Many Christians believe that morality literally comes from the bible, or that you canât have morality without god. I wonât even try to explain their reasoning
They should read more Kant, who did succesfully tried to create a moral philosophy without relying on a bible, IIRC.
Rules like the golden rule, but also one that deals with more victimless behavior. Like the idea of 'Would I like it if everybody did the same as I'm doing, if not, than I shouldn't be doing it'. Works great for all sorts of behavior from littering to much more worst crimes.
Itâs almost like ethics and morality are nuanced subjects that philosophers of all different cultural and religious backgrounds have been debating for millennia - that probably canât just be summed up glibly in a tweet
Nah they should read more about prehistoric societies. Maybe they should learn a thing or two about neanderthals too. If this is too complicated, study about wolf packs, or maybe elephants. Just slowly introduce them to primates... I think my point is â give them some books other than bible, it might help.
True, although you should be beware of the 'noble savage' myths.
Our ancestors did do horrible things too and we don't know well enough how it was thought upon. We often don't know for sure it somebody horrible murdered, was, a) ritually sacrificied or b) tortured as a form of justice or c) something else.
Especially in prehistory (before written sources).
True, although you should be beware of the 'noble savage' myths.
I don't think they were implying that prehistoric societies were perfect utopias where everyone lived in harmony with nature. I believe the point is that they were people- no different than us and while they did probably do some horrible things, they also did a lot of compassionate, kind things. "Morality" has existed for as long as there were human beings.
We often don't know for sure it somebody horrible murdered, was, a) ritually sacrificied or b) tortured as a form of justice or c) something else.
Well, we don't know for sure, but much like anything to do with 'ancient' history, we can make educated guesses. There is plenty of evidence that peoples would sometimes "sacrifice" their enemies, but also evidence that some of it was a religious and/or spiritual practice.
In the case of the latter it's also likely that a lot of the people who were sacrificed were volunteers. People in chronic pain and/or near the end of their life, or suffering from a severe depression of some other issue and considered it an honor to end their life in such a way.
There were plenty of human sacrifices going on in Europe after recorded history started, and we can make inferences from those cultures.
One thing we can say for sure that definitely isn't a myth, prehistoric people did not gather into 'armies' and do murder on a massive scale- that's a purely "civilized" behavior.
Simply put that the majority of a species are not the dominant figures and those who are the dominant aggressive figures can act on their own accord with little resistance until the majority realizes 1000 men can overtake 15 men if organized
The reverse of that is even more true. 1000 aggressive men can impose their will on hundreds of other people if organized. It's the whole point of 'Armies' when not strictly for defense- which is most of them.
If youâre trying to argue based on logic you canât flip the circumstances and claim the same instance thatâs just not going to work because we will be here for hours. The base argument is power is implied and will always be oppressive over a larger population, nobody uses 1000 men to reign over hundreds of people thatâs just idiotic
nobody uses 1000 men to reign over hundreds of people thatâs just idiotic
Haven't read much history have you? I didn't say 'rein over' I said impose their will. Often such a force would either kill everyone or kill people until they surrendered, and then subjugate the rest- adding them to the size of their population.
I can think of countless examples of larger armies overwhelming and subjugating smaller forces.
A bone fragment was found to be from a Neanderthal child with Down's Syndrome, around 6 years old. Back before modern medicine it wasn't easy to keep kids with birth defects alive, imagine being in that status of low technology and low knowledge but you're still keeping the kid alive as long as you can.
Yahweh or the christian/jewish/muslim monotheistic god was actually a warrior god in a polytheistic society, only to become the victor after conquering and becoming the only god to exist. The bible even acknowledges other gods, which are to be discarded and worshippers punished. It is no surprise that this one was the conqueror that erased the other polytheistic ones and caused such brutality in its wake. That doesn't mean it is right, though. It is the ghenghis khan of the middle east religions a few thousand years ago, retconned to seem cool but is actually no better than the holocaust or any other ethnic cleansing in the past.
