Tim Minchin has a properly modern moral zeitgeist.

As I noted previously, the Catholic church and the apologists for the church do not understanding that we put children above the rule of law or any other such things. Doing anything other than completely shunning people who rape children is unacceptable.

The Pope, the Moral Zeitgeist, and Children.

With the latest bit of hot water the church is in with regard to priests diddling kids and the Catholic Church covering it up, I'd like to point out that the Church is immoral. Not the obvious way, clearly diddling kids is bad and even if the stock lame denials the apologists for the Church give lip service to the badness of molestation.

Interestingly, when defenders advocate an innocent until proven guilty stance or argue that such matters should be dealt with restraint and without jumping to conclusions, they are being tacitly immoral. The US law (codified in the 6th amendment) of innocent until proven guilty and giving people their day in court doesn't apply to people who diddle children!

If you touch a child, the general view is far more Biblical. With regard to children, we're fine ruining people's lives with the accusation, forcing you to live in the streets for the rest of your life (sometimes everywhere in a city are too close to schools, etc), or if you go to prison having the general population shank you to death. Murderers get to wait decades on death row before dying in prison. If you touch a kid, you end up stabbed to death by bloodless hands. This is generally the moral zeitgeist with regards to touching children, and most defenders of the Catholic Church are going against this when they advocate that priests shouldn't be condemned in cases where there's very little evidence (often just an individual who said that the priest molested them), but that's enough. When it comes to touching children, we shrug at the murder of a man.

The Catholic church is reviled for covering for pedophile priests. The fact that they fail to put children ahead of their own self interests causes them far more trouble than they would ever expect. Most of society puts children before the rule of law. When defenders of the Church argue that we should embrace the rule of law because it appears to defend their interests, they aren't really understanding that kids are above the law. They are putting their religion, their faith, and their God before children and that's a huge mistake.

Some people suggest that maybe celibacy is the problem with priests. I think that that is tangentially correct for the wrong reason. Celibacy is the problem, not because it prevents priests from having a proper understanding of sex but rather because it stops them from understanding parenthood. Because if these "Fathers" were fathers, they'd understand why societies are far more fire and brimstone than 6th Amendment when you fondle children. They would better understand why the church protecting pedophiles is such a deeply immoral thing. There's a reason why "think of the children!" is such an effective rallying cry, because we really do think of the kids. When the Church administration says "think of the priests!" or the defenders of the church says "think of the law!" they are both woefully shortsighted as to the values most people have.

Rev. Ebenezer Warren, The Bible and Slavery

http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/warren/warren.html

"Nellie's mind was not at rest. The Bible certainly did teach that slavery was a perpetual institution. Its chains were forged in heaven, by God himself, and so fastened, that no power could sunder them but His."

It is an often uncomfortable argument that the Bible condones slavery. Many apologetics are offered to this idea, and many of them were addressed at the time. Rev. E.B. Warren here is a prime example, he argues with perfect clarity and good proof text and solid arguments that slavery is approved by the Bible. Indeed, the North was in a theological bind with sub par and bad arguments to mount a Biblical defense of abolitionism.

This has since been flipped such that nobody finds any moral rationalization for slavery. Such has become of many such arguments: they aren't what they intend to be. This was written to convey the idea that the Slavery is moral because it is approved of by the Bible. Today, however, it succeeds in showing that the Bible is immoral.

Ingersoll Morality

Reading Ingersoll About the Holy Bible at 5 in the morning having stayed up all night. He does make a number of fantastic points.

According to the Bible, picking up sticks on a Saturday and murdering your father on a Monday are equal crimes.

Great one liner.

Morality and IP

David Pogue recently lamented the moral divide of digital rights between the generations. Noticing that his shades of gray style debate goes plunk when it applies to the younger generation. For outright movie download instead of paying for it he managed to get only 2 out of 500 students to say that that is wrong.

Cry me a river!

The laws and morality in people's heads does not include corporations. They aren't people and people do not think of them as people. So, it seems as though information should always be free... but if you want to make a penny on it you can't unless you own the property rights. Seriously, rather than asking them about if they think downloading copyrighted material is acceptable, toss in a question about selling downloaded media and see the objections flow. The only rights to sell the material is reserved for the artists.

As these youngsters age, the media industry is in for a painful shock. In the morality of youth, they are worthless, they are over-glorified dvd-burners. The argument that artists and the makers of entertainment will crumble and die is silly. All the money to be made off such media belongs to the artists and nobody has a right to make money from the artists material without the artists say so. This right completely respected and somebody should figure out a way to make the art pay.

This is actually largely a greater view of artist rights than the current legal rights. Money is only to be made by the owners and so long as no money is changing hands, information is free. This is hardly the nightmare imagined. This is beyond the nightmare imagined by the companies who take the media and sell the media as it stands.

This is certainly no where close to where the law is set up. However, if applied universally it would protect the rights of the artists and completely wreck the media companies whose job is largely to charge 15 dollars for something any teenager can make for 10 cents.

As the law stands, it isn't allowed, but in the moral sense the prohibition against sharing is non-existent (within current youth morality) whereas the prohibition against making money off somebody else's work without the owner getting a fair share is iron-clad. The logic goes something along the lines of, I would not pay for this so I won't pay for this. Either way, they aren't getting my money. If there's any money to be given it doesn't go to "they" it goes to the artists.

