Animals Doing What Animals Do...

[pancreasman]

Hey seer, I just wanted to commend you for not getting caught up in side discussion that are not directly relevant to your OP. I notice that often times in these sorts of debates, skeptics seem more concerned with peripheral subject matter that sends a thread into a million different directions, its a kind of death by a thousand cuts way of debating, and its nice seeing you not get distracted by all of that. Of course, there are answers to all of these peripheral subject matters (ontological arguments demonstrate that a divine creator would need to be necessarily good, grace administered through Jesus' fulfillment of the law explains how God's moral character can be immutable and yet believers aren't expected to follow the letter of the law, etc.).

I'm struggling to figure out if those who are debating you honestly don't understand what you're getting at, or if they do understand, but just don't want to follow your line of reasoning because of where it may lead them.

All very interesting. Keep up the good fight.

You know, maybe this isn't the right place, but I really am unconvinced by those ontological arguments about God necessarily being good. Perhaps I just don't understand but it all seems like semantic slight of hand to me.

I can imagine a hypothetical universe in which the most powerful being is 'bad' compared to standards we might have in this universe. I can see no way in which the observable universe would appear different if this were the case here.

Regrettably I don't think Seer is capable of explaining this to me. (I also don't see issues raised here as 'peripheral'.)

I will listen to you because I think you can be reasonable although there are several areas where I believe you are profoundly wrong. You are profoundly wrong though with integrity and good will and I can live with that. lol.

[Truthseeker]

Is an ethics wrong when nobody follows it perfectly? And if there is an ethics that everyone is following perfectly, is it perfectly good?

[Kelp(p)]

I guess at least there is a tacit admission that the suffering is not proportional to the sin.

You're right. It is. But that isn't God's fault. It's yours and mine.

The issue here is whether when Jesus "took a bullet" for us, it was a bullet he had himself shot. Okay, I get that a lot of suffering is human-caused. However, the system engineered such that Jesus had to be nailed to a cross was designed by God.

And what would you have God do? Make us all robots? Is that really what you want? No free will for no suffering? Where's the love in that?

What makes you say Adam had no reason to distrust God? In both cases there is nothing in the story to suggest Adam having a reason to mistrust.

Why would he mistrust His creator who had hitherto only provided for Him and had given Him a wife? The way I see it, it makes the most sense if Satan convinced them to take the fruit out of sheer curiosity even though God told them not to. It was an irrational act.

What does that even mean? I am sorry, but that comes across as twisting the language to mean something very different to what is says. God does not say he will be dead to him, he just says dead. Dead means dead.

Even if you want to claim mystical nonsense, you need to show that the snake understood it to mean dead to God. If the snake understood it to mean physical death - which would seem most reasonable - then the snake was not lying, it was mistaken.

I'm sure I could find similar language used in the Rabbis, but the New Testament consistently speaks of us being "dead in our sins" and of reprobates being, "dead while they live." I don't see how that's any less reasonable than a modern expression like, "I'm dead on my feet" or "she's so dumb, she's dead from the neck up."

Which God sees as a sin, because of that ego of his. He gives us free will, then gets all narky when we use it!

He gave us free will so that we could truly love Him and one and one another. Love is meaningless if you have no choice but to love. He's not just getting angry because we disobey Him, it's because He knows that we're only hurting one another when we let sin separate us from our source of life and peace.

Malaria, smallpox, polio...

All of which we could have been immune to...

Well, seer was making a big deal about the form his death took, which is how we got into this discussion.

Ok. I guess seer and I have a different view of that.

For me, the point is that God decided that his death would be required, given humans were exercising the free will he had given them.

I don't believe that it could have been otherwise. The wages of sin is death.

It does not matter how you envisage heaven as long as you think people (in whatever sense) will be there. God created a place (in the loosest sense) where everyone is happy. Thus it is within his power to create a place (in the loosest sense) where everyone is happy.

Yes, but God also wanted to create a world in which we had things like mountains, jungles, and the deep sea to marvel and at and see His glory in. Would that have been possible without there also being the possibility of illness, poison, and natural disasters? I don't believe these things are going to go away. Our relationship to them is just going to change.

If your complaint is that God should have done it sooner, then I'll ask what you're doing to convert the world.

Right. It does not matter what we do, we are all born deserving hell.

I'm a universalist. Like Heaven, Hell is a state of rejection of God, of hatred of His love. Babies are incapable of this but it doesn't mean they don't feel the consequences of the fallen state we all born into. So, I see no reason to think that a baby that dies will suffer after death.

Christianity's message to mankind is a message of shame. No wonder seer has problems understanding that people have worth if he is fed this all the time.

