I’m glad to hear it… I don’t tend to be exposed to such moderate forms of religious view, alas. I’m more inundated with the “Innate Moral Depravity of Mankind” and “Inescapable Sinful Nature” and the like. These views (dominating the airwaves in the U.S.) hold that we cannot achieve moral wisdom on our own, because of our “Accursed Adamic Nature.”
I certainly wish the alternatives had as much media presence!
Good man - thought I’d lost you there for a minute.
What is the source of goodness? This is a key issue for a lot of religiously-based ethical systems. As it is, of course, for a lot of non-religiously-based ethical systems. And - as far as I can see - they all ultimately have to come down to the assertion that one thing, or a number of things, are intrinsically good, and you’re invited to accept this without any kind of proof or demonstration. So, for example, a humanist ethical system will assert that human life, growth and flourishing is good, and if that appeals to you may embrace that ethical system, or incorporate it into your personal ethical system, or whatever.
I don’t see any great distinction between religious and non-religious ethical systems here. And, lo, the observed evidence bears me out, since religious and non-religious ethical systems tend to come up with largely common ethical precepts. Treat others as you would wish them to treat you. Share your toys. Don’t lie or cheat. Establish justice. Look after the widow and the orphan. Keep it in your pants, unless you are willing and able to meet your responsibilities to any resulting offspring. And so forth.
All of which underlines the point that trying to treat religious ethical thought and non-religious ethical thought as fundamentally different endeavours, to the point of coining different terminology for them, is basically misconceived.
Proof is not the word to use here, but we certainly can demonstrate certain things. As I said, all systems begin with certain postulates, but the simpler the postulate the easier they are to confirm. A secular ethical system might begin with “We don’t like to feel pain. Other people are like us. Therefore other people don’t like to feel pain either.” A religious ethical system begins with God. Now, that we don’t like pain is subjective but nearly universal, that others are like us can be demonstrated (if not proved) scientifically. The existence of God is a bit trickier.
It is true that in the West religious morality has converged with secular ethics, in no small part as secular authorities reject religious justifications for laws. But I direct you to Islamic Law as the basis of some governments. So this trend is hardly universal, even today.
Now, I agree that there is a religious ethic. That more or less starts with secular ethics and tries to find religious justification for them, which is reasonable for believers to do. For example, some churches support SSM. I think it is rather difficult to find direct Biblical justification for this, but if you begin with the concept that this is ethical, find passages about generic loving your brother, and exclude passages which directly go against it, you can build a partial religious case for it. (If you believed in the Greek gods you’d have a much simpler time of it!) It is perfectly okay to use the Bible or religious writing as one source of an ethical argument - just not the sole basis of one.
Well, hold on.
I can certainly observe that “other people don’t like to feel pain”. (I can, in fact, observe that without regard to my own feelings about pain.) But that’s not the beginning of an ethical system. After all, I can equally observe that other people like strawberries, but neither observation leads to the conclusion that I have a duty to minimise their pain or maximise their strawberries. An ethical system has to begin with a postulate which uses a word like “should” or “ought” . And it’s that statement, I maintain, which is undemonstrable.
Similarly, the observation that “God exists”, whether it’s true or false, is not the beginning of an ethical system. It has no necessary implication that would be expressed with a “should” or “ought” statement. It’s perfectly possible - and perfectly common - for a culture to have quite developed religious beliefs but to draw no ethical conclusions from them. Classical Greece is an obvious case in point, but there are many.
I freely grant that, while religious and moral belief systems don’t have to intersect, in many cultures they do intersect. The intersection typically takes the form of a claim that God cares about you and, in particular, he cares about whether you are virtuous or not; that God wants to be virtuous; that God has a plan for you that involves you aspiring to virtue or learning virtue; that God will reward virtue; etc. But note that none of these claims tell us anything at all about what virtue is. The believer still has to work out some basis for asserting that this is virtuous, and that is vicious, exactly as the unbeliever does. In terms of making ethical decisions, therefore, the fact that your ethical system is shaped by your religious beliefs doesn’t necessarily mean that you will go about making ethical decisions in a different way from a follower of another religion, or of no religion, or that the ethical judgments you make will be materially different.
