I’m sorry to say you are right. I used to think it was, and I still like to think it is for some of my friends, but from what I’ve read in several threads here, it’s more often based on willful ignorance.
One could argue that according to the Big Bang Theory the universe “existed” before there was a time or place for it to exist in. The limitations we run into are more about our ability to conceive of and describe what a timeless spaceless existence (if “existence” is even the right word) would be like, than about the universe and/or God’s ability to do so under such theories.
I think I agree with this. Also the notion that a belief is arrived at by choise, or rational process is wrong, for 95% of the religious.
Most are religious because their parents were. So they have always been religious. There was no point where they did not believe.
Even the actual ‘facts’ of what they actively believe, the doctrines themselves, the stories, aren’t usually held because of study of the subject but because they were handed to them by authority figures. Their parents and priests. People you don’t question, you just gobble up what they present.
So, yes most people believe out of ignorance. they have never questioned or actually studied their own beliefs. Plus for those that do ask questions the authority figures have some ready-made answers up their sleeves.
Good answers to questioning inquieries about your religion are usually not to be expected from the priests themselves.
Which demonstrates how irrational, baseless and thus worthless religious beliefs are.
Do you only value knowledge? You are right, those silly teachings like be kind to your neighbor, don’t kill or steal, treat others as you would like to be treated… totally worthless
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Religion isn’t about being a good person, it’s about believing in and following the dogma and rules of the religion regardless of consequences.*
I’m not saying that every churchgoer is in good faith. True religion is about personal comportment, about finding one’s values and adhering to them. Most people in good faith are quiet and keep to themselves about it. They are all around you, but they really have no personal need to tell you what they believe. I also wonder what drastic consequences they have chosen to ignore?
Being religious is at best about being amoral. Being good is anathema to religion, since being good requires that you take account of the real world, and the real effects of your actions. And yes, religious people can be good - but only by being bad religious people; by being willing to put people and reality above their religion.
Because morals come from science and Christians don’t have to pay taxes? What is the definition of a good person? A Catholic hospital give out free care to a poor family or the church downtown lets a homeless man come inside on a freezing day and they have become bad religious people by accepting and trying to help an unfortunate reality? If you’re only in a religion for the afterlife, fine, I’ll cede to the point. But I’ve seen so much charity and support of the arts in churches that I think they can be quite valuable to society.
*As said, no. Agnosticism is sucking up to religion, giving it a privileged position, treating it much more seriously than it deserves. People aren’t agnostic about the existence of Santa Claus; they think an adult who believes in Santa is an idiot.
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True, but I’m sure there was a time when you wondered whether or not Santa Klaus existed (we actually do have stories of Saint Nicholas, upon which the modern Santa is based). No god or god is just more important to most people than a man in red velvet.
Either way, it is possible that God put rocks down in the ground with half decayed Carbon isotopes or messed up fossil records or what have you. Do I believe that? No, and in fact I do get annoyed when people bother trying to prove things that happened in the Bible, because once that happens they are missing the point of Christianity. To this end, agnosticism is annoying because it tries to reason faith, but it is still the most rational position. Yes, it can be a cop-out, but ignorance is a rational position. Besides, we often keep our universal ignorance in check with particular knowledge.
Richard Dawkins hypothesizes that religious belief gets deep-seeded because children get it from their parents, and children are wired to incorporate early instruction into their hardware. Necessarily, children need to obey commands like, “dont go near the alligators,” but the brain gives the same kind of urgency to superfluous cultural noise like superstition and religion (and maybe stuff like xenophobic fears).
Those are not religious teachings.
You don’t need religion for that. Atheists do the same.
Ha ha ha. Good one.
Morals are genetic. They are part of our evolved biology as a social species.
Horseshit. If this were true, Qadgop the Mercotan would be out of a job.
Hey, he didn’t specify good morals! Plenty of bad conduct is based on moral systems that emphasize the individual or their family/group/clan above other individuals in rather negative ways.
