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Author | Topic: Morality without God is impossible | |||||||||||||||||||||||
GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
Tangle writes: Probably some atheists are more offended that some Christians. The point is though that the crap I was talking about is ubiquitous and in your face. The fact that there is a church in every town and you feel obliged to go to the occasional baptism just doesn't seem like much in comparison.
But I have to put up with that crap too, plus I get the religious crap! Tangle writes: I'm not saying that they aren't, but I haven't heard you complaining about it. What makes you think atheists aren't offended by that all stuff too?He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
Tangle writes: How do you get out of bed in the morning.
The point is though that I have to put up with the same in-your-face crap as you do PLUS all this religious bollox. Tangle writes: That's a bit low. I have never said anything that could remotely give you the idea that I would think that. As a matter of fact I have a lot of respect for those who are atheistic because of the degree of suffering in the world. MY POV as we have gone over that we are called by a loving God to do something about it. Or do you think that us atheists are immune to it because we're sociopathic, heretical, immoral, pop star adoring trivial-minded beasts? Or something like that?He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
At least when an atheist anonymously feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, houses the homeless etc we know that he/she is doing it for the right reasons.
He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
Tangle writes:
I’ll try and answer this in a roundabout way. But I still feel that you're fluffing the real time intervention issue. You now seem to want to push the intervention back into wh at you call memes - cultural influences. That's fine, we all accept that they exist, though science calls them normative social behaviours and they too are perfectly natural. So I'm really struggling to understand what it is you're thinking/believing about it. We have to make moral decision almost every moment of every day and they're rarely of the running into burning buildings type. Deciding to choose the slightly smaller slice of cake so that you partner can the bigger one is a moral choice, is god intervening there? I am a Christian theist. As a Christian I believe that God resurrected Jesus and so I can understand God’s nature by what we have in the Gospels even though they are humanly constructed compilations of the Jesus story. They all agree that Jesus was resurrected and IMHO there is no motivation to make it up, as a matter of fact, the whole thing was detrimental to their lives. Also, as a theist I believe that there is an intelligent origin to our lives and that this intelligence remains involved and we can to one degree or another understand things about this deity. Also, as a Theist it only makes sense to believe that there is a purpose, beyond living and reproducing, for our existence. The following is something I posted to Faith on another thread. GDR writes:
We have a line in one of our prayers that says, so complex so simple, so clear so mysterious. As you say it is all mysterious. The clear and simple part is what matters.If we focus our Christian faith on this verse where Jesus sums up the whole of the Sermon on the Mount, we don’t need anything more. Matthew 7:12 writes:
I suggest that it is fine to do our best to understand everything else, (it is really interesting IMHO),but it isn’t what we hang our hat on. We have had incredible Christian scholars over centuries and none of them agree on everything. However they all agree on Matthew 7:12. 12 So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.Tangle writes: It seems unlikely to me that you have god directly influencing all moral choices -whispering in our ears with this poetical 'still small voice', but you're settling more on god influencing normative behaviours somehow? Is this correct? The bottom line is that I am simply trying in my own mind to come to a conclusion of how I think this all works, based on what I know, what I believe from the Bible, and from personal life experiences. It isn’t knowledge but if you like it is my best guess as to how God works in our lives. My best guess is this. God created a world that would ultimately create sentient moral creatures that would have a sense of right and wrong, and with the free will to make moral choices. However, the Bible tells me that in addition there the Holy Spirit of God, that still small voice or God meme that speaks, (not audibly, at least to me), to our hearts and minds and draws us to decisions that are moral and right for this world. So, finally, in answer to that question I’d say OK, that works for me. It is basically trying to put in my basic simple human understanding what is going on and so it is a bit like me reading Brian Greene to understand science. I can maybe get a small understanding of scientific concepts,but that’s about it. As to the technicalities of how God works in this world I’m in about the same position there as well.He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
I get all that. I realize it makes no sense to you, in the same way that the idea that we have simply evolved as a result of a myriad of mindless chemical and biological processes is just a far fetched to me as my beliefs are to you.
He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
At least my mess makes sense to me. If you run into Vera say hi for me.
