But, um, aren't some of you guys playing into that "myth?"

So, he's the one defending slavery as a good thing and we're the ones who are making our like-minded comrades look bad. I think that just about sums this comment thread up.

But.....and I know I'm at great risk of being thought a sorehead here (and I have taken risks - you've got to give me that).....sniff, sniff, poor me, etc.....but I cite this anti-atheist myth from one of your more current posts:

In self-righteous fervour, a fanatical atheist is about on par with a religious fanatic.

Actually, I never thought such a thing before this exchange. On the whole I'd rather, up till now, speak with 10 atheists than with one fundamentalists. But, um, aren't some of you guys playing into that "myth?" The sarcasm, if not meanness, from some of these comments fairly ooze off the screen, and I don't think (for the most part) I've done anything to provoke them. Just explanin a position, is all I'm doing, as persuasively as I can.

Of course, I guess sarcasm is always in the eye of the beholder.

I did answer your scripture. Twice. It's back there in the thread. I ignored the last time you brought it up, imagining you were ....well, I don't know what I imagined.

You don't like my answer, apparently. But I did answer it.

People put their lives on the line for any number of reasons, some decidedly frivolous. There is a steady stream of those who die in sports, especially extreme sports, accidents. Why not ban sports? They're hardly necessary.

When the Challenger astronauts died, they were praised by all. Nobody said they were foolish for risking life in a nonessential cause. They "died for science, fulfilling their dream, etc."

Not to mention those millions who have died "for their country." And exactly how have they died? At the hands of others also eager to die for their country.

the only difference between the JW cause and the others I've mentioned is that you don't believe in ours. In the others you do.

Uh. Are you sure you aren't seeing a difference here?

Ooh oh! Me! I know! Is it that those things are undeniably real things in the real world, while religious faith is imaginary or at best unproven?

People put their lives on the line for any number of reasons, some decidedly frivolous. There is a steady stream of those who die in sports, especially extreme sports, accidents. Why not ban sports? They're hardly necessary.

When the Challenger astronauts died, they were praised by all. Nobody said they were foolish for risking life in a nonessential cause. They "died for science, fulfilling their dream, etc."

Not to mention those millions who have died "for their country." And exactly how have they died? At the hands of others also eager to die for their country.

the only difference between the JW cause and the others I've mentioned is that you don't believe in ours. In the others you do.

Uh. Are you sure you aren't seeing a difference here?

I'm also not going to let Tom forget this passage:

Let as many as are slaves under a yoke keep on considering their owners worthy of full honor, that the name of God and the teaching may never be spoken of injuriously. Moreover, let those having believing owners not look down on them, because they are brothers. On the contrary, let them the more readily be slaves, because those receiving the benefit of their good service are believers and beloved.

If he continues to avoid this, as he's been doing so far, I'm going to close the comments on this thread.

I don't know. I would think the supply (of people) would have to go down or the storage space up. In any event, I don't see what's so awful, arrogant, selfish about it.

Ebonmuse:

You have cited several oddball religious practices so as to discredit them. So? Does the abundance of counterfeit money prove there is no such thing as real money?

And you have mentioned blood transfusions. It's true, Jehovah's Witnesses will not accept them. And yes, it is for religious reasons, not medical. Still, slowly but surely, the medical establishment is coming around to the thinking that if you can possibly avoid a transfusion, you should. And thanks to the efforts of Jehovah's Witnesses working with hospitals and doctors, you almost always can (with advance planning). Blood, after all, is a foreign tissue, even when properly matched, and we all know the body doesn't like foreign tissue and tries to rid itself of it. True, you can suppress the immune system, but that leads to other complications.

It's good to keep up with these things. Here are links to articles in the NYS Medical Journal, JAMA, a video which interviews respected medical people the world over, and an address before the Australian and New Zealand College of Anesthetists two week ago that declares all patients, ethically, should be treated as if they were Jehovah's Witnesses.

Is this to say that no JW has ever been inconvenienced by their blood transfusion stand or has even lost life? No. But it must be kept in perspective.

People put their lives on the line for any number of reasons, some decidedly frivolous. There is a steady stream of those who die in sports, especially extreme sports, accidents. Why not ban sports? They're hardly necessary.

