artisticsolution wrote:Can you see how you contradict yourself here? Do you see the underlying lie? You say you don't regard yourself better than anyone, but that you could be the worst of the bunch....which means right now you don't think your the worst...meaning you do think you are better because of God. Meaning God makes one 'better'. Meaning Christians are better. So you lie when you say you don't think you are better. You DO think you are better. It's okay to not lie about it, is my point. Just say it. You are speaking out both sides of your mouth again.
Not at all. What Christians believe is that God DOES in fact make people better than they would otherwise be. But to say so does not imply, as you wrongly suppose, that I must be comparing myself to others. The legit comparison is between
the man I am now, and
the man I would have been. I freely concede that I would likely be a much worse person than I am, but for the grace of God.
But does this imply I think I'm better than anyone else? Not at all. I freely admit I might be much worse, naturally speaking, than anyone on this board.
But this I can tell you for sure: I''m far nicer than the man I would have been if I didn't know God.
they doubt that anyone can have a moral compass without God.
No, actually, we do not. In fact, we think everyone has a moral compass: but atheists cannot tell us a) WHY they have one, or b) what makes theirs truly "right." In other words, they have no real answer to the question that heads this discussion.
What Christians know to be true -- and indeed, even secular moral philosophy also knows to be true -- is that a person can HAVE a moral compass without God, but they can't have any LEGITIMATION of that moral compass without God. Habermas says we're in a "legitimation crisis" today, and this legitimation issue has been called, 'the major problem in modern moral philosophy" -- namely, how do we prove there is any substance to moral concepts?
That's a hugely important distinction, and you really need to pause here and think about it. Because really, it accounts for your ongoing confusion as to what I'm saying, and what you quite wrongly think Christians must believe. You'll never really understand what we're saying until you grasp it. There's all the difference in the world between
being good and
knowing why you ought to be good. Without God, one can do the former but never the latter.
For example, it's quite possible for a rank atheist to come to the conclusion that, say, abortion, or date rape, or animal cruelty is immoral. But if you ask him what
makes it immoral, he'll have to answer "because I don't like it," or "because my society currently disproves of it (if it does)," but that's his limit. He can't say it's in any ultimate sense "wrong" or that it's compulsory for us not to do it, if the winds of change come in and change the political correctness of the day.
In a godless universe, there are no rules that are binding. You can make up rules if you want, and you can enforce them by power if you have power -- but you cannot prove rationally to anyone that your rules are in any universally-compelling sense "right". And if someone has will and power, and if he or she should simply choose to be evil, then to what will you appeal when you say, "But date-rape (or whatever) is just
wrong." His response: "Well, I like it, I have the power and daring to do it, and I'm quite sure I can continue to get away with it." Your answer would be....
Go ahead. Let's hear what you'd say.
Anyway, you can imagine how terrifying it would be, for a Christian, to not understand that people can have moral compasses even without knowing God.
It's not terrifying at all.
I find it not even mildly surprising. My non-Christian friends are fine people, in fact. But not one of them can tell me why it would be wrong for them to be otherwise than they are.
The point is, that while secular persons may "happen" to do good things, they can never find the reason why they "must" do good things. Nietzsche saw that. A world without God, he said, is quite simply "beyond good and evil." (his words) He didn't say that people could not any longer BE good, but that there was no necessity of it anymore, no explanation for its necessity anymore, and actually, no meaning to the term "good."
Morally speaking, then there is no "right" and "wrong" in an atheist universe. So the question which leads this thread is simply an atheistically incoherent one: for from an atheist perspective, it comprises two terms that can have no objective referent in the real world: "right" and "wrong."
Or if you now do, please explain to me...what makes a thing "wrong"? 
