Is it not clear that atheism leads to the degradation of society? If there is no God , there are no laws. You can create anything you want.
Despite all the unprovability of sacred knowledge, it at least gives a moral boundary to human activity. While the denial of all boundaries leads to savagery and moral decay.Lies, murders, pedophilia – why not, if everything is possible?An atheist observes the moral law only while he is being watched. But inside, he admits that under certain circumstances, you can forget about it. You can steal it while no one is looking. You can rape them if nothing happens later. Why not? You're just a piece of meat with blood on it.
For a believer, morality is synonymous with the Law of God – in academic English, this is called divine command theory.
Divine command theory is not just one of the ethical theories, but also just one representative of one of the classes of ethical theories (the class “deontological theories”). There are also other classes that are very densely populated.
That is, an unbeliever has a lot of options for how to conceptualize morality and what theory to adhere to.
All this is told to us by such a wonderful philosophical discipline as ethics. If the choice was limited to divine command theory and total nihilism, this discipline could be closed.
However, it does not close, but thrives, describing the principles that people adhere to, and offering new ones. It's just that for some reason you didn't get to the elementary textbook for the first year of a good university (Oxford or Cambridge).
Is it not clear that faith leads to the degradation of society? There is a God – there are no laws, you can create anything you want. You can burn heretics, because God allowed it. You can exterminate the aborigines, because God allowed it.
You personally lie about atheists and their motivations. No God will stop you from lying-blatantly and publicly. So what's the use of it then?
Personally, I don't kill people for internal reasons unrelated to external threats. Personally, I only call moral behavior that is based on nothing but itself and is carried out in order to be carried out. If you want a whip , well, I've got the police for you, they work better than God, even like us.
Two patterns of non-critical thinking, not a question.
First, the author of the question needs to indicate when and where “atheism led to the degradation of society”?!
Second, that “there is no God , there are no laws” should be reworked “There is a God , there are laws” and at the same time explain why the entire history of mankind is essentially a criminal history of religious societies that have been creating lawlessness since pea times?! Therefore, it is more correct to say :” If there is a God, everything is allowed.”
You can, for example, act like Constantine, the Emperor of Byzantium, who ordered one hundred Bulgarian prisoners to be blinded, and the first hundred to be left with one eye. They say that when the Bulgarian tsar saw an infinite number of these “hundreds” of cripples wandering along the road, he had a stroke.
Or arrange an auto-da-fe, the simultaneous burning of hundreds of heretics in the squares of western cities as a modern mass performance.
Or just for one, the so-called St. Bartholomew's Night, in the literal sense of the word, more than thirty thousand men, women and children were slaughtered…
I want to ask the author of the question, although I can continue the list of iniquities of religious societies or states even to the loan day – where did you see the “laws of God” in the past millennia?!
Real human laws began to take shape only from about the 17th century, when in many countries they began to separate churches from the state. And if today we live in a legitimate society, then it is not the merit of religions, but the development of legal relations, framed in the Criminal and Civil Codes. If the author of the question is attacked by armed men to rob him, then he will not be protected by the “laws of God”, but only by the timely appearance of the police.
And one last thing. More precisely, the last template is that the laws (of human society) are supposedly given by God or gods: There has NEVER been such a thing and there is no such thing. Any religious morality is secondary. For cavemen or people in ancient times, this was not obvious and they believed that the laws were “given” by God or gods. Of course, some of our contemporaries in this sense can descend to such primitive thinking, having invented the primary “Moral Law of God”. But they themselves admit that people easily violate this “Law”, that is, its wording is simply a fake.
The first best answer, in my opinion, was given by Kant, who introduced the concept of “categorical imperative”. This principle goes something like this:”a person must act in such a way that his actions become a moral law for other people.”
For example, I can constantly lie to people. Then my lies will acquire a “moral law” for other people. And then, when I ask any passerby, for example: “Is this a safe road?!”, I will be answered: “Of course,” and I'll die falling into a precipice on a steep icy slope. But if I tell the truth, then I will definitely be warned that that path is icy and it is better not to go along it, “come, spend the night with me, and tomorrow, when the sun melts the ice, the road will not be so dangerous” … well, or something else, but in a similar spirit.
That is, it is not only a well-known statement: “Don't do things to other people that you don't want to do to yourself,” but rather, “Do things to other people that you don't want to do to yourself.”
We can add a lot more from modern psychology and sociology, the sciences of the last two centuries, which will further confirm that moral relations among people are formed from our very nature of society, that is, not just a set of different individuals, but precisely the relations of social groups…
But the above is quite enough to show… atheistic approach to understanding the a priori (i.e., internal) nature of a person.
Religions, on the other hand, have long been just a convenient tool for maintaining ethics and morality. But this does not mean that there is a need for them today.
The Soviet people, having shown steadfastness, moral responsibility and heroism, defeated Hitler's Germany in World War II. And the winner was mostly the generation that grew up in a state where atheism was part of the communist ideology.
Today, in the post-Soviet space, people often equate atheism with communism. But were Bertrand Russell or Karl Popper communists?! No, they were ardent anti-Sovietists, anti-Marxists, etc… equally consistent atheists.
