Re: Is Existentialism an obsolete philosophy? ...Similarity to religion?

Great Debates
41

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?
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What the heck are you talking about? I’m not rejecting my own standard for “ethical”. I have no idea how you got that from the bit you just copy-and-pasted.

You’re entirely incorrect. I’m imagining an atheist who (a) set a standard for ethical, and then (b) did follow it.

No, there are plenty of other choices available.

While I again think you’re incorrect, I’m not even sure you believe this one. Here’s what you said earlier in the same post: “I never claimed there weren’t secular reasons to live peaceably… It’s just another topic.” Name some of the secular reasons you have in mind and we’ll promptly see whether atheists could use 'em as a basis to pick this or that objective by finding one better than the other.

Heck, maybe that explains this:

What if those “secular reasons” logically get him to the same “right conclusions” as the religious premise? You need to rule out that possibility; step one is naming the secular reasons in question.

42

Pretty much the way the world looks right now. There’s some stuff that virtually everyone agrees is wrong. (Murdering your mother, for example.) And a much larger collection of things that different groups of people assign different amounts of wrongness to. (Cheating a stranger in business, for example.)

The roots of morality are anchored in our human instincts. We feel an aversion toward hurting our close relatives. We feel protective toward babies. We don’t like selfishness. We value loyalty. All of these impulses are a natural part of being a human being.

However, we are also thinking animals. We use our capacity for reason to extend our basic moral instincts into broader moral laws that provide the basis for a larger society that exists beyond the level of our immediate family or tribe. However, different cultures will choose to extend their moral instincts in different ways. They’ll make different choices about what rules are important and when they apply.

This doesn’t mean that “anything goes” or that “right and wrong are subject to vote”. Within an homogeneous community right and wrong are understood through consensus. And when two communities with competing standards of right and wrong bump up against each other, they settle the matter through either force or argument. Maybe one society imposes its morality on the other. Or maybe one society is better able to rationally justify its moral choices, and convinces the other to change.

Theological morality is a dangerous brew, because it’s particularly immune to being changed through reason. Believers tend to adopt a set of arbitrary and rigid rules that they enforce inflexibly, even if they are unable to rationally justify them, or even if they run counter to their moral instincts. In extreme cases you get religious fanatics who murder thousands, or harm their own children to satisfy some bizarre moral imperative.

If you believed that God had told you to kill your own son, would you do it?

Abraham would have.

Is that the kind of morality you wish to follow?

43

I see I’ve lost you. I’ll try to keep it to one thought at a time.
Say you choose to belief conclusion “a”, (lowercase for conclusions), and you also beieve proposition “not A”, (and uppercase for propositions). Now, if it turns out that “a” is a logical consequence of proposition “A”, and doesn’t follow from “not A”, then to maintain a consistant and logical belief system, you must either reject proposition “not A” and accept “A”, or you must reject conclusion “a”.
It doesn’t matter whether there is any other reason to believe “A” or not. It doesn’t even matter if it’s true. Your choice to believe conclusion “a” logically demands you accept proposition “A”.

If you create something, who has the right to come along and tell you what purpose you really intended for it; or what is the right thing for you to do with it? If you make your own porcelain tea set with the intent of taking it to the shooting range and using it as target practice, who has the right to tell you, “no, you must use it for tea?” Who can tell you what purpose it has? Do you or do you not have the right to destroy it if you wish or to say how it will be used? Don’t you choose what is the right thing to do with it?

Yes, I agree that you can and do pick objectives. I said you had no basis for saying one is better than any other. “It makes the world better for more people” is one common standard. What objective basis is there for choosing that over, “it makes the world better for me?”

44

Then at that point you’ve screwed up because reality is what it is regardless of what you “choose to believe”.

No, it doesn’t “logically demand” that; once you start talking about “choose to believe” and “it doesn’t matter if its true” you’ve thrown logic out the window.

Whomever owns it, and in the case of intelligent beings that would be the beings themselves. God has no more right to make moral declarations than any other random person, even if he was real and actually talked. He certainly doesn’t have the right to tell us what to do.

That it makes the world better for us collectively; which tends to amount to the same thing. Besides, throwing gods into the mix doesn’t get around that problem; if a god says to do something that doesn’t make it right.

45

No, you reserve that one for yourself.

Why should that matter. Why should making the world better collectively be something anyone cares abouty. Either you must accept transcendent values, or you cannot accept any values at all, or you are an idiot incapable of thinking through the consequences of your beliefs. There is no other possibility. And once you accept transcendent values, you have to accept a source for them of some kind. Whether that is God or not is ultimately a seperate matter.

46

Sorry if I was misleading. I wasn’t using the personal “you,” I was using the collective “you.” As in atheists in general, not you specifically.

[QUOTE=The Other Waldo Pepper]
Quote:

[QUOTE=ch4rl3s]
So the only real standard you can choose for “good” and “ethical” is the average of human behavior.
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No, there are plenty of other choices available.