And, as I’ve already pointed out, the ethical judgments made by people of all religions and of none are, for the most part, strikingly similar - the Golden Rule, don’t lie, the king should establish justice, we should all practice sexual responsibility, etc.
I’m not saying that all moral and religious ethical systems are identical, because of course they’re not. But where there are differences - say, different attitudes to slavery exemplified in different societies and cultures, or different attitudes to polygamy - we can usually better account for those by looking at different social and economic conditions faced by those cultures than we can by looking at their different religious beliefs.
Again, hold on. I have a lot of quibbles with what you have to say here.
In the first place, I don’t think it’s true that “in the West religious morality has converged with secular ethics”, or at least not to any great extent, because I maintain that they have always had so much in common.
Secondly, to the extent that it is true, it’s not necessarily the case that religious ethical thinking has conformed to secular ethical thinking. There are many examples where the reverse is the case.
And, thirdly, this convergence is not particularly associated with secular authorities rejecting religious authority in matters of ethics; it happens equally when secular authorities embrace religious authority.
Again, I quibble.
I think you have a very simplistic - and unrealistic - view of religious (or at least Christian) moral thinking. You see it as basically a process of looking for scriptural mandates to do X or not do Y, and treating them as the basis of your moral code.
Except among simplistic fundamentalists on the margins of the Christian tradition this is not what happens in the real world, and we can see this fairly easily. Neither in the Old Testament nor in the New Testament is there a scriptural injunction against sex before marriage, and yet the Christian tradition developed a strong and consistent ethical condemnation of it. Similarly, neither in the Old Testament nor in the New Testament is there any prohibition of polygamy (except for bishops, curiously). In fact, in some circumstance the OT codes mandate polygamy. But, again, the Christian tradition condemns it strongly.
And these examples could be multiplied. The Bible doesn’t condemn slavery, but there is a strong Christian tradition of opposing slavery. The Bible doesn’t mandate the establishment of public hospitals, but they are an explictly Christian invention which has been unreservedly embraced by secular ethicists. Etc, etc. And we have numerous converse examples of things which are condemned in scripture - mixing fabrics, notoriously - about which the Christian tradition is entirely relaxed.
My point is not that the traditional Christian views on sex before marriage, or on polygamy, are right, or even that they are necessarily well thought out. They may or may not be. But they are clearly not simply the result of asking “What does God forbid in scripture? Right, that’s forbidden!” However Christians have arrived at their moral positions, it’s clearly not by a mechanistic application of commandments whose authority is taken to be absolute and unquestionable.
In other words, what you think of as “religious ethics” separate from “religious morality” is not separate at all. Many of the positions that you might think of as “moralistic”, like negative attitudes to pre-marital sex, have been arrived at in much the same way as positions that you might think of as “ethical”, like positive attitudes to SSM. I can’t avoid the suspicion that the real distinction between religious morals and religious ethics is not how they are arrived at; it’s that religious ethics is the term you use for judgments which align with your own, while religious morals is the term you use for judgments which don’t.
Ethical systems are built with should and ought statements, but starting there seems to be assuming too much.Why should we or ought we do something? As for strawberries, if strawberries or the lack of strawberries created the same reaction in us as pain and death, then strawberries could be involved in the basis of an ethical system. Since they don’t, it is rather absurd to bring them up.
If you get any morality at all from God, then the first postulate must be that God exists. If you have a belief system which includes god but has no morals from god (deism, for example) then you don’t need this as a postulate.
If God wants us to be virtuous then we need to know what this means. If there are differing views of virtue - based on different postulates - how do we know which God backs? The answer is through revelation. Now this vary because revelation really comes from the mind of the supposed conduit. Look how different the sexual morality of Western civilization would have been if Paul was not a misogynist.
The Golden Rule you can derive from first principles. The King establishing rules comes from power - and is kind of gone today. As for sexual responsibility, I hardly think that is a universal, at least not in the Western sense, given the proclivities of certain gods.
Not what I said at all. Yes, for most of history there were few or no secular only ethics. It certainly is useful for secular political authority to rule by divine right. (I’m only considering cases where there is religious morality.) Certainly secular authority often claimed they followed religious authority even when they didn’t. When we started deriving secular ethics without reference to religion, then some religious authorities converged to them. Sometimes kicking and screaming, to be sure.
I must not be writing clearly enough, since I said that the support of some churches for SSM comes exactly from this non-literal reading of the Bible.
