Mambo, please take a look at the link I provided last night regarding moral philosophy. Just because someone is an atheist doesn’t nessecarily make them a moral relativist. Also, just because someone is a moral relativist doesn’t mean that their morality is arbitrary; nor does it mean that they cannot morally hold others accountable for wrong actions.
In the real world, isn’t it true that each person has to decide right and wrong for himself, anyhow? Not all Christians agree on what constitutes moral behavior. Individual judgement is needed to make sense of God’s will; unless, of course, anyone is going to claim that they have a perfect understanding of God’s will… I think we can dismiss that claim before it’s even made. Your own moral judgement is a very important part of determining right from wrong, for theists and atheists alike.
Plato hat on: The morality advocated by the Christian religion may well be moral behavior, but it is not true morality. Christians believe that their moral code was set down by God, meaning that their “morality” is completely arbitrary. I trust you know that true morality is a fundamental truth, like mathematics and the forms; it is not truth simply because someone says it is so, it is true by its very nature. The essence of morality can be discovered by men through the power of reasonable discourse.
Pyrrho hat on: It is probably impossible to know the true nature of morality. Perhaps morality is some type of fundamental truth, perhaps it has been set forth by the gods, or perhaps it is nothing more than human culture. Since I don’t know which of these cases is true, or even if there are other cases to consider, I’m not going to worry about reducing morality to first principles.
Sartre hat on: The sad truth is that there is no God to provide for us laws and measures for moral behavior. There is only ourselves, and Man is cursed to be free. Without fear of eternal punishment, Man can do whatever he wishes… but he is forced to live with the consequences of his actions. The tragedy of freedom is that there is no easy answer to morality, there are only difficult choices.
People don’t decide for themselves, they agree to a morality with society.
Not everyone does feel bad. But most do because they are indoctrinated with the society’s morality so much so that it becomes a part of them.
Very few soldiers fighting on America’s frontier felt anything when they stole from and killed the native peoples. Why? Is what they did any different from modern murder and theft? Their society said it was ok for them to kill and steal, so they did.
Onesimus stole from Philemon, his master, and fled (Roman law would have demended his death). He met Paul when Paul was jailed in Rome, and became a Christian. He wished to return to Philemon (whether at Paul’s urging or not is unclear), and Paul in his letter urges Philemon to accept Onesimus as a Christian brother.
Nowhere in the letter to Philemon does Paul denigrate or oppose slavery as an institution. He asked Philemon to accept Onesimus “as a man and as a brother in the Lord.” (Phn 1:16)
It’s quite clear, then, that Paul was urging Philemon to accept Onesimus’ return not out of a moral constraint against slavery, but because Christians should all be brothers.
You wanna show me where Paul tells Philemon (or anybody) that non-Christian slaves should be released, I’m happy to read it.
Do you understand that this comes across as the height of arrogance? Why is it that out of two thousand years of faith, your interpretation of the Bible is the One True interpretation?
:sigh:
We’ve been trying to address this from the first of the thread. Morality is not necessarily based on religious faith. It is possible to know right from wrong without knowing your specific God. There can be decency, courtesy, kindness and yes, even love, without your YHWH.
I love. That is the basis of my morality. Who are you to tell me that is without meaning?
(Hey, where the heck is Libertarian anyway? Or Polycarp? Or Tris? Help me out here, guys!)
Love is the main focus of Christianity. This is nothing new.
The more one understands the Bible, the more one can see the Spirit behind it. Although Paul did not explicitly admonish the act of slavery (do keep in mind that the Jews/Christians were the ones being persecuted at the time), if you have an overall understanding of the Bible’s other Christian teachings such as charity, loving your neighbors as yourself, being the least among men, you can see that slavery doesn’t jive with Christianity. I don’t disagree that the Bible has been mis-interpreted by people who have an agenda of their own, but you cannot judge the whole faith by those type of people. When an atheist’s basic argument against God is “Christians are stupid,” I’m not going to assume that that’s the way all atheists think.
Then why would an all powerful God want to hurt anyone or anything. Is He so egotistical that He’s going to look out for His guys only and if you are against His guys he’s coming after you? Wouldn’t he be more powerful if he pardoned people? The best answer you and Glorfindel can seem to come up with to the question “why would a God concerned with love hurt people?” Is pretty much “they deserved it for not joining His club.”
