So I was watching Lateline (which is an Australian late night newscast program) when this video was played.
For those who do not wish to watch the video, and I don’t blame you, it is footage of a person running a 2 year old baby with their car, stopping only for a moment, before slowly driving over the child again. Blood is obvious. Time elapses and multiple people walk past the screaming, bloodied baby, without doing anything. Yet even more blood is on the ground around the baby, no one could possibly mistake the screaming bloodied thing on the ground to be trash, like some people seem to think.Then another car runs over the baby’s legs, without stopping. A few more people ignore the child before, finally, a lady stops and yells for help.
Many people must be wondering how people could be so sick and heartless as to just walk past and COMPLETELY ignore the baby. It makes no sense. You’d think if you saw the same thing happen that you would be on the phone calling an ambulance in seconds.
This happened in China, and as I was reading about the issues, it turns out this is quite common. People often ignore crimes in China because, they fear that if they help out, they will be held responsible by a corrupt legal system.
I find this incredibly fascinating and horrifying at the very same time that a country’s government can be so corrupt, oppressive, and inhumane, that it could instill fear into its citizens that helping those in trouble will end in them being prosecuted.
Could you imagine walking down a street and seeing an old lady knocked out and mugged, but you can’t do anything because if you do, you could be prosecuted with the very crime you were trying to prevent? Neither can I, yet millions live like this in China.
The only positive thing that I saw out of this video was the fact that at least one person ended up helping. Then I read somewhere that she did it for the fame and reward only; this had my blood boiling, I thought she was even worse than the man who ran over the child in the first place. However, thankfully that information was incorrect. http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/stories/lady-who-helped-little-girl-run-over-by-van-rewarded-25k.html
The main thing that I take away from this story is how easily influenced we as humans are by power. I mean, I thought that we could be oppressed to the extent that we wouldn’t steal, speed, or use Google, but fucking hell, people can ignore a screaming bloodied baby with two fucking broken legs.
Either way, those people who simply walked past without even looking at the child by my definition, degenerate cunts. I do not use that word lightly under serious circumstance, but there is no other phrase that does it justice. Perhaps ‘scum’ would have sufficed, but scum can be cleaned away, unfortunately it is no legal to do the same with those people.
And I almost went a day without losing a little more faith in humanity. Almost.
Noel’s Comment:
‘How about the good things that most religious people follow, such as loving our neighbors as the self, forgiveness, feeding the poor, justice, making peace, being humble, turning the other cheek, honesty, loving our enemies, etc, do you also hate these things? Remember, although many religious people do evil things, most of them do the opposite. Just a thought.’
Once again Greg and I have filmed a video response to Duncan Ryan’s comments on my posts.This time is is addressing the comments made on my ‘Why follow your God?’ post I made a few days ago.
Again, we look forward to his response, as well as anyone else who wishes to join in on the discussion!
Here are the comments that have taken place between now and my last video:
Duncanryan:
Gentlemen, Firstly let me say a genuine thanks for taking so much time to try and refute my comments. I was somewhat surprised in the number of directions you launched into (who would have expected a refutation of Noah’s ark to come up?) but I think you’re still a little bit quick to dismiss some of the big issues. I am more than happy to discuss further any of the matters you raise (bats being birds, goats milk, insects on the ark, Conservatives destroying the planet or Adam and Eve) but I think perhaps we should try and stay on one or two subjects, and maybe add that by saying “science proves” or “science is pretty conclusive” actually proves nothing – if we have ‘proof’ then let’s produce it rather than merely allude to what we think is out there.
Belief in the existence of God is neither foolish nor irrational. We live in a world which exists – this in itself provides evidence for God; the general consensus of science is that because the universe is expanding it is not something which has just always been there but rather had a beginning. If we concede the “Big Bang theory” for the moment (which seems to be astrophysicists best guess) why would it be rational to conclude that all of these things could spark into existence without some cause behind it? Why would it be rational to think that something materialised out of nothing? Moreover, one of the dimensions of this universe is time and so time must have commenced with the beginning of the universe. What sort of force could have brought these things into existence? One which is intelligent and one which is outside of time – sounds like a prominent Bible character to me.
