keithprosser

Perhaps instead of changing your moral beliefs to better fit your worldview paradigm you should allow your moral beliefs to change your worldview paradigm.

Why are you unsure now?

In short, I don't think there is any escaping Hume's 'is/ought' dilemma.  It's 'obvious' that murder or rape etc are bad, but their badness doesn't seem to follow from the laws of physics - you have to bring in 'values' and values are inherently subjective.   Non-atheists have a ready-made alterative source of moral value, but we atheists really should trace things back to physics - and its not so easy!
 

Let's suppose that a Mindful, "Intelligent" Deistic Being IS 100% for certain, the creator of the universe.

That, by itself does absolutely nothing to "give your life meaning".

the twentieth century has been the bloodiest to date

More Americans died in their civil war than died in WW1, WW2, Korea and Vietnam combined.

I say it does, for you are discussing that very meaning and purpose now. The question that keeps bugging me with an atheistic perspective is why would you expect to find meaning and reasons in a chance happenstance universe? Even the chaos has an order. (^8

This is a Red Herring.

I'm not not all clear what aspect is the 'red herring'!   I don't believe in gods or 'meaning' and 'purpose'; I am trying to second-guess the mindset of people like PGA who do.   I'd guess they suppose life gets meaning by virtue of our being part of a universe that has god-given meaning and purpose.

My own view is that we create our own meaning and purpose.  We can choose to flourish and spread peace and harmony across the galaxy or we can choose to smother ourselves and die under a poisonous and polluted sky - the universe doesn't care either way.  Of course i don't mean we choose our destiny in a referendum even consciously - we decide our future implicitly as the consequence of our actions and activiies today.  

I wrote:

It seems your objection is that atheism is nihilistic.  It is very likely that atheism is nihilistic, but it doesn't follow it is false.

How can you get much more basic than either God or chance happenstance (that which lacks intent) as the cause of the universe...

I'm not sure you should use a capital G, but I'd agree that the choice is between a 'mindful' and a 'mindless' cause of the universe.  

I favour a mindless cause, the details of which are yet unknown but are often referred to as a 'theory of everything'.  

You, no doubt, favour a mindful cause and go further, indentifying the Christian God as the cause.   Were I to accept the cause of the universe was mindful and intelligent I'd doubt it was necessariy the Christian God when there are so many other candidates!

The universe needs something to get things started.   Does that something have to resemble what is commonly thought of as a god?  My feeling is 'no', I presume your feeling is 'yes'.  But it is a matter of gut feelings, not cold rationality.

The reason is that it can't make sense of its starting point/position - blind, random, chance happenstance causing what we see. There is no REASON that it would since blind, random, chance happenstance lacks reason.

I don't think there is any good reason to believe the Lilith explanation, yeah. I don't believe it was ever a part of Genesis. 

This is, in fact, the definition of macromutation: a mutation that has a profound effect on the resulting organism.

It seems there is confusion as to whether the 'macro' refers to the amount of change to the genome or to the resulting phenotype!

I just want to add that it's true I don't like darwinism, but only because it is a foolish theory that implies randomness (random mutations) and mindless process (natural selection) are the main engine for the evolution of such extraordinary complex living beings.

Evolutionists do tend to under-state the awesomeness of it all, as if transforming legs into flippers or inventing lungs was nothing special!  Perhaps this thread is really about how we know that macro-evolution is in fact almost always the cumulative effect of gradual micro-evolution.

The 2 different accounts focus on two different aspects of the creation.

Again the people that made the stories clearly did believe that their god was real, but the stories were created to convey certain messages rather than saying that the things in the stories literally happened in history.

I disagree.   The priests would not present their scriptures as a mish-mash of fact and fiction. It was their job to know such things, not to make them up.   Their authority depended on their claim of having knowledge.

This is what is magical about spiritual texts, they have layers of meanings not just one. That is the fun part about using illustrations/stories... you can apply more angles to it.

But I'm afraid Saltationism, or macromutation nowadays, is gaining more popularity among Darwinists and scientists in general as an alternative to gradualism....

As to mutation and epigenetics, there is no problem with them. The main problem is natural selection as the main driver of evolution.

You said micromutations and macromutations were essencially the same. This is what I understood, which is not true. Macromutation entails major changes in the phenotype without several changes, only the enough to turn a species to a new one. But to be honest I didn't find more information about it since it's under research, or I would say it's unexplicable.

In their haughtiness, they deny truth itself.

I don't think it is fair to compare Mohammed's religion of death and subjugation to the life giving religion of Jesus Christ.

the word "Orthodox" means. "True belief"

It wouldn't have got very far calling itself 'Untrue belief', would it?

I don't think it is fair to compare Mohammed's religion of death and subjugation to the life giving religion of Jesus Christ.

'Fairness' is not served by calling Islam a 'religion of death' and Christianity 'life giving' at the outset.

Christianity is not life giving.  It is life negating by settings its value at naught compared to a false promise afterlife.  It's al about getting your own  worthless soul into heaven - in Christianity doing good is only a means to that selfish end and even doing good is not mandatory - simple belief in esus isenough according to some.

Islam is not a religion of death but it teaches the correct repsonse to violence is not to 'turn the other cheek' but to fight back in defence of one's brothers and sisters.  Islam values life - it does not consider life merely a prelude to afterlife.
 

You ain't going nowhere when your physical body gives up.

That bit's right.

We Orthodox see Jesus all throughout the Old Testament because we know that Jesus is The Word of God. We don't worship a man as God, that would be an obvious error to us.

I think that the NT's Jesus is not 'a man'.  Could a man be born of virgin, perform miracles, raise the dead and defeat death itself?  I believe that the reality  - the 'Truth' - is that Jesus was a man; but what the NT depicts is not 'a man'.
 

But a parent doesn't naturally stand by and watch their child play in traffic.

Humanism was a theistic thing long before it turned into the secular humanism you see today.

Religion ... pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

(James 1:27)

Even though we Christians are supposed to obey and pray for our civil authorities, we don't worship them as gods, which is what all these "the state is god" systems really want. 

We are called to help those who are afflicted.