Atheism is a worldview that tries to understand a person and the world without out-of-nature concepts and abstractions. And in this sense, such a worldview cannot lead to degradation, because it tries not to take anything for granted, but strives for knowledge. Moreover, they are not limited in the very process of cognition.
Believers can also strive for knowledge, but their consciousness is limited in advance… divine ideas or representations. And as the experience of the twentieth century has shown, the knowledge of the world and people should not be unlimited in order to reach the Truth.
This freedom of knowledge is the main thing in atheism, and not the philistine “I do what I want”. Atheists, as criminal statistics show, on the contrary-very rarely go to various kinds of crimes. Probably because they understand it well… Kant.:)
Reality contradicts your ideas. Take the murders, for example.
Top ten least religious countries in the world: China, Sweden, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Israel, Japan, Germany, Switzerland. The number of homicides in all these countries is in the range of 0.5-1.5 per 100,000 population per year. And the leaders in the murder rate are El Salvador, Jamaica, Lesotho, Honduras, Belize, Venezuela, the Bahamas, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, with a murder rate of more than 30 per 100,000 population per year and a negligible number of atheists.
Moral boundaries appear wherever relationships arise between people and it is a question of joint survival. Religious morality simply sacralizes social rules and traditions: it tries to consolidate them by giving them a divine status. This, of course, does not affect the actual practice of the declared (due and valid exist in parallel). Even during the period of dominance of a purely religious worldview, people fought, lied, killed, stole, prostituted, and hounded competitors for power… But yes, they bowed with Talmuds in their hands-that's all the difference.
ATHEISM and FAITH have both positive and negative sides. Weighing “what's more” can only be done by very conscientious EXPERTS, but not by individual belligerent individuals.
CLEVER manipulation of information-listing only positive or only negative-is very widely used in political propaganda by both would-be atheists and would-be believers….this is a 100% disgrace.
Degradation criteria, please contact the studio. Otherwise, the conversation will be completely pointless, it will be difficult to assess the state of morals in society without clear criteria for what is considered degradation. It is clear that there is a certain dynamic, but what it is is an open question.
The presence or absence of laws is not directly related to God or his absence. Wherever there are sane people, creating a society they will agree on reasonable rules. Otherwise, life will become too unpredictable and dangerous. In ancient states, laws were indeed tied to the deity; the sacral nature of laws and power was the main explanation for their legitimacy, allowing people to unite and subordinate their will to the authorities. Today, this mysticism is no longer needed; the more rational and contractual the social order is, the better it is to predict the outcome of human interaction.
They like to rub us from high stands about faith and morality as a universal remedy for social vices. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The most immoral people have no faces , only masks. Catching them by the tail and punishing them is a very non-trivial task.
Moral rules apply only to those who follow them.
The dogmas of religion apply only to those who believe.
The laws of the state apply only to those who do not know how to circumvent them.
The laws of physics and ballistics are the same for everyone.
All freaks get a bullet in the head on the house!
Lies, murders, pedophilia – why not, if everything is possible?
A believer observes the moral law only while he is being watched. But inside, he admits that under certain circumstances, you can forget about it. You can steal it while no one is looking. You can rape them if nothing happens later. Why not? You're just a piece of meat with blood on it.
Hello.
Tell me, who should understand this? Individuals? So if I choose to be an atheist, I'll go crazy and kill everyone, and if I choose to be a Christian, I'll become a good person? In this formulation, atheism is more likely not the cause, but the consequence of a sinful life. They give up God in order to live in their own way, and not as they are told in the Church. At the same time, they gradually reach immorality. But even the morality that remains in the beginning is no longer morality, for it is not based on the Commandments of God.
Still, the question is hardly useful for an individual. If he feels that there is a God, he believes. If he understands that there is a God, he also believes. Otherwise, he will continue to believe by inertia until he reaches atheism.
If we talk about teachers, lawmakers, etc., they hardly understand this. Those who believe that morality is possible without God will continue to fight for it.
The most terrible thing here is that believers often live worse than non-believers and give rise to such disputes.
On the other hand, if a person does not need God, he is immoral in principle. Morality is not about not killing or harming without good reason. Morality is objective, just like religion. It comes from God, as does truth. Outside of God, there is no morality, no knowledge, no beauty. And those who think otherwise have been carried away by false wisdom, false learning, and the beauty of false art. They need their own, and not the true, which is from God and His Truth. They won't understand. On the contrary, they will persecute the righteous of God and slander them, looking for something to accuse them of.
Our (Christian) task is to keep the faith and live by faith, to bear witness to the Truth of the Gospel. And arguing with atheists isn't always helpful. They reject the very foundation of Truth on which to agree. And there is little opportunity for a Christian to communicate with a non-believer or atheist. The basics are completely different. What is good for one person is evil for another, and vice versa.
We must believe, live righteously, and pray to God. God willing, there will be faith in Russia, there will be holiness and life with God.
God help us!
Conscience and compassion-have you ever heard of this? If you could kill a man with impunity, would you be stopped only by the threat of punishment from God? I don't think that all believers constantly think of God in their moral choices.