While i have argued with pro-lifers, i have always respected pro-lifers who are consistent in that belief.
I think we have quite a lot of evidence that we die when we die. To the extent that we live on after death, it is in the memories of other people, and in the changes we made to the world. So i hope to leave a good impact on the world.
Yes, standard Christian theology has a rather serious problem. If it’s true, God is a really scary and evil being, and we are all screwed.
Are there any theologies that have thinking entity god(s) that do not have them as similarly scary and capricious in their actions?
It’s not just that God is powerful and capricious. I think all gods are portrayed that way. It’s the promise of infinite punishment for finite sins that is special to Christianity.
And back when most people lived in small, culturally homogenous communities, and didn’t know much about the world outside their community, you could at least say, “we all know what God wants of us”. But today that’s manifestly false. Each community has a different idea of what God wants us to do. Many of those wants are incompatible. And there’s really no good way to determine who is “right”. Surely, if God really wanted us to behave in certain ways, God could have been more clear in communicating that to all of humanity.
So either God wants different people to do different things, or God doesn’t actually care all that much, or God is intentionally setting up most of humanity to rot in hell. (Or there is an underlying flaw in our understanding of God, such as believing in such an entity at all.)
The much loved by Calvinists verse about “Vessels of Wrath”. Human beings made by God purely so that God can make them suffer to show just how good He is,
Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?
What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory,
Romans 9:21-2
And Calvinists think all humans were made to be Vessels of Wrath.
Yeah, me too. But I don’t take seriously their claims that their morality is objectively correct, and I don’t want them to mandate their beliefs in law.
Just the ‘killing almost all people and animals on Earth’ part seems plenty scary and evil to me.
This would be much easier if the god(s) in question are not omnipotent, because otherwise, they have to be allowing extensive suffering. But I don’t know of any monotheistic religions where God is not all-powerful, and for polytheism, I’m not sure if all feature a ‘chief god’ who is all-powerful
Because so much of what happens in the world is unfair, and pointless suffering common, it’s hard to see how any omnipotent god could be good. If a god or gods are not all-powerful, then this isn’t a problem, because they might be doing the best they can to avert evil. But I don’t know
I don’t think it matters. Some beliefs are by nature incompatible with others, and as such it doesn’t really matter if they are “objectively moral” or not, the people who hold them are opposed to each other anyway. And in any case if I somehow learned my beliefs were “objectively immoral” I wouldn’t care , for the reasons I’ve already discussed that just means being a good person is “objectively immoral”.
There’s also the issue that while there’s not much if any in the way of provably “objectively moral” beliefs ,there actually are plenty of objectify wrong beliefs. I don’t actually need to prove that the bigots are objectively wrong morally, since they are objectively wrong factually.
And if basing their actions on falsehoods doesn’t make someone in the wrong we might as well just abandon that whole line of argument anyway.
For once, I agree with @Der_Trihs. At some point you have to say “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” if you’re told that ‘objective morality’ requires doing something you personally feel is very wrong.
I don’t agree with this, however (in general, not in this specific instance). If someone decides not to steal from their employer or cheat on their spouse because they believe they will go to hell if they do, that doesn’t mean they are in the wrong, it means they are doing good things for bad reasons.
I read a book many moons ago called Moral Minds by Marc Hauser. In it he posited that morality is an innate part of human development and is acquired similar to language. He discussed studies of sociopaths, who have their own internal sense of right and wrong, they just lack the ability to care whether their actions are aligned with their sense of morality.
In fact, morality is so ingrained, it appears that moral intuition comes first, emotions second and reasoning for why they think the thing is wrong come dead last. My takeaway from this is that rational moral justifications are just the consciousness’ way of making sense of one’s own completely innate and unreasoned moral beliefs. Morality is an instinct. This fits with other reading I’ve done that suggests different thoughts and emotions come from competing neural networks. Why we think we do something appears to have nothing to do with why we actually do it. There are extreme examples of this where brain-damaged patients who know they are brain-injured make up clearly fabricated reasons for why they take certain actions. And they appear to believe these obviously false things (I’ll have to dig this up, I’m curious to revisit it now.) That’s not even getting into the studies where people routinely make moral decisions that contradict their professed values.
There are a lot of values that seem almost entirely universal, what seems to shift is how those values are prioritized. For example, a person who is liberal and one who is conservative may both value life, but they have other values they will prioritize over life when their morality calls for it. In my case there are circumstances where I think autonomy is more important, in other people’s cases, the value of justice trumps life.
I have a clearly defined sense of right and wrong and if science is to be believed, my reasoning for it is all bullshit. It’s there for an evolutionary purpose; probably to increase social cohesion, establish group order, that sort of thing.
Knowing this doesn’t make bad things feel any less wrong, dammit!
But yeah, I guess take your own moral code with a grain of salt.
