76 Republican staffer and long-term director of financial operations for Seattle Republicans Larry Corrigan pleaded guilty for attempted rape of a 13-year-old girl

77 Republican talk show host Scott Eller Cortelyou plead guilty on charges of using the Internet to try and lure a child into a sexual relationship with him

78 Republican constable Joshua Dickens sentenced to five years in prison for torture-related activities against a young woman.

79 Republican spokesman Brian Doyle arrested for trying to seduce a 14-year-old girl over the Internet. He was later sentenced to 5 years in prison

80 Republican campaign official and former Romney staffer Matthew Joseph Elliott convicted of sexual exploitation of a child Got a great deal, but really went astray, ending up murdering a child.

81 Republican party chair Donald Fleischman was charged with two counts of child enticement and one count of exposing himself to a child

82 Republican Michael Flory, former head of the Michigan Young American Foundation, raped a colleague at convention

83 Richard Gardner, a Nevada State Representative (R), admitted to molesting his two daughters and 34% of voters still voted for him. That 7 over the Keyes Constant!

84 George Roche III resigned as president of conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan after accusations of a quasi-incestuous relationship with his daughter-in-law, Lissa. This is an exception to my no adultery rule because yuck, his daughter-in-law. How could he do that to his son?

85 Bishop Paprocki is not a sexual predator, but he protects them. He protected and enabled pedophile priests. He engages in partisanship to order Democratic politicians be denied communion by all priests in his diocese, including Dick Durbin

86 Republican high-level Bush appointee Dr. David Hager sodomized his wife while she slept. She divorced him for it.

87 Republican sheriff Don Haidl used his office to try to smear the victim that was gang raped. The main perpetrator was Haidl’s son, who poisoned the victim. Sheriff Haidl claims that the girl deserved it because she was a "slut." The original story I linked is now 404, but here is another one.

88 Republican activist Neal Horsley admits to having had sex with a mule. Horsley also wants all homosexuals arrested and solicited murders of abortion providers on his Nuremberg files site.

89 Conservative Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston covered up thousands of instances of sexual molestation by fellow conservative members of the clergy.

90 Republican congressman Joseph McDade charged with exposing his genitalia to two women on a public beach

91 Republican delegate Robert McKee resigns after police seized two computers and videotapes from his home pertaining to child pornography

92 Republican blowhard TV personality Bill O’Reilly paid several million dollars to settle a sexual harassment suit with Andrea Mackris.

93 Republican mega-preacher Marshal Seymour arrested on charges of having sex with underage boys. Seymour had been jailed almost a decade earlier for similar charges in a different state

94 White supremacist National Vanguard leader Kevin Alfred Strom arrested and charged with child pornography

95 Daniel Dean Thompson founded a family-values film company that removed all the "bad parts" from films to make them family-friendly front for child porn, arrested for having sex with 14-year-old

96 Wharton prof & conservative consultant on media effects on children Lawrence Scott Ward had video of himself having sex with children. Sex tourist

97 Spokane Republican homophobic mayor Jim West recalled after evidence surfaced that he molested little boys

98 Focus on the Family's Steve Wilsey - molesting an 8-year-old boy

99 Republican Southern Baptist megachurch pastor Paul Williams faces charges of molesting his son

100 Chairman of the Young Republican National Federation, Glenn Murphy Jr., from Indiana was busted for assaulting another man. Not the first time it's happened.

Also,

Matthew Reilly, Cranston City council member and chairman of the Cranston Republican Party caught passed out in the drivers seat of his car after smoking crack. He had cocaine, fentanyl, and crack all over the open car where anyone including children could grab it.

Let me guess, your answer will be some random person’s tweet having nothing to do with republicans smoking crack and fucking children.

Imagine what this would do if that steering wheel had one of those Clubs mounted on it.

Pretty sure the driver seat would be empty and there'd be a new sunroof for the car.

Nazi Germany - the modern poster child for tyrannical government - actually made it easier for right wingers to get guns*, while making it illegal for Jewish people to own guns. Remember that white right wing nationalist were not oppressed by Hitler. Quite to the contrary, they were emboldened and deified (as the master race) by Naziism. When Germany went Nazi, angry right wing gun owners were in the drivers seat.

If you want to change the government, put down your guns and write a song or a poem. Organize a march on the capital. Stage a hunger strike. Peacefully lock arms and allow the fascists to spray you with firehoses while the rest of the world looks on with disgust.

Violence begets violence.

Source: *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Germany#The_1938_German_Weapons_Act

And speaking of the gun control thing, I totally agree with @Fletch and @dannym3141 (the nuclear warhead scenario is allways the one i try to bring up talking with gun loving people)

I had a friend who would have a steel pipe lying under his driver seat in case of such incidents (On a side note, sometimes he was the one raging, but mostly to himself). The thing I (for)told him was, that someday if he walks out of his car with the steel pipe to "calm down" (read intimidate) the raging guy of the other car, that guy may draw a knife. Which was exactly what happened to him one day. Luckily nobody of them snapped and did something stupid. They just screamed at each other for a little while until they realised that they didn't wanted to die that day.

