The inferior "objective" morality of faith

In the United States, Christianity is seen as the guider of the prevalent, moral consensus through the simple fact that Christians are the majority and hold their morality from Christian teachings, indoctrination, and reading the Bible themselves, at times. Christians argue against other morality that threatens their assumed “moral authority” by stating that if you do not believe in “God”, anything goes. Which, to some extent they do have a point. However a disciplined, learned mind, with reason and logic on their side, can quickly conquer not only this statement, but also offer a morality that Christianity cannot obtain, a more righteous ethical system, that is based on logic and reason, aside from belief that “god says so”. What we can gather, that if you are not a believer, the Bible was written by awful archaic people, with inferior morality by today’s standards, who try to pawn of their morality as coming from the “one true God”.

Considering much of the old testament morality is seen in the Western Hemisphere as morally bankrupt now, we can see how obvious it is today that this “objective morality” has changed over years, centuries, to adapt to a less religious, but more of a reason backed morality and value system, which does have a tendency to shine through, even in believers. However, there is still cherry picking of morality from the old testament. Currently the gay agenda is something that is “objectively” wrong, because “God” says so. Never mind the numerous mentions to stone adulterers, or to judge not lest ye be judged, or to love one another as you love yourself. Yet the believers fail to recognize that this morality was not of their “God’s”, but of reason. Or they do have their reason, which isn’t very noble to hate and discriminate against gay people, but they use the Bible to back up their preconceived notions of homosexuality. Yet the same people claim their morality is objective and of “God”. What they fail to see, is that their morality is indeed not objective, it is merely believed to be. Some of their morality is backed by their own reason, some is caused by a herd mentality, and some is due to their indoctrination. Due to the ever evolving morality of Christianity that is evidenced throughout it’s history, it is obvious we have nothing close to an objective morality in Christianity, and due to its judgment based on believing god exists and believing that god told them these rules, we have a baseless morality founded upon belief and an archaic backwards morality. It is not founded on reason and logic conducive to values that people hold dear, thus making this morality not only subjective, but also unreasonable and irrational.

The origin of reasonable morality is through the values one holds. Christians, holding the bible and their belief in “God” which somewhere along the lines gets misconstrued with a knowledge of their “God”, fail to understand this. They only understand that morality comes from their god, that they believe in, which essentially has been formed through the same way as any other religious god who tells people what to do, through the writings of men, spread through a local culture, until the entire world has become indoctrinated. For the origin of morality, please reference my blog post, The Core of Humanity https://ruminationfactory.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/51/.

But as alluded to earlier, reason and logic of our modern values oft shine through, and that is the job of those moral, or good non believers, to provide a reasonable sound morality, based on knowledge and logic, not belief, not the writings of an immoral archaic people, who promote misogyny and stoning of adulterers, or killing those who are homosexual. For reasons outlined above, religious morality will always be inferior to that which can be derived from logic and reason, and that is how religious morality bends to pressure of logic and reason, why Christianity evolves, and why one day, they will likely accept homosexuality. After all, it is in the O.T. only, just like all the other nonsense that is ignored, from commands to not eat pork or wear multi-fabric clothes, to condoning slavery. This will be justified by something the bible says, they will claim, because Jesus loves us all, allowing them to ignore and cherry pick some more, until one day hopefully there is nothing left to ignore but the entire whole goddamn thing itself.

Be good, have a good day, and most of all, be ungodly, for the sake of humanity.

Well. Go ahead then.

I see you saying that the moral opinions of right now differ from the moral opinions of back in the day. I don’t see you saying why we should consider one correct and the other not.

On the other hand, morality on this side of the grave has always seemed a rather less compelling reason to believe in God than in being able to attach “my soul” to immortality and Salvation on the other side of it. After all, what is the 70 odd years most of us will have “before” next to all of eternity “after”

And the “morality of faith” is still basically just the price of admission.

Instead, I always focus the beam on the extent to which someone is able to demonstrate, for example, the actual existence of a particular God. In other words, if you just want to demonstrate the moral narrative itself, you pass around the Bible.