If you study ethics, you can create ethical codes which allow you to tell people they are acting unethically based on specific premises. On the other hand, in supposedly objective moral systems you do not need these premises or arguments, but consider things objectively moral or immoral based on the supposed lawgiver. We can fairly build several ethical arguments against slavery. However, of someone takes the Bible as the source of objective morality, they will have a hard time calling slavery immoral. Was it moral in Biblical times and not now? Something dependent on time is hardly objectively immoral.
Anyone claiming there is an objective moral system needs to give evidence of the lawgiver, and why we should listen to them especially if we can make ethical arguments against their morality.
Simple example. Same sex marriage is clearly not ethically wrong, since no one is hurt and claims that it will destroy society (some made right here during the time this was a debate) have been demonstrated to be incorrect.
However many preachers claim it is objectively immoral based on a clear reading of the Bible. I know you can get readings that can be shown to say it is okay, but the Bible comes down on both sides of many issues. This is a good argument against objective morality - if you pick and choose what is moral by selecting the passages of your moral source that please you, it is hardly objective.
That tends to happen when it’s a set of documents written and compiled over many centuries, by people with different agendas.
Which is reasonable. It is the people who think it is entirely divinely inspired that get me. They are the people who claim contradictions are not contradictions if you twist your eyes just so, or ignore the other side of whatever piece of “morality” they support.
All well and good. But these explain how we come to have senses of morality commonly shared. It doesn’t inform about its reality outside of arbitrariness. Evolution has selected for the senses of vision and smell for better survival and reproduction reasons: light wavelengths and the chemicals our olfactory receptors react to are still real, and, we presume, exist even if we do not sense them.
I believe that some basic human rights exist. I do not accept that the position of they do not exist is as valid of a reflection of reality.
The moral systems are the specific premises that the ethical codes are built upon. They are the postulates. That which we hold as self evident counts. You start with the premises which based upon your moral senses.
No. Such is not required.
I’ll need proof of the “lawgiver”.
I’ll be the karen of the paranormal. Show me your badge number. Call your supervisor.
If I’m required to believe is some man-made moral code of ethics I need more than a very old book of fairytales that’s been so adulterated/translated, if it were ever true we can’t know it, here and now.
Huh. I haven’t read that book, but I must have read others that came to the same conclusion.
Yes. And all moral theories are working backwards, trying to rationalise and systematise our moral intuitions, and resolve contradictions. (And there’s no reason to believe our moral intuitions aren’t inherently contradictory.)
Something I’ve been wondering for a while is whether there is any point to theories of morality/ethics at all, since they are likely to be ignored or abandoned if and when they contradict someone’s moral intuitions. In which case, why not forget about theories and rely on the intuitions? Judging from the past, it’s generally better if people avoid doing something if their moral intuition tells them it is very wrong.
But then it occurred to me that moral theories can also induce people to behave better than they otherwise would, by persuading them to do things their intuition does not prioritise, like donating to charities that help distant people. So maybe it is best to follow some kind of ethical code, but ignore it if it tells you to do something you intuitively feel is morally wrong?
I don’t know, maybe this is all circular, because you can only evaluate which is best according to your own moral code and/or intuitions?
I have also read about this. There’s a decent summary on this blog:
Present the left hemisphere with a picture of a chicken claw, and the right with a picture of a wintry scene. Now show the patient an array of cards with pictures of objects on them, and ask them to point (with each hand) something related to what they saw. The hand controlled by the left hemisphere points to a chicken, the hand controlled by the right hemisphere points to a snow shovel. So far so good.
But what happens when you ask the patient to explain why they pointed to those objects in particular? The left hemisphere is in control of the verbal apparatus. It knows that it saw a chicken claw, and it knows that it pointed at the picture of the chicken, and that the hand controlled by the other hemisphere pointed at the picture of a shovel. Asked to explain this, it comes up with the explanation that the shovel is for cleaning up after the chicken. While the right hemisphere knows about the snowy scene, it doesn’t control the verbal apparatus and can’t communicate directly with the left hemisphere, so this doesn’t affect the reply. The patient instead confabulates .
What did ”the patient” think was going on? This is a wrong question. Once you know what the left hemisphere believes, what the right hemisphere believes, and how this influences organism behavior, then you know all that there is to know.
The explanation I heard for this kind of confabulation is that the left hemisphere tries to maintain a narrative that makes sense of one’s actions, while the right hemisphere acts as a reality check, flagging up contradictions between this narrative and reality. This is why patients who have a stroke in their right hemisphere are more likely to deny they are paralysed, or to claim an affected body part somehow belongs to someone else.
While I was searching for a summary, I came across a mention of this book on the subject, which seems interesting - Maybe you have even read it?
Here’s where I saw it talked about, with a link to the (free) first chapter:
Abortion and the death penalty?
