Then your "No' is meaningless. So for all practical purposes your no is actually yes. Because according to your moral system if the majority favors it then it will be done.
No, I am referring to deeper moral principles like human equality and freedom of conscience. Where did Christianity borrow those principles from?
How can a purposeless process explain purposes?
It has all the characteristics of an effect.
Here's what you said … "Such as it containing purposes, such as eyes for seeing and ears for hearing",
But this doesn't demonstrate that it is an effect. Things in the universe operate by cause and effect, but that doesn't mean that the universe as a whole is an effect.
Where do you get that number from?!
Evolution explains conscious beings, and conscious beings are the ones that impute purpose.
Even if true, the fact that it is done does not mean that I consider it to be moral.
People that espoused them before Christianity appeared on the scene.
No, you seem to misunderstand causality. Characteristics produced by the cause CAN exist in the effect, just the cause itself cannot be part of the effect. Other persons and characteristics that were produced by the cause CAN exist as part of the effect.
How do you know this? People have experienced the bottom of the ocean, how do you know people have not experienced the transcendent?
Maybe but it is unlikely that they would restrict sex outside of marriage and only with your wife. And not even allow thinking about having sex with someone who is not your wife. And not even allow so called white lies.
Yes, but we are the result of an impersonal amoral process if atheism is true. So anything that emerges from us, is ultimately from that same process. And if is just emerges from us then it is relative and subjective so that you have no rationally objective basis for condemning Hitler.
No, it is more rational to believe that our morality is derived from a pre-existing morality.
I see nothing above that refutes my statement.
Do you consider Hitlers self protection mechanisms by promoting his people wrong? If so, why? Since you said it is a valid morality above if it is based on such things.
See above about Hitlers self promotion and self protection of his society.
If there is no moral God then morals are not objectively real.
What makes God moral?
This creates a conundrum for the Christian in that he must then sort out what characteristics found here in the effect actually represent the character of the cause. Evil, disease, suffering, and sin are all now the table as a characteristic of the cause. Scripture tries to explain this reality away with an unwarranted hypothesis concerning our behavior. Our behavior is also on the table as an effect directly inherited from the cause.
Because the varying anecdotal descriptions of those that have said they experienced the transcendent all ascribe mundane and personally anthropomorphic familiar characteristics to it. People who have not seen the bottom of the ocean might describe it, based on what they see on its surface, to be smooth and wavy as opposed to to the completely dissimilar and chaotic landscape that is hidden beneath it. This is how your anthropomorphic god gets its characteristics too. He resembles a willful sentient mind... just like us.
Not true. Another part of human nature is jealousy, and the effects of jealousy are bad for a society as well. Thus its codification. The emotion , and thus our need to address it, emerges from our living human reality, not from cold and amoral stone tablets.
Same goes for your God then as stated in point 1. If we as atheists cannot separate out the amorality of our formation from the morality which emerges from us anyway then either can you separate the origin of evil, disease, suffering and sin from God. Pick you poison. Goose or Gander. Be consistent.
Not if the characteristics are common to us all such as the need to self promote and self protect at the same time. Then these become human objectives. Hitler is a perfect example of my point, not yours. Hitler's act of self promotion to save his nation from the effect of the Jew violated the self protection of the Jew. Proper moral action is not dictated by one side of a human interchange. The Jews fought back as much as they were capable of. Then the rest of the world saw the threat that such a human philosophy as Hitler's would effect on them as well. Needless to say... the moral philosophy I am ascribing to here was proven true. Hitler was destroyed by his self promotion when it was evaluated outside the vacuum of his myopic side of the moral equation.
Obedience to supernatural fiat would be amoral. It would exist without any human emergent reason and therfore be meaningless.
It all does.
Yes, because it violated common drives of self protection for his victims. Again, proper moral action is not dictated by one side of a human interchange. Eventually the wider societies saw the threat to their own potential self protection and ended Hitler's practice. If the rest of the world agreed with Hitler, you would still have the Jews internal drives to self protect to consider. Even if the Jews were wiped out, because of their drives to self protect, regardless of their capacity to act on it, this alone would never have made Hitler's act moral.
Refuted above.
Transcendent fiat makes all acts of obedience amoral. Objective morality only emerges from real human experience when we discover and navigate common objective realities that define what we are.
That is not my argument. My argument is that flowers have the objective mathmatical symmetry that humans consider beautiful.
