Atheism

I was thinking child labor in terms of children being forced to mine for blood diamonds. Child labor may not have been the best example as there is context whereas some child labor is immoral (as in slave mining for blood diamonds) and some is not (children helping on the farm.) But even that not withstanding you choose to challenge and explain the history of child labor, not the meat of that paragraph where I question you on confusing what is moral or not moral with the actions of people throughout history and how that is a basis of societal norms.

I think you confuse and romanticize history a bit here. I don't think history as ever consider murder moral. They may have justified it or else it was something beside murder. A group that did a human sacrifice would argue defiantly that what they were doing wasn't murder at all but an offering to their god. I think you only illustrate that history has a long record of being immoral and ignorant.

The problem with this is that we're combining multiple types of slavery into one catch all term that today we see as immoral. Slavery in Biblical times was different from slavery of the black man in America. Slavery in biblical time was more of a social status and not something someone was subjected to based on the color of their skin. Many times doctors or well to do people choose to be slaves because it better fit their economic needs. God's people where enslaved simply because of their race.

This is a much deeper questions and gets into the question of what slavery is and what we are really saying is immoral. We also get into what is allegory, what is history in the bible and the notion of biblical inerrancy.

Even so, I think you can find objective morals independent of the bible.

I think if you want those ideals to have real truth and meaning then it's hard to get that without God. If it's just society or biology then it's subjective and logically can't have any real meaning. If you think that there are higher truths to our existence that are transcendent and more than just biological social evolution then wouldn't a perfect loving God defining those truths make sense?

 

Why do you continue to say this. The laws of physics have no meaning? How about other scientific laws/theories? By comparison, morality is nothing more than the evolution of our understanding of the rules for successful social growth, stability and interaction. It is really like studying anything else in nature that we apply scientific principles to. It's really not abstract - compare it to how we condition our behavior based on scientific observation in regards to diet, sleeping, and exercise. Very similar process.

 

Why do so many people think that a belief in God requires throwing out all forms of science?

 

Of course physics have meaning. Scientific laws and theories are all well and good but come up short in comparison to theology when looking at morals. If your naturalistic view is correct then we are no different from animals but we are. Humans sometimes make moral choices that fly in the face of what biology or society would predict therefore there must be more to it.

 

Why do so many people think that believing in God means you should ignore science?

 

Why did you answer a question with a question?

But, to answer yours, I don't think that there are many that do.

 

I have never said this. Nor suggested it.

 

Ohhh. Thank you. (marks post)

There are plenty that do both. I don't understand how they can allow themselves to do that, in light of what we know.

 

Yes, please do. Asking for clarifications of things is natural in the course of a debate. Refusing to answer while throwing a question back, is the type of thing that you regularly complain about when others do it.

Most people do not try to replace what we know with a "God did it" explanation. As I have pointed out many times, in many threads - it's the parts where we do not have concrete answers where those answers can be used.

 

Naturalism is a system of thought holding that things are explained in terms of natural causes and laws.

This lead me to the idea that you have a naturalistic world view. My apologizes if I mischaracterized your assertions.