What Happens When You Remove Faith

First off, I have never made the claim that loving people IS morality. Second, I disagree that if someone did make that claim that it would be necessarily false. You dragged us down the rabbit hole of defining morality and yet never offered anything more than your cryptic and subjective reasons for claiming that moralities framed in certain ways that you disapprove of are wrong. I also disagree about this. I think that there is much to learn for myself about the difference between having a morality that is built by conditioning in religion versus conditioning in reason. It will not only help me more properly define my morality but it will show to both me and the rest of the readers how weak or strong these claimed "God derived" moralities actually are.Not to say that this should be any reflection on God of course. God may certainly still exist. It just goes to the weight of the point that God is most certainly not the arbiter of morality like some religious people like to claim.Do you disagree that there are MANY religious people who claim that their religion is "good", "right", or at least "useful" because of the effect it has on morality? Don't you think it is interesting to examine that claim?

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

That's sorta my beef Stile. Greedless goodness works ALL of the time if your motive in morality is to make the Christian God happy or to gain salvation. This is why I have been discussing motive so much. Change your motive, you change your morality.We might not need God in order to develope a moral system, but for all you atheists out there, I suggest that our current moral system is 'recovering' if you will, or transitioning, from a God based one, and that there exist gaps in the logic of it because folks are not yet thinking about motives. We are kind of like birds returning again and again to a feeder because we remember it held seed at one time. It's habit without use, a monthly dinner with the college roomie you no longer relate to.

Sorry I didn't respond to this sooner.Sure if you are raised in a cult scenario and have it removed then there will probably be a visible effect on your morality.I think the big difference to notice though is that the change in this scenario is not a loss of faith but rather a loss of the environment that mandated a certain morality. You mention that in your last statement.It is important to recognize that we are not talking behavior that is deemed "rebelious". We are talking about people who believe they may have no incentive to do anything unselfish, perhaps even selfish and hurtful things even toward people they love, if they didn't believe in certain mythology.I don't see that kind of rhetoric winning over many people with half a brain into thinking that either their morality is good or that their religion is worth anything.Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

This is the statement from your OP. This is from your last post. In the above and throughout the thread you DO equate love with morality. You skip a few obvious things. Loving your wife and cheating on her are not mutually exclusive. They are only so by some standards. The polygamists have no problem with someone loving more than one person, thus there is no 'cheating' involved. Cheating is only considered wrong by the standard of having and remaining faithful to one wife, which incidentally is largely Biblical. It is the fornication and adultery part which was considered immoral. If you reason the way you have, a person who is not in love with their wife would be justified in his adultery. It's no different from what the silly theists are saying about 'cheating' on GOd if they didn't love Him.How would you behave if you didn't love your wife? Edited by anastasia, : No reason given.

I don't see how it works all the time.Motive: To gain salvation.
This is the opposite of greedless goodness by definition. It's not greedless if your motive is to gain salvation.Motive: Make the Christian God happy.
Lots of people attempt to "make the Christian God happy" by descriminating against others and treating them as inferior. This is not greedless goodness.And if you're going to try to tell me that the Christian God doesn't actually want them to do this, you'll have to have the Christian God come and tell me himself. Some book he may have inspired thousands of years ago doesn't count for His desires today, or even his desires from thousands of years ago. Otherwise it's simply you telling me what you think will make the Christian God happy. I think it's easy for you to see how others can reach alternative conclusions from there.Motive: Unidentified
How does greedless goodness work if someone wants to kill you? Wouldn't the ideal of greedless goodness in this situation mean you should get to them as quickly as possible and forfeit your life? How is that working?How does greedless goodness work if I learn someone doesn't like anyone performing greedless acts for their benefit?
It can't. It's impossible.Greedless goodness, because of it's specific definition, cannot work for ALL situations. It's impossible.

