TreesNightly

Religious apologists often overlook secular reasons to be decent to our fellow man in order to make their arguments that morality can only be grounded in God. For them, I present these ten secular incentives to ground one's morality in reason. Points one and two can be seen as a catch all and that all following points can be seen as subsets of one and two. The truth is, by making one and two so broad was the only way to cover all the ways people can come to what we consider good behavior. The rest are just some specifics that are probably obvious to all but the most religious of apologists. 1. To avoid negative consequences. Try to kill, rape, or steal from someone and that someone will be pissed. If the person is able to hurt you, he or she is much more likely to hurt you as a punishment of your previous action. The motivation for the retaliation could be revenge or just to put you on notice that if you try that shit again then you�ll be hurt again. If that person is unabl...

I find that the best premises used in apologetic arguments for God take something that is true for the things we observe then assumes it is true for everything that we don�t observe. An example used in the cosmological argument for God is �everything that begins to exist has a cause outside itself.� We obviously haven�t observed everything�s origin of existence to confirm the premise, but it is seen as true to apologists for the things they have observed and are willing to assume those observations apply to everything everywhere. This isn�t a great way to know objective truth, but it is a reasonable model to say something is probable based on current information. Of course, they aren�t using this in a probability model, they are using this as a justification for what they believe is objectively true. Misattributing a model for truth is a problem, but that isn�t what bothers m most. These same apologists are presented with similar models that all observations confirm and treat them very...