Examples of non-Christian Moral systems.

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How very sad that you are so divorced from reality...

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Ahhh, the arrogance of Christian youth.Yes, please instruct all of us on the nature of reality, oh wise one.

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It IS very sad if humanity is all we're living for anyways, so I can see how it would be hard for you to accept this, since doing so would destroy any motivation to make a difference in this life.

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Interesting that I have a LOT of motivation to make a difference in this life, because, as far as I can tell, it's the only life I've got.Tell me, have you done much reading on Humanisic philosophy? I strongly suspect you have not, because you are making ignorant mistakes regarding it.

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What if you and I met at the local coffee shop to debate our views in person. What if the argument became a little heated and I just out of the blue told you to go sexually amuse yourself and then gave you few slaps in the face. What do you think would be your first urge immediately afterwards?

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I know what my first urge would be, but I am a grown up and can choose to act on my urges in a number of ways.I would probably run away and call the police. I would probably reflexively try to shield myself from your blows.

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It is only after we gain control over our will that we can hold back our sinful urges.

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Right. That's what teaching children the self-discipline they need to follow the rules is all about.

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As I pointed out this is why self-discipline works so well in the Eastern religions. The thing is that they believe they are really good, but have to "realize" this and our good will then materialize. But they also place huge amounts of effort into becoming more self-disciplined. If humans are naturally good, why is self-discipline SOOO necessary to become good? Of course if we attain any freedom from subjectivity at all we also have urges to do good to others.

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But everyone who lives with other people will have learned some degree of seslf-discipline, regardless of belief, because the group will enforce the behaviors that are generally best for the group.This is basic sociology.

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If humans were naturally good, then when I cussed you out and slapped you in the face a few times, you'd IMMEDIATELY have the urge to hug me or bake me a pie or something and it would take self-discipline to start doing bad things.

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Silly example.Self defensse isn't "bad".It wouldn't be good to hug you in that situation, it would be stupid.I will agree that humans can be violent when we are not taught to use our intellects.

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There is potential to do both good and bad in all of us.

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I agree.However, I choose to focus on the good and positive in our nature and you choose to focus on the bad and negative in our nature.I think that is depressing and leads only to guilt, shame, and a life focused on the punitive.I don't want to live like that. It's too depressing.Just to be clear, I hold to the position that humans generally choose to do the right thing.After thinking about it more, I do not think that humans are inherently good, nor do I think they are inherently bad.

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The problem is that even the slightest amount of bad makes us unacceptable to God's perfect Righteousness and Justice... but you do not understand this, so I won't go into it again.

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God made us this way; imperfect, so God made us unworthy.

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How does this explain the French revolution or the Nazi's or the Inquisition or Saddam's and countless dictator's evil regimes? Oh. Right. Their environment caused it all...

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Well, the French revolution was precipitated by the have-nots rebelling against the haves because were tired of the INJUSTICE of it all. the same with the Nazis, except their sense of outrage was misdirected.

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Everyone bases their morals to some extent on subjective experience and reason. It is the Bible that gives us confirmation or refutation of what this has found and lets us know with certainty what is right and wrong.

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...and yet, I believe slavery is ALWAYS wrong, and you, drawing from the Bible, are not so sure it is always wrong.

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Since the Bible did not come from us, but God, it is not self-made and, which is more, it is truth, and therefore provides an objective view of the world.

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Men did not write the Bible?Men did not comprise the Council of Nicea?Men have not translated it thousands of times over the millenia?King James wasn't a man?You, as your own interpreter of what you read in the Bible, are not human?

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and where does the people's moral authority come from?

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Themselves.Societies reach general consensus on what is good for societies as a whole.If it's true, as you say, that the only correct morality is the code found in the Judeo/Christian bible, then it would be clear by their actions that these are the most peaceful, loving, humane societies.We do not see this.

