"And people tell atheistic me that you can't be moral without religion."

Those who have told you this are WRONG, just plain wrong.

I think those that need a powerful, can-hand-out-punishment God to keep them in line are those who lack a moral compass as they lack empathy for their fellow human beings.

That includes these priests and, especially, their higher-ups. They make me want to believe there is a God, and that it is the most vengeful kind who makes them burn for eternity for their crap.

"And people tell atheistic me that you can't be moral without religion."

I'm an atheist, and I've never heard anyone say this. They say things like if there is no god, there are no objective morals (right and wrong), or that without religion, our collective morals will deteriorate. But I've never heard anyone say what you said. I really wonder who says that.

I don't understand why you think that because you are an athiest that the obvious moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian culture you grew up in had no effect on you? Yes, you are an athiest but you were raised in a culture filled with religious people and the teachings of the religions they believe in. You did not grow in a cultural vacuum and suddenly come up with a morality of completely your own making.

Morality is evolved, but that's certainly not the whole of it. You know this, since you point out how different the moral values are of Muslim cultures are.

So Islam infected Muslim cultures making them backwards, but the West's morality has nothing to do with Christianity? That's called creating an unfalsifiable position -- heads I win, tails you lose.

No D, the fact of the matter is the west became more and more moral by REJECTING the morals of christianity

Interesting. So what you compared people in the US -- those who are actively religious vs those who are not? What do you think he result would REPEATEDLY show? What would the famous evolutionary biologist, David Sloan Wilson's, own research show? How about Arthur Brook's research? How about the study sponsored by google that was reported in the NY Times by Nicholas Kristof?

In fact all of these show the opposite of what you're saying or what you're hypothesis would predict.

I believe this is the part where Amy recounts for the 123rd time how badly she was victimized as a child(was it teased, made fun of?) by some other little kids.

This is such an amazing and inspiring story, because kids, you know, they aren't typically cruel and never tease other kids who are different in any way. So I'm always like, whoah... poor Amy.

I know a fat guy who believes skinniness is evil primarily because he was teased for being fat by little skinny kids in the 4th grade. Actually I don't know that guy, because those people are so rare and generally silly that they're not that easy to come by.

I'm an atheist, and I've never heard anyone say this.

Then D, apparently, you don't tell a lot of people about your beliefs.

I've heard it a lot, not even directed at me.

No D, the fact of the matter is the west became more and more moral by REJECTING the morals of christianity

lujlp:

I don't think so. The underlying morals are still there. What we did, largely due to Luther's Reformation, is stopped trusting in the church and churchmen to do the right thing. IOW: Just cause they did it, and they were the church, didn't make it right.

That's not so much rejecting the morals as disallowing divine exceptions.

Is you is or is you ain't my baby?

Catholic church lawyers now say a fetus ain't a baby if the church is getting sued for wrongful death of the fetus.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/26/us/colorado-fetus-lawsuit/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

"You obviously don't like me and were looking for a place that relates to post this..."

The great irony is that it is you who tells this story over and over. I only pointed it out once. So if my doing it once means I don't like you (as you say), what does it say about you that you bring it up every chance you get?

"...you seem to lack the rhetorical skills and reasoning ability..."

Nothing you wrote demonstrates this. Merely asserting it doesn't make it so.

Amy, I bought your book when it 1st came out and I enjoyed it very much. I think you're smart and a good writer. And we agree with each other on most things economic. I started visiting your blog back then. It was only after I had heard this little story for about the 5th or 6th time in the comments that I realized how annoying it was.

I don't hate you or even hate hearing about your life. I did, however, begin to hate that story, and saw your adult reaction to it -- retelling it with great frequency and using it to justify a macro position of a far more complex issue - as childish and beneath you. Anytime someone suggested religious people can and are often very kind, you would start in with this story.

It's the kind of story that, if I had a good male friend who regularly talked like that, I would tease him for being such a huge pussy every chance I got until he felt embarrassed about his attachment to it (male friends do that kind of thing). Or if he couldn't let go of it I would suggest therapy.

"When people are shitty to you in traffic, does god smite them for you?"

No, but I so often wish he would . . .

You know, no one (including the weak pussies at the LA Times) ever asked the question: Was Roger Mahoney gay, and covering up for, or treating with kid gloves, priests he perceived as kin?

And how did it get to the point where most SoCal priests are gay?

That is not discrimination?

It gets worse: Priests admitted to humping each other in the offices of St. Vibiana's, the old diocese HQ in downtown.

Maybe they built Our Lady of the Angels with no private rooms---you know, windows everywhere, even in the interior....they should anyway...

