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Seculars vs Christians?
Being a “Secular” American is not a “moral” issue.
We all have a strong sense of moral values and we basically have another opinion of the origins of the human species. I don’t know of any Secular American who hasn’t thought out right from wrong and we came to the conclusion that the fear of the afterlife should not be our diving force. It has been my experience for all of us to learn the simple rules of our social culture and obey the rules of our community and understand that in America our social laws come from the individual states, not the Federal Government.
Most Secular Americans believe in evolution. It makes perfect sense when compared to the superstition of the Old and New Testaments. Natural selection has taken homosapiens through millions of years of breeding with the survivors of the previous generations and we managed to develop language, better nutrition (meat) and the design of weapons to kill our meat (and each other). Like other hunting mammals, we learn the art of living in tribes for our own safety. As we humans were gaining in intelligence and teamwork we became tribes of family members.
It took millions of years for these tribes to develop a ghost or God to hold the tribes together and in many cases the tribes were made stronger and weaker. Many Seculars were trained from birth to pray to the family God but many of us found the laws laid down by these Gods were inconsistent with individual actions. The glory of the human race can be found in our individual thoughts and actions away from the organized tribal Gods. We did not evolve to be handled by representatives of the various Gods. Our brains continued to grow and our thinking became our actions and most ended up as individual families not ignorant masses doing what we were told to do.
When human men decided to try to make the rules of many tribes under a single God, the wars began and even national governments entered into civil wars each having interpreted the words of men who never laid eyes on God or his disciples. The power of terrorism was introduced into the tribal members with orders to succumb to the laws of the God even over the heads of the tribal leaders themselves.
In America many of us were taken in by the promise of a separation of church and state and were very upset with President Bush 43 for promising the Christians they would be given faith based grants. It was buying votes that he needed to win. It ended up with a Primary of Republican candidates being grilled on their religious tenets. After the Primaries established a candidate from both parties, they had to be grilled again by an Evangelical Minister with questions asked that were insulting to the American system of individual freedoms.
Has it been established that America is a Christian nation with no exceptions? Are the Seculars expected to bend into a God they do not recognize? Many of us have lived under an active Christian President since 2000 and have never witnessed such corruption in our many years in America. Our Bush Cabinet has lied and manipulated us into a reaction to terrorism that is slowly removing our individual freedoms found in the Constitution. Every member of the Bush Cabinet has shown complete disrespect for human rights and individual freedoms.
This has been a double shock to me as I was a Registered Republican since 1953 when I reached the voting age. I saw a terrible trend with President Bush 41 when his focus was on the One World Order and he wanted to invade the Middle East to force a Democracy. It lost him his reelection and my membership as a Republican, but his son was enveloped in the concept of an American Empire and he brought in the religious right to make it happen. The level of corruption that came in with President Bush 43 made me stand up against this horrible man who felt that anything done in the name of Jesus Christ was justified.
Christians are using the moral values card to win power over the United States and there is apparently no way to stop this assault. It is such an evil action in a free nation that I would rather have Immigration Laws changed to accept Christians only in the next round of laws being written. If the American people really believe that only Christians have moral values, it is time for many of us to locate a new place to live. I have never had my morals questioned in 65 years but my name and family members are trashed all over the internet.
We all have a strong sense of moral values and we basically have another opinion of the origins of the human species. I don’t know of any Secular American who hasn’t thought out right from wrong and we came to the conclusion that the fear of the afterlife should not be our diving force. It has been my experience for all of us to learn the simple rules of our social culture and obey the rules of our community and understand that in America our social laws come from the individual states, not the Federal Government.
Most Secular Americans believe in evolution. It makes perfect sense when compared to the superstition of the Old and New Testaments. Natural selection has taken homosapiens through millions of years of breeding with the survivors of the previous generations and we managed to develop language, better nutrition (meat) and the design of weapons to kill our meat (and each other). Like other hunting mammals, we learn the art of living in tribes for our own safety. As we humans were gaining in intelligence and teamwork we became tribes of family members.
It took millions of years for these tribes to develop a ghost or God to hold the tribes together and in many cases the tribes were made stronger and weaker. Many Seculars were trained from birth to pray to the family God but many of us found the laws laid down by these Gods were inconsistent with individual actions. The glory of the human race can be found in our individual thoughts and actions away from the organized tribal Gods. We did not evolve to be handled by representatives of the various Gods. Our brains continued to grow and our thinking became our actions and most ended up as individual families not ignorant masses doing what we were told to do.
When human men decided to try to make the rules of many tribes under a single God, the wars began and even national governments entered into civil wars each having interpreted the words of men who never laid eyes on God or his disciples. The power of terrorism was introduced into the tribal members with orders to succumb to the laws of the God even over the heads of the tribal leaders themselves.