Ever stop to think that you’re the one mis-interpreting the Bible? Maybe their interpretations were right all along and you’re wrong. Then what will you do?
Good, because I don’t think “Christians are stupid” (a gross simplification and misunderstanding of all the posts that have already been written if you think that’s what any atheists think. IMO atheists put too much thought into it, than Christians that blindly follow, than to just come to the conclusion that “Christians are stupid”) I wouldn’t call them stupid, illogical would be more accurate.
A couple of points to be made in response to this. I agree; if we take the “general message” of the Christian Bible, it is hard to say that it actively supports the idea of slavery. Nor does it condemn it. The point is that at the time the Bible was being written, in its original context, it was unthinkable that slavery might be abolished. It was so much a part of the culture that it was accepted without question. It was obviously regarded as an unpleasant position to be in, but was not regarded by any of the authors of the Bible as being evil enough to condemn.
But while I agree that to defend slavery using the Bible requires a little twisting of words, it is’t such a stretch that it wasn’t done pretty successfully. Enough to crush the lives of many, many people in the US, the effects of which linger. There are probably other verses, but I Corinthians 7:21 springs to mind: Were you a slave when you became a Christian? Don’t let it bother you, but if you can gain your freedom, do so. Admittedly, it doesn’t clearly say that it’s okay to own slaves, but it was used to ease the consciences of slave-owners. A more general argument was that if the poor Africans had been left alone in the jungle, they would have never received the Gospel, so all in all it was still a pretty good deal for them.
The point of this observation is that the book is way out of date. Taken in context, there is a lot of wisdom to be found in the Bible. There’s also a lot of nonsense.
Spiritus Mundi has really done a good job of summing up my thoughts but…
asking questions such as “God, for the Jews/Christians/Muslims, answers a lot of the oldest philosophical questions: Where did we come from? What is morality and where does it come from? Why do men do evil? Why is there evil? These questions are answered for people who believe in God. But what about those who don’t believe in God?”
These are all ‘human’ questions. Why did we HAVE to come from anywhere? Morality and Evil are also ‘human’ thoughts and creations. Does an animal or a child feel or understand evil? How can we consider a defined evil when it is purely subjective? A religious sect in the middle east is justifiable to itself and considers it’s actions viable and pure. We as Americans or Christians or Buddhists or whatever may find their motives evil but it does not make it so. And since evil is subjective it is not entirely written in stone (unless you’re a Jew or Christian - no pun intended) and is therfore not a defined subject.
By seeing all of your questions as ‘human’ questions there really need be no answers.
Just read this whole thread - missed it before somehow. But several thoughts occurred to me while I was reading it:
I kind of think there’s a good point buried in what Mambo is asking and what Glorfindel is raving on about:
[ul]
If you’re Christian, your sense of the meaning of your own life and the meaning of the universe really are in harmony. (even if it’s a poorly constructed harmony).
If you’re an atheist you have to negotiate a dual sense: that your life and the universe itself are meaningless and random; but you must live as if they’re not.
[/ul]
In a way, an atheist is resigned to living a lie. For the sake of the truth.
So when Mambo asks: what do you replace God with? I think what he’s saying is - how do you regain that sense of meaning again? where do you get your meaning? And my answer is - you don’t regain it. You live a meaning which you know to be a lie, for the sake of honesty.
2. While evil, existence, etc. are NOT big(ger) problems for an atheist, there IS a problem that suddenly rears its ugly head for the new atheist:
why is there RELIGION?
(I was watching this anthropological documentary on some amazon hunter-gatherer tribe the other day, and it looked to me like they must have been spending 50% of their time working on mind-numbing, labor-intensive superstition-related tasks. From an evolutionary perspective, that’s a gigantic waste of precious energy. So why have we evolved that instinct - or why wasn’t it selected out of us long ago?)
This actually came up in another thread - but nobody’s mentioned it here. At least not that I remember. As an atheist, I don’t consider morality to be a construct - at least not primarily a “construct.” I think it’s innate and instinctual.
Which means, afaic:
a. atheism doesn’t give you free reign in determining what’s right and wrong.
b. it’s the instinct that keeps atheists from running amok, not the fear of retribution or the desire for reciprocity from others (not just anyway).
I don’t know what has gone on lately in this thread, I only read the first page, but here’s my spiel.