it kind of depends on the idea that some christians (and maybe others) that human beings are all bad all the way to the core and that the only reason they do anything nice at all is because they have jesus. but that's not even demonstrated in the scriptures, even if it's stated. there are plenty of non-christians and non-jews who did good things and of course plenty of christians and jews who did nasty things.i talked to my mom the other day about the "universal fuzzy" and whether it points to a creator or if the idea of a creator points to the "niversal fuzzy." now, naturally we disagreed on whether it necessitates a creator (even though we both believe in it). i defined the "universal fuzzy" as the internal drive to do good things. i don't have a problem with there being two separate internal drives one in either direction (we'l call them c and d). i think we can all say that we are torn, despite our faiths, in working for "fuzzy" or "spiky." spiky may be protective, but it tends to hurt others. while fuzzy keeps us warm and rubs nicely against others but doesn't necessarily protect us. i think it's a personal choice really, cause i know plenty of christians who claim they're phenomenally good and are instead rather spiky, nasty people. i think the solution isn't belief, necessarily, but self-sacrifice, which is what i thought christianity was about. believing in god doesn't mean anything for the choices we make.

I had a best friend who had a horrible childhood, so she tried to be spiky to protect herself. But if you ignored the spikes and rushed in where angels fear to tread, she turned out to be very fuzzy on the inside.She had no reason to be fuzzy, but she seemed to have a need to be fuzzy.

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But I don't want to shed my culture and I don't want to join their's. I think I'm just stuck in out-group mode. In fact, I don't think I'm even invited into thier group. Maybe that's why I sometimes come off as a selfish asshole, because the greedless goodness isn't an option, and from what I've seen, I better keep my dukes up. ...but an inevitable and possibly neccessary one. Oh, I thought thats what they were suprised/disgusted about. Well, I don't know of any people like that.I think both sides are somewhere in the middle thinking that the other side is on the extreme :\ As an aside, what about the Vatican? Do you find their culture to be "repugnant to your sensibilitis"?But anyways, I see what you're typing. I don't think I'd like a 'faith only' culture, but I wouldn't like a 'secular only' culture either. I believe god exists and I think it makes the world a better place. But I love science too. I'd like to have both. I don't think it will ever decline that far. People are still going to have faith regardless. I don't think it is something that can be eliminated. I also think it was, and still is, an important part of our evolution. I saw the thread on it but haven't come up with a post yet. I think your right. I think that faith should be 'under' rationality, so to speak type. When you keep faith on top, it starts to fuck up all kinds of shit, IMHO.
But still, I think it should be there somewhere. Not gone altogether, or negligible. What do you think under the premise that god really does exist? I just don't think that we, as humans, are going to be able to rid ourselves of faith. Maybe that's because I'm a theist though. If god really does exist, how are people going to NOT have faith in it, especially if it is somehow interacting with people.As an atheist, I think I would be right with you. But doesn't it seem like burning other people's culture to eradicate faith?

hrm, I'm a good person but I'm spiky.

Well. I know I'm jumping in kinda late, but it seems to me somebody ought to mention the bonobos.Bonobos are (to quote Susan Savage-Rumbaugh) "a very egalitarian and empathetic society".There's a wonderful video: Susan Savage-Rumbaugh: The gentle genius of bonobos | TED Talk.It's only 17 minutes long and well worth the time.

