Icons, what gives?

Quote: terapined

Maybe I am street smart, dressing down, always aware of my surroundings.

None of those will get you out of
a situation that you all of a sudden
find yourself in. I've known lots of
people like you who never considered
arming themselves until they were
violated. Antique dealers that were
robbed of their cash. Homeowners
that were burglarized multiple times.
It only takes once to wise you up.

Most people never use their home insurance
in their lifetime. But they still buy insurance.
That's what a gun is, insurance.

Quote: Evenbob

I've known lots of
people like you who never considered
arming themselves until they were
violated.

And that's it, entirely.

Have it happen once and your whole tune will change. I wouldn't say you're stupid, but I would say you're lucky. But have it happen just one time. Broad daylight. Middle of town. In familiar settings, where you go all the time. And the minute you realize that everything you are and will be hangs on the actions of some animal, and there's nothing you can do personally to change the outcome, your tune will change very quickly.

I wouldn't mind carrying a gun in Mexico City. Unfortunately, you can't do that legally.

Quote: terapined

Would Jesus pack a gun?
Did he pack a knife to protect himself back in the day?

Peter did and if you remember he used it when Jesus was arrested cutting off the ear of high priest's servant. Jesus healed him and told Peter to sheath his sword because those who live by the sword die by the sword.

Quote: FrGamble

those who live by the sword die by the sword.

Those who don't live by it often die
by it also. Better to defend yourself
than not.

Quote: Face

By being "good", I create a reputation for myself. If I borrow a fiver and say I'm gonna pay you back Monday, I'll be there Monday with a fiver, if not a tenner. Not because there's some supernatural thread woven into me, but because I've been taught by lesson and by example that doing so is beneficial to me.

Great post as usual Face, but I think you are wrong here. Morality doesn't boil down for us as human beings to the question,'is it beneficial to me?' If that guy who loaned you the fiver passed away and nobody knew about the loan my guess is that you would find a way to give that fiver or tenner to somebody not because it would be beneficial to you but just because you thought it would be the right thing. More to the point we do all kinds of things that are not strictly beneficial to us such as give to charity, care for the sick and elderly, take a bullet for our family or loved ones, give up what we want to do in order to love and be with our spouse, kids, or friends. There is many more, in fact I wonder if morality is really based on doing what is beneficial for the other person?

Now you could say this is only done so that what goes around comes around and we care for the elderly so that when we are elderly others can care for us, but we know that is no guarantee and even if we were told no one is going to care for you when you are old would you then not respect and honor the elderly? Certainly this is where your analogy of human morality compared to animals is dashed upon the rocks. Besides travelling in herds and not wanting to fight and some other similarities it seems to me that our morality is really radically different than that of animals.

Quote:

godless FrG the Younger

That is a cool title.

Quote:

You may fear some rise of differently aligned morals, and that surely does already happen. I've seen evidence, I've talked to those people. There was a kid I was friends with in HS, who every now and again would for some reason bully me. We'd be laughing and having fun and borrowing each other's Sega games on Tuesday, and we'd be getting kicked out of school for fighting on Thursday. I never understood it. Some ten years later we were getting high together at the crick and he brought it up. He actually apologized for it. He explained that his home life was a wreck, his dad was a mean drunk, and when he got beat at home, he'd come to school and do the same thing. You see, he was taught that fighting was right. Taught from his parents. He wasn't evil, he was just taught that different set of morals you worry about.

But you see this different set of morals couldn't stick. He apologized. Having been tragically taught that fighting was right and having experienced this lesson throughout his life he still knew it was wrong. That supernatural thread you mentioned earlier runs through us, lets call it our conscience, and while your friend was being taught a different set of morals his conscience was trying to teach him the truth. It looks like he listened to that supernatural thread and maybe had some help along the way and rejected the morals he was taught and apologized to you for his actions.

I'm not denying the importance of parents, teachers, coaches, priests, etc. teaching us morality, but if they are teaching us the wrong morality it doesn't ring true. It is like we have built in virus protection software that fights against the malware and bad code. I will also admit that over time and with a serious and powerful enough virus the protection of our conscience can be overwhelmed and silenced. This is really bad news.

Quote:

So every time one of these outliers pop up, they will be punished by society - loss of privilege, fines, loss of freedom - until they choose to conform with what society deems as moral.

Society ultimately doesn't determine what is moral. I think we were talking about slavery earlier and you agreed that things like it and genocide even if society has no problem with it are never good and moral. What happens when someone is punished by society for doing good?

