Posted on 03/19/2010 1:04:09 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good. There is no celestial headmaster who is going to give you six (or six billion, billion, billion) of the best if you are bad. Morality is flimflam.
Does this mean that you can just go out and rape and pillage, behave like an ancient Roman grabbing Sabine women? Not at all. I said that there are no grounds for being good. It doesn't follow that you should be bad. Indeed, there are those – and I am one – who argue that only by recognising the death of God can we possibly do that which we should, and behave properly to our fellow humans and perhaps save the planet that we all share. We can give up all of that nonsense about women and gay people being inferior, about fertilised ova being human beings, and about the earth being ours to exploit and destroy.
Start with the fact that humans are naturally moral beings. We want to get along with our fellows. We care about our families. And we feel that we should put our hands in our pockets for the widows and orphans. This is not a matter of chance or even of culture primarily. Humans as animals have gone the route of sociality. We succeed, each of us individually, because we are part of a greater whole and that whole is a lot better at surviving and reproducing that most other animals.
On the one hand, we have suppressed all sorts of common mammalian features that disrupt harmonious living. Imagine trying to run a philosophy class if two or three of the members were in heat.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
As opposed to evo tales, like the Darwinian kind?
Made up as he went, while on a long sea voyage?
Why are you ponticating on morals. That's philosophical in nature. What scientific evidence do you have to back up your assertions about morality?
You know, anything testable, repeatable, concrete.
For many decades I have pointed out the obvious to almost every liberal I have met, all of who think they have a real principle for their hatred of America's glaringly obvious conservative cultural, legal, institutional history. They all want the biblical foundation of America's inheritance trivalized and destroyed.
A nation's population can decide upon what reality it wants to base its law, culture, and decisions about right and wrong. Evidence that what a culture thinks about its foundational reality is very important and distinctive is seen in the freedom and prosperity of that culture.
Yes, a nation can believe what it wants to believe, but only a fool would think that all faith and beliefs systems are anywhere near the same, or that they show no evidence that one creates true freedom while others create differing levels of bondage and despair.
You are getting there! That's what makes them tales. :)
In this sense, they cannot be just "made-up stuff."
Oh, people never make up things...Fatima 1917 and the "dancing Sun" comes to mind.
The experiences themselves prompt the telling of the "tale."
Anything form an illusion, to a delusion, from a neurosis to a psychosis.
No you dind't. I didn't think it was necessary to explain what is meant by the Bible or by a tale.
I believe I was addressing all types of people inclusing those who 'worship' science. You need to read the whole thing; not just cherry pick words to toss around.
Yeah, like the Bible and God maybe? You have any good 'tests" for them? Something concrete, testable, and repeatable?
Anyway I am not 'ponticating' on morals. Morality exists outside theological pontifications.
With this statement, it seems to me you deny on principle any value to human experience, especially as articulated in language, on grounds that human experience is always to be doubted as a source of knowledge, distrusted because it's "too personal," and thus cannot indicate a more general, let alone a universal rule.
If that is what you actually believe, dear kosta, I hardly know what to say to you in reply.
But I'll take a stab with this observation: You have to completely invert reality to accommodate such a conclusion.
Consider that statement for openers. Then maybe we'll see where it goes from there.
Do you usually treat your partners in debate with such disrespect — including disrespect for what they actually said, which is still awaiting a reply from you?
Dear betty, just saw your comment above in the “latest posts” list.
If human experience has no value, then nothing has any value, becuase there is nothing in objective reality that has any meaning apart from how humans can experience said reality; of course there is also the fact that God experiences objective reality; but we cannot know how He experiences reality other than by our own human experience; from our vantage point.
So to say that human experience has no value, is to say that nothing has any value at all, including that opinion that no human experience has any value! So it is a self-defeating piece of nothing.
As though reality only has value if completely apart from, and unknowable by, any human. Wow.
Nope, just stating that it is not reliable.
My advice: go back and read the threads leading to her erroneous conculsion, rather than start with it. :)
Talk about stirring up the pot!
Discuss the issues all you want, but do not make it personal.
I think it is disrespectful to imply something I didn't say.
Did someone die and leave you in charge? You answer for me (#118), impute I said something I didn't (#128) and now you are accusing me of disrespect for suggesting they read the whole thing and not just out of context "buzz" words (#129).
Talk about intense...
Okay, maybe tomorrow I can read the whole thread.
If human experience is not reliable, then its value is very limited. In which case, why is one opinion (say, for instance, yours) of any more value than anyone elses? Seems there is no purpose in even discussing truth, then, since all opinion is based (I guess according to you) on unreliable human experience. Every person creates his own reality and all that good stuff.
OK RM, what did I say that was “about” other Freepers?
You are referring to _Guardian_ subscribers, aren't you? You answered your own question.
Read the essay. Bleh. Shaftesbury cocktail with a Darwinian chaser. Something to numb the senses of the ignorant so that rassenhygiene programs can get going -- again -- without too much trouble.
Yes it is. That's why we don't go by hearsay, but look for as much objective evidence as possible. Subjectivity is simply not very reliable. Two people can watch one and the same movie in the same circumstances and one may find it true and wonderful and the other false and horrible.
Making a thread "about" an individual Freeper is often the first step in a flamewar.
Discuss the issues all you want, but do not make it personal.
This is actually possible, I grant you, dear kosta. But how often, really, does such a situation actually occur?
Most human beings can identify with the experience of other human beings. All are existentially in the "same boat," so to speak.
Which is to say there is a commonality in human experience such that people in movie theaters tend to identify the same things in the film projected to them. Indeed, if they didn't, that is if this were not a reliable expectation, then producers, directors, and actors wouldn't know what to do next.
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