+1
Human rights are entirely a social construct. There is no one definition of them, they have frequently changed over time, and many cultures either don’t recognise the concept, or have a very different list. Things we regard as rights also conflict frequently, so they aren’t even consistent.
If there is an underlying reality, it’s whether an (evolved or cultural) value promotes individual and group survival and flourishing, especially in combination with others.
I see no problem with that. Goods often conflict. To give an extremely simple example, reading until i feel full today may conflict with saving enough food to safely get through the winter. Those are solid appropriate goals (unless you want to lose weight, i guess) but they conflict.
So “freedom of speech” and “don’t hurt other people” are both fine aspirations, and there’s nothing weird about the fact that they sometimes conflict with each other, that doesn’t make our moral compass “inconsistent”.
What is “better” if all moral judgements are equally arbitrary and without any validity?
Logically there is no justification for any action or inaction other than that it happened to have been selected for by evolutionary and less so cultural mechanisms. In that framework your sense of it being “right” or “better”, your willingness to make sacrifices for any moral reason, is an illusion, that you are intellectually saying you disbelieve.
Again it eventually comes to the same place as Free Will does: as a thinking and deciding entity I can acknowledge the intellectual arguments that there really is no such thing as Free Will. There are no intellectual arguments against it that are convincing to me. Yet I still necessarily experience making the decision, having a Will. No matter how much I accept the argument that I really don’t have any choice about it. So Free Will may be an illusion but it is a necessary one that underpins my very sense of self. No matter how strong the arguments against it I cannot avoid believing it in my actions, in “my heart”, in “my soul.” (And please debate that other than here.)
That “moral instinct” is closely tied to it. We cannot help but experience it as something as real as Free Will; the experience of moral values that are real, real enough to make great sacrifices for, to suffer and die for, and yes to punish those who harm others, is arguably part of the mechanism of Free Will, of our experiencing making a choice. I don’t believe we can choose to not experience it. Any more than I can choose to not experience the feeling of pain at a bee sting, the taste of coffee … My experience in each case is in my mind, it is unavoidably real to me, and I accept it reflects something real in the world. And again an objective moral reality to me implies some god concept even as I reject the concept of god as a thinking entity, let alone one that has shared revealed truths with us in some text or who does anything.
Pulling back to the OP - could my and your experienced reality of the bee sting, of the taste of coffee, of beliefs that causing needless pain is wrong and reducing suffering is right is a very real sense, real enough to sacrifice for, all be hallucinations? Sure. Just as the demons are for someone experiencing them.
But each of just have experiences in our brains made up that are responses to the actual world, not the actual world. If we mostly all say we experience coffee having a taste and a feel we accept it as something real. If we mostly all see something like birds flying we accept that as a real thing. We mostly all experience very similar moral senses. To me it makes just as much and just as little sense to accept them as real and what that therefore implies.
A meaningless question, since that doesn’t resemble reality. We aren’t emotionless blobs floating in some void where our actions have no effect on ourselves or the world. We live in a world that has objects and events independent of our opinions and desires. We have results and experiences that we prefer, and others that we want to avoid, and our course of action will affect which we get.
None of this is “equally arbitrary”, and “it works” is all the “validity” needed. Certainly a better stamp of approval than that of some fictional evil god.
Well. I believe they should exist. That’s something. It’s also pretty rational for people to agree that they do exist, if only in their own interest.
Yeah, it’s tricky. There’s what I believe is right and what I actually do, and the vexation caused by the gulf between them. The last few months I’ve felt like I’m not on the right path. Haven’t meditated and haven’t been to Sangha, even though both of those things seem to have a lot of benefit for me and people around me. It’s been really hard for me not to think of this nefarious other ruining my country. I recently muted all political threads, because that’s at least a step away from demonizing the other.
I find Buddhism useful because it is a sort of guidepost. When I took the precepts, the point was to have a guiding set of principles from which to act. But I chose that particular religion because I already agree it is the right thing. Having that framework just helps me close that gap .
I’ve often said religion has an exacerbating influence on people. It can inspire people to lean into their best qualities - and their worst ones. It depends on the person, and probably the circumstance.
I added that book to my wishlist. Sounds right up my alley.
Your concept of “god” is not part of what I am talking about nor is “approval” of it.
Getting results and experiences that you prefer and taking actions based on whether or not “it works” may be enough validity for you. You say so, anyway.
It isn’t enough for me. Personally I will sometimes choose to do things knowing that they won’t work, that doing what I believe is “the right thing” will fail to result in the result I desire. I think that is true for most of us. And I don’t expect to be awarded in an afterlife or avoid punishment there by the choice. People make great sacrifices by that mindset but it true on small scales: most of us act ethically and honestly just because, not because it gets us anything or avoids us anything. Just because it is right to do so.