on discussing god and religion

My point though is more in imagining the reactions of philosophers, ethicists and political scientists reacting to what I construe to be political prejudices rooted in dasein.

Would they agree that this is basically what they are, or might they concoct a frame of mind said to be the moral obligation of all rational people to embrace?

And folks walking in the woods [either getting lost or not] revolves more around the either/or world. They either possess the skills necessary to find their way out or they don’t.

Again, it comes down [for me] to assessing your experiences in contrast to the experiences of others; or assessing them such that it can be determined which choices you ought to have made in order to be construed of as a rational and moral human being.

In a No God world.

Here though, we are still grappling with the extent to which homosexuality may or may not be embedded in genes. For some it may be entirely natural to be gay. And, since human beings are inherently a part of nature, it can also be argued in turn that any behaviors that any of us choose are natural.

But, historically, culturally and experientially, any number of conflicting memetic narratives have been broached and embraced.

So, putting the two together, what are philosophers, ethicists and political scientists to make of it? Is there a frame of mind here that transcends the existential components embedded in my own frame of mind?

I would certainly never argue that there is not one, only that no one has yet to convince me of one. But that can ever only be embodied in the “here and now”.

What interests me about speculation of this sort is in imagining those on both sides of this cantankerous political debate reacting to it. The part in other words where your “general descriptions” above bump into the actual experiences that particular individuals might have.

Out in a particular world of actual flesh and blood human interactions.

And then in imagining a particular community coming up with a set of behaviors – either prescribed or proscribed – relating to homosexuality.

How would the “best of all possible worlds” here not revolve around moderation, negotiation and compromise?

“You” can, “I” can’t. And what you call “actually concrete and lived” in embracing one set of values/behaviors, those who embrace an entirely opposite set of values/behaviors champion in turn. Somehow they just know – intuitively? viscerally? – that helping and hurting others revolves around that which they have come to construe as their “core” self.

But we are still back to moderation, negotiation and compromise as the best of all possible worlds here.

Something the objectivists will accept only to the extent that they still believe that their own frame of mind reflects the most rational/moral agenda. They need but convince the other side of this.

And that [psychologically] is the source of comfort and consolation that folks like me are not able to experience.

What on earth is abstract about this…

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

…as a description of my own approach to moral values? “I” here is embedded in the actual existential trajectory of my life as it intertwines ideas/ideals in a sequence of experiences that helped to shape and mold them

Choose a value of your own and situate it out in the life that you have lived. Then note how you are still able to somehow just know what your real “core” is.

The “for all practical purposes” “I” that “works” for you here and now. And then when you bump into the points that I raise here about that you just brush them aside. Why? Because [I speculate] if you do go down that path, whatever comfort and consolation you have managed to stitch together with the “I” you have now is put in jeopardy.

And I know this in particular because “I” did tumble down into the hole I describe myself.

Yeah, but the Buddhists have this whole “spiritual” thing going for them. And, one suspects, they too are all over the map when it comes down to reacting to conflicting goods.

Consider: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_abortion

And, re this thread, any particular Buddhist will express an opinion about abortion as it reflects a point of view regarding behaviors on this side of the grave and the manner in which behaviors here and now relate to an imagined fate on the other side of it.

But even Buddhists are no less daseins.

And then there’s this part:

“True happiness, enlightenment, and freedom from suffering can be found through Buddhist teachings. A spirit is not extinguished upon death, but instead transfers into another life in one of six separate planes (three fortunate and three unfortunate).”

Any Buddhists here willing to bring their own value judgments down to earth?

Now this is abstract.

Note a particular value judgment of yours and situate it out in the world that you live in.

What on earth does it mean to speak of behaviors “grounded in the organism”? And how is that reconciled with human autonomy?

This sort of thing…

…really gets me no closer to understanding this “core” self of yours. “Fluid” in what way? In other words, given an actual encounter you had with someone whose “core” self challenged one of your own values/behaviors.

You both might embrace this idea of a more or less “real me”, but that doesn’t make the conflicting goods go away. Or the part about dasein and political economy.

But to the extent that I use the expression “show me the money nihilists” in a pejorative sense, I am recognizing my reactions here as just one more existential contraption rooted [re dasein] in the particular political proejudices I came to embody as a radical leftist. Ranking things here [in the is/ought world] is just another manifestion of my frame of mind.

