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 ...
RM, I agree that there is no need or room for flamewars, but I never said that human experience has no value, and she says I did. What do you call that? How would you phrase it?
I would call it a misunderstanding and I would phrase my reply that way, i.e. you said this but I said that.
Are moral standards simply social conventions?
I think it happens all the time and in great numbers. Look at the the Health Care obamination! Some people see it as mostly bad, others as the best thing since sliced bread.
Chances are that people in movie theaters experience movies the same way because people pick the same movies based on the same predisposition.
For example, the "Passion of the Christ." Chances are that atheists and non-Christians will see it one way and Christians in another. Chances are the non-Christians and atheists will most likely not even see it, but if they somehow end up going to see it, they will probably go there with their minds already made up as to how they will receive it.
The same can be said of the movie "Religioulous." It will be see as positive and great by skeptics and non-believers, but certainly as repulsive for believers.
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
There is commonality of human "experience" but it seems to be predicated by the predisposition. Again, the 1917 Fatima "dancing Sun" witnessed by 70,000 people illustrates this very well.
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.
Directors "target" populations with certain disposition, knowing what they like and knowing how they will experience the movie. Human predisposition is like colored glasses. It tends to influence how we "see" things subjectively.
Thank you RM. That’s a good suggestion to follow.
Not in any meaningful sense. Without concrete theological grounds morality is governed by social Darwinism, which invariably leads to tyranny and ultimately to genocide.
In some societies, social conventions play a large part in what is acceptable and what must be shunned. I lived in Japan for six years, a country where pagan religions and culture represent the norm. Yet, Japanese has a very strong moral code, a sense of shame, contrition, the sense of right and wrong, etc.
If you asked them why some things are "good' and some "not good" they will usually site a social convention rather than the Ten Commandments.
And we know how good Christian societies were at tyranny and genoicde.
So I take it from your statement that you say moral standards are conventional. Then I will ask you if there is absolute moral evil in the world? Please explain your position.
With a Christian moral foundation tyranny and genocide is possible. With atheistic social Darwinism as a moral foundation tyranny and genocide is inevitable.
I do not believe in absolute moral evil. Christian dualism is somewhat problematic, imho, because it makes Satan an "absolute," and therefore somewhat of a god, because only deity is believed absolute.
Why is that? What evidence do you have for that conclusion?
The need to prove that another standard for our culture is better is your burden, not mine. The traditional morality of America, the one hated so badly by liberals, the historical default standard of America is the one I will stay with until someone can 'prove' they have a better one.
I will repeat what I said before.
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.
You know, the last time you asked me for "evidence" I gave you what would be considered solid evidence and you rejected it out of hand. I then asked you what kind of evidence you would accept and you either failed or refused to respond. So frankly I don't think you are one who would accept whatever evidence would be presented which might cast doubt upon your own pre-conceived notions of morality and theology.
I will ask you again, however.
What kind of evidence would you accept?
INDEED.
So . . . on a continuum . . .
from
0 = totally unreliable and worthless
to
100 = totally reliable and of maximum value
where would you place human experience, on what grounds, and why?
LOL. wonderfully put.
INDEED. VERY WELL PUT.
observations, issues, 'realities'
which 'reasonable people' can 'reasonably' differ on.
There are observations, issues, 'realities'
which, when people decline the conventional consensus
are considered to be insane.
Most of the time, it's a reasonable label.
Sometimes, as with OThuga, it is the Main Stream Media brainwashed society that is insane . . . a la Eric Fromm's SAN SOCIETY insane.
On the one hand, none of us can ever, this side of eternity, hope to be 100% understood by anyone, much less 100% of 'others.'
Even identical twins reared in a very stable consistent home have a very different life experience because the one is not really totally the other. They do not 100% of the time have 100% the same identical thoughts and feelings.
On the other hand, Holy Spirit fostered empathy can, by His Grace, offer us through another Spirit Filled mortal an incredible amount of understanding, empathy, congruence.
It is one thing to throw the baby out with the bath in terms of human experience and observation--because of some irrational or hyper prissy pseudo objectivist criteria.
It is something else to recognize that even micrometers have limitations and adjust one's expectations accordingly.
AND
Wisdom recognizes that Almighty God knows us thoroughly, exhaustively, 100% completely. That He knew from before the foundation of the world and still considered us, His feeble, finite creation, to be worth His own death and suffering via the person of His Only Begotten Son, is one of the infinite mysteries of the construct of Love.
To deny that love in any sense of the word to any degree has to be one of the, if not THE worst insults, travesties, most horrific stupidities in all Creation.
To try and squeeze that Love and any understanding of it into finite, prissy, pseudo-super-rationalist criteria and constructions on reality . . . would, logically, be very close to such a hideous travesty, insult, stupidity.
Not in any meaningful sense. Without concrete theological grounds morality is governed by social Darwinism, which invariably leads to tyranny and ultimately to genocide.
###
ABSOLUTELY, INDEED.
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