{"id":16829,"date":"2013-02-19T19:51:23","date_gmt":"2013-02-20T03:51:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=16829"},"modified":"2013-02-19T19:56:06","modified_gmt":"2013-02-20T03:56:06","slug":"so-what-is-the-church-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=16829","title":{"rendered":"So What Is The Church For?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"590\" height=\"332\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/jGFS_hkHfCc\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Stephen Fry: The Church is very loose on moral evils, because, although they try to accuse people like me, who believe in empiricism and the Enlightenment, of what they call &#8216;moral relativism,&#8217; as if it&#8217;s some appalling sin, where what it actually means is &#8216;thought.&#8217; They, for example, thought that slavery was perfectly fine. Absolutely OK.<\/p>\n<p>Anne Widdecombe: As did all societies of the time!<\/p>\n<p>Stephen Fry: And then they didn&#8217;t. And what is the point of the Catholic Church, if it says, &#8216;Well, we couldn&#8217;t know better, because nobody else did&#8217;? Then what are you <em>for<\/em>?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This, to me, is part of why I&#8217;m an atheist. If there&#8217;s a God, and God is good and important, then shouldn&#8217;t we expect Churches &#8211; especially large ones that are run by people who have spent a lifetime intensely studying the question of what God wants &#8211; to be noticeably better at morality than the rest of humanity?<\/p>\n<p>An hourlong video of the debate between Fry and Widdecombe (and also Christoper Hitchens and Archbishop Onaiyekan) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=V2wzsaZKiGo\">can be viewed here<\/a>. The debate is pretty good, but the moderator spent waaaay too much time on audience comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stephen Fry: The Church is very loose on moral evils, because, although they try to accuse people like me, who believe in empiricism and the Enlightenment, of what they call &#8216;moral relativism,&#8217; as if it&#8217;s some appalling sin, where what &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=16829\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16829"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16831,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16829\/revisions\/16831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}