A deity is no more inherently required for good and evil to exist than Super Mario Brothers is. A deity is simply a representation of one or both of the two abstracts.
Actually it must exist outside the structure of religion, as Love can’t operate under constraints. And evidence is meaningless if reality is subjective, which I believe it is.
Well I think you are just making up your own definitions here, that’s not something worth arguing with.
I couldn’t have said it better.
I don’t think you can answer the question usefully without context. Redemption in your own eyes? In the eyes of your victim? According to some abstract moral balance?
No, they aren’t. Except for the matter of the soul which is only just a religious question because they aren’t real; if souls were real then they wouldn’t be just a religious question either.
Ah, standard atheism bashing. We’re all amoral monsters, there’s no reason without God to not go around slaughtering and eating each other. :rolleyes:
As I’ve said many times before, gods are irrelevant to morality; even if gods were real, a god saying something is moral doesn’t make it so. And as I’ve also said before, “objective morality” is equally as meaningless since we have no way to know it, and I for one have no intention of following it if it happens to conflict with what we mere humans have decided is right. I’m not going to start murdering and enslaving people just because some abstract “objective” morality says we should (I notice that people who believe in “objective” morality always assume that it will conveniently agree with their own).
No. Societies do not have morality. People may assuming you believe it exists. Societies can have ethics to a very limited degree, but this is always a case of people beliving in different things, and varying them to their personal taste. It only “exists” to the degree that enough people with sufficient cumulative power can enforce it.
However, the fact that people think this way does not show it actually works this way. Either there is neither good nor evil and repentance is just a meaningless, empty word - or there is a real good and you can fall away from it and repent to become good again (better than you were, in fact).
I love watching SD’ers flail away trying to match up their beliefs in mechanistic atheism and yet maintain their deeply-held belief that good exists. The amusing little insistance that you can repent if you are forgiven and forgive yourself. How lovely: a system which posits that hateful spuse abusers can be forgiven constantly and are always redeemed, while those who hold themselves to a high standard are not - because they haven’t forgiven themselves. Or perhaps that the people who did some minor wrong, but sincerely regret it and want to do better, can never be forgiven if the person they did wrong against are themselves spiteful and nasty and never forgive…
Of course, I suppose they could be just abusing the language to their whim, but it will amount to the same thing in the end.
Whether you personalize it or not, you MUST have a religious belief in a true, correct good, timeless and universal, in order to believe in any good and evil. Otherwise, you’re just fooling yourself. This belief is unprovable, unfalsifiable and cannot be surmised by any analysis of the world we inhabit, unless you are really believing it first and the finding it second.
The OP asks if redemption is possible outside of religion, and your reply is yes, but you need your god to do it right?
Again, wrong. What you are unwilling to grasp is that not everyone feels the need to pretend that good and evil are written into the laws of physics.
Redemption must be outside of religion, I was addressing if it is needed to go through religion to get to redemption. Or in other words must a person experience religion at some point in their life to be redeemed, and my answer is it depends, some will some will not.
Is redemption possible without god and/or spirituality?
Further, redemption doesn’t require any input from the person/people against whom one has sinned. Redemption is entirely between the sinner and God.
Judaism does place value on seeking forgiveness from anyone whom one has harmed. However, it’s still possible to be forgiven by God without being forgiven by human beings.
Without religion, the entire concept of redemption strikes me as meaningless. Redemption is specifically about sin (not about good/bad or right/wrong), and the concept of “sin” exists only within religion.* Further, redemption is about the relationship between humans and God(s) - if there are no deities, there is no relationship to redeem.
On the other hand, there’s no reason that an atheist can’t recognize that he or she has behaved badly and harmed people. Further, there’s no reason an atheist can’t set out to right those wrongs, make amends, and seek forgiveness – from people. That’s more about a sense of closure and moving on than about redemption.
*Questioning this? Would you consider eating a ham and cheese sandwich this coming Saturday (18 September)? Why or why not?
I don’t think so; people do say things like “redeem themselves in X’s eyes” when “X” is a human, not a god.
Actually, I’m going to revise my contribution as I’ve realised a fatal flaw in any idea that “redemption” requires forgiveness of the person you harmed. If you harm someone, they may later become unable to forgive (key example is they may die before they forgive you).
If morals are mostly social though, then it is only in the eyes of whatever society judges someone to have done wrong that the someone can be redeemed. Hence “self forgiveness” whilst poetic has nothing to do with redemption either.