Shame in our disobedience, yes. There's nothing shameful about the world God made in itself.

If babies are born into sin, it is because God chose to create a system that causes them to be born into sin. He could have chosen to engineer a system where Adam's sin does not carry over into new born babies.

I strongly disagree and as the naysayer the onus is on you to show how it could have been done. Remember, God cannot create a square circle.

Though as you do not think Genesis is literal, I wonder why then babies born into sin.

Because they're human. Because we've screwed up our entire race.

Wow, you really do think little of mankind. I think the sad thing about people who claim the pyramids were built by aliens is that it so diminishes what ancient man has done.

You are doing the same thing here. Great men have worked long and hard to eradicate smallpox, to give people with cancer a good chance of surviving it. You seem to want to take that achievement away from mankind, and award it to God. You seem to think so little of your own species that you think all the bad stuff that every happens, even earthquakes and diseases, are mankind's fault, and all the good stuff, even scientific breakthroughs and technological achievements, are due to God. I appreciate I am arguing from emotion here, but I find that very sad.

I didn't say it was solely due to God. God creates the mind of man and God can control what obstacles and circumstances might get in its way of his thought process or not. How many eureka moments have happened in the history of science like Archimedes seizing on the principle of displacement or Friedrich August Keukule's dream about the circular nature of the Benzene molecule?

Furthermore, God is the one who gave scientists life and intelligence in the first place. It's no different than saying that a scientist would only have made such and such a discovery if his doctor had been there to keep him healthy.

[Kelp(p)]

You know, maybe this isn't the right place, but I really am unconvinced by those ontological arguments about God necessarily being good. Perhaps I just don't understand but it all seems like semantic slight of hand to me.

I can imagine a hypothetical universe in which the most powerful being is 'bad' compared to standards we might have in this universe. I can see no way in which the observable universe would appear different if this were the case here.

Regrettably I don't think Seer is capable of explaining this to me. (I also don't see issues raised here as 'peripheral'.)

I will listen to you because I think you can be reasonable although there are several areas where I believe you are profoundly wrong. You are profoundly wrong though with integrity and good will and I can live with that. lol.

The ontological arguments work because good is more fundamental than evil. You need a rule before the rule can be broken, right? Likewise, you need life before the concept of death has any meaning. So if there is a supreme being, it must embody that which is more fundamental.

So, if there was a god of evil, it would not be the supreme being. If that was the case, we would either be living in a technically atheistic universe that just happens to contain some kind of spirit world or we would be living in a Henotheistic universe in which there is one God and one or more lesser "gods."

[pancreasman]

The ontological arguments work because good is more fundamental than evil. You need a rule before the rule can be broken, right? Likewise, you need life before the concept of death has any meaning. So if there is a supreme being, it must embody that which is more fundamental.

So, if there was a god of evil, it would not be the supreme being. If that was the case, we would either be living in a technically atheistic universe that just happens to contain some kind of spirit world or we would be living in a Henotheistic universe in which there is one God and one or more lesser "gods."

Nope. Sorry. Don't buy it. There MIGHT be a supreme being. Or there might be fundamental principles which are part of the nature of the universe.

I don't necessarily concede good is more fundamental than evil. I, for one, am quite ok to be in a universe where 'there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.' It doesn't bother me that systems of ethics may be more or less relative. I tend to view them like systems of mathematics. We start with a set of principles or assumptions and go from there. A system may be judged on the basis of how few its assumptions are, how self consistent the system is, and how 'successful' the system is when mapped onto the real world.

[Kelp(p)]

Nope. Sorry. Don't buy it. There MIGHT be a supreme being. Or there might be fundamental principles which are part of the nature of the universe.

That's why I said, "if there is a supreme being." I agree that God's existence cannot proven from scratch the way Anselm thought it could be.

I don't necessarily concede good is more fundamental than evil. I, for one, am quite ok to be in a universe where 'there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.' It doesn't bother me that systems of ethics may be more or less relative. I tend to view them like systems of mathematics. We start with a set of principles or assumptions and go from there. A system may be judged on the basis of how few its assumptions are, how self consistent the system is, and how 'successful' the system is when mapped onto the real world.

Relativism is self-refuting. If good and evil are relative then it is evil to assert that they aren't (and worse to try to force your point of view on others).

[pancreasman]

That's why I said, "if there is a supreme being." I agree that God's existence cannot proven from scratch the way Anselm thought it could be.

Relativism is self-refuting. If good and evil are relative then it is evil to assert that they aren't (and worse to try to force your point of view on others).