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There are other choices, yes. How do you choose between them? If these two people believe “A,” and those two believe “B,” and another couple believe “Y,” what tells you which is the “best” objective? I admit that once we have choosen an objective, we can determine which of a set of actions better accomplish it. But, how do you determine which objective is “better” in the first place?

My contention is that any objective that is not agreed to by every human on the planet is subjective. (Maybe I should say “purpose” instead of “objective(noun)” to denote “a purpose to be achieved,” since I’m about to use objective(adj) in it’s other sense, “perceived without distortion by personal feelings.”)

47

Because by definition that includes everyone. Because playing one man against the world means you lose because the world is a lot bigger than you are. Because making the world better ultimately is better for everything I care about, including me.

:rolleyes: That’s ridiculous. Why should I care about “transcendent values” that I have no way of knowing and may not agree with? You are trying to create a false dilemma; there are more alternatives than buying into some mythical “transcendent values” and being a sociopath.

Hardly; the whole point of this kind of argument is to convince people that they need to believe in God to be moral and that people who don’t believe in God are demonically evil.

48

There are other choices, yes. How do you choose between them? If these two people believe “A,” and those two believe “B,” and another couple believe “Y,” what tells you which is the “best” objective? I admit that once we have choosen an objective, we can determine which of a set of actions better accomplish it. But, how do you determine which objective is “better” in the first place?

My contention is that any objective that is not agreed to by every human on the planet is subjective. (Maybe I should say “purpose” instead of “objective(noun)” to denote “a purpose to be achieved,” since I’m about to use objective(adj) in it’s other sense, “perceived without distortion by personal feelings.”)
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Morality is an aesthtic. It’s just personal opinion. Right and wrong is whatever I feel it is. There is no such thing as an objective morality or ethos.

This holds true for theists as well. Even if you choose to follow a religious ethos, you still have to first make an automonous moral decision that following that religious ethos is “right” thing to do. There is no way out of this. At the end of the day, it all just comes down to subjective, personal opinion. “Right and wrong” have no more objective reality than “deliciousness.”

49

One reason religion exists and will always exist (till the Kingdom of God comes) is that without it is a very dark reality there is no hope no future in human based knowledge, and that to many is unacceptable. Things like science just doesn’t have the answers for many people, neither does religion, but it does offer the possibility of them, and that for many seeking real answers will becomes a personal relationship with God over time, and that offers real assured hope and the truth that human studies will never ever satisfy. So as religion as a intermediate step to knowing God it will exist and is needed.

There are many ways to define religion, one such way is human simulation of the spiritual.

From a personal relationship with God point of view religion is a training exercise where you can substitute people for deities. This way you can easily speak and hear from them, look to them for advice from ‘above’, learn basic concepts like giving. It’s a simulated relationship with God, but will fail a person because the ‘priest’ or whoever is the authority, is not God. Once that failure comes the person may seek God and start the proper relationship with God directly and religion is no longer needed.

Also about Buddhism I would say it’s about finding our ‘godself’ or God one with us, so there is a deity, and is in line to what Jesus taught we are being conformed to, but if not then it is really a atheistic religion then by default.

50

You see, the problem is that you would have to show me an ethical atheist. And to do that you would first have to define ethical and good apart from religion. And when there is no superior being who ordered the universe and decrees what the outcomes should be, you have no basis to say that any given outcome is superior to any other.

If actions A, B, and C lead to outcomes X, Y, and Z respectively, the very best you can hope to do is say, “I, personally, and this is only my opinion, prefer outcome X. So the best course of action to achieve it is action A.” You have no basis for saying that another person is wrong because they would prefer outcome Y. You have no basis to say X is “better” than Y. “Morality,” and “ethics” become completely subjective. You can say that society S has determined that it wants to achieve outcome Z, and so it has determined that action C is good, (at bringing about outcome Z, not good in any absolute sense.) And now the fact that any athiest might happen to agree with that society and promote action C doesn’t prove that he is good. He just agrees. What he is is a “good citizen” of that society. It’s completely subjective and relative only to that society. Another society might decree his actions “bad” because they adhere to outcome Y. There is no absolute good from that perspective.

The reason that only religions can make a claim of absolute objective goodness is that a supreme being who created the universe is the only one who has the absolute authority to say, “I created this universe for purpose X, therefore action A is good. Actions B and C are not.” I’m not saying that their claims are right. I’m saying that only in that case can you make any objective value judgements about outcomes X, Y and Z. Athiests can not be capital E Ethical, they can only adhere to the standards around them. And therefore, the existence of an ethical, “adheres to the standards around him,” athiest proves nothing.
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Why do you dismiss a single person’s goals and his prescribed actions to achieve those goals as unworthy consideration for agreement on propriety?

You ascribe “absolute authority” to a religious creator figure, but simply deny that validity that people may feel their own, rationally arrived at conclusions about purpose and conduct has, and the power that may hold over a society.

In fact, your non-atheist is also only adhering to the standards around him, unless you can show that he knows those standards without learning them from other people and his society.

51

First of all, as an atheist, I derive my ethics from a real being: me; not an imaginary one.