When the Challenger astronauts died, they were praised by all. Nobody said they were foolish for risking life in a nonessential cause. They "died for science, fulfilling their dream, etc."

Not to mention those millions who have died "for their country." And exactly how have they died? At the hands of others also eager to die for their country.

the only difference between the JW cause and the others I've mentioned is that you don't believe in ours. In the others you do.

We are all slaves to realities greater than human bondage, and I think it unwise for atheists to give up on the spiritual, since science offers nothing to free us from this "slavery, " but spiritual things might.

This couldn't be more backwards. If anything is going to free us from physical sickness and weakness, it's science. In just a few hundred years, science has already brought vast improvements in our day-to-day lives. Think of how many diseases we can treat, how many injuries we can cure, that would have been utterly impossible to do anything about even a few decades ago. (I have an upcoming post about this.) Think of how many people are alive today that would have been dead by now if they'd lived in an age when we couldn't treat appendicitis, or when we didn't have vaccination, or when C-section was a death sentence for the mother.

Meanwhile, millennia of religious belief have produced not a glimmer of insight into the way the world actually works, nor a shred of real improvement in the human condition. When it comes to alleviating suffering in meaningful ways and not just offering comfort, superstition is utterly ineffective. If someone has a fever, you can anoint them with oil, or you can give them antibiotics. If someone has AIDS, you can tell them to drink holy water, or you can distribute antiviral drugs. If someone has a mental illness, you can have them undergo psychotherapy and take medication, or chain them to their beds and perform exorcisms. If someone has diabetes, you can prescribe regular prayer vigils and hymn-singing, or you can administer insulin. Which of these options would you choose in any of these circumstances?

And given what Tom has told us about his faith, I can cite one more particularly apt example: blood transfusion. Yes, if careful preparations are made beforehand, surgery in a tightly controlled environment can often be done with relatively little loss of blood. But if a Jehovah's Witness is in, say, a car crash, or some other traumatic accident that causes massive blood loss, and they sincerely believe that God has commanded them to abstain from blood, they can and do die for that belief. What a tragic mistake these people are making! They're so sure about the existence of another, unproven life that they're willing to throw away their real life right now for its sake, and if they're wrong, they'll have wasted the only life they were ever going to have. What sort of foolish person mortgages a certainty for a mere possibility?

Let's put it this way: When religious people can offer evidence - any evidence at all - that "spiritual" things have any efficacy whatsoever in the real world and are not just empty words uttered by desperate and ignorant men, then I'll believe that they might help us at some point in the future. Until then, I'll take my antibiotics and organ transplants, thank you very much.

Notice the same principle of not fixing everything all at once.

The problem with this is that, if we as a society had stayed with the Bible, slavery would never have been fixed. There is no biblical verse abolishing it. The canon is closed, and no new scripture is being written. (In fact, the Bible explicitly says that we should reject any new doctrine, even if it's brought by an angel.) As I've shown before, abolitionists who argued against human bondage often faced fierce opposition from believing Christians, who repeatedly pointed out that the Bible clearly does sanction slavery in multiple places, and never speaks of it as if it were a wrong or a sin. I repeat the verse that I've brought up several times and Tom has never addressed:

Let as many as are slaves under a yoke keep on considering their owners worthy of full honor, that the name of God and the teaching may never be spoken of injuriously. Moreover, let those having believing owners not look down on them, because they are brothers. On the contrary, let them the more readily be slaves, because those receiving the benefit of their good service are believers and beloved.

This is no grudging, reluctant acceptance of slavery. On the contrary, this is a genuine and heartfelt endorsement of the practice.

If the Bible was going to take a stab at eradicating slavery, this would have been the place to do it. It doesn't. On the contrary, it speaks of slavery as if it were the most normal and natural thing in the world, and offers not a hint of condemnation of Christians engaging in it. As I said before, even if the Bible does not attempt to abolish all the sins of the world in one stroke, it certainly does not give believers permission to engage in them themselves. On the contrary, it commands believers not to do that, to hold themselves apart even if it makes them very unpopular. But when it comes to slavery, we see no such command.

