But the whole idea makes no sense. If God changed his mind, would this “absolute morality” change ? If it’s determined by the arbitrary will of a single being, how can it be called morality at all ? That’s not a moral philosophy; it’s grovelling and mindless obedience. It’s no different than rounding someone up into a concentration camp, claiming “I was just following orders”, and thinking that’s a valid defense.
How can “morality” that ignores any and all consequences be called morality ? Obedience is no more morality than power is.
I would only worship something good, so god must be good.
God does things that would be immoral if people did them.
God must be good, so the things god does are good by definition. Thus, god defines morality. And if you think killing people is bad, you just aren’t as smart as god.
A poor argument. By that logic, You are no better than Marleen “Murray” O’Hara [sp?]. Or Stalin. I don’t believe that: I think you have something very good to offer!
What you should be opposing is not faith, because belief and faith in something greater than humanity - and something better than sterile and ultimately flawed reason - has given us most of the good ever seen upon this earth. It created immense benefits that few can imagine. Explicit and implicit Christian ethics
No, what you should oppose is fanatacism, which is a whole different kettle of fish. Fanatics have existed for every goverment, faith, or ideology. And they are very dull and similar, under the skin. They don’t really care about the thing they profess to love. They may kill in its name, but they always do it for themselves; Christian abortion bombers, agents of Communist repression, Muslim terrorists today. They use faith or government or ideology as an excuse to justify their deeds. Religious ones do tend to be more visible. But all are committing the same sin: placing themselves above God.
And indeed, looking at wars and violence in the name of religion, we can see that most of it was committed by politicians of various stripes: people concerned with power, not faith. The European Wars of religion were sparked and maintained primarily to acheive political ends. Buddhist monks in Japan fought secular authority to maintain their power and wealth. And we must fight these forms of evil as long as they exist.
Nothing human can be protected from all evil or error, and certainly not from deliberate perversion. It is in the nature of humanity that some of us choose the easy road. By the same token, your singling out of religion only leaves you blind to the real threat: human capacity for evil.
I would be happy to examine this issue logically in some other place, assuming I have the energy for it (this kind of thing gets really tiresome after debating the fiftieth time. I would note, however, that increased “rationality” has accompanied not more peace, but increasing war, violence, and repression.
Now, I actually do understand why you’d think that God has no right to judge you. You think of God (as you would say, “if he exists”) as a human being who happens to have a lot of power. But I respond that this is not so. He created all, including Himself (and believe me, we’ve been trying to figure out that Gordion Knot for millenia). He did not define good; He IS good. I believe that God can even change His mind (although I also believe He knew He would change His mind in advance).
But he certainly created all the goods of this world. Including Death. And yes - I believe that Death is good. Because we were not made to be eternal in this form, but to rise again. Death is no evil, and I think we both agree we should not fear it. Are there floods and catastrophes? Yes, but so what? We all die; the form and the way matter little.
In the last years, I lost a close relative. I weep for my loss. But I am also joyful, because I believe God will raise him from the dead. One day, I would have lost my father no matter what. And I would have rather more years with him. But God’s will be done, not mine. If I have lost something, God will give me something more. He already has.
We do evil because of our own bad natures. All else is an excuse. (There are those who do bad things without doing evil, because of ignorance, mental illness, etc.) While we are stained from birth (because of the organic nature of creation, which I won’t get into and is really an arcane theological idea), God does not condemn us because of it.
Sigh. As I posted above, you are confusing one aspect of Christianity with the whole. Not all Christians believe that, and those that do are generally far more accepting than you might think. In fact, no Christian I have ever known has believed this, though I gather there are a few nasty folks who do.
And yes, there are bad people who are Christians. There are probably even Evil people who are Christians. That is life: I don’t blame all Communists because Stalin was a Communist; I do not condemn all Christians because some are bad people. And indeed, it would be foolish to think we would be, since we openyl acknowledge we are not and will not be in this life.
Lastly, God does not kill people in massacres and floods. He established the natural world; we are the fools who abuse it or dwell in dangerous places. And God accepts that. But it isn’t His responsibility to remake the world because we’re dumb enough to live in dangerous places. I live in an occassional tornado alley breathing bad air. It’s my fault, and I accept the potentnial consequences (while trying to mitigate them). We could have stayed in peace and been hunter-gatherers. Our choice not to.
But I love stormsand tornadoes. They are beautiful, and they display the power and glory of God. To stand outside in a thunderstorm is a wonderful experience. And I should note that it is we men who create the more terrible floods, and cause massacres. (I should note here that I think the Israelites were someone loose with the rules, and justified their deeds with “divine approval” after the fact.)