To smiling bandit - you seem to be confusing “atheism” with “utilitarianism” and “religion” with “deontological ethics”. The concepts are disjoint. Religion is a way of framing and representing morality, not a source of it. Christianity is a key example - it has both utilitarian and deontological requirements, but practitioners have to pick and choose which ones are important based on some external morality.
I thought redeemtion came from god. No god, no redeemtion.
You just gotta learn to live with it, whatever it is.
I can’t see how without God, as we are gods (little child gods). The closest thing I can think of is Buddhism, which as I understand it, is it realizing who we are, though they chose not to use the word ‘god’ but substitute beings of light & love. And a connection to a ‘oneness’ of light and love. But admitting that I have only attended 2 Buddhist ‘services’ so I may not be correct in that.
We are also spirits and it is the spirit that is being redeemed and the spirit is who we really are, not the physical body. So I’d have to say that I can’t see how it’s possible.
I believe it is. But that’s only 1 person’s belief. So doesn’t really matter much.
But I believe it is certainly possible for atheists to be “redeemed” by a religion, without ascribing to that religion. But those are only my personal religious views and thus if you want mass appeal, well that’s probably a different issue.
Can’t you have subjective redemption, though? As an athiest, I certainly would not argue about there being inherent, objective standards of morality built into the world, but I don’t see why it isn’t possible to have redemption on those subjective standards. As you say, you simply establish a personal and arbitrary system of value.
You can. It’s just that nobody else has any reason to accept it.
I talked it over with a friend, however, and he suggested I might be being too harsh in my standards. After all, most people are implictly accepting the millions of years of evolution which may or may not be forcing communitarian ideals upn us as a method of survival. In this case, it’s perfectly rational to accept them without reflecting on it: it gives you more time and energy for practical things like gathering wealth. In this case, I can’t argue that an unreflective social-acceptance is wrong or “incorrect”. it is, however, limited, and cannot be true except by chance.
Likewise, you can go for a culture-specific morality, but that would in fact require that “evil” be variable by the minute. The Nazis were evil before they gained power and social authority, then they were good, then they were evil again.
Strictly speaking, I would agree with you, except…
The problem is that mechanistic atheism (the prevalent variety today) can have no sources of value other than the personal/arbitrary and the utilitarian: it specifically disallows everything else as a consequence (and watching some people try to wiggle around that is hilarious). It can have ethics according to a specific philosophy, but not a morality.
That said, I do not confuse Religion with Deontology. Religion is is not about morality: no religion has ever been about morality, and Christianity is is the closest perhaps but still not about morality. Religion is about the source of a moral order.Religions teach behavior in a way that reflects their understanding of that moral order. But the morality cannot come before the order. This doesn’t have much to do with Deontology.
Ethics are a code of conduct for ensuring fairness and socially-determined roles, status, and order. People have trouble stepping outside of their own familiar ethics, but most ultimately can accept multiple competing systems. This is complicated because the law may support, ignore, or hinder the social ethics, and because epople with differing cultures or personalities canc lash over what is proper. But the key is what is “proper”.
Morality often partly include an ethical code, but are principally concerned with intrinsic good. An ethical society would likely not interfere with an individual doing something bad to themselves, but moral individuals may choose to do so. Ethics are collective, morality personal.
Here’s the real brain-buster: morals are individualistic because they claim to be universal. Individuals must apply morals as best they can, from a universal set of rules and values. Ethics are social because they are a code which applies only to certain individuals at certain times and situations. They are created, implemented, and monitored by social organizations. The indidivual is left largely to personal judgement in the former, and constrained by social rules in the latter.
An ethical actor, for example, chooses actions based on a (frequently explicit) code which spells out duties and obligations. To the extent he meets those obligations, he has done his duty. However, there is no way to exceed your ethical duties. Morals, however, can be stretched further. You can go beyond what is considered normal and required.
This is not to say one is neccessarily superior to the other. All I can do is explain my understandings of the terms, and accept that some people may differ. And this analysis assumes for the sake of argument that morals may in fact exist.
I think you have a point, having looked up the definitions of redemption, if we ignore any financial meanings regarding redeeming debt then we are left with redemption of sin, and as I stated earlier as an atheist I do not accept the existence of sin. So maybe no redemption is possible without religion. Although this does not mean that one cannot be forgiven for one’s actions.
Maybe for non-theists though there is something in the paying a debt back concept that amounts to a kind of secular redemption. Could this be where the concept of blood money comes from?