spin

You are down there part of the herd. Your views are just as arbitrary as anyone else's down there. They say that what they do is right. You say what you think is right.

Is emulation of Jesus the christian target?

I came not to bring peace but a sword.

He who has no sword, let him sell his garment to buy one.

You have no standard of good. You just rely on what a book says and the way society has evolved. You don't support slavery do you? It was insitutionalized in ancient Judea. You probably don't think people should be stoned for being diviners, or for blaspheming, or for laboring on the sabbath, etc, as dictated by the bible. Morality changes as society changes.

First my correction regarded the arbitrariness that you are ignoring with "on the other hand". You are in a sea of arbitrariness and you want to point fingers at non-theists. (I'm not an atheist.)

You're right that you don't make morals. Morals evolve.

Why don't we have slavery in the "western world"? Why has the notion of poverty changed so drastically such that poverty in our society is relatively well in poor countries? Why are we more balanced regarding gender in our society? Why are we religiously tolerant of sorts in our society? (And a host of other questions which are meant to show that morality is something that is not fixed but represent "progress" of society.)

You have no way to judge the standard. You have to trust.

On the contrary, free will requires the ability to make judgments. If you are hampered by your beliefs, you vote for Dubya...

But in fact it is not because they are christian, but because they are a part of society.

That may be your sad desire, but you aren't working on making judgments, you are following the dictates of a code contained in an ancient book which represented an ancient society and augmenting that with the dictates of the society you live in -- though with resistance.

You don't seem to be aware of that much.


spin

Johnny Skeptic

But who, if anyone, has the right to determine what is moral, certainly not the Bible writers?

In your opinion, must a God be moral no matter who he is?

What is, or was, the original Bible? No one knows.

If you wish, you can start a new thread at the General Religious Discussions Forums and answer my questions?

Flux Æon

My thanks, Toto. I have the quote in a list of hundreds of other interesting quotes....just don't remember how I got that one.

ible

You can assume that I have nothing to teach you, but then you won't learn anything. Where does that get us? Well, you will have made a self-fulfilling prophecy, but that's not hard to do.


Yep, we're all supposed to be Jesus in our own special ways. Why else would we be called "Christians" unless our role model was Christ?

If you have good reason from the rest of Jesus' teachings to suspect that he really meant that statement literally, then go ahead and interpret it that way.


Morality stays exactly the same. "Love your neighbor as yourself." Our interpretations of that line may change in different situations. But surely you don't hope that we will evolve past such a "primitive" morality as that! That is the only morality worth following, yet it is a morality we somehow cannot follow. You're looking forward with the hope that some future morality will be attainable and everyone will live in bliss. Heck, we already have good moralities. Our problem is not lack of a good morality, but lack of the ability to follow any given moral code.

Of course, being a Christian the other line in morality is "Love the Lord your God with all your strength," but that cannot be legislated by governments or societies. As such, I do believe it is wrong to be a diviner or a blasphemer, but in all likelihood I'm not going to go kill anyone who does such things. Vengeance is God's.


If you're not a theist, and not an atheist, what are you? Not that I really care what sort of group you say you belong to---I'm actually rather more interested in the sorts of things you believe yourself.


The "evolution" of morality, as you have spoken of it, is not progress per se unless there is some goal that we are hoping to attain. And if there is a goal, if there is a standard of good which is what our morality should be, then you have the same viewpoint as myself. But I can hardly imagine that you would concede such a point as that. Believing in an objective standard is not common round here.

So why move "forward"? Why not move backward? What's wrong with burning witches and making scapegoats out of people? Doesn't it make us as a society feel better? Isn't that the point? For the majority of people to live in peace with each other?


I have no way to judge the standard, but I do have the ability to judge anything that claims to be the standard.


It's true that people are manipulated by their beliefs. Is the point then to have no beliefs, no hope, no trust, so you are un-manipulable?

You seem to have dodged my point, however. There is no free will in materialism. Therefore there are no truly virtuous actions, for none are freely willed for the sake of that which is good.

Now, I'm of the opinion that we will gain for ourselves what we truly believe in. If you truly believe in materialism, you will gain for yourself the inability to make free choices. Sounds good, right? Not really. In my worldview, you would be losing your ability to make choices.


So wait, on one hand you are decrying society for being this horrible herd thing, and on the other hand you are saying it is the only thing which teaches us morality? Which way do you want to have it?

We can dispense with the psychology and deal with real arguments. You haven't shown me how my reasoning (regarding free will and morality) is flawed, so regardless of whether it is my desire or not, you haven't shown your position tenable.


I know I don't know much. But IMO your "witty" or "cool" insults (as they would be seen in some circles) don't indicate to me that you are a well-meaning person. From such a person I don't care to learn morality.

