The inferior "objective" morality of faith

But: There are those who root this authority in God, while others root it in Reason.

I “root” it instead in the manner in which I have come – existentially – to understand the meaning of identity, value judgments and power.

Thus a position of authority for me revolves more or less around democracy and the rule of law. Rather than in either might makes right or right makes might. I just have no illusions regarding that in a world deeply ensconced “for all practical purposes” in the capitalist global economy.

And there “philosophy” will revolve far more around “show me the money” [around realpolitik] than anything approaching a deontological assessment of Good and Evil.

However folks like uccisore like to argue that capitalism itself is the embodiment of the Good that is the embodiment of the Christian God.

Or so it seems to me.

But then he is a flagrant, doctrinaire objectivist – both politically and religiously. So, from my perspective, how deeply can we ever expect his thinking here to actually go?

And, regarding my own daughter, I made it abundantly clear to her that my own moral and political values were largely existential fabrications/contraptions. And that there does not appear to way a way in which to “reason” morality into existence.

Although, sure, there actually may well be. I can only be persuaded or not persuaded of this.

Or, perhaps, any discussion here will revolve by and large around convincing others that their own God reflects the highest values. Though even here that will often revolve around a subjective interpretation of what is said to be the one and only rational [or spiritually correct] manner in which to construe God’s agenda in the Bible.

Just think how ludicrous it is that, while Jews, Christians and Moslems all speak of a God’s, the God’s, my God’s authority in different ways, they are all speaking of the same God!

They will then even go on “crusades” or “jihads” in order to impose their own understanding of this God and the “Good” on the “infidels”.

But: What they won’t do [at least not with me] is to discuss the existential relationship between their moral values on this side of the grave and their imagined fate on the other side.

Here though I do not see any real substantive, substantial or practical difference between rooting values in God or in one or another political ideology; or in one or another deontological philosophy. Dogma in, dogma out when push comes to shove. It just gets passed down through the generations when and where it is able to do so.

And allowing your children to question your values is one thing, allowing them to reject them something different. Some parents will encourage their children to “be yourself” but then draw the line the extent to which they are not choosing to be what the parents themselves deem to be the “right” thing or the “good” thing.

They really seem to want it both ways though.

Yes - so I make that claim with the understanding that the moral opinion is based on a coherent, rational, logic valuation, or value, that led to that opinion. Values as I stated are something that are at the core of who we are as humans, who we are as humans are different from one person to the next, although commonality does occur quite frequently on a variety of values. I did not make the claim that Christian values are evil, that is a strawman on your part. I said something that is different and shouldn’t be paraphrased to some simplification that Christian values are evil. Christian values are very broad as I have shown in the OP and often don’t even have roots in their faith necessarily, but can have roots more in the culture or aspects of culture that isn’t necessarily related to the faith.

I explained why “correct” was harsh. I don’t think you may have understood what I meant when I discussed this in multiple sentences why I considered it harsh. My position has the foundation of my values, as should all morality. This is important - it is a morality that is of the individual - not of some people from 5,000 years ago pawning off their morality as that of Gods. Note, I stated pawning off your morality as God’s is evil, in the sense that those who wrote pretending to be writing “gods words” when in truth, they were not, is evil.

Sounds reasonable, iambiguous. So you find your values in this political framework, if you will, as I see it?

Sure, aren’t they all existential fabrications? It is merely just a judgment of good and bad…

I wouldn’t necessarily think they are speaking of the same god. Rather, every single person has an individual god, which is their own personal idea of what god is.

Yes good point…

It is not just religions, but ALL forms of monopolies morally bankrupt society.

Anybody is free to read the words you actually wrote and see how vile and horrible you consider Christian values to be, it’s right there in your post. The fact that you only explicitly use the word ‘evil’ to apply to the way Christian values are taught instead of the values themselves is moot when you DO explicitly call Christian values morally bankrupt, inferior, baseless, archaic, backwards, not founded on logic, unreasonable, irrational, misogynistic, and immoral. If you want to claim that you in no way meant to imply that a value system that is all of those things and is also taught in a way that is evil is not evil itself, well then I simply don’t believe you.