Sorry, but I can not find a single point in that whole post that makes any sense whatsoever.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Thank you for the reply. To what extent have you experienced the real world? How often as I asked before do you get out and talk to ALL different kinds of people with ALL different kinds of views?You cannot explain all the hate, violence, bitterness, misery, persecution, destruction, poverty, perversion etc... in human history by saying humans are inherently very good. You choose to focus on the good and positive and somewhat ignore the bad and explain it away, saying "Oh people weren't informed enough" etc. This is ignoring part of reality. I don't choose to focus on the good or bad. I am only demonstrating the bad in us here to prove that we are inherently bad. I know that we all have a constant battle going on in us to choose one over the other. If you ignore your enemy (bad), he will overtake you. Oh good!!! We HAVE reached an agreement. You just need to stop ignoring the bad. It is every bit as much a part of us as the good. You still have to deal with it and can't ignore it. Well, I read the humanist manifestos for a class last year and remember thinking that it was a lot of B.S.Human history is cyclical. Things come and go. Powers rise and fall. Societies reach a grand peak and then decline. You have no guarantee that what you are working for will make a lick of difference in the greater scheme of things, in fact history shows it probably won't. You have no guarantee that human history will not go back to the dark ages a hundred years from now. You have no guarantee human history will not be wiped out 200 years from now. You are just going to die soon anyways, so any power, money, acheivements, and whatnot will disappear. You will just vanish. Even if you are incredibly famous, people will forget about you. Those who love you will get over their loss. Your impression in this life is like a foot print in the sands on a beach. Taking the easy way out eh? Blaming all the bad on God and giving us all the credit for the good eh?I'll explain it AGAIN: God made us perfect and gave us soveriegnty to choose for or against him. We chose against and he provided a solution so that we can still be worthy if we choose. Sigh... I'll explain this AGAIN. God inspired it. God the Holy Spirit interprets it. No one including myself can gain spiritual truth apart from God. RARELY is this the case. Usually it has been a monarchy or oligarchy or aristocracy or plutocracy that has decided what is good for societies as a whole. And when people do, they usually do not re-invent the wheel every time. It's interesting that those under the guise of Christianity who cause all the atrocities and make names for themselves are the one's who have plotted and schemed their way into power and wealth. A true Christian does not care about such things. The true examples of Christianity are the silent humble invisible heroes that the world never knows about because they do not care if the world knows. I'm sure there are some in your community that you never knew about.This message has been edited by Hangdawg13, 07-04-2004 01:13 PM

What are you talking about?First, what do prophesies or miracles have to do with the discussion of " Examples of non-Christian Moral systems"?Second, in the threads discussing either miracles or prophesies, neither you or anyone else has been able to show one clear and supported example of either a Prophesy fullfilled or a documented miracle.The question in this thread revolves around examples of Non-Christian Moral systems. Some examples have been shown. One that you seem to be commenting on is Buddhism.Would you agree that the Buddhist Moral system is at a minimum, as effective and productive as the Christian Moral system? If not, do you have anything that shows that the Buddhist Moral system (one that has been around far longer than the Christian Moral system) is not at least as effective if not more so than the Christian Moral system?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Buddha's version of path to enlightment focuses on the practical life and the suffering the human being goes through. while gita offers a much broader concept.he himself said that he could only show the way but to follow it was upto a person and his path was not the only way.
and by the way, if you are looking at words from God himself, then why not read Gita.the Hindu's believe that it came from Lord Krishna himself.

well ,
i thought i would point out that Hinduism,(from which Buddhism derives a lot of its concepts) has been around for longer than christianity and has still a large following in the asian continent, has other ways of following the path of enlightment which are not as hard as buddhism to follow.
hinduism knows that it is difficult for an average man with lots of practical responsibility to follow the strict principles of self control and meditation, especially in today's world, and describes alternative ways. Like for instance, 1 out of the 12 months will be used as a month of atonement and people generally practice abstinence from meat, alcohol, sex in this month and practice meditation. there are many other paths. hindu's belive there is a time for everything. hence they divide the age of man into 4 phase. in the infancy stage(1-9yrs) the child is expected to be child and he learns from his family the values of life. 9-21 yrs is when you are expected to gain knowledge. in old days this was the timeyou would learn from the holy text, learn to fight , learn the laws. Early on, the knowledge was not with held from females, but later on MCP's prevented female education. 21-45/50 yrs you were expected to be a man of society. raise a family, work and try and dedicate some time to follow the scriptues. but your moral duty was to ensure that your family was taken care of. once you were past 45.. basically an old retired man/woman, you could decicate time extensively to the scriptures, and try to follow the path to salvation.
hinduism, in MHO, is a religion which allows for individual freedom and space as it never says follow only this God or this way. it just says
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE...