I don’t know what I would call myself. I was raised loosely Christian, and I suppose now I’m a Deist (a term I only recently discovered and have yet to actually investigate). Currently my mind feels like a tornado is constantly making its rounds. I am riddled with doubt that my conscious mind tells me is merely openness to possibilities.
I blame Nietzsche for my current predicament, heh. Obviously he’s an extremely free thinker, and through his books, namely Birth of Tragedy and Beyond Good and Evil, I found myself doubting just about everything. In my view this was his goal: to make us see that pretty much everything is arbitrary by offering alternative views (ie: the Apollonian vs Dionysian in BoT). Unfortunately perhaps the scientist or maybe the ex-Christian in me seeks answers, answers that my now Nietzschean mind cannot accept with any certainty.
This may sound to a Christian like a case for restricting exposure to new ideas. That is to say, “his mind has been made unclear by the forces of evil, and only religion can make it better”. I don’t see it that way, but in my formless pool of indecisiveness, who knows?
Hopefully this is all just part of the tumultuous change my mind is undergoing as it is being opened to the world, and I will someday find resolve or at least be satisfied with the openness. If not there are ways I can put my vacillation to good use as an unbiased observer, though truth be told I would almost rather have some firm ground on which to stand, even if its hot coals.
What a late-night half-coma digression that was eh? Oh well, off to browse the boards again…
I don’t agree. My life has meaning to me. My life has meaning to other people. This is not a lie. I don’t care that “the universe” doesn’t care about me.
In my perspective, religion provides an answer to many questions if people find “I don’t know” intolerable. It assuages fear of death and guilt and sorrow (and creates these sometimes, too, but then the “cure” encouraged is nearly invariably more or “better” religion, not less). It provides a sense of community. It makes people feel important and gives them a sense of purpose. It makes people confident, since “God’s on [their] side”. It provides an outlet for artistic instincts. Sometimes it can do darker things too, but things that may still make the religious person happy: it provides an ironclad way to justify hate of people who are different. It gives you absolute justification to kill people and take their stuff.
Primitive people really do have a stunning amount of spare time compared to us. So they have plenty of time for art and dance and religion. Even though modern man is comparitively busier, we still find time to do non-survival related stuff. I spend many hours a day surfing the web, which is hardly vital to my survival. Nevertheless, I don’t think non-survival related activities are going to be “bred out” of our species. If our needs are provided for, we have time for many different sorts of physical and mental stimulation.
Untrue “time-wasting” ideas are not as easily “bred out” as you seem to think. As long as the belief does little active harm to the believer–and religion does do some useful things, though as I think it’s false I can’t recommend it—it will likely stick around. Look at the number of people who still believe in psychics and astrology, and they even try to make frequent objectively testable claims, which religions tend to eschew.
My life may be random and meaningless in the cosmic view of things, but I happen to be very fond of it, y’know?
I don’t see how it’s “living a lie” if I give my own life meaning and live accordingly. If it doesn’t have a meaning in your “holy book”, then that’s a problem with your book, not with me.
Stick with the dual sense, if the lie part bothers you that much. Or call it negative capability - whatever you want. I was just going for dramatic emphasis when I said living a lie for the sake of the truth. And it wasn’t a criticism but an observation.
Religion is the grandaddy of all lies, btw, in case I neglected to make that clear. I’m just saying that it’s a lie that has at least one kind of internal consistency atheism doesn’t. Even if in every other way religion is an intellectual disaster area.
I don’t know about this…when I read books on evolution and behavior they tend to suggest that activities which consume a significant amount of energy that doesn’t improve one’s chances of survival…tend to be bred out pretty quickly.
I don’t recommend it also because I think it’s false. But I wonder - maybe religion does convey enough of an advantage that religion is “good” for us, even if it IS false. Maybe sometimes the truth is not the most important consideration.
This is pure speculation. I’m not advocating it…I’m being more of a devil’s advocate.
Correction: activities which consume a significant amount of energy that don’t improve ones chances of reproductive success tend to be bred out pretty quickly. An activity does not necessarily have to improve ones chances of survival to improve ones chances of reproductive success. (E.g. getting in a bar fight over a woman will decrease a man’s chance of survival – the bar fight might kill him – but may increase his chance of reproductive success by eliminating a competitor for access to the woman.)
“Meaningless and random” in a purely logical sense, yes. However, that’s not the same as “worthless”. I can recognize that most creatures value their lives as I do mine. That is the basis for my morality, personally.
