The only reason your Spirit-based morality is less arbitrary than a nature-based morality is that you’ve defined it as such. I could just as easily proclaim that the Ultimately Real Morality is that all actions that anyone does must benefit me personally, or they are immoral (or possibly amoral). In this situation, the standards of your morality are totally arbitrary, since it does not align with the Ultimately Real Morality of Quix-benefiting.
And that’s fine that you’ve defined it as such. You see a Spirit-based morality as the only true morality, because you’re Convinced (I’ll use a capital C to not make it sound like a trivial decision on your part) that it’s Real (again, capital R). Why do you begrudge others the right to posit their own Ultimate Standards of Morality? I haven’t seen anyone say, “Lib, you can’t define a morality that way! It’s arbitary and worthless!” And yet, you are doing exactly that to anyone who doesn’t see things your way.
You said something earlier to the effect that Arnold, Gaudere, MEBuckner, etc. need to stop viewing morality as a brain-based decision, and see it as a Spirit-based decision. Yet, I have seen no reciprocity from you.
I guess there’s no real point to this note, and you may very well dismiss it as another Anti-Libertarian post. Maybe I’m imploring that we all agree to disagree. Maybe I’m imploring you to open up that obviously fascinating mind of yours to other possibilities. Not to accept them, just to accept their existance.
It’s not an a priori assumption, it’s a conclusion.
Gaudere’s view is simpler and thus satisfies Occam’s Razor. Your view does not. Why? It assumes, without solid evidence, that Spirits exist.
Or microcephalic. In extreme cases of microencephaly, the person has nothing above the brain stem. IIRC, a girl was born like this a few years ago and the parents ahd to let her die because there was no hope she would live at all. In your opinion, did she have a spirit?
He called some people fools. Either he or Peter said anyone who called another person “fool” would go to Hell.
And this wasn’t cruel to the pigs?
[quote]
I submit that God usurped the will of the Spirits of the Amalekites when He had them butchered by the Hebrews. Only if they were willing sacrifices would this not be true. Does the Bible say they wer? I don’t think so.
Feeding a hungry child could be an immoral act? It does not matter if you feed that child so you can make it your sex slave. Making the child your sex slave would be the immoral act, not the feeding.
Actually, they’re called anencephelitic infants, and I once got into a debate with a pro-lifer who insisted that we are morally obligated to sustain the brainless child until it dies of natural causes 70 years from now. (They do have a brain stem, so they can breathe and sometime have suckling reflexes, but that’s about it.) Anyhow.
Can you give me an example of him doing somthing to my body that would be an usurpation of my spirit? Would raping me be usurping my spirit, or would it simply be his right?
Ok, so there is not such thing as morally acceptable “indifference”, I guess. So, you do not love the cow when you eat its flesh. Is eating animal flesh therfore immoral?
But then you say:
So the paragon of love apparently did not love the tree when he made it wither, or the pigs when he caused them to drown. Can you explain why his actions were not immoral here?
Going retro…
So all cruelty is equal–microwaving an ant is exactly as immoral as microwaving a baby, assuming the person feels the same degree of “cruelty” towards the microwavee (and is not suffering from brain damage).
Well, I’m back from Saturn, but I see that I have a number of gentle empathics to deal with, all deserving of thoughtful replies. Since it will likely take me a couple of hours to sort, consolidate, and respond, I’ll take it back up in the morning. G’night.
Well, Libertarian, all I can say is that I read the Bible, and I don’t see the God you see anywhere in it, Old Testament or New Testament. Of course, I haven’t had your personal experience with which to view the Bible, but then, there you go, I haven’t had your personal experience, and all I can do is view things in light of my personal experiences.
I would say that I find your basis for morality pretty “arbitrary” as well. You’ve had what seems to me to be an entirely subjective personal experience of God (or what you perceived as God), and based on that you interpret life (including the Bible) in a way which I just don’t see. If someone else had had an entirely subjective personal experience of God, but one which led them to a different view of God–say a Calvinist God–and they became a convinced and devout Calvinist, then to the extent their worldview is based on this subjective personal experience, it’s arbitrary in the same way yours is. Your views may lead you to be an easier person to get along with, socially and politically speaking, than the Calvinist, but it’s still all arbitrary. And your mind is, obviously, made up about these issues.