True, but there is evidence that some of the sources for the gospels are eyewitnesses, so they should be treated as such and unlike many other historical events should be considered historical knowledge.
True but I think you would also agree that if someone who was a family member or a friend of yours wrote a biography of you, you would think that it is probably be more accurate than if it was written by a total stranger. Especially if it touched on your personality.
There is also the testimony of the women of the empty tomb. In first century judaism, the testimony of women is practically worthless. And yet they recorded that the first to see the empty tomb were women, this is strong evidence that the tomb actually was empty. If they had wanted to truly impress and convince other jews they would have written that the male disciples found the empty tomb, but rather the evidence points to them trying to be accurate in their recording of this event rather than making up events to impress others.
The jewish high priest would not have allowed or caused his execution unless James was guilty of blasphemy which was the belief that Jesus was the Son of God, and James would not have believed that Jesus was the Son of God if he had not seen the resurrected Christ.
I think my line of reasoning and my explanation of James' train of thought above is pretty logical about why James was killed.
Flowers have objective, mathematical symmetry.
To the extent that there is good evidence that some sources were eyewitnesses, we should conclude that some sources were probably eyewitnesses. But even "eyewitnesses testified that this happened" does not establish something as truth.
If you ever read a biography of me, written by a friend or relative, which says that I won every argument I ever entered -- let alone that I performed feats which defied the laws of nature -- don't believe it.
This is not relevant to the claim I responded to, which was that the Jews themselves conceded that the tomb was empty. And it is possible that "women were the earliest to express faith that Jesus was alive" was true but "they came to his tomb and found it empty" was not.
Why do you say that? Josephus strongly implies that the high priest had no concern about whether he was following the law, he just wanted some people dead.
That is not the only possible way to be "guilty of blasphemy."
Countless numbers of people have believed things which they have not seen.
Even if it were, you simply cannot claim that Josephus says that this is why James was killed, if Josephus does not say that is why James killed, it is only your deduction that this is why James was killed. How can you not see this?
Well I dont remember that and dont have time to try to find it, but I dont deny that that also could be a motivation.
No, it is called understanding human nature.
"Anybody who reaches a different conclusion than one I have reached must be motivated by greed and/or cowardice" does not show "understanding of human nature."
Which would have a greater impact on someone, someone they know rising from the dead, or someone preaching new dogma?
Actually Jesus never criticized the teaching regarding the general resurrection so it is unlikely that up until His resurrection, they never really had any doubts about it. And in fact later Christ revealed that there will be a type of general resurrection when He returns to earth. So while His resurrection was of course unique from a jewish perspective, it was not as radical as you are attempting to portray it.
The criteria fits human nature, so I think it is a rational criteria and helpful in finding out what happened in the past. But of course, believing in the resurrection of Jesus Christ is much more profound and totally life changing than discovering that George Washington didnt cut down a cherry tree when he was child. So the disbelief is much more difficult to overcome. Not to mention overcoming our natural antipathy to the Christian God.
All the evidence points to the story being a unified whole.
Of course you are not obligated, freedom of conscience and religion is a Christian principle. God wants you to freely choose Him not be forced into choosing Him.
What? You are the one saying that the idea of one man being resurrected was so radically contrary to Jewish doctrine that the disciples would not have promulgated it unless they knew it to be true! If that's not the case, if his resurrection was not something radical from the Jewish perspective, then you have no case at all for saying it meets the "criterion of dissimilarity"!
All things being equal, it is somewhat less likely that someone will make a claim that goes contrary to the beliefs of his neighbors than it is that they will keep quiet about things that go contrary to those beliefs. But there are a million ways in which things can be far from equal, in which circumstances make it more likely that people will adopt such claims, and one obvious example of that is when they are part of a breakaway religious community. Again, if we adopted your version of the "criterion of dissimilarity" (assuming you have just casually abandoned it, as your comment about "not so radical" would suggest), then any new religion is instantly granted extra credibility because it represents a departure from the beliefs of its neighbors. That's absurd.
No it doesn't. The obvious fact that the earliest Christian writing we have (Paul's) does not refer to the empty tomb, or the women as the first to learn of the resurrection, is evidence of a story that changed over time.
I meant "obliged as a reasonable person." When I say I don't see how I'm "obliged" to adopt the religion which I consider best in the competition, I mean I don't see anything unreasonable about not adopting any religion at all.