on discussing god and religion

Right. That’s what you speculate. It’s the speculation of a very negative nihilist. Most folks don’t seem think that way. They don’t invent God to punish immorality. They aren’t driven by needs to punish the immoral. That’s a small part, if any part at all, of God.

Why should folks care about what nihilists( and etc) care about or what nihilists (and etc) think of folks practicing virtue?

Sure. Somebody may try to exploit you and your behavior but the advantages of virtue outweigh the disadvantages.

Yes, you proposed the hypothetical community but you won’t discuss the consequences that come out of that community … which is an objective benefit to virtue and no particular need for a punisher God.

“Make the real world go away”???
Morality evolved to deal with the real world. Evolution is entirely about adapting to the real world. All social animals have some sort of morality.

What does that have to do with it?

I’m saying that there is a tangible benefit to virtue. I didn’t say anything about solace. But sure, being virtuous will make a person feel good. Which produces more benefits.

Well, you used the words first as part of your post … virtue, vice, virtuous behavior … what did you mean back in the original post? What do you mean when you use them now?

So now you want to drop the hypothetical community.

If there is a difference between virtue and vice in that community, there is probably a difference in a “real” community. If you know what the next card is in an upside down deck then you can use the best strategy in a game of cards. If you don’t know but you know the probabilities associated with a deck of cards, then you can use that to improve your results compared to knowing nothing about a deck of cards.
From thousands/millions of years of experience we know something about virtue and vice.

“Can We Be Good without God?”
William Lane Craig from the Reasonable Faith website

Here of course everything revolves around your understanding of God. As that relates specifically to the behaviors you choose here and now; as that relates specifically to your “sense of self” on the other side of the grave.

For some, with so much at stake — immortality, salvation, divine justice – it is not arrogant at all to inisist that those ignorant of the existence of the one true God [their own God] behave only in accordance with their own rendition of Judgment Day.

Bingo!

This has always been the reason I surmised for the existence of God and religion. If you are faced with the option of choosing one behavior with one set of consequences over another behavior and another set of consequences, what can you rely on as a final arbiter with immortality and salvation and divine justice at stake?

How can ethics realistically be construed as “meta” unless there is a font that transcends the considerably less than omniscient/omnipotent capacities of mere mortals?

It has to be a God, the God, my God it would seem. Then we can get down [historically] to the question of whose God it is.

:icon-rolleyes:

A group can choose to drive on either the left or right but once the choice is made, it becomes objectively correct to drive on that side. That’s how you get where you want to go without crashing or getting blocked.

Of course preference is part of it. Humans prefer not to be killed or to have friends and family killed and that’s why killing is immoral. If people didn’t care then ‘killing’ would not be a moral issue.

If you personally don’t care about ‘killing’, it’s still a moral issue for you when you live in a society where most people do care.

The foundation is the structure of the universe, the structure of humans.

And yeah, you can say that God created the universe so therefore morality comes from God.

You can act in your self-interest and against a society’s moral rules at any time, if you are prepared to take the consequences : disapproval and punishments. And there are the non-social consequences … for example, inbreeding producing genetically damaged children.
You can act in your self-interest even if God exists and even if it God will thrust you into eternal damnation at Judgement Day.

But what really is “your self-interest”? Is it to go outside “the rules” or to live within them? Do I eat my marshmallow now or delay and get more in the long run?

There are consequences embedded in the structure of the universe - feedback coming at you from objects, plants, animals, and people.

The irony is that a morality based on “God says so” is less objective than a morality based on looking around at the consequences of actions. :smiley:

It is also not particularly good. Let alone Good. I’ve brought this up before. If God tells you do this or I will be angry or you won’t get into Heaven or you are not a good person, you may follow the rules, but then who are you in essence. We all know people who act well, but don’t feel good to be in a room with. I suppose God’s rules could be pointing in a direction so you learn to calibrate yourself, divine parenting. Of course I never liked Abraham’s choice to follow God’s order. I would have said not, I will not kill my son. It’s funny what can pass for moral. But then perhaps God was testing Abraham and he failed. Even the existence of God, for me, does not make morals objective. And from a gnostic point of view, perhaps you are just dealing with a demiurge, which is what a lot of theists seem to be following.

Then they wouldn’t have much use for this thread, right? Because this thread was created specifically to address the question of someone’s belief in God as that relates to the behaviors they choose on this side of the grave, as that relates to their imagined fate on the other side of it.

Partly because we live in a world where they clearly exist. Though, sure, if you never come across one, if you never have to deal with the consequences of their existence, why care about them?

And over and again I have discussed why I believe this to be the case. And in the real world there are those who fall back on one or another God to bend that real world in the general direction of “one of us”. Here and now…there and then.

But: How does that make the impetus behind the OP go away?

And I’m saying that the tangible benefit that you ascribe to your virtue that you ascribe to your God prompts you to choose particular behaviors based on the manner in which you then connect the dots between here and now and there and then.

The solace for most believers is derived precisely from their faith in God.

But: they bump into others who ascribe different virtues to different Gods commanding different behaviors. Or to No God communities. Or to the sociopaths and nihilists.

Then what? If not the complex and convoluted consequences of the “real world” that we do live in?

But for those who do chose a God world here, I created this thread. Let’s bring their belief in God down to earth in regard to those behaviors that they do choose.

Or, for that matter, the behaviors that you choose.