No, that doesn't make relative systems of ethics anymore 'self refuting' than different kinds of mathematics make mathematics self refuting. Let's take basic arithmetic as an example. The natural numbers (0,1,2 etc) work great with the addition and multiplication operations but not with subtraction and division (in all cases). So, 5-7 is not solvable in the set of natural numbers. Expending the set to include fractions and negative numbers makes the system more 'inclusive', more able to solve problems, and a better fit to the real world. (work with me now, it's a metaphor.) The systems don't 'refute' each other. We can use quite reasonable criteria to judge between the systems. I think it's similar to ethics systems. Perhaps I might not say my ethics system is 'better' than another person's but we could have a reasonable discussion about which system is more universal, works in more situations, is more inclusive and so on.

And BTW, thank you for your contributions, but I was specifically asking Adrift's view.

Oh, and I don't want to force my ethics on anyone. My consistently expressed view is that the state ought to have the fewest enforceable laws necessary for a civil society.

[Kelp(p)]

Ok. Then I guess I'll respond if Adrift asks me to. And I know you weren't talking about forcing your ethics on anybody.

[Truthseeker]

No, that doesn't make relative systems of ethics anymore 'self refuting' than different kinds of mathematics make mathematics self refuting. Let's take basic arithmetic as an example. The natural numbers (0,1,2 etc) work great with the addition and multiplication operations but not with subtraction and division (in all cases). So, 5-7 is not solvable in the set of natural numbers. Expending the set to include fractions and negative numbers makes the system more 'inclusive', more able to solve problems, and a better fit to the real world. (work with me now, it's a metaphor.) The systems don't 'refute' each other. We can use quite reasonable criteria to judge between the systems. I think it's similar to ethics systems. Perhaps I might not say my ethics system is 'better' than another person's but we could have a reasonable discussion about which system is more universal, works in more situations, is more inclusive and so on.

False analogy, I think. I need to give this more thought, though.

And BTW, thank you for your contributions, but I was specifically asking Adrift's view.

Not to be impolite, but I would like to say that you need to give a reason why I should not address any of your assertions.

Oh, and I don't want to force my ethics on anyone. My consistently expressed view is that the state ought to have the fewest enforceable laws necessary for a civil society.

What about forcing your ethics on someone who clearly is trying to kill you? To me, the right of self defense is good!

[pancreasman]

False analogy, I think. I need to give this more thought, though.



Not to be impolite, but I would like to say that you need to give a reason why I should not address any of your assertions.




What about forcing your ethics on someone who clearly is trying to kill you? To me, the right of self defense is good!

No, you're right. I rescind my request. By all means everybody jump in. I guess I was mostly interested in Adrift's response.

As to self defence, I think we're jumping from the BIG picture 'Whole Systems of Ethics' to particular ethical quandaries that even Christians may disagree on. I guess my first thought would be that we all face a HUGE variety of ethical situations all the time and make moral choices. I tend to agree with you about self defence, but I know of famous examples where people did not value there own lives over that of their attacker. Very tricky moral territory for everyone I think.

[Adrift]

And BTW, thank you for your contributions, but I was specifically asking Adrift's view.

Hello pancreasman. I'm not really interested in discussing that subject right here or right now. Perhaps some other time. And thank you for the compliment. I have a feeling that if we do end up discussing the issue sometime that it'll be constructive and profitable. A lot of the time these conversations dwindle into tit-for-tat, saving face, and attempting to win at all costs. I'm not really into the whole arguing for argument's sake. I guess some people just see it as a game. Sort of like chess, but with words or something.

[Kelp(p)]

No, that doesn't make relative systems of ethics anymore 'self refuting' than different kinds of mathematics make mathematics self refuting. Let's take basic arithmetic as an example. The natural numbers (0,1,2 etc) work great with the addition and multiplication operations but not with subtraction and division (in all cases). So, 5-7 is not solvable in the set of natural numbers. Expending the set to include fractions and negative numbers makes the system more 'inclusive', more able to solve problems, and a better fit to the real world. (work with me now, it's a metaphor.) The systems don't 'refute' each other. We can use quite reasonable criteria to judge between the systems. I think it's similar to ethics systems. Perhaps I might not say my ethics system is 'better' than another person's but we could have a reasonable discussion about which system is more universal, works in more situations, is more inclusive and so on.

Alright. Maybe it isn't formally self-refuting, but I still think it's useless and inconsistent.

Like you, I believe in tolerance. I think people should be allowed to live how they want to as long as they are not hurting anybody else. But for such a principle to have any teeth, it has to be applicable to everyone. Say that a tribe believes that they have to sacrifice a virgin in order to appease the volcano (I'm using a simplistic hypothetical so as not to get bogged down in sociological discussions). Amnesty International comes and tells them they can't. Then from the point of the tribe, Amnesty is directly endangering their livelihood. Suppose further that the tribe holds that even making the suggestion that the sacrifices are wrong constitutes blasphemy. The tribesmen might then even be compelled to kill the Amnesty agents if they try to push the issue, lest the volcano god be angered.

