[Closed] God's will

if it is god's will then he's a bit of a git and I'm don't get why anyone would worship someone/thing like that

Ok, so the most common defenses that I'm aware of* are theological skepticism and the unknown greater good and especially the imperative for free will.

[b]Theological skepticism
[/b]Basically, god is ineffable, we cannot know what the will of god is and how an individual event fits into it. It may appear evil to us but in the objective it may be part of a plan which is good or even be good in and if itself. We simply can't know.

[b]Greater Good
[/b]Evil could be a necessary consequence of creating a greater good.

Free Will
If we consider that doing good is one thing but choosing to do good is better - or that it's impossible to do good without the possibility of doing bad - then free will is a necessary part of producing a maximally good world. With free will in the world all bad is explicable - even the seemingly arbitrary "natural evil" like childhood disease can be explained away by appeal to the free will of evil spirits.

Salvation
Alternatively you could take the greater good to be brought about by salvation or the possibility of entering an afterlife. I was never convinced by this but some people argue that the existence of the possibility of salvation and heaven compensates for the suffering on earth.

There are other responses - some people deny that evil exists for instance - but those two are the most common.

Sorry if this is a christian-centric version, I don't know to what extent this relates to Islam.

*a few undergraduate philosophy of religion modules at uni...

I'm of the opinion that by blaming things on God, in whichever flavour, it takes the heat off of people. Want to bomb crap out of folk because you're mental blame one god, want to drive down busy roads on steep hillsides in the dark with no lights on blame another god, want to do all manner of things to all sorts of people blame yet another god. Fact is people are mostly crap and will use anything to take the blame away from themselves.

What about deja vu?

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

- King James Bible "Authorized Version", Cambridge Edition

 

If God if omnipotent then we can't have free will.

What about deja vu?

Just a glitch in the matrix.

If God exists he's a **** undeserving of worship.

Just a glitch in the matrix.

Now unglitched.

Simple really,1 John 5:19
You just have to forget what the main stream Christian religions teach (lots of tradition and man made ideas and philosophy) and read what the bible actually says.

If God if omnipotent then we can't have free will.

Why?

If God exists he's a * undeserving of worship.

She thinks you're a * * of a ****, too.

God?
An imaginary friend for adults..

What tyres for hajj?

Simple really,1 John 5:19
You just have to forget what the main stream Christian religions teach (lots of tradition and man made ideas and philosophy) and read what the bible actually says.

Cougar - Moderator

....... this isn't intended to be Yet Another Theist Bashing thread

But you won't be moderating it if things just happen to drift that way...

I expect he (or she) is just 'moving in mysterious ways'

As an atheist, there's nothing wrong with giving this stuff a little more thought than "God's a ****!!!111!1" which makes you sound like a 14 year old.

But you won't be moderating it if things just happen to drift that way...

I considered it (and was halfway through deleting the first nobby comment before I reconsidered). But I'm even less of a fan of censorship, figured you lot could self-police / ignore. Slippery slope, that (and arguably an abuse of power on my own thread).

I think what they do is fall back on the fact one cannot know what gods will is and one must just have faith that the deity has a plan that we are too simple to see

Corinthians 13:12King James Version (KJV)

12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

I know of no real logical manner to reconcile it because god is all powerful all loving and all knowing

Given this god either chooses to not intervene or does not love us enough to intervene.When it happens at an event like the Hak rather than say at a KKK gathering its pretty hard to see his /her/its working so some sort of fudge has to occur. St thomas of Aquinas wrote on this if you really care enough to read it.

If God if omnipotent then we can't have free will.
Why?

FWIW if we dont have free will and god decides then god is the author of sin .
ON balance its better for them if we have free will given to / taken by us when we ate the apple.

Cougar it just another area where IMHO one has to suspend your intellectual faculties as there is no reasonable satisfactory answer beyond shrugging and going trust in god whilst being incapable of explaining gods will

Do you have the freedom of choice to ride if I can stop you on a whim?

edit: employment law aside, my boss can fire me at any moment and yet I still have a role to play in determining whether I'm in work on monday.