Second, as you complain about the grave danger of trusting in people I can see, converse with, and kill if necessary, I’ll take a chance on that.

By contrast, if I were to allow a consensus among religious people to decide what’s good as you suggest, the danger would be much worse.

That sort of thinking is exactly what’s produced all kinds of horrors from the mass murders of religious regimes (the Crusades, the Inquisitions, etc.) to eugenics (Muslims wanting to exterminate Jews, etc.) to lobotomy (??? well, maybe somewhere sometime, eh) to a whole bunch of others (like female circumcision, human sacrifices, religious wars, terrorist bombings, the molestation of children and the cover-up by RCC clergy, the Westboro Baptist Church, etc.).

History teaches that we clearly cannot trust a consensus among religious people to determine our ethics.

52

I was ridiculing the literal reading of the statement you made:

Because a strict reading of it indicates that everyone would have to check the same box on their questionaire… But since only “virtually everyone” agrees it is wrong to murder your mother, etc. You aren’t going to find many questions where everyone checks the same box.

Every purpose you wish to accomplish is subjective, (your opinion or the opinion of a select group,) unless you take in to consideration everyone’s idea of what would be a proper purpose. That would be the “collective agreement” you spoke of. There is no other objective way to decide between purposes. (or not specifically “agreement” since there will be a wide range of ideas of what to do in any situation, and not much agreement. You can’t just dismiss some ideas out of the collective mix because some group doesn’t like them. That isn’t objective. You have to average in the ideas of the serial killer who thinks it’s a good purpose to please himself by killing others, along with the narcisist who’s thought is “whatever makes the world better for me,” and along with the pacifict who’s thought is “whatever makes the world better for everyone.” And that means that your standard must be the average of humanity.

53

Please look at the blued portion. Does that sentence seem incomplete to anyone else?

Shouldn’t it read: You started with the premise that I didn’t exist, and there is no inherently right thing, and then tried to decide what was right and why?

In which case the declaration of impropriety falls apart, since the atheist was doing the same thing the theist did: the best he could with the tools and information he had at hand.

Why is the atheist punished because a God didn’t create him properly? If this God wanted the atheist to know he existed, why did he let the man walk around ignorant? And why is that the fault of the atheist, and not the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of everything, including existence itself?

54

Consensus need neither be unanimity nor the numeric mean. You’re creating a false dichotomy.

I notice that you’ve avoided answering the uncomfortable question I asked.

If God spoke to you and ordered you to kill your son, would you do it? After all, since you believe that all morality comes from God, it he tells you to kill an innocent child, that’s the moral thing to do, is it not?

Personally, as an atheist, I believe murdering one’s own children to be abhorrent and evil. However, as a theist, you may have other ideas, depending on what your deity tells you to do … .

55

I missed my edit window, and now I see that the King is touching on the same thing I was gonna touch on, that Der Trihs brought up as well: even you do not have an objective or inherent standard for morality, ch4rl3s, if your standard is “God said so”, since he could tell you tomorrow that everything he said was bad is now good.

That’s not objective. That’s actually the very definition of subjective: subject only to God’s will.

56

If there are spiritual beings that influence human behavior, how do you know you get your ethics from you?

The danger is religion usually has spiritual power behind it, when there is a attempt to control that power comes from the devil, who is many more times as powerful as man, which will lead to :

I disagree, because for many it is a needed step, discovering the spiritual, that will lead them to God, and without that it is a beak and depressing future for humanity.

57

Because there are no spiritual beings, not as you define them. They do not exist.

The rest of your post is just the usual nonsense, ascribing as a priori all sorts of things which you cannot justify except to point back to your god.

There is no devil. There is no god.

And those who profess a belief in either are just as likely to do whatever they hell they want as anyone who disavows them, as the evidence of history shows.

58

I’m going to blow him out of the water on this one, and send this argument to the bottom of the briney deep where it belongs. But, don’t worry, Der Trihs won’t feel anything. He will blithely continue to believe he’s sailing merrily along on this argument, never noticing that it was never floating to begin with. (Be careful if you look down, Der Trihs. You might notice you aren’t supported by anything; at which point you’ll fall into the ocean below, and the cold splash of reality might accidentally shock some sense into you.

But, first: Is there any reason for me to be encouraging his arguments by answering them? I only do it on the off chance someone might think there is some sense to them. Does anyone think Der Trihs is a benefit to their side? Does anyone agree with his take on logic? Is anyone willing to stand on the deck with him and risk sinking their reputation?

Alternatively, is there anyone with the integrity to tell him where he’s wrong on this one? He’s not going to listen to me; I’m on the other side, so I’m wrong. While every argument for his side must be right. Would someone on his side let him know when he’s wrong, because he won’t listen to anyone else.

59

What a positively Freudian example of psychological projection. You’ve just described yourself.

60

Yeah.

Me.

I don’t always agree with Der, but I find him to be one of the most entertaining and logical posters on the SDMB. And sometimes I agree with his sentiment, but hate the way he presents it.

I’ll look at your rebuttals and see what you’ve got to say. That’s why the board is here in the first place, right? So we can learn from each other?