The original views come from certain readings of the Bible, but as some are forced to adopt secular morality (see divorce, for example) or become irrelevant they’ll change.
Believing in the Bible is still important, but they got to fill those pews.
But isn’t there a point at which we have a duty to intervene? I mean, surely it would be a grave injustice to let a 40-week-old fetus be killed just because he’d had the misfortune not to have been born already.
Where there is a very strong consensus – near unanimity – moral rule-making is easy. If all cases were as easy as that, anybody could be a judge.
It’s where there is a highly polarized moral debate that things get dicey.
Not absurd at all; it makes the point that ethical systems,as you neatly put it, are built with “should” and “ought” statements. The mere observation that somebody likes X, or dislikes Y, does not make even the beginnings of an ethical system; it make no difference whether X or Y are strawberries or pain.
I’ m not sure what you mean by saying that starting with a “should” or “ought” statement “seems to be assuming too much”. As far as building an ethical system goes, until you make a “should” or “ought” statement, you haven’t started at all. If what you mean is that your first “should” or “ought” statement has to involve an assumption (in the sense of an acceptance as true of something not demonstrated to be true) - yes, it does. That’s my point.
It doesn’t have to be through revelation (in the sense of “graven on tablets of stone and handed to us by an omniscient deity”). As Trinopus has already pointed out in post 117, a religious understanding in which God’s plan is both for us to be virtuous, and for us to be responsible for our own moral judgments and actions, is entirely coherent, and is in fact pretty mainstream.
You’re assuming that Paul’s misogyny only had traction because it was backed by the claim of religious authority.
There’s no evidence for that assumption, and plenty of examples of people whose moral stances we reject today, but who were extremely influential without ever making any claim to religious authority - Aristotle on slavery would be an obvious example.
Paul was not notably more misogynistic than the (non-religious) morality of the Roman world against which he competed. In fact, there’s a strong case to be made that women in particular were drawn to the Christian movement because of the relatively higher status it afforded them.
You can derive the Golden Rule from first principles (depending, of course, on what your first principles are. Ayn Rand, to take a m modern example, spectacularly failed to derive it.) But, given that, the fact that the Golden Rule does in fact play a central role in most (all?) of the religious ethical systems that we encounter is surely evidence that religious ethical systems are developed from observations, experience and refection in much the way that secular ethical systems (which also, Ayn Rand notwithstanding, tend to find their way fairly quickly to the Golden Rule) do?
Nonsense. You persistently assume that anyone who - or any culture that - is religious must derive their ethical standards from their religious beliefs. This simply is not the case. The Greeks, for example, had their pantheon and their creation stories, etc, but they signally failed to draw moral lessons from them. As you must know, they were hugely active and influential in the development of moral thinking, and much of the western ethical tradition - secular and religious alike - still rests on foundations they built. But their ethics is very much based on observation of human nature and the human condition. As you rightly point out, many of the Greek gods behave in a distinctly unethical fashion - and not just sexually. How can you recognise this, and still have failed to tumble to the corollary; that the Greeks did not rest their moral beliefs on the actions, commandments or authority of their Gods?
And the Greeks are not exceptional; we could say the same thing about the classical Roman religion. Further afield, we see the same thing in Hinduism, and of course in Buddhism.
The simple truth is this; it’s not the case that anyone who has religious beliefs must draw their moral positions from their religious beliefs.
And the other simple truth is this; it’s not the case that anyone who who does draw their moral positions from their religious beliefs does so on the basis that unquestionable ethical precepts have been authoritatively revealed.
No, you’re writing clearly enough; you’re not reading clearly enough. I’m not disputing that, e.g, the support of certain churches for SSM is the result of experience and observation of the human condition, and reflection thereon. I’m disputing your suggestion that the moral stances that you don’t like are not the result of ethical reasoning, but are the result of literalist application of biblical precepts which are taken to be beyond question. This is simply not how religious ethical thinking works, for the most part.
That seems an odd point of contention, given how quickly most people agree with the adage that “nobody’s perfect” … or is it that most of the people who talk about it seem to forget that they, too, are made of clay?
There is a world of difference between “Nobody’s perfect” and “everyone is morally depraved, sinful, wicked, and intrinsically evil.”