Anyway, I’ve got a ton of work to do today…
Morals are taught. We can see this by looking at the various modern societal moral standards for, say, treating women. There has been no great genetic mutation in countries with universal suffrage over the last hundred or so years. We can also see shifts in morals over the last few thousand years as a result of societal changes, like the Romans thinking it was perfectly acceptable to leave a sickly child to die of exposure. The Romans, like many early Americans, also found no problems with slavery.
Christianity is one of many avenues to developing one’s own morals. Any religion can function as such, so can philosophy for that matter. I’m not saying that religion is the only way, but certainly a viable one.
Not horseshit, backed up by evidence. Research also shows that early childhood trauma stops the empathic response from developing in the brain, and that’s how you get psychopaths.
Basically, though, stuff like empathy, bonding, nurturing isntincts and other kinds of altruistic instincts are just functions of brain chemistry.
What did you think it was, magic?
Cultural codes are taught, but the essential, emotional components of “moral” responses are biological. Humans don’t have to be taught to love their offspring anymore than cats and dogs do. We are a social species. Our brain biology is evolved to sustain our survival in populations, not just as individuals. You can see some of the same “moral” instincts in other primates (hell, you can see it in dogs). There’s nothing magical or mystical about human morality.
That’s just one hypothesis among many, Dio. The evidence is pretty tentative, and lots of serious neuropsych folks think that’s not anywhere near the whole story.
Noone is claiming they know what makes a psychopath. Noone who’s not a quack, anyway.
Morals, in the sense of the principles or rules which prescribe what is right and wrong to do, may certainly be taught, and may change over time.
Many crucial factors which drive and dictate an individual’s moral behavior, however, are not taught. Individual differences in empathy are evident from infancy and are easily observed across individuals. Related abilities or tendencies towards perspective taking also vary across individuals in ways that appear to be due to inherent constitutional features. Certainly, you yourself know people who reflect different positions on a dimension of “typically caring about other’s feelings,” “being thoughtful,” or “being able to put oneself in others’ shoes.”
This is not to say that one’s morality, in the sense of how one actually behaves with respect to right and wrong, is immutable. It appears to be much more of a function of an interaction between constitutional features and environment. Milgram’s famous experiments indicate that even fairly subtle social pressures can cause people to engage in behavior that they believe is markedly wrong or immoral, while also suffering from significant distress while doing so.
Nevertheless, in terms of structures of moral behavior, justifying one’s behaviors based on having been told what one should do by someone else is relatively low-level moral reasoning, as is doing something to avoid harm or to earn reward. In this sense, even a hospital providing free care to the indigent may reflect low levels of moral reasoning if the justification is because Jesus said it would be a good thing to do.
ETA: Dio, QtM is right about that hypothesis. If only preventing psychopathy were that simple. In fact, if you just flip your own hypotheses around (about being wired for empathy etc), then you can envision people varying along dimensions based on variations in that hard-wiring, and see how some people are going to be at the low end on key dimensions. NB: that does not at all rule out important interactions with the environment that foster differing outcomes, however.
Maybe that’s not the only way to get psychopaths, but it appears to be one way.
Anyway, the point is that psychopaths are - well, pathological. Their brains are different. It isn’t because they weren’t taught morality.
Dodged a bullet there. It just says because some apologetics can couch their arguments in the form of a logical argument (like Liberal’s beloved MOP), belief in god can have a rational basis. It’s not exactly a winning argument…
No. The root of “atheism” is ἄθεος (a-theos), “without god”, not “a-theism”. The -ism came later.
Um…more like enlightened self-interest. Societies promote and enforce moral and ethical behavior because failing to do so leads to the disintegration of that society. The alternative is a life that is nasty, brutish, and short, to paraphrase Hobbes.
One does not need to train a child to be bad. Neglect will do that just fine.
We never would have gotten to the societal stage if we hadn’t already developed the “moral” building blocks to survive in primal populations.
Neglect is training. Also, children will be “bad” even without neglect.
…hence, evolution. Human intelligence. The capablity to understand that certain behaviors end up hurting the whole and must be curtailed.
You are right that the roots of ethics are, more or less, innate, but the entire idea of the noble savage, pure and moral before being corrupted by civilization, is ridiculous. With no social suasion, people very often behave badly. Trivial, but telling, example.