Thank you for this informative instead of argumentative post for a change. Atonement is a phrase that I associate with the OT sacrificial system when Jews offered sacrifices for their sins.Is the hindu month of atonement to purify them from their sins as well? Completely agreed. Do the Hindus' have a compiled holy book of scriptures? If so, what is the name? Is the Hindu path to salvation "living righteously" in other words, basically a more and more perfect morality? And finally, what do the Hindus believe they are being saved from? Do you mean in the sense of freedom of beliefs since there was a caste system? Or did the caste system come about later as a perversion of the original Hindu scriptures? Couldn't be more true.

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To what extent have you experienced the real world? How often as I asked before do you get out and talk to ALL different kinds of people with ALL different kinds of views?

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You cannot explain all the hate, violence, bitterness, misery, persecution, destruction, poverty, perversion etc... in human history by saying humans are inherently very good.

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It doesn't matter what I've done or you've done.It's arrogant for anyone to think they have it all figured out, and especially arrogant to think this when one is still a teenager.It is the arrogance of youth, born out of the limitations of your limited time on the planet. Very natural, but still arrogance.You choose to focus on the negative, I choose to focus on the positive.Anyway, as I said, after thinking about things I am not saying that people are inherently good or bad by nature, but that given the choce, most people choose to do good rather than evil.Not all the time, and only as much as they are capable given the values they were raised in.I think it's harder in some ways to be good to each other in a capitalist society like the US where individuality is so valued, and easier to be good to each other in a society like many Asian or African cultures where the group is valued over the individual.

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You choose to focus on the good and positive and somewhat ignore the bad and explain it away, saying "Oh people weren't informed enough" etc.

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Oh, no, you have this wrong.I think that people need to ALWAYS take responsibility for their own adult actions, barring severe psychological impairment.However, it seems to me that you are inappropriately thinking of humans as sinful, or bad, by nature.I guess I consider our natures to be both good and bad, with our cultures and intellects influencing what behaviors are accepted or approved of or not by others and ourselves.

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This is ignoring part of reality. I don't choose to focus on the good or bad. I am only demonstrating the bad in us here to prove that we are inherently bad.

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...and inherently good.Both.

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I know that we all have a constant battle going on in us to choose one over the other. If you ignore your enemy (bad), he will overtake you.

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Ignoring our dark sides isn't good, but neither is is healthy to focus on "man's sinful nature" all the time. What about our great capacity to be altruistic, or for love, or for selflessness? Why not focus on proactive promotion of our nobler aspects rather than condemnation of our less admirable traits?

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Well, I read the humanist manifestos for a class last year and remember thinking that it was a lot of B.S.

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Maybe you just didn't understand it. You are making basic mistakes regarding the philosophy.

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Human history is cyclical. Things come and go. Powers rise and fall. Societies reach a grand peak and then decline. You have no guarantee that what you are working for will make a lick of difference in the greater scheme of things, in fact history shows it probably won't.

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I disagree.I do my best to make a positive difference in the lives of other people every day.I am a pebble thrown into a pond.I don't have to cure cancer to make an impact on people's lives.

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You have no guarantee that human history will not go back to the dark ages a hundred years from now.

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True, but if the fundamentalists get their way, we would go back there.Remember, the Dark Ages were a time when religion and superstition were rampant, and the only thing that got us out of it was reason and science.

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You have no guarantee human history will not be wiped out 200 years from now. You are just going to die soon anyways, so any power, money, acheivements, and whatnot will disappear.

