"Why believe in a god?, Just be good for goodness' sake."

Wait, what? Not what I was saying at all. Did you read the part that I quoted?

You openly said that you should put family before God, which is definitely not how it's supposed to work. Any further discussion on this can be PMed to me. No more in this topic.

Why not discuss the point I made in my tl;dr post? The one about my gripe with the Christmas season altogether.

As far as I'm concerned, people can "believe" whatever they want, but there can only be one universal truth. Either there is a God, or there isn't. It's a yes or no question. Somebody's right, and somebody's wrong.

First Commandment.

Here's a wrench for you:

What is more important?

Following the words of God and Jesus
or being a good, virtuous person?

To me, basic human virtue is the most important thing. The will to be a good person outweighs pretty much most anything.

This post has been edited by Parakarry on Nov 19 2008, 02:39 AM

I agree

I also think it's more valuable to be independently ethical rather than relying on an authoritarian figure like god to keep you in line. or being led along by the promise of heaven. that's just as bad as only being good to sucker santa into giving you presents.

I agree with this, though I still think Religion plays a bigger role to peoples' lives than we're stating. We have to imagine if religion never existed, I guess. No, not at this time, by now humans know right and wrong. Go back earlier. People based their terms of 'ethical' on the religion they followed, where their God had their rules. If you had it, wouldn't doing things wrong be considered right? How would they know? What is right and wrong? How do they form these boundaries? Where do they get such guidelines? That's what I'm taking off of.

religion didn't invent ethics, especially not the earlier religions.

Following the words of Jesus MAKES you a good virtuous person. Let's have our cake and eat it too, eh?

It's more valuable to put everyone's ethical perspective in the light of moral goodness than it is to create a sea of philosophical turbulence.

The problem here is that you are attempting to speak for a large majority of Christian people whose virtues are completely inverted anyway and are pulled forward to be 'good people' by crude ideals like 'God' and 'Heaven', whereas what this ad campaign states that it's to be good just for the damn sake of feeling good about it. Doing good for something in return in essence makes you, well, not a bad person, but the priority for this particular branch of Christians I'm addressing is to be good for the sake of going to heaven and being accepted by God and whatnot. Which essentially breaks the concept of human moral values.

Not if that moral 'goodness' you speak of is not fueled by your drive to feel fulfilled rather than the need to accomplish something good to be in good terms with God - and again throwing the whole purpose of this ad campaign out the window. In that case, it's just as bad.