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Originally Posted by InfiniteLoser
Like I've said in other threads, it's much easier to be a moral atheist than a moral theist, because you aren't REQUIRED to abide by any set of rules and regulations.
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No religion based in the Judeo-Christian scheme of things (that I know of)
requires you to follow a set of rules and regulations. They're all very proud of the idea that God gave us free choice, and the ability to obey or not obey, believe or not believe. Further still, many of the JC religions offer a forgiveness for sin; so long as you repent, you're still A-OK. Frankly, that sounds just like the moral compass used by atheists. You're asked to abide to a set of rules by a book, and we abide to a set of rules from ourselves. You can break rules, and so can we. There's no enforcement agency for either set of rules. If you believe that God will 'enforce' these rules after you die, we too can believe that we'll be 'enforcing' punishment on ourselves in this world for our moral slip-ups. And likewise, if you can transgress and be forgiven, so can we.
The only difference between the rules and regulations and their enforcement is that atheists allow the enforcement (and punishment) to be handled by themselves, whereas theists allow the enforcement (and punishment) to be handled by God.
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Originally Posted by InfiniteLoser
Because, you know, I've got nothing better to do than to make up false statistics. I could have said "3.6 times more likely" and "87%", but those figures would be incorrect as that's not what they are. Hence why I said "nearly 4 times" and "90'ish".
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Demonstrating that equally vague numbers are fallacious does not support your claim. You could've used 94% and 4.2 times more likely, and it wouldn't have
added any credibility. My point was that if you had the study on hand (and weren't just reciting a lie by rote) you would've been more likely to specify; out of x number of theists surveyed, y were likely to "care about the poor." And so we're clear, I wasn't implying that you were deliberately making up false statistics, but that you were perhaps reciting a false statistic (lie) passed on by another or that you had misunderstood or misrepresented an otherwise accurate survey.
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Originally Posted by InfiniteLoser
You're right about one thing, though. I don't have the exact statistic on-hand, but I can find it (Won't be too hard. I know exactly where to look).
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If you know exactly where to look, you may have it on hand by now. Care to share?