In fact, ranking is inevitable given that the human condition revolves entirely around the need to establish “rules of behaviors” in any community of human beings.

There are – necessarily – rewards and punishments that must meted out. But which behaviors get one rather than the other?

How are the components of your moral philosophy more reasonable than mine?

We all must rank if we choose to interact with others. There is no getting around it. But most here are not in the hole that I am in when the time comes to rank.

The objectivists for obvious reasons. I’m just still fuzzy about the ranking that you do. In other words, I suspect that what seems clearer to you about “I” here is just another “psychological defense mechanism” that you have concocted in order to sustain at least some measure of comfort and consolation.

Here and now it works for you. It just doesn’t work for me. So, in that sense, as with Prismatic, phyllo and so many others here, you “win”. You feel more grounded and in control of your lives than I do.

The rest is just the part that revolves around death…the part after the grave.

That [to me] is just common sense embedded in the manner in which the human brain is programmed by the evolution of life on earth to ask “why?”

To connect the dots between “in my head” and “out in the world”?

Obviously: something or other [ontologically/teleologcially] set it all into motion.

Not to grapple with this is to be cow or a bacteria or a rock.

But to assess it all correctly? How on earth would that be demonstrated?

And here [perhaps] the only thing more mysterious than a No God world may well end up being one with God. In other words, who or what set Him in motion?

The next time one of your own value judgments comes into conflict with anothers, situate a description of the exchange in the point you are trying to make here.

My own goal revolves around feeling less fractured and fragmented in confronting conflicting goods out in the world that I live in; given how I construe the embodied “I” here as an existential contraption.

Considering that one or another set of behaviors must be either rewarded of punished in order to sustain the least dysfunctional human interactions, how on earth would not ranking even be possible?

In other words:

Please note where I stated that I do not rank above. What was the specific context?

My point is only to suggest that ranking will revolve around one or another agglomeration of might makes right, right makes might or democracy and the rule of law.

And even here I make it abundantly clear that my own assessment of all this is just another existential contraption.

Same here. I always savor an exchange with someone who is obviously intelligent and articulate. Indeed, the fact that someone like you easily holds his own against the points I raise, allows me to better imagine that the points I make are wrong.

So, sure, maybe some semblance of “comfort and consolation” is still within reach for me.

Good luck to you in turn.

Tim Madigan from “The Basis of Morality” in Philosophy Now magazine.

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Isn’t that basically what morality comes down to in a No God world? We can frame human interactions in whatever secular/humanist narrative that happens to appeal to us. But “for all practical puropses” it seems to come down to creating social, political and economic interactions that are construed to be the least dysfunctional.

The only other really important factor then being political power. You can think about the “right thing to do” however you wish. But, when push comes to shove, you can either enforce your own narrative existentially or you cannot.

And this seems to be true whether the community is predicated more on might makes right, right makes might or on moderation, negotiation and compromise.

Rewards and punishments. It all evolves into or devolves out of that. Depending on your point of view regarding pleasure and pain.

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In fact, any number of religious folks scoff at the idea of discussing morality in the absense of God. Even philosophers like Plato, Descartes and Kant recognized that without a “transcending font” there is “for all practical purposes” no basis upon which to resolve conflicts revolving around “right” and “wrong” behavior. Not on this side of the grave.

And that has certainly been my own argument here in defending “moral nihilism” as a reasonable frame of mind.

No God, no access to a morality in which the behaviors of mere mortals can be judged from both an omniscient and omnipotent point of view.

Then what?

How about this: Human history to date.

From “The Basis of Morality”
Tim Madigan in Philosophy Now magazine

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Of course without genes there would be no memes. So, is morality more intimately intertwined in the evolution of life itself? Are memes only manifestions of human biology out in a particular world historically, culturally and experienctially — given a particular context in which particular individuals interact?

My guess: We’ll probably never really know. Not in the sense that we can finally pin down with precision the exact manner in which genes and memes interact in the mind of any one particular individual predisposing him or her toward or away from a God, the God, my God.

Instead, I tend to steer the discussion here more in the general direction of the subjunctive: emotionally and psychologically a belief in God provides the clearest, cleanest, most definitive foundation for “I”.