Thanks, Cougar, for opening up the second thread.

I would begin by saying that I don't think that any of the questions we raise on STW can ever really be satisfactorily answered on STW, as good as it is, but I certainly think it's worth the banter. Well, in light of some of the comments above, not everything is worth the banter, but...

The idea of God's will, from a Judeo-Christian point of view, is that existence itself, and the laws of existence, are his will. Mathematical realities, such as Pythagorean theorem and the Golden Ratio [i]might[/i] be seen by some - on the basis of their apparent universality and, in the case of the latter, the geometric beauty - as examples of God's mind in existence. [Please note: I DO NOT suggest that this - or anything like it - might act as some sort of PROOF of GOd's existence!]

That said, the idea of God's will is not - as is so often construed - that he would simply impose himself on the very existence he is behind. Rather, existence simply unfolds the way it does according to itself. This includes suffering.

From a [Christian] theological point of view, suffering is the result of humankind having thrown a spanner in the works of existence, and so throwing off course what existence might have been; but then God takes on suffering itself (in the person of Jesus), and so transforms suffering.

This means that, while suffering endures as a reality (God would not re-set a course that creatures had set for themselves, and so take away their freedom), the effect of suffering is transformed.

So, little Johnny may pull through an operation, and give his parents the inspiration to 'thank God', or he may not pull through an operation, and so give his parents the inspiration to curse God. Either way, God's function in the situation is to have given the mind to humankind for medicine in the first place, and to redeem the situation for the better whether Johnny lives or dies.

In the end, though, there is no easy answer to your question. It is the very question that vexes everyone who has ever experienced suffering, and there is simply so much philosophical and theological ground to cover in a forum post, that it would be almost impossible to address every possible angle.

But I am happy to try.

Yes, we both do.

I would argue your " free will" is entirely what I decide to allow

What you choose is immaterial as only what I decree happens.

If a god does exist, and everything that happens happens for a reason, then what possible reason could there be for my wife and I losing our third child at the weekend?

I was pretty agnostic when I was younger. I'm rapidly falling into the "he's a ****" camp.

God would not re-set a course that creatures had set for themselves, and so take away their freedom

Respectfully, what you call difficult is inconsistent to the point of intellectual incoherence
Its why you need to fall back on faith

Isn't "Gods Will" just the religious version of "Sh*t happens"????

What you choose is immaterial as only what I decree happens.

Only if you think that your granting me the choice is valueless. As I pointed out above there's reason to think that that's not the case.

Isn't "Gods Will" just the religious version of "Sh*t happens"????

Not really, no. HTH

Only if you think that your granting me the choice is valueless

We cannot have a situation where you have free will but someone can remove it as it is then , de facto, no longer free as it requires someone elses ascent.
Imagine you can marry who you want if I let you is not free will.
Or I can post what I want here but cougar/mods can remove it

Its not worth debating , its not free someone has to let us do it , and I dont know what you are trying to get at tbh.

Junkyard - lazarus

Given this god either chooses to not intervene or does not love us enough to intervene.

The argument (not that I am especially interested in it) would run:

1. God in his goodness, creates something good.
2. It is more good to be free than to be bound, so what God creates is free.
3. God's creation uses its freedom to turn away from God.
4. It is antithetical to God's goodness to override the very freedom that he has instilled in his creation in the first place.

Analogy:

In the middle of Cardiff is the beautiful Roath Park. In the middle of Roath Park is a lake. Now, early one summer morning, before anyone has headed off to work, and the swans and geese on the lake are still sleeping, and there is not so much as hint of breeze, you wake up and go for a very quiet, contemplative stroll around the lake.

