[Sternwallow]

Egor wrote

I was reading your post and trying to get past the loose associations and then I saw this statement, and frankly, I was taken aback.

And, the farther aback you are taken, the better.

What, pray tell, does an atheist know about nobility?

Many of the atheists here, if not most, were religious and some even staunch Christians, who came to atheism by serious thoughtful evaluation of the literally unbelievable absurdities, completely lacking any objective justification, that our religious communities expected us to unquestioningly accept as truth.

Some of us, during our personal search for God, came to atheist disbelief merely by reading the Bible completely, while sincerely hoping to bolster our fervent faith with deeper knowledge than the pretty bits doled out to us from the pulpit.

We we found the errors, lies and contradictions and the evil passages that had been deliberately hidden from us by the preachers. We discovered that most Christians do not actually read their Bible and they do not believe in it as they say; they believe what little the clergy tell them about it.

For many of us. these flaws simply invalidated any claim that the book was the inerrant word of God and therefore invalidated its claim that there was a God.

Some of us managed to apologize those flaws away using the old twisted "interpreted" passages and fallacious logic and devious wordplay.

The last category of atheists in this whole-Bible-reading group could overlook the small problems and provisionally consider the "big picture", "the Message of Jesus" of the Bible's full context, to be the word of God.

But then they found that, by His own confession in the Bible, God was "a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak, a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully" (accurate condensation by Richard Dawkins).

Such an entity, as described in the Bible, is wholly without merit as an object for worship, reverence, duty, adherence or even gratitude, certainly not for any love. If He exists as described, He is an object for loathing, fear, repugnance and I think, even a dribble of pity for His apparent self-hatred, fear of not being loved and insecurity in His identity.

It is a very good thing if God does not exist and it is good fortune that people can be good and happy without Him.

What nobility can a dirt clod have? Isn't that what atheists reduce us all to?

Atheism says nothing about good or evil or love or nobility; it is only a lack of belief in god(s). It does not expand or reduce anything to anything else.

There are many reasons not to believe in god: never having heard of one, being given insufficient evidence (in this case, none whatsoever), being given contradictory claims for every god offered, being raised in a non-religious family/community and being offered a terrible immoral and evil god for veneration.

Dirt clods with accidental consciousness?

You seem to think that "accidental" things exist less validity; for consciousness and other human capabilities, it does not.

Clearly "the dust of the ground" (Gen), however he acquired perception and sensibility, can recognize attributes such as love, perseverance, charity, courage, compassion, and, yes, nobility. It doesn't matter whether consciousness and intellect and perception were accidental or an inevitable consequence of evolution or some other cause; they are present and they are the best that biology could produce up to the present time. That is to say, even if God gave us consciousness, it is limited and imperfect and has pitfalls like wishful thinking and self delusion, so [sarcasm] Thanks a whole lot, God[/sarcasm].

Based on human inborn empathy, love, attachment, memory, thought and imagination [sincere gratitude to goodness]Thanks, evolution[/sincere gratitude to goodness], we humans invented the notions of perseverance, charity, courage, compassion, and, yes, nobility to support the fact that we are social animals.

So, of course, behavior based on a combination of fear of Hell and desire for Heaven offered by an invisible intangible totally inaccessible (except through stories told in antiquity by superstitious ignorant anonymous people) old white guy in the sky ("His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow" (Rev)) solely for personal gain, is ignoble.

You only get nobility if there's a Supreme Being to which you give your life and service to[sic].

That is an unsubstantiated bald assertion and, if love and service to other humans is a laudable behavior then your "only" assertion is false since it exists in our imperfect world without God.

It appears that you have a crippled idea of nobility that would not exist if there were no supernatural tyrant arbitrarily demanding it. Nobility is not about our relation to some god; it is about how people behave toward one-another.

If you can't understand that, you need to get yourself to the back of the short bus. You don't belong in this debate.

This is our debate, on our turf. You do not get to determine who does or does not belong here. My ticket reads "I do not believe in any god(s)". That absolutely true and unassailable fact is the sole necessary characteristic by which I claim a right to be in this place. You are here strictly on our sufferance and you are rudely stressing our hospitality with your falsehoods and insults.