Because the former is an actual altruistic reason, whereas the latter one reduces morality to fear and self-interest.
Imagine you are in the hospital, and nurse takes extra good care of you–is very attentive to your needs, very thoughtful, and always willing to go the extra mile. You think the nurse is very caring. But suppose, after you check out, you find out that your rich uncle promised the nurse $500 to take extra good care of you. It puts the nurse’s behavior in a whole different light. There is a difference between an action that is done from caring and one that is done from self-interest. If the theist really thinks that morality must be done from the latter motive, then theism debases morality.
It’s not altruistic, it’s personal interest that ends up being altruistic. Yo do it for you.
(comment on my bolding)
You’d be right if that were, at least in my case, true.
Catholics do good not because it gets us to heaven but because that’s how we praise the Lord, which is commandment #1. We would still praise Him if there were no heaven.
But you haven’t shown that. Indeed, arguments that human motivation is all purely selfish are exceedingly implausible. Bishop Butler’s classic refutation of psychological egoism is still is powerful today as when it was written. Most of the criticisms in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on PE derive from Butler’s critique of PE.
Fine, but you’ve already conceded the existence of non-selfish motivation, which is all the atheist needs: if there is no heaven (even if there is), why should I give a rat’s ass about God or want to praise Him, if all I care about is me?
You can’t base morality on religion; it’s fundamentally amoral at best. As well as delusional. Today you say “God” wants you to feed children; tomorrow “God” may tell you to drench them in napalm. And if you really base your “morality” on religion, you’ll feel just as moral doing the latter. Obedience, self indulgence and delusion are incompatible with morality, and those are what religion is about.
I don’t take bets. Are you willing to actually say what you mean ?
Wrong. Millions support it.
No; they can be good, but only if they are bad Christians. Christianity is evil; therefore anyone who is good and Christian is bad at being Christian.
A cite for what ? Christianity being based on delusion ? Given that it makes no sense and has no facts to support it, it can’t be anything else. For there being millions of fans of the end of the world ? Who do you think buys the Left Behind series ? For Christianity being evil ? Look at history; look what it calls for; look what it does now. Christianity has spent 2000 years trying to crush everything good out of the world.
I dind’t say selfish. I said you do want you want to do. There is, of course, a socity and history and family and personal experiencies that shape your actions. You may, as an atheist, choose to do things that are bad for you.
(numbering mine)
(1) Today you say that killing is wrong and tomorrow you say it’s right because you neurons tell you that, unless you are trying to say that their is a level beyond the purely electrochemical reaction in your brain. What’s intrinsically wrong with (a non-existent) god telling me to kill children. What is this concept of “wrong” yuo keep talking about. Can you buy it? Does it have positive or negative charge?
Or is it just a particular array of neurons?
If it is only in your head, I don’t care.
If it is decided by society, then it’s like fasion.
(2) Exactly that. It’s a common theme to talk about christians killing abortion-providers (which has happened). What I say is that those (wrong) “righteous murders” are fewer than those that members of the abortion-provider community have commited against thmselves.
(3) There are like 250 million christians in the US. If 5 million support it it’s like 2% of US Christians, tiny fraction.
(4) So when the priest says “be good to your neighbours” and “help the poor” he’s being a bad christian? Your theology flabbergasts me.
Buying a book doesn’t (necessarily) mean you subscribe to the author’s view.
“Left behind” and “bringing Armaggedon” are not the same. Even if pre-trib requires the temple, the number of christians actually working even indirectly to re-build the Temple is microscopic. Once again you mix stuff.
The last sentence is so patently wrong it’s amazing my computer hasn’t blue-screened. Everything good? Everything?
Actually, what you said was, “It’s not altruistic, it’s personal interest that ends up being altruistic. Yo do it for you.” Which strongly implies to me that it is self-interest that motivates all of the atheist’s actions. But whatever. Grant for the sake of argument that the atheist always does what he wants to do (something that is also false). The contents of the atheist’s desires are what is important. If the atheist wants to benefit others, then it is an altruistic action. If not, then not. In other words, if the content of your desire is altruistic, (“I want to benefit person X for the sake of X”), then your action is altruistic, even though you are acting on your desire. On the other hand, a desire to benefit X because you fear God’s wrath is obviously purely self-interested. A desire to benefit X in order to praise God isn’t self-interested, but it doesn’t display any intrinsic concern for X’s interest or welfare, and so (I would argue) misses something important about genuinely *moral *motivation. So again, the atheist gives a better account of moral motivation than your theistic account.
Agreed on the altruistic thing. We could go on into minor philosophical and linguistic detail. Of course atheists don’t always do what they want, I (unseccessfully) tried to frame it in a context of real possibility of choice.
Re: God’s wrath. At least in Catholicism, incurring in God’s wrath really requires extended effort. Heaven is our birthright it is us who (by our actions) chose not to go there; God simply stamps out transfer papers (I know it’s much more complicated). Doing good things is not propitiation or akin to casting the virgin into the volcano to stop it from erupting.
Doing good thing inorder to get to heaven is against God’s will. We help our neighbours because they are our brethren, we love them, we can’t stand to see them suffer (I’m not that good a guy, by the way).
Your last sentence is interesting and I can see how, from certain perspectives, it rings true. It’s simply that the idea the altruismis good per se is, in my mind, impossible in atheism. Its goodness is extrinsic.
An atheist that acts in that way is following the law that God wrote into our hearts.
That argument is a bit too metaphorical for comfort. Clever strategies by selfish genes. Real altruism versus merely apparent altruism. Contrasting the genuine against the pretentious. A physicist speaking of gravity in such a way would raise an eyebrow or two.
That’s true. I take the strongest evidence of altruism to be that, well, people behave altruistically. And some of them are atheists. Like, QED and stuff. How’s that for an airtight argument?
Sophistry; I think we agree that both theists and atheists (but not those bloody agnostics) can behave morally and altruistically.
Your links and quotes have been infromative and this last one in particular, so let’s end it in a handshake.
Hmm. Maybe if you pick another atheist. QED has certainly shown no altruistic grace towards me whatsoever, and I would think altruism, as the Bible puts it, is not a respecter of persons.
I meant quod erat demonstrandum, as befitting the conclusion of my utterly convincing proof. Sorry for the ambiguity. Or maybe I’m being whooshed. It is certainly not outside of the realm of possibility.
Whereas an atheist could just as easily say that a theist acting that way is following the the rules which evolution and natural selection encoded into our genes. Frankly, I feel that ascribing my morals and ethics to a supernatural being is fairly insulting- if we don’t have free will, what’s the point of trying to be good? We’ll either be good or evil, and God has already decided which.
(bolding mine): Of course, completely agreed that you have correctly expressed the opinion of many atheists, and since this is not a thread about the existence of God, it may well be true.
It may be insulting, but if it is true it really wouldn’t matter. Anyway, I don’t see it as more insulting than saying a couple of gene-copying mistakes 3 million years ago gave you morals. You’d still have no choice
Re: Your last sentence: Your theology is wrong. God gave you the rule book, you choose what to do.
Ah. if only more people who are absolutely convinced that the only way to live an ethical life is by being afraid of God would stop and ask themselves this question…
