What defines the difference between right and wrong?
Not saying I’ve been a perfect angel, but:
Is there a difference between there being absolutely no God vs. a God who seemingly sits back to allow evil to triumph again and again over good without recourse? I suppose the only difference is whether or not justice prevails in the afterlife. (What message do we get from an apparent apathy towards fair play and justice?)
This, then, makes one wonder…what is the point to THIS life where the good and innocent suffer so - without due cause?
I can only come to a conclusion of ultimate doubt: Is there REALLY a difference between good and bad? To me, with years of wisdom behind me, are they not merely two sides of the same coin…of which only one’s conscience decided that one side (the good side) of this “coin” is more preferable over the other side (the bad side)?
I’m not so sure I see the difference, but only my conscience keeps me straight.
Seriously, except for a few extreme cases ‘right and wrong’ are very subjective terms. Your sense of what is right and what is wrong are formed by society, religion, personal experiences, etc… In the end you form your own opinions and work from there. Just realize that what you consider right and wrong may be very different from what I consider right and wrong even though both of us may have equally valid standpoints.
From a societal standpoint not everyone can agree either so we have ways of trying to find the balance among diverse notions (should a murderer be sentenced to death or be imprisoned forever or be rehabilitated and released?)and implement them as laws everyone is supposed to follow imperfect thought they may be.
I’d say there is a big difference. Some might say the struggle is the whole point to life. Some might say that just because there is evil in the world does not, in and of itself, deny the notion of a God. Robbed of free choice what’s the point of life in the first place (i.e. everything is preordained)? Others might say you couldn’t possibly know the mind of God and what seems horrible and bad to you might somehow make sense in a bigger scheme of things.
Personally I’m agnostic and just list the above as a few possible explanations to what might be happening. They may not be compelling to you but hopefully you get the gist and can maybe think of some others.
Given this and your other postJinx it would seem as if you are having some crisis of faith. Not possessing much faith in a higher being myself I’m not very qualified to help you out on this. I do believe, however, that this is a healthy process. Whatever side you land on I think people are better for having to do the deep, soul searching examinations such a crisis leads to at least once in their life.
Either that or you’re just bored and posting random stuff to GD…
I think there are fundamental truths that are accepted by most people as to what is good and what is bad. Things like murder, and stealing, and a sense of fair or right are basic in children from a very young age.
“Is there a difference between there being absolutely no God vs. a God who seemingly sits back to allow evil to triumph again and again over good without recourse? I suppose the only difference is whether or not justice prevails in the afterlife. (What message do we get from an apparent apathy towards fair play and justice?)”
God allows humans to have free will. They can choose to obey the rules or not to. There is recourse. I think that people who intentionally do harmful, “wrong” things are either mentally un-balanced, or have deluded themselves into thinking they are happy. Most of the people that I know who seem to have no regard for right/wrong are very unhappy people, whether they admit it or not.
Of course, that’s just my opinion, and I might be wrong.
I disagree that seriously using the term “fundamental” to mean “held by most people” is correct.
A favorite poster of mine once asked me where I got my morals from. Since I couldn’t answer him then, and I haven’t seen a method to get them from any objective source, I have been “forced” to conclude that he was correct in stating my morals come from me. A shame it took quite a long argument over a series of different threads in multiple forums to accomplish what should have otherwise been a pretty simple task. He is a man of great patience, and will make an excellent father. He probably knows who he is, so I won’t drop any names. Hi!
Morals are not absolute. Even if we agree on them.
Well Jinx, I would have to say yes in the manner of Mole: there is a difference between good and bad if you put it there, or agree with someone else who put it there. It isn’t there without you.
I hope you don’t mind, Jinx, I’ve paraphrased some of your questions: 1. Is there a difference between no God and an absentee God?
Yes - in that the existence of God at all implies that there is an absolute scale of right and wrong held somewhere - like a perfectly calibrated ruler in a vault - whether or not it is used.
*2. Is there a difference between right and wrong? *
I don’t believe in God, so I don’t believe there has to be a ruler in a vault. But I do believe we are wired to greatly prefer some scenarios and reject others.