The former is pretty obvious, almost tautological.
The latter is an extremist view held by the sects who control the bulk of U.S. Christian radio broadcasting.
That’s kind of my point - “Let everyone decide for themselves” is not a good law.
You mean Calvinists, then? Total depravity and all that fire-and-brimstone jazz?
Sure. I want limits. Pure democracy is scary. Democracy, as regulated by certain constitutional constraints, is much healthier. This not only specifies certain terms of basic morality, but also puts down rules regarding how those terms may be changed.
We don’t want our morality to be modified too easily…but we also don’t want it locked down so tightly that it can’t change at all.
I say “Let everyone decide for themselves” for a lot of moral issues. The basic rule is “If it doesn’t hurt anybody, then go for it.” Why would I care?
(This is the utter hell of the abortion debate: half of the people think it does hurt someone else, and the other half don’t. Not only are the basic views irreconcilable, the meta-issues are also!)
Calvinists and the modern fundamentalist ilk, yeah. Like I say, the guys who absolutely dominate Christian broadcast radio. They may not be a majority of all Christians…but they are a heavily dominant majority of Christian broadcasting. It is very, very rare to hear a Christian radio show that talks sensibly about evolution. Instead, all we get is “evil-lution” and “Darwinism” and grotesque distortions.
I only learned of “Universal Salvationism” from a friend; I never hear it discussed on religious radio shows. (I hold a religious radio show to be remarkably sophisticated if it even mentions “annihilationism,” even if only to dismiss it.)
Um.
I haven’t heard the Christian radio shows of which you are so inexplicably fond. But in this context is may be relevant to point out that “total depravity”, as preached by Calvinists, is one of those jargon terms that doesn’t necessarily mean what we might think it means.
“Total depravity” doesn’t mean that everything human beings do is utterly depraved. It means that depravity touches every aspect of our experience and existence; there is no “pure place”. It means not just that we are fallible human beings (a view that I think believers and unbelievers would all share) but that we live and move and take moral/ethical decisions in a context, and subject to constraints, that are imperfect because they themselves are touched by human fallibility. The systems we encounter and the systems we create are themselves broken, morally speaking.
So, to make this a bit concrete, suppose I am claiming welfare as an unemployed person, and at the same time I am working “off the books” every Saturday for someone who pays me in cash. If I declared these earnings I would lose my welfare. And if I’m detected in this, I’ll likely be prosecuted and convicted for some form of welfare fraud.
If you stop there, you can say that my behaviour is dishonest, and therefore unethical (even if perhaps understandable). But if you want to engage with the notion of total depravity, you can’t stop there. You have to go beyond that. Why am I unemployed in the first place? Are the actions of the grasping capitalist whose greedy decisions destroyed my job judged as harshly as the actions I take in response to my situation? Is he at risk of prosecution and conviction? Or, why is the welfare system set up in a way which penalises or disincentives my efforts to earn? Does it have to be that way? Is it set up that way to serve the greed, selfishness or self-interest of someone else, someone who is more influential than me, or who is valued more highly by my society than I am?
In other words, my welfare fraud doesn’t happen in a moral vacuum. It’s intimately connected with a lot of other moral decisions and attitudes that I don’t control, and that I can’t insulate myself from. And this is always going to be the way. Hence, total depravity.
And you can multiply these examples. Intergenerational poverty, in a wealthy society, is a classic example of total depravity; it’s an evil which simply can’t be explained by pointing to anyone’s individual depravity; it’s the outworking of a depraved system. The human tendency to resort to war is another. The cycle in which an abuser of women or children turns out to have been a victim of abuse himself is a third.
The notion of total depravity can lead to a certain moral gloominess; what are the chances of my making the ethically optimal choice if all my circumstances and incentives steer me towards the other? What are anyone’s chances? And the Calvinist response to that is “grace”; only through the grace of God can we transcend total depravity. Obviously that’s not an answer that the unbeliever will find appealing. But the fact that he doesn’t accept the answer doesn’t mean that he can so easily dismiss the question. “Total depravity” may be an unhelpful term, but I think it actually stands for an analysis of the human condition that a lot of secular ethicists would take very seriously.
Which is not to say that it can’t also stand for a very simplistic, judgmental, fundamentalist approach to ethics. And perhaps it does, in your favourite radio shows. Perhaps you need to broaden your listening a bit!