My point being, in Germany we have a very strict gun law and I think thats a good thing. Look at the situation I just described, someone might say that they could have killed themselves as easily, as if they had guns, and at least with a gun you could make sure that you could defend yourself. But there is a general mistake in that logic. It takes far more "effort" and willingness to attack someone head on with a knife or a steel pipe. And the whole attacking process can be stopped at any given time (in the unusual event that the guys come to their senses). But on the other side, every freaking kid in the world would be able to kill anyone with a gun. It doesn't take much skill, practice or time, just a slight movement of the finger and pointing the end into the right direction.

@shinyblurry

Overall, this is how I summarize your arguments: (A) Life without God is meaningless, and (B) a meaningless life would sometimes be difficult to tolerate, therefore (C) God exists. We pretty much agree on A, and we do agree on B, but C does not follow from A and B. You can correctly conclude that (C) life without God would be difficult to tolerate at times. So? That still doesn’t mean that God exists. I believe that God doesn’t exist, so I conclude from A and B that life is difficult to tolerate at times. Which is true.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who weren't believers who died happily in ignorance of the truth, but the question is, did they understand that their life was meaningless? I doubt it. It is not something that many people are able to face, and even if they could, they certainly don't live that way. In some way or another, they are deluding themselves and living as if their life does have meaning.

Fair point. They may not have ever had the philosophical conversation with themselves about whether their lives have meaning, so it never occurred to them to be upset about it. I agree that it could be a very difficult thing to face, and I think that’s why the human species developed a proclivity for religion. Elsewhere here I’ve suggested we developed metaphysical faith because we’re intelligent and inquisitive, and it freed our minds from the obvious nagging questions of our existence with a one-stop catch-all answer: “Because God”. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense. If believing you have a purpose in the grand scheme of things makes you feel better and gives a higher community bond, then it conveys higher survivability to you and your genes. It may be (or once have been) helpful for us to believe that a god exists (any god/gods, mind you, or even a non-deity-based faith system like Buddhism), but this still is not an indication that any god exists.

Hope is what keeps people going … They are not mentally ill, they are simply facing the cold, stark reality of their situation.

I’m going to be blunt here: you don’t have a clue what depression is. You’re starting with your conclusion, and applying it to whatever pop psychology you’ve picked up. You’re like a North Korean telling me what democracy is, and concluding that Kim Jong Un therefore is the greatest person on Earth. I know what depression is for me, for my family members and my friends who have suffered from it, and I have done private research on it beyond that. Reducing depression to the factor of “hope” is incorrect, and presuming to know something because you’ve got Yahweh on your side is arrogant. You don’t know us, you don’t understand our condition, so please don’t assume to speak for us. You can guess, and you can ask me, and I’ll tell you what I feel, what I have experienced, and what I have learned. Then if it fits your argument, you can let me know.

The point being, that if there is no God then no one is in the drivers seat here on planet Earth. I would be surprised if the extreme fragility of our civilization escaped you. If you look at history, and you contrast it to what is going on today, you will find that the new is simply the old in different packaging. We're watching the exact same game show, simply on a grander and more dangerous scale. Humanity has never been closer to utterly destroying itself anytime in its history than it is today. I'm sure, like everything else in creation, you will attribute that to dumb luck. However, if you think everything is a numbers game, then sooner or later the odds say that cooler heads will not prevail and there will be a civilization annihilating calamity. The truth is, it is only the sovereign hand of God that is restraining this from happening.

Your first sentences are close enough I’ll just agree. The last one is your own fantasy straight out of nowhere. That aside, so what? We’re close to killing ourselves. I don’t know if humanity will survive another 100 years. I hope it does, but I can’t know. It’s hard to face, and very frustrating to watch our so-called leaders (who all leverage claimed faith in God, mind you) pissing it all away for money and power. No other age has had to face the possibility of the destruction of civilization. It’s hard. You said your point was that there’s nobody in the driver’s seat. I agree. What’s your point? How do you figure Yahweh’s “in the driver’s seat”?

My original point, however, still stands. You say you can't imagine someone finding bliss in hurting people. Well, have you ever heard of psychopaths? They do indeed find their bliss in acquiring power and control and making other people miserable, and they feel absolutely no remorse for doing so.