You are enjoying the absolute peace of it, when all of sudden, you see me coming over the road to join you. I have been out all night, and am just stumbling home, still somewhat drunk. I see you and shout, and at the same time, cast my mostly empty can of Carling into the lake.

With that, the peace is broken. The sound of my vulgarity echoes around the park, the swans and geese stir and start to flap about, and below the surface of the water - well beyond our seeing - even the water is disturbed. Now, you will remember from GCSE science that, in a vacuum, a wave will continue if there is nothing to stop it. Well, the ripples of the disturbance on the surface permeate the water underneath so that even the fish feel it.

The only one responsible for the disturbance is me, but now everything in the vicinity of the lake - things and creatures we both see and do not see - are affected. And now that it has started, it continues. The first of the commuters have started to drive down the surrounding streets, followed by the first children with their parents coming down the pavements. In fact, one or two of the little boys pick up some gravel, and throw it in the already-disturbed water. They are not doing anything bad; they are simply responding to stimuli and acting [i]according to their nature[/i].

But now you can probably see what I am getting act. From a Judeo-Christian point of view, suffering enters into the world (first made good) through the actions of human beings. Thereafter, nothing can really stop it, as that would reduce the freedom that made creation good in the first place. What can be done is that the chaos is mitigated, and Christians believe that this is what God undertakes in the Incarnation. But what would be antithetical, is if God simply descended and put a stop to the very physical laws that he authored in the first place.

Its not worth debating

That won't stop you humping it to death though, will it?

Its not worth debating , its not free someone has to let us do it , and I dont know what you are trying to get at tbh.

People have argued this for thousands of years. If you think you're able to dismiss it that easily then you're not understanding the discussion.

edit: I think that's me out. I don't care enough to argue with a big hitter.

"Free will" is merely a philosophical construct with no scientific evidence to support its existence.
All experiments to determine the nature of free will/conscious decision making have shown that even in the simplest situation, such as "deciding" when to flex a finger are detectable by electrical brain impulses an average of 0.8 seconds before the subject has "made the choice".
This may be a fallibility of "the reductionist scientific method" but as that's the yard stick most people use to evaluate "life" you have to consider that "free will" is as much a matter of faith as "God's will"

Junkyard - lazarus

God does do this as there are miracles [ if you are a christian] which are this very thing God intervening and taking away freedom.

Excellent point. And there are a number of approaches that some philosophers would take to the question of miracles.

In one respect, there are indeed times when - from a religious point of view - a miracle is the only way to explain something, and why it is granted at that given point in time, no one really knows. A miracle is an almost entirely subjective experience.

Then again, a miracle - which we often describe as 'supernatural' - might also be interpreted as 'natural' - that is, an aspect of nature that we do not normally perceive simply manifesting itself in a given instance.

Take the example of Fido, the two-dimensional dog.

Fido lives on a two-dimensional plane with a bunch of two-dimensional creatures. I can see Fido, because I am the one who cut him and all of his fellow two-dimensional mates out of the construction paper.

One day, I place my foot in front of Fido's two-dimensional snout and then quickly remove it. Fido is startled, and thinks he must have had an hallucination. But then I do it again, and he is convinced he has experienced a miracle. He goes off and tell his two-dimensional mates.

The thing is, what Fido doesn't know, being that his perception is limited to the two dimension, is that their is a universe beyond him that is comprised of more than two dimensions, and that what he experiences as a miracle is actually just a bigger natural reality than he is normally aware of.

The analogy works when you remember that physicists tell us that the universe is likely comprised of - what is it? - something like 11 dimensions?

That won't stop you humping it to death though, will it?

We both do our thing, yours is to enter threads to tell the participants how low your opinion is of them or the thread, where as i just choose to not enter threads I dont care about just to whinge at the participants. I will let you decide which is the more noble choice.

Thereafter, nothing can really stop it, as that would reduce the freedom that made creation good in the first place

If you think you're able to dismiss it that easily then you're not understanding the discussion.