With God:

1] Sin on this side of the grave when right and wrong behaviors are at stake
2] immortality and salvation on the other side of it if we choose the right behaviors
3] a place to dump all of our pain and suffering
4] a teleology able to provide the ultimate reason/meaning for…everything

Genes or memes, there is simply no getting around that for atheists . Old or new.

From “The Basis of Morality” by Tim Madigan in Philosophy Now magazine.

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The idea being that arguing back and forth about whether religion is a good thing or a bad thing, misses the point.

This one: That for all practical purposes it was necessary to invent it. Why? Because as we evolved from those naked apes living in caves to the communities that we are familiar with going back centuries now, without it there was really no capacity to anchor human interactions to anything that might be embraced teleologically.

Indeed, why on earth would one choose to be good if not in order to be in sync with the rules of behaviors that are said [in any particular community] to be in sync with the “meaning of life” itself?

And how else to secure a belief that death is not the end of life at all?

There’s only one possible font for that. And while philosophers eventually came along to explore all of this more “academically”, science was progressing to the point that “the meaning of things” we experienced from day to day became more and more in sync with the discovery of “natural laws” than with supernatural explanations.

But God and religion are still the only way to connect the dots between “here and now” and “there and then”.

Or, rather, they are if teleology is important to you.

From “The Basis of Morality” by Tim Madigan in Philosophy Now magazine.

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In fact this can still be what is at sake when you bring God and religion down out of the theological clouds and implicate them in the actual existential interactions of flesh and blood human beings. The part where, among other things, The Bible meets The Communist Manifesto or The Wealth of Nations.

In other words, the part where actual individuals move back and forth between rendering unto God and rendering unto Caesar. That governing body otherwise known as the state.

And while in much of the world today you are not likely to meet Socrates’s fate, there are still any number of places where that is nowhere near out of the question.

And even in places like America where God and religion are particularly well-entrenched, you roll the dice when choosing behaviors deemed to be “unChristian.”

The point being that one way or another, a narrative will be found that rationalizes either rewarding or punishing certain behaviors. It just comes down to how intertwined the interests of sacred and the secular become in any partivular historical or cultural context.

The “politics” of religion.

Which reflects in part just how problematic it can be for the moral nihilists. It’s one thing to argue back and forth about the “transcending source” of morality, another thing altogether to suggest that there may well not be one.

Folks like Nietzsche got around this by eschewing God but then reconfiguring right and wrong into one or another rendition of the “will to power”. In other words, though God is dead, morality can still be manifested in those men who deserve to call the shots. Might makes right meets right makes might.

The crucial thing being that there is still a font that mere mortals can invest “I” in. In becoming one of the Übermensch.

Think Satyr and his clique/claque over at KT.

This is something I often find myself coming back to with respect to either God in the universe or the universe in God. The universe manifested in the world of the very, very large [the surreal multiverse?] and the very, very small [the surreal quantum world?].

Namely this: Does the world of the very, very large and the very small exist as they do because this in the way God created them, or did God create them as He did because this is the only way that they could have been created?

Which [of course] takes the mind [mine] back to the profound mystery that surely must be embedded in the existence of existence itself.

In fact, nowadays that more or less reflects what is still left of my own religious sense. Why something exists rather than nothing, and why it exists as it does and not in some other way, is something I am just not able to wrap my mind around at all. So, sure, from time to time I think, why not God?

But then it all tumbles over into the abyss. Nothing of any real substantial value mamages to “stick”.

What is this however but a suggestion that religion is as much a reflection of what we want to be true as it is what we are able to demonstrate to others [or even to ourselves] is true. And, for some of us, considerably more. It becomes a reflection of what we yearn for in order to make life more bearable on this side of the grave and even possible at all on the other side of it.

The deeper we go psychologically, the more it seems that coherence is just a frame of mind that allows us to square or to reconcile what we see around us [in a frightening world] with a yearning for an explanation that can somehow be squared or reconciled with the “will of God”.

And the human brain is wired such that one only has to believe this in order for it to be true “for all practical purposes”. We behave in accordance with what we think is true. It doesn’t necessarily actually have to be true.

We get this sort of thing from religious folks all the time.

As though others are expected to believe that something like this is true simply because someone believes that it is.

Of course some will argue they don’t believe that this is true so much as that they have faith in it being true.

And that is certainly something that is not an irrational thing to believe. God would seem to be one possible explanation for the existence of existence itself.

