His honest answers should be 'nowhere, they don't exist', 'yes, everything is relative' and 'yes, the truth is nihilism'. But he can't bring himself to say this and instead, as most atheists do, satisfies himself with criticising religion and fluffy language. It's self-deception - on a par with the 'divine bigots'.
And ethics do not come from human evolution. Human behaviour comes from human evolution. If you want to call some behaviour 'good' or 'right' then you need to provide evidence.
Appealing to 'majority opinion' doesn't achieve that. 'Humans have come to see' is a load of rubbish because it depends on which humans you ask at which times. Societies have and are 'flourishing' on vastly different ethical standards and who said this should be the goal for individual human behaviour anyway? If you want to talk about evolution, at least stick to the survival of my genes as the goal rather than randomly introducing your own preferences.
That may be so. Maybe we cant answer the questions to your satisfaction. But what is your answer Sparky? Where do you derive your ethics from? A divine source? Thats a staggeringly huge claim and the trouble is that you just cant prove it.
At the core is a claim by a bunch of people to have seen a miraculous event - not the claim of an individual to have heard God's voice. Mohammed's claim stands alone because it contradicts the very early revelations that it claims to confirm. The bible's claims come from multiple sources and can therefore be checked against each other. In my reading of modern biblical scholarship, I've not found anything to be afraid of yet.
I dont follow - so a bunch of people claim to have seen a miraculous event i.e. the resurrection of Jesus. First of all, just because several people claim to have seen it and documented it and you can trace the history of said documents and know that they havent been falsified somewhere in the intervening millenia, does that make the claim itself true?
Surely if the claim itself is irrational , it doesnt matter how meticulous the scholarship is?
And the conclusions drawn from the claim are even more irrational - the person who rose up from the dead was actually a superintelligent all-powerful superbeing who created the universe and yet had to come down to earth in the form of his own son (a human being) in order to kill himself in a horribly cruel way so that he could then forgive us for our sins?
How on earth did anyone reach that conclusion?
And why base your moral code upon an event that a few people claim to have seen 2000 years ago? Maybe social evolution, common sense, compassion, empathy, the golden rule, etc are all imperfect explanations and our ethical systems are deeply flawed, but even so - they have to be better than THAT!
Topic: Islam has made me an atheist