In America many of us were taken in by the promise of a separation of church and state and were very upset with President Bush 43 for promising the Christians they would be given faith based grants. It was buying votes that he needed to win. It ended up with a Primary of Republican candidates being grilled on their religious tenets. After the Primaries established a candidate from both parties, they had to be grilled again by an Evangelical Minister with questions asked that were insulting to the American system of individual freedoms.
Has it been established that America is a Christian nation with no exceptions? Are the Seculars expected to bend into a God they do not recognize? Many of us have lived under an active Christian President since 2000 and have never witnessed such corruption in our many years in America. Our Bush Cabinet has lied and manipulated us into a reaction to terrorism that is slowly removing our individual freedoms found in the Constitution. Every member of the Bush Cabinet has shown complete disrespect for human rights and individual freedoms.
This has been a double shock to me as I was a Registered Republican since 1953 when I reached the voting age. I saw a terrible trend with President Bush 41 when his focus was on the One World Order and he wanted to invade the Middle East to force a Democracy. It lost him his reelection and my membership as a Republican, but his son was enveloped in the concept of an American Empire and he brought in the religious right to make it happen. The level of corruption that came in with President Bush 43 made me stand up against this horrible man who felt that anything done in the name of Jesus Christ was justified.
Christians are using the moral values card to win power over the United States and there is apparently no way to stop this assault. It is such an evil action in a free nation that I would rather have Immigration Laws changed to accept Christians only in the next round of laws being written. If the American people really believe that only Christians have moral values, it is time for many of us to locate a new place to live. I have never had my morals questioned in 65 years but my name and family members are trashed all over the internet.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Sandra Price on -
I am very concerned because of the threats made by Senator McCain to prohibit abortions and gay marriages. I am on the board of directors of the Death with Dignity movement in N.W. Phoenix and we are working on the State of Arizona following the same laws as Oregon.
These are all legitimate choices that must be left up to the individual citizen. I am fighting for these choices!
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Permalink Reply by Sandra Price on
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Stop the right wing prohibitions and vote for Obama! Our Supreme Court may lose 2 Justices in the next couple of years and I do not want Christians appointed. My opinion of D.C. is we must throw the bastards out! All of them!!
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Permalink Reply by LifeAttacks on -
I think morals are built in society, and not a specific belief or a lack there of. Its part of humanity, not a specific belief, and thats how it should be treated. I went on a rant about this on facebook with a born again christian who titled an article "obama vs. life"
http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/note.php?note_id=40323696376
Its about time people just stood up and claim to be what they are instead of being pushed around by the deception of the general masses.
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Permalink Reply by Sandra Price on
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Jim, I absolutely agree. But it is not the ordinary Christians that are working to destroy Islam but the Evangelicals. I live in a senior development where all the Evangelicals come for the weather from the bible belt. There is almost immediately a sense of danger for many of us who live here full time. Many of these second homes are now for sale and hopefully will be bought by younger residents. 55 is the youngest who can live here.
Governance is like faith and in the case of global governance, the Evangelicals found their global power within the GOP. I fear that the rest of us could take some serious legal hits if McCain gets the white house. We will be back to the threats of Justices and Federal Judges who will promote the agenda of Bush. Were you aware that Blackwater was given the contract in Iraq because they all attended the Pat Robertson University? They were hired killers! We called them the Christian CIA. This has to stop.
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Permalink Reply by Freedom of Anonymity on -
Being secular means absence of morality; as morality is descendent from "mores", to wit:
pl.n.
The accepted traditional customs and usages of a particular social group.
There is no uniformity, (not that it isn't being tried), to atheism.
There are no "traditions" or "customs" or "usages" inherent to atheism.
Atheism barely qualifies as "a particular social group".
Personal ethics can always be in play, but morality is defunct for the secularist, of whatever variety.
P.S. "evil" is a property of metaphysical belief; i.e. more specifically, one of its descendents, religion. It doesn't exist for a secularist/atheist.
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Permalink Reply by ryan cameron on -
Clever, golf clap and all, but you are ignoring the commonly held view of what morality is, which makes the obscure etymology a bit academic and functionally unimportant.
Morality, as understood by our cultural zeitgeist, is the measure of good and bad, right and wrong, sense and nonsense.
I would argue that free of adhesion to invisible gods and delusional fantasy, the human has a much greater ability to understand what is right, and what is wrong, what makes sense, what is most beneficial to all. Secularists possess the greatest potential for what is commonly understood as "morality" and the least potential to honor a "tradition or custom" in favor of what is right.
