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Showing posts with label Religion and Morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religion and Morality. Show all posts
Live Science ✒ Atheists and believers have different moral compasses.

LIVE SCIENCE


The moral compasses of atheists and believers are different in a few key ways, a new study finds.

In some aspects, the moral compass was incredibly alike between the two groups; they both highly rated fairness and protecting the well-being of vulnerable people, for instance, and both highly endorsed liberty but not oppression. However, the groups diverged when it came to matters of group cohesion, such as valuing loyalty and respecting authority, the study found.

This research shows that, contrary to public perception, atheists do have a moral compass, but compared with believers, "their compass is differently calibrated," possibly due to factors such as how they were raised and whether they are highly analytical thinkers, the study's researcher Tomas Ståhl, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told Live Science.

It's a common question, including among fellow atheists, whether disbelievers even have a moral compass. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 44% of Americans (compared with 26% of Canadians) think that a belief in God is needed to be moral.  

Continue reading @ Live Science.

Atheists And Believers Have Different Moral Compasses

Da Grym Reefer ✒ A Powerful Message About How People Use The Bible For Hypocrisy

 

Bible Hypocrisy

Los Angeles Times ✒ Fresno Bishop Urges Catholics Not To 'jump on the COVID-19 vaccine bandwagon'.

Hayley Smith  

Citing ethical concerns about the use of fetal cells in vaccine development, Bishop Joseph Brennan of the Diocese of Fresno is urging Catholics not to "jump on the Covid-19 vaccine bandwagon.” 

In a video shared by the diocese this week, Brennan said that some of the researchers racing to produce a coronavirus vaccine have made use of cells derived from an aborted fetus, and perhaps other "morally objectionable" materials.

"I try to maintain a joyful spirit, so I don't like to rain on anyone's parade," Brennan said. "But I'm going to rain on a parade today: the vaccine parade."

In his message, Brennan said the use of fetal cells at any stage of a vaccine's development means Catholics cannot avail themselves of its scientific results.

I won’t be able to take a vaccine, brothers and sisters, and I encourage you not to, if it was developed with material from stem cells that were derived from a baby that was aborted, or material that was cast off from artificial insemination of a human embryo. That's morally unacceptable for us.

Continue reading @ Los Angeles Times.

Bishop Bollix

Michael Nugent with the twenty-first in a series of pieces on whether gods exist.

One of the arguments made in favour of gods is that they are the source of morality. In the case of the Christian god, this morality is often expressed in the ten commandments.

But these commandments are not a guide for ethical conduct. They are not based on universal values of right and wrong, because they were never intended to apply to all people.

They were designed to protect the stability and interests of one Bronze Age tribe, the Jewish Israelites, specifically because this tribe was set apart from all other people.

The Christian churches that evolved from the Jewish religion still promote these rules today, even though human understanding of morality has evolved considerably in the intervening centuries.

The first four are arbitrary rules for how this tribe should worship its god. The next six regulate the tribe’s day-to-day conduct, mainly by protecting the position of its adult males, and also by treating members of the tribe differently than strangers. Most of these laws were enforced by the tribesmen stoning lawbreakers to death.

These laws demand unthinking obedience, based only on desire for amazing rewards and fear of horrific punishments meted out by this god.

If you obey his laws, you will be his chosen people, and he will give you somebody else’s land that is flowing with milk and honey (Lev 20:22-24), where a hundred of you will kill ten thousand enemies (Lev 26:3, 7-9).

20:22 ‘You shall therefore keep all My statutes and all My judgments, and perform them, that the land where I am bringing you to dwell may not vomit you out. 23 And you shall not walk in the statutes of the nation which I am casting out before you; for they commit all these things, and therefore I abhor them. 24 But I have said to you, “You shall inherit their land, and I will give it to you to possess, a land flowing with milk and honey.” I am the Lord your God, who has separated you from the peoples.

26:3 ‘If you walk in My statutes and keep My commandments, and perform them … 7 You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. 8 Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you.

But if you disobey his laws, he will punish not only you, but also your children, your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren (Ex 20:5-6).

Ex 20:5 For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6 but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.

He will bring upon you sudden terror and wasting diseases, send wild animals to kill your children, make you eat the flesh of your children, and make you so fearful that you will flee even when nobody is chasing you (Lev 26:14-39).

Lev 26: 14 But if you do not obey Me, and do not observe all these commandments 15 and if you despise My statutes, or if your soul abhors My judgments, so that you do not perform all My commandments, but break My covenant, 16 I also will do this to you:

I will even appoint terror over you, wasting disease and fever which shall consume the eyes and cause sorrow of heart. And you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it. 17 I will set My face against you, and you shall be defeated by your enemies. Those who hate you shall reign over you, and you shall flee when no one pursues you.

18 And after all this, if you do not obey Me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins. 19 I will break the pride of your power; I will make your heavens like iron and your earth like bronze. 20 And your strength shall be spent in vain; for your land shall not yield its produce, nor shall the trees of the land yield their fruit.

21 Then, if you walk contrary to Me, and are not willing to obey Me, I will bring on you seven times more plagues, according to your sins. 22 I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, destroy your livestock, and make you few in number; and your highways shall be desolate.

