Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Despite religious rhetoric to the contrary, morals, ethics and laws do not necessarily derive from the Bible. In a group, there are selective pressures that tend to keep people in line. If a member of your tribe is killing other members of your tribe, then the tribesmen will not trust him, and will either kill him, or force him to leave the tribe (banishment), thus making it very difficult for the murderer to pass his genetic/ideological values to the next generation. This is just an example, but there are many more. There is no need for God to sit at the ethical bar; society does that for us as an emergent property of living in large groups. Religion provides ethical laws given by someone else which are followed out of faith. There is nothing wrong with that. Organized religion can be a powerful force for good. One test of a good ethic is to switch the roles of the individuals and see if the situation is still fair. Another important realization is that there are many valid ways peop...

Abortion is unlike any other issue debated today. Millions of American women have aborted a child, and the pain, loss, and emotional need to justify what was done, both on the part of the mother and on the part of her loved ones, is strong and deep. This means that, in any debate, you may face an invisible thumb on the scale so that even the best logic will fail to persuade. The best you can do is arm yourself with the facts and deliver them in what you hope will be a winning way for your audience -- meaning you will need to make your case, in most instances, not in the language of faith or religion but in the language of the post-modern secularist. Arguing from Science The "classic" arguments from the other side collapse under the weight of science . Establishing the evidence of the beginnings of human life will ground your argumentation in science, giving you a much firmer foundation for additional arguments and preempting the charge that you are basing your position on fa...