No, I was asserting, in that particular instance, that the validity or not of atheist morality **has nothing to do **with the validity of theist morality. That is all.
I’ve dealt with the validity of the foundations of an atheist morality in other posts, though.
No, it is up to the opponent to show that it is, in fact, broken, first. That’s what he gets for being the first to make the statement.
Meh. While Dibble and Shodan play round after round of “After you…” I just figure a purely theistic morality is contra-indicated by evolution, simply because of the time it wastes in weighing every decision against a checklist of religion-based rules. Unless a person is truly nuts or robotically indoctrinated by smeone who was truly nuts, they make some if not most of their day-to-day decisions without wondering what Jesus (or Muhammed, or whatever) would do, simply by consulting an internal guide.
Sure, the OP could become an atheist, but unless he gets all goofy and fanatical and convert-zealous about it, it won’t make the slightest difference. If he was a nice guy before, he’ll be a nice guy after. If he was a jerk before, the jerkiness will persist.
But like you yourself said, people can be mistaken. I’ve had experiences which I would hope you accept might be as “divine” as yours. I simply ascribe a natural (read neurophysical) explanation to them.
And do you think it accurate to say that if human morality evolved (just as, say, the human brain or immune system evolved), then it is a step of faith to set forth that morality in preference to others? The explanation of the brain and immune system requires no “faith” as such, does it?
The “Golden Rule” and the moral principles of Kant are both based on making universal the principles of reciprocity. No so much “an eye for an eye” as “do unto others as you would be done by”.
No disagreements there.
The mistake the religious thinker typically makes is to assume that, absent the moral authority of the word of God or whatever, people would not be able to access the earlier stages of moral reasoning at all. This leads to the counter-charge from athiests that religious types themselves would all be sociopaths without the “crutch” of moral authority provided by religion. This is in effect the debate over the OP.
The mistake the athiest typically makes is to assume that the only manifestations of religious morality are commandments of the “do not kill” variety, and thus that all religion is concerned with the lowest stages of morality (and that it is only be progressing beyond religion that one may advance to the higher forms not dependant on reliance on authority).
For the most part, I agree with you… however, it’s been my experience that the “Theists would murder if their god didn’t tell them it was bad” argument comes up as a direct result of the theist’s charge that atheists don’t have anything to keep them from committing atrocities.
In other words, if a theist claims that atheists have no compunction against murder (as they have no god to tell them not to do it), the the logical conclusion to draw is that the only thing keeping the theist from murdering is the fact that their god tells them it’s a bad thing.
Heh, pretty well exactly what I said in the paragraph above the one you quoted. 
To expand on my thesis - I think that it is symptomatic of the higher stages of moral reason to see a great deal of convergance and agreement between people, regardless of what the morality is based on (whether it be some version of religious or non-religious moral philosophy). In contrast, people at the lower end of moral reason will be all the more likely to argue bitterly over trivial differences.
The reason is pretty simple - the higher the level, the more it is based on general principles of universal application, and the less on specific commandments or instructions; and often those universal principles are basically the same no matter how derived (the classic example being the Golden Rule). In contrast, lists of commandements can vary infinitely and without reliance on general principles of the instructed individual concience it is difficult to tell which are truly important.
You’ve got the Golden Rule right, but it doesn’t specify reciprocity. What you should do doesn’t depend on what the other person does in return. If you think what is right to do is exactly what the other person does to you, that’s reciprocity, and that is not advanced moral reasoning.
I dunno, I have always thought of the Golden Rule as an “ethic of reciprocity”.
Others have so described it:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/reciproc.htm
Indeed, “ethic of reciprocity” appears to be generally treated as synonymous with the Golden Rule. The argument that the Golden Rule is not a form of reciprocity I haven’t heard before.
I think what you mean by “reciprocity” is only its most narrow possible meaning. My making of reciprocity an ethic, that is a rule of universal application, one means something more like the Golden Rule.
Except that by virtue of being the OP and I wasn’t referring to a prior argument there was no opponent to mischaracterize.
Other than not meeting the essential criteria, I think you’re onto something.
I am clearly influenced by the moral pedagogy, but I also don’t want to mop up the blood. There are definitely times where I think about religious morality and it stays my hand in terms of my actions. It’s not the sole concern at certain point acting morally becomes reflexive, a natural consequence of our training and analysis, but I do not believe you can derive morality from self-interest alone.
That was the interpretation from a Catholic lay priest. shrug One must understand the cultural context in which Abraham lived with idol worship and human sacrifice, I think to comprehend it. One thing I think that is left out of this is that people think that human beings are inherently rational, and that people were rational in Abraham’s time. Couldn’t it be possible that Abraham was actually dumb as a post regarding such issues? That within the bible’s literary context, Abraham may have needed such an explicit lesson to get it?
Capital punishment can be thought of as human sacrifice in the abstract, but in this context it’s not the same thing. It’s one thing to kill someone who is upsetting the social order and is a drain on the overall civil economy, and entirely another to ritually slaughter your child in order to appease the caprice of a cruel God.