Cheers He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
Sarah Bellum writes: True, but everybody has an ideology, and more wars can be attributed to nationalism than anything else. The question is really the reverse: Wouldn't humans behave more morally if religion never had been invented?Face it: good people may behave well and bad people may behave badly, but to persuade both good people and bad people to commit really heinous deeds it requires religious belief (or some other odious ideology like that of Mao or Hitler) and true believers to tell them to do these deeds. If religion had never been invented it would have no bearing on whether God existed or not, and whether or not there is a universal morality that flows from God. I'd also add that in the case of Christianity Jesus is clear that the basic law that we are to follow is based on love of neighbour as spelled out in the Golden Rule. Also in the Sermon on the Mount where we are told that that the peacemakers are blessed. That hasn't stopped evil being done by nations and Christians as people are still people. He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
I've gone around that with Tangle so if you like you can read what I have posted there.
He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
I agree that morality has evolved over time, but I would see it as a growing understanding of a morality that always has been there.
We would all agree that slavery is wrong, and we would all agree that in the past in many cultures slavery was accepted as the norm and not seen as wrong. We agree that it is wrong now but was it wrong then? Was slavery ok in it's time, but wrong now, or has slavery always been wrong?He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
AZPaul3 writes: Certainly, we today see slavery as immoral. With help from retroactive morality, we can say that in accord with our enlightened intellectual development today, slavery has always been immoral. I agree completely. So then, if they were wrong then how do we know we are right now? If it has always been wrong then there is a morality that exists that isn't simply the result of human evolution. It would have had to exist outside of human thought. Sure, it has evolved over time in our thought processes, but slavery is wrong, has always been wrong and always will be wrong.He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
deleted. wrong thread
Edited by GDR, . Edited by GDR, . He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
AZPaul3 writes: ou cannot say your present morality is right in all things for all time. You cannot say your present morality is proper, right, humane or good. That judgement lies in future societies to decide the same way we judge the ancients today. By future standards your present morality may be abhorrently barbaric. But there always has been a sense that some things are wrong or bad some things are right or good.Sure those ideas change from one culture to another, but why do we even consider some things good or evil. From what you write you seem to think that slavery in the right context was not necessarily good but that it was ok and not bad at all. Is that correct, or was slavery always wrong. Naziism was the dominant culture in Germany in 1940. Was that good, bad or morally neutral within that culture? The practice in the world at the time of Jesus was to leave unwanted babies, usually girls, in the hills or even in dumps. This way they weren't actually killing them and they might have a chance of survival. Was that good, bad or morally neutral as that was the accepted custom in that time and culture?He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
Tangle writes:
Sure we can figure out what works, but we find things in life that we do, not because we can see that it works or can see that it will bring about some particular result, but it is something we "ought" to do just because it is the right thing to do. Because we have a brain. A pre-frontal cortex. It reasons. It's why we're called Homo sapiens. Wise Man. We figure stuff out. If someone in front of me drops a 50 dollar bill on the pavement, why is it that, whether we return it or not", is it something that we all, somewhat instinctively, know we "ought" to do?He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
AZPaul3 writes: As I said: - Slavery was practiced in the ancient Roman empire. - They didn't care. - 2000 years later, we do care. - Just because we acknowledge their historical use of the practice does not mean we condone it. Is this clear? Is this understandable? So, now, again, we have a morality where slavery was accepted as normal by society and, we have a later morality where slavery is abhorred. All the evidence of reality shows the difference to be due to 2000 years of human evolution. But that misses the point. Did they have it wrong 2000 years ago. Yes, it was accepted but did that make it ok?He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
Tangle writes: It requires the emotion empathy which is instinctual and found in other primates. When combined with an ability to reason and imagine a future the feeling is amplified and our early communal life reinforced it. Our current high degree of organised society comes from the evolved instinct/emotion of empathy, an evolved, reasoning brain and an evolved set of social rules (laws and punishments for breaking them.) If you want to believe that god put your 'still small voice' into our ape ancestors I guess I can't help any further. I would just ask why he left it (empathy) out some modern day people. Psychopaths. They lack the instinct but because of their reasoning brain can learn the rules - they just don't feel the need for them. They don't understand 'ought' - but they do understand the consequences of not doing ‘should’. I have no problem with saying it evolved. The question is simply were they wrong 2000 years ago when slavery was the norm?
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