That you haven’t apparently read your own book is evident - no need to keep reminding us.
And while you are digesting that how about a cite for the second sentence? And I’ll just note in passing that as the majority of the world claim to be religious if your claim were true it just further undermines your position.
By an astonishing coincidence, secular philosophies likewise often come up with some form of the golden rule; they were doing it loooong before Christianity got up and running, in greatly varying cultures at rather impressive distances.
I could list a number for you, sure as you can likewise name a number of religions which “suggest” one should persecute others.
What gives him such authority? I’m missing a step in your argument. If, say, he created this universe for the purpose of making women suffer, then would raping and murdering them suddenly become commendable as good action A – such that refraining from same, or forcibly stopping others from doing so, would be blameworthy actions B and C?
Well the Bible gives pretty clear indications as to how one should deal with people inconveniently occupying land you happen to want.
You don’t need God to tell you not to beat up your neighbor - not beating up the guys in the other tribe is the hard part. God seemed to find that okay until relatively recently.
It sounds like you’ve never studied Ethics. There are plenty of secular reasons to live peaceably, not the least to keep the relatives of those you kill from killing you, and also not to run afoul of secular police authority. What atheists actually say is that we are demonstrably as good as those who claim that their morals come from god.
I don’t know. The people they sacrificed were captured enemies, who were no danger to the tribe. I don’t think the sacrifices added to the wealth or power of the king - except perhaps in that the priests told the king that without the sacrifices the gods would be angry and cause them to lose power.
I’ve read the Bible three times through, and I based my statements on those reads. Many atheist posters assure me that it’s full of instances of women being oppressed, but when I ask for specifics, they always fail to provide them. Kind of like you just did.
You’re actually asking for a cite about the human rights abuses endured by third-world workers who make goods for the first world? Really?
Forced labor in the garment industry.
Child slavery in the chocolate industry.
Human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia.
Of course many people will say that they are opposed to slavery and abuses of women, but actions speak louder than words.
How so?
It takes two people to conduct a financial transaction, one to buy and one to sell. If my entire society consists of just two people, than two people is enough to determine what constitutes money and what constitutes morality.
However, most of us today live in societies consisting of millions of people. So it takes considerably more than two. There isn’t a hard cut-off. The larger a percentage of people who agree that something is good, the more solid that moral claim becomes.
We can even observe moral shifts occurring in front of our very eyes. Fifty years ago homosexuality was an abomination. Fifty years from now our children will probably live in a world where intolerance toward homosexuality is an abomination.
The only way you can argue that moral laws exist as some sort of unwavering, God-given absolute is to close your eyes to the obvious evolution that occurs over time.
Christians never seem to read the Bible.
"“Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.”
There are plenty of other examples. So much for the absolute morality of God. Christians are moral relativists just as much as atheists. They just don’t own up to it.
But that dodges the obvious question of whether you’re really willing to assert that things actually become morally good and morally bad based on the opinions of the majority. Take the examples you’ve given. Fifty years ago in England all the major Christian churches held the position that homosexuality should be legal. (Cites in this thread if you need them.) The government of England decided that homosexuality should remain illegal, presumably mirroring the will of the majority. So are you willing to assert that what the churches taught on the issue actually was immoral in 1960, and that supporting the legalization of homosexuality only became moral later when it became much more popular? Or to take the issue of slavery, in 1537 Pope Paul III declared that slavery in America [was evil](Sublimus Dei), but the decision-makers in America decided that it was good instead. (No recorded statement about what the slaves themselves felt, but I bet most of them would have sided with the Pope if they had the chance.) So do you assert that what the Pope said was immoral when he said it and that opposing slavery only became moral after the immoral minority of opponents of slavery finally convinced the majority three centuries later?
And the other position seems to be that things actually become morally good and morally bad based on the opinions of one guy: white beard, lives in the sky, can declare homosexuality fine tomorrow if he sees fit. Have I got that right?
No. I believe that slavery is always wrong, so I believe that the Pope was moral in opposing it. But I admit that my belief that slavery is wrong is entirely the result of my being a member of a contemporary community that believes slavery is wrong.
As a Christian, you have a bigger problem. If morality is the absolute law of God, and God’s law says that slavery is fine except in certain circumstances (Hebrew owning other Hebrews, for example) aren’t you compelled to argue that the Pope’s opposition to slavery was immoral? After all, the Southern Baptists split with the rest of the American Baptist church over exactly this point.
Actually what’s funny is that you just said that secular humans trying to maintain their own wealth and power tend to practice intitutionalized human sacrifice, with sufficient enthusiasm as to resemble mayan religious rituals.
Believing absurdities may be useful in allowing you to maintain your religious beliefs (and honestly what’s a little more absurdity added to the pile), but you should probably take note of the fact it’s not particularly compelling argument.
