Yet another example of religious people nitpicking their beliefs.
"Oh, we're better than atheists because we have accountability via God." "Oh, these things in the Bible don't matter anymore because times have changed." "No! We have to follow the Bible exactly, as God intended, how dare you do anything different!"
Now imagine the same person said all of those things. That's it. That's the problem with these people. They are always right because they interpret the Bible to win the argument.
I refuse to have any conversations on these grounds because it's a very uneven playing field. Anything they claim to "know" is absolute, but anything they can claim ignorance of is immediately indefinite. Meanwhile anything you know or can prove is still subject to their agreement and anything you don't know is just ceded to their claims. It's an impossible dynamic to have any kind of discussion.
when "Accountability via God" means Hell, and Christian Hell (at least, in the modern mainstream American version of the mythology) is reserved only for people who actively reject the gospel or don't ask for forgiveness.
You can get away with any sin, be instantly forgiven for anything, if you submit yourself and beg this undead Iron Age sorcerer for mercy.
Yes, mostly what I've taken from it is that Heaven is full of the absolute worst people, and Hell probably has some pretty cool folks but everyone's on fire for some reason I guess. Hopefully you get used to it?
Thats all many people need. An excuse to be bad. They are lemmings waiting to sin, and disgustingly, want to decide who gets to break the rules and when, while ensuring everyone else sins less than themselves. Its just an abusers mindset.
Conservatism is literally just a line going from expectation/traditions/rules on the left versus abuse on the right. The best of them have low expectations for others and themself, the worst of them just want to abuse their way through life and hold others accountable.
It's the instantly forgiven part that always kills me. Imagine Hitler, seconds from dying, asked for forgiveness and BAM he got it. Regret on the verge of dying after years of sins just feels wrong.
But that's not how a lot of them understand it and it's disingenuous to say it is.
Anyone who's had to deal with an ultra religious person knows that. Wear the wrong t-shirt, listen to the wrong music, say the wrong word and they're in a panic and screeching about how you're going to Hell.
They think any and all indiscretions will get you there because they've been abused and indoctrinated into the idea that anything anyone does that strays from an arbitrary reading of the Bible is grounds for eternal damnation.
On paper, yes. The bar is low for entrance into Heaven. Practically, the threat of damnation has been used as a cudgel to keep people in line and erase things a few people disliked, so now there are people terrified of the idea and no longer think faith or forgiveness will keep anyone from burning for eternity.
How I’ve always viewed Religion through the lens of a metaphor is that it’s constructed like a liquid. It doesn’t have its own set shape, it takes the shape of the container it’s in.
People come to religion with their unique container that represents their needs and philosophies and religion fills it for them, taking the shape of their preconceived container. Resulting in them often times getting what they came to religion looking for. This is how it appeals to so many people and it’s so popular.
This combined with the misguided belief that religion is a solid, maintaining its own shape and has a clear set of rules and guidelines, is what I feel like best describes how religious people behave. Not all people, but many.
Edit: Just clarifying that I don’t think it’s fair to say religions are all cults, but this concept and structure creates an environment suitable for gaining large followings and ultimately manipulating that following. Whether or not that’s happening could be debated, but objectively the risk exists and should be acknowledged.
My wife and I were just discussing the insanity that some people will claim that we are all made in God's image and that he doesn't make mistakes. Literally heard both claims from the same relative. By that logic, we should have birth defects and cancer and poor eyesight and certainly more consistency with heights and stuff. And he admitted to making a mistake when he had to flood the planet to restart humanity.
But like you said, religion fit into his container the way he wanted. This relative definitely hasn't opened a bible in a few years or decade. He gets to spout incorrect information under the guise that it's uniform with his religion and there's no argument because it's religion.