Quote:

I had parents, and friend's parents, and aunts and uncles, and grandparents (especially grandparents), and coaches, and mentors, and teachers, and older friends, all of whom formed a path that made it hard for me to stray. Anytime I did, I'd get bumped back to true. The church does this, too. But it's not special in this regard, nor is it the source of it all.

The Church is not the source of morality. The source of morality is God who universally places in our minds and hearts what is right and good.

Quote: Evenbob

Besides which, we have no god like
abilities. We hunt, we eat, we crap,
just like animals do. Eventually we
learned to build things, but that's
hardly a godlike ability. A god can do
anything. By comparison, we can do
almost nothing. So saying we want to
be god is a little far fetched, at best.

We have the most godlike characteristic ever, namely freedom. Your post reminds us that we are really a creature and it is good to remember that, but sometimes our amazing freedom gets to our head and we think thoughts like: "I am in control of my life and I can do whatever I want!" or "Other people should serve me." or "I determine what is good and right for me and no one can tell me differently." or "Why should I care about anyone else, it is all about me." These thoughts all express a desire to be God and I dare say they are not as far fetched or as uncommon as we wish they were.

Quote: FrGamble

The source of morality is God who universally places in our minds and hearts what is right and good.

This is impossible, there is no god. So your
god placed in the minds and hearts of good
Catholics that burning poor women as witches at the
stake was right and good? That forcibly
converting Jews and killing them if they
refused was right and good?

Do you even know what you're saying?

On Evenbob's suggestion I did a little research about the statistics he was quoting concerning what percentage of the prison population are atheists. First of all I want to reiterate that I don't think this statistic is super valuable. There are much more important demographics of the prison population that show more clearly what often leads to imprisonment. Things like where you grow up, your economic level, education, family life, use of drugs and alcohol and others clearly lead most often to going to prison. It is things like this that we should be paying attention to and trying to help those who fall in these danger categories.

Nevertheless the statistic that Evenbob is quoting comes from very questionable sources. Here is the concerns that atheist writer Hemant Mehta, The Friendly Atheist has about the data:
•The percentages did not take into account prisoners whose religious affiliations were unknown or who did not respond at all.
•The data in question is more than 15 years old. Whatever it may have represented in the past, it’s practically irrelevant now.
•There’s no link to any official document with this data, only HTML code that has gone unverified for well over a decade.
•The websites talking about this data aren’t unbiased. They’re clearly atheist sites trying to make atheists look good. While numbers don’t lie, without the primary documents, it’s hard to evaluate how objective this information is.
•Golumbaski, the research analyst, no longer works at the Federal Bureau of Prisons… so we couldn’t even confirm that she did this research.
•The Holysmoke.org website this information appears on doesn’t exactly exude credibility.
•It has been said that the U.S. doesn’t even keep any data on the religious beliefs of inmates. Tom Flynn once wrote in Free Inquiry: “… no prison I know of has permitted researchers to catalogue inmates’ religious affiliations. No such data has been kept by any department of corrections — or if kept, no such data has been released.”

This last point is important because the US really doesn't keep this information. The federal government does however keep the stats for prisoners who self identify religious preference. For those who do self-identify the number of those who claim atheist or no-preference in 2013 was around 17%. Now of course not all of those who claim no preference are atheists and likewise all of those who chose not to even answer the question are not all atheists, but it is clear that there are more than being reported in this small sample of federal prisoners.

Now in an article from the Associate Press concerning Baptists being the highest percentage of prisoners in Texas it also included that 22% claimed to be non-religious. Again perhaps not all atheists, but a fairly high number.

This made me think of other places in the world. In the United Kingdom it turns out they do ask everyone and keep stats. In Scotland 34.1% in 2008 claimed to have "no religion". In England and Wales according to a March 2000 study 31.9% of prisoners were "no religion". This "no religion" group is the fastest growing group in the prison system there. link

I also thought about communist countries around the world were there most definitely are Christians, in fact sometimes that is all you need to be to find yourself in prison. However, the vast majority of such prisons I imagine are full of atheists.

So again, I don't know ultimately how valuable this information is because I don't think people find themselves in prison because they believe in God or not, but after looking into it a little bit I don't think the statistics about atheists in prison that Evenbob quotes are not as clear or compelling as he makes them sound.

Quote: Evenbob

So your
god placed in the minds and hearts of good
Catholics that burning poor women as witches at the
stake was right and good? That forcibly
converting Jews and killing them if they
refused was right and good?

Of course not! Do you even know what you are saying? Do you really think God would want that?