Obviously you and I would say that Amnesty, with all their foreign talk of "human rights," is the correct party. How can we decide this, though? We don't mind that they fear the volcano god. That's tolerance. But they are hurting young girls. Do we send missionaries or the Peace Corps to try and convince them to stop the sacrifices? That would be endangering their lives, according to the tribesmen. It would likely just result in more bloodshed.

Might makes right? Send the American army to force an end to the sacrifices? From the point of the tribesmen, that would be an even graver injustice than blaspheming the volcano god by arguing against the sacrifices.

Here's an argument from William Lane Craig as to the problem of defining which "culture" or "society" among the many each of us belongs to is relevant to a case,

For example, suppose a woman named Carla is a resident of a liberal upscale neighborhood in Hollywood, California, attends a Christian church, and is a partner in a prestigious law firm. In her neighborhood, having an adulterous affair is considered "enlightened" and those who do not pursue such unions are considered repressed prudes. At her church, however, adultery is condemned as sinful while at her law firm adultery is neither encouraged nor discouraged. Suppose further that Carla chooses to commit adultery in the firm's back office with a fellow churchgoer, Winston, who resides in a conservative neighborhood in which adultery is condemned. The office, it turns out, is adjacent to the church as well as precisely half-way between Carla's neighborhood and Winston's neighborhood.

[Enjolras]

You know Enjolras, most atheists I know are openly ethical relativists. So it is refreshing to run across moral realists like you and Pixie - as irrational as your view is. But it's sad that you don't realize that the universal moral truths, the love, grace, tenderness and goodness that you so ardently seek - that you intuitively know - are found in the teachings and person of Christ Jesus. The Son of God...

I became Christian as an adult and remained in the faith for 20 years, so I'm pretty familiar with Jesus. I no longer believe he deserves the exalted reputation he has.

[Enjolras]

Is an ethics wrong when nobody follows it perfectly? And if there is an ethics that everyone is following perfectly, is it perfectly good?

No, and no.

[pancreasman]

Alright. Maybe it isn't formally self-refuting, but I still think it's useless and inconsistent.

Like you, I believe in tolerance. I think people should be allowed to live how they want to as long as they are not hurting anybody else. But for such a principle to have any teeth, it has to be applicable to everyone. Say that a tribe believes that they have to sacrifice a virgin in order to appease the volcano (I'm using a simplistic hypothetical so as not to get bogged down in sociological discussions). Amnesty International comes and tells them they can't. Then from the point of the tribe, Amnesty is directly endangering their livelihood. Suppose further that the tribe holds that even making the suggestion that the sacrifices are wrong constitutes blasphemy. The tribesmen might then even be compelled to kill the Amnesty agents if they try to push the issue, lest the volcano god be angered.

Obviously you and I would say that Amnesty, with all their foreign talk of "human rights," is the correct party. How can we decide this, though? We don't mind that they fear the volcano god. That's tolerance. But they are hurting young girls. Do we send missionaries or the Peace Corps to try and convince them to stop the sacrifices? That would be endangering their lives, according to the tribesmen. It would likely just result in more bloodshed.

Might makes right? Send the American army to force an end to the sacrifices? From the point of the tribesmen, that would be an even graver injustice than blaspheming the volcano god by arguing against the sacrifices.

Here's an argument from William Lane Craig as to the problem of defining which "culture" or "society" among the many each of us belongs to is relevant to a case,

I'm not sure I can see where the quoted passage is going other than 'Gosh, modern life throws up a lot of complex moral issues'. They're as complex for theists as they are for non-theists. Given the broad range of Christianity, it doesn't seem to me your 'absolute' clear morality is either absolute or clear. You all seem nearly as confused as the rest of us are. Practically then, I find this is pretty useless conversation. We're all going to have our opinions. There are no 'gotcha' arguments despite both sides thinking there are. The theist view is reasonable and internally consistent. I can see that, but for lots of reasons I doubt its premises.

The 'clash of cultures' thing is indeed a complex moral minefield. Before Christianity was dethroned as the default Western view missionaries did a lot of 'good' stuff but they also did a lot of 'bad' stuff. So once again, this black and white morality fails to produce any better results than reasonable people of good will achieve. Is modern world morality complex? Yes indeed. I think it is best faced with a nuanced and flexible approach that can see the complexities and acknowledge them.

(And BTW, your first sentence is in no way supported by the rest of your post as far as I can see. Maybe I'm just dumb.)