This is my fault. As I mentioned in my last comment, I had intended to write further down about people who do find bliss in hurting others, and I had it fleshed out in the drafting process, but I guess I accidentally deleted it before posting. Anyway, here it is. First, there’s psychopaths. You don’t understand what a psychopath is. It’s not a blood-crazed killer from a Hollywood movie. In real life, a psychopath is someone who fails to feel empathy or sympathy, someone who has no sense of altruism. They do whatever serves their own interests best – however they define that. This is in sharp contrast with how the rest of us think about other people, which is mostly with compassion. I’ve been close to a few psychopaths, and they enjoy things like music or sports or writing or whatever like anyone else, and they mostly understand that others think hurting people is bad, so they avoid it. They don’t get any special thrill from hurting others – it just doesn’t hurt their conscience if they do. I’m guessing they don’t really ever feel the bliss I’m talking about.

Separate from those people, let’s imagine there’s a group of people who feel they’re experiencing the same bliss you feel in your numinous experiences, but they feel it only when they hurt or kill people. Now, I’m asserting that these people probably don’t exist, but if they did, people behaving according to the principles of what’s “good” (which I’ll get to later) would have to restrain them from hurting other people, and with a heavy heart, would probably imprison them. And while they were in prison, compassionate people on the outside might be researching ways to help the inmates self-realize – within the limits of their confinement, like they do in the Swedish penal system.

Yes, it feels good to feel good, but this doesn't tell us why we *ought* to do anything.

The reason we’re having this conversation, or at least the reason I am, is because we both already have a sense that some things are right and other things are wrong. That is primary. We both agree that we have this sense, and that for us it feels important to follow it. So for me, the fact that I have this feeling that some actions are good and others aren’t is all the “ought” I need. I don’t need anybody’s permission or orders. I ought to do things that I feel are good things to do. So, whether my conscience comes from human DNA (my position) or from an external entity (your position) doesn’t matter because we have both already decided to follow it, and so has just about every human on Earth.

In a meaningless Universe there is no actual right and wrong, so why shouldn't you just do whatever you want? Why waste your time trying to navigate some moral landscape that you don't even believe really exists? Why not just take what you can, when you can, before you lose the opportunity?

There’s nobody who’s going to judge my soul when I’m dead, so in that sense, once I’m dead, it won’t matter to me in the least what I do now once I’m dead because I’ll be dead. What I want to do at any given time is what feels good to me, and that’s the same with almost everyone, in spite of what religions teach people about their wicked “fallen” souls and how not to trust themselves (except when they paradoxically teach us to trust ourselves). Like, I might like to eat your cookie, but it would feel worse to steal it from you than it would feel good to eat it. Instead, I think about how I can have the cookie without feeling bad about it. I would probably ask you for some of your cookie, and then I’d not only have some cookie, but I’d also share a friendly interaction with another person in my community, someone who will probably enjoy sharing their cookie with me and be glad I asked them. Win-win. So to recap, “taking what I can” to me and most people, involves having the greatest amount of personally rewarding experiences I can, and those involve not doing bad things, and often involve doing good things.

I don’t feel I’m wasting any time navigating any landscape. I hardly think about morality at all, since to me, it’s quite easy. Jesus knew it; he just claimed that his father had made it up. I think it’s human nature. It gives me immense joy to see people in love getting married. That extends identically to same-sex people too. See? It’s not complex. Taking what I can when I can in the malevolent sense feels awful, and I don’t want to do that.

People do evil because they get carried away by their lusts and become enticed. You view this as some sort of ignorance, or automatic function. Not so. When a person is doing wrong, they are almost always entirely aware of this, but simply override their moral restraints with their desire to fulfill their lusts. People are responsible for the evil that they do, not society, environmental factors, their parents, or anything else.

I agree completely (except where you said I think it’s out of ignorance or automatic function, which I didn’t say). You say it’s about people getting carried away or being enticed. What I was explaining is when that happens and why. It’s not relevant anyway. People are the only ones who can be held responsible for their own actions, and they should be, but not because they are bad people who need to be punished, but because their behaviour hurt someone and as a member of society, they need to understand this, make amends, and hopefully change their behaviour moving forward.

I've already agreed with you that we all have a God given conscience that tells us right from wrong. Therefore, we don't need to read the bible to know that it is wrong to murder or steal. However, what God has commanded is that we all repent and believe in the gospel. This is something you aren't going to intuitively understand without being told.

But I would have had to already accept Yahweh to think that’s true. And I don’t, so it’s not. Nothing in me tells me that the bible is a holy book or that following it has anything to do with what is good, so I don’t need to follow any religious dogma.

what is the ground for associating moral evil with misery and moral good with "moving people away from misery". Where do you get moral duties in a meaningless Universe?

It involves accepting one assertion: Harris’ definition of “bad”. If you accept that, and you accept that “good” is its opposite, then moving away from something bad must be good. I think your problem with my argument is that there’s no argument for a metaphysical morality. That’s because I don’t believe in one. As I said above, this whole conversation, for me, is based on our shared feeling that there are right and wrong things. That’s it. If I kick someone’s dog, no matter who they are or what their religion, they’re going to know without consulting any authority that I did a horrible thing. I don’t really know why, and I don’t care. I do know that humans share this sense, and I’m keen to live with respect to it.