But you see, that IS the thing, to them it’s just axiomatic, “the will of God” not just can but IS “called morality”. It’s the definition and it’s the source – and by their definition of “God”, that source transcends any standards or judgements that the human mind may come up with. In that cosmovision, God judges Man, and it is right, because by definition it is right.
Like I said before, it does not make sense to you but it does to them.
Some Spiritualists believe you get a judgement of sorts, but you have to judge yourself, you get to experience what you have made others experience, to feel what they felt, then you decide what to do about it, even if you feel you are in the right, thats ok, no matter if you are a mass murderer, you have all eternity to see the error of your ways and you can do it in your own time, you can come back here if you want, to continue the learning process, God will not judge you, you have to come to the right decision by yourself.
Having said that, what is the “right” decision?
You took me to task for this earlier and I think you are too generous in your assessment.
The Bible seems pretty clear on this point and I can say that while most christians I know do not believe that salvation is only achievable by belief in Jesus Christ I have met more than a few who do believe it. They may not be a majority but neither would I say they are rare. FTR I do not buy it but while the Bible may be vague on many things it seems straightforward on this point.
I do not know that this list is exhaustive but it is a good sample at the least of this notion (in no particular order):
John 3:36 – He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.
John 14:6 – Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Act 4:12 – Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.
Act 16:31 – And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.
Ephesians 2:4-10 – But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus. For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.
1 Timothy 2:5 – For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;
Before someone issues a jihad on my ass (what with cartoon riots breaking out all over th eplace you cannot be too careful) that winkie above was an unintended consequence of the board interpreting the copied text into a wink. In this case it is the hamsters who shall be damned <— That wink is on purpose
Right! There are quite a few Christians who believe this and if smiling bandit doesn’t know any then he/she has led a very sheltered life. After being in a thread with **Joey Jo Jo **recently my guess is Joey believes that. I have a sister and brother that I’m pretty sure believe that. You must accept Jesus as your Savior or you are going to hell, period.
I suggest you read some history. The modern world is far less violent than the past ( which is one reason we have so many more people ). We simply have better weapons, and more people to fight and die. You go back far enough, and most people died by violence.
Good is an abstract concept,not a being - especially one you can’t even prove exists, or has the charactistics you say if it does.
But I don’t want to wander around eating brains !
More seriously, there is, again, no evidence there is any life but this one. If only for safety’s sake, we should operate on the assumption there is nothing more.
And if that’s true, it’s all God’s fault for such poor design. You claim God created us; if that’s true, it’s something he deserves blame for, not praise. He does shoddy work.
He should have made the world safer, or us smarter or tougher. Again, shoddy workmanship.
But that’s simply not morality. They simply change the definition, and think that changes reality. Frankly, AFAIKT the reason it makes no sense to me is because - unlike them - I’m not crazy. If there is an absolute moral code, it exists no matter God’s opinions or commands; if not, it does not exist, regardless of God’s opinion. It’s the “can God make a married bachelor” bit again.
IF God created everything then by definition God created an Absolute Moral Code (or rather if there is an AMC then God by definition decided what it is).
It reminds me of the answer given here when someone asks, “What are ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ specifically to impeach the US president?” The answer is it is whatever congress says it is. That is the case because there is no higher power to appeal to. They are it.
So to with God. Although with God it goes a bit further God is the final word on…well…everything. Congress can be wrong but again by definition God cannot be wrong…at least not the God as posited by christian theology (a perfect creator). This is not Zeus of Roman mythology with all sorts of quirks. This is THE God, THE perfect being. I will add here that while God would be the final word on everything God chooses not to tell us much of anything. What we do supposedly “know” about the word of God is really just stuff written by humans who said that God told them. I would personally be more convinced if God shared the word with everyone…surely within a God’s abilities to do.
Could such a God have created a “perfect” world devoid of pain and suffering? Absolutely. But for whatever reason God made this world instead. One can only begin to guess at why it is this way and not some other way but again it goes back to the ant trying to understand your motivations. The ant is simply too far away on the consciousness/intelligence scale to remotely have a useful opinion of your actions. The ant might well feel you are capricious and evil for any number of things for which you might have excellent and good reasons to do. What’s more I doubt you’d ever feel any compulsion to try and explain yourself to the ant.
And why are we made with inherently bad natures? Why do some people have the mental illnesses which you correctly say are responsible for some bad acts? In the day of Jesus they thought they were inhabited by demons, but some of it is genetic. Is it original sin?