FWIW i am trying to give up the personal stuff and turn the other cheek so I will withdraw from the thread and leave it to others - wander off to rugby thread to explain to the CPT how little I like it 😉

When folk spout God at me, I am reminded of this, and why I cannot reconcile the existence of God, or if they do exist, why they deserve our worship instead of our loathing.......

[img] [/img]

I don't know where I saw it, but there's an Internet meme doing the rounds......

Gods don't kill people, People with Gods kill people.

FWIW i am trying to give up the personal stuff and turn the other cheek so I will withdraw from the thread and leave it to others - wander off to rugby thread to explain to the CPT how little I like it

the more noble choice.

As you have said yourself, take time away from arguing endlessly in a copy'n'paste frenzy. You'll feel a lot better for it, I hope.

I hope, Smudge666, that you are not suggesting anyone is 'spouting God at you'. We are discussing a question raised by a forum member by putting forward ideas and disputing them in turn.

I have always found it hard to swallow simple statements like those of Attenborough (and Fry, and others), as if they in themselves were enough to knock down thousands of years of human thought about the divine. I mean, they are legitimate enough to express. But they can hardly be considered fatal to all notions of God. In, I might add, precisely the same way that I don't think anything I say in some pithy way on here is bound to convince anyone that God exists.

It is all just part of legitimate human discourse.

Smudger666 - Member

I don't know where I saw it, but there's an Internet meme doing the rounds......

Gods don't kill people, People with Gods kill people.

Tosh. People kill people. Full stop.

Sometimes they do it 'for God', and sometimes for politics, and sometimes for money, and sometimes for land. Whatever the case, people kill people.

I have always found it hard to swallow simple statements like those of Attenborough

Well, for a start it assumes that the god in question only cares about the human, not the worm....

But they can hardly be considered fatal to all notions of God. In, I might add, precisely the same way that I don't think anything I say in some pithy way on here is bound to convince anyone that God exists.

Someone, possibly Alvin Plantinga, said that he doesn't believe that anyone has every been converted to belief by argument. This stuff's important in so far as it challenges and changesour positions, not so much in terms of conversions.

A similar one...
[img] ?oh=82683cf6617d4225342c44138ce4c0f6&oe=56AA1437[/img]

Thanks SaxonRider for some good explanations/analogies.

With this...

Junkyard - lazarus
God does do this as there are miracles [ if you are a christian] which are this very thing God intervening and taking away freedom.

...I wondered, is it taking away free will if someone is [i]asking[/i] God to intervene? I'm not sure it is.

If a god does exist, and everything that happens happens for a reason, then what possible reason could there be for my wife and I losing our third child at the weekend?

I remember seeing an interview with a devout Muslim who had survived the Boxing Day tsunami. His only explanation for what had happened was that "God was testing me". God wiped out 1/4 million odd people as a test for his faith. Either that's one solipsistic world view or one weird god. Was he testing the people who didn't survive too?

5thElephant, some are. They just don't get called extremists.

[img] [/img]

Good question, thegreatape. My first answer would be to say that I think it probably wouldn't diminish free will. If someone is disposed to God, and chooses to ask for his intervention, then the love of God felt in response might well be 'miraculous' and non-contradictory.

Its not me getting shitty or personal is it flashy and that is not what I said

Thanks for your concern about my "welfare" I am sure it was well meaning and not a personal dig. 😕

Amusing that you say ok I will try to be nice and you get that from folk as a response and its still my fault
Turns the other cheek again to the CPT

Surely religion started as a means of trying to understand the world in which we live? Why does the rain fall? Why does the Sun shine? Why do the crops fail? Why are we here?
Some of the bits of Abrahamic tradition make sense - Kosher / Trefeirah, Halal / Haram make sense in that part of the world in pre-refrigeration days. These are pretty good food hygiene ideas for the day. I'm sure there's something in there about washing fish and / or hands under running water - specifically running water.

The rest is fairy stories.