The morality that God gives can be summed up in two commandments: Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy mind and all thy strength, and love thy neighbor as thyself…That's a very simple system. When you love God and other people everything else follows naturally.

Yahweh’s morality is nowhere near as simple as a secular morality. Where in those two commandments of Jesus does it say that using condoms or allowing same-sex couples to marry is wrong? In fact, saving lives, preventing unwanted pregnancies and allowing all loving couples to get married are ways to love your neighbour, and they’re exactly what I would want my neighbour to do or advocate for on my behalf.

On the contrary, it's all arbitrary, because "what makes things better for people" or what "makes the world worse" is something determined by consensus. If everyone in the world agreed that torturing babies for fun made things better for people, it would be good in your view. If your moral system allows for this possibility, I think that's a sign its time to throw it away.

First, you’re talking in circles. If Harris’ model of morality is arbitrary, then so is Jesus’ model of “do unto others…” because they amount to pretty much the same thing, and what one person wants his neighbours to do may not be the same as someone else’s, etc. At some level, we’re going to have to determine for ourselves what’s right and what’s not.

Second, you can’t possibly make the argument that “better for people” and “makes the world worse” are arbitrary concepts. They’re not perfectly defined, but that doesn’t mean arbitrary. As for the torturing babies example, according to Harris’ morality, it’s bad because babies are people, and torture causes misery. Where’s the ambiguity?

Third, do you picture a world where everyone suddenly agrees that torturing babies is OK? Do you really believe that without religion people have absolutely no internal direction whatsoever, and will accept torturing of babies as acceptable? I don’t. So, no, Harris’ moral system does not allow for the possibility of torturing babies.

But yours does. Whatever else you address, please answer this: I believe –and forgive me if I’m putting words into your mouth– somewhere on the Sift you agreed that if God commanded you to do something people think is horrible (like torture an infant/rape your own son/etc.), that you would do it. Is that true to say? If so, then by your own witness and a test you came up with, it’s your system that allows for the possibility of absolutely any vile act, and it’s time for it to go.

If you think I’m being ridiculous, what do you think is more likely: that a society somewhere will suddenly realize that they feel just fine about torturing babies, or that a society somewhere will get the idea that it’s their god’s will that they torture babies? Human instinct is much more consistent than the will of any gods ever recorded.

If this were true, there would be no need for courts, judges, prisons, or police officers. There are also laws which may make some people miserable but are necessary for the greater good.

True. Your point?

It doesn't suffice, though. Yes, we can both agree there is a universal morality among human beings. How is that fact supposed to serve as grounds to invent an arbitrary system of good and evil based on people following their bliss and avoiding misery? I could just easily reverse the two and say the existence of universal morality justifies that too. I could say that the existence of a universal morality justifies that we should all love eggplants and hate rutabagas. There is no logical connection here between the system you've created and universal morality.

It’s not arbitrarily invented. Religion is. I must be misunderstanding you. By my reading, your argument is that the connection between reducing people’s misery and doing good is arbitrary. Is that right? You don’t think that wanting to help people who are suffering is normal and good? If you agree that there is a connection between the two, that’s all you need. If you don’t agree, then your morality system really sucks, and I don’t know who I’m talking to.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/06/29/half-german-teens-dont-know-hitler-dictator_n_1636593.html

I take it you didn’t read the article yourself. There’s no mention of Americans, anyone of college age, nor anyone who can’t identify Hitler. It’s about German high school students who didn’t know that Hitler was a dictator, etc. Please take better care with your arguments. It’s disrespectful and a waste of my time.

I found these to be presumptuous. They do happen to some people, maybe even most people, but they don’t happen to all. Many people of no religion, and despite immense tragedies, live happy and fulfilling lives, and feel happy and fulfilled on their death beds. I’d further argue that people with religious faith also get depressed. I suspect you’d counter that anyone who is depressed has insincere faith. That seems tautological to me, but either way, it’s moot, for now.

Well, the central argument of the video is that life without God is meaningless. You've already agreed with that point, so the argument now seems to be is whether someone can be happy and fulfilled with a meaningless life. I'm sure there are plenty of people who weren't believers who died happily in ignorance of the truth, but the question is, did they understand that their life was meaningless? I doubt it. It is not something that many people are able to face, and even if they could, they certainly don't live that way. In some way or another, they are deluding themselves and living as if their life does have meaning.

Some people do, at least in part. It’s a lot more complex than just a lack of hope though. For some people it’s due to a tragedy, or overwhelming cognitive dissonance, or it’s simply chemical, and has no correlation with anything in their lives at all. Maybe I’m nitpicking. I just want to make clear that depression is a mental disorder and is not a synonym for, "lack of hope because I don’t have God in my life."

