We must return to the days of when the one true living God's influence on society was paramount. When the one true living God directed the Israelites to punish the evil ones with death or slavery, sex slavery for some virgins and not let the dead ones land go to waste.
When Christianity became the state religion and the one true living God ordered the murder or conversion of sectarians, infidels, schismatics, even fellow religionists, if their possessions were desired.
God ordered the holocaust brought on by Christian diaspora through out the world. A world that still suffers from trading the invaluable gift of knowledge of the one true living God, Prince of Peace Christ for their lives, liberty and property.
Remember the people that impoverished Ireland for 800 years, Asia, India, China, Australia, Africa, the Americas for centuries did it with the blessing of the one truth living God.
Slavery is blessed and endorsed by the New Testament and was only ended when secular society determined that is was immoral, just as the extermination of Australians ended when secularist morality infused society.
The current war in Iraq was inspired and blessed by George Bush's living God. Don't believe me, just ask him.

Gee what a load of, This is the standard stuff from the christian right and wrong on every level, I could go into all the logical pitfalls of this post but what would be the point. The reality is Man is only different to other herd animals in so much that we can speculate on where our inbuilt behaviour come from (Evolution), and why we have contrasting thoughts and occasional actions. The rest of the post is a really bad example of the set piece. However this did stand out..

"If there is no God, no objective morality, no ultimate purpose, no final accountability, and presumably just the one chance to live life, then the sensible person will throw off all that would hinder them from maximising their own interests, whatever they may be, while prudently maintaining a respectable public façade."

That I would say is how just about every christian lives their life... pretending to follow the rules.

No, Graham, we don't need a god to provide us with an ethical compass. There are so many different gods and so many different interpretations of what can or should be done in the name of god that it is every bit as much a recipe for confusion, if not more so, than the dangers you perceive exist in having a moral code in which god is absent.

All gods are human constructs, most of them having their origin many centuries ago in a completely different world to the one we inhabit today. It is a nonsense to argue that intelligent rational human beings with a vast wealth on which to draw of scientific, technological and environmental knowledge, built up incrementally over many centuries, should defer to the words attributed to a god but written nonetheless by a small number of men, who lived in a different age and who would have no conception whatever of the ethical issues confronting us today.

Ethical decisions today are made within a framework that has been built up using the wisdom of many generations, a lot of which does happen to be based on Christian morality but which is also very much the product of secular, rational and humanist thought. The future direction of our ethical compass should maintain this balance and continue in that same tradition.

The churches don't have a monopoly on how to live well. Living by the motto of "do unto others..." is a universal human possibility and capable of informing all ethical and policy frameworks. The philosophy of caring for others and caring for the natural environment and all its inhabitants is all we need to guide us. I myself am eternally grateful that I don't have to go and listen to a preacher every Sunday to tell me how to live, or to waste precious time deciphering an opaque and dated document when there is so much of real value to be read.

The Sydney Morning herald in an article 'In God's Name' answered this OLO diatribe in a few sentences so the appropriate extract follows,
"The French philosopher Michael Onfray, in his book The Atheist Manifesto, writes: “The old idea of the immoral, amoral atheist, with neither faith nor ethical rules, dies hard. The phrase ‘if God does not exist, then everything is permitted’ - a refrain picked up from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov - continues to resonate ... this misguided notion needs to be thoroughly demolished".
Perhaps this is a good time to remember, as Richard Dawkins writes in The God De¬lusion, that it’s not OK to disrespect non-believers when your own moral code is seemingly dictated by fear of retribution from a divine being - especially codes that have, as Onfray points out, allowed their various adherents to 'plot terrorist attacks in Manhattan, launch punitive raids into the Gaza Strip, or cover up the deeds of paedophile priests'”. I would add, 'and continue in the fundamentally evil business of indoctrinating innocent children'.
Children have an innate sense of justice which is essentialy the basic ingredient of ethics only because for hundreds of thousands of generations out forebears, back at least as far as australopithecus africanus used weapons in co-operative defence and hunting to feed their dependants. Religion is only a relatively recent political power intrusion into homo sapiens society. Co-operation and sharing responsibilities requires a sense of justice, the real basis of all ethics and all morals that are not just aimed at contol of thinking or worrying about what goes on behind closed doors.

Very nicely put Bronwyn.

There is a natural tendency within many of us to strive for what we can get, regardless of the morality or legality of the situation. Many of us take calculated risks, only respecting what we think we can get away with, while being devoid of morality or the principle of law in the particular area of our actions……while at the same time giving every impression that we are moral and lawful people….which some of us indeed may well be in areas where there is no prospect of us making ill-gotten personal gains! Oh, the duplicity!

But that’s life. It’s the human condition.

What do we do about it? As a civilised prosperous democratic society, we surely must strive to make the boundaries of what is acceptable and what isn’t as clear as possible and make the policing and deterrence regime as effective and uniform as possible.

Cut out the ambiguity and get rid of unfair policing procedures. That shouldn’t be hard. I can’t for the life of me understand why there is such a reluctance, or apathy, in the general community to call for tight definitions and effective policing, penalties and overall deterrence.

I was in the minority when I called for tightly defined parameters for art versus child pornography in the Bill Henson debacle.

I was again in the minority, although with a few people expressing agreement, when calling for tightly defined laws and a good policing regime in response to the extraordinarily fuzzy special ‘annoyance’ laws for the pope’s visit for World Youth Day.

Ages ago I tried to discuss road safety with respect to these things. I started a general thread which received precisely zero responses!

continued

Amorality begets amorality! If we let some people get away with amoral, unprincipled or illegal activities, another very large part of the populace will feel pressure to follow suit, in order to not be left behind.

For example, the careful law-abiding driver that drives 5kmh under the speed limit and never gets right up the rear of the car in front of them, gets tailgated, cut in on and horn-blasted. They are more of a hazard on the road than they would be if they drove like the majority of us. A large portion of the driving public don’t wish to drive at all illegally, but they feel the very strong need to do so in order to not incur the wrath of other road-users and indeed to be safer than they would otherwise be.

I reckon one of the most amoral things of all is the incredible acceptance of laws and other things that guide our behaviour, such as the codes of conduct, that don’t apply evenly, don’t apply at face value or don’t even apply at all…but which remain in place in officialdom!

Here’s a prime example; Queensland has no nude beaches, by law. But in reality, it has many, which the police, local councils, state government and relevant communities know of and accept or tolerate. This gross mixed message from our leaders and from the community by way of accepting it, is to me the pits of duplicity and amorality. It is far far worse than any amorality that anyone might argue in relation to public nudity.

So where does God and Christianity fit into this? Stuuuffed if I know!

^^^^

“Children have an innate sense of justice…”

Do they really Foyle?

It seems to me that they have to be carefully guided and disciplined, and that the innate behaviour is for them to do what they can to get what they want, without caring too much about anyone else.