credoconsolans

For the OP:

One sci-fantasy book I read had a computer being the 'god' of a pre-industrial society. Upon finding this out, one character has the following exchange with the 'god' computer.

Computer: I exist to serve.
Character: And all this time I thought we existed to serve you. The world is not at all as I thought.
Computer: Yet the world is the same as it has always been. It's just that you see it with new eyes.

TedM

Christians haven't adopted the 'screw everybody else' attitude because their teachings don't allow it. Christian ethics are NOT as flexible as everybody else. Christians have black and white teachings--some very ambigous, which does allow for much flexibilty, and others are inflexible.

Have no idea what you are talking about. 'Society' doesn't mean anything in this context. Many standards exist. What 'large christian majority' is in society's jail system?

You sure are throwing words like 'most' and 'all' around loosely here. I didn't say most, and I certainly dont' think atheist should be lumped together as all acting the same way either.

Didn't mean too. Only that an ethical system created by society is a 'false' standard that will not and cannot be applied to each person in it...thus people are justified in doing whatever they want for whatever reason they want, and will pay the consequences that result. It's a man-made ethical system that serves no real purpose other than continual survival...Who really cares if we all die in the end and that is it? Christian ethics are a 'real' standard if Christianity is true and must be applied to each person in it. The purpose is upholding something that is eternal so it matters a lot because when we die then that isn't the end, and our actions then are held to the standard for bringing ultimate justice.

I'm not saying I believe in Christianity--I'm just explaining why a Christian who loses his belief system might easily adopt an attitude of 'screw everyone' since in the end it really doesn't matter.

If you believe that, you just made my point because he believed in evolution when he was behaving in a 'crazy' manner--he figured there really is no standard so he wouldn't put restrictions on his urges. Toto has suggested that things didn't happen in that order though..

While 'overt' behaviors will be regulated by threat of punishmennt, 'secret' behaviors allowed are endless for those who become atheists: They can rationalize all kinds of behavior: adultery is ok as long as the spouse doesn't know about it, drinking to oblivion is ok because it is 'my life', stealing from the govt is ok because the impact on any one individual is negligible, and on and on..no real standard opens a pandoras box of 'secret' behaviors...

spin

Belief is just a blind guide leftover from primitive times. The further we have got from total rule of belief the more civilized and ethical we have generally become, ie belief guides less of society's actions over as time passes. This of course doesn't stop christian politicians from committing acts of mass murder as we have recently witnessed in Iraq. There are other factors at play as well. Nevertheless, belief is certainly not the poster child for ethics. Our society is more ethical despite belief: while the basis of christian belief doesn't change, we have become more ethical. (Christians simply embrace the ethical changes in society and believe, erroneously, that those changes are derived somehow from their religion, a derivation which history shows is utterly wrong.)

You should work against belief.


spin

spin

Conservative retardation, maybe.

Just think of yourself torturing another heretic during the inquisition. All you need to do is conveniently reconstruct reality and you can allow yourself to do anything. There is no obvious truth in what you say: you are simply out of touch with reality.

Primitive societies can set standards. The religion was an integral part of the society, so it is difficult for you to separate out what was the religion and what was the state of the society. Remember that when you were getting "turn the other cheek" you were getting ethics from Greek sources about doing unto others.

You can forget the Jewish issue as you'd never separate the religion form the society. And you might have seen how ethical christian was to christian at the time of the Arian controversy. I don't think christians do that sort of thing any more. You know, times have changed.

Only in as far as they are conservative, working against change for the better.

That's just you defending your religion, not you thinking.

Christians tend to be fluid in the matter. They'll be Greek ethically when it suits them and primitive Jewish at other times.

It may be naive, but you can't pin that naivety on me. I've talked about christians changing not because of their christianity, but because of the society in which they lived.

I couldn't parse this in its context. What is "it" here?

Where did I do that? I did talk of society's ethics changing. That doesn't indicate that there is only one ethical standard.

They are only as free as their parental training allows them to be. A christian brought up in a repressive family, will be predisposed to act repressively when they lose their religion. A christian brought up in a liberal family will tend to act liberally.

And I guess christians such as Scott Roeder, James Kopp, and Paul Hill, who murdered doctors who performed abortions were acting in good faith.

How would all those good christian Mafia men have acted if they didn't have their religion to keep them ethical?

If you read closely about Dahmer's case, you wouldn't take much of what he said at face value, but then your choice of Dahmer most certainly wasn't based on clinical analysis. Incidentally, Dahmer was raised by a good christian.