I Believe morality was not from a Supreme Being but Humans, who thought that there were certain rules to protect themselves( and others) by acting in a certain way. Buddha’s Golden rule to treat others as you would want to be treated a shortened version of other human’s thinking of ways to live together in peace.
One can realize that if you have the right to kill or rob someone then they also have that right to kill you, so laws are away to protect us. Like driving in a car, there has to be rules so traffic keeps moving well. It is a good for everyone or most people.
I think that there is a kind of objective morality, which is basically: if your action does more harm than good, to other people, it is morally bad.
Well, lucky you. (I’m not “fond” of them; I make the occasional survey, the way I read newspaper reports of crimes in my neighborhood. It’s a good defensive posture to know what the enemy is up to. I listen to about five minutes a week of Rush Limbaugh for the same reason. “Fond” is so very much the wrong word it beggars the imagination. And disrupts the digestion, too.)
However, it also means, to some interpretations, that humans cannot attain salvation on their own, but that salvation must be granted by a deliberate act of God. It is the key to the doctrine of the Elect. It’s all part of the “original sin” package, and I think this is an example of extremely bad theological morality. I prefer a much healthier Madisonian morality: people are both bad and good, however, the laws must be written to address the bad, for there is no need of laws to tell good people to behave themselves. In this view, bad people are considered social aberrations, not the standard model of humanity itself.
Point me to a mild, moderate, intelligent, literate, humane (if not humanist) Bible radio station, and I’ll give it a lick. I challenge you to find one that speaks of evolution as an established and valid scientific theory!
My point is not that there aren’t any of that kind, only that, if they exist, they are vastly outnumbered by the dominant, ultra-conservative form of Bible broadcasts. I do not know of any moderate Bible radio stations. I’ve never been lucky enough to come across one.
Christianity, in America, is diverse. But Christian radio broadcasting is, unfortunately, not.
I don’t live in the US, which perhaps explains why I haven’t been exposed to the same radio shows that you have.
Podcasting is your friend, Trinopus. If your sufficiently interested - I’m not suggesting that you have to be, but if you are - you can podcast the religion/ethics output of the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and others, and you’ll find what seems to be treated as central in American Bible stations being treated as marginal in the rest of the world.
All of this is only a sideline anyway. It’s sad how far behind the rest of the world the U.S. is in so many ways. We’re pretty much the center of worldwide Creationism, for instance. And we have an absurd resistance to reform of our death penalty laws, the metric system, and a decent health care system.
Oh, well. We still make most of the world’s hamburgers!
Serious footnote: I do not reject religious-based morality on the basis of the bad theology I’m exposed to from radio. Yes, that goes a way toward poisoning the well, but I am on record disagreeing with theologically-based moral views even when I am in agreement with their content.
For instance, I think that religious-based arguments against slavery, or the death penalty, are badly reasoned, even though I am opposed to slavery (well, duh!) and the death penalty. I really don’t like having priests make arguments that are collateral with my own, because the underlying framework of the thinking is alien to me, even if the conclusions are in alignment.
Presumably, there could equally be non-religious ethical reasoning whose underlying framework you don’t accept, even if the conclusions are in alignment with your own.
I think an appropriate response depends on context. You can take a pragmatic approach to this. Ethics is about how we ought to behave. If you and I agree that, ethically, people ought to share their toys, then we have a shared ethic about toy-sharing. The fact that we arrived at it by different means may not be all that important. As pointed out already, all ethical reasoning is ultimately based on undemonstrable claims, chosen because of their subjective appeal. And if you are co-ordinating a campaign to encourage toy-sharing, or to protest against the death penalty, or to urge reform of immigration law, you will presumably welcome the support and participation of all people whose ethic on these issues aligns with yours.
It’s quite different if someone us urging you to embrace not just his ethical conclusions, but the framework through which he arrived at them - if he’s trying to evangelise you, in short. In that circumstance, the fact that you agree with his ethical conclusions is not, in itself, much of an argument for saying that you should also accept his framework - particularly if you have already arrived at those conclusions independently of his framework. (But perhaps if there is substantial alignment between his ethical conclusions and yours, it should cause you to question whether there is such a radical difference between your ethical framework and his as Voyager supposes. )