Are Athiests evil?

pinder wrote: »

you know what i find interesting kayroo ,the celts saw women as equals.they were seen as equals on the battle field and intellectually.it was only when christianity was introduced that the idea of men being somehow better than women was brought here.iv always found that interesting.makes ya proud to be descended from them.and the normans thought we were savages

I agree that is a fascinating point and Brehon laws of marriage bear out your point. If anything though it shows how transient the ideas of a social structure and of "morality" are.

pinder wrote: »

ah i dont want to go down that road again kayroo,cant we just agree on somethin and leave it at that

As you wish.

Fanny Cradock wrote: »

I find the lack of admitted subjectivity found in the line in bold curious. Was this just a slip on your part?

Not really. I am forced, by necessity, to discuss morality within the definition most people undertand. Morality, in my view, requires separation from law, although many of the ideas which underpin both are, in my opinion, born of the same mother.

Man is a social creature by nature. Our advantage over other creatures is our ability to communicate precise meaning through language. In order to better facilitate that communal nature we developed social conventions which would acts as disincentives to actions which would cause social breakdown. Some of these, such as not killing other people or forcibly having sex with someone, became laws. Others, such as not having affairs, became morals. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbours wife and thou shalt not kill are part of the same religious covenant but they hold different places in our laws and in our "moral" code. These were born of necessity. As necessity changes moral attitudes towards areas such as equality for the sexes change. However, religious attitudes are, as you put it, immutable.

I do not believe people have an inate immutable morality whatsoever. Our morality is a product of our need to live in a social environment. Where people do not have to interact there is simply no need for morality. Our morals are all codes of conduct in our interaction with the world. Therefore no person can have an inate morality as how each person deals with the world will be a product of social conditioning and how the world has decided to deal with them.

Morality cannot be inate and equally changeable. It flows from the requirements of our social fabric and responds to changes within it. Any religious underpinning of morality is simply a doctrinal appraoch to a pre-existing sets of ideas laid down within the framework of the time in which they were written and through the perspective of those people who wrote them.