"I'm a polyatheist - there are many gods I don't believe in."Dan Fouts



Please help out the Big Fat Atheist Quiz Of The Year by submitting multiple choice questions!

Archive for March 25th, 2008

A Question Of Morality?

Due to recent discussions on my blog post Answering “ed”, I’ve felt it necessary to clarify a few of the points I made when responding to the comments made by ed. A lot of the things I wrote were not explained well enough since I hadn’t had the time to sit down and think out my words properly. Before I do this though, I should add this simple “disclaimer”:

I am not, in any way (academically or otherwise) a sociologist and I have never studied sociology. I am however, a freethinker, and as such have formed by ideas on the origins of morality merely on what I have read, combined with my own reasoned thinking. As a freethinker, I invite anyone to criticize and even disprove my points, as long as you have decent enough evidence to suggest otherwise.

Now I’ve got that out the way, I’ll begin.

Christians love to claim that the Bible brought morality into the world, and that without God, we would all be treacherous murdering bastards (to use the term lightly). This is simply not the case, and if it were, we simply wouldn’t be here today. Can you imagine a world without morality? People would kill people simply for the fun of it, we would steal, insult, rape, and torture. Not just certain individuals…but everyone. The outcome? Extinction.

Yet supposedly this world already existed, and not too long ago either. In fact, if we go back about 2000 years, we should find ourselves in the middle of a civil war between every member of the human race. What we do find however, is a relatively peaceful society, prone to the occasional conflict, but on the whole quite sophisticated both socially and technologically. The Bible will not be seen for at least another 200 years or so (in its current format), and yet we see murderers being executed along with thieves. Some form of morality is in place here, so where does it come from?

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments

Written by Adrian Hayter

March 25th, 2008 at 3:10 pm