I am your king.
Posted on 03/13/2005 9:49:16 AM PST by Lando Lincoln
Nonsense. Anyone who earns an honest living contributes to the "support" of his civilization.
The suggestion that one's contributions are irrelevant unless accompanied by right ideology is the sort of totalitarianism associated with the little troll in Pyongyang.
Does this mean that one can have an absolute system of morality if one believes in a higher power?
I've have often heard this argument, usually to support Christian morality. But something about it leaves me uneasy. What is it that makes us adopt the moral code prescribed by the higher power?
If it is because we face punishment for disobedience, does that make morality ultimately just a matter of utilitarian self-interest? If it is because we are commanded to, isn't that just a circular argument? And if it is something else, outside of the higher power's prescribed code, doesn't that mean that our morality is based on something outside of the higher power- or possibly within ourselves?
I am your king.
And, for that matter, what makes us declare that the Prophet John Doe is conveying the will of a genuine higher power but the Preacher Richard Roe is just spouting crazy talk?
Nope. Buddhists have transmitted their ethical teachings across more generations than Christianity has existed. For that matter, the classic Greeks maintained a moral system independently of their belief in various gods (the denizens of the Greek pantheon might as well have been so many comic-book superheroes, and their mythology contained less moral edification than an average month's worth of Marvel or DC output).
Indeed. Would the author defend Clinton for siccing the Secret Service on a guy who yelled "You Suck!"* at him? (After all, yelling vulgar insults in a crowd does show "startling lack of judgment", does it not?)
*This event, of course, occurred before it became known that the passive voice of the verb would have been more accurately descriptive.
Breaking natural adjustment mechanisms is stupid. In this case, it is clearly necessary for the birthrate to adjust downward once individual resource consumption, energy use, etc rise to levels characteristic of a mature economy (otherwise, the various bleak forecasts of environmentalists become fact rather than Chicken Little doomcrying). The fact that it happens naturally is fortuitous, as it avoid the need for government intrusion upon the family (which would also be incurred by any social engineering efforts to "break the link" of natural adjustment).
The problem is that our society is based on growth and once a society stops growing it starts declining and gets replaced. That is exactly what is happening in Europe where the Arabs are displacing the normal ethnic populations.
I think the reason for our population not growing and starting to decline is partly because the government has stepped in to provide services that children typically performed. From a selfish viewpoint it doesn't make much sense to have a big family and spend your life raising those kids when the government will take care of us in our old age.
Growth always stops, because exponential increases always exceed any finite limit. It can happen the easy way (gradual adjustment) or the hard way (a collapse). Nature doesn't care which.
Ping
1-Buddhism is not atheism.
2-What are the "holy books" of the Greek atheists? Plato's Republic? The ancient Greeks had a pantheon of gods. By and large they were not atheists.
These quibbles are beside the point, which is that the promulgation of morality without divine sanction is clearly illustrated by Buddhism (which does not encompass belief in a divinity) and classic Hellenism (in which the gods were, as I put it, the equivalent of comic-book superheroes about whom larger-than-life tales were told).
Actually, quite a few RELIGIONS have started that way. If we follow your logic, the morality of the followers of these religions has just sprung from some guy named Fred. That certainly was the case with the Manson family...although the guy was named Charlie.
If you pick up a morality or ethics textbook and go to the footnotes, and then get those books and go to their footnotes, and so on and so on, you will find they trace their roots back to belief systems that at their founding premise assumed the existence of a Higher Power. The school of thought known as morality originated based on a belief in a Higher Power. The school of thought known as ethics grew out of the school of thought known as morality. This isn't my opinion it is just a fact.
But morality is, as we defined earlier, a doctrine or system of moral conduct, any particular set of moral principles or rules of conduct. We debate about whether those are divinely inspired or universally present, and human morality corresponds to a supernatural code of ethics, which is absolute, or whether it is a human phenomenon, that can be explained as a result of genetic and cultural forces, and a true, universal moral code does not rightly exist. If you could prove that the former was the case, you would cite to these footnotes and do so. You cannot. It is your assertion and your job to look it up and back it up with facts, but you will find it tough or impossible to do, because the origins of morality are not footnoted. The reason we're debating this at all is you deny even the possibility that morality could exist outside religion. I've demonstrated otherwise by proving there are groups that have a morality of their own and aren't religious or basing their morality on religion.
But if you'd like to say that those groups aren't really outside of religion, then YOU show me how it is that the teachings of the Buddha or the doctrine of the Soviets were NOT atheist. That's how logic works. You make a statement that's unsupported, I show you an example of how you're wrong, and to prove otherwise YOU need to defuse the examples' viability. You can't do so.
I can see how using the word "absolutely" twice when talking about absolutes could be a little "unclear."
Sure, all we did was talk about absolutes before your latest reformation of your thesis. /sarcasm Whatever.
Personally, I don't think anything at the UN has ever had anything to do with morality, nor is morality a particularly good starting point for an analysis of Soviet treaty signing motivation.
