Subject: Re: Prayers For Our President
I have had religionists challenge me with that question, and I like the meme 'If you have to be a good person under threat from God, then you are not a good person to start with.' I believe everyone except the psychologically damaged (psychopaths, sociopaths, etc.) knows the difference inherently

I am not saying you are wrong about any of this. But I would like to point out that you are just trotting out another inherently unprovable moral theory, and saying THIS ONE as if you read it in the bible or something. So the answer to the question of how can you tell something is right or wrong is, we have to ask Goofy how he FEELS. Its a fine theory, but not really any finer than the Taliban or the nihilists, in a logical sense. I admit I don't have a better theory, but I feel as though its valuable to understand that nobody does. My solution to Moral Relativism, by the way, is to not say on the one hand it is all relative, then say on the other hand, therefore we don't get to defend our faith aggressively because we realize it is not real. Our faith in our system is as real as the beliefs that are a threat to us, and it would be a sad world indeed in which knowing the truth made you powerless.

Anyway, I think the bible stories actually help elucidate how it came to be that we feel morally how we do. I think it is from culture we get our feelings about right and wrong, and that culture evolves (memetically) and that western culture is as good a bet as any there ever was as being a good one for humans, so why not defend it aggressively. I think the predecessor to culture is the emotional brain of the mammal, and that as we are all social creatures, our emotions drive us to be able to cooperate with others, and this is the starting point of our moral feelings. I think the layer of culture on top of this which is memetic and evolves as ideas instead of DNA is a creation of the primates, perhaps not all of them, but the ones that became us, and that it has pretty spectacularly sped things up, for better or for worse. I think the bible is an artifact like a fossil from which we can learn about the earliest part of memetic evolution of humans that became western civilization, and that makes it incredibly interesting.

But mostly I have spent too many years asking for evidence without a single, solitary thing offered except goat-herder tales, rote childhood indoctrination, or similar. There are 3 billion video cameras on the planet. Where is the evidence? 'Jesus on toast' is a miracle? At every turn the Bible has been shown to be ridiculous, yet it persists. Bah. Time for the human race to grow up.

May I suggest, if this is true, that you have been taking an overly naive approach? There is plenty of "evidence" about the bible, about who wrote it, how the stories evolved over time, what the background human situation at the time these things were being created or modified or forgered. Of course, not too remarkably, there is very little evidence that the stories are true. Out of curiosity, did you reject Plato when you went to Greece and couldn't find his cave? Or his perfect city?

As a perhaps interesting aside, there came a point in my own atheism where I had learned at least some about Buddhism and Zen, that I realized it was not so much that I didn't believe in God, as that I didn't believe in a Judeo-Christian supernatural being who had a largely human-like personality and liked to pick winners and losers and seemed somewhat OCD about what it was OK to eat or not eat.

Is the universe an amoral place? Well, it seems it is possible for moral relevance to be a thing (us) that can be created through evolution within our universe. I'm a Physicist, not a Metaphysicisist, so I am not sure, but I think if we can build somehting moral here there is something about the universe itself that is interesting that we do not yet have a clue about. Yes the angry god was something we just made up to explain this, but isn't that an interesting thing to know about ourselves, that this is how we first try to explain things before we realize science?