that’s not true. even if i believed in god i would accept that my morals were irrational because as i have already said, emotions are irrational and morals are emotions.
i can accept that my (athiest) morals are irrational. because i think all moral values are irrational. as i have said i don’t think religious morality is any different.
ALL MORALITY IS IRRATIONAL. in my view. including my own.
You know, all this discussion may have a point if someone were to prove that theists don’t lie, steal, and murder; or that atheists don’t lie, steal, and murder.
Or we could even develop theories if anyone had any real statistics, instead of making generalizations and unfounded accusations.
How does that disagree with what I said? Read it again, slowly this time:
In order for a theist to convince you that their ethics were rational, they would have to make you a theist first.
What does any of this have to do with the rationality of an ethical system, besides potentially being a huge ad hominem, I mean?
Are you kidding? What do murder rates have to do with being ethical? Maybe you should define what you mean by ethics.
Samkhya,
Yes, there are many ‘schools’ in eastern philosophy, but they have an entirely different cosmology ( wrong word, but as close as I can get to western concept) that presents “God” in a much different understanding than what is normally accepted in western thought.
I’m not trying to be obscure, but there is a difference. In the western concept, there is God (positive) or there isn’t (negative). Either/ or. My understanding of ‘eastern thought’ is that which is, is seen as present or absent. A subtle difference in language, but a big difference in perspective. It renders the issue of “God” as indeterminate and simply does not fall into the theist-agnostic-atheist western argument.
JT
Noooo...what do murder rates have to do with the [i]rationality[/i] of an [i]ethical system[/i]? Perhaps you should define rationality.
Could you define “define” please? 
That’s a good a point to bow out on as any. 
no. you misunderstand my analogy.
i am comparing physical death to the death of an idea. i.e he bought the ticket (i decide to lay down my life) before his love for enrique died (before i died).
his decision was based upon present values… as would be my decision to die for those i loved.
i know the athiest does not think anything will mean anything to him beyond the grave. that’s my point. he bases his decision on his PRESENT values because they are what dictates to him in the present. you decide to die when you are alive. and so can only base it on your living experience.
Sigh. Ok, well, first of all, you used the word rationality, not me, but I’ll try to give you a hand on this one. Maybe we could even work together and make a really solid definition.
Rationality is a process by which an organism uses analogies, deductive reasoning, and empirical evidence to give an approximate estimation on the likeliness of a belief being true. (Though I guess we’d have to define the rest of that stuff too now.)
As for whether ethics are rational or not, I believe it’s based solely on how you define ethical. If you mean ethical to be “actions that promote the good of all of humanity, including you,” I would say atheist ethics are the most ethical of all, most of the time. But if you personally define ethics as, “actions that anger or please a magic monster that lives in the sky,” I would say no ethic systems can be ethical because I personally lack a belief in said monster. Am I clearing up my position any, or is this just muddling it?
EDIT: Mixed up the words rational and ethical by mistake. I think I fixed it, but my mind is starting to spin from definitions, lol.
no need to be rude.
it disagrees because you are saying that i would have to be a theist to find theistic ethics rational.
and i am saying that even if i was a theist, i still wouldn’t think that my (theist) ethics were rational.
Perhaps you could give me some reference… ?
Right. And these statements don’t interact with each other in the way you want them to. It’s as though I’m saying ‘Socrates liked to drink tea’ and you said "Yes, but he painted his house blue’. In other words, these statements don’t disagree with each other. They could both be true, they could both be false.
The point of all this is that to say to a theist “You have to prove that God exists before we can consider the rationality of your system” is an unfair demand. That’s all.
More importantly, the creator of this thread used it.
I can agree to this definition, though it may have implications you didn’t intend.
That can't be a definition of ethics, because it leaves out the most crucial part- ethics are propositions about what a person ought and ought not do. Precisely what sorts of things [i]are[/i] (un)ethical comes after that, and that sort of thing isn't key to the definition of the word. Whether they come from a giant monster living in the sky, or a short hairy monster living on a college campus is completely besides the point, at least as far as definitions are concerned.
i already said i was never asking the theist to prove that god exists.
it was you that assumed i was. what i was saying about that was (as i have already said) a side-point to do with me asking what the difference was between athiests who are consistent with themselves and other types of athiest (which i am still not quite clear on).
and again, it was you that brought up the two statements. not me. so don’t tell me that they don’t interact ‘in the way i want them to’ since i merely made one of the statements and then you made the second one in reply to mine. it was you who said about me having to turn into a theist in order to find it rational after i had already stated that in my opinion NO MORALITY IS RATIONAL. therefore it would seem that these two statements do not interact in the way you want them to.
so i don’t quite see your point. you are bringing things up that (according to yourself) have nothing to do with statements i have already made and then lambasting me for the fact that they are unconnected.
i would like to repeat that my argument has nothing to do with whether or not god exists.
i do not see theistic morality as any different from atheistic morality. they both seem irrational to me.
look let’s not argue. i really can’t be bothered with hostility. it does no good. i want to discuss this sanely. not just looking for little things to pick at with eachothers arguments. why not get to the point of what we are both really saying?
my ultimate point is that all morality is irrational.
what is yours?
My point is that atheistic morality is certainly irrational, and that morality based on theism does a lot better.
on this we agree.
ok.
why does theistic morality does better?
Well, like I said- it's coherent. If there's a God like the one the major religions claim there to be, then it follows that there are certain things that a person ought and ought not do. A theistic understanding of ethics also includes good reasons for doing the right thing, and a justification for why these particular things are right/wrong, and not others.
Now, why do you think atheistic ethics are irrational?
because a moral reaction to something is an insitinctive emotional reaction. if you were walking along the street and saw an old lady being mugged, you wouldn’t rationally work out whether it was a good or bad thing. you would simply have a basic emotional reaction that the perpertrators were doing wrong.
these moral values come from different places. this can be proven by looking at cultural relativism. even within a culture different moral values are in place. eg. views on abortion or the death penalty.
so if morals come down to emotional reactions to events or ideas, and it is accepted that emotions are not rational, then it must be accepted that morality is not rational.
it is irrelevant where morals come from because they are by their very nature irrational; being governed by emotion; not reason.
for this reason i think that all of morality is irrational.
by the way that doesn’t mean that i am not a moral person, or even that i despise morality. far from it. i think it is very important. it serves a very important purpose, but i still don;t think that moral values can be reasoned to.
True. But even rational things don't always involve a 'working out'. For example, When I see 5x4 and think '20', there was no rationalizing on my part- it's something I know from memorization. If someone asked me to provide rational proof that 5x4 was 20, I'm not even sure I could do it.
This could just be a matter of people being incorrect about the facts- There are many different views on some difficult scientific matters, that doesn't mean science is relativistic, it just means it's hard. Couldn't ethics just be like that- there are so many different views because the subject matter is very difficult? After all, it seems to follow a pattern of difficulty: some ethical situations, like beating an old lady to death because you want her purse, almost everybody would consider wrong. We could say that it's 'easy'. Others, like abortion, are controversial, and even single individuals may change their minds over the course of their lives. We could call these 'hard'.
Emotions aren't rational in the sense that the don't involve rationalization. If I run away from a tiger because I panic, the emotion may have been irrational because I didn't think it through. That doesn't mean that avoiding tigers is itself irrational. Similarly, seeing a tree and coming to believe that there is a tree there is irrational, because it doesn't involve the process of rationalizing.