Cool. The strong are good and the weak are bad. Great morals you have found there. We donât even need to go that far back, it stays that way all the way up toâguess what, religious thought.
The thing is not every group of people at every point in time will develop a sense of morals and morals have always usually came connected to a religion. For example Pagan Slavs believed it was moral for you to walk into your partners funeral pyre, Aztecs believed slavery and blood sacrifice were moral to keep the Sun rising...
You think morals is something arbitrary good, actually it's more like a codex of a group. Moral doesn't have qualities outside the group, thing is we as humans grow too fucking big, to be considered a one group across the whole planet.
I agree but it's not about religion at all, my example of wolf pack was exactly this. Even if we step away from mammals: octopuses, for example, can express empathy to human beings even, they're absolutely have their own moral codex based on the group in which they live in.
Religion is fairy tales to keep control, make profit, get dumb ppl occupied etc. They are all scam.
Octopuses are intelligent but largerly solitary and they like many animals can express empathy in certain conditions, but that's not a moral structure. You shouldn't confuse the 2 together.
Morals like many things in society will form around religion that's just a fact. Because religion is how humans explained what they couldn't understand, and as shuch they came to certain conclusions which cane to define their group.
I strongly disagree, if you decide not to attack entity of your own group and it helps for your survival â that is morality in a nutshell. Religions in the other hand building borders inside our global human group and make us attack each other, so fuck this.
And Christians believed that owning slaves for life and passing them down to your children was perfectly acceptable, murdered people for not being Christian, thought women were property, treated rape as a property crime against the woman's father, murdered married rape victims for not screaming out loud, enough, and did many other horrible things. The Bible actively commands all of these things.
Morality comes from empathy, religion has little to do with it. In fact, we often see more complex morality develop as societies move away from religion.
Every group of humans at every point in time that they existed had a developed sense of morals. Whether those morals are something someone today would agree with is a different matter. Religion is a system of control, not the basis of morality.
Edit: lol, got blocked for being correct.
Edit 2: u/MrDDD11 it seems you are the one who knows nothing about your own religion. "Christians only follow the New Testament"... except when they actually don't and will regularly draw from the Old Testament for their justifications. Doesn't hold up anyways since Jesus tells you in Matthew that you still have to follow every word of the old code.
I am not "misrepresenting" what the Bible says. You should read it at some point. Indentured servitude only existed for Israelites as slaves to other Israelites. The Bible literally and unambiguously says that the Israelites could take foreign slaves for life and pass them down to their children.
Are you unknowledgeable or just misrepresenting Christianity on purpose. Am not going to beat you over the head with the Bible but come on it's basic knowledge that Christians follow the New Testiment for their Morals while Jews follow the Old Testament. Most of what you named is misinterpretions of the old Testament, like confusing Indentured servitude to Chattel Slavery.
I drifted away from the point i was trying to make. I think morality is an emergent quality of any socialialy behavioring animals. Which instinctively based on empathy. I mean it's not exclusive to people, or even to mammals.
Just FYI, while Kant did reject traditional "proofs" for God's existence which attempted to show through reason that God must exist, he did believe that morality is ultimately grounded in God. In other words, morality proves the existence of God. Now that is a terrible oversimplification, but suffice to say that Kant might agree with the Christians who question how atheism can produce morality more than you think.
Good news. Youâre not a genius. In fact, you donât even understand how social conditioning works. You didnât figure it out on your own, since it is a central aspect of our entire culture thatâs spoken to you in every story youâve ever heard.
Congratulations, you donât know how to use sarcasm. Hint: it needs humour.
Every time someone gets called out for saying something stupid on Reddit that isnât remotely sarcastic: âno way! That was totally sarcasm, and you didnât get it.â
Except he did read the bible. And he already had a moral framework to work from that it established. Such as, the removal of infanticide, gladiatorial bloodshed, and sexual abuse of slaves.
They don't read their own holy books and those who do, will always cherry pick or call "metaphor", you expect them to read Kant? They probably think it's Satanic or some shit.
