The Adrian Empire wrote:Zandan wrote:That is what I wonder.
They say atheists don't have morals, but if we followed the morals from the Bible we would all be murderers, we would be stoning people, burning "sorceresses." It's weird isn't it? The bible tells people the disobey the Ten Commandments.
Mainly, "Thou shalt not kill"
Your comment shows your ignorance of Christianity, all to common today with those who lambaste us, Of course Atheists have morals, but the very foundation of Western Morals is Christianity, this cannot be denied, and although society today has been more and more abandoning these tenants (I won't go into that though). You also confuse New with Old Testament, Jesus advocated that we be merciful "Let ye who is without sin cast the first stone" ring a bell. I don't believe anywhere in the Bible is burning witches mentioned, witches in fact are never mentioned in the Bible, witches were a pagan myth endemic to Europe that the masses of medieval feudal society still hadn't flushed out, unfortunately the Roman Catholic Church took advantage of this to eliminate powerful women who seeked to change the misogynistic views of the Church, that had nothing to do with Christian beliefs
He raises an important point, actually, regarding the Catholic Church. Not to offend Catholic Christians who would enter here, but the practices of the Catholic Church during the middle ages is the indirect cause for such fear and resentment towards Christianity today. Western Civilization split into three divergent paths around the turn of the sixteenth century. One group, Reformationists sought to reform Christianity and bring back the true meaning of the Word and Salvation through a new movement, which they called Protestantism (after Luther's "Protest", I'd reckon). The second group was a group that sought to reform the Catholic church from within, or at least keep the status quo going. This would eventually morph into the group that we know as the Catholic Church today. And there was yet a third group that rose following the Catholic Church's loss of political influence: the secularists. These were people who'd been unable to express their true views prior to the Catholic Church's loss of secular power, or had become disillusioned with the faith following the Catholic-led massacres and the Protestant Reformation. Catholics and Protestants share the same general path, while the secularists went down a different road. People of the Christian faith became more and more interested in understanding their place in God's universe, while the secularists focused on the role of man in the universe.
First you had the "Age of Enlightenment", where philosophers attempted to use reason as a means of explaining reality without seeking a divine inspiration. Though the first major movement following the Catholic/Protestant/Secularist split, it's probably the most endearing and has demonstrated the greatest longevity of the cavalcade that would follow. The Christian influence wasn't quite shaken by this point, as a lot of major Enlightenment thinkers still held belief in Christ. Secularists moved into the period of Romanticism following this, trying to expound on the belief that, if there was a God, he was too far from man to be of any use. This is why you had the Romantic movement of the 18th and early 19th century which focused on the idea that man was the peak creature in the universe and was the paragon by which all other materials were to be judged. Romanticism was destroyed by the French Revolution in large part. American transcendentalism bares a strong resemblance to this era.
Existentialism came next, and basically brought the equation down to the study of man himself, and his own inner nature. This gave rise to two competing philosophies in the twentieth century: modernism and post-modernism. Modernism could be seen to advocate that there's only one right answer, and that all others should be forced to conform to it. This is why we had Imperialism throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Fascism in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, and the prolonged Capitalist vs. Communist struggle known as the Cold War in the 1950s. There was supposedly only one answer, Imperialism and Fascism had been eliminated, so it either had to be Communism/Socialism/Totalitarianism or Capitalism/Free-Market/Democracy. Well, Democracy finally won out in 1991, but surprise surprise, turns out that Capitalism wasn't always the end-all, be-all for people. That's where we've come to today: post-modernism. The belief that there's not one single answer out there for life's mysteries, and that people's viewpoints can be equally equitable and charitable given sufficient justification.
The problem, which most are coming to terms with, is that if there's no one correct answer, then it juxtaposes that there could be any number of "correct" answers, and that everything is a matter of interpretation. But if every answer can be deemed right, then can any answer truly be deemed "right"? So what you'd assess to be the future of secular thought would come into the question: can man truly know anything outside of his own physical self? I of course mean this in a philosophical sense, not a physical sense. Rational thought is the name of the game, and the secularist movement has been trying to figure it out for centuries now.
Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2009 7:52 pm