Not even close. Secularism as said has plenty of good reasons to support benevolence over predatory cruelty, such as the desire to avoid such predatory cruelty inflicted on yourself. That’s a much better basis than “God said so” for morality. And the other major difference is that secular ethical systems are normally based on real consequences to real people; religious “ethical” systems are based on imaginary consequences (like an afterlife) to imaginary things (like souls), usually as laid down by an imaginary being.
Secular ethics tends to work to make the world a better place for people, because it focuses on the real world and on real people. Religious attempts at ethics tends to make the world worse even when well meaning, because they focus on imaginary things regardless of the real world consequences. Like torturing real people to save their imaginary souls from the wrath of an imaginary God in an imaginary afterlife.
The majority of whom? The slaves? Your argument implicitly takes the slaver’s position that the slaves were subhuman and their opinion didn’t count.
Yes, but then there’s still the obvious question: what is the moral basis for your belief that slavery is wrong? You say that your belief in the wrongness of slavery results from your surrounding society, and thus you’d likely believe slavery to be right if you’d been born into, say, a white plantation family in the South 200 years ago. That’s a position admirable for its intellectual honesty; a great many people would not be willing to say as much. But what then is the reason why you believe that “slavery is always wrong”?
It can’t be that the human race at large sees slavery as wrong. Every ancient civilization, once it reached a certain degree of organization, had some institution that could reasonably be described as slavery. It can’t be that modern, progressive opinion has turned against slavery. As I mentioned above, most folks are quite willing to buy cheap junk made using forced labor and just not think about it very much. So if slavery is truly “always wrong”, how can that be if there’s no moral authority outside of the human race?
Or the same question arises on any other issue. If you believe in morality determined by “social consensus”, then you have to realize that moral ideas that are part of the social consensus now were once very rare. But, in each case, some person or small group believed in a rule and worked hard to convince the majority to change views. In many cases the process took generations or centuries. For example, in the late 19th and early 20th century only a tiny group of people believed it was imperative to protect the environment while majorities (at least in this country) were content to pave everything and drive wild species to extinction. John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, along with a handful of others, believed in the task and fought for it, and now it’s mainstream. But if Muir and company had followed the social consensus then, we wouldn’t have a pro-environment consensus now.
We’ve had threads on the that before that I don’t really want to rehash now.
No, you do not have that right.
Slavery is always wrong for ME. But my beliefs about slavery only carry weight to the extent that others agree with me.
If I’m a John Muir or a Martin Luther King or a John Brown … if I hold beliefs about right and wrong that are out of the mainstream for my time … then I’m in no way compelled to adopt the standards of the time. What is wrong for me will still be wrong for me even if nobody else agrees with me. I may be punished for rejecting the dominant morality, but my moral compass is my own.
However, if I want something that is “wrong for me” to become simply “wrong” then I must convince others to agree with me. If I succeed, my standards become the new community standards. And if I fail, then my beliefs die with me and the old standards prevail.
LOL … too bad.
The Bible teaches that slavery is moral. Do you, as a Christian, agree? If not, why not?
If God spoke to you, and told you to kill your son, would you?
It’s pretty easy to be correct when you define your position as the correct one and then argue from there.
What’s YOUR moral basis for saying so? " ‘God’ says it’s wrong" doesn’t work; not only is it untrue as pointed out, but that’s not an “objective” base for morality anyway. God assuming he was real could say that slavery was immoral today, and say it was moral tomorrow. And since God doesn’t actually show up and say anything there’s no actual way to base your actions on his opinions; you have no way of showing that the religious beliefs that oppose slavery are in any more line with God’s actual opinions than the ones that support slavery.
Again; in practical terms, basing your morality on “God” is just basing it on your own whim and putting a divine label on that whim in order to avoid having to justify it. This is true even if your god exists.
Care to elaborate?
Here is your position, as staked out in this thread: “First of all, as a theist, I derive my ethics from a real being, God, not to any imaginary one. Second, as you complain about the “grave danger” of trusting in God, I’m willing to take a chance on that. By contrast, if I were to allow a consensus among secular people to decide what’s good as you suggest, the danger would be much worse.”
You say you “derive your ethics from a real being, God”. What do you derive if that “real being, God” makes it known next week that homosexuality is a put-'em-to-death abomination? What happens if, a week after that, said “God” makes it clear that homosexuality should be legal?
What does it mean to “derive your ethics” from God? Do things become right and wrong because he says so, or is there some other criterion? What happens if he tells you to put an adulterer to death? Can he pop back in centuries later to reverse that? Can he tell you to kill a young woman on her wedding night if she turns out not to be a virgin? Can he authorize slavery? Can he delegitimize it? Is there any declaration he could issue that you’d deem incorrect?