Maybe, unless you revert 'gaining salvation' back to 'what God wants'. We can already see that the entire speech on greedless goodness is a little droll, because if we have a motive for our morality, that already implies that there is a use for it. If we are not going to benefit from morality in some way as humans, why have it? If God exists, and there is indeed an afterlife, I would not consider gaining it completely greedy. Is it greedy to eat, or is it a necessary part of survival?As we have already discussed, anyone can make moral behaviour a source of personal satisfaction. It is going to have a reward, immediate, long term, real, or imagined, either for us or for someone else. When I ask you to find a motive, I ask 'what are you trying to accomplish?'.Now, say I tell you I am trying to get 'saved'. That's my motive. You ask how I will do that...and I say 'I will love others as Jesus told me to'.So, I ask you, 'Stile, what are you trying to do?'. Your answer: 'love others'. Yes, love them selflessly, love them for the pure sake of doing it...but maybe you can see why someone may ask 'why?'. It is because, to us, love was the how and not the why.I believe it was Aristotle who concluded that the purpose of life was to be happy. That is a hop, skip, and a jump away from morality. How to be happy is a very subjective thing, just as how to be moral is. You may or may not include others in your happiness, and you may not be happy unless others are happy. Morality is still very greedy, because it essentially asks 'what do you want from life' and only then asks 'how do I get that?'. It could be greedless, but you are having a time with finding it goodness. I don't blame you, but I am detached enough to say that if the person discriminating truly believes it is the right thing to do, it could be 'good' to him. If I don't tell you that, by most accounts of what the Christian God 'wants', discriminating is wrong, I will have no basis for judging other Christians. You would, because by YOUR account, discrimination is wrong. As it so happens, I agree with you, so we are in the clear, and I AM telling you that this is not my opinion of what the Xian God wants.There are definitely alternate opinions about what will make God happy. It is not only a problem in a religion based morality. Remember I gave you an example of telling a joke to a friend, and it turned out that the joke offended him? People are point blank going to be wrong when they try to make God happy, and wrong when they try to make others happy. It is the TRYING that makes a person moral.Can you imagine what would happen if we all believed that the purpose of life was to be happy? We would have utter chaos, or people brainwashing us into thinking their ideas will make us happy. Hm...sounds like some Christians.There's a fine line somewhere. God DOES want us to be happy and fulfilled, but it is up to us to determine how to do that. We have a few clues, and loving others is one of them.Btw, I can not get God to tell you anything personally, and it would be up to you to determine what God desires of you now. There are scores of Christians already making those determinations. Hey, I keep telling you that doing whatever anybody else wants is not morality. In order for something to be greedless goodness, it has to BE goodness. I told you the idea doesn't make sense, because you can't find out what is good unless you have a motive. If your motive is 'making others happy' there is a problem. Someone is forgetting about the 'as you love yourself' clause. In most utterings of the GR, there is the presumption that self somehow comes first. Oh stop. You can just cease performing greedless acts for their benefit, and that will be a greedless act. No, it's not. Mother Theresa was very good at it. Only God knows if she was greedy. All of us would say that leaving home and living in the slums of India, caring for lepers, cradling the dying, not even preaching, and never getting rich from it, was about as close to greedless as you can get.

I disagree with the premise, brenna. It depends on the brand of Christian, but I would tell you that all people are dualist by nature. I think the Christians who say we are all evil are really saying that we are all capable of evil. None of us is good. We can be only called 'good' after we rectify our behaviour through morality. For many Christians, 'good' is a quality of God alone, and we are stuck with something like 'trying to be good'. That's really all that makes morality. The most messed up ideas of goodness can't make a person evil.

Well hey, I agree with you. I also don't want a morality that is built upon conditioning in society. I am only trying to debate the reasoning behind morality, because I am becoming convinced that the morality of athiests is a conditioning by society, and left-over from when society was Christian. I think you are all slowly working on what morality is, and why you need it, but I am jumping to the 'reason' part and leaving behind the conditioning part.

I shouldn't respond to you because it is OT but you keep posting these very strong statements!I totally and 100% disagree with the "left-over" business you are talking about. I would say that the exact opposite is true. Society is tending toward becoming MORE moral in SPITE of the conditioning influence of the Christian religion.I also disagree with the "morality of atheist" part. Are you suggesting that anyone who chooses to build their morality on reason is automatically an atheist? I wonder because I am certainly not an atheist and I would say that I at least attempt very vigilantly to define my morals with reason.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

i was refering to the "sin nature." besides. just a bit of yeast levens the whole dough.