Person A loves B. One day, B gets mad at C for coughing too close to him, drags him off into the woods, and brutally tortures and murders him. D (Who happens to be Sherrif D) is wandering by and sees this, and after a short action-packed chase, arrests him. A takes the pump-action shotgun that B had kept for hunting and heads down to the town center, intending to free B as an act of love. He warns D and the rest of the townsfolk there (E-Z) to get out of the way, because A really doesn’t want to hurt any of them (He doesn’t!). D says that B will be hung in punishment for his crime, but seeing that A isn’t going to listen to him, grabs his gun. A, seeing that he is faced with either dying (In which case B would die as well), or shooting D (To save B). Naturally, A shoots and kills D. The rest of the townsfolk quickly round up a good-old posse, grab the pitchforks and torches, and try to storm the sherrifs office where A holes up to protect B; In the end, many are killed or wounded as A tries to defend his love, B. Naturally, A is doing this out of a love for B.
Since A acted because of his love for B, this would be a moral thing?
Or how about this; A (A different A) is walking through a forest, on a hunt, with a high-powered rifle. B (Also a different B) is also walking through a forest, and is also on a hunt, but he is hunting A (Old childhood grudge; A had been picked before B on a 3rd-grade baseball team). When B sees A, he opens fire, wounding A. A tries to run, but finds himself unable to get to safety because of his injury. Huddling in a partly-hollowed log, A tries to hide from B, knowing quite clearly that B is trying to kill him, and that he may have to kill A to save himself. B slowly approaches the opening, rifle leveled as he tries to see into the darkness, and starts to taunt A, apparently not knowing A was armed. A keeps aimed right at the middle of B, starting to get unnerved, frightened, and even a little angry due to the taunting, and just as B starts to point his own rifle into the opening, fires, killing B with a single shot through the chest. Obviously not an act one does out of love (Unless you count love of one’s self, but that not only opens up the possibility for all sorts of crimes, but is just about the -definition- of pride, considered one of the really-bad sins), but it’s certainly not an immoral act (And if you’re going to say he could have shot to wound, let’s say that it was an automatic rifle B had leveled at A, not a hunting rifle; If A just wounded him, B almost certainly would have squeezed off a few rounds before going down, and at that range and in a confined area, A would have been seriously screwed).
(Erf… I hope this doesn’t look too much like flamebait, especially with my low post-count. I appologize if it does, but I wanted to point out what seemed like a bit of a flaw…)
Ooh! Can I take this one? (I’m not a Lib, but I argue with one on the internet frequently.)
Let’s assume all parties have healthy brains.
Scenario the First (Libmorality)
B was acting unethically (by coercing C to death) and probably immorally (although we’d have to know all the particulars of his relationship with C to hazard a guess).
A was acting unethically (by coercing D to death) but probably morally (if his motive was purely his love for B).
D was acting ethically (as a duly acknowledged agent of the gov’t responding to initial force) and probably amorally (although we can’t know that).
E - Z may have been acting ethically, but there is not enough contractual information in order to decide, and were probably acting amorally (Yahweh’s MMV).
And Zed? Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.
Scenario the Second (Lib)
A was acting ethically (responding to initial force) and probably amorally (YMMV).
B was acting unethically. The morality of B’s actions is questionable (by God), but it would depend on the specifics of his relationship with A.
Zed’s still dead.
[/quote]
Scenario 1 (xenomorality)
B is a monster; A is a twisted creature. Both have done evil. The ethics of immoral actions are irrelevant.
D executed the duties of his office conscientiously and attempted to protect the weak (the townspeople, obviously, but also A, through his restraint). Good man. Too bad he wasn’t quicker on the trigger.
E-Z shoulda known better than to press the seige offensively; they needed to contain A and B and call the state troopers. Individual idiocy is not immoral, but community endangerment is.
C shoulda covered his mouth when he coughed.
Scenario 2 (xeno)
A done right.
B picked the wrong letter of the alphabet to screw with.
In political science, ethics deals with man’s relation to man and man’s authority thereof. In theology, morality deals with man’s relation to God and God’s authority thereof. Jesus teaches that man’s relation to man ought to recapitulate his relation to God, with authority thereof given, not to government, but to God. I render ethics unto Caesar and morality unto God.
