Inspired by this post, in a thread I refuse to hijack any further:
This, to me, is just chilling. It means that good Christians, in kanicbird’s mind, have completely abdicated their own moral responsibility and bypassed their native moral sense in favor of following the group they felt called to follow. They can do no wrong in their own minds because following the leader is the definition of doing right. There are no words to express the horrors this kind of thinking has unleashed on the world.
I do not think kanicbird is any threat to anyone. I don’t think most people of kanicbird’s philosophy are any threat to anyone. But every so often, more ‘often’ than ‘so’, enough of them follow someone who works in mysterious ways that lead right to a bloody hostage standoff, or a vicious burglary and multiple homicide, or a suicidal war against the entire rest of the world. The leaders and the top cronies get reviled, but the masses of people who bypassed their own moral sense, who would never do anything antisocial in their lives without inspiration and guidance, are left to live out their lives.
People unthinkingly obey all the time. The man who starved in a hospital because somebody lost his dentures was killed by people who unthinkingly obeyed normal protocol instead of helping him. Kids who get hazed to death are killed by people who place obedience higher than their own gut response. The holy are no more or less culpable than any other group. There is no simple ward other than the stomach-knotting, floor-pacing, career-ending, relationship-destroying process of looking at your moral compass and following its direction.
A very few people are born without a moral sense. They need separate consideration, as ill people often do. The vast majority of humans are not so disabled.
The hell of it is, I expect kanicbird to agree with me and I sincerely hope he/she isn’t angry or hurt with me for picking on them in this way. Most people understand what I’m saying once I point it out to them, and most people understand why it is a problem. But it can be very difficult for people to analyze their own worldview and find its flaws.
I don’t think it’s a case of following a group, but following a God who is more powerful than a group of humans. That becomes the moral thing to do. That is the native moral sense because God’s spirit and grace is native to us.
God said don’t eat the fruit. Satan talked Eve into it. She knew God said not to, but she decided that she was capable of determining for herself what was right and wrong, just like Satan said to her. Yes, Satan lied about this, but Eve just as easily could have asked God, “So what’s with the talking snake? He said you’re lying to us. What’s up?”.
The original sin is not respecting the fact that God is the only one with the right to tell us what is right and what is wrong, and then obeying what he decides.
So, it’s more like thought-inspired disobedience.
I guess that’s more of a nitpick, isn’t it?
And finally - I think that will be my last post under my guest membership here. For crying out loud…fighting ignorance is like crack. Maybe that’s why Cecil stayed at it for so long!
Fare thee well / up in here, up in here. Ya’ll gonna make me go all out, up in here, up in here. Ya’ll gonna make me act a fool, up in here, up in here. Ya’ll gonna make me lose my cool, up in here, up in here. DMX is so great for a pointless laugh!
I think there’s probably a reason that people blindly follow a set of moral codes – and I’d bet that reason probably has some sort of evolutionary advantage. Let’s face it, when any given action is automatically good or bad, fighting off that saber-toothed tiger gets the priority it deserves.
Let me take a stab at this. You accuse Christians (or at least those who folow knaicbird’s model) of “completely abdicating their own moral responsibility” and “bypassing their native moral sense”. These could only qualify as failings if we accept that “native moral sense” and “their own moral responsibility” actually exist and are worth following. Christian thinking is based on the assumption that such things don’t form a sufficient moral basis. Some do not believe that innate moral sense exists at all. If it doesn’t, then there’s no crime in abandoning it. If innate moral sense is poor, then there’s no crime in replacing it with a better moral sense.
ITR champion: First, historical precedent shows that just following the crowd is a spectacularly bad way of acting like a decent human being. The best you can hope for is to not make the world much worse than it already was.
Second, if most or all humans really were moral morons as you suggest the human race wouldn’t ever have gotten ahead. We’re too weak to survive playing by baboon rules.
echo6160: So some being setting itself up as ‘God’ told Adam and Eve to not eat the apple but refused to explain itself in terms they could understand. Plus, if you buy the whole story, ‘God’ created Adam and Eve and made them curious enough any intelligent child could guess what would happen next. When the inevitable did occur, it threw them out of their only home and condemned them and all their offspring to eternal toil and suffering.
That sounds like a cheap, lying bedtime story to explain to a kid why the world is so screwed up. Any adult would write this ‘God’ character off as a dangerously unstable type and realize it would have thrown them out for one infraction or another soon enough anyway. Even a kid could poke holes straight through it, and it gives kids the wrong idea anyway. (Don’t try to make broken relationships work, despite what Genesis tells you. Anyone crazy enough to damn the descendents down through generations is a racist and, we later learn, genocidal as well.) None of it is really a reason. It’s all more of an excuse, or an alibi.
This deserves special comment:
Why is that? Because God is big enough to destroy us all in horrible pain and suffering? I didn’t worship Saddam Hussein and I don’t worship Osama Bin Laden and I don’t worship Kim Jong Il, even though they meet or met the same standards.
gigi: That isn’t what kanicbird said, though. kanicbird said “It’s the morals that are derived from service to Christ, service to Christ our king is primary, morals are just what comes along with that.” In other words, morality is subordinate to service. That is what I started this thread to debate against.
Um. But the ‘service’ is all about being moral. It’s about loving God and your neighbour. Nothing more moral than that.