Moreover, anyone who has done high school biology knows the simple law of biogenesis. That is, life can only come from life. However, the atheist tries to convince me that it is rational to believe that life could come from no life…indeed that life could come from something which came from nothing. We have clever men like Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) who, though an atheist, got around this biogenesis problem by proposing that aliens must have planted life on earth. I have also heard Richard Dawkins (another clever man) say that a “…civilisation evolved…to a very very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Now that is a possibility and an intriguing possibility and I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry and molecular biology you might find a signature of some sort of designer”. This is one of the leading atheist thinkers who is so sure there’s no God, yet concedes that a higher life form may well have designed and put life on earth – makes me feel a little less irrational. What happens when we ask where the aliens came from?
If I may, I’d also like to return to this concept of evil which you refer to a few times (because I think it’s related). The point I was trying to convey is that if there is no God, then there’s no such thing as evil because there’s no such thing as objective morality. If there’s no God, all our morality is subjective and is actually an illusion. If our morality is some product of evolution coupled to our social conditioning then nothing about our morality has any objective basis whatsoever. Some behaviours may be disadvantageous (from an evolutionary standpoint) but there’s no basis at all to say they are ‘wrong’ behaviours. Without God morality would be arbitrary – we’re just another species on earth but we have some delusion about concepts such as good/bad, right/wrong. However, I have yet to meet someone who believes that there is no such thing as objective morality; there are things which are always wrong (‘evil’ if you prefer). If there is such a thing as objective morality you have no choice but to accept that there is a higher moral authority.
Thanks for reading and discussing.
My Reply:
‘Belief in the existence of God is neither foolish nor irrational. We live in a world which exists – this in itself provides evidence for God.’
If you use this logic, and think it is sound, then you would have to agree that because the sea exists then that itself is proof that Poseidon exists. Do you agree with this? If you don’t then you pretty much have to retract the previous statement.
As for your arguments about biogenesis, just because there are many opinions on the matter (Such as Dawkins and Crick’s) does not make them cancel each other out; it does not make God to be the best answer. Science still has a long way to go, and to make up some reason as to why the universe was created such as God created it would be immature. Science is growing, not all the answers are there yet. The issue of the Big Bang will most likely never be resolved because we weren’t there to prove it. The reason scientists stick with the Big Bang theory is because by their calculations it seems very plausible; if you read about Hubble’s Law and other aspects, just do a Google search and find a trustworthy website on the issue.
You act like Dawkins is our God, and because he has some outlandish claims and observations that the whole of science and arguments from non-believers are less credible. Personally, I don’t know enough about biology and science to say how life started; I’ll have to let someone else make that point.
The reason we have things that are ‘wrong’ in the eyes of morality is completely up to society, so that is not subjective to us because things like killing for no reason are bad for society. It causes grief and fear in some, and anger for revenge in others. It could lead to more bloodshed and this would just be terrible for many aspects of that society. Therefore, the general consensus is that murder is wrong, it is morally evil, unless you’re killing someone who has killed others and has a high potential in killing more; killing him eventually leads to less bloodshed. Or of course just throwing him in prison, which I’m all for.
We as a species know that murder is wrong, for the same reason as a child, if you bump your head on something and it makes you cry, you know that is a bad thing, and you know it would be bad to do to someone else. You most likely do it, but more out of curiosity to confirm that fact or because you’re a little dick a kid, like I was. Nevertheless, just because we weren’t handed down our morals from God doesn’t mean they are any less concrete, they come from the betterment of society. What constitutes evil is generally something that stands in the way of letting a society prosper evenly, or stands in the way of happiness for many, or some.
Excuse my grammar or spelling, I literally just woke up!
Duncan Ryan:
You’ll notice that there is a world of difference between the word EVIDENCE and the word PROOF. Moreover, I deliberately tried to keep to ‘big picture’ ideas and so when I say “We live in a world which exists – this in itself provides evidence for God” (N.B. ‘evidence’). Because the sea exists it does not provide ‘proof’ that Poseidon exists, but it does provide evidence that something caused it to exist. I’m not even getting so narrow as to speak about the God of the Bible here – all I’m saying at this point is that our existence is evidence of a force required to bring us into existence (that is still the case whether we hold to Big Bang or whatever our theory is).