A man might behave immorally, and owe a moral accounting to God. But that does not mean necessarily that he owes an ethical accounting to government. That’s why libertarians oppose legislation of morality. Morality is between a man and his God or conscience, and is of no ethical concern to government.
Coercion is a Platonic ideal that bears upon both morality and ethics. Freedom is the absence of coercion. Thus, noncoercion is necessary both for a perfect ethic and a perfect morality, allowing for both the autonomy and free-will of every individual.
Phoenix Dragon
Welcome to Straight Dope Great Debates. Your post count is irrelevant. What matters here is the soundness of your argument.
Regarding your scenarios, you got a bit sloppy with your As and Bs in the second one, but that aside, you have described a sequence of electromagnetic wave collapses suspended in a gravitational field, heading in the general direction of greater entropy. Within that context, you have vaguely described certain neuroelectrical discharges in various neuclei acumbens and substantia nigra, along with other synaptic farts, such those that comprise an emotion you call “love”.
In order to assess the morality of your scenarios, I need you to provide me with the attributes of the morality waves and their particles.
MEBuckner
And I wouldn’t really blame you, having seen things from a perspective similar to yours. But even back then, I understood that, for a morality to be nonarbitrary, it must be derived from Perfect Goodness with a reference frame that is Absolute.
And it will be unless and until my experience changes. I do not begrudge you your opinion. I was under the possibly naive understanding that people were seeking to comprehend my view. After all, it is pointless to debate subjective experience, isn’t it?
Gaudere
I covered that here on page 2. I don’t know how you missed it. That was the post that prompted you to remind me of the dichotomy between your own views and those of rational materialists.
Here it is to save you from enduring a slow load:
Now, back to your latest post.
I am resigned that it is not understanding, but rather debate that you seek, and that’s fine. At least now I have my bearings. Empathy would have told you your answer, since you would know that the only suffering that is morally significant is spiritual suffering.
God’s perfect Love is a metaphysical state, not a brain fart. His Love takes a predicate nominative, not an object. It is an identity, not a transivity. The moral decisions made by Jesus reflected God’s moral imperative. The tree and the pigs were mere molecules. Jesus saved your eternal Spirit from death.
[stunned stare…]
What the person feels is irrelevant. A feeling is merely the brain’s amoral perception of the moral decision made by the Spirit. I cannot fathom making the moral decision that I love a baby and then watching my healthy brain carry out a motor decision to put it in a microwave. But that it is not to say that it is impossible a priori. Jesus talked about how very difficult it would be for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. But then He said that with God, all things are possible.
I would say that if you microwave a baby, you will certainly answer to your government for your unethical act. You will likewise answer to God for your moral decision. God does not judge you per se, but the same Spirit that hates a baby will hate God as well, and will choose to run from His terrible Light and Truth.
Quix
Inaccurate.
Spirit is a metaphysic. Morality is an ethic. What I define is a Love-based morality that is not arbitrary simply because it is the morality that is deemed Good by the only being Who is Good. It seems reasonable to me that God ought to know what He is talking about in matters of morality.
Arnold
Well, any one of the countless possible inferences, I guess, including that one that might have reasoned along these lines: “Lib was likely mindful of a composition fallacy, and thus did not mean to associate every attribute of white supremacy morality to materialist morality, but rather the single attribute that they obviously share: empathy”.
I cannot make a moral judgment about certain African and Amazon tribes. I think it is certainly uncivilized to eat people. I don’t do it myself. And it is certainly impossible to do so morally against their will. (See coercion references littered here and there.)
And where is their reference to Jesus? Recall that I had said, “There is no interpretation of God’s Word (Jesus) that will allow you to hate another man, despite whether you make your comments a hundred times over.” In fact, Jesus Himself set the example of nonseparatism when, despite the protests of others, He lovingly interacted with a Samaritan woman.
Was Spiritus Mundi the only one who understood what I said? The statement I make is “I don’t know if it is possible, but unlike the proof that His Spirit is in humans, there is zero evidence in my experience that His Spirit is in other things.” It is no different at all from the reason why I reject what Gish says and accept what Darwin says.