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Ah, but my memory will not die as long as I touch lives in a positive way now.

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You will just vanish. Even if you are incredibly famous, people will forget about you. Those who love you will get over their loss. Your impression in this life is like a foot print in the sands on a beach.

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And so it is with every person who has ever lived.Maybe this idea makes you uncomfortable.I have made my peace with it without inventing an afterlife to ease my discomfort.

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RARELY is this the case.

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Um, this is ALWAYS the case.

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Usually it has been a monarchy or oligarchy or aristocracy or plutocracy that has decided what is good for societies as a whole. And when people do, they usually do not re-invent the wheel every time.

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Sure, if you are only limiting the definition of "society" to recent European nation states. Nation states are a very recent socio/political construct.Human civilization goes back a whole lot farther than that, and they have all had some form of general consensus of what is acceptable behavior of the members of the group.European style governments just built on what had been started amny thousands of years ago, thousands and thousands of years before there were any Jews or Jesus or Christians, or the idea of a monotheistic deity.

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It's interesting that those under the guise of Christianity who cause all the atrocities and make names for themselves are the one's who have plotted and schemed their way into power and wealth. A true Christian does not care about such things.

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No True Scotsman fallacy.No true Scotsman - WikipediaNo true Scotsman is a term coined by Antony Flew in his 1975 book Thinking About Thinking. It refers to an argument which takes this form:Argument: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."Reply: "But my friend Angus likes sugar with his porridge."Rebuttal: "Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."This form of argument is a fallacy if the predicate ("putting sugar on porridge") is not actually contradictory to the accepted definition of the subject ("Scotsman"), or if the definition of the subject is silently adjusted after the fact to make the rebuttal work.You are simply rationalizing away the bad behavior of Christians in the past by redefining what a Christian is in a way that is acceptable to our current moral standards.According to the moral standards of the time of the Crusades, for example, killing the Infidel in the name of God was considered just and morally sanctioned by God.There's a reason that Bush has used the term "Crusade" when referring to the war in Iraq, you know. He wants to stir up that old Christian hatred of the Moslem.

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For one thing was like the slavery we know today?

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There's no way to know.
But it does show that morals change as the needs of the culture change.

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A gentle answer turns away wrath, But a harsh word stirs up anger.

No answer to the first half of the question. I point this out because it has been my experience that the ones most virulent about other religions have been christians - as though they feel compeled to attack other religions as a way of 'proving' theirs.I have liked this behavior to racism, as those who are most racist belong to the one race they feel is most favoured. When measured in some crude tests I have run this antitheism of christians equals that of reactionary atheists.Personally I do not have much against christianity per se, but do have a dislike of those who want to dumb down education or replace science with fantasy.That all being said, there is no independant record for the existence of christ (as there is for buddha), exemplified when the burial cask was "found" with the (fake) inscription "James brother of Jesus" and touted as the first proof.surely if there was other proof that statement would have been corrected.enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Thanks for your reply. Hey, my Birthday is tomorrow! Shoot, I know I don't know everything. But I can be guaranteed that what I learn from the Bible is truth and therefore know it with certainty. When I match what I learn with what I see, it makes perfect sense. Call this post-hoc or whatever, but it definately fits reality. It seems that humanism and similar philosophies have been born recently out of the unprecedented prosperity we see. People that relied on these philosophies became terribly disillusioned during the two World Wars, but they have made their come back. I can only hope and pray that God will give you a strong dose of "reality" to shake your philosophies as well. Oh not at all. I am a very trusting person to the point of gullibility. I tend to trust people implicitly until they do something to violate it. I always look for the good in people, but am not at all surprised at the bad.I admit that no matter how successful a person is at becoming "moral" he still has skeletons in the closet and has not changed his status as a sinner and will always be suceptible to failure. And in light of our position relative to God's perfect justice and righteousness, we are no damned good! How comforting it is to know how nothing we are in comparison to Him and he loves us inspite of this! AND how great it is that OUR ability to reside with him does NOT depend on our MERITS as all the other world religions apparently imply. You've got something there. However, US society has evolved a lot. There is no community anymore. There is no more Mayberry and Andy and Opie and Aunt Bee. We are both good and bad by nature. But we have no reason, but sheer blind optimism to say that the good in humanity will eventually triumph over the bad in humanity. The good and bad will always be fully with us.Why I place emphasis on that we are sinners, is that even if a person only does ONE bad thing in life, he is impure and unacceptable in comparison with God's perfect righteousness and needs reconciliation. In other words, in relation to God, our bad trumps our good, and therefore our good gets us no closer to him because we still have the bad with us. So we need a scapegoat, a perfect sacrifice to take away the bad in us so that we can have God's righteousness. Haha... Spoken like a true liberal. Were the Popes like leo and the kings like Henry VIII fundies? True. And why were the people ignorant? Because the monarchs and church officials wanted to keep and expand their power and wealth... A most un-christian concept. "My power is made perfect in weakness" - GOD Good. I'm glad you accpet this. I see no meaning in anything for the sake of anything, because it all passes away unless there is more. Thats what Ecclesiastes is all about. "Everything is meaningless a chasing after the wind." THe only thing that adds true everlasting meaning is loving and serving God.Well, I'm out of time. Off to go blow suff up. Happy Independence Day!