To the extent that wiring is common and universal, our sense of morality and our value judgements are common and universal. 3. If the measure of right and wrong is purely internal, is it “really” arbitrary and meaningless?
Not necessarily. The internal representations in our mind - whether visual, logical, associative, narrative, whatever - are not arbitrary. Almost always they are designed to reflect external reality as accurately and usefully as possible.
So why not your conscience? It’s your inborn sense of right and wrong. And why should it be any more solipsistic or arbitary than our sense of hot and cold or light and dark?
LOL! Yeah, I’m struggling to find something to make sense of because life and man’s actual actions, in practice, is a direct contradiction to all the theory (i.e. Bible lessons) regarding right and wrong.
I do believe some superior being created it all, but I just don’t know why the maintenance is so long overdue. What would be the point to digging a garden, just to sit back and let the weeds take over? Ok, some maintenance may have been performed early-on until some date centuries ago, but has modern Man been forsaken?
I don’t know what sense to make of all this…from making a lifetime supply of lemonade from life’s lemons. I’m tired of making lemonade, now…
Like Whack-a-Mole I agree that your search is a healthy thing. FWIW, I personally was (and still am) fortunate to have a close relationship with an individual who has helped/helps me through the maze.
He did/does this not so much by telling me answers (although he did/does answer my direct questions) but more by asking me searching questions that allow me to figure things out for myself.
What I can’t tell you is how to find such a person… at least not easily.
Much of the world believes in a cycle of lives, rather than a single life followed by some sort of infinitely long “afterlife”. If you rethink things in this context, I think that many of your questions will “evaporate”.
Later, in another post, you wrote:
Who is to know what is a “weed” and what isn’t? Maybe the plant that looks like a “weed” will, in the Fall, burst forth with beautiful flowers. Maybe the flowers will be tiny but the smell will be stunning. Maybe the fruit which finally grows will be fantastic. So how do you know that it’s a real, live, thoroughly despicable “weed” until you let it grow and thrive?
Even [much] more: Try the “weed” analog in the context of multiple lifetimes.
There seem to be a lot of issues being kicked around here and I’m having a hard time separating them, so if you don’t mind I’ll just ramble on for a while and hope some of it makes sense.
Jinx, you seem to be asking if their is a real basis for calling things right and wrong. You’re not alone: the Greeks were obsessed with this question. Plato thought there might be an actual thing, call it the Good, in a kind of heavenly realm, by virtue of which all good actions got their goodness. This is kind of hard to get a grasp on at first, but it is an idea which still infleunces Western thinking, as your discussion shows (St Augustine blended explicitly Platonic philosophy into Christian theology, as Thomas Aquinas did with Aristotelian philosophy. In Christian thought actions get their ‘goodness’ from God). You seem to want to find something external and objective by which ‘right’ actions can be measured, but there is no such thing to be found.
There is a parallel with the idea of what is beautiful. Plato again thought that there was a mysterious entity, the Beautiful, in the heavenly realm which all beautiful things got their beauty from. We would no longer countenance such a belief, but allow that different people see beauty in different objects, precisely because there is no object that corresponds to the concept of beautiful.
A common objection here is to agree with the Christian notion of goodness as derived from God (mutatis mutandis for other religions). I’ve talked about this before so let me be big-headed enough to quote myself from this thread:
I’ll be happy to expand on this if it’s a bit obscure or you just disagree.
uglybeech, you said
I assume you realise that this universality would only apply to humans, as other species are wired differently. The thread I linked to above discussed this issue: whether evolution could give us moral values.
All this is not to say that I don’t believe in morality or ethics. Just because there is no thing out there making actions right doesn’t leave us without anything.
Actions still cause and relieve suffering. Actions are still selfish or not. Actions can be done with sincerity and respect, or with contempt and deceit. If we decide that one or all of these qualities is what we mean my ethical/right, then we have a perfectly useful and objective notion of right and wrong.
Hope this helps, or at least doesn’t baffle you further. I’ll be happy to elaborate on anything, as I’ve glossed over a lot.
I do like to think about this from time to time as it does offer an at least nebulous manner in which one can call on some form of moral absolutism; the biggest problem with that is how one can discern which morals are required by physiology and which are the result of societal interaction.