I can’t imagine anyone would uphold Dawkins as their god (not very easy to worship), but I’ve done exactly what you suggested. You say you don’t know enough about biology – well I’m letting the ‘experts’ talk. Such is the bizarre corner that the leading geneticist of his time and one of the leading evolutionary biologists of our time have backed themselves into they have to acknowledge a higher life form may well have originated and designed life on earth. Despite what ‘the word of me’ wrote there is still no conceivable way in which we can make life from dead matter without pre-programming some genetics. Moreover if we believe the first cell came to life in a primordial soup or whatever it was, then it should be a reasonably straightforward process to replicate – but no, all our complex equipment and experimental conditions and the best we can do is create a few amino acids. Again the only point I’m trying to make is that the existence of life on earth (whatever your theory of how it developed) could not have come into existence without a cause – thus we have EVIDENCE for a Creator.
(I have to put in a quick aside, ‘the word of me’ was very bold in saying “You can go to any college or university in the world (that is not run by religious orders) and check into their Archaeology, Paleontology, Geology, Biology, or any of the earth sciences classes or professors or the textbooks and the proof is there for all to see and learn. Fundamentalist religion doesn’t believe any of it…but, we can prove our position …and they can’t.” Presumably by ‘fundamentalist religion’ he had me in mind. It certainly by no means makes me more ‘right’ or more worthy of being listened to, but I have obtained a PhD in Neuroscience and have worked in the research departments of a reasonably significant university (not run by religious orders) for a number of years. This has given me opportunities to read textbooks and listen to professors and this ‘proof’ that you speak of on these big issues has so far eluded me.)
My point on morality is that assuming there’s no God (of the Bible or otherwise) then our morality is a human invention, entirely subjective and arbitrary. Please note, I in no way said that people who don’t BELIEVE in God have no morality, my point is that for OBJECTIVE morality to exist, a higher moral authority must also exist. That is simple reasoning which ‘the word of me’ has alluded to: “Who needs a ‘Higher Moral Authority’? I/we always have choices.” This is exactly my point, a truly atheistic stance would recognise that morality is only ever about human choices and is an entirely subjective thing.
There were others joining on on the discussion too, you can read their replies by viewing the comment sections of my posts.
There comes a time where most Atheists realise that once you’ve had one religious debate you’ve had them all.
I’m talking about the arguments you have where you’re presenting logical evidence that disproves the gods in every way except for faith – because that’s their last safety blanket they can hide under, telling themselves their whole life hasn’t been wasted worshiping a fake god.
Disregard all of those arguments, what I want to focus on is, if God is real, or Allah or whatever, then why do people dedicate their lives to worship?
Think about what they are pledging their individuality and eccentricity to. They think that a God who created a man and woman without and sense of right and wrong, damned them to a live of evil because they broke his law (even though they had no idea what the difference of right and wrong was – considering they had to realise they were naked after eating from The Tree of Knowledge).
God knows all past, all present and all future. He knows everything that is going to happen. He is responsible for everyone who goes to hell, and everyone who goes to heaven.
He says he gave us free will, but that contradicts that he knows the future.
He creates people who he knows will become Atheists, he dooms them to that fate himself.
He creates homosexuals knowing that they, by default, without any reason, will go to hell.
He didn’t make himself known to any tribes in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, New Guinea and other places, so they didn’t know of him, thus they couldn’t have accepted him into their hearts. He knew this, so he damned thousands, perhaps millions to hell just because they lived on the wrong continent, even though he put them there.
And then there is the part where he has to threaten everyone with the concept of hell itself. If hell didn’t exist, no one would care. Why would a god create a species that needs punishment by default? Because of the attributes he gave them whether it be sex, drugs, alcohol, basically anything that involves the pursuit of a greater experience, whether it be for happiness, or knowledge. And we all know God is the biggest fun sponge of all time.
If God made himself known to me, I would spit in his face. I’d rather go to hell than give in to a plan of that amount of evil.