And the more you think about how and why this something exists rather than something else or nothing at all, you are right out there at the very end of the metaphysical limb. The deeper you go the “spookier” existence itself can seem.

So, sure, why suppose that God and religion can be ruled out.

Still, the last thing that many who think like the poster above will be willing to concede, is that they believe what they do either because others told them to, or because it just feels a whole lot more conforting to believe it than to not believe it.

Yeah, I’ve seen that nightmare. I’ve also seen what’s there when you ‘overcome’ it and get past the ‘spookiness’ of it.

Okay, describe for us how you have in fact come to embody this “overcoming” in the course of living your life from day to day.

And then connect that to the OP: to the manner in which someone who has “overcome the spookiness” is able entwine this new frame of mind into his behaviors on this side of the grave so as to achieve that which he is after regarding his soul on the other side of the grave.

Obviously, a lot of this revolves around intentions. For those whose faith in God is genuine, religion is their connection to immortality, salvation and divine justice. On the other hand, re folks like Marx, religion is construed to be but the “opiate of the masses”. And then there are those who note how religion can be used as a political tool to control the masses.

On the other hand, fake news as we bandy it about these days may or may not have a religious element. And those who propagate it may or may not be aware of just how fake it actually is. Again, it can be used as a tool to control those unable or unwilling to dig down deep enough to discover the extent to which the news is fake.

Cue, among others, Niccolò Machiavelli.

Or, perhaps, Don Trump?

But in either case it still revolves around the extent to which what you believe is true is something you can demonstrate that other rational men and women are obligated to believe is true in turn.

And then the part where rationality itself can only go in so far. And can only explain so much.

First of all, both historically and culturally, “guilt and shame” are clearly embedded deep down in the human brain. We all come into this world genetically equipped to feel these things.

So they were actually “invented” by nature itself. Then it comes down to the extent to which “I” have any substantial capacity to choose or not to choose to feel them autonomously in any particular context.

But, historically, religion is hardly the only memetic contraption to “weaponize” them. Political ideologues can do [and have done] the same. Just as those who [philosophically] embrace one or another deonotolgical assesment of human interactions speak of things like “categorical imperatives” and “moral obligation” in judging the behaviors of others.

Or the folks who insist that only those who embrace their own assement of human nature can be admitted as “one of us”.

Like most things embedded in human raltionships, there is that enormously complex and convoluted line to be drawn between genes and memes.

Christians here are just one of hundreds and hundreds of objectivist fonts intent on shaming those who refuse to draw the line where they do.

[i]Theism: belief in the existence of a god or gods, especially belief in one god as creator of the universe, intervening in it and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures

Rational: based on or in accordance with reason or logic[/i]

Here and now there does not appear to be an accumulation of evidence that allows folks like me to rationally believe in the existence of one or of many Gods.

But that’s not the same as insisting that there is no accumulation of evidence out there.

Even a belief in No God ultimately comes down to a leap of faith.

And that’s where we are collectively. Existence clearly seems to be all around us. Why? God is the explanation of choice. But “reason” here seems to be embedded as much in human psychology as in cold hard logic. We want God to exist because He becomes the moral font on this side of the grave and the source for immortality and salvation on the other side.

But: making this argument hardly settles it.

It would seem necessary that existence itself was either created or not. But there does not appear to be a way in which to establish that it was created by No God.

So, until there is a “philosophical” or “scientific” explanation for existence, God will always be around.

It’s not that modernism believes in the absolute ONE, but that there are dozens and dozens of hopelessly conflicting and contradictory narratives out there all espousing one or another authoritarian rendition of it.

The “one of us” ONE in other words.

And that’s before we get to all of the various post-modern attempts to deconstruct ONE into an essentially absurd and meaningless world.

And the irony then being that their own intellectual contraption ONEs are but more psychological/secular manifestations of God.

Some believe that the ONE truth revolves around their own understanding of Nature. Figure out how it is “natural” to behave and you won’t need God.

But, of course, they have already figured this out for you.

This sort of thing is always tricky. And that’s because God and religion can be understood in two very different ways.

On the one hand, discussions and debates about God and religion can unfold in places like this. Arguments are made involving conflicting sets of assumptions embedded in conflicting sets of premises resulting in conflicting conclusions. But, by and large, the exchanges are aggregations of intellectual contraptions swatted back and word in a world of words.