Please show me an authoritative source from a major church who says redemption is possible not through Christ? I do appreciate the nice thought, but that does not seem to be what Christianity is about, nor has it ever been. Why have missionaries, then? If missionaries only taught moral education, then I might believe your statement.
I have never claimed that all Christians are bad, so please don’t put words into my mouth. There are many, many Christian dopers who refuse to accept the nastier parts of some mainstream Christian belief. I’ve been know to say they are more moral than god appears to be.
It is Christianity I have a problem with, not most Christians - particularly that it allows some not so nice religious leaders to tell their congregations to condemn some groups based on Bible verses, and the congregations, having been taught that God’s will and word trumps their inborn moral sense, follow them.
The very claims in this thread that God dictates morality, and we humans cannot hope to understand him, leads to the sheep following the evil wolves once they are convinced that God commands it.
The only moral response to this is to tell these ministers: If God truly said that, then I say fuck God.
Dangerous places like beaches on Sri Lanka? There is no place in this world that is not dangerous. If God made the world, he did a crappy job, and should be fined by OSHA. Blaming the victims of the tsunami for living there is despicable. God could have stopped it if he wanted to.
Anyhow, I was referring to the Biblical flood and the massacres in Exodus. Were they moral acts? If they never happened, did God have no control at all over what went into his holy book? What kind of message did he let in, and if that got in through his oversight or his not caring, what part of it could you trust? If you say the good parts, why are you claiming to be able to limit god?
I like thunderstorms too, but I feel they represent the power of electricity on a massive scale, and how the world is so much bigger than we are. How did this retroactive divine approval make it into the Bible? What other words of god do we not have to believe in?
Is your Bible filter based on your morality, and why do you think God has to be limited by yours? I do, but you don’t seem to. This contradiction, which you have run into because you are moral enough to be disturbed by these massacres, is exactly why I reject God as the source of morality.
I have seen people say the flood was just fine, since the babies would have grown up evil anyway. At least they had no contradictory notions of god’s goodness to worry about.
So, the Flood and the massacres in Exodus are just peachy keen with you, because God did it?
Hey, my dog doesn’t understand why I do things for him or to him, like yank his leash so he doesn’t run across the street, but I don’t consider it right to starve him or beat him. If God thinks otherwise, I say report him to the ASPCA.
By this reckoning you are at fault if you give a child a bicycle and they fall off and hurt themself. You could keep your child safer and never let them out of the house and never play with other kids and never ride a bike and so on yet most people accept these risks and encourage their kids to go do these things. Why? Because your child would probably be worse off in so many other ways if you locked them in a padded room till they were 18.
Now your bit above suggests that God perpetrated the massacres and floods and of course according to the Bible God did do that. Personally I think the Bible was written by a few humans to suit their own needs and build/maintain their own power structure for their own selfish ends. I do not think that God threw plagues and floods and turned people in salt pillars and so on. All too convenient that God did all these things (along with good miracles) in a time when people were gullible, objective record keeping was almost unheard of, anything approaching scientific explanations for natural occurences also unheard of. If there was a flood it must have been because someone, somewhere in the area, did something bad right?
Why is it God took such a close and personal interest in the earth and did so with amazing displays of godly power and yet before and since has largely stayed behind the scenes? I for one would love to see the Red Sea parted today (and not at Universal Studios).
So, floods happen and people die. Earthquakes, disease…the list is terribly long of all the awful things that face us yet what would the alternative be? God create the padded room equivalent of a world I mentioned putting your child in to keep them “safe” from all the horrible things out there? A perfectly safe world where we are coddled from all harm? Frankly sounds worse to me. Perhaps there is value in being allowed to try riding a bicycle and face the possibility of getting a skinned knee from falling off once in awhile.
If there is some “Absolute Moral Code” and if there is a God who created everything then that Absolute Moral Code is known by and made by God. It would be as fundamental a part of the Universe as 2+2=4.
That said I never suggested that what is in the Bible (or Koran or take your pick) is God’s word on the matter. Frankly I do not think God has told anyone anything directly much less an answer to such a profound question. The Bible was written by humans. And rewritten I do not know how many times not to mention translated from original texts and recopied with who knows what errors before they had Xerox machines and digital archiving. Even if any part of the Bible was actually divinely inspired (doubtful in my mind) I doubt the original survived all the possible pitfalls described above to get to us in a useful manner.
