Comment

A Thanksgiving Story About One of Those 47-Percenters

54
lostlakehiker11/22/2012 12:35:39 pm PST

re: #38 Randall Gross

There are several studies including ones using MRI imaging that seem to indicate that people and their God seem to speak the exact same way, and believe the same things. So people who are trying to please the morals of their God are really trying to please the morals of themselves if you want to be empirical in your atheist skepticism.

Here’s a simile. A chess player may seek to emulate another, greater player. They may actually make moves not because the move seems “right” to their own reason and calculation, but because it seems like the sort of move their hero would have made.

A soldier may seek to emulate a mythical hero.

If a player does this, and wins, does that mean he’s not really a good player because he wasn’t making his own moves? Or is the soldier not brave, because he, going by his own lights, would have run away?

Their actual conduct arose out of their own brain. No one else picked up the piece and put it on the next square. No one else stood to their post and fought it out. But their beliefs helped them find those courses of action. And those beliefs really do guide them to conduct they would not think of “on their own”.

Moral beliefs are not silliness.