Ok, just so you know where I'm coming from, I am an evangelical Christian (Mennonite background, for those of you who care). For me, however, I have striven in my life to have reasons for my faith that go beyond simply parroting `For the Bible tells me so` every time anyone has a question. I have tried to synthesize faith and logic in my life as much as I can.
Now, I`d like to comment on this, if I may:
Burnswell said:
Its' very important to distinguish the difference between the weight that believers and thinkers put on morals. Thinkers see an 'immoral' action to be 'bad' on its own merit, while a believer would consider merely 'offending' someone as 'evil' as it is actually two actions lumped together in their eyes, the action itself and disobeying god, which far outweighs the actual immoral action itself to them. To a believer, giving reasons to be nice to people is either missing the point or 'playing god' and also evil, simply for questioning god.
Understand that at any point in time if some televangelist claimed that 'god talked to him' to them as they always say, but said that god wanted them to throw away their morals, the morals are as good as gone. If you are a believer, ask yourself if you would start killing people if God told you to, but please, in advance, figure out how you would know if it was really God who told you. Believing is a few holy words away from psychosis at any moment, I?ve seen it in action, it really is.
Any televangelist that would publically declare that `God told him` to abandon the moral principles set out for us in the Bible is not being spoken to by God. Period. And anyone who blindly follows such a televangelist needs to be way more familiar with what is written in the Bible, starting with Jesus` words: `Be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves.` Nowhere in Scripture are we told to just blindly follow the words of someone who claims to have spoken with God; in fact, in the Old Testament, anyone making such claims was expected to meet certain criteria as proof that God had truly spoken to them (one such criterion being that they made some prediction of the future that would come true; how many televangelists these days do that).
Now, back to the point at hand: there is, I think, a misunderstanding at play here. The argument that God must exist because human morality exists doesn`t quite mean what some of you seem to think it means. It does not mean that `No atheist can be a moral person.` Rather, it suggests that, since there are some moral principles that seem to exist across all cultural lines, some higher or Divine being must have placed the idea in our minds. Basically, the idea is that God is the source of the very idea of human morality, not that all Christians are one short crisis of faith away from homicidal mania.
And actually, for my part, I don`t really buy that argument either. Morality is inherently logical: it is logical to develop a society where people are raised to know that murder is unacceptable behaviour, or that someone who steals from others should be made to accept restitution. If this argument were the only one upon which people base their belief in the existence of God, it would be flimsy to say the least.
