There is such a thing as secular morality. I’m not sure if you’re saying there isn’t. Apologies if I misunderstood.

Actually, I think that the phrase “secular morality” is an oxymoron. Morality implies the reception of fixed behavioural dictates from on-high, something that is (or ought to be, anyway) incompatible with secularism.

But I consider myself somewhat idiosyncratic in that I think the words “ethics” and “morality” describe completely different — and mutually exclusive — ways of processing the world.

Although I refuse to go to church with them (I’ll often cook while they’re away) I enjoy the holidays with family (I just wish I could have more of my family of choice involved with my family of origin–geography and all that).

This whole war on christmas thing is such complete and utter bullshit. Almost all of the atheists (and even a few jews) I know celebrate the holiday, not in its religious form, but in the secular form (my family and I have moved toward small gifts for each other, but major gifts as donations).

It was yummy. Huge yellow apples, crisper than granny smith, but not so tart. Can’t remember the name, darn it. They came from a local farmer’s market.

For the crust, use the food processor to blend the butter and flour (not too fine) then work the water in with a fork. And I add a little instant tapioca, along with flour or cornstarch, so it’s not runny.

Alara Rogers:

Not only doesn’t the Bible discuss abortion, but it doesn’t discuss conception. Indeed it repeatedly refers to the “breath of life.”

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
— Genesis 2: 7 (KJV)

The implication is that our soul enters our bodies when God breathes the breath of life into us. At birth. This whole abortion argument is based on a terrible misreading of the Bible. It derives from a melding of pseudo-science and theology. Our souls enter our bodies at birth according to my reading of the Bible. Conception as the starting point was made up by theologians looking over the shoulder of scientists and misunderstanding what they see.

34″Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?”
35″Who has ever given to God,
that God should repay him?”

You honestly think that the only reason murder, theft, corruption, etc. are illegal is because they’re arbitrarily “immoral”? Can you really not think of any practical secular reasons why those things are prohibited?

There is such a thing as secular morality. I’m not sure if you’re saying there isn’t. Apologies if I misunderstood.

Theists posit that God is good. But is God good because there is an objective standard of “good” that God meets? Or is good “good” because it is what God desires? In other words, do we use good to define God, or God to define good?

If you use God to define good, then literally anything “God” wants becomes “good”. Murder unbelievers? Burn witches? Slaughter all your enemies, including the women and children, except for the teenage girls, who you take home and rape? It’s all good as long as God says so! (And, in fact, the Old Testament strongly suggests that God not only approves of the Israelites doing such things, but in some cases directly admonishes them to do so.)

But, the modern Christian says, that’s wrong! God couldn’t have said to do those things, because they are evil, and God is good. So the Bible is just being metaphorical there. OK, fine, but that means that “good” *doesn’t* mean “whatever God says” — there’s an objective standard of good that you’re applying to the words of God, and if they don’t match up, you’re throwing out the words. In other words, you don’t actually *need* God. You are figuring out “goodness” without reference to God.

So, either you have an internal moral compass, or you don’t. If you have an internal moral compass, then whether you are a theist or an atheist, you know good from evil, right from wrong, and if someone tells you it is good and Godly to go to the Holy Land and kill the brown people who worship Allah, you know it’s wrong. Killing is wrong. Rape is wrong. They just *are*. God doesn’t need to tell you so, you just *know.*

And if you don’t have an internal moral compass, then someone can tell you that God said it was a good thing to torture an elderly woman until she confesses to crimes that make no logical sense and then burn her to death, and you’ll agree, this is a perfectly fine and Godly thing to do. Because God said you should not suffer a witch to live.

To complicate matters, often ideas of right and wrong come from the culture we live in, rather than God, whether you’re a theist or an atheist. But theists often then project their vision of right and wrong onto God. For instance, I will bet you that black Christians who call homosexuality an abomination and think it’s like the worst sin ever would all agree that God abhors slavery. Except the *same* book of the Bible that rants about homosexuals also says it’s okay to have slaves. There’s nowhere in the Bible that mentions abortion, but Jesus Christ *specifically* says you can’t get a divorce — yet protesters don’t line up outside Vegas chapels to prevent people who have been divorced from remarrying.

To me, it seems obvious that there are three major places we get our sense of right and wrong. We get it from our culture (which may be our subculture), our religion if we have one, and our own internal moral compass. The people who are truly “good” are the ones who can look at evil behavior being perpetrated and called “good” by their culture and their religion and say, “No, this is still wrong.” Abolitionists and slavery. The rape of teenage girls in arranged marriages in countries where that’s legal. Prejudice against people who love a consenting adult of the same sex. People who stand up against these attitudes and practices and say “this is wrong” are people with an internal sense of good and evil. And those people are just as likely to be atheists as theists.

Now, what philosophical underpinning can we use to determine what is wrong and right? A sense of “it just *is*” is of course subject to terrible bigotry as well; good people are using *some* kind of objective metric to determine what is good and evil. And what I think it boils down to is “would I like this treatment if it were done to me?” It’s the ability to empathize with the situation of another human and ask “what would it be like if I were in his or her shoes?” This is why sex out of wedlock is not actually morally wrong — because when you objectively consider it, no one is being hurt. At best it’s a paperwork issue, a bookkeeping problem for society about as objectively bad as not making out a will. Killing and rape and theft are morally wrong because they cause other humans real, quantifiable harm.

Abortion becomes a morally sticky issue if you believe that humans are human from conception (and you *can* get there philosophically, without going through theism) — but objections to abortion that are *also* coupled to objections to birth control, sex education, universal medical insurance for pregnant women and children, and state-supported day care demonstrate plainly that the desire is actually to make women suffer for having sex, not to prevent abortion. Also, I believe that people who object to abortion and do not have a secret agenda to make women suffer are simply not applying empathy correctly; they have perhaps been convinced by their subculture that women go get abortions for trivial reasons, and they don’t imagine what it’s like to be pregnant under circumstances where a pregnancy can destroy your life. Those people, we can reach.

Given the underwhelming respect the Constitution has received lately, I’m afraid to find out how this would be answered…

So the first question we should ask our candidates at a debate is, which is more important, Jesus or the US Constitution?

It was one of those things packaged like a softball question, like, “What are you reading now?”, but it was actually about as repulsive as it gets, because the unspoken assumption was that non-Christians are simply ineligible to run for President.

Why? Why can’t a non-Christian have a favorite bible verse? I’m an atheist and I have several. And, of course, the Old Testament is part of the Christian bible so a religious Jewish person would have no trouble whipping out a couple of verses.

But it basically comes down to this, Tim is sitting in a room with a bunch of people who say that the Bible is the basis for their religious beliefs. Asking them what their favorite verse is seems perfectly reasonable. If all the candidates had claimed to be huge baseball fanatics, asking them who their favorite team is would be reasonable, wouldn’t it? And it certainly wouldn’t imply that only baseball fans can run for president.