Honestly the whole "if there's no god then how do you know right from wrong" argument is astounding to me, I don't know how someone can say that with a straight face.
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The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you. -- Penn Jillette
When someone tells you who they are believe them
Hell, I'm not even an atheist, but if someone actually came up to me with this kind of shit, I'd run as fast as I could. Like, why would you want to rape or murder in the first place? If you need to be threathened with eternal torture in order to be a good person, then maybe you're not a good person.
Not only that, there's still laws to consider
Without the [holy book], how would morality exist?
Maybe we need to thank religion for saving us from some literal sociopaths...
This right here is the answer. Religion was an effective way to control many psychopaths. Very useful before there was an effective legal system and police force.
"So what you're saying is that the threat of Hell is the sole reason you're not a murdering rapist pedophile?"
I remember a YouTuber explained that since watches work and had a maker, that humans are immensely more complex, so that's evidence of a maker of the human.
Don't get me started on how badly crafted the human body is. If someone designed us, they should be dragged out in the street and shot.
Why can't I breathe out of my nose ever? Why does food go down the same hole as air? Why do I have to sleep? Why did I have to get boners in Mrs. O's second hour Spanish class right before the end of class and have to walk to lunch at half mast for the whole second semester sophomore year?
The recurrent laryngeal nerve. Our liquid waste evacuation tubes sharing space with our reproductive organs. Our reproductive organs being immediately adjacent to our solid waste evacuation tube. Hangnails. Acne. Teeth (god damn luxury bones).
But my go to for "if there is a god, they're not worth worshipping" is always Children's. Bone. Cancer. Those 3 words should not fucking go together.
But my go to for "if there is a god, they're not worth worshipping" is always Children's. Bone. Cancer. Those 3 words should not fucking go together.
I watched my sibling deteriorate over the course of a few years and then die a couple days after their sixth birthday. They had a brain stem tumor which was inoperable. There is no god
Add scurvy to that list, since primates lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C endogenously, while other animals kept it.
Because Mrs O has a great ass.
Perhaps, SatansMaggotyCumFart. Perhaps.
Without knowing the constraints I'm going to have to withhold judgment.
Unless God is omnipotent cause if so he really sucks at this.
I’d like to see a theist defend their god with “He’s doing all he can, give him a break!”
Sky daddy is supposed to be strong
Phones are more complex than watches. Phones are made by Jesus confirmed.
JC Mobile - Unlimited Data, Eternal Life.
That's Paley's Teleological argument from the 18th century. It's a classic but back then you have to remember clocks were more impressive.
The modern day spin on it is the "fine tuning" argument. Basically: the chances of life existing at all with our earth and the solar system being in a goldilocks zone seems too perfect to be a coincidence. You can probably explain it with selection bias but it's a better argument nonetheless.
Which would make sense if this was the only solar system in the galaxy. 1 in 8 chance (rip Pluto) is pretty impressive, but when you include the rest of the galaxy 1 in however many trillion stars with however many trillions of planets is pretty low odds. Mathematically there should be more planets with life on them, so either we can't find them, they're too far away, they all killed themselves, or some other reason is preventing us from finding them.
The Bible. Never understood how anyone could read that and believe. The answer I leaned much later on is that they don't read it.
'If God isn't real, why do you say oh my God?'
That was from the deputy head of my school...
Holy shit
Godly excrement exists. QED.
Fucking hell
Proof it's getting hot in here
Cowabunga
... I'm not really sure about that one, never mind.
I had one guy who told me that he believed that God made the white people.
And that the black people evolved from monkeys.
And the people like me who are Native American and the Indians and Chinese and whatnot are all products of miscegenation between the white people who have souls and the black people who do not.
Surprisingly, being told that i am the proud possessor of some undefinable fraction of a human soul was not enough to get me to participate in their religion.
This really makes me rethink a lot of my core beliefs. I used to believe that racism is an ancient problem that we will one day overcome, but after reading this, I believe new types of racism can still be invented, and we have to fight those too.
So god copied an existing product, changed superficial details, and added his holy trademark?
Confirmed Bill Gates is God
Pascal's Wager
My friend once told me he had heard this very convincing argument on why he should believe...
I told him the usual "gimme your wallet, I'm your god or whatever", and he relented that maybe it's not so simple.
Then a few years later, there he goes bringing it up again...
"My God thinks I should drink, and do drugs, and rob the blind and sick. I'm not entirely sure if that's right, but I should do those things just in case I have to to get into his good graces."
Even they have to think it sounds pretty silly when you turn it around on them.
If there were no god wed all have no morals.
If violently abusive rapist psycopath threatening to torture you is your only reason for being nice, maybe you're a pos to begin with?
All of them.
They're all stupid.
Not necessarily God but intelligent design. I saw someone talk about a banana being the perfect fruit and how well it matched the shape of our hands. So obviously someone planned that out. Must've been God, the same being that releases half a dozen new apple varieties every season.
Sounds like someone who's never seen a wild banana.
The banana is one of the earliest cultivated plants. It is specifically cultivated, by humans, precisely to be the best fruit possible.
Bananas rule, and we can thank their creator: 10,000 years of human ingenuity
That's an argument used by Ray Comfort and former Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron.
Chicken and Egg argument. Christian apologist said it's only a paradox for atheists. God just made eggs and chickens at the same time.
Of course, as an atheist who has seen dinosaur fossils... Eggs existed hundreds of millions of years before chickens.
I believe in God but found the arguments in The Brothers Karamazov (and yes I read the book) to be misguided. There's a part in particular where a quasi-villainous character loses faith in God and suddenly goes right to murdering other characters who have been getting on his nerves. The whole thing takes Nietzsche to a whole new level. We aren't the sum of our schools of thought; in fact, in my faith, God doesn't really care about faith as much as he cares about how good we are. I've never met anyone before who doesn't have at least some innate sense of some kind of boundaries.
How would anything have been able to form, i.e. make more order, without decreasing entropy?
Of course there are multiple errors in that thought.
- Entropy does not mean an actual grade of (dis-)order or organization. It's one model to grasp certain processes through that concept. Outside of these the model doesn't hold.
- The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy cannot decrease in a CLOSED system (i.e. mass, energy, information flow at the boundary = 0). It doesn't mean that within that system there can't be local imbalances. For example: For a plant to be able to "order" - to use this term - its molecules to cells, Hydrogen atoms had to have been fused to Helium in our fusion reactor 150 million km away that we call sun which increases local entropy.
Of course there's more wrong with it, but those would be the blatant ones for me.
The weirdest to me are variations of, "If God didn't exist it would make me feel bad." Uhh???
This is like the best and most honest reason.
"It's not a cult." Wake up Karen, it's a cult.
"how else would you know the right thing to do?"
queried by a zealot at a picnic table in the park.