atheists: would religion make a better case for morality if its past was not so violent?

Well, too late now isn't it.

There is no connection. Or rather there should not be any connection. The problem is that people in general never learn much, so they talk without ever knowing what they are talking about.

When two or more people live in the same area they have to adopt some rules about who does what to whom. Any such rule is called a more, pronounced "mor-ay". The adjective form is moral, and the habit of following mores is morality. Mores do not have to be right, only accepted. Another group on the other side of the river might have very different mores. A person who has not traveled tends to assume that his local customs are laws of the universe.

The word 'religion' appears in the bible just four times, and all four emphasize that religion is of man's making, not God's. It is obvious from the context that religion is men telling each other what to do, and that is what governments do. Religion and politics are pretty much the same thing, except that it's not a crime to refuse to contribute money to support religion. You might have noticed that when God brought the Hebrews into the promised land, one of the things He commanded them was no central government. God does not like religion!

Likewise, when people talk about "violence" in the name of "religion" they usually have only vague impressions from some nameless person they heard, or some wacko movie they saw. Some people go through the bible, picking out passages that seem to suggest some sort of violence in English, without bothering to check what the passages actually meant in ancient Hebrew. One passage they love is when the bears attacked a band of children. Well, in Hebrew, grown students of a priest or monk were called children. They were not exactly helpless. In all cases, God was serious about preserving the righteous line that was to produce the savior in the fullness of time. God is the God of rightness, not niceness.

-If one argues, as some deeply religious individuals do, that without God there can be no ultimate right and wrong - namely that God determines for us what is right and wrong - one can then ask the question: What if God decreed that rape and murder were morally acceptable ? Would that make them so ?

While some might answer yes, I think most believers would say no, God would not make such a decree. But why not ? Presumably because God would have some *reason* for not making such a decree. Again, presumably this is because *reason* suggests that rape and murder are not morally acceptable. But if God would have to appeal to *reason*, then why not eliminate the middleman entirely ?- Lawrence Krauss, A Universe From Nothing, Pgs 171-172.

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Which one of the following is immoral?

a) Raping someone

b) Treating women as objects

c) Picking up sticks on a Saturday

d) Genocide

e) Infanticide

f) Killing someone for having different views to you

g) Slavery

According to the Bible, only option c) is wrong. All of the others are either accepted as mainstream, or even encouraged, in the Bible.

However, you and I both know that all of the others are wrong and that c) is perfectly innocent. You do not get your morality from scripture and neither does anyone else.

Searching through religious scripture for morality is like searching through the sewers for small coins; sure, there is some in there, but is it really worth it?

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Nope.

Probably . . . but even for the present, statistics still show that the highly religious USA has 7x more people per 100,000 incarcerated than in highly atheistic China (or the highly atheistic Nordic countries), the highest date rape in the world, and highest divorce (50% of marriages in USA ended in divorce).

And, the highly religious nation like USA has no qualms in fabricating evidence of WMD against Iraq in order to plunder their oils because Halliburton failed to secure deals from Iraq 20 years before the Iraq war. History would not look kindly towards the "Christian" nation that is USA (*many Christians in USA made the claim that USA is a Christian nation).

No, the past can be written off as a bad job. It really needs to address its present and future if it wants to be taken seriously as a good moral stand-point.

No, we won't be happy until all the 7th Day Adventists are rounded up and put on an island somewhere. Or maybe they just need a better name. Methodist got the best name though. Unitarian sounds weird for some reason.

Why ask atheists about religious rationalizations? Who cares?

Religious morality, doctrine, dogma, beliefs... totally irrelevant to atheists. Pretty much irrelevant to modern life, too.

Yes.

But it would have to work mightily hard on its present, too.

And even then, that of course wouldn't make it "true" -- that would be a fallacious appeal to consequences.

Divine command theory has never been a good basis for morality

sure, genocide, murder and the stifling of innovation and research is bad and shows immorality

kinda hard to be the moral authority when you're involved in genocide

Look at the present.