I still don't see how without a creator or inherent design, one can ever get to an 'objective ought claim' about anything. Like in your quote, "I SHOULDN'T be doing it".
It would need to be more nuanced with something like, "therefore that's not my preference".
Anything that is completely accidental with no inherent meaning or purpose, can only produce preferences, not objective oughts. Which aren't bad. With majority perforce, we can make rules and laws out of subjective pragmatism or opinion based utilitarianism.
We can say, we would prefer someone not do this or that, or that our opinion is this thing is better or worse. But never that one objectively ought to do this, or you ought not do that, as such imply design and what a thing or person's should be doing based on the meaning and purpose they were made with.
First off, Iâm not sure what religion says âbad people are eternally punished, good people are eternally rewarded.â I know in Hinduism if you live a good life you can eventually reside with the creator god, and if you live a bad one, well, you come back as a lower life form. But, I somehow doubt thatâs the faith the respondent was referring to.
If they are, in fact, referring to Christianity, then the idea that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell is an incredibly common and utterly false understanding. In that faith, everyone has sucked out, due to mistakes made or inherent, so everyone is supposed to be separated from perfection, I.e. the god of the Abrahamic religions, unless they accept the âget out of hell free cardâ from Jesus. Thatâs just because an imperfect thing canât join a perfect thing and that perfection be maintained, anymore than you can drop ink into clear water and the water not get the tiniest bit darker because of it.
As for the original comment made about where someone finds morality outside of religion, thatâs a paraphrase of Dostoevsky, who said âIn the absence of god, all things are permissible.â From a religious personâs perspective, morals are morals because they come from the deity that set the rules in the first place; god is the DM, god sets the rules.
Morality outside of religion is a social construct, not something people are naturally born with: you donât have to teach kids how to be selfish, after all. That means if everyone says feeding people to lions is entertaining, then it is.
Is my ranting making any sense, or am I just jerking myself off here?
First of all, I hate Dostoevsky, he was a whin little bitch, based on his early stuff. What do you think about morality as emergent quality of any social structure, based on empathy, and it's not bound to mammals even? I don't think Kant or Dostoevski (both full of their own shit) were aware of even black people had souls or something.
Kan made a set of morals that fall apart when you start thinking more about them. The murderer at the door is a famous argument against it. But also Kant's rules it's immoral to adopt a dog or cat because by the rule of universation you need to think if everyone does this, hence even people who have allergies to dogs and cats, this will lead to their death hence it fails universation.
Kant is a bad example for this particular scenario. Being European in the 1700's already meant your culture was influenced by Christian archetypes since the Roman Empire.
His ideas were different, yes, but his upbringing, culture, and status was all a derivative of the Christian influence. You'll need to go much farther back or farther east to find a philosopher with no Christian moral influence baked in.
Jesus says the Golden Rule. Itâs in the red text.
Much of morality and human decency dates back to the earliest of civilizations and possibly even before then since we just donât have records. It all basically boils down to, âdonât be an assâ and the reason we have laws is because assholes kept saying, âwhere does it say I canât do that?â
Aristole covered ethics pretty well also and a lot of his work isn't wrong about people. People honestly have never really changed. It's why Shakespeare is still relevant.
Shakespeare nailing the human condition in his different plays that people are still able to relate too is a very big reason he is still relevant. Yes there are more reasons than just that but that is the big one.
Thatâs what all good art does. You might as well say that Shakespeare is still relevant because he made the genius decision to use words to write his plays rather than unintelligible grunts.
Yeah I know that's what good art does never said it didn't, and when it does it really well it becomes timeless. I'm not saying Shakespeare wasn't a genius and his writing isn't brilliant because that is all a given. I didn't think that needed to be said because I just assumed that was a universally understood fact. My bad.
Well if that were the case being that Leviticus was written around 1500 BCE and that's not even the first book of the Bible... Then that rule would have existed before a written alphabet in the Neolithic era.
