When I relinquished Christianity, or it was torn from me, I was left with pretty much nothing. I think I was at nihilism. Then my freshman year of college, I took a seminar on Nietzsche, and he seemed to encapsulate so perfectly the terrifying feeling of being completely unmoored from faith. But Nietzsche and other existentialists offered an alternative to nihilism, which is embracing life in its full absurdity and building your own framework to suit you. Now I do think there’s something innate about morality, be it psychological or biological, so I’m not claiming you can build this moral framework or idea about the meaning of life without your own internal compass. But it’s an alternative to the “either God or nihilism” fallacy. A lot of my early adulthood was spent reading Nietzsche, Frankl and other existentialists and while that was decades ago, existentialism is still the foundation of my life.
I’ve also been a Buddhist that long, and when I got back into Zen Buddhism and finally became a member of a Sangha last year, I still approach it with the attitude that this is what’s working for me right now rather than some objective truth. Thanks to existentialism I have a soft grip on most of my ideas about what my life means in any given moment and how I choose to pursue life’s meaning.
My morality is relatively unchanged from when I was a Christian though. I tried to impose certain Christian ideas upon myself (like abstinence) but I’ve always been a progressive thinker, despised bigotry and violence, and wanted to do good in the world. That is fundamentally unchanged. Which is why I think morality is probably pretty innate.
At any rate, there’s this whole excluded middle here between God and nihilism and I wanted to point that out.
I agree, but my objective morality is based on a set of ethical guidelines that work for me. The problem with deriving morals from a deist or pantheist god or gods is that by definition we have no idea of what that moral base is. Somewhere in the universe, an asteroid or supernova has obliterated a thriving culture. Does a deistic god know about this? Did it set up the universe so this happens? If so, how could we derive morality from it.
Usually traditional believers bring up the objective morality argument, but they have a problem since their setter of morality never once said that slavery is wrong, to use your example, and even set up rules for it.
I posted my response before reading the other replies. I was talking only about deities with no actual influence in our universe besides creating it or being it. I get that some people find comfort in the idea that the universe was created for a reason, (I don’t) but that does not imply these deities imposed any sort of objective moral code.
There are good evolutionary reasons for not killing someone inside your tribe. We don’t have to posit a deity to explain that kind of objective morality. Throughout human history it has not been a sin to kill those outside your tribe. In the Bible it is sometimes a divine commandment. Having a human generated, or personally generated, moral code, as pretty much all the atheists I know do, is far from nihilism.
I can conceive that in 100 years eating meat from animals will be considered to be immoral, since we need to respect their right to life. So, we shouldn’t pride ourselves on being so moral today, even those who think they get morality from some kind of god. If there is an objective morality, we’ll never know what it is.
Some Jewish traditions interpret the psalm’s vivid descriptions of suffering as a metaphor for the nation’s historical suffering. The interpretation of Psalm 22 varies, with some rabbinic texts.
In Christian tradition, Psalm 22 is a well-known prophecy of the crucifixion of Jesus, with many of the psalm’s details corresponding to the Gospel narratives.
It is possible to have different interpretation of something.
This is a good reason not to care about being ‘on the right side of history’. There’s no real reason to believe future people will have a better idea of what’s objectively right and wrong than present ones.
I also want to believe in objective morality, but logically, I don’t see how it could exist. What agreement we do see on morality among humans is due to evolved moral intuitions, and shared religious and cultural beliefs.
I never really considered the belief in supernatural beings to be a contradiction of science to be honest. Science is a method for describing the natural world based on observation and measurement. it is not equipped to address questions such consciousness, morality, religion or subjective experiences, which lie outside its scope.
Do you believe that human being live on in spiritual form or that this world is just it. You live and die here on this planet nothing more?
Postulates do not follow logically. We do not deduce that parallel lines do not intersect; we accept it axiomatically and Euclidean geometry follows. I accept this axiomatically. I definitely recognize that human moral beliefs do not require it.
Not that I am aware of, but some religions think that demons do have spiritual legal rights. The belief is that demons can quire certain right to oppress people through open doors such as unconfessed sin, occult practices or vows made to them.
When I first started dealing with them they did come as benign beings before revealing their true nature. One of them did mention killing large number of people in the past and that it enjoyed tormenting people in hell.
I am going to assume that they enjoy all the other things you mentioned.
in some interpretations of Christian demonology and folklore, specific demons are associated with and focus on specific sins
According to myth, only one being killed almost all people and animals on Earth, and this same entity both created Hell and sentences people to infinite and ultimate punishment for finite crimes. If demons exist, they are the least of your worries.
From what I understand they did not take him as a serious threat. His small following and ministry would not have even been a huge deal outside of the province. The Roman historians who did mention him did not do so in detail. After he was crucified and his following started to grow he became a bigger concern.
No, it can address most or all of those questions. It’s just that religious people don’t like the answers, so they claim science can’t talk about them.
I believe in objective morality because I otherwise have no right to tell others that something is wrong. In general, some level of objectivity is needed to impose something on others, lest one devolve into authoritarianism.
In other words, if bigotry isn’t objectively wrong, then I have no way of fighting to stop it.
I find that people who claim there is no objective morality seem to all have some very strong moral convictions. Why do you do so if you have no way of knowing if they are right or wrong? If someone else can just decide they are wrong?
That doesn’t mean that morality isn’t socially constructed. I would call it an emergent property. It’s jus that this social construct still necessarily winds up going a certain way in many many cases.
The principles behind why bigotry is wrong are objectively true. The principles behind defending it are objectively false. It’s just it takes interaction with other humans to prove this. We can see the results.
See also fascism/authoritarianism. They ultimately don’t work for the majority of the people involved. The socially emergent property of needing to get along with others lest they rise up against you.
(of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts. Not dependent on the mind for existence; actual.
By definition, a moral code that comes from the mind of a god is no more objective than a moral code that comes from any other mind or minds.
A version of Leibniz’s version of the Euthyphro Dilemma;
“It is moral because a god (subjectively) says it’s moral”
or
“It is moral because there is a (objective) morality that the gods are subject to and enforce.”
There are ways to get to an objective morality like consequentialism and utilitarianism but you can’t get objective morality from a god.
Which where this hijack took off from: the limited mindset of god as a being, something of a mind, a thinking entity that does anything. And why some of us would care about the concept of one that isn’t and doesn’t. At least not in any way comprehensible to our minds.
In other words, you want to impose your personal moral beliefs on everyone else, so you choose to believe objective morality exists and happens to match your personal beliefs…?
Presumably, this is the same logic used by pro-lifers.
IMO, you have as much right to tell others that something is wrong as they do to tell you the same about something else.
How do people choose to believe things anyway? I can’t will myself to believe something different to what I do, for example that any gods exist.