fredjones wrote:The point of this thread was to show that the only reason why we consider the question of god's existence important, is because religious people believe that only their version of morality will get you into heaven. Getting into heaven requires living a good life. I say that it is impossible to know god's version of morality, so we should not rely on any religious text to live a good life.
For some reason I followed a tangent that brought me off course.
fred,
I agree with you about the part that we can't know god's version of morality.
The point I was making is that humanity can't even decide what morality is, either. Once you start choosing what is "moral" and "immoral" for someone else, you become like the Bible-Thumpers, imho.
How many different religions have you studied? You state that "Getting into heaven requires living a good life." See that is true for some religions. But for some, its not true.
Satanism is a religion.
Or take a more innocuous example: The thief who died on the cross beside Jesus (so the story goes). He lived a crimminal life, a bad life. Immoral. He asks for forgiveness and accepts Jesus at the last moment prior to death, and he goes to heaven. Thus, it was not required that he live a moral life to get to heaven. There are entire huge religions, yes even Christian religions, that don't require you to live a moral life to get to heaven.
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This gets complex really fast, and I don't want to write a whole book on it.
Suffice it to say, it appeared to me you were making Society into the new God. Which is fine, that has been done before.
But you were kind of assuming that society can define what is moral.
And I take issue with that.
Society has decided some very immoral things in the past.
I'm just saying its not so simple.
But yeah, we do agree on a lot of stuff, like no one know's god's opinion of what is moral, etc. :wink:
