Choosing a faith

No, murder is not a grey area. Your religious views are leading you into morally wrong choices, unquestionably wrong. Let me ask the same exact question but with a different example. Is murder wrong except when carrying out the court ordered punishment for a capital offense? This is not a grey area. The answer is yes, murder is wrong, no matter who wants to do it, even when it's the state carrying out the will of the majority. There are no just wars. I grant that that raises grave complexities, contradictions and conundrums. For example, if there are no just wars, then what was the proper response to Pearl Harbor? The American public was little handicapped by their isolationist principles. Probably the most common feeling after Pearl Harbor was a desire to take revenge on the back-stabbing Japanese, and they quickly abandoned isolationism to kill Japs.Or here's another WWII example on a smaller scale. Few people know that the Japanese occupied United States territory during WWII for about a year, the Alaskan islands of Kiska and Attu. Taking them back involved bombing and amphibious landings resulting in many casualties on both sides (hundreds). If murder is ruled out, then how should we have taken back the islands? I don't know. Maybe the Quakers have answers. Yes, those are the issues. Do I support war by living in a country that wages war on other countries? Am I complicit in the murder of Ayman al-Zawahiri (the Al-Qaeda leader recently killed in a drone strike)?There's evidence from WWII that even murderers have a conscience. Nazi Germany wasn't forced into developing gas chambers because of their desire for economy and efficiency. It was because they were finding that soldiers assigned to the death brigades that were machine gunning Jews and other undesirables into pits were increasingly suffering from what we would today call PTSD. You could almost say they were suffering from humanity or empathy.So the gas chambers were an attempt to save their fighting forces from becoming psychologically disabled. They instead built gas chambers at a number of concentration camps and began shipping them undesirables from all over by rail.
​ You asked if "there is an overarching definition of moral and immoral or is it whatever any individual or group decides it is." In the context of other things you've said it sounds like a quest for certainty.--Percy

I said that you're trying to argue our views are on an equal footing when they're not, because our views have evidence and yours do not. Your reply presents an example which has no evidence, so it is in no way representative of the discussion we're having. Your views have no evidence, ours do.A much better example that is representative of this discussion, one drawn from the real world, is the 2020 US presidential election. One view is that Trump won the election. Another view is that Biden won the election. The former view has no evidence. The latter view has tons of evidence.--Percy

Edited by Percy, : Grammar.

You shouldn't quibble at all. You should say, "You're wrong." I can't believe I committed that slip-up.--Percy

Yeah, sure, Meyer's another "goddidit" kind of guy. Dump the Christian counselor, get a professional. "Christian counselor" is a profession? Isn't it just one of many forms of Christian indoctrination, like Sunday school and Bible study? Yeah, counseling, just one of the many forms of atheist outreach. Phat, please, see a professional.--Percy

On the contrary, it is precisely your experience. You just caught him trying to cut you off from your friends of 20 years.Is there nothing you won't fall for? Oh, right, evidence based arguments, I forgot.--Percy

I said I'd let you alone. I lied. Sorry. Uhm, no, not sorry. Then what is it like? If not scientific answers then what kind? Purely emotional?Your initial exposure to the woo, of course, came from your youthful acculturation, family, priests.What has changed your views? Experience, knowledge, yes, but what kinds of experience? What kinds of knowledge could possibly lead your mind so deep into this fantasy?You accept at least some science. Why not all? Failure to prove a negative is not a winning argument. It's a logical absurdity. No one can do such a thing and asking is considered bad form. Very bad form. Is there some other form of evidence? The evidence we're talking about is recording facts about our observations. What other kind of evidence is there?

I'm agnostic on the question of whether there is a god. To put that in perspective, I'm also agnostic on the question of whether there are leprechauns or gremlins.Actions speak louder than words. The actions of Christians belie their claims of belief.Take an example. The Trumpian Christians believe that their God wanted Trump to win the 2020 election. They also believe that their God is omnipotent and could have affected how voters chose to vote. And they believe that their God is omnipotent and omniscient so could not be affected by attempts at fraudulent voting. And yet they believe that the result of the election was fraudulent.They also believe that there God is omnipotent, yet they stormed the capitol on Jan 6th because they didn't expect God to do the job for them.There's a whole bunch of confusion and incompatibility there.

Absolutely. I do believe that it is both when it comes to morality in a culture. Both through an external moral consciousness and through normal human contact.You've finally nailed it.

