<p>Religious people have long held that atheists do not have a standard of morality to believe in because all morality (supposedly) is derived from religion. Well, they forgot to mention that Dungeon and Dragons has had a model of morality since it was created by Gary Gygax.</p>
<p>D&D splits morality into Good, Evil and Neutral and the degrees of lawfulness into Lawful, Neutral and Chaotic. From this, we can derive 9 different alignments of morality.</p>
<p>A who is Lawful Neutral for instance does their best to follow the law to the letter while performing their actions, ideally this is people in the justice system fall under. The saying "justice is blind" would best represent this. </p>
<p>A person who is Chaotic Neutral would be best exemplified by George Bush, a man who has little regard for laws of any sort and doesn't really follow any good or evil alignment being a retard who acts solely on instinct and "gut". </p>
<p>Lawful Evil? A person who sells bomb making instructions on the internet. </p>
<p>Chaotic Good? Best represented by the Robin Hood characicture.</p>
<p>So there you have it religious people. We atheists base our morality on a role playing game created by a man with a beard, similiar to how you people base your morality on omnipotent cloud being(s) and their zombie children.</p>
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You can't even prove he violated any UN laws.
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</p>
<p>Or that he was even bound to them in the first place. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>One CAN, however, definitively prove that he BACKED UP the resolutions made by the UN, and that the UN then decided to ignore when the target of those resolutions thumbed his nose at them.</p>
<p>Isn't it funny? George Bush is Hitler because he chose to violate UN "law", but what they call him Hitler over is deposing a tyrannical mass-murdering and nation-invading dictator who openly violated UN resolutions and committed crimes against humanity, including the use of WMD against civilians, for over a decade.</p>
<p>I'm telling you, Liberalism is a mental disease whose first symptom is a complete lack of any grasp upon reality.</p>
<p>As for the article, a far better measure would be to determine what percentage of convicted criminals were religious vs. athiest, and to normalize the data to reflect the prevalence of religious vs. athiest in the study. Anything else is bias.</p>
<p>Save your political "debates" for your daily yuppie meet ups at the local Starbucks please. The point of this article is to prove that there are indeed atheist pillars of morality.</p>
<p>Now, according to D&D, Bush is a chaotic neutral person, but according to Republicans, he is a couple levels below Jesus. It's all relative in this case because we're using different standards of morality and alignment. I'm using Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Ruleset 3.5, and you guys are using...actually I don't know what you're using but it's not D&D.</p>
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but according to Republicans, he is a couple levels below Jesus.
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<p>As a Republican, I can assure you that's not the case. ;)</p>
<p>The only problem I have with the concept of Athiest Pillars of Morality is that those pillars can be moved since they are set by man. The pillars underpinned by a faith cannot (which shouldn't be confused with the fact that even the faithful can and do ignore them from time to time, often with horrific results).</p>
<p>We can certainly discuss the matter as the Moral Law (as C.S. Lewis put it), but to say that an atheist CANNOT be moral is no more logical than saying a person of faith CANNOT be immoral. Both statements are false on their faces.</p>
<p>And, as always, the matter of relativity stands, but that's far more difficult to nail down.</p>
<p>Oh, and I would hardly consider D&D to be a good ruleset for anything other than playing D&D....</p>
<p>Yeah but what does it matter what you consider D&D to be? I think the Bible is more useful as toilet paper than a guide for living. Ain't no thang.</p>
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George Bush, a man who has little regard for laws of any sort and doesn't really follow any good or evil alignment being a retard who acts solely on instinct and "gut".
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<p>I'm no fan of George Bush, but saying stupid stuff like this makes YOU sound like a "retard".</p>
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Yeah but what does it matter what you consider D&D to be?
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<p>Because if you are going to use it as an authorative source, it matters what people think of it, its source, and its credibility on the matter being discussed. D&D is a game, not a moral code.</p>
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I think the Bible is more useful as toilet paper than a guide for living.
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<p>You are grossly outnumbered in that regard, even among those who are not Christian. </p>
<p>It would also help your position if you were not so openly hostile to the core beliefs of others whom you are trying to convince...</p>
<p>No it doesn't. It clearly states in the Dungeons and Dragons handbook that it is the sole authoratative source on D&D, it's even copyrighted.</p>
<p>As for being hostile to religion, well, I could care less how many people disagree with my views on the their version of the Big Book of Fables. I'm not actually trying to convert anyone to my "religion" (or more rather lack thereof), I'm simply showing that people can adhere to moral codes that do not necessarily have the backing of omipotent cloud beings.</p>
<p>And it's not like D&D is the only source of it. One can also adhere to a strict moral code that has evolved around the Miller Lite, "Man Law" commercials.</p>
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It would also help your position if you were not so openly hostile to the core beliefs of others whom you are trying to convince...
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That's ironic coming from someone who called liberalism a mental disorder. You wouldn't, by chance, be another person from Free Republic, would you? You have all the markers: arrogance, ignorance, etc. If you aren't, you might want to go check it out. You'd fit in.</p>
<p>you could put it this way-atheists/agnostic people could almost be considered more moral than religious people, because we are not held back by the superstition and traditions of standard religions (which often is justification for wrongdoing in the first place). </p>
<p>Morality/being religious are completely separate things. If you are religious, you are 'supposed' to be moral. But hello, we're humans. Just because someone is religious doesn't mean they are exempt from doing moral wrong.</p>
<p>Prisoners are religious at a higher rate than the general population, for whatever that's worth.</p>
<p>
<p>Isn't it funny? George Bush is Hitler because he chose to violate UN "law", but what they call him Hitler over is deposing a tyrannical mass-murdering and nation-invading dictator who openly violated UN resolutions and committed crimes against humanity, including the use of WMD against civilians, for over a decade.
</p>
<p>I don't think anyone here is actually calling GWB Hitler and so your "people" are rather irrelevant to this discussion. The reason people think GWB made a catastrophic judgment error in Iraq is that the "solution" to the problem of Saddam has been infinitely worse than the problem ever was. And it doesn't look to be getting much better. Meanwhile, billions upon billions are being thrown after the war.</p>
<p>It is also worth noting that GWB has indeed been accused of genocide for actions taken in the Iraq war (Clinton has too, for that matter). I don't know that I agree with those accusations, but PM mini (a parent who posts on the parent forum) if you want to know more. Or hit Google.</p>
<p>A moral
[from "more" (pronounced moray) (an informal rule in a given community that is protected by informal or formal sanctions)]
is a cultural tenet. </p>
<p>Where there are "religious morals" the religion comes with its locally defined set - and that varies from community to community, and village to village.</p>
<p>Atheism is the absence of a belief, or if you say so, the presence of one particular belief. </p>
<p>I have few expectations about the morals, but I cannot fathom that someone raised in a religious culture will suddenly abandon the mannerisms and acculturations, entrenched both formally and subliminally, with which they have been bred, on the account of a disagreement about one belief.</p>
<p>Just my 4 cents. I think many of the arguments on either side of this rhetorical shoutfest have used a lot of nonsense.</p>