On the other other hand, morality predicated on one or another enlightened rendition of Reason can be equally as dangerous to the human race. I quote for example the 20th Century.

Still this does remind me of that classic scene from Big Bad Bubby: youtu.be/HfwKMcFNKC8

The Scientist: You see, no one’s going to help you Bubby, because there isn’t anybody out there to do it. No one. We’re all just complicated arrangements of atoms and subatomic particles - we don’t live. But our atoms do move about in such a way as to give us identity and consciousness. We don’t die; our atoms just rearrange themselves. There is no God. There can be no God; it’s ridiculous to think in terms of a superior being. An inferior being, maybe, because we, we who don’t even exist, we arrange our lives with more order and harmony than God ever arranged the earth. We measure; we plot; we create wonderful new things. We are the architects of our own existence. What a lunatic concept to bow down before a God who slaughters millions of innocent children, slowly and agonizingly starves them to death, beats them, tortures them, rejects them. What folly to even think that we should not insult such a God, damn him, think him out of existence. It is our duty to think God out of existence. It is our duty to insult him. Fuck you, God! Strike me down if you dare, you tyrant, you non-existent fraud! It is the duty of all human beings to think God out of existence. Then we have a future. Because then - and only then - do we take full responsibility for who we are. And that’s what you must do, Bubby: think God out of existence; take responsibility for who you are.

Of course that won’t seem at all reasonable to most Christians, will it?

Okay. What have you got? Present a more righteous ethical system to us.

It’s kinda weird reading an essay that declares a moral system to be inferior without giving any indication of what exactly it’s inferior to.

Most people imply the concept of moral accountability and personal responsibility when calling upon and conjuring their (christian) god(s).

So a deity essentially sits atop all moral hierarchies of a supreme form of agency, offering insight and wisdom when people cast blame against and judge each other.

If you take away Deism, and put morality into the hands of humanity, then your “objective morality” is nothing more than relegating morality to the courts of laws and men.

If you think a random judge should decide, rule upon, who can marry and who cannot, who can fuck whom and who cannot, who can get abortions and who cannot, who can murder and who cannot, then you’re opening the door to an anarchistic legal system. Instead, you and other atheists don’t actually think this way. You would not give random judges and lawyers that kind of social power. So you’re back to square one. Who relegates morality? Who has superior morality? What is objective morality, without subjective human interference? Your argument cannot progress without serious, deep, insightful answers to these questions.

A deity is merely a metaphor for a moral agency beyond humanity, something or somebody extraordinary. Somebody who can hold all humans accountable for their actions, punishing and rewarding them flawlessly.

…to an “extreme extent”.

Well okay, I’m listening. Let’s hear it.

And realize that if you cannot deliver, then by your own testament, you are not that “disciplined, learned mind, with reason and logic on his side”. And then as such, why should anyone, including yourself, care what you think? And even if we merely disagree with your “reasoning”, regardless of how perfect you personally think it might be, we STILL have NO reason to accept anything that YOU say to be “more moral than Christianity”. A reasoning person already knows that.

You seriously set yourself into a trap. You lose no matter what you say. Is that your morality? To set oneself up for certain failure? That sounds like a certain OTHER morality, specifically anti-Christianity.

“Correct” is too harsh of a word for difference of a moral opinion. As long as it is true to ones values - I might say it is then correct, perhaps. The difference is, when a morality is based on values of another, and you subscribe to that morality but your values differ, then it is not “correct”. Unless you mean something else by “correct”.

It is one true to ones values. Not the values of people who live 2,500 - 5,000 years ago. Not the values that are pawned off as that of an almighty all knowing being - that ultimately contradict and don’t make much sense.

So to have a righteous morality, it must be true to your values.

Of course we all have our judgment of values and our subsequent morality from those values. I may fight you to the death if we disagree on values, but at the very least, embrace your values, not those of others.

Think for yourself, question authority. http://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=190058

Yeah I agree, you’d have to read an awful lot in between the lines to get to where I wanted to go, but a simple revision or reply to this question can fix that.