For example, it was a "tradition or custom" to keep slaves in 18th C. America. By the technical definition you post, this is then "moral" behavior sanctioned by the bible and most other holy books available at the time. Today, however we regard this practice as a-moral, not because of any new custom or tradition, but because of a secular, scientific understanding of the world.
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Permalink Reply by Freedom of Anonymity on
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Today, however we regard this practice as a-moral, not because of any new custom or tradition, but because of a secular, scientific understanding of the world.
Ummm, try wrong?
We regard it as immoral/amoral today, because a tradition was set in motion over a hundred or so years ago; whereby it became customary to see equality of all "types" of humans.
The fact of slavery today, is still a moral issue, which has nothing to do with a secularist or scientific understanding; unless Abraham Lincoln and the Abolitionists just left office? The earliest of these acts dates to 1542, under Emperor Charles V.
It's part of the mores, which are emergent and malleable.
Morality is directly a "code of conduct" developed through what social manners are found to be acceptable for a particular duration of time; i.e. see the changes in the handshake custom(s) over time.
There is, not atypically, in the third descriptive stage of "morality", a linguistic error; it is the individual level, which means "ethics". They are discernably separate; you can hold to a certain "moral" code of your group, until it violates a personal ethic. That's where morality collapses.
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Permalink Reply by ryan cameron on
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again, largely missed the "big picture" to focus on the speck, but your last paragraph here makes more sense. I would agree that morals as you define them are broken down by ethics. Traditions exist because they serve as guides when knowledge is not present. Knowledge should take president over traditions but in today's climate the biggest challenge we face is a staunch resistance to enlightenment by the self styled "moral majority" or traditionalists who either truly believe traditions trump new knowledge, or use traditions to thwart new knowledge that threatens their personal financial/political gain.
My issue with the statement "Being secular means absence of morality", while true in the technical sense, is misleading in today's culture because it gives the full weight to those who ignorantly equate morals with ethics, then use that opportunity to bolster their position.
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Permalink Reply by Freedom of Anonymity on
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My issue with the statement "Being secular means absence of morality", while true in the technical sense, is misleading in today's culture because it gives the full weight to those who ignorantly equate morals with ethics, then use that opportunity to bolster their position.
Then perhaps the error isn't mine. Had you started with this presentation, the discussion would have been a bit more progressive. Yet, at the same time you are disagreeing, you are agreeing .... excuse me, if I find that convoluted.
The entire reason that I'm going at the loci of morals from a technically fine position, is expressly because of what you state: the lack of discipline with linguistics affords too many, (ignorant? foolish?), individuals to misuse the term, under a false definition, to achieve an agenda.
Perhaps, one of the things that the "atheist community" should work on, in their attempt to be a distinct group, is discipline.
I've looked around this site quite a bit, looking at individual's reasonings for their lack of faith, destruction of the god delusion; in the majority of cases, what I have seen is that they express a time/point where the "church morality" stepped well past their individual ethics. The light bulb went off/the big "wtf" moment , as the sayings go.
Perhaps in the development of this particular social stratification, there should be an aggressive attempt to put morality back in its ancient sarcophagus; and pin people's ears back with personal responsibility; ethics. That's my biggest issue with "morality", outside of the group think; it helps to absolve individuals of their responsibility to act according to known correct practices ~ "when no one is around to see you do wrong ..."
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Permalink Reply by ryan cameron on
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now that I agree with. Well put!
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Permalink Reply by Tarquin St John Sh'gn'sty on -
There are some problems with your post,due to some unfounded generalisatiosn and the odd logical fallacy.
EG "Most Secular Americans believe in evolution." So what? (argumentum, ad populum, even if true)
"It makes perfect sense when compared to the superstition of the Old and New Testaments." (argument from personal incredulity)
To you and to me. But not as a principle. Most religious beliefs are rational and logically valid but probably mistaken. In formal logical argument the premise is always presumed to be true. EG:Premise: 'the bible is the inerrant word of god'. From that premise, literalism is rational and logically valid. Logic does not guarantee truth any more than the oxymoron 'common sense'
Creationism, is far more rational and intellectually honest than the equivocation and compromise found in many of the mainstream churches.
The term 'Christian' is no more useful as description than the word 'atheist'. I've noticed on forums that [especially with Americans] 'christian' usually means the lunar religious right,a nasty aggressive bunch of dropkicks which has a disproportionate influence on its country and gets away with ignoring the US constitution."
My response to creationists is:" Evolution is evidence base science. Creationism is a faith based belief,without any supporting evidence.Go away" I never argue with apologists,but I do resist their idiocy. Fortunately this is not the issue in Australia it is in the US. Here people who wear their religion on their sleeves are viewed with deep suspicion.
Australians tend to have a healthy contempt for clergy,politicians, lawyers,journalists, child molestors and other members of the criminal classes.
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