> What we did, largely due to Luther's Reformation,
> is stopped trusting in the church and churchmen
> to do the right thing. IOW: Just cause they did
> it, and they were the church, didn't make
> it right.

I disagree. Church was removed from the center of power in American life not by authority —and I assume you mean government authority when you say "what we did"— but by fragmentation. (Notice I say 'church' was excused from the Big Chair, not "the church.") This success, one of our greatest, was not about collective action, but about atomized response.

There are many churches here, and they have to compete fiercely for adherents... They quibble and niggle so ferociously that the rest of us can get on with our intense & freaky sexual explorations without interruption.

A favorite factoid goes like this: The United States is the most religious nation in the world. The parallel factoid goes like this: The United States is also perhaps the nation with the least to fear from the practice of religion within it.

THIS IS NOT A CLEVER IRONY. Most Americans practice their religion in the same way that refineries & wells sometimes do burnoff of excess product... It can seem brash and garish, paranoids will cluck about it: "Wasted!", squeals the NYT, which nonetheless doesn't want to pay more for energy than the market demands.)

But in free societies, the vast majority of energy is put to good use, both in geology and in cosmology.

I'm 800' from a pew fulla Baptists... But I'm sleeping in tomorrow, and nobody gives a rat's ass. The Bahá'í-ist's are 1200 yards the opposite direction, plus we got Jews and Catholics and Methodists and some absolutely ass-kicking Buddhists... And this is West L.A, presumably one of the least-observant neighborhoods in the country. By the time they fight it out, I'll be dead of venereal disease or heroin addiction or fatty tuna, and I don't even date that much.

I'm just sayin', Uni, check your reflex: Not everything that's great in America happened because of a memo from the Central Office. Most of the really great stuff happened when people were free to experiment and do whatever they wanted. ALL the people who go to church tomorrow in my neighborhood are going because they want to, and none because they know their daughters will be beaten on the streets with garden hose after dark if they don't.

It's not like this in Kabul.

And with full acknowledgement of the foregoing, Mahony is a simpering fuckball, destined to burn in Hell forever. Remember: Those shitheels don't pay taxes.

Oh, to assess this mother.

"I'll be dead of venereal disease or heroin addiction or fatty tuna, and I don't even date that much."

Dang, Crid, just call the girls plump and be done with it. Fatty tuna? How rude.

I don't remember arguing that there isn't a evolutionary component to morality or that other religions do not have their own moral codes that have similar aspects to that of the Judeo-Christian tradition. I don't remember mentioning my own religious affiliation which based on what I wrote could have been an old man in the sky (your favorite derogatory term), one whose name we can not speak, or the toad in my backyard who talks to me in the deep dark night. I haven't set foot in a church in thirty years and have no intention of doing so in the next thirty but I know that the culture in which I was raised does inform my morality though we all start from similar evolutionary backgrounds. I have spent the last 25 years of my life travelling for work and have been to every continent except Antarctica. Cultures and morality are not the same everywhere.

"No D, the fact of the matter is the west became more and more moral by REJECTING the morals of christianity.."

That's funny. Which of those are they?

The unheralded sacrifice for another? The action for the common good?

Meanwhile - check out some truly basic history. We are not descended from Portuguese Catholics, so we are not Brazil, nor Spanish Catholics, so we are not Mexico; we are not French Catholics, thus not Quebec.

No, we stem from British Protestants, who sought to escape religious persecution, but who brought the central tenets of Christianity with them anyway.

Now, as soon as you rebut the usefulness of things like, "love thy neighbor" and "go and sin no more", I'll listen to you. Otherwise, it appears your comment was a bit premature and overly simplistic.

An awful lot of people seem to need some sort of guidance, and they are not going to hear "thou shalt not steal" or eschew single motherhood just because you think it's a good idea, even when you can show long-term benefits.

> How rude.

Can't help it; I'm entranced by the big'uns.

"And people tell atheistic me that you can't be moral without religion"

It helps, though. Every little bit helps.

People keep telling agnostic me that you can't be moral with religion.

I don't believe that the well-documented lapses of the Catholic Church, and there are many, discount the moral teachings of Christ.

> I don't believe that the well-documented lapses
> of the Catholic Church, and there are many,
> discount the moral teachings of Christ.

No, but they cheapen the credibility of his champions so deeply that we can wait (patiently) for His return before getting too concerned with his personal syllabus, however they might describe it in the interim.

Human decency is older than God. We got here first.

"Human decency is older than God. We got here first."