But out in the world that we live in combustible beliefs about God and religion can easily become embedded in any number of “for all practical purposes” confrontations. Then we have things like crusades and inquisitions and infidels and fatwas and evangelical bluster about those “left behind”.

And while the faithful concentrate on all the good that can come from religious faith, many in the atheist community point to the at times very real human pain and suffering that can be attributed to conflicts over God and religion.

And then the part where those wealthy folks in power use religion as the “opiate for the people”. All in a more or less calculated effort to sustain economic and political relationships that make God and religion all that more crucial for those focused more on “salvation” in the next life.

This sort of thing speaks volumes regarding a fundamental role that religion plays in the lives of many.

It takes behaviors in which the options might be vast and varied and reduces them down to either this or that. It’s not what you choose to wear but that what you choose to wear is more or less obligatory. That way you don’t really have to choose at all.

And you don’t have to grapple with feminism because the particular religious denomination that you have been brought up in tells you how to be a righteous man and how to be a rigteous woman.

Some things are inherently the same, other things inherently different. But there is always someone there to make those distinctions. To prescribe and to proscribe certain behaviors. To make them a necessary part of your life.

And, as we all know, what you choose to wear can be the least of it.

Still, in the modern world all of this gets more and more complicated. And that is because we have access to so many alternatives. Others have reasons for doing things differently. Why our ways and not theirs?

Also, in the world today, religion is often more an ecumenical hodge-podge of whatever behaviors can be rationalized. So those who choose to wear burkhas [or allowed others to choose that for them] might be seen as a reaction to that. It might even be argued that they take their religion more seriously.

And, with immortality, salvation and devine justice at stake on the other side, why wouldn’t they?

And then the part where historically religion and patriarchy become intertwined in a political narrative in turn.

I thought comparing the Easter bonnet to the burka would be amusing as well as instructive. But when religion and God are taken literally, it has a way of taking all the fun out of it. Oh well. :confusion-shrug:

Well, I did learn about the differences between men and women’s head coverings, the reason for them, in Christianity. So that was instructive. I didn’t realize it was meant to be amusing, I might have just let it go. Everyone is taking something literally, even if it’s the difference between literal and metaphorical and how one determines the difference. Which everyone seems to have a take on.

As a side note, if you remove all literalness from metaphors, they mean nothing.

And why is that? Well, think about it. We can go on and on and on exploring religion analytically as philosophers. But the bottom line is that Gods exists because in a far more visceral and fundamentally important way they need to exist.

On this side of the grave to become Kant’s transcending font able to back up your moral obligations from the cradle to the grave. And on the other side to ensure both immortality, salvation and divine justice.

What else is there that “for all practical purposes” even comes close?

The secular objectivists might secure for you an essential moral and a political agenda. A psychological anchor. But this obligates you “as a rational human being” to share them. To become “one of us”.

But they have nothing with which to confront oblivion.

So, if one takes religion seriously why wouldn’t one take “the word of God” encompassed in one or another scripture seriously?

As for literally, the problem with this is that, as many have shown time and again, there are any number of passages in any number of scriptures that are either 1] open to a broad interpretation or 2] are completely contradictory:

atheists.org/activism/resou … adictions/
ffrf.org/legacy/books/lfif/?t=contra

It’s the modern “ecumenical” approach to God that turns a belief in Him into a kind of spiritual cafeteria. You pick and choose the behaviors that are the least burdensome. That are the least restrictive in your interactions with others.

Indeed, the behaviors that permit you to have the most “fun” before you die. But that still ensure you all the good stuff after you [as a mere mortal] are dead and gone.

What are we if not primates with hyperactive imaginations and the linguistic ability to communicate some sense of our inner life through language and art? We have an intuition of not being which terrifies us but we can only imagine it in terms of symbols as for example darkness. We spontaneously imagine our deepest desires in dreams and visions and act them out in rituals.

At some point in the development of human society males became dominant. Therefore, most of the recorded expressions of deep fantasy which became the holy texts of the dominant religions are from the male point of view. The female point of view was largely suppressed. Hence the women shaming, head coverings and veils etc. which are so much a part of traditional religions.

The fun part for me is digging into this stuff. It’s as serious as a heart attack. But, for the most part, it can’t be expressed literally without metaphor as far I am aware. Whatever… it’s human all too human, and so am I.