Faceless corporations are seen as non-moral agents. Sharing is not viewed as wrong. Profit is viewed as evil, if benefiting non-artist entities. Some people advocate the destruction of the media industries, an end to the MPAA and RIAA, as a sort of freedom movement for the artists. These are the faceless corporations taking money from the artists and from the people. They are the epitome of immoral. They do not let the information be free, they do not share, and they do not give all the money made to the artists.

Unless people realize that the younger generation doesn't consist of immoral information thieves who want to steal albums, movies, and media, but rather have an entirely different moral zeitgeist which differs from the law in critical ways, they are going to fail to properly adapt. I understand that they have the law on their side and have been doing well for a long time. However, as far as the main cash-cow of information distribution... I'm sorry but the next generation is going to start downsizing your industry and outsourcing it all over the world to people who work for free.

If you can find a way to deliver media to people without the corporations and the profits going to the artists. Like Itunes without any bother with DRM and the money going right to the artists. You'd have the core of the market for the next generation. When information is free, selling it isn't much of an industry. However, there's certainly a silver lining... if you rock people will gladly give you money so long as some corporation doesn't take a cut. -- Not sure how you can make money off this new world... unless you're an artist, and really... that ain't bad.

Amoral atheists and the more annoying canard...

PZ beats the dead horse of the Christian myth of amoral atheists some more.

What really gets me about this claim, isn't the obvious implicit statement "you are amoral" -- rather it's the suggestion that the Bible or simply a "belief in God" makes one magically moral. How the hell does that work? You need to ignore massive chunks of the Bible to even make it coherent, and damn near all of it to make a moral system out of it. Pretty much the only thing you are left with is the Golden Rule and that's been produced hundreds of times (in fact Matthew 7:12 where it appears attributes it as "for this is the law and the prophets" rather than Jesus saying he made it up himself). Also, it's more moral in the negative creation than the positive creation. Do not do unto others as you do not wish them to do unto you. If you don't want to be killed, don't kill. However, in the positive formation it would be fine for the mafia to murder a snitch, because they would expect the same.

How does belief in God make a person moral? What magical criteria does one use to sort the nasty bits out of that book? Implicit, almost always, in the claim that atheists are amoral is the claim that religion makes religionists moral or theism makes theists moral. That's the bigger lie.

I dare say it is slightly incumbent on me to explain why I'm moral, or which moral theories I tend to prefer (though it's nearly impossible to come to that conclusion without some major problems in your thinking). However, the assumption that they are moral because of religion or God belief, can't be established. The better response is to turn the question around and ask them where they get their morals and when they say "the Bible", backup slowly, apologizing, and pleading to not be stoned to death.

As if people don't natively understand the very basics of morality. A lot of human instinct has been tuned to this purpose. Empathy, love, reciprocity, pain, anger, sense of fairness, mercy, and other deeply ingrained bits of ourselves goes into keeping us moral, worked out over millions of years by tinkering and they want to give credit to their book. Moral systems take a lot of time and energy to evolve and they want to say that it magically flows from their book! A central focus of which is small amounts of moral understanding between ingroup members and no respect for outgroup members. This isn't the source of morality, these are moral understandings best left to die in order to give rise to better and improved morality within changing zeitgeist of moral philosophy. However religions want to give them a pedestal. It is a testament to human morality that so many religious individuals are moral in spite of the Bible.

We are all deeply immoral and nobody realizes it

In the history of the world there has been more than a few shifts in morality. The perfectly acceptable slavery of one century is turned into anathema the next, racism, sexism, heterosexism. Even as early as fifty years ago, a number of things have shifted. And it stands to reason that things will shift again.

What will it be?

What are we doing today which will be universally condemned by progeny? Our vile eating of meat from murdered animals (tasty!), our admonishments against pride (it's okay to feel good when you kick ass), our patriotism (USA! USA! USA!)? Certainly, killing animals will seem barbaric when you're eating steak grown in a petridish, or humble about things when you should be rewarded for your deeds and given reinforcements for good behavior, our illogical love for our own country and group due to nothing more than our non-choice in being born here?

Perhaps something more sinister? Our respect for religious faiths that do nothing to earn our respect? Our rather critical attacks on higher learning in a number of areas? How about our old classics, such as xenophobia and racism. Certainly they aren't wiped out, and as such we have much to condemn from a place beyond such petty bigotries. How about the idea that we think races exist at all. That there are black people or white people or asian people rather than simply humans with a slightly different gene frequency set?

How about something rather odd? Our pathetic public school system? Even funding our public school system at all? Not providing universal healthcare? Being a society that allows lawsuits for every little stupid thing. Perhaps PETA has a point and our very ownership of animals as pets will someday be looked upon as that of slavery. Perhaps even our idea that animals are things, or that we are somehow not animals ourselves. Perhaps the very notions of sin or God? Perhaps our frigid views of sex as something you can only do with people you know the names of? Perhaps the very idea of clothing will be seen as quite Victorian and worthy of scorn. Our wasteful nature? Our trash? Our use of nuclear energy? Our lack of use of more nuclear energy? Our pollution? Our ignoring of global warming? The notions that big faceless corporations are big bad and faceless? Taxes existing at all? Circumcision being permissible on children without their consent? Indoctrination into political, religious, and ideological view points? Psychology? The very existence of science?

It's impossible to know what morality will look like fifty years from now, and thusly it's impossible to be moral in the way the future will view morality. Thusly, if my view that my family is worth more than comparable individuals who aren't my family is someday viewed as gross bigotry, my most humble apologies... assuming apologies aren't viewed as some sort of cop-out shouldn't really absolve any previous behaviors.