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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (2681)	10/26/2000 1:15:48 AM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

I just saw this post for the first time. <<E, I never said that you said that atheists were morally INFERIOR. >> I beg your pardon. The following statement of yours implies that while once I argued that atheists are as ethical as believers, now I have conceded that they aren't. <<OK, I see you've abandoned your argument that atheists are as ethical as believers.>> It was outrageous of you to say that, and outrageous of you not to have retracted it in the face of my reams of clearly explicated contradiction of it, and it is outrageous of you to claim you never said it. It is indistinguishable in its implication from "OK, I see you have abandoned your argument that atheists aren't morally inferior." As for Proposition 2, I have iterated and reiterated my position on it. I cited some studies that I wouldn't have cited if I had "abandoned my argument that atheists are as ethical as believers," because the act of citing them dramatized my rejection of your characterization of my argument. But I then hastened to point out that while the studies don't reflect well on the religious, I fully recognize their defects. I said, re your Proposition 2, the following: I don't claim anything except that I have never noticed anything morally more impressive about the religious than I have about atheists, and am impatient with the implication oft made by the religious that they are that. and I do not take the position atheists are morally superior. I am convinced that my subjective impressions to that effect are explained by sociological circumstances (education, social class, the conscious intellectual process atheists have often gone through to arrive at their positions when they were often raised religious) rather than by a notion like that theism is itself, separate from the institutions which promulgate it, morally corrupting. I would like you now to admit that I did not "abandon" any "argument [of mine] that atheists are as ethical as believers." Show me where Solon, Steven, and cosmicforce believe you never said that. I missed those testimonials.