Nowadays we have a better understanding of the world and the universe in which it is located. We understand a lot about the fundamental forces and particles which create and shape that universe. We know why the rain falls, the Sun shines, and why crops fail.

We know what the structure of the atom is, we know the structure and the forces within that atom. What we do not know we have been able to postulate, and then prove.

We have the Standard Model. It is right*. As an example, which received a fair amount of media attention. Higgs, Brout, Englert, et. al. proposed a theory of how gauge bosons could acquire mass through interaction in a quantum type field that permeates everything. There was no [i]proof[/i] for this other than the need to explain mass in a way that Goldstone's Theorem didn't, their ideas and a whole bunch of calculations. The theoretical explanation seemed right. It fit everything else we knew about particle physics at that time. This was 1964. In 2012 both the CMS and ATLAS at CERN, in independent experiments detected a previously unknown boson with mass that was expected as predicted by the Higgs Theory.

Not a fairy story. A real explanation of the world around us.

*Is the Standard Model [i] correct[/i]. Yes, for now, with our current understanding. I look forward to the day when we prove it isn't. Sure as spit beats the idea of believing in something that people debated about as being correct 2000 years ago and saying that's how we should all live our lives today and if you don't you're all gonna burn.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics - Yeah, that one is right, bet the house on that one. Ain't gonna change.

Wine fuelled rant about religion over for now. Do not start me on Creationism! My laptop would experience something akin to an SCM quench with the pith, piss and bile with which I would have to respond. Don't, don't do it.

Miracles eh? Let's take as a miracle what millions and millions of Catholics would call a miracle (or claim they do). Someone has cancer. They pray for a cure to Mary/st someone or they take a trip to Lourdes and the cancer goes away. They believe that God has intervened in their lives and made them well.
But has anyone who is missing an arm ever grown a new arm? No matter how fervently they have prayed, I don't believe you could show me anyone who has ever grown a new arm.
So- either God has some unfathomable dislike of limbless people and refuses to cure them, or he can't (in which case he is not omnipotent and therefore not God), or - and let's invoke Occam's Razor here - he doesn't exist.

Saxonrider - sorry mate, but they are as valid as any statement you have made - regardless of the thousands of years of mans philosophical thinking about God......

Either they exist, and therefore everything that happens can be attributed to them or they don't and everything that happens is a result of thousands of years of evolution/chance/chemistry/physics.

I can't reconcile the crap that goes on in the world with any kind of deity worthy of worship, so have to believe they're a bunch of Sherman tankers, or they don't exist.

I can see that my brain is too simplistic for this convoluted 'tosh' of which you speak, so in the words of the dragons, I'm out.

@ironnigel: I don't think anyone on here would start in on creationism, so not to worry.

5thElephant, some are. They just don't get called extremists

[img] [/img]

Smudger666 - Member

Saxonrider - sorry mate, but they are as valid as any statement you have made - regardless of the thousands of years of mans philosophical thinking about God......

I can see that my brain is too simplistic for this convoluted 'tosh' of which you speak, so in the words of the dragons, I'm out.

Sorry if I sounded harsh. I don't mean to suggest that it is stupid to have the thoughts expressed in those memes; it's just that they are single, throw-away sentences that shouldn't be given too much weight on their own. I think sometimes discussions around the issue of God get swamped by these sorts of things from both sides. And yes, I agree with you that the thoughts are as legitimate as my own. I don't want to assert superiority on my part.

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5thElefant - Member

Even the good ones are evil.

Wow. Just wow. The implications of your assertion are huge.

I'm pretty sure that good and bad are just constructs, entirely inside the human head. Perception, nothing more and nothing less. Shit happens, or doesn't, no reason. Same for God, purely a product of the human mind.

Now then, back to the wine and popcorn.

Happy Friday 🙂

God isn't complicated. The human condition makes God complicated, just so we can contemplate our navels, rather than just be the best we can, as much as we can.

And for the ultimate flaming...

