🎄 DAY 4 of the 12 Days of Christmas! 🎄
🎶 On the fourth day of Christmas, Eric Hovind gave to me… a reminder that moral outrage only works if God is real.
People love to say, “You shouldn’t lie.”
They love to accuse Christians of dishonesty.
They love to appeal to right and wrong.
But here’s the catch:
If the universe is just matter + time + chance,
and humans are just rearranged stardust,
then why is lying actually wrong?
13 comments
“People love to say, “You shouldn’t lie.””
Your dad lied to the judge in tax court.
“They love to accuse Christians of dishonesty.”
Well, Your dad’s not terribly Christain, but he did lie to the judge in tax court.
“They love to appeal to right and wrong.”
Which humans invented and attribute to various skybuddies.
“But here’s the catch:
If the universe is just matter + time + chance,
and humans are just rearranged stardust,
then why is lying actually wrong?”
Because your father swore an oath to be honest in tax court.
And got caught lying.
And went to jail.
Not that much of a catch. The laws your dad broke made no mention of time or chance or stardust or gods. Just humans demanding a certain behavior from other humans.
Which he failed.
then why is lying actually wrong?
Oh, I dunno: just ask your ultimate arbiter of Morality.
Certainly why he lied to Abraham re. Isaac.
When the creator of your Big 10 breaks his own 8th there’s more than all your opinions destroyed, OP.
There are people who believe that God cannot exist without objective morality, but objective morality doesn’t need God. We can follow objective morality (assuming anyone can figure out what it is) without caring about whether some higher being exists or not. There are also people who believe in subjective morality, and that doesn’t exclude the existence of God but does imply that most of what typical Christians believe about him would be wrong if he did exist.
There are also people who don’t believe in “morality”, finding it arbitrary and incoherent, so instead go with “ethics”. Which is what works as a practical matter, regardless of whether other people believe it is right or wrong. Admittedly, that requires there to be agreed-upon goals; and for most people who pursue ethics, the primary goal is making a maximally-functional civilization, and the secondary is minimizing suffering and/or maximizing pleasure and fulfillment. Also admittedly, that’s still arbitrary on a different level, but there’s a fundamental difference - ethics are discovered and refined, while morality is declared. A person pursuing ethics says “we can probably do better than this, but it’s useful in the meantime” while a person pursuing morality says “this is the best which can be done, no one should ever do anything else”.
Also, people who call your father a liar do so because, regardless of their beliefs in ethics and/or morality, “liar” has a dictionary definition and your father very much is one. It’s not necessarily moral outrage but a statement of fact, and even when it is, not everyone saying that is an atheist.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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