Hope is what keeps people going. Without hope, you are just going through the motions. When you have hope and lose it, it is emotionally devastating. A person without any hope is a person most likely clinically depressed.

You can call depression a kind of mental disorder, and some people may be born without the right chemical receptors for instance, but most people are depressed because of a lack of hope. A person, for instance, who worked their whole life and lost their retirement in an afternoon, or a mom whose kids abandoned her to live in a nursing home. They are not mentally ill, they are simply facing the cold, stark reality of their situation.

Here you slipped into metaphysical talk that means nothing to me, full of judgemental words ("sick and depraved") and terms that I had just told you I don’t accept as objective concepts ("evil"). You also know that I don’t think there’s any hope in your Yahweh God since he’s a mythological character, so I’m not sure where that’s coming from.

The point being, that if there is no God then no one is in the drivers seat here on planet Earth. I would be surprised if the extreme fragility of our civilization escaped you. If you look at history, and you contrast it to what is going on today, you will find that the new is simply the old in different packaging. We're watching the exact same game show, simply on a grander and more dangerous scale. Humanity has never been closer to utterly destroying itself anytime in its history than it is today. I'm sure, like everything else in creation, you will attribute that to dumb luck. However, if you think everything is a numbers game, then sooner or later the odds say that cooler heads will not prevail and there will be a civilization annihilating calamity. The truth is, it is only the sovereign hand of God that is restraining this from happening.

The reason I made that comment about God is because of your comment about your depression. The reason you have that feeling that if you believed in God you wouldn't be depressed is because you know there is hope in God.

(Also, not that it’s critical to the discussion, but I’d like a reference for your poll about young people not knowing who Hitler was.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/06/29/half-german-teens-dont-know-hitler-dictator_n_163659 3.html

Now, about "bliss". I didn’t define what I meant by that, so you didn’t understand it. I’ll make up for that now. By “bliss”, I don’t mean immediate pleasure, or instant gratification, or fulfillment of a goal, or basically anything you mentioned. I do mean a great powerful feeling of being centred, being in tune, achieving self-fulfillment, overflowing joy, love, inner peace, elation, connection, lightness, "harmony", "rapture" or a feeling that many describe as "doing what I was born to do/meant to be doing" or "transcendent". It’s the kind of happy that boosts your immune system and makes people around you feel good about themselves as well. (The words in quotes aren’t words I tend to use myself—I’m employing them to help clarify the concept I’m talking about.)

If you understand now what I mean by "bliss" (as opposed to instant gratification, etc.), you’ll understand that people don’t follow their bliss and rape people, nor find inner peace by beating their wives, and so there’s no need to append any rules about not hurting. I can’t imagine how anybody’s bliss could ever include causing harm to other people, but I’ll even address that hypothetical, towards the end of this comment.

Thanks for the elaboration. I am familiar with the philosophy of Sam Harris, and I figured you were borrowing from him, but it is good to know where you stand. My original point, however, still stands. You say you can't imagine someone finding bliss in hurting people. Well, have you ever heard of psychopaths? They do indeed find their bliss in acquiring power and control and making other people miserable, and they feel absolutely no remorse for doing so.

You also say that you feel the best state of a human being is to be blissfully happy. I'm sure everyone will agree with you that feeling blissfully happy is good. However, why should we believe this is actually what good is?. Yes, it feels good to feel good, but this doesn't tell us why we *ought* to do anything. Maybe this is just incredibly selfish and the opposite of good, or somewhere in the middle is true, or maybe none of it. You give no actual reason (beyond arbitrary statements like that which makes the world better or worse) to equate feeling good with moral goodness. In a meaningless Universe, neither is there any basis for thinking that you have any moral duties. This leads me to some questions that you didn't actually address in the last post. Let me ask them again because they are central to this discussion:

In a meaningless Universe there is no actual right and wrong, so why shouldn't you just do whatever you want? Why waste your time trying to navigate some moral landscape that you don't even believe really exists? Why not just take what you can, when you can, before you lose the opportunity?

I'll also address some of your comments:

In all cases, whatever they did, it was because they were feeling bad about something, weren’t centred, and reacted from "lizard brain" instincts of individual survival rather than from human compassion

People do evil because they get carried away by their lusts and become enticed. You view this as some sort of ignorance, or automatic function. Not so. When a person is doing wrong, they are almost always entirely aware of this, but simply override their moral restraints with their desire to fulfill their lusts. People are responsible for the evil that they do, not society, environmental factors, their parents, or anything else.