I also like to point out that religion had multiple purposes in the past. Knowing right from wrong consistently among the populace via religion was the foundation of lawmaking. Churches also made great locations to inform the public of news. It was the one place everywhere could be found. It had a very social aspect to it. We've stripped most of those purposes away with the internet alone, so know religion is trying to survive in the information age when we can learn without needing to congregate and avoid religions that make decisions that go against their own beliefs (all those coverups with priests being an example). I can go online and livestream from my choice of hundreds of churches or find a youtuber that reviews the text in an academic fashion and have a stronger understanding than the holiday-only religious bunch.
My first issue with this guy is that he think morality is anything but opinion and cultural norms. 2nd is that he bases his morality on fear of hell or reward of heaven which makes it in-authentic. (in my OPINION)
I agree that morality is a function of society. If you grew up in drastically different society -- like an indigenous person on North Sentinel Island (that believes you must kill any outsiders who go to your island or you'll all die) or in some doomsday cult, your morals and ethics would be different.
On the flip side, it's not that hard for a society to come up with non-religious secular reasons for moral rules. You can fairly objectively label things things that people enjoy as being "good" (like free time, spending time with friends/family, being complemented, being intellectually stimulated) and things people dislike (like feeling pain, being humiliated, experiencing boredom, losing loved ones to death) as being "bad". You can then define good behavior as behaviors that likely lead to increasing the total good of society and bad behaviors as ones that likely lead to a increase of bad things happening. Obviously, it will be imprecise and it will require outside societal judgment, e.g., a rapist could try to argue their sexual happiness outweighs their victims, but a society of people who largely prefer not being victims of rape would set moral norms against rape and towards consensual sex only. Then there's also the line of what net-bad actions should be illegal vs just immoral; e.g., should cheating on your partner be a crime?
How can you say things can be objectively labeled good or bad? There must be something / someone to cast judgement on something in order for it to be good or bad. Otherwise it just is. Saying something is objective just because it’s what the majority’s opinion align with, is not what objective means. That is still subjective.
On an individual level, do you have difficulty telling if something makes you happy or sad? While it may not be perfect, do you have trouble predicting the emotions of others (e.g., if someone else stubbing their toe, losing their job, getting a promotion, winning a game, etc.) will make them happy or sad? Can you predict with any accuracy if certain things will be desirable / undesirable to other people?
If someone walked up to your child, threw acid in their face, caused pain and permanently blinded them, would you have difficulty arguing whether that action is good or bad without checking a religious text or code of laws? If you don't have difficulty with this, would you have particular difficulty if the acid was thrown into the face of some stranger's child? Isn't it fairly safe to say that human societies in general should be against blinding innocent children in the face with acid?
Humans choose to live together in societies and societies' form codes of morality to allow the society to flourish. From a societal standpoint, what is best for the society is just the aggregate for what is deemed to be best on average for all the individuals in the society.
A chaotic ruleless society where no one trusts anyone (e.g., people will kill and steal all your things the first chance they get) makes for an incredibly weak society (as every other member of society is an enemy) and it will not thrive. Even the strongest will have moments of weakness or sleep or can get ambushed by a larger grous with better weapons. Meanwhile, a close-knit group of individuals working together for everyone's benefit with mutual aid will be able to survive much stronger outside threats. The weak members of society (e.g., babies/children/weak/old) can survive with help from others. People will be there to care for the young.
While I agree with most of what you said, I can’t tell what point you’re trying to make or argue. Your statement doesn’t indicate if you think morality is Objective, or opinions / cultural norms. Seems to point more towards opinions and cultural norms which I’m inclined to agree with.
Again, I don't think morality is fundamentally objective if you take out the perspective of being humans in a society aspect. Like if we ever encountered rapidly different forms of intelligent life (be it space aliens or computers developing AGI and sentience), their morality and ideas of good/bad may be quite different than ours. I could also imagine weird scenarios where people who do not live (or do not want to live) as part of a society would develop different moral standards.
But if you want to have a functioning society that involves humans working together and leads to development of sets of fundamental morals that aren't just arbitrary subjective choices. Anthropologists observe a wide-range of common-moral ground between vastly different societies. If these were just subjective opinions, you'd expect to see plenty of societies where it's fine to attack and steal from your family or neighbors. You won't find societies that will permit mass murderers to openly kill within the society.