I call this view the inherent atheism of morality. Given the diversity of religions, and the lack of good evidence as to which, if any, is correct, each person decides what is moral and then finds a religion supporting that view. I except the sheep who define morality as the teachings of the last preacher they listened to.
See, you still came back to me and said that doing the bare minimum makes you a good person. Not killing others so their relatives won’t kill you isn’t “going out of your way.” Not getting caught by the police isn’t “going out of your way.” That isn’t demonstrably “as good.” (depending on how you choose to define “as good.”) You have no basis for claiming either is good and yet you still choose to do so. (By the way, I never claimed there weren’t secular reasons to live peaceably… It’s just another topic.)
Really? How would that look? Do we get a list of possible situations, each with a set of check boxes detailing the range of possible actions, and whenever the **entire population of the planet **chooses the same action, we can call that good? That would be ludicrously restrictive… I don’t know if you would get even one action defined as good.
And I can’t believe that you would be claiming we hold a vote and the majority gets to dictate what is “good” to the minority. (well, I could believe that, it just doesn’t make much sense, either."
No, group gets to dictate to any individual what that individuals beliefs are. Since this method doesn’t even adress what they believe, those beliefs aren’t being used in the calculation of “what everyone agrees to.”
People lie. Those who would cheat the system will often claim beliefs they have no intention of upholding. And will even turn in other cheaters; giving themselves more opportunity to cheat themselves, both by reducing competition and by getting a free pass because keeping them around turning others in is more beneficial to everyone else than locking them up.
People don’t know what they actually believe. Studies have shown that people are very good at guessing what others would do in a situation and bad at guessing what they would do. They usually ascribe “higher moral standards,” to themselves than they do to others, and they are often right about the others, and often wrong about themselves. (I put “higher moral standards” in quotes because, an athiest has no basis to choose one objective over another. But I think we all know what I mean.)
Imagine you say, “stealing is wrong,” but then you say “my social status is very important;” “those new Nikes will get me that social status;” “I don’t have the money to buy them;” “I would have to steal them.” Now if you steal them, your social status was obviously more important to you than the principle, “stealing is wrong,” and you didn’t know what your true beliefs were.
So the only real standard you can choose for “good” and “ethical” is the average of human behavior.
Ethical, for an athiest, can only be decidedly average. And deviation in any direction can only be defined as worse, even when most people would call it better.
But, then, after rejecting your own standard for “ethical” you choose something else at random, (redefine your whims as “ethical,”) and then expect credit for it?
I don’t believe it’s about “getting the right answers;” I think it’s about the process of becoming a better person; of trying and failing and trying to get it right again and coming to the right conclusion based on the premise you start with. But, none of you can say what “better” is.
If you want to believe in right and wrong, if you choose to believe that you can make yourself a better person (without being completely average,) and that it is possible to better humanity, or if you just wish to feel you’re superior because you have a better logical position… Then you would be logically and inexorably led to the conclusion that you should simply accept the existence of a higher being.
Atheists can’t find a basis to pick one objective over another. There is no right and wrong. No objective is better than any other.
Athiests can’t find a basis to “better” humanity since the only basis of “ethical” action is based on average human behavior, humanity is always the standard. there is no “better” than that. any deviation from that, in whatever direction, is “worse.”
Atheists shouldn’t feel superior for having a “better” logical position. (First: they don’t,) second: logic isn’t “better” than illogic. A lion still survives without logic. The universe doesn’t applaud logic. As soon as you feel superior, you accept a conclusion that is inconsistant with atheism.
Any atheist that accepts the standards I do, is not ethical, since ethical can only be average, and my standards are not average.
Any logical atheist that chooses to live by the standards I do will be accepting the premise that you can be better, that humanity can be better, that there is right and wrong, and will be led to the conclusion that those beliefs he chooses to accept are inconsistant with the premise that there is no god, and either reject those beliefs, or choose to change his premise.
Again, no. Both because there’s zero reason to think such a being is even possible, much less real; and because the existence of such a being has zero relevance to whether or not something is moral. If your god were to actually show up and say that slavery and murder were moral, that wouldn’t make it true.
We can, and we do. “It makes the world better for more people” is one obvious and common standard. It’s certainly a better standard than claiming the mandate of a being for which you have no evidence that it can exist; no evidence that it does exist; have no evidence that it’s moral if it does exist; and even if it is real and moral you have no way to talk to it. And no, variations on “I feel God’s spirit” aren’t a useful means of communication with “God”, since believers can’t even begin to agree on what “God” is or what it/they are saying".
Even if your god is real, it is useless as a moral guide.