God IS love. Infinite, unconditional, love.

On the all the bad shit in the world is derived from our abuse of free will, even if you extend that to other living organisms then you've still got geological, cosmological and meteorological disasters to contend with where the only deviation is either the random chaos of the universe or a malevolent act on the behalf of god.

If god has built that chaos in to the system what is it's purpose? Does it need to have purpose? Or could the literalistic interpretations in this thread about omnipotence be wrong and is god there as a presence but not a controller or even necessarily as the creator with the ultimate vision.

The whole earthquakes happen so we can appreciate the insignificance of our selves doesn't seem like a very satisfactory explanation. Collateral damage doesn't seem like a very godly concept.

Also the devil in general - outside of it as a metaphor - is another nail in the coffin of the literal omnipotence narrative.

Been drinking. Atheist for the record.

@ thestabiliser - It's not random chaos. It's really, really, really well ordered chaos.
Hope that helps.

Devout Atheist - in case you missed my earlier post!

Willard. Don't know what to say except that I'm very sorry to hear of your loss. It won't help at all but thinking very much of you and yours.

Jay

God IS love. Infinite, unconditional, love.

Well, I'm glad that works for you. I suspect you must have to cover your eyes and ears quite a bit to stay on message.

Faith is just a coping mechanism, built into our phsyche to help us survive in a very big bad world
Its just an electrochemical state, like all of our conscious thought and emotion

Theres gotta be a genetic element to being a believer and like all genetics it will vary from person to person

Add into that religions being used as a control mechanism in societies to help keep things stable through time

Religion is here to stay, even in an age where we can split the atom (and way beyond) where we can create and modify life at its most basic level in a laboratory
It persists, in the complete absence of any proof whatsoever, despite the many obvious fallacies, contradictions and truly horrible things done in its name, millions, billions? Of people still believe- it's evolved with us probably since before we were human

truly horrible things done in its name, millions, billions?

Stalin killed around 50 million, Mao in the region of 45 million.

Is religion to blame for those deaths?

Kimbers - Its just that that sort of thing that boils the piss in my bladder!

Not your response, please don't think that. It's the fact that goes with it. "It persists in the complete absence of proof"

AAaaaaaaahhhh!!

In the absence of proof, science seeks that proof. Without proof, anything is merely a theory.

Is religion to blame for those deaths?

Maybe not religion in terms of a social club of (deranged) people but if it was 'God's will' that those wicked men existed, I guess it must his/her fault. He/She was probably just testing some bloke in Texas' faith.

The Bible is a creation of man put together a significant time after J the C was crucified. You're just picking a different tradition and set of man made ideas to follow.

OP I assume you saw my comment on the earlier thread. In an effort to cast things in a "modern" and secular context people have many philipsophies to deal with life's events which span anything from God's Will, to fate to sh1t happens. I am sure a bhuddist would have an explanation somewhere within that range. Who is to say another persons way of understanding is different.

We see many threads whuch discuss religion with those that speak of imaginary friends or fairly tales. Instead of trivialising elements such as these try and look at the power of something as simple as the Ten Commandments a value system which underpins so many modern societies, forms the basis of social behavioural standards and the law. Then take that and take the step to a belief that events are Gods Will instead of sh1t happens,

@kimbers we understand your point of view, the OP is trying to understand why people have this value system and how they rationalise it. If I might say so you have nothing to add on the subject, your view is "I don't believe in it" - we get that

sorry chap, I flounced earlier but like a moth to a flame, I'm back. only to say, childish edited childish. I blame the Malt.

a value system which underpins so many modern societies

I find that a tiny bit arrogant. You are not alone in this - religious types have this as a common failing. I see the 10 commandments (actually not all 10 - you can have the first four as self serving twonk) as humanity's value system - it kind of evolved just like the whole standing up thing. Religion just nabbed it and chucked it in a burning bush. The best bit is some of us don't need them as decreed rules, it just comes naturally.