Divine morality isn’t necessary. Having any collective understanding of what is good and what is bad is enough. For most of humanity’s existence, even up to now, there hasn’t been a clear standard. In patches of geography where there was one, it only applied well to that time and culture. Just as ordinary people supplanted kings and emperors as absolute leaders without society collapsing, and just as ordinary people supplanted religions are sole arbiters of the law without society collapsing, ordinary people can supplant religion as arbiter of what is good and what is bad as well, and society will continue not to collapse.

I've already agreed with you that we all have a God given conscience that tells us right from wrong. Therefore, we don't need to read the bible to know that it is wrong to murder or steal. However, what God has commanded is that we all repent and believe in the gospel. This is something you aren't going to intuitively understand without being told.

And better than a list of what’s good and what’s bad is a system that determines for us what’s good and what’s bad. I’ve seen one model that I like, delivered by Sam Harris. The most salient bit starts at about 10:00 and runs to around 27:30. If you don’t want to watch it now, I’ll summarise the most important ideas: For a moral code to have meaning, it has to apply to some form of consciousness – it cannot apply to rocks and dust. Then there’s the central point which requires you to imagine "the worst possible misery for everyone", and assume that this situation is "bad". "Good" is then defined in terms of moving people away from this "worst possible misery for everyone". That’s it. I recommend hearing it from Harris himself.

I am familiar with his system, to which I reiterate the point; what is the ground for associating moral evil with misery and moral good with "moving people away from misery". Where do you get moral duties in a meaningless Universe?

The three advantages that occur to me of this system over Yahweh’s morality are that it’s a simple system rather than a long intricate list, so it’s quick to teach, easy to absorb, understand and reference, hard to corrupt, and all-inclusive; there’s absolutely nothing random about it, so odd details like not being allowed to wear garments made from two different thread types won’t make it in and there’s nothing objectionable about it from the standpoint of people who just want to do the right thing; and it’s truly universal in that it applies equally well now as it would have in 4000 BC China, in 30 AD Mesopotamia, or will in 12 000 AD Mars, so it’s broadly acceptable too.

The morality that God gives can be summed up in two commandments: Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy mind and all thy strength, and love thy neighbor as thyself. As Jesus told us:

Matthew 22:40

All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments

That's a very simple system. When you love God and other people everything else follows naturally.

Every act that is good makes things better for people. If an act makes the world worse, then it’s bad. Simple. Lots of generalities can be derived from it, like killing people is bad, respecting other people’s property is good, and there’d be no arbitrary crap about touching pig skin being bad or extra-marital sex being bad.

On the contrary, it's all arbitrary, because "what makes things better for people" or what "makes the world worse" is something determined by consensus. If everyone in the world agreed that torturing babies for fun made things better for people, it would be good in your view. If your moral system allows for this possibility, I think that's a sign its time to throw it away.

Even more generally, we clearly don’t require any god to tell us what’s good and what isn’t. We already have a conscience inside us that tells us what’s good and what isn’t regardless of laws. I know you believe that Yahweh made our conscience for us. Even if that were so, it doesn’t change the fact that if properly relied upon, a conscience precludes the need for an external set of laws. Any law that echoes what everyone naturally feels already is superfluous. Any law that contributes to human misery is morally wrong and deserves to be disregarded.

If this were true, there would be no need for courts, judges, prisons, or police officers. There are also laws which may make some people miserable but are necessary for the greater good.

You state that without a divine moral standard that exists outside our consciousness, there is no objective justice. This is true by definition. Without a true objective moral code, you further argue that nobody can condemn any action as bad without being hypocritical, so in effect, everything is permissible. This is not the case, however. Although the moral code I advocate isn’t "objective" in the sense that it exists beyond our consciousness, it is universal among humans. And if we’re only attempting to determine moral behaviour for humans, then a universally accepted standard among humans suffices, regardless of where we think it came from.

It doesn't suffice, though. Yes, we can both agree there is a universal morality among human beings. How is that fact supposed to serve as grounds to invent an arbitrary system of good and evil based on people following their bliss and avoiding misery? I could just easily reverse the two and say the existence of universal morality justifies that too. I could say that the existence of a universal morality justifies that we should all love eggplants and hate rutabagas. There is no logical connection here between the system you've created and universal morality.

If there is no objective morality, then nothing is really wrong. Any system you create in the end is a human invention, based on human interpretation, and agreed upon by human consensus. You still cannot get an ought from an is. Good could be defined as a world of people who love each other, or a world of people who love to eat children. What is wrong then is simply based on your personal preferences.

The arguments I make here don’t describe a perfect system. That’s wasn’t my intention. I believe they do, however, answer your concerns about non-objective morality being insufficient to guide humans.

I understand that this wasn't meant to be perfect. It has, however, raised more concerns than it answered.