I will now leave you with my favourite Bible quote:
Ezekiel 23:19-20: “Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. “
We do stumble over our words a bit, but that’s what beer does to you!
His comment:
Hope you don’t mind me commenting. If the Bible is truth (and I’m assuming you would require some convincing on that), then we have explanations for why the world is as it is. Namely, we are told that the world today is not how God created it, but because sin entered in, so too did death and the world has worsened ever since. Reading some of your thoughts I don’t get the impression that you need to be convinced that the world is messed up and only getting worse – this will be the case until the end of the age.
Anyway, sin enters in and makes human beings less than human (i.e. less than God created them to be) and as descendants of Adam and Eve we too are bound to sin. We have rational free-thinking minds in a manner of speaking, but in another sense we have no freedom from sin, we are slaves to it – it is all we can do naturally. The Bible tells us that God can have no part in sin and that he will judge sin. Therefore, by rights, he could judge us all and the requirements of his justice would be entirely satisfied and none of us could complain – we have sinned against a holy God, he has the right to judge. However, he has chosen to save human beings by offering his son to take the penalty for sin in their place, if they would repent of sin and submit to him (a penalty that otherwise we couldn’t satisfy, hence the eternality of hell).
You raise a very good point about the Aborigines (for example), but the Bible tells us that God has left no-one with an excuse: “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). Moreover we’re told that something of God’s moral code is imprinted in the hearts of those who are separated from God’s revealed ‘religion’: “when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature the things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts…” (Romans 2:14-15). So far from God being evil in this regard, he has left every man without an excuse, made every man aware of their condition before their God – if mankind chooses to reject that, or hardens his heart to that, it does not make God evil.
The argument of ‘God made me gay’ is not one that stands up to much scrutiny. Whilst I do not doubt that those who are gay have, in a sense, a natural inclination to be attracted to members of the same sex, it does not necessarily mean that it is a morally right thing to do. We would have less difficulty in telling a kleptomaniac that he should resist the urge to steal, because stealing is wrong (“But God made me a thief…?). We would also (and I’m not saying that they’re on the same level, but the principle stands) say to a paedophile that his ‘natural’ urges and inclinations are morally wrong (“But God made me a paedophile…?”). Or someone who has a strong family history of alcoholism…and so on. A natural desire to do something does not make it a morally good thing to do. And God judging that which is natural to us does not make him evil, but should point us to see how far short of God’s standard of good we fall.
Lastly, the very concept of good and evil which you speak about, from where do these concepts come from? If there is no God and therefore no ultimate accountability for actions, who is to say that something is evil or something is good? In many ways being too good (say, for example helping the weaker members of society) might be seen as detrimental to the advancement of the species. I would put it to you that we can only have this concept of good and evil if there exists a higher moral authority – otherwise, what does it matter?
Tonight I found myself extremely bored and not in the mood for human interaction. So I sat on my bed and began to think. I have been a thinking Atheist for a couple years now, and I’m always having a go at religions, but I never really stopped to think about the Christian God, and ‘his’ personality. After some time I naturally realised how evil he really is.
The following is a short compilation of realisations I had about God’s personality in the bible.
I started to think about what happens to those who are born in countries where people are not predominantly Christian. Let’s say, Australia for the heck of it. In 1200B.C. the owners of the land, the Aborigines, had a completely different ideology of how the land came to be. Australia is a landmass that is not physically connected to any other land masses on this planet. Until man invented the boat, the Aborigines had no contact with human beings from other countries.
Their ‘religion’ was The Dreamtime and that was all they knew. Why had they been going to hell upon death for 1200 years because they hadn’t even heard of Jesus? God placed these people on a secluded continent, without giving them the knowledge of whom and what he is.
Why was he so kind to Moses? Why he was so sickly unkind to the Aborigines? Sure the Europeans eventually came over by boat and stole their land. That was almost 1800 years after Jesus began his ascent into heaven. Why did God choose to let the Aborigines conjure up their own religion, and go to hell for it? I don’t know about you, but that seems pretty fucked up to be completely honest.