If I am understanding correctly, tomsheepandgoats claims that his god essentially compromised morality, by dumbing it down to the level of biblical society. This compromised morality calls into question the legitimacy of the Bible as a moral guide today.

Yes, that is pretty astute, Riddle of Steel. I wouldn't phrase it that way, but from an atheist's point of view, I guess it is fair.

How would I phrase it? This is a challenge, because in order to phrase it, you have to grant me a premise or two. And you are not going to want to grant them, because they run against your core belief. Ah, well, no matter. Sometimes you can only understand a viewpoint by acknowledging, if not accepting, a viewpoint upstream.

A brief aside: You may know that Jehovah's Witnesses differ substantially from mainstream churches, including fundamentalists, so much so that the most strident among them will not acknowledge we are Christians. For example, we are not Trinity people. It makes as little sense to us as it does to you. And early JW C.T.Russell was billed as the man who "turned the hose on hell and put out the fire," this back in a day when all churches believed in hell. I say this because you will answer us according to your knowledge of churches, and so your answers will not always hit the mark. We don't "come from" the place you think we do. Of course, that's not to say we're chums. We are still diametrically opposed on many things. Just not always on the things you imagine.

A premise that we hold but most of churches do not: God created humans for earth, not heaven. He meant them to live indefinitely on it, without death. Death only came about through initial disobedience to him, as a consequence, sort of like pulling the plug on a fan. Thus, you will notice in Genesis, lifespans progressively fall, from almost 1000 years till the 80 years of Psalm 90, to even lower after Bible times, then, per Reed Ulvestad, science and sanitation succeeds in picking it up a little. Now, I don't expect you to agree with any of this. It is just background for my explanation to the point you raised.

The Bible essentially is a chronicle of how God intends to restore matters to his original purpose. Now we get to the point you raised. Things have fallen a long ways from God's original purpose, not just in lifespans, but in societal relations. A consequence, in our view, of man's rebelling from God, deciding for himself what is "good and bad," an allusion to the Eden tree. So how does God start to repair matters? The answer is a bit involved, but includes the notion that you don't do everything at once. For example, should you decide to repair your house which has been flattened by a hurricane, you start with the bathroom. All the while the atheists are loudly bitching 'what about the kitchen? How come that's such a mess?' In time you move on to the kitchen, but the atheists are mad about the garage! When are you going to get to that?! The point is, in a repair program, you don't do everything at once, nor would anyone expect you to. So that is how I would phrase your observation that morality in the Bible is “dumbed downed” to the level of primitive society.

Here is an parallel example from the NT. Jesus' opposers, intent on trapping him: (Matt 19:3-9)

And Pharisees came up to him, intent on tempting him and saying: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife on every sort of ground?”  In reply he said: “Did you not read that he who created them from [the] beginning made them male and female  and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and will stick to his wife, and the two will be one flesh’?  So that they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has yoked together let no man put apart.”  They said to him: “Why, then, did Moses prescribe giving a certificate of dismissal and divorcing her?” He said to them: “Moses, out of regard for your hardheartedness, made the concession to you of divorcing your wives, but such has not been the case from [the] beginning. I say to you that whoever divorces his wife, except on the ground of fornication, and marries another commits adultery.

Notice the same principle of not fixing everything all at once.

Now what about your second point, that this delayed repair, or "compromised morality calls into question the legitimacy of the Bible as a moral guide today"? It depends on how you use the Bible. If you consider it a rulebook, that it, every verse should dictate how you ought to be acting, then your point is valid. But who uses it that way? We certainly don't. The Bible is history and it contains real warts of real people. Nobody, at least among JWs, imagines differently.

The Meathead put it well. He quoted [wasn't he an atheist?] some "disgusting" verse in the Bible, and his wife exclaimed "that's terrible!" But Archie [Bunker] interjected: "It's beautiful, it's in the Bible!" But much of what the Bible reports is terrible because it records human history, which, unlike today, has not always been idyllic. (forgive that final sarcasm, but note, at least, no further reference to JMan) Also, Polly's comments sound interesting and worthty of reply. Alas, will time permit me to get to it or not? Maybe someone else will.