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Originally Posted by BinaryLife
In reguards to athiests, it's the same kind of mentality. They are comfortable living without the image of God in their heads.
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For me at least, atheism is not a choice. I wasn't indoctrinated into a religion as a child so I have no religion. I guess that makes me an atheist. This isn't a choice. My brain will not spontaneously start believing a fairy tale. Even if I wanted to, I can't perform brain surgery on myself and start having faith in something that there is no evidence for (and if there was evidence for it then it wouldn't really be faith..). If I spontaneously started believing in God I would consider myself mentally ill.
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They don't need to be told that when they die they will go to heaven. They're juts fine believing that they will stop existing.
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Well even if I weren't fine with it, I can't delude myself into believing that when my brain rots I'll still exist in a happy cloud palace for all eternity.
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Originally Posted by Innoc
Without moving forward in the discussion let's agree for the moment that God does exist. If God establishes the framework of the rules those rules are constants. They are not subject to amendment, modification or deletion. Within that framework you have absolutes of right and wrong. You can pick and choose which rules (thank you free will) to follow but in doing so you violate that rule structure. Man does not get to change the rules so that the action of ignoring a rule is no longer wrong. It's always wrong.
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Even allowing that God exists, even allowing that (for reasons which are not clear to me) God is some absolute arbiter of what is and is not moral.. humans have no way of knowing what this divinely inspired moral framework is.
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Originally Posted by Innoc
Within the framework of moral relativism it is possible to shift the rules enough for the situation so that nothing is evil. Because man does not get to shift the rules within a God framework Good and Evil would be absolutes and not subject to change by man to suit the situation.
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Even allowing an absolute moral framework dictated by God, humans don't act according to that framework. They act according to their interpretation of that framework. It's not clear to me why a human intepretation of a divine moral framework is any less malleable than a secularly born human moral framework or a human interpretation of an objective moral framework.
Re : free will
If you believe that the entire universe is determinstic and that this means free will doesn't exist then debating morality is meaningless. The idea of an action being "right" or "wrong" depends upon a choice existing between alternatives. If you're debating morality then you ae implicitly assuming free will exists.
It seems completely nonsensical to me to deny that free will exists on a macroscopic level. So what if everything is determinstic on a microscopic level? The human brain is certainly a complex enough machine to have emergent properties that are not embodied in the equations describing how the physical components of it interact.
Circ btw you're being perfectly sensible in this thread. Keep it up.