Prove it. But that's the rub isn't it. Unfortunately, you can't prove that God doesn't exist any more than the adherents of a God can prove that he does. You don't really know if we were here first. You can postulate this and you can believe it but that is as far as it goes.

> Unfortunately, you can't prove that God
> doesn't exist

It's not so unfortunate. I can't prove that Amy doesn't have seven kidneys, either... Though that seems as probable (and more importantly, as evident) as is a deity who's presented you in such a snot-blowingly defensive posture. Nope, I'd say that you were going to be a asshole anyway.

I've read the Good Book. (Well, it was more like a power-browse, but it went on for years.) How is it that believers so often skip the passages about humility?

Your tone is all fucked up.

> You can postulate this and you can
> believe it but that is as far
> as it goes.

Humanity is (best guess) 100,000 to 200,000 years old. Beyond that verge, atop it and ever since, many hominids (whether or not you'd call them men) have treated each other with love and respect, only to suffer and die youthfully in a world of chill, disease, and predators... BUT IT WAS ONLY IN THE LAST SIXTH THOUSAND YEARS that a Christian God took enough interest to intervene... Or, more likely, it's been that long since a squadron of shysters at the village center decided to credit Him for our creation.

No, Buttercup... If there's any excuse-making to be made for delay in humanity's long & bloody crawl from the muck, it must come from you and your idiot clergy. You are, after all, at the rear of this charge, with little to occupy yourselves beyond the diddling of defenseless children.

("Caustic?" I'm guessing that's Corinthians...)

Proving Amy doesn't have seven kidneys is a fairly simple proposition though it would take her cooperation.

As to humility, I never professed to possesing any which you should be able to understand fairly easily nor did I profess to being an adherent to the Good Book by which, I assume, you mean to be the Bible. Which particular version, Fuck Monkey?

I've read several versions of THE GOOD BOOK and did not take them to be the EXACT WORD OF GOD but there are some things I can use and others that I could do without.

I tend to to be one of those guys who looks at the evidence and says I could be wrong so I will keep an open mind. I understand by reading your comments over the last couple of years that being contrary is the only God you adhere to.

No reply is pretty much what I expect from you when you are challenged, Crid.

> Proving Amy doesn't have seven kidneys

"Proving" is the the the last direction to which you should be steering this discussion, as the claims of believers are so very much more ambitious, while buttressed with so much less evidence.

An extant deity worthy of their admiration, being so consequential, ought to be easy for believers to introduce. But they got nothin'. They got dick.

But even a casual visitor to this blog knows that Amy is full of piss. Amy hurts no one, whatever the source of her vigor.

> I never professed to possesing any

Spellcheck, Niblets.

> I've read several versions of THE GOOD
> BOOK and did not take them to be the
> EXACT WORD OF GOD

Nobody asked. Your cosmology is your own beeswax, wHaTeVeR yOuR cApItAlIzAtIoN.

> being contrary is the only God
> you adhere to.

You do not sparkle, and credit yourself too fondly: As each dawn unfailingly chases the dreams away, I'm infallibly reminded that the day will bring a new set of people to disagree with, no less wrong than yesterday's batch and no closer to right than tomorrow's.

You just happened to show up this afternoon, and your error was plain and mosquito-like: You misplaced the burden of proof for the most extraordinary claims the human project has yet offered.

Don't do that.

> pretty much what I expect

Again, you shouldn't pester others with your neediness... We'll answer you when and if the impulse appears.

And I couldn't help but notice you composed no apology for God's disregard of one-hundred-ninety-four-thousand millenia of savage horror, or for the pettiness of the consolations which finally were offered.

Well, that was my family, bitch, and I WANT ANSWERS.

Darwin provides them with convincing, and sympathetic, grace:

He was a family man to his core and while he was grief-stricken by the death of baby Charles in 1858, he had been left utterly shattered by the death from tuberculosis of his 10-year-old daughter, Annie, in 1851, as his great-great grandson, Randal Keynes points out in his book Annie's Box: Charles Darwin, his Daughter and Human Evolution. Mustard poultices, brandy, chloride of lime and ammonia were all that medicine could then offer Annie when she started to sicken. None had any effect on her worsening bouts of vomiting and delirium until Annie 'expired without a sigh' on 23 April 1851, Darwin recalled. 'We have lost the joy of the household and the solace of our old age.'

Keynes argues persuasively that Annie's death had a considerable impact on Darwin's thinking. 'In her last days, he had watched as her face was changed beyond recognition by the emaciation of her fatal illness. You could only understand the true conditions of life if you held on to a sense of the true ruthlessness of natural forces.'

"But even a casual visitor to this blog knows that Amy is full of piss."