Ok, think of a mouse. Give it a piece of cheese. If the mouse touches the cheese, it is given an electrical shock. Naturally, the mouse needs to eat, and wants to eat the cheese, but is punished for doing so (Think of a mouse compared to a human. It’s kind of like the comparison between man and God. The mouse only knows that the cheese is food and wants food. The man knows everything about the situation he created; he knows the chemical breakdown of the cheese and almost everything about it and the anatomy of the mouse. The intellect between man and mouse is similar of that between man and God). The person who placed the mouse in the experiment was well aware of this. They created the situation themselves. They had the power to make the food something mice hate, or more simply not electrocuted it in the first place. I don’t about you, but if I caught someone doing this to a mouse, I would think they would have some kind of mental illness, or just a dickhead in general.
Now think of a homosexual. It is a well-known fact that Christians believe that homosexual will go to hell (not all Christians wish this, but they can’t deny it). God created him to be naturally attracted to his own gender and he wants to send him into a land of fire and eternal punishment. See the correlation to the mouse situation?
In my opinion, God is a sick, twisted being who gets his kicks from what he disguises as ‘justice’. His ideology is to punish what comes natural. He created us with certain natural attributes and preferences to which he constantly punishes us for. God gave us rational free thinking minds, but made himself and his religion so obscure, that anyone who happens to use the logic that he himself gave us is sent to hell. That is evil. God is evil.
I lot of people believe that good, in fact, outweighs all of the evil in this world but we just focus on the evil too much.
I would disagree with this notion by agreeing that we do focus on the bad too much.
This does not mean that I think good over powers evil. I think it is so far in the other direction it isn’t even a joke.
I have a scenario which perfectly illustrates why I think evil outweighs good.
Scenario:
200 people are having a fundraiser in a town hall for charity. This is a good act, one of the few things people band together for to do good.
It takes 200 people to fund-raise enough money so that little Jimmy can afford life saving surgery. Let’s say this is in America, the land of the free, the land where you pay $100,000 for simple procedures. The government is evil and won’t fund healthcare properly.
It took 200 people to save one boys life, but let’s just say this boy ran a blog online that exploited the evils of Islam (because he believes in equality and all that lovely stuff), and a local Extremist does not like this. He thought the boy was going to die from his ailment and is furious that people are trying to save the blasphemous boy’s life. The extremist straps C4 to himself and runs into the hall and blows himself and everyone up in it.
It takes 200 people to save one life, yet it takes one life to take 201 lives.
To survive as a species this long, selfishness has been behind everything we do, and I’m not using selfishness as a negative here, because the most good acts that you have ever committed have selfish reason behind them. Would you give to charity if it made you somehow feel terrible? Probably not. You do it because helping someone out makes you feel good inside. See? Selfish, but not evil.
I have heard Dawkins believes we have a selfish gene, but I haven’t read about it too much extent so I can’t comment on how I feel about that. But I will say that without it being a gene itself, I believe that selfishness is so prevalent in us because it’s what has made us prosper as an animal. So what I am explaining is based on my own thoughts, not his.
The very fact that humans working in groups makes them more successful is testament to this. We do it because, if we do, we have a better chance of survival. Again this is not an evil thing, we just take advantage of each others strengths and weaknesses to better the chances of our survival.
A person on their own has a set of strengths and weaknesses. They might be an excellent hunter, but they can’t clean and cook an animal for shit. So they ask someone who is good at that, ‘Hey, if I hunt down a boar and you cook and clean it, you can share it with me’. But then when hunting the boar, it manages to charge him with its tusks and injure his leg. He can’t dress a wound to save his life (pun intended), so he asks the same of someone who knows about medicine, ‘Hey if you fix me up I’ll give you a share of this boar for dinner’. The ‘doctor’ agrees, and together they form a pack, or a community in which every contributes their skills to survive, all because their selfish survival needs beg it of them.
I almost said ‘but more often than not, selfishness is used for evil’, but that’s not true, considering everything we do is for ourselves… Selves… Self… Selfish.
The ironic thing is that the thing that is behind our survival as a species, is most likely going to be the reason we are wiped out.
The Opinions Of An Atheist Journalist 