Good GOD yes!!!!!!! As was Luther and most others.I really wonder just how deeply you've looked into the history of Christianity? It is a fascinating study and one that every Christian should explore.But the Judaic based religions have really been fundamentally different from any of the other religions that have developed. They have been far less tolerant, especially within their own community. And that is something we need to know and learn from or we will repeat (and all signs are that we are actively doing so) the very things that lead to such atrocities.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I not sure I understand what you are saying.If there was different kinds of slavery, then not all slavery would be the same. There was many rules about slavery. I also stated that I am not an expert on it, so I shouldn't be talking about it I guess.Anyway, why couldn't a non-believer be not moral?
There are many non-believers who are great people, and do many great things for our society. God gets to judge them too.

Sometimes.

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Atonement is a phrase that I associate with the OT sacrificial system when Jews offered sacrifices for their sins.
Is the hindu month of atonement to purify them from their sins as well?

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That is really a difficult question to answer. But according to the Vedas which are the most ancient Hindu scriptures, you have to purify yourself to reach nirvana. this can be interpreted in the most loose terms as purification from sins. but it can also be interpreted as the month to try to come closer to the truth. Hindus, at least the vedantic hindus, believe that we all have th e power to become one with the Lord(or the Brahman)which resides within us and hence by meditating we can focus within ourselves and find the "Brahman". this is also a belief of Buddhism and to certain extent Tao.

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Do the Hindus' have a compiled holy book of scriptures? If so, what is the name? Is the Hindu path to salvation "living righteously" in other words, basically a more and more perfect morality?

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The original hindu text is the rigveda but eseentially there are 4 text each offering advice on different things. Then most hindus also follow the gita, which they believe is recited by Lord krishna himself.
and to answer the next question, no. Hinduism allows for a man to make mistakes and believes that not all men can lead a very holistic life. and hence there are very different ways to achieve nirvana.
Buddhism publicized the 8 fold path as Buddha believed that life's suffering can only be alleviated by following the most pure life. Not all paths of Hinduism are that strict, though most cases there are lots of rule.

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Finally, what do the Hindus believe they are being saved from?

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most hindus believe that life is an eternal cycle of life and death and thats what they hope to be liberated from.

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Do you mean in the sense of freedom of beliefs since there was a caste system? Or did the caste system come about later as a perversion of the original Hindu scriptures?

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you hit the nail on the head. the caste system arose because of few men who liked the power. the old scriptures outline the caste system but it was not a rigid rule, people were put into castes based on what work they performed, eg. a teacher was the highest a brahmin, a warrior the second rung and so on. but there were no hard rules that said you could not change your profession and hence your caste. that came later on when a few brahmin did not want to give up their power.