Which you have not presented yet. I'm not trying to pry, but rather my question is whether yours is a Christian counselor or a normal one.If a Christian counselor, do you find him expressing concern for keeping your faith intact, to protect you from any doubts or niggling questions? Or does he keep it on a lower key by using your faith to try to motivate you to do what you need to for your own sake?If a counselor for normals, do you have difficulty understanding what he's trying to do or difficulty getting motivated?And OBTW, what I wrote was based on my observations, though I had gotten talked into their "DivorceCare" program (I was looking at another program, but it was on the same night as our dance class which my friend wanted to keep me in for sake of the ever lopsided male/female imbalance). Actually, I was seeing a counselor for normals at the time, but I couldn't follow her instructions.She wanted to get me out dating again while at the same time she'd be advising me on danger signs -- and on the side she'd regale me with tales of "borderline cases", the dangerous ones to avoid. In order to do that, she wanted me to go onto dating sites and start dating three women at the same time (never on the same date, of course, but rather have me juggling three at one time). Then I would come in and report on them and she would point out issues and advise me. Why three? If I only dated one, then I become fixated on her and leave therapy prematurely with her ending up with a Land Shark (see below), the type she was trying to teach me to identify and avoid. With three, no risk of becoming fixated on any one.I have to admit that is a practical plan, but it wouldn't work for me. The dating sites just left me cold such that none of them appealed to me at all -- it's kind of like when you're in a restaurant and you don't see anything you like on the menu but you have to order something, so you go through a process of elimination rejecting dishes because you don't like something in them until you finally end up with one dish that is the least undesirable. Only in the case of the dating sites there was no "one dish" left at the end of the process.The other issue is that I already had a therapeutic plan in place. My divorce with the accompanying issues (infidelity, malice, abuse, etc on her part) was only about a third of what I was going through. For that other major part (see http://dwise1.net/ ) I had turned to dance classes to take off some time and recharge my batteries, basically to give me the strength to keep going. I expanded that with the divorce such that I had classes seven days a week. I would have to cut some of that out to do the three-woman-juggle she wanted me to do. I just couldn't do that.Plus what she was asking me to do is not in my nature.Though I did get out of it an awareness of the existence and dangers of borderline cases (actually, my son got bitten by one, his first wife, who turned out to be an opioid addict (before it was fashionable) who would have ended his police career much sooner). Wikipedia's former page on Land Shark (that one is no longer there) which described that as the term sailors traditionally had for the shifty merchants, women, and cutthroats in the port towns ready to prey on the sailors -- "This port is a predator-rich environment." That image has stuck with me.

I have no problem with what you call the science based evidence for morality, although I don't see any science in the conclusion. I just don't see at as being the whole story.

It was a slight slip-up which was corrected almost immediately.If you had not corrected it yourself (which you did), then a correction on my part would have been called for.But to use your slip-up for nothing more than a ¡ gotcha! would be ill-mannered and not conducive towards the good of the order.

Certainly, but as he said it only makes it plausible ,which means that it is something one can choose to believe or reject for another possibility. Frankly it took over an hour to listen to it and I don't want to spend the time to hunt it down. It was a casual comment made during his discussion on how the laws of the universe could have come into existence. If something is only plausible then by definition we know that there is something else, defined or not, as possible. Firstly I am very confident that I am way out of my depth in talking cosmic physics as fascinating as I find it. I am simply saying that he agrees that science has limitations and I used the example he gave.Also, what I was saying has nothing to do about my specifically Christian beliefs. The point is I am simply trying to make a case for an intelligence that is responsible for our existence. Can you define what you mean by a god. Would a deistic god be included in that or are you just including any god that humans have believed in.

I guess that we need a clearer definition of murder. I am strongly opposed to capital punishment, however, I don't think that I would call it murder. I think we are pretty much on the same page. I think that maybe a just war is when the sole motive is to save lives. I am more familiar with the war in Europe but I suggest it is roughly the same for the war in Japan. The Nazis attacked most of Europe with the goal of brutally conquering and ruling. Britain and others including Canada responded as did the US later. I think that we have to look at what the world would have been like without the Allied response.However, when Nazi defeat was inevitable we bombed Dresden, which was about revenge, primarily because of the bombing of London, and probably did nothing to shorten the war. IMHO, the war was won when the west, (Primarily the USA) aided in the rebuilding of the countries and became friends instead of enemies which is the opposite of what the "Treaty of Versailles" did after WW I. It isn't about certainty but about an unprovable truth that we can have faith in.

Philosophical, theological, and observational.
I find my experience to see things as Lewis did when he made this statement.
"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”Now obviously that is not a scientific statement, but it is consistent with my own experience in how I understand my life and the world I live in. I know that statement will get no agreement from any of you here but it resonates with me. Frankly it has come from reading a wide variety of Christian scholars as well as people like Dawkins, Hitchens and all. I've read other religious books and then contrasting it all with my own life experience. What science do I not believe in? I just answered that in another post. Philosophical evidence for one.
You though are claiming that the observation that morality can be passed on within a society. I don't disagree, but it doesn't answer the question which is, is there a universal morality or is it simply something that a group of people can agree on?

If it's unprovable how do you assess its truth value?