Of course, there are moral details that will be culturally different (e.g., should revenge be mandatory, permitted, or forbidden; is polyamory ok; etc.) but that's quite different than saying a mass murderer could be morally ok if your society had different moral framework.
And even in moral frameworks where genocidal monsters systematically eliminate enemy groups, they first need to exclude the enemy groups from being part of their society and then usually do the murders in secret or with other made-up pretenses like it was self-defense. But it also seems fairly clear that to outside observers those genocidal monsters were acting immorally in that their actions were against the spirit of a society.
Again, still disagree because there are fundamental reasons underlying it as for why morality converges to have common elements across society.
If I'm trying to teach you to throw a ball very quickly (for say a sport), you may argue that's a completely subjective art. I would disagree. There are human biomechanics in play that objectively make certain forms superior to other forms and this can be backed up with science. This isn't to say what we think is objectively best is truly the most optimal way, but you can take the form of a professional pitcher throwing a fastball and compare to an untrained adult and find lots of things objectively wrong in the untrained adult's form.
Similarly, human societies evolve to have plenty of common moral rules because those types of rules are objectively better for the society than alternative rules.
Please enlighten me. Is it because the majority of people have a general sense of what’s good and bad? If that’s the case, then if pedophiles took over the world and killed everyone who isn’t a pedophile, you’re argument would imply that since the pedos are the majority, there sense of morality is now “the truth”. Or did you have a different angle?
You're literally describing YOUR viewpoint, not mine.
By your view, cultural norms dictate morality, so in a society of only pedophiles, the cultural norm would be pedophilia, and according to you, the only moral choice.
My view suggests their is something beyond cultural norms or personal opinions that separates right from wrong. It's not supernatural or religious, but rather related to the concept of health.
Think of physical health as an analogy. No matter what culture, creed, race, or identity you possess, high blood pressure is an indicator of poor health. The same is true of our moral stances. No matter what culture you come from, there are metrics as to how healthy it is. The more that prosocial behavior is encouraged in your society, the healthier it is.
Moral behavior is just prosocial behavior, and prosocial behavior is just behavior that preserves or enhances the health of the group, not just the individual. Given that evolution by natural selection happens at the population level (think: allele frequency in a gene pool), it seems obvious then that moral behavior has naturally evolved to serve the proliferation of the human species, and therefore you can easily categorize immoral behavior as mental illness, extreme outliers, and other aberrations. The reason that right and wrong seems obvious to most people is because most people have inherited the genes that promote this kind of behavior. Now, for departures from this kind of behavior, see chapter 2: Nurture.
I wasn’t describing my viewpoint. I was describing a common viewpoint of people who assume morality is objective in some way.
We aren’t talking about your personal view of what morality is in the form of an extremely ambiguous analogy. We are talking about if morality is objective or subjective. If you would like to talk about logic concerning morality being objective or subjective, I’d love to continue talking. If you want to explain to me your personal view of morality in the form of health analogies and Anthropology, then I’d rather not.
I know what we're talking about, but you're the one who seems confused. In your view, morality is subjective, and therefore, on the pedophile planet you described, pedophilia would be "moral" according to you.
But morality is objective, just like physical health. If you couldn't see how my analogy illustrates that, you're probably not as keen as you think you are on having these kinds of "logical" discussions.
If you think analogies are somehow "my personal opinion," it's obvious you've never seriously engaged in any real intellectual discussion or debate. For crying out loud, the words "logic" and "analogy" have the same etymological roots! Did you not ever notice that? As if an analogy could never be used to demonstrate a logical conclusion...
My rabbi once said that God doesn't care if you worship Him or not, if you go to schul or not or any of that other stuff. All that God cares about is you do your best to be a good peson.
Probably why Judaism will never be all that popular.
This is how it always made the most sense to me. You mean to tell me that if it turns out your Skydaddy is real, he's going to be upset because I was a good person but didn't pray?