As for priests/ministers/rabbis/imams/etc they are just men like anyone else. Some may suggest religious leaders are “closer” to god than the rest of us poor humans. Poppycock…they are people just like anyone else and subject to all the same flaws found in anyone else. History is rife with evil people cloaking themselves in religion…some of the worst in fact. I am not saying that makes all of them bad. Most are good people with good intentions. Unfortunately power corrupts and the power of the pulpit is no different. As a result you see all too often religious leaders perverting their own religion to grind their own axes. I find it shocking how many people do not think for themselves and allow such leaders to sway them into actually becoming worse people. In the end though it is those people’s own fault for not using their own brains to decide if what the minister just told them made moral sense rather than just assuming it must be right because a man of god said so.
It’s your choice, you could be “in the clear” within minutes of the act or 7 times 70 years. Rumor has it, as soon as you seek forgiveness, you’re forgiven.
No. If God decides it ( or anything else ), it is not absolute by definition.
First, it’s a bad comparison. Laws are arbitrary; anything absolute, by definition, is not. Nothing can change an absolute, or it’s not absolute. Second, the world and humans are flawed; therefore either God is incompetent or he’s evil; he’s flawed either way. The version of the Christian God you described is logically impossible.
Wrong again. We are not ants; ants have no mind, and can have no opinion on their own situation. We can; we can judge our own world and natures and declare them flawed. Humans can’t understand god-things, but we can understand human things just fine.
Beside which, it contradicts your own claims that God is “good”, as “good” is a human concept. If he’s so incomprehensible we can’t judge his actions evil, then you can’t logically claim he’s good either. If you can claim he’s good, then that means he can also be judged evil.
You start with training wheels, and then go to bikes - but you don’t give five year olds a car to play with.
Let me split my response into two parts
Part 1: You’re saying that large parts of the Bible are not believable. I couldn’t agree more. In fact, oddly enough, the parts with god are less believable than the parts without god, as measured by alignment with independently verified historical fact. The Flood story, for one, clearly got adopted from that of Gilgamesh, and changed to be caused by sin.
Now I might ask why you believe that the Bible, full of made up stories, offers any insights into God at all?
Part 2. Your response does not answer the main thrust of my comment, which is: if the Flood did happen, was it moral? You see, the answer that it couldn’t happen because god is too good is limiting god based on your morality, and is thus invalid by your argument that God creates morality. So, this is purely hypothetical, but of crucial importance in understanding the origin of morality.
You also don’t quite get the problem of natural evil. It is not saying that no disasters should happen - just that their cost should be minimal to meet god’s purpose. I think it would be hard to argue that the cost of the tsunami was minimal.
Perhaps you missed where I said “if God truly said that.” The response would be to someone saying to do evil because god commands it, not to god. So your response totally misses the point.
Now, many religions incorporate the notion that certain people are more qualified to interpret and spread the word of god than others, such as Catholicism. If you are calling for religious anarchy, that is cool with me. Millions of churches of one would probably be better for the world. But at least some of these churches are run by jerkwads, right? Surely not every religious opinion is of equal validity!
I once wrote a little fantasy where I died, went to heaven, and had god ask what I felt about the flood. I answered that if God did it, I’d punch him in the face. God answers, “right answer! Anyone thinking I could do such a thing is not using the moral sense I gave him and goes to hell. Welcome to heaven.”
The point of this is that god doing it does not make it right. If you think it does, you have no moral basis to argue that the Flood is wrong, or that a religious leader ordering his followers to do evil based on god’s commands is necessarily wrong.
BTW, your view of the Bible, which I agree with factually, leads to problems also. God belief, and least in the Judeo-Christian god, is based on the Bible. (We don’t have any independent reason to believe in this type of god, right?) Yet when you yank away the Bible, you leave your God belief hanging in the middle of the air just like the Coyote after running off the cliff. Just like him, you’re held up by faith. I’m trying to get you to look down, so you can hold up a sign saying “oops” and plunge downward into the canyon of atheism. Happily, you’ll land in a lovely pool, and spend the rest of your Sunday mornings sunning yourself in luxury, never again to chase the elusive Roadrunner of god.
*** This imagery brought to you by Voyager Studios.
Excellent point. Let me expand on this, since I think our theist friends won’t get it.
Can god change morality - in other words, is it dependent on time? He must be able to, since if not we have the following problems:
his power is limited, therefore he is not god.
If he cannot, there must be an independent moral authority which he cannot violate, thus morality comes from this undefined moral absolute, not god.
So he must be able to change what is moral. But then, how can you call a changing morality absolute? Perhaps you are following what you think is moral, only to find that he changed it on you, and you are not not acting morally after all. God is not very good about getting the memo on these changes out, after all.
Therefore, god and absolute morality are mutually contradictory. One gotta go (or both.)
<— That wink is on purpose