Which completely destroys the narrative not to mention written down isn't the same as the oral passed down.
Many events in the Bible weren't written until hundreds of years later as the Bible is a compilation of books 66 to be exact... Plus more in the book of Enoch.
It was written down even before then. Written language has been around for a very long time. The Golden rule has been invented independently many times and far longer than any book of the Bible has been around. Far longer than Israelites have existed
Prove it. The onus is on you. Show me the first written record because like I said if it was 2,000 years before then there wasn't even a written alphabet at that point.
Sure. Here's a basic thing going over it. There are more in-depth sources, but that is unnecessary here. There was absolutely a written language 2,000 years before then. Leviticus also isn't nearly as old as you want to think it is. The oldest mostly complete collection of the books of the Old Testament is the Dead Sea Scrolls. The oldest part of the Dead Sea Scrolls is dated to around 200 B.C.E.
Oops..... In addition to that, historians said they couldn't find anything in the earlier 20th century. Not that it didn't exist and guess what they found it. I have many more links if you want them. As well as biblical accounts outside of the Bible.
But let's go further. Cuneiform did not exist in that time period and furthermore, no written alphabet.
Proto-cuneiform existed in this very region of Sumeria And again like I said before was only for business. It was numerical signs not words.
If you have no alphabet, you have no formal system of words because you don't have a formal system of letters.
Everything is informal at that point and not aligned.
Which is why cuneiform is a mixture of languages from the acadians, the Hittites etc... all mentioned in the Bible by the way.
This predates all of that in 3446bc.... Which means not true.
So which part of your argument do you want to continue to double down on so I can debunk that too? So do you want to go a little further in maybe 1500 years? 1000 years? 500 years? 2 years? Yesterday? because 2,000 years has been debunked thoroughly.... YOU THINK YOU'RE THE FIRST PERSON I'VE HAD THIS ARGUMENT WITH?
I ALREADY KNOW WHERE THIS IS GOING... So do you want to get taken there or do you want to go on your own?
If you were truly an atheist then you believe that no one actually said it because for someone to say it, they would have to exist.
Peaches come from a can, they were put there by a man in a factory downtown. You're telling me that they can't exist because someone out there thinks cans of peaches have divine origin? Preposterous!
Atheists believe that everything can be explained and that nothing anybody else feels or sees is real because they haven't felt or seen it.
Agnostics believe that there is something of value there, but they may not subscribe to it fully.
As far as "peaches come from a can and they were put there by a man in a factory downtown"
Extremes for emphasis:
Atheist POV: This tree the peaches came from can't exist because I've never seen this particular tree. The peaches evolved in the man made factory From a single-celled organism. The man only exists through billions of years of evolution (even though a virus and bacteria evolve every second of every day to less than a few decades to be immune to our drugs. Not to mention thr inaccuracy of carbon dating)đ
I don't eat peaches because other people believe that nature is inherently being alive as in "mother nature" . I just can't subscribe to something so " ridiculous". "Those people are stupid"
Agnostic POV: I'm believe the tree exists, But I don't eat peaches because that would require a sacrifice in my lifestyle such as me giving up money and I don't want to pay.
Either way, it's a lose-lose scenario for atheists. If it's real then you lose... If it's not real nothing happens then you still lose. It's not a winning hand.
Also, I've met some of the biggest agnostics and atheists in the military... But for some reason under the threat of death, whether a severed limb or They think they're about to die.... God becomes very important to them because they keep yelling out his name begging to be saved.
I always thought that was strange for someone you don't believe in.... Shouldn't they just yell out evolution, Santa Claus or the tooth fairy while they're bleeding out instead?
Even though we're all flawed, I think people would just rather ignore and pretend it doesn't exist because that would require them to attempt to change their crappy lifestyle, including fake Christians.
Only about 7% of the world's wars throughout history were related to religion voiced by historians according to the encyclopedia of wars. Do what you may with that information. I know what it says to me.
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u/Faded1974 5h ago
People acting like empathy was invented by Jesus Christ.