Cows. They have no belief in a God, indeed they are soulless lesser animals. They don’t as a rule kill each other though.

Now why is this? We know beef is tasty, why would cows not hunt each other down and have their fill?

Perhaps we have underestimated cows. All cows believe in the Almighty Bovine God. He lays down their moral code.

Or perhaps, there is another explanation……

David has done that. He has not engaged with your point in your first paragraph, but started off on a hobby-horse of his own.

Of course if David’s thoughts are simply the random results of a random convergence of chemicals in his brain, that are the result of an accidental convergence of chemicals that brought about the human race, then his thoughts are just accidents and have no value.

Are you really suggesting there was no morality in the world before God?

Do you think that before Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, that people thought it was ok to murder one another?

Belief in God has never been a pre-requisite for morality. Just to cite one example, what about the Catholic Priests in the US who were exposed in 2002 as committing many acts of child rape?

As you are probably aware attitudes of morality or moral law change from decade to decade - if morality comes from God how does he communicate these changes in attitude?

For example, nowadays both seculaists and the religious find slavery immoral, but in the past the Bible was used to justify Slavery, particularly with the following verse:

Genesis 9:25-27: “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers. He also said, ‘Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem. May God extend the territory of Japheth; may Japeth live in the tents of Shem and may Canaan be his slave’. ”

So you could say that those who kept slaves in the past derivied their justification to do so from God, yet now in the present day we consider them to be immoral and against moral law.

What of those who existed before belief in the monotheistic god, or those who believe in other god such as Hindu’s - are they all immoral who think nothing of murder?

Regards

David

If there is no God, then there is no Higher Power to give us a moral law. In other words you can do whatever you like! So, if there is no God I have no right to condemn a murderer because what makes me so special that I should decide what is right and what is wrong? It would just be one human imposing his moral opinion on another human and without an Arbitrator there’s no grounds for deciding who’s right. As an atheist do you have a right to be angry about anything? Because it’s just your opinion about what is wrong and without a God it is an arbitrary opinion.

Regarding the religious indoctrination of children (do you mean sunday school or something?). I haven’t seen much indoctrination but I have seen the spreading of knowledge. An atheist friend of mine is bisexual, despite the fact he knows my position of such things we remain friends. When he was younger his dad took him to a gay bar because he wanted him to have a wider experience. In fact what he did was determine his sexuality even more than if he’d have just left him alone.

You call bringing up children as out standing Christian citizens indoctrination? Presumably the good atheist antithesis to this would be to bring up a child with (let’s call it) “non-indoctrination”. But surely non-indoctrination is only another form of indoctrination! Children instinctively look for models around them, models of truth if you like. If their parents truly believe that God is truth, this model of truth rubs off on the child. Surely you’re not telling the whole of Christendom how to bring up their children are you? If there is no God, who gave you the right to impose your model of truth on us?

My image, at top of my blog is me sitting in Nero’s coffee shop in York. My PA was mucking about with a camera for some reason and took that of me waiting for him to sit down. We both thought it looked so respectable that it got used.

Good one eh? Having coffee in a place named after the man who martyered Christians.

Have fun

Graham

Not all atheists rage. I think I rage sometimes when I’ve encountered what seems to me like a particularly preposterous religious explanation, or when I see something particularly outrageous, but most of the time I don’t. And raging of this sort isn’t limited to religion - I’d rage in exactly the same way if I encountered something preposterous or outrageous in any other context.

Some atheists - usually those who have been brought up in a particularly “heavy” religious environment - do feel very angry at what they were put through and what was inflicted on them. I don’t fall into that category, though.

But rage or no rage, it’s just interesting. Same as someone (though not me, as it happens) could be highly interested in classical mythology and could spend a lot of time finding out about it, discussing it with other interested people etc - without ever believing that the minotaur really existed.

I think you probably will find a photo of me if you’re serious about googling me, but a static photo’s never much good really, is it? If you go to http://www.youtube.com and do a search on “Richard Dawkins Paula Kirby” you’ll find a series of videos from the interview I conducted with him at Eden Court last week for his UHI public lecture.

All the best
Paula

With some I get the feeling they believe in God but are just trying to dodge him, or else they don’t like him so they rage against him. If someone were a real atheist and did not believe, could they not be confident in their unbelief and would they not then simply move on? Why the continued obsession with God? Why the continued rage? Why not then forget about God and get a life?

Anyway, so nice to hear from you. I am going to google your name and see what you look like.

Well, I can confirm the existence of at least one of them.

I liked his quote,
“When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.”