fschmidt

Actually you do have a good reason to read it. It is a classic and educated people should read such classics. It is also short and entertaining. Aristophanes was a reactionary in Ancient Athens living in times much like ours. He recognized that it was traditions and religion that enabled the success of Athens. But when average idiots were convinced by the likes of Socrates that they can reason away tradition and religion, then the result is disaster, basically liberalism.

http://www.mikraite.org/In-Defense-of-Feminism-tp570.html The IQ around here doesn't seem high enough to understand this, but what the heck, there may be exceptions.

Did you read it?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00H9M61H8/ What happens when average morons put reason above tradition and religion.

Okay, let me clarify a few things. Capital means money. Capitalism is a system where money can buy power (in business). The right to enter into a contract is a freedom. However the enforcement of that contract by the government is a regulation. This point is essential. Under anarchy, contracts wouldn't be enforced so they would be meaningless. Capitalism requires giving up the right/freedom to violate contracts. Since I strongly believe in freedom, I believe that the government should only enforce contract that do violate the public good. Contracts like indentured servitude do not serve the public interest, and therefore should not be enforced by the government. Not enforcing such contracts increases freedom. I will pospone explaining why I partially agree with the article until these basic concepts are understood.

http://www.mikraite.org/file/n230/case4wd.doc This is not the usual Leftist garbage, it is quite intelligent. I partially agree with it.

NotDarkYet, I assume the people in Asia weren't as horrible as the people in Austin. The explanation is simple, modern culture is horrible, and the more a society is influenced by modern culture, the more horrible the people are. The only way out is to find an alternative to modern culture, and that basically means a sane religion.

What is UPB? But to answer your question, there was a guy who considered the best environment to teach the concepts of freedom and virtue. His name was Moses and the end result is the Old Testament.

Morality is subjective, but I can give an objective description that quite closely matches my morality and the morality of the Old Testament (which are the same since I follow the Old Testament). What is moral is what benefits the long term health/strength of a society. But now the question is how to judge what matches this criteria. One cannot conduct experiments, as in science, for this. And deductive reasoning is mostly useless, only useful really to rationalize emotional viewpoints, as is commonly done in modern liberal culture. The only valid test is that those behaviors that correlate with rising cultures should be considered moral and those behaviors that correlate with declining cultures should be considered immoral. A perfect example of this would be female premarital chastity which which is present in all rising cultures in history and is lacking in the vast majority of declining cultures in history. I can give many other examples, such as simple classical styles of dress in rising cultures and body distortions (tattoos and piercings) in declining cultures. Modern western culture seems to have virtually every trait common to declining culture and no traits common to rising cultures.

This thread is full of standard atheist apologetics. But to answer the question based on facts, no, atheists as a group cannot be moral. This comes from history where one can see that the loss of respect for the founding religion of a culture inevitably results in the moral decline of that culture, followed by the collapse of that culture. Modern culture is disgustingly immoral, and thankfully it will soon collapse, the passing of yet another culture.

Here is the case that I made: Human Evolution

I am a sexist carnivorous religious reactionary. I hate modern culture. I follow the Old Testament. I admire Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Homer, Solon, Aristophanes, Machiavelli, Galileo, Newton, and Darwin.