We all relegate our morality. Think for yourself, question authority. Objective morality does not exist

Kids are going to be educated/indoctrinated by their parents or society or some institution. They will get someone’s values.

In what way can these modern values be considered their own values?

If everybody followed their own values, then there would be no moral system in place. Somebody has to suck it up and get in line with the system.

I’d like to hear it too.

Pick a moral conflict, and note which narrative/agenda reflects the most “disciplined learned mind”.

Still [in my view] almost any secular rendition of this would seem preferable to the many denominational Christian dogmas. With Christianity you merely assume that this particular God exists by way of either defining and deducing Him into existence, or in passing around the Bible and insisting that He must exist because the Bible says so.

Or you claim to have “faith” in His existence.

But which God – the Real God, or the God that folks like uccisore and phyllo believe in instead?

And with so much at stake – immortality, salvation – shouldn’t it be so that they are more or less obligated to demonstrate why it is their own rather than the others?

Or is that sort of exactitude moot in a philosophy venue?

I think good values from parents should be taught and handed down to generation. Just because I think most of us have a general consensus of what we see as good values, already. I could be wrong. But there are basic values humanity seems to share, but not always. That includes the value of life, to some extent, honor, justice, etc. My values I mention a bit here: http://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=190107#p2597118

As long as we understand the values of others, we can make them our values as well, if we like them, or want to. That doesn’t mean we will, though. Valuation for individual humans is an interesting subject to me. Where does it come from, how do we have the values we have, why do we have them? All very important questions to ask to understand the nature of values or at least have a philosophy on the nature of values.

I cannot speak for others on what people should value. I can attempt to become a position of authority and attempt to persuade others to hold my values, but that doesn’t work very well with adults. My children however, is a different story.

However if people believe in God, then there’s no reason to discuss values. Their values are of their God’s, which I would say is of the dogma of men who pawned off their values as Gods. As such, I find that type of moral persuasion to be evil. It is not the moral persuasion I engage in with my children, I let them question my values. However, I don’t know if they take this to heart, yet. They are young and they are keen on being like me, or their mother and this is natural for children, it seems.

Then how can you say that Christian morality is wrong and that another morality should be adopted?

In part, from what you omitted from quoting “However if people believe in God, then there’s no reason to discuss values. Their values are of their God’s, which I would say is of the dogma of men who pawned off their values as Gods. As such, I find that type of moral persuasion to be evil.”

Also because it is not based on their values… It is not true to themselves. That is why I say it is “inferior”, I did not say it was “wrong”. As well as that, a claim to be objective morality, yet it changes, is not objective. In that sense, it is “wrong”.

You know when people are not being true to themselves? You know what their ‘real’ values are?

How do you manage to know all that?

Well when they say “because god says so”. Well, then they are essentially telling us its not based on their values. But of course, there is the possibility that they don’t even know what they are talking about or even saying.

So you’re a mind reader then. That’s all you’ve got. You took a great big shit on Christian values (and honestly not really, just a particularly ignorant, cynical strawman depiction of Christian values), but at the end of the day you have nothing to offer except to say that in your imagination, most Christians aren’t being true to their values or true to themselves or whatever.

And you must KNOW all this shit you’re claiming about 2 billion anonymous people, because we all know that merely believing it isn’t the kind of thing ANGRY would do. No no, when you make up a story about 2 billion people, it’s completely different than when other people do it. It classifies as knowledge, and it totally isn’t prejudice.

I at least figured you’d try to toss utilitarianism at me or something.

Then why didn’t you, to the three people who asked? Where do you get off talking about some ethical systems being more ‘righteous’ than others when at the end of the day all you got for me is ‘well when it comes to values anything is fine as long as you’re sincere’? Where the fuck do you have the gall to say that a non-Christian value system is based on logic and reason, when as soon as you’re pressed you admit that correct and incorrect don’t really apply to ethics?

You’re absolutely resolute that religious ethics are The Worst Ever, but when asked about your system, it’s suddenly All So Subjective.

It was all a bunch of anti-Christian polemic, collapsing on itself at the first sign of criticism.