This response originally fell into a bit bucket.  I'm reposting it just so Bill doesn't think I'm ignoring him.  In article <C4w5pv.JxD@darkside.osrhe.uoknor.edu> bil@okcforum.osrhe.edu (Bill Conner) writes: >Jim Perry (perry@dsinc.com) wrote: > >[Some stuff about Biblical morality, though Bill's quote of me had little > to do with what he goes on to say]  Bill,  I'm sorry to have been busy lately and only just be getting around to this.  Apparently you have some fundamental confusions about atheism; I think many of these are well addressed in the famous FAQ.  Your generalisms are then misplaced -- atheism needn't imply materialism, or the lack of an absolute moral system.  However, I do tend to materialism and don't believe in absolute morality, so I'll answer your questions.  >How then can an atheist judge value?   An atheist judges value in the same way that a theist does: according to a personal understanding of morality.  That I don't believe in an absolute one doesn't mean that I don't have one.  I'm just explicit, as in the line of postings you followed up, that when I express judgment on a moral issue I am basing my judgment on my own code rather than claiming that it is in some absolute sense good or bad. My moral code is not particular different from that of others around me, be they Christians, Muslims, or atheists.  So when I say that I object to genocide, I'm not expressing anything particularly out of line with what my society holds.  If your were to ask why I think morality exists and has the form it does, my answer would be mechanistic to your taste -- that a moral code is a prerequisite for a functioning society, and that humanity probably evolved morality as we know it as part of the evolution of our ability to exist in large societies, thereby achieving considerable survival advantages.  You'd probably say that God just made the rules.  Neither of us can convince the other, but we share a common understanding about many moral issues.  You think you get it from your religion, I think I get it (and you get it) from early childhood teaching.  >That you don't like what God told people to do says nothing about God >or God's commands, it says only that there was an electrical event in your >nervous system that created an emotional state that your mind coupled >with a pre-existing thought-set to form that reaction.   I think you've been reading the wrong sort of comic books, but in prying through the gobbledygook I basically agree with what you're saying.  I do believe that my mental reactions to stimuli such as "God commanded the genocide of the Canaanites" is mechanistic, but of course I think that's true of you as well.  My reaction has little to do with whether God exists or even with whether I think he does, but if a god existed who commanded genocide, I could not consider him good, which is supposedly an attribute of God.  >All of this being so, you have excluded >yourself from any discussion of values, right, wrong, goood, evil, >etc. and cannot participate. Your opinion about the Bible can have no >weight whatsoever.  Hmm.  Yes, I think some heavy FAQ-reading would do you some good.  I have as much place discussing values etc. as any other person.  In fact, I can actually accomplish something in such a discussion, by framing the questions in terms of reason: for instance, it is clear that in an environment where neighboring tribes periodically attempt to wipe each other out based on imagined divine commands, then the quality of life will be generally poor, so a system that fosters coexistence is superior, if quality of life is an agreed goal.  An absolutist, on the other hand, can only thump those portions of a Bible they happen to agree with, and say "this is good", even if the act in question is unequivocally bad by the standards of everyone in the discussion.  The attempt to define someone or a group of people as "excluded from discussion", such that they "cannot participate", and their opinions given "no weight whatsoever" is the lowest form or reasoning (ad hominem/poisoning the well), and presumably the resort of someone who can't rationally defend their own ideas of right, wrong, and the Bible. --  Jim Perry   perry@dsinc.com   Decision Support, Inc., Matthews NC These are my opinions.  For a nominal fee, they can be yours.