Except for the society thing. See my comments to Xeno about the difference in what we owe to Caesar and what we owe to God.
Whew! Four power outages later, I barely meet my promised deadline. Thank you, everyone, for your patience!
And similarily, what I define as a Quixotic-based morality (for those of you just joining, a fictitious morality where all actions must benefit me, or else they are immoral or at best amoral) is not arbitrary because it is the morality that is deemed good by the only being who is Quixotic. But both of our statements are silly, meaningless tautologies, mere circular definitions. “It’s good because God/Quixotic is good, and only God’s/Quixotic’s opinion matters, because only God/Quixotic is good.”
I think your response to MEBuckner may allow for more substantive discussion…
**
And you’ve defined God as the only being who is Perfect Goodness, and whose reference frame is Absolute. In Quixotic-world <shudder>, I’ve defined Myself as the only being who is Perfect Quixotic, and whose reference frame is Absolute. The only difference between these two scenarios is your Weltanschuung. You cannot accept any scenario where God isn’t defined exactly the way you’ve defined Him. In my last post, I feel that I judged you harshly for this, accusing you of being close-minded. I apologize based on what you say here:
I had gotten the impression that you were begrudging others their opinion. Or, at the very least, tolerating others to have opinions, but considering any opinions differing from your own ridiculous. I was off-base, and am sorry.
No one’s taking away their freedom of choice. G-d just wants them to be subject to fewer temptations of that sort, but certainly, as seen from almost everywhere in the Bible, there’s freedom to commit sins.
Yes, he chooses to exert as little influence as possible so that we mortals have a genuine equivalency, in our minds, between good and evil to choose between.
Kimstu:
“Charitable” in this context refers to giving benefit of the doubt. Obviously, G-d does not expect us to have any doubt when he writes explicitly about the subject’s evil.
Opus1:
Just to clarify - Samuel told them that the time had come to do so. The commandment to do so eventually is explicitly written in the OT (Deuteronomy 25:19).
No, because there’s one additional qualification in that portion, but I don’t blame you for not recognizing it as such…it’s subtle, but present. It’s in verse 15 of that portion (Moses speaking) - “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me” - in other words, the person claiming to be a prophet must be known to be pious and dedicated to G-d like Moses. Someone who is known to be pious and considers the Torah to be true is extremely unlikely to take a chance on declaring a sign he has no control over (likely though it might be, as in your Mariners-Devil Rays example), especially since the Torah declares a death sentence on a false prophet.
Of course it’s possible, but it also sits pretty well with the commandment of Deuteronomy that this be done when the Israelites are settled on their land and the fact that they had just anointed their first king.
And did this hypothetical later author also put the commandment in Deuteronomy? (Of course, according to the Talmud, Samuel himself was the author of that portion of the book bearing his name.) And the attack in Exodus that it was pinned to?
I’ll continue by responding to the rest of your post later tonight. Sorry my posting in this thread has been so broken up, but long, thought-out posts require long, thought-out responses, and the time for doing it all in one shot isn’t always there…for me, at least.
Ok, I’m confused. First you say that we exerts his influence by making them “subject to further temptations”. And then in the very next line you say He chooses to exert as little influence as possible. How are those things not completely contradictory? So He kills whole nations to keep people from tempation, but at the same time, he exerts little influence?
Sounds like you still believe that atheists can have a code of ethics but not a moral code.
Does this mean a person who has no relationship with God is not entitled to have a relationship with his fellow man? Does this mean a person who does not believe there is a God should not believe there are men?
Why do you define freedom so negatively? It’s like defining light as the absence of darkness or heat as the absence of cold when it’s the other way around.
“Morality waves?” WTF? I don’t believe I have ever heard of or read that term before. Let me check the Bible…
Since you apparently coined this term yourself, could you explain it in depth?
[quote]
**MEBuckner
This confirms it; you truly do not believe atheists can have morals. Why do persist in repeating this libelous assertion?
The tree had no nervous system, therefore it felt no pain, therefore, Jesus’ cursing the tree could not have been an immoral act.