Irrelevant. Moot. Those ‘leaders’ are humans. Nutjobs, usually. Following a lunatic has nothing to do with serving Christ. A David Koresh may call himself Christ but we are expected to have some sort of discernment. Jesus said He’d not come back until the end of time and it would be a big show so anybody who follows some bogus guy calling himself God or Og or Allah or whatever is lost or sad or not too bright but is not an example of what ‘following Christ’ is supposed to be.
I have no problem accepting that God is the ultimate arbiter of morality. If God tells you something is right or wrong, you ought to listen.
But here’s the thing: How do you think God tells us what’s right or wrong? Through some book or another? Which one? No, God wouldn’t rely on a method so fallible for something so important. I believe, and a great many Christians along with me, that God lets us know what’s right and wrong by creating us with an inherent moral sense. In fact, I’m pretty sure this is the official position of the Catholic Church, and it seems to me that I’ve seen a few Bible passages to the same effect. So a person who denies that humans have an inherent moral sense, or who say it should be subjugated to what some book or some pastor says, are in fact willfully ignoring God’s instruction to them.
No one follows God. They follow a book, written by humans, that is supposedly inspired by God. They follow people, supposedly with a line from god, who act like people - sometimes worse. If Jesus came on down and told us what to do, I’d consider it. But take it from a Bible full of error and irrationality or ministers like so many we’ve seen - no flippin’ way.
Is “God’s grace” native to all of us? Some people are born amoral. Is that God’s grace? We are born with varying degrees of goodness. Why would god do that to us?
Some people don’t have an internal moral sense. Some people are just asocial and amoral. What about them.
And I’ll echo Gorsnak’s question. When God told the Israelites to slaughter their enemies, was that moral? In other words, is there some sort of underlying moral code, which God has access to, or does God make it up. (Argument from Russell, of course.)
If God told me to kill my neighbor, I’d tell God to go fuck himself. Anyone who wouldn’t do that is a monster.
And Paul wasn’t a nutjob? Surely some people in Judea considered Jesus a nutjob too. If there was a god, he and his prophets are not limited to your idea of sanity.
Well he was mostly OK but he’s in my bad book for saying women shouldn’t teach or wear gold and all that jazz. Then again, he got knocked off his horse so must’ve sustained a bit of damage.
This is even more moot than the previous moot point. And more irrelevant.
What point are you trying to make? Nobody has ever said that every human or every christian is the epitome of perfection. It’s completely illogical to blame God for the actions of all humans.
We were told what to do. Ten commandments. Boiled down to two by JC but it comes out to be the same. We aren’t puppets whose strings are being pulled by God. None of us can claim to discern God’s wishes without error. Being screwed-up humans, we are prone to error. Some are prone to the error of thinking they are without error.
We have some words that are attributed to JC telling us to love. That’s a pretty good moral code. If people were to follow it, things would be pretty good. However we don’t. Nobody’s fault but our own.
The problem as I see it is that we have no great innate moral sense beyond not-murdering-immediate-kin, yet for a more comprehensive set of moral guidelines have to rely on ancient writings left wide open for every power-hungry charlatan to selfishly misinterpret. I was brought up by non-believers and am a non-believer, yet feel I am a pretty moral person. But I’m under no illusions as to where my morals come from - a Christian tradition, albeit a questioned one. As ‘God’ doesn’t interact with us, there is no need for him, but without him, where’s the eternal father figure to glower at our transgressions, and keep us in line?
Maybe a set of reasonable, equitable moral rules could be constructed so as to be truly self-evident - without the need for supernatural authority. But they would still have to compete against the appeal of the reward of an eternal life…
Whoa, wait a minute…you’re telling me that Jesus boiled the 10 commandments down to only TWO?? Why didn’t someone tell me this?
And back on the subject, I agree that we all have our own moral standards and should listen to them. If Jesus were to appear today and do no more than he did when he was here the first time, almost everyone would just consider him some kind of smoke and mirrors con man.
Jesus: “See, I just healed that hobo, he can walk now.”
Me: “Um, maybe he was faking it, can you move that building over there into the park?”
Jesus: “um…no, it’s not part of my fathers plan”
Me: “yeah…sure…I’ll just be over here calling the police, don’t mind me”
And as for my moral standards. I have read a great deal of the bible and believe that a lot of it goes entirely against my own moral standards. Some of the acts in there that are carried out by the word of god, or in his name, are just completely horrendous. If they happened today, you can bet your ass that the UN would be drafting up plans for a nice little carpet bombing of said people quicker than you can say “OH CRAP, DUCK”
Christians don’t get their morality from the Bible. If that was truly the case they would still be stoning people for working on the Sabbeth and happily expecting their slaves to be good and obedient. They get their morality from their society, the same as everyone else. Anyone who tries to claim that they get modern morality from the Bible is cherry picking what they want from the various passages and tossing out whatever doesn’t agree with societal norms.
All you have to do is look at changing standards and morality throughout history. What was thought horribly decadent 50 years ago is commonplace today. Did the religions all change? No, society changed. Religion still tries to preach the same thing, it’s society that has advanced.
You do realize that all of these acts are in an ancient book written by a bunch of guys way back when right? And if you believe all of the stuff in there, I feel bad for you. Just off the top of my head, women aren’t supposed to be teachers, they’re not allowed to speak in church, if a man lays in a bed where a woman has menstruated he’s committed a sin, and so on and so forth. Believe what you want.