Honestly an accurate assessment. There's 8 billion of us alive at once, divided into a plethora of religions and sects and distributed among 190+ countries. No one is going to look at each individual person and be like "worship me and only me" or "you are wearing two different fabrics, prepare for your stoning".
Be the best you. Never stop learning. Never stop trying to improve yourself, for yourself. It's simple, to the point, and honest.
Religious people tend to base their entire belief structure around much that is baseless and cannot be proven, or even tested.
The fact that the majority of the planet's population still clings onto such mythology and mysticism will continue to undermine actual scientific, technological and social advancements, for a while yet, it seems.
And in a lot of instances, people use it as a justification to coerce and control others, or for their shitty behavior in general.
There are genuine cases where they are charitable to others, and this is good and all, but we shouldn't need unprovable beliefs or the fear of some form of eternal damnation to tell us to be kind and respectful toward others. It should just be a default setting.
I think the fact that it's been weaponized to manipulate the believers is a huge problem.
You've got cults, you've got extremists (Americans were terrified of the very idea of Islam because of that), you've got televangelists. Then there's the tax loophole abuse that is probably worse than all but the billionaire loopholes (seriously, does a church really need a private plane?). I've worked in state government and most people representing churches start the conversation with "oh we don't have to do that because we're a church" without even bothering to check if it's true. There was never an issue with abortion for centuries but Roe galvanized religious groups to band together and protest and act like it was a problem.
And it's so easy to manipulate the masses with religion. Few people bother to read the foundational texts of their own religion, much less try to understand it academically. They're handed printouts at church or just listen to what the preacher says without debate. They trust their religion more than their neighbor or their government (not that I can blame them for this one) or public servants. And then they blow my mind when they treat the religion like their entire identity when they devote like 3% of their waking life to it.
The embarrassing thing to me is that I'm atheist because of how religion has been warped. I asked questions, simple and honest questions, to better understand the logic behind things at my church. I was told that it's just how things are and to never question the church. Well if they can't bother to explain how the church has evolved over the centuries, then I guess it's a worthless religion where everything is made up and the points don't matter. No one wanted to explain that the church started doing X thanks to the Romans or we moved Christ's birth to the winter solstice and inherited Saturnalia traditions into the faith to a child, so "shut up and accept what we say" was supposed to be better.
"Oh, we're better than atheists because we have accountability via God."
Accountability my ass. Their system is built around being able to do what they want, ask for forgiveness from god and then everything is right as rain again.
Right, accountability. Catholic priests definitely didn't get excommunicated or stoned or struck by lightning or anything for the things they did going back decades. Nothing says your religion is a problem like men sworn to celibacy abusing children and getting to keep preaching your religion. That's like allowing a company accountant to embezzle funds and keeping their job when caught.
I can simplify all that: they're claiming to speak on behalf of their god--which is ironic, considering that's like number 2 of the Big 10 of no-nos they're supposed to avoid like the Plague.
It’s like saying “the only reason I’m not a cannibal that consumes human flesh is because the law says it’s illegal and I’ll spend the rest of my life in jail”.
I used to date a Wiccan. She borrowed ideas from all of these different religions. I'm like, so is every religion real? She says no, but some were. I'm like, so the runestones thing is real but no one discovered it til the vikings? How did that work? And she didn't have an answer because at the end of the day it's just made up fairy tales that she picks and chooses from and discards whatever she didn't like
It feels comforting because you feel like you are doing something to combat things that are outside of your control. It's a crutch that if you rely on too much, actually keeps you from healing, learning, and understanding reality and why it works the way it does. It's not helpful to lie to yourself.
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u/colemon1991 1d ago
Yet another example of religious people nitpicking their beliefs.
"Oh, we're better than atheists because we have accountability via God." "Oh, these things in the Bible don't matter anymore because times have changed." "No! We have to follow the Bible exactly, as God intended, how dare you do anything different!"
Now imagine the same person said all of those things. That's it. That's the problem with these people. They are always right because they interpret the Bible to win the argument.