The pigs, however, having nervous systems, were very much capable of feeling pain, therefore felt great pain when forced to drown (drowning is NOT painless; ask anyone who nearly died that way), therefore Jesus making them drown just to get rid of a few demons He could have eliminated in a far less painful and messy manner (not to mention sparing the financial loss of the pigs’ owners), was, indeed, an immoral act, the kind Jesus is supposed to be incapable of committing.
Going with definition “1”, we see that a person needs an ethical code to define or determine how morally he or she will behave. A person with perfect ethical standards will try not to do that which he or she believes is immoral.
But the only evidence we have that God is Good is His behavior. Owing to all the supernatural disasters He caused and massacres He ordered, God does not come out looking very Good at all.
Ok, why is God not morally “allowed” to have sex with me against my will, but he is “allowed” to kill me against my will? My body is His to do with as He desires, and I fail to see how inserting a penis in me is coercive, but stopping my heart is not. Quite frankly, I’d rather He rape me than kill me right now. He is imposing his will on me, because I do not wish my body to die just as I do not wish my body to be violated, but He wishes me to be dead and so He kills my body. Just as inserting a penis may be rape or not depending on whether I desire it to happen, killing me may be murder or not depending on whether I desire it to happen. If I wish to die, fine, kill me, but if I do not, what right has God to usurp my will here?
Lib, I DO NOT UNDERSTAND, and I don’t think it’s because I’m choosing to be unempathetic (as you are apparently saying I am). I do not understand why you say causing harm without meaning to be cruel is not a loving act, so it is immoral, but then killing and animal out of desire for the taste for its flesh is not immoral. Are you saying the animal is not “suffering spiritually” when you kill it, therefore if you kill it without your Spirit desiring to be cruel, it is not immoral? Animals have no spirit, according to you, so they cannot suffer spiritually, so does that mean you do not think anything done to them can be considered “morally significant suffering”? How does the spirit suffer, anyhow?
OK, so destroying mere molecules, withering a tree and sending pigs to a watery death, is not immoral. If I, on a whim, with my Spirit not wishing to be cruel, decided to drown a kitten, would that be moral? I would not be acting lovingly towards the kitten’s molecules, just as Jesus did not act lovingly towards the pigs’ molecules.
Can the Spirit make a moral decision to neither love nor hate? Or must it be one or the other?
Well, you did say, “Thus, cruelty to an animal is as morally heinous as cruelty to a man.” Therefore the Spirit that hates an ant will hate God as well, too, right? Any hate at all is equally morally heinous, regardless of the object of the hate, regardless of whether the hate is directed towards a single ant or a single human baby. A Spirit hating an ant and killing it due to that hate is equally as immoral as a Spirit hating a human child and killing him/her due to that hate. Is this correct?
Uh oh. If your spirit is filled with hate, you are rejecting God! Either that or your choice to hate brussel spouts is not immoral, because you are not causing spiritual harn to the sprouts. I’m just not sure which it is…
Ummm… smiles and nods Okay… I have no clue what you just said
Other than you are reducing the people and their emotions well beyond the degree of scrutiny needed to evaluate the situation; Person A works just as well as describing all the molocules, EM fields, and the like that make up person A. That, and as has been noted before, there is no way to describe some condition (Morality waves??) that has not been defined (Since it -seems- to be a term coined by yourself, you need to supply a definition). Or better yet, how about just plain english, instead of all that? We’re not all neurobiologists/physicysts/biologist/etc, and it’s hard to understand what I’m reading when I have to refer to a dictionary every other word
And regardless of that, you CAN still answer wether you THINK the action was PROBABLY moral/immoral/ammoral. We don’t need a definitive, flat-out “Yes it was” or “No it wasn’t” in the grand, all-seeing POV of the universe. Are you saying that, with the events I described (Assume they happen JUST as I described them, nothing more nor less), there is the possibility for it to actually depend on something else? Such as, the entire events may be moral in one event, yet immoral in another, even though there were NO DIFFERENCES between the two? Come on… Express your own opinion on the matter. If you mean that you absolutely can no form an opinion on the event from what was described, just say so, but I would find it incredibly hard to believe you would not have -some- suspicion of the overall morality of the situation, even if you can’t claim an “absolute knowledge” of it…
Pheonix, I think he was being facetious. Use a bunch of high term words that don’t go together very well to confuse one in a humorous way. I sure hope he wasn’t being serious…
Well, it would have been much simpler to just answer the question. Not to mention, that’s pretty much the same responce he had last time someone proposed a hypothetical situation…
Quite frankly, yes. The Torah’s text was widespread enough so that variations would have ended up getting noticed. It would have taken a massive conspiracy for one generation to hand down to the next something not present in what they received. In addition, it would have taken an extremely stupid bunch of conspirators to include such phrases as “Ask your father and he will tell you, your elders, and they will explain to you.” (Deuteronomy 32:7), and “Ask now about the former days, long before your time, from the day God created man on the earth; ask from one end of the heavens to the other.” (Deut. 4:32).