>> ^messenger

I'm glad you enjoyed the video and I appreciate your thoughtful reply. I'll reply by saying that if you accept meaninglessness as a fact, then there are many implications to such a belief. For instance, if it true that life is meaningless then it is also true that there is no such thing as justice. It means that any truly terrible things that happen to you will never be adequately recompensed, and that frequently, the purveyors of such will get away with it scott free. It means that ultimately, might does make right, and he who has the gold makes the rules. If you are smart enough to get away with it, or powerful enough to avoid the consequences, you will never face any justice for any evil that you've done.

It also means that everything you have worked for and dreamed about could be randomly taken away from you at any moment, and so could all the people you love and care about. One moment you are an eternal optimist, the next, you get into a car accident and become a parapalegic. Now, you can say that this could happen to you even if there is a God, since it obviously happens to people all the time. This is true, but, if this life is all you have then it means that the hope you have is a very limited and fragile commodity. Hope is not a limited commodity for a Christian. For instance, the closer you are to death the less happy and hopeful you will become. When you're young, you don't concern yourself with it as much, even though it could happen at any time. As you get older, you start to realize how little time you have left to accomplish your goals. Your mobility starts to decrease, the sharpness of your intellect and your beauty fades. You become less desirable to others and to society in general. What this means is that your happiness is always situational. Eventually, when enough tragedy happens to you, you will break down and the future will become more and more like a millstone around your neck.

Yes, some people are able to squeeze some happiness out of desperate circumstances, and more power to them, but they have no real hope. A meaningless universe provides you with zero hope in the end. Many people believe they will achieve some lasting legacy but think about all the people you remember from the last century. Shockingly, a poll done by college age kids from America and Germany showed that many of them had no idea who Hitler was. If no one can remember Hitler, they probably won't remember you either. Where does that leave you? Your best case scenario is that you lead a completely pointless life where you hopefully experience a modicum of pleasure before expiring prematurely, never having reached anything near your true potential, with all your love and dreams being cruelly erased from existence forever.

People become depressed because of a lack of hope. If you look at the world today, and constrast it to our history, you will see that nothing has really changed on planet Earth. For all of our so-called progress, humanity is just as sick and depraved as it always has been. Evil is increasing, not decreasing, and mankinds destructive appetites will never be satiated. There is no hope in man, but there is in God. I think you know that.

Now, you make an argument about following your bliss, but if what is good to do is simply what makes you feel good, then you could excuse some of the worst crimes in history. People murder, rape, cheat, steal, etc because it makes them feel good. I'm sure Hitler took a lot of pleasure in what he did, and was following his bliss for aquiring absolute power. You can't use what feels good as a compass for what is right. Now, I think you're trying to insert the caveat that we shouldn't do what causes harm to people, but what if it is someones bliss to harm people? You would be stopping their bliss and thus violating your own rules. In short, there is no way to impose any absolute standard of morality when you are determining it by a completely arbitrary standard. In a meaningless Universe there is no right and wrong, so why shouldn't you just do whatever you want? Why waste your time trying to navigate some moral landscape that you don't even believe exists? Why not just take what you can, when you can, before you lose the opportunity?

For myself, what led me to start thinking about what was true was to notice how much this world was going down the tubes, and with seemingly no one in the drivers seat. I noticed the love I felt from this world being slowly drained away, year by year. I saw that humanity was on a collision course with ultimate destruction if nothing changed. If life is meaningless then it doesn't matter. But deep down, you don't really believe its meaningless, and neither did I. That's probably another reason why you're depressed. Your head says its meaningless but your heart tells you that this is a lie. Until the two reconcile you will never be happy and you will never be truly free. It's only Christ that can reconcile them, because He knows the reason that you're here, and only He can point you in that direction. It is only by discovering the meaning of your life, the reason that you're here, that will lead your mind and heart to agree with one another.

>> ^messenger

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if campers that are not unpacked or sitting on a lot/owners driveway are bound by open container laws and such. Since you don't really have any legal course to camp in most parking lots and public roads, the camper remains a van until such time. This is speculation on my part since I actually haven't run across a case like this.

>> ^ryanbennitt:

>> ^jmd:
#1 This is also the way it is in the US. If you are caught sleeping off a drink in a car you can be charged with DUI.
#2 I think sitting in the passanger seat as the lone person in the car would be treated in the same way as a traffic stop where the driver hops into the passenger seat when the cop isn't looking. They can pretty much assume you are the driver, and again the dui law doesn't require the driver to actually be driving or in the driver seat, just in the car.

So you're not allowed to sleep in a camper van then?

>> ^jmd:
#1 This is also the way it is in the US. If you are caught sleeping off a drink in a car you can be charged with DUI.
#2 I think sitting in the passanger seat as the lone person in the car would be treated in the same way as a traffic stop where the driver hops into the passenger seat when the cop isn't looking. They can pretty much assume you are the driver, and again the dui law doesn't require the driver to actually be driving or in the driver seat, just in the car.