23 And if by these things you are not reformed by Me, but walk contrary to Me, 24 then I also will walk contrary to you, and I will punish you yet seven times for your sins. 25 And I will bring a sword against you that will execute the vengeance of the covenant; when you are gathered together within your cities I will send pestilence among you; and you shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy. 26 When I have cut off your supply of bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall bring back your bread by weight, and you shall eat and not be satisfied.

27 ‘And after all this, if you do not obey Me, but walk contrary to Me,
28 then I also will walk contrary to you in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins. 29 You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters. 30 I will destroy your high places, cut down your incense altars, and cast your carcasses on the lifeless forms of your idols; and My soul shall abhor you.

31 I will lay your cities waste and bring your sanctuaries to desolation, and I will not smell the fragrance of your [h]sweet aromas. 32 I will bring the land to desolation, and your enemies who dwell in it shall be astonished at it. 33 I will scatter you among the nations and draw out a sword after you; your land shall be desolate and your cities waste. 34 Then the land shall enjoy its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate and you are in your enemies’ land; then the land shall rest and enjoy its sabbaths. 35 As long as it lies desolate it shall rest— for the time it did not rest on your sabbaths when you dwelt in it.

36 And as for those of you who are left, I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; the sound of a shaken leaf shall cause them to flee; they shall flee as though fleeing from a sword, and they shall fall when no one pursues. 37 They shall stumble over one another, as it were before a sword, when no one pursues; and you shall have no power to stand before your enemies. 38 You shall perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up. 39 And those of you who are left shall waste away in their iniquity in your enemies’ lands; also in their fathers’ iniquities, which are with them, they shall waste away.

Regardless of whether you believe this to be literal truth or literary metaphor, it is no basis upon which to build an ethical moral code.

This becomes even more evident when you look at the Biblical background to each of these ten laws. I will do this over the next ten posts.

Michael Nugent is Chair of Atheist Ireland

Do Gods Exist? ➤ 21 The Ten Commandments

From Progressive Secular Humanist some interesting claims from a new study. 

By Michael Stone

Religious conservatives in the Bible Belt search for online porn more than anyone else according to a new study published earlier this month.

The new study, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior and produced by researchers from Canadian Universities, found that American states with more religious conservatives search more for sexual content on Google.

Researchers used Google Trends to analyze porn searches while linking state level information from Gallup polls asking about religious and political attitudes together with a variety of sex and porn-related search terms.

The following is an excerpt from the study’s Abstract:

(researchers) examined associations between state-level religiosity/conservatism and anonymized interest in searching for sexual content online using Google Trends (which calculates within-state search volumes for search terms). Across two separate years, and controlling for demographic variables, we observed moderate-to-large positive associations between: (1) greater proportions of state-level religiosity and general web searching for sexual content and (2) greater proportions of state-level conservatism and image-specific searching for sex.

While researchers caution that aggregate data can’t be used to draw conclusions about individual religious conservatives, there does seem to be a strong correlation between religious conservatives and the consumption of pornography.

For example, the Daily Beast reports:


Earlier this year, Homegrown Video announced the results of a six-month study on amateur porn demographics. Just under a third of all homemade sex tape submissions were created in the “Bible Belt”. Perhaps even more surprising is the increased female involvement. According to Homegrown Video owner Farrell Timlake, women are now submitting their own videos almost as much as men. Mind you these are not porn stars, just regular folks at home who film themselves for the world to see.

But perhaps even more interesting is the type of user-generated content coming from areas of the country some consider repressed. ‘We get so many interracial tapes from states that people would stereotype as being racially bigoted areas,’ says Timlake. ‘And that plays into the same thing: the more repressed it is, the more taboo it is, the more somebody is going to want to see it or touch that fire.’

In addition to the Homegrown Video study, numbers released last spring by Pornhub, one of the world’s biggest porn sites, indicates that folks in the Bible Belt watch more gay pornography than anywhere else in the nation:

… the majority of states with a high percentage of gay viewers is in the South. According to the numbers, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia lead the South in gay porn consumption, and the state with the highest percentage of gay porn viewers in the nation is Mississippi at 5.6%.

In concluding the study’s Abstract, the Canadian researchers offer “the paradoxical hypothesis that a greater preponderance of right-leaning ideologies is associated with greater preoccupation with sexual content in private internet activity.” 

While one can only speculate as to why there is such a strong connection between the consumption of porn and professed conservative Christian values, multiple reports indicate similar findings concerning the Bible Belt’s apparent voracious appetite for pornography. 

Bible Belt leads the nation in search for porn

Religious Conservatives Lead The Nation In Search For Porn

Radical Unionist commentator and former Blanket columnist Dr John Coulter comes from an evangelical Christian background. But in this latest article for The Pensive Quill he fires a shot across the bows of mainstream Christian Churches in Ireland for not doing enough to combat what he calls 'The Magaluf Madness.' A shorter version of this column appeared in the Irish Daily Star on 11th August, 2014. 

The scourge of the Magaluf Madness can only be cured by Ireland’s Christian Churches getting off their asses and into the communities they are supposed to serve.

Social media footage of an Irish girl allegedly performing oral sex on up to two dozen males in the sunspot has gone viral. 

Magaluf Madness

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