Whatever you say, Sunshine. Did you mean to add " and vinegar" ?

"> I never professed to possesing any

Spellcheck, Niblets."

Let's see a real objection, Sweetheart.

"You do not sparkle, and credit yourself too fondly: As each dawn unfailingly chases the dreams away, I'm infallibly reminded that the day will bring a new set of people to disagree with, no less wrong than yesterday's batch and no closer to right than tomorrow's."

Never looked for a sparkle and, yeah, I probably do credit myself too fondly but doubt I am the only one. “I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.” Nabokov

"You just happened to show up this afternoon, and your error was plain and mosquito-like: You misplaced the burden of proof for the most extraordinary claims the human project has yet offered. Again, you shouldn't pester others with your neediness... We'll answer you when and if the impulse appears."

No, Baby, I been here before and I certainly didn't misplace the burden of proof. If you had something to offer, you wouldn't be telling me to do a spell check. As to neediness, you did reply to my comment.

"And I couldn't help but notice you composed no apology for God's disregard of one-hundred-ninety-four-thousand millenia of savage horror, or for the pettiness of the consolations which finally were offered."

No, I didn't and I won't. I'm not God maybe you should look to him for your answers.

OK, it was only 194,000 years, not as many millenia. You piss me off.

Anyone who cares about this stuff might get a kick out of this.

Now, AR Wallace was the co-discoverer of evolution, and I was not. Props, OK? Boyfriend had his shit together, and I'm a lowly technician.

But this is a little goofy:

I should have had no cause for complaint if the respective shares of Darwin and myself in regard to the elucidation of nature's method of organic development had been thenceforth estimated as being, roughly, proportional to the time we had each bestowed upon it when it was thus first given to the world – that is to say, as 20 years is to one week.

That was an important twenty years. Literacy and reason were raging like wildfire all over the place. People were applying these insights to all sorts of new realms. If neither you nor Darwin had figured it out, someone was going to make the breakthrough within a short span of time.

About fifteen years ago, there was an eight-year-old girl somewhere in the 'States who was getting a lot of attention from the popular media for her abstract paintings. As the chatter put it, she had the same sensibility that Picasso had. And she was just a little girl!

But of course Picasso had that sensibility a century earlier, when it was truly at the forefront of aesthetic innovation. It was risky. Nowadays it's everywhere. It's the same reason you wouldn't be so impressed to hear a 2013 High School graduate singing a McCartney song. Sure: It's a pretty melody... But melodies of that sweetness have been in the air for some time.

Anyway, it was a surprise this afternoon to see that Wallace had lived long enough to get defensive about it. I guess that means he lived to see the correctness of his insight validated by the best minds of his generation, which must have been a considerable consolation for not having sole claim to the Blue Ribbon.

> I didn't and I won't.

Hold your breath! Turn blue! That'll show 'em!

Show them what? As usual when you have no argument, you spew jibber jabber.

Crid:

I disagree. Church was removed from the center of power in American life not by authority —and I assume you mean government authority when you say "what we did"— but by fragmentation. (Notice I say 'church' was excused from the Big Chair, not "the church.") This success, one of our greatest, was not about collective action, but about atomized response.

No, I don't think we disagree, I think you're just unfamiliar with the fragmentation that I was also referring to.

Prior to Luther, the Religion was entwined *with* the local government/royalty. After Luther (not just because of him, but he's a useful point to note the inflection), the Church lost power, and local denominations started cropping up. Massive oversimplification, to be sure.

By the time of the American Experiment, we had religions diametrically opposed to each other and quite a few deists highly placed.

So when luljp said:
No D, the fact of the matter is the west became more and more moral by REJECTING the morals of christianity

That's referring to "The West". But it's not that the West (And the US) became more moral by rejecting, but instead, by rejecting the notion (very Lutheran) that the clergy was somehow divinely inspired.

You're right, about the fragmentation, but another large part was the opening of America for all the various branches to go forth and multiply.

So by the time of the American Experiment, there was no religion that *could* have been the state denomination for all the colonies, so the best choice was to let people decide.

I'm just sayin', Uni, check your reflex: Not everything that's great in America happened because of a memo from the Central Office. Most of the really great stuff happened when people were free to experiment and do whatever they wanted.

Crid, love your work, but you need to check your reflex to tell me to check my reflex. :)

Dood, IJS. In discussions like these, "we" never makes me think of Western culture. And I think the Framers mostly wanted to keep the clericals out of their own hair in Philadelphia. They had no idea it would work out so well for clergy —who suddenly had a diversity of faiths to sell— as it did for the rest of us, who pursue secular fulfillment with minimal encumbrance.