So you're not allowed to sleep in a camper van then?

>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^Mashiki:
Some useful info for you to know. In Canada, don't do this, it's the same as getting behind the wheel intoxicated. Even if you have no intention of driving. Intent is 9/10ths of the law on this.
Then I will defeat your ridiculous law by sleeping in the passenger seat!
ChaosEngine: 1
Canada: 0
suck it, canucks!


#1 This is also the way it is in the US. If you are caught sleeping off a drink in a car you can be charged with DUI.

#2 I think sitting in the passanger seat as the lone person in the car would be treated in the same way as a traffic stop where the driver hops into the passenger seat when the cop isn't looking. They can pretty much assume you are the driver, and again the dui law doesn't require the driver to actually be driving or in the driver seat, just in the car.

Anytime people describe Obama as a Muslim or a socialist, there is really no reason left to hear what they say.

As for the scare mongering, the "we haven't seen the real him yet" - on what is that based?

Whereas we know exactly what Romney and his pals will do once they're in the drivers seat again: continue to rape the country as before.

I don't think these machines were his idea. But they're there now.

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
I agree that the buck stops with the President. He could sign an executive order (as far as I know) and make those machines go away. In fact, it would be an excellent way to score some points with his base before his re-election campaign, assuming there is no terrorist attack between now and then. My objection was to your insinuation that these machines were Obama's idea. These machines were put into production a long time ago.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
Even if this was true, it has nothing to do with the increased security procedures except for some business is using 'Crony Capitalism' to make money on these backscatter x-ray machines, which I would give you as granted. That's a tiny portion of the argument. The larger argument is still that the TSA is under the control of the Obama Administration, and the buck stops with him.

It's his fault.

Period.

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
Corporations and 'market forces' are how we got here. I know that by admitting that, you'd have to tear down your entire belief system and start over from scratch, and that's a lot to ask of anyone. I've got no problems attempting to treat the numerous symptoms, but this kind of shit is going to continue as long as big business is in the drivers seat.

I agree that the buck stops with the President. He could sign an executive order (as far as I know) and make those machines go away. In fact, it would be an excellent way to score some points with his base before his re-election campaign, assuming there is no terrorist attack between now and then. My objection was to your insinuation that these machines were Obama's idea. These machines were put into production a long time ago.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
Even if this was true, it has nothing to do with the increased security procedures except for some business is using 'Crony Capitalism' to make money on these backscatter x-ray machines, which I would give you as granted. That's a tiny portion of the argument. The larger argument is still that the TSA is under the control of the Obama Administration, and the buck stops with him.

It's his fault.

Period.

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
Corporations and 'market forces' are how we got here. I know that by admitting that, you'd have to tear down your entire belief system and start over from scratch, and that's a lot to ask of anyone. I've got no problems attempting to treat the numerous symptoms, but this kind of shit is going to continue as long as big business is in the drivers seat.

Even if this was true, it has nothing to do with the increased security procedures except for some business is using 'Crony Capitalism' to make money on these backscatter x-ray machines, which I would give you as granted. That's a tiny portion of the argument. The larger argument is still that the TSA is under the control of the Obama Administration, and the buck stops with him.

It's his fault.

Period.

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
Corporations and 'market forces' are how we got here. I know that by admitting that, you'd have to tear down your entire belief system and start over from scratch, and that's a lot to ask of anyone. I've got no problems attempting to treat the numerous symptoms, but this kind of shit is going to continue as long as big business is in the drivers seat.

Corporations and 'market forces' are how we got here. I know that by admitting that, you'd have to tear down your entire belief system and start over from scratch, and that's a lot to ask of anyone. I've got no problems attempting to treat the numerous symptoms, but this kind of shit is going to continue as long as big business is in the drivers seat.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
Who said anything about them being the "brainchild" of Obama? You're stuck in that fallacious bipartisan thinking. Just because I've got a beef with Obama doesn't mean I an absolving Bush of his atrocities. But he's not "in charge" anymore, so to insinuate that these porno-scanners are in place now because of Bush's Administration is a fallacious and disingenuous argument. Let's go over the finer points:

First, the TSA today is under the purview of the Obama Administration, so anything it does is the fault of that administration. Period. The chain of command works like this: TSA > Department of Homeland Security (DHS) > Janet Napolitano > Obama. When Obama is no longer the president, then the TSA will be the responsibility of the new Administration... and so on.

Second, more porno-scanners are being added under Obama.

Third, the "enhanced security procedures" are being added under Obama. This includes touching of groins and the added frequency of the porno-scanners.

Fourth, Obama even admits the buck stops with him.

Lastly, Obama ran on a platform of "change". That change was meant to "correct" the ills of the previous administration, including the Bush Doctrine, FISA, the Patriot Act, and domestically the DHS. It hasn't been corrected. It's gotten worse.