You mean, you accept that evolution might have shaped your morality just as it shaped your stomach or thumb, but there is still self interest at work insofar as you don’t want the inconvenience of taking a human life? These aren’t mutually exclusive propositions, regardless of the fact that the second factor would only eclipse the first in an actual psycopath - agreed?
Or maybe, your morality stays your hand regardless of its source, and you merely apply a post-hoc religious rationalisation to that retraint. Again, I don’t believe you are the type of person (read “suffer from cognitive disfunction”) who would start carrying out those actions if he became an atheist.
Read the book I recommended. If others can remember when you screwed people over somehow, your self-interests would be confounded compared to competitors whose co-operation they can remember. This goes a heck of a long way to deriving the morality we observe in humans today.
Regardless of how stupid Abraham might have been (and I try never to undersetimate someone’s potential stupidity, especially in scripture where everyone seems as dumb as posts), it’s still quite dumb on God’s part to try and start off prohibiting human sacrifice by ordering somebody to do it when they otherwise wouldn’t. It would take some pretty tortured thinking to decide that that avenue was rational on God’s part. (It’s good to hear that it’s not your tortured thinking, though. 
)
(And I don’t see what capital punishment has to do with this at all.)
He didn’t order Abraham NOT to sacrifice Isaac. The lesson was that he wouldn’t ask him to do such a thing.
You quoted a passage from Deuteronomy about stoning someone in the tribe for being lazy. That’s capital punishment, or at least resembles it in as much as we can conflate a modern context with the ancient one.
Funny, I thought that he did order Abraham not to sacrifice Isaac - at the last second. After ordering him TO sacrifice Isaac, which is what inspired the old guy to take his kid to the top of the mountain in the first place. Perhaps you’re talking about a different story about some other Abraham and Isaac, in which God isn’t capricious and ordering people to do terrible things, for the stated purpose of proving that his tyrannical control over his people exceeded even the strength of their love for their children.
Having rechecked the text, it’s clear that the interpretation you offer for it is not only unsupported by the text, but also directly contradicted by it. The thinking that would have to justify that self-deception must be so tortured, it’s surprising any thinking survived the process (if, indeed, any did). So it’s very fortunate for you that it wasn’t you who went through the arduous process of thinking it up. 
So you’re saying that the OT god wasn’t a sadistic bastard who would kill children for no reason - but that instead he was a sadistic bastard who would kill children for the most trivial and undeserving of reasons. Gotcha. (Though, he did order Isaac’s death. Just to be clear on that.)
begbert2 You are judging the law of a culture that you have never lived in. That’s all well and good, but you don’t even acknowledge the historical context of religion. As such it makes discussing these things impossible. This is not to say that your arguments have no merit, they may, but you are interested in trying to prove to me that God is a sadistic bastard and not trying to understand hte historical context.
I fully acknowledge the historical context of religion. For example, I don’t think that it was at all foolish for ancient peoples to fully believe in their dieties and myths and legend as if they were hard solid proven fact. They didn’t know any better, or have any avenue for knowing any better. So believeing that all their scriptures and stuff were hard fact is perfectly understandable. (Presuming of course they weren’t twisting the meaning of their own texts as dramatically and as contradictorally to the texts themselves as the preacher you cited did; that’s stupid in any era.)
I very explicitly am not criticizing the ancient peoples. I’m also not criticizing any modern civilizations that might be isolated from modern knowledge an information. I am criticizing two classes of people: modern people who are still religious despite available modern knowledge, and the fictional character God, who presumably also is to be considered an enlightened being, regardless of the era he’s spoken of in. It is possible for me to discuss these groups without falling afoul of cultural problems, though, so your criticism is meritless, and my arguments still stand, and are applicable.
If you’re not able to defend your position, just concede. Incorrectly pretending that nobody else is fit to argue with you is unseemly.
Do you think that in a tribal agrarian society it is reasonable to have a grown man consuming his family’s resources while contributing nothing to it’s collective survival?
I figure that’s what you mean by it’s arbitrarily cruel to stone a man for being an idle drunkard.
And I don’t pretend that no one is fit to argue with. I can count the people I have refused to argue with in the past couple of weeks on a single hand, while in those same threads I cannot count the number I continued to argue with on two hands. You and Der Trihs are not, ‘everybody’.
You mean “A stubborn and rebellious son”, right? Because the “glutton/drunkard” business is part of the punishment, not the crime. Perhaps the most interesting about this situation is that it clearly refers to an individual young enough to be under the charge of his parents. (Though the fact that the charges for the crime are explicitly trumpted-up and falsified in the carrying out of them is pretty interesting too.)
And yes. I think it’s reasonable for a stubborn and rebellious child to be allowed to live, grow up, and learn to mind as he got older, although I do concede that harsh punishment might be merited in the short-term. Adults, of course, would be forced by the usual economics of the situation to either do some work or be left to starve.
Explain to me how this makes your little ‘high and mighty’ pretense anything other than a way to avoid answering arguments that are too difficult for you to counter? Because there doesn’t seem to be a consistent pattern of insult in the posts and posters you reject. Just a consistent pattern of hard-to-counter arguments.