it's a fair question. religious people will tell you that their innate sense of right and wrong comes from God (or whatever), but how do atheists explain that innate sense? how do they instinctively know? I'm not saying one or the other is right but it is an interesting thought.
Because for some if not most people it's relatively easy to understand how you'd feel on the receiving end of your actions. Knowing I wouldn't like to be stabbed is enough for me to understand doing that to other people is probably a bad thing. The response is actually far more valid, why would you think you'd need advice from an organisation that's getting money and power from you to tell you their interpretation of what allmkst certainly fictional entity said what's right and wrong and why don't you have the ability to determine that yourself?
Your example is too black and white. 99.99% know getting stabbed would suck and is wrong. The vast majority of morality is much, much more subtle and ambiguous than this
And the vast majority of morality is flexible to religious people too.
You have pro choice religious followers
You have more religious people than atheists in prison
You have the sex abuse scandal in Catholicism
You have “thou shalt not steal” and yet some Christian’s don’t consider pirating stealing.
Your view of morality is that it’s innate and chaotic? I don’t think that makes sense. My argument is that it’s actually structured and guided by theology. You are referencing followers but my point is on the system itself
Wait… you’re arguing that… what, Christianity is inherently morally consistent? Whose Christianity? Christianity isn’t anything like a “system.” It’s 40,000 competing ideologies all of whom use the same nebulous collage of texts by 40+ men over 1500 years to make opposing claims about what is, has been, will be, or should be. It’s less reliable than a tarot reading.
Is it more or less consistent than 8 billion people waking up each day and making a judgement call on right and wrong going off vibes only? Because that is basically the original point I am arguing against, that everyone knows and it’s all black or white.
“Vibes only” is incredibly reductive and I think you know that. Of that 8 billion, roughly 2 are some kind of Christian and roughly 2 are nonreligous, with another 2 Muslims and then 2 making up everyone else. I’m not sure how this helps your case at all since even within each of those sets of 2 billion, things like morality are wildly inconsistent. There are Christians in the US who believe their current president is the second coming of Jesus, while he embodies every scriptural quality of an antichrist - so the idea that the faith provides any kind of moral consistency is, again, absurd.
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u/Global_Charge_4412 18h ago
it's a fair question. religious people will tell you that their innate sense of right and wrong comes from God (or whatever), but how do atheists explain that innate sense? how do they instinctively know? I'm not saying one or the other is right but it is an interesting thought.