It is objective because it is founded on actions that promote the flourishing of others. 'Godly' morality is arbitrary. It is based on divine whims and can include actions that are morally repugnant to all reasonable humans.

Sea Breeze

Cofty,

Those topics have been covered many times before on this forum. There are many good websites that demonstrate the errors in your assumptions, like:

https://christianthinktank.com/

And:

https://www.gotquestions.org/

Are you done defending your atheism? Or, do you have another source (other than God) to present that accounts for your objective morality?

nicolaou

Or do you have another source (other than God) to present that accounts for your objectivce morality?

I gave you that on previous pages. It's frustrating when you take the time to answer the questions put to you by your opponent to then have them summarily dismissed.

Stop posting links and answer for yourself Sea Breeze.

nicolaou

Oh, and try to spell others names correctly. It's just good manners.

Sea Breeze

Nicolaou,

I didn't dismiss your response. But you never responded when I challenged your assumption:

how do you determine "good" in a chance universe?

What if one person says they benefit from eliminating Jews, and another person says they benefit by changing the definition of marriage, and yet another says they benefit by educating our youth on transgenderism?

What say you?

In other words, what is objectively wrong with this picture? Isn't he just another chemical mistake like you claim that you are?

Moral responsibility.

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