And even if not every father managed to impart the entire Torah to every son of his, there were plenty enough scholars around who did manage to pass it along.Also, bear in mind that this was not merely an oral transmission, it was a written one as well. There were original texts to fact-check.
I will concede that there is one circumstance in which a changed text could become accepted by an entire population: if a king with strong authority published his version and mounted a successful campaign of replacement. However, according to the OT itself, the kings had zero religious authority; that was in the hands of the prophets who were more often critical of the king than supportive of him. If the king were pushing his version of the OT, I find it unlikely that he’d go for the inclusion of unflattering material.
Everyone in possession of the unaltered text.
On top of that, if someone later on changed text to be more flattering, why in the world would he have left in so much stuff about the early Israelites sinning? Making them out to be overly pious and righteous would have been a smarter thing to change.
As one of my Rabbis has said, there have been many unflattering accusations made about the Jews, but “stupid” has never been one of them.
Yes, I know that we Jews claim to have an Oral Torah from Sinai; that’s what we now refer to as the Talmud. Do you know how controversial it was back in the days when Rabbi Judah the Prince decided that the Oral Torah had to once and for all be committed to writing?
But in any case, my statement above applies here as well: enough people had texts of the Torah, and enough people were learned in what it said, that an abberrant version would have quickly been verified against existing texts.
It’s a simple single syllable (say that one three times fast!). There’s no reason that that couldn’t have been a city name unrelated to the Israelite tribe of the same name.
I see you’re quoting here from Jeremiah 8:8, and the NIV clearly takes the liberty of translating the “lying pens of scribes” as having falsified the Torah itself. I hate to resort to this again, since it turned into such a boondoggle last time, but: in the original Hebrew, it is clearly not saying that the scribes falsified the Torah. “It says that the lying pens of scribes write lies.” I can see where the translators make the leap to assuming that it refers to the Torah itself, but it seems to me (of course, I’m relying on existing Jewish translations when I say this; when I say “seems to me” I mean that it seems to me I can make my point to you by this) that the following verse indicates this: “Since they have rejected the word of the LORD, what kind of wisdom do they have?” Sounds to me like these lying scribes are trying to spread “wisdom” in forms other than the Torah, not that they are actually using the Torah and twisting it.
In any case, clearly enough folks (like Jeremiah himself) who knew what the original said were still around to declare fakes to be fakes.
If it weren’t in written form, disseminated to the entire nation, with no central controlling authority (gee, I sound like Al Gore), with inter-generational questioning encouraged, numerous missed opporunities for revisers to improve on the image the text presents, and a host of other reasons, I’d say you’re right. Sinai is merely what makes me so certain that what Moses said came from G-d. These other factors, along with some I haven’t mentioned due to irrelevance to this thread, are what lead me to believe that the transmission from that was faithfully executed.
Libertarian:
My apologies. I certainly make no claims to be expert in Chriatian theology. But if it’s not true that “the Son” is a more merciful aspect than “the Father,” then what is the distinction between the two, if any?
And please don’t chide me for hijacking, not after this whole Goedel thing you and Gaudere have gotten into.
pepperlandgirl:
Because we’re talking about two completely different kinds of influence. He chooses to exert as little direct influence as possible, because a direct experience of the divine leads (to a great degree) to a clear understanding of the advantage of choosing good over evil, and therefore choices are made not from righteosness but from calculation based on knowledge and experience. He chooses instead to subject human beings to indirect influences, all of which appear to be completely natural, thereby providing the human with a struggle to contend with in which the advantages and disadvantages of the options appear to be somewhat equal.
