Inasmuch as you can consider it a religion, Taoism doesn’t require unthinking obedience - you’re supposed to figure out the Tao for yourself before you can “obey” it.
Shinto is also quite light on commandments and moral diktats - give offerings to the local kami, (get it on) bang a gong to keep the demons away and you’re more or less good to go as I understand it.
I don’t understand. You’re a Christian that doesn’t think the Bible is the very word of god?
How do we examine each of those commandments as being relevant for today? What metric should we use?
I thought the meat of your OP asked where does Atheist’s morality come from. I think you can agree that morality is an absolute and laws exist to codify them. How can your sense of right and wrong *not *change what laws you think should be enacted?
Zeitgeist.
I can’t think of any way in which Hinduism “demands obedience.” Obedience to whom? To do what? The strictures on individual action in Indian society are not really based in religion. No one has the authority to claim to speak for any god and set out demands.
The guru traditions in Hinduism often demand total obedience to (and even worship of) a guru.
Too many “ifs” in this argument for me, I’m afraid:
(1) if we’re as dumb as dogs.
(2) if there’s a positive purpose to pain.
I don’t believe either of them. Do you? Did you just throw them out as hypotheticals, or do you really see them as plausible?
That’s what Shinto has become today, but there was a time when Shinto was a religion which drove a nation to ruin.
The Japanese used to worship the living god arahitogami also known as the emperor of Japan.
It was through Shinto that the Japanese were disciplined in bushido, the Samurai warrior code. Some say Shinto and Bushido are opposites, which they were in a sense, but they also went hand in hand. Shinto instilled unquestionable worship of the living god emperor and bushido taught the discipline which ultimately ended with the Japanese producing some of the fiercest warriors that culminated in WWII.
For the Japanese, surrender was dishonorable. I’m sure everyone is familiar with Japanese soldiers of WWII, not to mention the kamikaze pilots who gave their life in the name of the emperor.
After WWII, MacArthur forced Emperor Hirohito to renounce his claim to being a living god. The complete destruction and the realization that the emperor was just another human being made most Japanese turn away from Shinto.
So today it has been reduced to banging gongs, blessing new homes and cars and can also be found in some traditional rituals like sumo wrestling for example. All the sumo referees are official Shinto priests.
It may seem harmless today, but keep in mind what it once was.
Hey, that’s another one for “good people doing evil category”. Obviously not all Japanese could have been evil during WWII, I’d say most were good but were made to do evil because of their living god.
Zen Buddhism is pretty much ALL thinking.
My understanding was that bushido as practiced in WWII was a political construct invented by the military as an hybridization of the extremes of Shito Emperor-worship, (Zen) Buddhist denial-of-self, and a mythical samurai ethos that had as little real-world historical existence as “the code of the West” from cowboy movies did in the frontier era.
Granted, I WOULD call that a religion (despite it being recently invented for political reasons) due to its heavy emphasis on spiritual constructs, where I don’t think we can call political ideologies with no explicit supernatural components (like Communism) “religions” without diluting the word to uselessness.
But Abraham knew God really well, right? He knew him so well that he actually negotiated with God about how the Sodomites should be treated. God at first wanted to kill them all, but Abraham persuaded God to save the righteous.
So when God told Abraham that he should kill his son, it apparently wasn’t foreign to Abraham’s understanding of who/what God is. You think you know God better than Abraham?!?
I don’t think it even matters whether it’s really God. Being God is not a good enough reason to demand that somebody kill their own kid. God can’t be harmed by a refusal anyway. Saying no, harms nobody. Saying yes harms an innocent for no justifiable reason.
Well, first of all, let’s look at the Ten Commandments from Exodus:
1.You shall have no other gods before me.
2.You shall not make for yourself any carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.
3.You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.
4.Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.
5.Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.
6.You shall not murder.
7.You shall not commit adultery.
8.You shall not steal.
9.You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
10.You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”
1-4 are basically “God rules!”.
5 doesn’t make sense for anyone over the age of 18
7 and 9 are more or less covered under “don’t be a jerk”.
6 and 8 are pretty much universally considered felonies in most legal systems
and 10 isn’t so much a sin as it is advice for not living a life of constant frustration and envy.
So. What part of the Judeo-Christian “system of ethics” would a reasonable person not be able to figure out on their own?
I do, but the people doing the interpretation are fallible, including you and me. It behooves us to keep in mind that we humans are fallible and therefore a little tolerance for others’ different interpretations (so long as they don’t result in bad behavior) only makes sense. There’s more of value in everyone besides whether they believe certain things you or I believe to be true or false, and it’s disrespectful to dismiss people just because they don’t believe the same things you or I do.
[QUOTE=Sitnam]
How do we examine each of those commandments as being relevant for today? What metric should we use?
[/QUOTE]
The same metric we always use. We put it to a vote. G-d may have given commandments regarding the treatment of slaves, but nowhere does the Bible claim that slavery is mandatory. Likewise, I think the “proscription” against women having positions of authority in the Church is a misinterpretation of an instruction that was intended to minimize loud crosstalk during Synagogue services (my interpretation – I could be wrong, but others have drawn the same conclusion).