If you have something intelligible to share, do so. You don't need to resort to insults.

spin

You're frothing and I apparently didn't communicate my idea well. You are playing games about some christians being better than others and I'm trying to say that you've merely got your opinion in the same forest, so your views are no better than those of the christians you want to point fingers at.

This isn't bibical. Follow yes, be, no.

I don't even know if there were a Jesus, so I'm not going to waste my time interpreting too much on such an assumption.

This will be a hard nail to remove from your forehead. History will probably not teach you anything.

And exterminate the Canaanites.

Some people aren't your neighbors.

Certainly. At one time one's neighbors were white and well off. Forget arbitrary neighbors and think of everyone.



So, if your neighbor is gay, will you love them? If your neighbor is Hindu or Jewish or wiccan, will you love them?

That's nothing to do with morality. That's is required obeisance.

You're supposed to join the stoning.

The one thing that seems most difficult for people to understand is the provisionality of the world. They like to either know things or know that someone else knows things. It's comfortable. Our culture has spent millennia trying to gain control of an unstable world labelling it, mentally packaging it, a world that we cannot even perceive directly because of its very nature. We like to feel that there is rhyme and reason. The only rhyme and reason is that our fates are the same, the realization which should lead to a further evolution of morality.

It's not a teleological process: there is no destination.

Majority? That isn't good enough, is it?

The standard is at this moment what can be perceived to be beneficial to as many people as possible, the aim being not to exclude anyone.

Beliefs aren't questionable. Trust is a choice and hope is inevitable (unless things have gone so bad in your personal education process that it has been cauterized).

This notion of no free will in materialism is a mantra. If it meant anything it would also include the notion that there is no free will in religious commitment, rendering your concept contentless. No-one is free in the sense that your thought structures are formed by outside influences; if your parents don't have much range of language, then probably neither will you and language is the major shaper of basic thought. Free will comes when you attempt to consider all the factors that play on any decision you have to make and you weigh them on their merits and what ever other criteria you want to let influence the choice. Rabbiting on about free will about one person's situation as compared to another's is at best relativistic. Free will is about choosing your own criteria.

Perhaps that makes sense to you but it seems like a repackaging of the naive American dream syndrome. (How many amputees come back from Lourdes with fresh limbs?)

YOU don't seem to have thought through this very much or very clearly. It sounds like religious propaganda.

You need to concentrate more and not mix issues. Your choice depends on your ability to deal with all the relevant criteria in the moment you are in including foreseeable consequences. Morality is about developing social awareness of one's responsibilities in society.

Free will blah, blah, blah. You've in a rut. Trying to find hands to drag down.

You shouldn't learn morality from me. Morality is about your social responsibilities.

You need to deal with the content of what someone says. It's easy to put up shutters. It's harder to engage in dialog.


spin

ible

Let's get a couple things straight. I am trying to engage you in a dialogue; I am encouraging you to share things that aren't mere smears or insults. On the other hand, you don't care to listen to what I have to say. That's not dialogue, that's you getting up on your soapbox. I'm not going to waste my time speaking to someone who's put up his shutters because he thinks he knows me (and the category I fit in). And if that's what you're doing, you're doing exactly what you hate "the Christians" for. I'm totally up for an honest discussion, so let me know when you're beyond making stereotypes and generalizations of who I am.

ible

spin

I'm sorry, but this seems to be using the phrases I'd used and projecting them back onto me.

It's not strange that, when you've projected onto me, you can postulate such a thing.

I like discussion when there are facts and arguments built on them at play. As is you jumped into a conversation talking about role models and standards and the lack of these for non-believers. That wasn't the prelude to an honest discussion. That was just making stereotypes and generalizations. Again it seems you are projecting your own actions onto me. Perhaps you could have held back and not come to the rescue of sschlichter, waiting for a better time to seek honest discussion.


spin

Johnny Skeptic

How have Jews been a blessing to other nations?

Sheshbazzar

It seems to me, far more likely that they chose "Yah" or "Yahweh" because they were NOT afraid of this innocuous minor god, an as yet obscure and unclaimed "son of El".
Thus they were able to fearlessly and conveniently employ him as their own cultural sock-puppet, by putting their own ideas and words into the mouth of this relatively unknown deity, one who had never said much of anything previously, and lay claim to him as being their own god, and in turn he of course, (with their hand firmly stuffed inside his otherwise quite empty head) Would speak, and say; "These are my people, whom I have chosen, blah blah blah"

Yahweh has never spoken a single word, or even uttered a grunt, that did not originate from the lips, or from the pen of some totally human source.

ible

They were supposed to be a direct line to God. In particular, they've been a good example for what God expects of us. A lot of the time they did bad things and were chastened. So it seems like they weren't exactly the best direct line. But of course, in the Christian view Jesus was a Jew, so the God to human direct line was actually accomplished in the Jewish people.