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Originally Posted by SUBMAN1
I'm just waiting for the Atheist rebuttal on this one! :D
-S
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If you walk around Washington, D.C., on a regular basis, youre likely to see some rather peculiar posters. But you wont see any more peculiar than the ads put out by the American Humanist Association. Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake, say the signs, in Christmas-colored red and green.
Sounds great, doesnt it? Just be good for goodness sake. You dont need some Big Man in the Sky telling you what to do. You can be a wonderful person simply by doing the right thing.
Theres only one problem: without God, there can be no moral choice. Without God, there is no capacity for free will.
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This doesn't follow. In fact - if god is omniscient, then he must know everything about the past, present and future. If he knows everything about the future, then he knows everything we will ever do, right down to how I will finish this very sentence. If he knows everything we will do, how can we have free will? How could he know anything about the future if we had the ability to make real free choices?
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Thats because a Godless world is a soulless world.
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Please show me a soul. Why believe in them? It's been shown that brain damage can affect personality, and that brain activity corresponds with certain ideas. Why assume there's a soul?
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Virtually all faiths hold that God endows human beings with the unique ability to choose their actions -- the ability to transcend biology and environment in order to do good.
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What, the faiths that don't believe this don't count? Their adherents are amoral monsters?
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Its not only our criminal justice system that presupposes a Creator. Its our entire notion of freedom and equality.
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They don't, but even if they did, it still doesn't give an iota of evidence for a creator.
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Human equality must spring from a Creator, because the presence of a soul is all that makes man human and equal.
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Nope. We're equal in that we're all members of the same species.
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Without a soul, freedom too is impossible -- we are all slaves to our biology.
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Nope. I'm a determinist, but I can still have freedom of speech, etc. And even thought I'm a determinist, I still act as if I and others have free will, as we simply can't know all the causes for each action.
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Atheists simply gloss over this point. The American Humanist Association states on its website, whybelieveinagod.org, We can have ethics and values based on our built-in drives toward a moral life. Without a soul, this is wishful thinking of the highest order. Since when does biology dictate a moral drive?
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Richard Dawkins made the point that the very existence of liberal belief proves the idea that we don't get our morals from religion. How do you know to choose to follow the nice bits and not the killy smashy bits in your "holy" book, which is the original source of your belief? You must have some standard independent of religion.
He also cites a study which had Westerners and members of the Kuna tribe participate in similar moral quandary thought experiments. The results were almost entirely the same between the two groups.
Regardless of my rebuttal, any apologist worth his salt would recognize this article as utter crap.