[QUOTE=Sitnam]
I thought the meat of your OP asked where does Atheist’s morality come from. I think you can agree that morality is an absolute and laws exist to codify them. **How can your sense of right and wrong not change what laws you think should be enacted?
[/QUOTE]
[Emphasis added]
Because I believe that laws aren’t put in place by men to make others obey G-d. That’s G-d’s job. The function of law (as laid out in the U.S. Constitution,anyway) is to define behavior that infringes on others’ rights and, where necessary, prohibit or limit such behavior and provide appropriate disincentives for such behavior (jail, fines, etc.) Of course, the consensus not too many years ago may have been dysfunctional by today’s standards (sodomy laws, blue laws, etc.)
[QUOTE=Sitnam]
Zeitgeist.
[/QUOTE]
Oh. Well I suppose it must be. The governments under which mankind has operated throughout time have largely either been a tool of religion, or used religion as a tool of government. The United States’ constitution prohibits the state from establishing or respecting any religion as an “official, government-approved” religion that then creates a second-tier citizenship for those who aren’t members. You are free to choose your own path without government interference so long as you do not infringe upon the rights of others in doing so.
If I had been born in Ireland 200 years ago, I might have taken it for granted that the only purpose of government was to accommodate and enforce Catholic church law and doctrine. So, yes, one’s environment is quite influential in shaping your worldview. You do the best you can given the circumstances.
I threw that out as a hypothetical. If true, that could be why we don’t understand. I could have chosen a different example, but I like dogs and am familiar with their behavior and chose the analogy from personal experience (from the human perspective, anyway ;)).
Why would you say that? I don’t think the people who came up with that commandment thought that it applied only to people under a certain age.
When you have a dilemma, do you let God tell you what to do?
No. You think back through your teachings and determine God’s will as interpreted by you.
What if you alone can’t figure it out and need to ask your preacher or priest? Isn’t that the Word of God?
No. It’s the Word of God as interpreted by that preacher or priest who has learned through his or her own study and asking questions of his or her own mentors.
What about growing up? How did you learn right or wrong as a child?
You learned from your parents who taught you based upon their philosophy and their understanding of the Word of God.
You see what I’m getting at here? No one -not you, not your mentors, not your parents, not your friends- are teaching you what God wants. What everyone’s teaching you is their best guess based upon their own internal philosophies and social understandings of right and wrong.
I do the same thing. The exact same thing. I learn from my self and my past experiences. I learn from research. I learn from my mentors. I learn from my parents. I learn from my friends. I learn from society what right and wrong is.
I just don’t pretend that all of it comes from “the word of God” but it’s the exact same process you go through every day.
Not that this is is any kind of defense for the bible endorsing slavery, but, in point of fact, it does say that God sometimes ordered the Israelites to take slaves (and to rape virgins and to kill infants and children).
I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.
(1 Tim 2:12)
women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says.
(1 Cor. 14:34)
This does not look like an admonition against “crosstalk.” Paul flat out says that women cannot have authority ovr men and can’t speak in Church.
Agnostic here. To this day, I am constantly astounded by how many times I am asked by believers how I can be such an ethical person without having any religious convictions. I love to quote Arthur C. Clarke to them on that.
Most people have pointed out already that a basic concept of the golden rule or something similar seems to be a foundation, and I can’t argue with that. If I am nice to others, others are nice to me and my little portion of the world is a brighter, better place. And I have helped make others’ portions of the world a little bit brighter and better. That means I don’t lie, cheat, steal, murder, expectorate on the sidewalk, etc., etc. simply because those kinds of actions tend to “darken” the world, no matter who does them.
I know that sounds New-Agey and woo-woo, but I really can’t say it any better.
I note a small resurgence recently, at least anecdotally, in the number of Christians who are essentially throwing out all of Paul. Does that sort of thing show up anywhere else?
I’m not calling you a liar, but I’m always struck when I hear things like this–I have never heard it from anyone, even in my more stark atheist phase, even in my ridiculously backwoods conservative hometown.
And it’s not like I lived in a bastion of politeness or demure phrasing–I posted my political affiliation on Facebook as “Democrat” and within a week a dozen folks had asked my parents about it, usually phrased as “What the hell’s wrong with your kid?”
Thanks for the responses SSgtBaloo.
I think this is the essence of the difference in attitudes between the religious moderate and the fundamentalist.
Sorry to hear about your family problems. Your translation makes sense, but what is it’s source please? I’d be interested to see it in context. The more common translations are a pretty clear carrot and stick, which is consistent with the tone of the old testament.
Notice that it’s preceded by “jealous God”, which really emphasises the punishment is coming from God himself. Also, “steadfast love to the thousandth generation” is not something that can possibly come from the parents.
From your responses, clearly you are not a literalist, and are firmly in the “the bible was inspired by God, but written by man” camp. Personally, even if that was the case, I’d expect more from the bible in way of moral instruction. I don’t think it’s authors were fools, and they had some worthy things to say, but a simple statement denouncing slavery and racism could have helped prevent much evil. The closest thing is the parable of the good samaritan.
Why would o write a book that required interpretation if he wanted his dictates followed?
There was a time where you’d have been commanded by your priests to kill others with a different interpretation (and that would have been considered ‘good’ behavior)…Oh, wait that still happens.