With the only one true God we all fall short to the Glory of God ...so how do you constitute a level of Goodness without Gods standards...?
 

I'm curious. Did you listen to the video? I thought DJ did a very good job of discussing secular morality. I'll just add a little bit more, though.

From your profile, I'm assuming you mean the Christian God, and you probably look to the Bible to find out what God's standards are. I would argue that the Bible is not the gold standard of morality. Like any book, it has good ideas and bad ideas. Both the Old and New Testaments, as you probably know, condone slavery, murder, genocide, rape, and generally treating women as property. (I will refer you to http://skepticsannotatedbible.com for a comprehensive list. I would encourage you to use your own Bible, whatever translation that may be, to double-check the verses.) Now, this is a problem if you believe that the books of the Bible are the inspired word of God; however, it makes sense if you understand that the books were written by humans who were just trying to make sense of the world given the limited information that they had from their own experience and observations. The books of the Bible are a valuable historical tool that give us insight into the minds of Jewish people living in the Bronze Age and early Christians living in the early days of the Christian church, but they should not be used to dictate morality in the 21st century.

Morality and ethics have been evolving for a very long time, as long as humans have lived together in groups. Murder, for example, is not beneficial to the group for obvious reasons. If early humans allowed killing indiscriminately within their own group, the group would not survive very long. They didn't need a supernatural agent telling them that murder within their group was a bad idea. Killing other competing groups indiscriminately would be beneficial to the group and has been done throughout history; however, as humanity has progressed, we have slowly learned that things like genocide, slavery, rape are bad ideas and should be discouraged for the good of society. Again, we didn't need a supernatural agent to tell us that these things are wrong. Through thousands of years of experience and discussion, we have come to the conclusion that these things are wrong. That is, not beneficial for society.

I'm not sure if you'll be back to read my response or if you were just dropping by, but if you have any more specific questions, I'll be happy to discuss them.
 

thank you for your repsonce....so can I ask you wether you think we are born bad or born good?
 

I would say that individuals are born neutral, neither good nor bad. We are a product of the culture we grow up in. What is "good" is what is accepted in society. What is "bad" is what is not accepted. Our ideas of what is good and bad are always evolving. Equal treatment of women and minorities is a good example of this. Look how much things have changed in the Western world in just the last 50 to 100 years. Our collective consciousness has been raised as the result of a lot of discussion, debate, and hard work.
 

Wow - how'd you grab the attention of Mr. Jesus Freak there? ROFL Nothing is more absurd than those who try and assert that the bible is a good moral compass. The most heinous atrocities like slavery and mass murder are fine if you go by the bible's morals, while completely innocuous shit like engaging in manual labor on the wrong day of the week are punishable by eternal damnation. Yeah - the bible is a fantastic moral compass. NOT.

I could never say it better than Dawkins, however. The god of the Old Testament is "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully". And to think that christians like to claim that "jesus set the example for love". LMFAO
 

Hey there, Z! It's good to hear from you! How have you been? :D

I'm not quite sure how he found me, but I really like it when people ask me questions. It doesn't happen a lot for some reason. He seems to have disappeared, though. :(

Yeah, the differences between the OT God and the NT God were one of the first things that really bothered me as a kid. The usual answer I got from church was that the people who were the object of Yahweh's wrath were blatantly sinning against Him, but to me, the punishment never seemed to fit the crime. In the beginning of Christianity, the Gnostics couldn't reconcile the differences between Yahweh and the NT God either, so their doctrine said that Yahweh was a false god. It doesn't make sense if you read the Bible as fact. You have to read it and look at the different cultures involved like an anthropologist would.

BTW, I love the Dawkin's quote. I heard him say in one of his interviews that he wrote that paragraph at the beginning of The God Delusion for comic effect. He said he loves to read it outloud because it always gets a laugh from the nonbelievers in the audience. I'll try to find a link to the interview. Z, you've probably seen it already, but I want to post it in case any Christians read this. You don't really get the comic effect unless you've heard him read it outloud. I heart Richard Dawkins! :D
 

Here it is!

http://richarddawkins.net/articleComments,2588,Richard-Dawkins-Interview-on-TVOntario,Your-Agenda,page2

This whole interview is a good one, but it's at the beginning of part 4 where he talks about why he thinks the above quote is funny. Starting at 6:15 in part 1 and going into part 2, he talks about morality and gives a very good answer to "JC Cliques" original question.

Here's a clip of Richard speaking at Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, VA. He reads excerpts from chapters 1 and 2 of The God Delusion starting at about 4:00. The above quote is at about 8:20.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe7yf9GJUfU

Enjoy! :)