Anyone can say that. Some guy reads the Bible, decides that it makes sense, and bases his values on what it teaches. There, his moral position has the foundation of his values.

I’d say probably 80-90% of moral valuations deal with how we interact with other people. Each individual having their own private morality that has no standard other than “As long as you came up with it yourself, it’s fine” makes no sense at all. Morality is inherently cooperative.

But you also said that it’s good to teach morals to future generations. So you’ve got this incoherent dynamic in which people teach their morals to others, and if those others like what they hear (or are children) they adopt them, and this is good, except when religious people do the exact same thing, and then it’s evil. That’s raw prejudice.

Your imagining that religious values are taught by people ‘pawning off their morality as that of Gods’ is just cynicism, not an argument and certainly not a position you’ve defended. Neither the teachers or the students would describe what they’re doing in that way- it’s just a thing you say because of your prejudice.

The problem here of course is that any Christian would agree with you on that. No Christian value system or other religious value system I’ve ever heard of endorses pretending that the things you write or say are God’s word. In fact, in the Bible it’s a capital offense. It doesn’t make any sense to criticize a value system on the base of something that the value system condemns just as strongly as you do. So your argument against Christian ethics goes right out the window, that simple. Byebye.

All you’ve got left is an argument against Christian people- you can allege that even though their moral system is fine, the people are guilty of hypocrisy, because they do the thing they condemn (teaching their own morals as if they are God’s). I can’t stress enough that at this point you are no longer criticizing a moral system, but leveling accusations against a group of individuals. That takes you out of the realm of pure logical argument, and into the realm of empiricism- i.e., you need evidence to back accusations against people.

I see none. There appears to be a presumption that you are an atheist, and that everybody who reads this will be an atheist, and that we should all just accept that anybody who claims to be teaching the words of God is wrong. Well I’m sure I don’t need to tell YOU, logical and rational as you are, that “Divine Command Theory isn’t very good given God doesn’t exist” isn’t exactly compelling.

And anyway, that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that if a person is teaching something that isn’t God’s word but they think it is, they still aren’t guilty of what you’re claiming. They’re merely making an innocent mistake, as any given moral teacher is bound to do. You try to escape this problem by putting the blame on people living thousands of years ago- surely those guys must have known that they were’t teaching God’s word even if everybody since then believes it. But again, what’s your evidence? It seems to be nothing more than a presumption of atheism, again. And once again, I shouldn’t have to remind you that “Assuming there’s no such thing as God, people who claim to be teaching God’s word must be lying or mistaken” isn’t a very compelling argument.

So in short, when you peel away all the vitriol, we’re left with, “Atheists shouldn’t accept Divine Command Theory.”

Well no shit.

Just because they say something about God does not mean that those values are not genuinely theirs nor that they would not have adopted exactly the same moral stance under another moral system.

"Thou shalt not steal ", God said.

Maybe they don’t steal because God said.
OR
Maybe they don’t steal because that’s one of their values. Maybe they are being true to themselves when they don’t steal.

How can you know?

Maybe they are drawn to the Bible because it corresponds to their values.

Then they shouldn’t claim the reason it is wrong is because God says so. Now, as a former Christian - I deemed keeping holy the sabbath as right, and disobeying it to be wrong, only on the account that “God said so”. I saw no reason why it would be morally wrong other than it was a commandment. I saw no reason why I couldn’t pick up sticks on my lawn on Sunday afternoon, which is considered work, but God said so, so it must be wrong. I was an unthinking slave to this so called God.

Your complaint, in that case, is that they use God as the justification rather than explaining it in terms of their own values.
Seems much more efficient to use God because the explanation in terms of values will be long and drawn out. And maybe they are not good with words but they feel what they do is right.

I’m saying the actual value is “God said so”

I don’t have any numbers about how many Christians think of it in those terms but I think that it’s a very small minority.

How many do you think understand the morality behind the 4th commandment, keeping the Sabbath Holy? “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.”

But previously you said that men wrote the Bible and attributed it to God.

So those men thought that giving workers a day of rest was fair, reasonable and morally correct.

