Category Morality

Is there trouble with Islam?

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 31 comments

Before I get stuck in, I want to emphasise how I am a liberal commentator and am happy to be shown where I am wrong; I do not want to level accusations at Islam which are wrong and which have developed out of a biased media caricature of what Islam is. It is easy to fire from the emotional hip and to rely on emotional social identity theory of ‘us and them’ such that I present an attack on Islam which is either straw man or unwarranted.

Moreover, there is an issue here with the while notion of causality, something which I have looked at in the post “Have I ever killed someone?” I will not so much deal with that in huge depth here as I want to look at the two ideas in unison in the next post on this matter.

Pro-life, anti- everything else

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 357 comments

This meme is pretty powerful because it is so accurate. I can never understand how pro-lifers are very often pro-gun, anti-universal healthcare and so on. There is a disconnect there, for sure.

The Religion Hurts Humanity blog recently posted this on a survey about pro-life attitudes:

1 in 50 priests are paedophiles, says Pope

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 3 comments

Pope Francis has been quoted as saying that reliable data indicates that “about 2%” of clergy in the Catholic Church are paedophiles.

The Pope said that abuse of children was like “leprosy” infecting the Church, according to the Italian La Repubblica newspaper.

Quote of the Day – Robert Bumbalough

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 142 comments

I posted one of my SIN posts over at Debunking Christianity recently, and this comment was posted which I found pretty insightful:

“And, of course, such suffering, in light of an all-loving God, must be seen as necessary for some greater good.”

Should We Police Thoughts?

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 70 comments

The other day, the CEO for Mozilla had to step down. This was due to influence from social media – a sort of power to the people. Basically, Mr Elch has held private views on gay marriage which have subsequently become public.

Christianity and Homosexuality Part 1

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 73 comments

I am writing a post in reaction to something about which I was talking with my Christian friend (let’s call him Colin). We were talking about homosexuality and his approach to it given his Christian background. Some points were interesting and some I fundamentally disagreed with. Here are his views:

As according to the Bible, homosexuality is wrong.
This morality is grounded in God.
He is not homophobic and detests that label as it automatically halts any further informed discussion.
People can have genetic or environmental variables which help to influence a persons likelihood to homosexuality.
However, to commit to a homosexual act is an act of free will, and thus falls within the moral sphere.
As a result, it is not necessarily the disposition of being homosexual which is wrong, but the decision to act upon it.
He has no ‘problem’ with homosexuals and has / has had homosexual friends.
Hopefully I am not building up a straw man of his position, but it does demand some serious unpicking.

A Great Myth about Atheism: Hitler/Stalin/Pol Pot = Atheism = Atrocity

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 147 comments

For Hitchens and co, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Never mind that tyrants devoid of religion such as Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot perpetrated the worst atrocities in history. As H. Allen Orr, professor of biology at the University of Rochester, observed, the 20th century was an experiment in secularism that produced secular evil, responsible for the unprecedented murder of more than 100 million. (Abramovich, 2009)

The Problem with Divine Command Theory #1

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 117 comments

Divine Command Theory (DCT) is the idea that morality is grounded in God or God’s nature such that what God commands is necessarily morally good. Historically speaking, the Euthyphro Dilemma has been used to combat such a position. DCT comes in several forms and is adhered to by a good many theologians and apologists.

The Moral Life of Babies

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • No comments

Morality is not just something that people learn, argues Yale psychologist Paul Bloom: It is something we are all born with. At birth, babies are endowed with compassion, with empathy, with the beginnings of a sense of fairness. It is from these beginnings, he argues in his new book Just Babies, that adults develop their sense of right and wrong, their desire to do good — and, at times, their capacity to do terrible things. Bloom answered questions recently from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.