Your dismissal of the example is indicative of your dedication to your thesis in the face of any evidence otherwise. You stated that if I have a rational basis to declare something as heinous as rape or genocide objectively wrong, a higher power must exist. The Soviets declared that genocide was wrong. We can safely presume they had a rational basis for their declaration, they weren't insane. Therefore under your terms, a belief in a higher power must have existed in the Soviet Union. Except that was against state policy. You may dismiss the U.N. or the Soviets, but you can't dismiss the fact that the example is dead on applicable to your stated thesis and proves its untruth.
You seem to think that in personally, or collectively, viewing something as always wrong that this qualifies as an absolute morality--it does not.
Not at all. Just that it qualifies as morality, which you think can't exist outside of religion. But how have you demonstrated that it doesn't qualify as absolute? You haven't. You've just stated that it doesn't, which isn't the same thing at all. I've already demonstrated that other people may have a moral code and an ethical sense when they perform acts outside of OUR code of morality. They may know right from wrong--in the context of their ethical system. They may even have the same absolutes we do. But they do not necessarily need a higher power to have those absolutes, and to claim otherwise is simply a claim, one without any proof. I've provided examples. You just deny, without any assertion as to how those examples are somehow false.
You can have a moral code that has a rational basis to declare something always wrong. At the same time, someone else can have a rational basis to declare that very same thing not wrong, or even right and desirable. Either you believe that those two value systems can coexist with no contradictions (moral relativist) or you believe that one must be right and the other wrong (absolute morality.)
This is true. It doesn't disprove the fact that the other morality EXISTS, which is what we're arguing about. Not that there is a right and wrong morality; that there ARE other moralities outside of religious thought.
Compare the rational basis for these two contradictory value systems and you will find it is rationally impossible to declare one absolutely correct and one absolutely incorrect without looking to a Higher Power. (If you can, I'm all ears.)
You certainly are not. I have already done so. A Utilitarianist view that providing the greatest good for the greatest number is the goal of government shows that the Soviet and American systems competed rather poorly. If we allowed analysis of the citizens' opinions under their system, the judgment would inevitably come out on the side of the American system. There would be an absolute as to the judgment of the people involved, no relativity there whatsoever. A poll is not a higher power. I am not a utilitarian, but I've already noted that there are ways to judge the difference between competing moralities and you sweep these aside as unacceptable and wrong--demonstrating again that as far as you're concerned, your thesis is unassailable even by facts or examples which show it's wrong.
Ok. Why? What is your rational basis for declaring one morality definitively superior or inferior to another? What moral authority do you draw upon to declare Eichman's morality to be wrong? Is it just your subjective opinion that Eichman was wrong or was he objectively wrong on the face of what he believed?
Irrelevancy again. I said that to demonstrate that there can be more than one morality, and to illustrate that I'm not a relativist in so saying, and you brush it aside with 'but what's YOUR opinion on the wrongness of the morality?' That is simply not relevant, when the debate's about whether morality can exist outside of religion. You are dismissive and attempt to distract from any example that demonstrates your point is wrong. It's tiresome.
Getting back to the atheists--and try not to read any superiority complex into this, it is only an intellectual argument to make a point. This Country was founded based on a certain set of beliefs. All our laws trace themselves back to the Constitution--it's the thing that says we can make laws, the Constitution traces itself back to principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence--it's the thing that says we can make our own government. Thomas Jefferson and those who helped him write it reasoned that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." They based this on the belief, "that all men are created equal" and have "certain unalienable Rights." That belief is premised on those rights being "endowed by their Creator." If you dispute the postulate the those Rights are endowed by a Creator, all that followed that postulate--the founding of America, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and all of our laws--is brought into question. If "Nature's God" does not entitle men "to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station" and found their own country, what does? So all of our Constitutional Rights are premised on the existence of a Creator.
Flag waving irrelevancy. You are trying to get me to say that the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or the United States would exist without religious people acting on inspiration from God, and I never said anything of the sort and disagree with that. Where we disagree you have already been proven wrong--that morality can exist independent of religion.
Therefore there is a certain level of irony in an atheist-- who based on the definition of what he is disputes the premise of those rights--invokes those rights to try and abolish the symbols that are the basis for those rights existing in the first place.
Irrelevancy again. That American atheists derive rights from a constitution that religious people were the motivation for, we don't argue about. And if you were arguing from a strictly American standpoint, you wouldn't have made the statements you did about morality in general. You believe morality can't exist without belief in a higher power. Post 2--All morality stems originally from a belief in God. This flag waving is distraction from our debate, because you've already lost it.
I've been trying to avoid this thread. I knew it would take a lot of time and reading and I've been overwhelmed. But you have now officially served it onto my plate, thank you very much! I'll get to it later tonight after the other half of little jeremiah goes to bed.
:-)
Laura Ingraham is an arrogant, sanctimonious, but well educated moron. To her truth is congruent with her assinine chatter each day only by coincidence and only when it suits her daily irrationality.
Of course their are limits to growth. It is just that if I had my preference I would rather limit the Muslims growth rather than ours. You on the other hand seem to want the Muslims to conquer the world by out breeding us.
Are you an advocate of the thoroughly discredited book "Limits to Growth?"
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