While you have this albatross around your neck, you will continue as you are.


spin

TedM

I simply said that if you believe you should love someone, you can. That doesn't require the kind of 'religious' belief you seem to be talking about here, so I've decided to not respond to your comments that branched off of that false assumption.

If your main point is that society or environment influences ethics that people choose/adopt, I do not disagree. But, if you are claiming that religious standards do not influence the followers of the religion just because you can point to contradictory interpretations of those standards or blatant rejection of them in the name of the religion or not, I do not find those arguments persuasive. The fact is that the belief in ethical teachings of Christianity have changed many unethical people into ethical people even when similar teachings from a society failed to do so. This is because the individuals adopted a belief in the authority of those teachings. Belief guides behavior.

I don't know if the current world would be worse off or not without the belief in Christianity. Some positive ethical standards WOULD be lost because the motivation to practice them would disappear. However Christianity-inspired lack of tolerance would disappear which in some cases would be a good thing.

I also want to clear up that I wasn't saying all of the former Christians will turn into selfish jerks if they became atheists. Just that some of them would. Perhaps it would be the ones who have a predisposition to be that way but had formerly chosen to behave in a less selfish manner because they had aquired beliefs that it was proper to do so from their Christian faith.

spin

You seem to be taking yourself out of context. Here's what you said in full in context:
You were functionally claiming that at least a subset of Christians who actually do care about their neighbors do so merely because it just happens to be one of the commandments they have been told to comply with, ie it is the (powerful) "belief system" responsible here.

That's convenient.

I'm claiming that christians are not ethical because they are christians: they ethical in as much as they are members of ethical societies.

You'd need to demonstrate that the ethics are not derived from society but from christianity.

(Out of curiosity, where do you think all the good German christians went during the Hitler era?)

That doesn't explain why christians have killed christians throughout the centuries: just think of the crusade in which a bunch of knights went off to the holy land to liberate it and ended up getting distracted besieging christian Constantinople. History is firmly against you.

Packaging Jews as "Christ killers" made it easy to commit the most atrocious policies against Jews. I guess belief may guide behavior. As long as there are whacky beliefs, we are going to get inappropriate actions. (But then such beliefs were usually stimulated by the expected gain of the motivators of the demagoguery.)

The only problem about weaning people off beliefs is the reaction period that may occur, the "I've been conned by belief, so now I'm going to show my anger" reaction.

I find that this is starting to reflect ideas that I can appreciate. Insecure parents breed insecure children, warped parents warped children. (There are of course pathological exceptions, such as chemical abnormalities in the brain, but there would be out of the scope of our discussion.) What you call predisposition, I'd see as upbringing in all its facets.


spin

thedistillers

If it was established beyond a reasonable doubt that Jesus didn't exist, then it might ruin the life of some skeptics who spend half of their life arguing on messageboards about it.

gurugeorge

The only way that kind of "should" would work from God is if it's literally a command, with a threat of punishment.

Otherwise, the still, small voice of conscience is already in us - we just need to listen to it.

And it's not just a trained thing - it's partly a trained thing but it keys into something that's already there to some extent. Even with the most vicious animals, they have a certain amount of natural kin altruism.

There is really not much essential difference between the Nazi and the Saint - the Nazi has a smaller "circle of affections" (his "people") than the Saint, but they are both altruistic in relation to something. The business of ethics is to nurture this bud of conscience, and widen the circle of affections, so that we see we have some degree kinship with everything (we are all made of the same "stuff" in the end).

Eventually the Universe will be one great big hippy love-in! To further that end is your task, should you choose to accept it (i.e. if you're called to promote ethics).

OTOH, because the basis is genetic, a very small number of people don't have it at all (i.e. a conscience).

Joan of Bark

But your love for her makes you feel good! And if you didn't care for her, you might feel guilty. Your feelings always enter into the equation for everything you do. The only way anyone could be truly altruistic is if they lacked all emotions, so they could do something without feeling anything about it.

Joan of Bark

(Bolded mine). This is an important point, TedM, and you haven't addressed it. The threat of hell does not keep a Christian on the straight and narrow, because one of the central tenants of Christianity is that no matter how horrific the act, a person can always be forgiven.

This point became obvious to me after reading A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Barbara Tuchman. She writes about how when a noble who had lead one of the armies of medieval Europe through a campaign of slaughter, rape, and pillage (the Hundred Years War was notorious for such things) felt his life ebbing away, he would donate a portion of the money he'd stolen to the Church, who would then forgive him (and the Church forgiving was the same as God forgiving). He then presumably died in the comforting knowledge that he was going to heaven.

With God, anything is permissible ...