Yep, Kona, Fairy tales and all that. I did point out that there was a lot of common sense on Halal & Kosher food practices. There was [i]some good[/i] that came about as a result of those practices.

Please, please point out the specific Sura in the Koran that dictates the women must wear the Niqab. Surely that's a good argument for men deciding what religion should dictate the rest of the populace should do?

I for one am a BIG fan of Niqabs and Burqas. As a European chap who spent my *ahem* formative years in Iran I am glad my male lustful desires were not inflamed.

There's a Creationist Museum in Utah that has an exhibit showing primitive Man hunting & killing Dinosaurs. Whoah - Proof if any...

Instead of trivialising elements such as these try and look at the power of something as simple as the Ten Commandments a value system which underpins so many modern societies, forms the basis of social behavioural standards and the law.

So why do Christians ignore the first two?

Religion just nabbed it. The best bit is some of us don't need them as decreed rules, it just comes naturally.

How do you know that "it just comes naturally" ?

Gods Will………..?

This may upset some folk but i consider that anyone that has a genuine belief in an all seeing/all encompassing God or deity must be mentally unhinged, surely in this day and age a belief in a creator of the universe/our earth/existence is akin to madness/crockofshite and should be considered as such.

Since a very early age at primary school i refused to go to church at the start/end of terms and as such it was myself and Andrew Shamash (token jewish kid) that spent our time in the art dept listening to music and drawing cartoons, don't get me started on the various High schools/academy's i attended as religious studies were a compulsory part of the curriculum which usually led to me making a sit down protest outside the classroom for the entire lesson or if i was dragged into the classroom (early/mid 80s when teachers could whack you/grab you) i would turn my desk and face the rear wall.

Religion is a farce, that's always been my opinion and the older i get the less patience i have for it.

This may upset some folk but i consider that anyone that has a genuine belief in an all seeing/all encompassing God or deity must be mentally unhinged

Actually your claim that most human beings are mentally unhinged makes you sound unhinged.

It's not me.......it's everyone else that's mad. Yeah right......of course it is.

How do you know that "it just comes naturally" ?

Good question - guess I'll never know. I didn't do the whole Sunday school thing so didn't actually read them until well into my teens but in all the time beforehand I never had unnatural thoughts about my neighbour's Ox (or pig come to that) if that helps.

didn't actually read them until well into my teens but in all the time beforehand I never .......

I dare say that before your teens you were influenced by a moral code which has its origins in religion.

I very much doubt that a baby leaves the womb with the concept that murder, stealing, shagging your neighbour's missus, etc, is unacceptable, already imprinted in their DNA. I disagree that "it just comes naturally".

Not fussed ernie - i may well be as mad as a box of bible bashing religious nut jobs, but how is it genuinely possible to place unwavering belief in your existence on this planet to a plagiarised rehash of an ancient Hallucinogenic ritual.

Ok…I could bite/answer back but there's better things i could be doing with my time such as contemplating the trials and tribulations of the wolf spider that is attempting to cross my ceiling so if you don't mind i'd rather not bother wasting my time arguing on forums or suchlike as i consider it narcissistic and a waste of energy.

PS : I'm not religious in anyway possible but i absolutely love an Ayahuascha or a DMT ritual every couple of years to [i]centre[/i] me so i guess i'm a conundrum wrapped up in an non religious shell?.

Whilst I agree that much of what we conceive to be right and wrong is social conditioning, I was more inferring that it does not need religious education to effect that - 'it came naturally'by being a member of the community rather than religious brainwashing. I contest that religion did not define that moral code (in its crudest form - it has been massaged locally by the dominant religion but the core values are almost universal) merely adopted it. Take the language used for instance - "shall not murder". Not kill note, but murder. Murder - 'To unlawfully kill' - based upon a predefined supposition of right and wrong. For religion(s) to take authorship of the core moral code that makes us human the world over is to distort history.