So what if they wrote it thousands of years ago. Who cares that they phrased it in those particular terms. It’s a idea that is still applicable today and lots of people agree with it.

Indeed they are attributing the reason to god. They don’t know why god values the sabbath as holy, maybe on a superficial level, but if they don’t value it the same as god, how do they know what that reason is, or value is? They are merely accepting god’s notion that the Sabbath must be holy, it is not really their value, but their god’s value, and that is good enough for them. That is not how morality is formed. That is adopting someone else’s morality… it is not being true to their values, they are blindly following. “Think for yourself, question authority”.

If the reason is good and true then why does it matter to you whether or not it comes from (christian) god?

It doesn’t if it is good and true, from my judgment.

Then you technically agree with Christians and their God when those reasons are good and true, according to both of you, and you agree. However you disagree on the source of that reason.

You never explained, argued, or justified your reasoning when it comes to the source of those “good and true” reasons/judgments. Why are christians wrong to attribute some of those reasons to their god?

Agreeing with morality is one thing. Being persuaded because it comes from an almighty being that will damn you to eternal punishment is another.

Why are Christians wrong to attribute some of those reasons to their god? Because it isn’t their morality, it isn’t how moral judgments occur. It has also changed, there’s a claim that it’s objective because it comes from an all knowing being, but then when it comes down to it, the morality is tossed aside for other greater morality that the “Christian’s” perceive, such as not condoning slavery anymore, even finding it morally wrong. Which contradicts their faith, contradicts the basis of some of the moral system they agree to. Yet they in turn, may take the morality such as keeping holy the sabbath as good, simply because God says so.

Christians are devout followers, how can anybody make a morality “theirs”. That doesn’t make sense. To practice a morality, is to make it yours, is to own it. One of the big tenets of Christianity are to practice what you preach, expressed by their Lord in flesh form, Christ. Christianity, literally, is the practice of emulating their Lord’s superior, and “perfect” to them, moral behaviors.

God is meant to be the final arbiter and retribution of godliness, good and evil, and sin. In Christianity it is unjust and immoral to presume that humans can “equal” their god’s judgement.

So if someone arrives on their own independently, somehow, from others, to values that you WWW disagree with strongly the values can be correct, perhaps. But if they believe in values because they got them from someone else, the values themselves are not correct?

Most people, most Christians, will not simply say that it good because God says so or it is bad or evil because God says so. They also will tend to explain why, in down to earth, humans terms. They may be wrong or write, but while it may happen on occasion, most Christians will say that their values and God’s values match and this is implicit in the way they argue against abortion. They do not just say that God says so. They say because the fetus has a soul, as one example amongst many. They will call it a baby and emotionally explain why they want to protect babies. They will refer to bad feelings in almost mothers who aborted. (note, I am not anti-abortion, I am simply saying what I encounter in discussions with Christians. They almost always will explain in practical terms why something is good. IOW they will show that their values and God’s match. Yes, it does happen that Christians will say ‘Because God said so.’ Period, end of discussion. But I find this very rare.

I imagine you now saying that they say that a fetus has a soul because it is in the Bible. But this makes it seem like there is some, for the modern secular person, clear development stage for the fetus to baby, where they think, now we must consider it a person. It is possible to believe that once the life has started it is a person AND to find this coincides with the Bible. Or, in the reverse order, one is exposed to the Bible and then decide that this makes sense, about the baby. Of course in real life deciding oneself and learning morals from others are not neat packets. My point is that you are writing as if it is mutually exclusive. One can either have one’s own values or follow some version of God’s values. And that is simply not the case.

Just as you may, for example, end up with many values your parents had, conscously or not. They can be both theirs and yours.

And with your 20 years of talking to Christians I cannot understand how you did not notice that they JUSTIFY God’s moral laws all the time. They explain why they are good rules. They do this all the time. They do it here. Yet if someone who did not have contact with them read your posts it would be as if all they answer is with an appeal to authority. This is not grounded in reality.

Let me ask you, is this a belief on your part or something you know. Do you know that they do not share the values of their God or is it a belief on your part? Or is it a fairly well justified belief but not knowledge? Or is it a not so well justified but potentially correct belief?