In my view, this sort of thing would seem to come back to the manner in which you have come to construe the meaning of God; and in relationship to the manner in which you have come to construe the meaning of Judgment Day.

Or, in other words, is there a way in which a true believer is obligated to construe both on the day of their own death?

Different believers will tell you different things. Some are clearly more fierce in their conviction that all others must toe the line of their own scripture…or risk Damnation.

There never seems to be a list of behaviors that all denominations can agree are not negotiable. Even “thou shalt not kill” can become tangled up in all manner of conflicting assessments given different contexts.

A lot depends on the nature of the wager itself. You might not be sure if God does exist. In all sincerity in other words. So you take that Kierkegaardian leap to one or another God, and hope for the best.

But what of those who are less sincere? Or their wager is more cynical? They bet on God figuring what have they got to lose. As though God won’t see right through that.

Still, if you do choose to bet in all sincerity then you are obligating yourself to behave in whatever manner you imagine this God expects you to behave. Sure, it can be comforting when morality is able to be reduced down to either/or, but it can also become very restrictive. You see others choosing to behave in a more purely selfish manner and you note all of the things that they get to do that you can’t.

It does work both ways, right?

But situating this in the context of the OP, what if, hypothetically, England and the United States agreed to merge. And what if driving on the left or right side of the road was a factor in whether or not one was favored by God.

Then what? Different Gods have different scriptures relating to any number of conflicting goods. Given that immortality, salvation and divine justice are still at stake, what then should be the objective law?

And what is driving on one or another side of the road compared to conflicting value judgments that revolve around things like abortion or sexuality or social and economic justice or the separation of church and state?

You either believe in a God that expects you to choice salvation over sin here or you don’t.

Not sure exactly what you mean by this but, in my view, the reason the “God says so” moralities can be construed as less objective is that, ironically enough, they basically revolve around conflicting Gods!

Objectivist religious dogmas all claiming that their God and their God alone embodies the difference between one or another rendition of Heaven and Hell.

It’s just that, sans God, the consequences of one’s actions are predicated first and foremost on getting caught. And, if not caught, on not being punished.

Why on earth do you suppose [as Kant noted] that a “transcending font” here is an utterly crucial component of any deontological moral philosophy.

Objective morality would be tied to the structure of the universe. Observed actions and results is how you discover it. “God says so” is just words, whether spoken by one God or many. Those words would have to be linked to observable actions and results in order for them to be considered objective at all.

I already said that there is more to it than being caught and punished. But you ignored it. :confusion-shrug:

His point was that there is something 'wrong" with a morality if people decide on a convention and abide by it. As if there is something inherently wrong with agreeing to drive either on the left or the right. As if we need God to decide which side to drive on. #-o

That was the point that I was addressing. I don’t see anything ‘wrong’ or unobjective about such conventions whether in traffic control or morality. Seems perfectly reasonable with or without God.

Maybe God is not such a control freak that He has to decide everything. He gave us brains and the ability to reason. Maybe He wants us to use them.

Use your brains.

There’s also the issue of whether God is moral. Let’s assume a God for the moment and one is in some form of contact either via texts, intermediaries or direct contact. God says Kill your kid. 1) do you do it? 2) must it be right just because God says it? I wouldn’t, terrifying as that might be. I mean, I have been given paternal feelings, empathy and so on by this deity, or something anyway, in this scenario. And now I must put aside the very values of my body and heart because God must be moral? I understand how in a sense a God’s morals are objective. This God made things and can potentially judge how we act. But to me this doesn’t let me off the hook behaviorally. Iambiguous loves the phrase ‘sans God’ as if ‘avec God’ settles everything. I don’t think it does. And even many traditional Abrahamists certainly think they must follow God’s rules, but the devil is in the application also, the details, not just a set of rules. Real life is complicated (and by this I am tying this part of the argument to your response above.)

But beyond that even if one presumes of demonstrates the presence of a deity, this to me still is not an end to what people call moral decisions. We are still creatures with built in urges as social mammals, God given if God made us. I can’t how we suddenly must assume that God is moral. A whole argument line is missing there.

Strange that he an atheist would echo theist arguments that once there is no God or belief in God people can do anything. 1) like we cannot shape our rules either claiming they are objective or claiming that we do this to facilitate the running of society. 2) atheist parents manage to raise children to adulthood who do not kill whenever they can get away with it.

We can always catch ourselves. We can always, however inconvenient, feel empathy. We can always notice what we dislike and agree to conventions.

Sure.

There are lots of possibilities :

  • God is good
  • God is evil
  • God is indifferent
  • God’s morality is not applicable to humans
  • That’s a prophet talking, not God

Therefore everything that supposedly “God says” has to pass the test of human experience. I don’t see any way around that.
(And yes, sometimes humans will get it wrong.)

Yes. It’s like there no consequences unless God is there to punish on Judgement Day.

What on earth does that have to do with my point though? Until we pin down the actual existence of a God, the God, my God, our observable actions are going to be connected to any particular faith in one of them somehow intertwined in someone’s rendition of “the structure of the universe”.

Again, the whole point of this thread is to bring assessments like this down to earth. To imagine actual observable actions in actual contexts that allow folks to connect the dots between here and now and there and then.

But: Being caught and being punished is the whole enchilada in discussions of this sort. Sans God that part is ever and always embedded in the profoundly problematic interactions of mere mortals.

First it has to be decided which behaviors entail someone being captured and punished for. Then it shifts to those many, many, many contexts in which no one ever is caught and punished.

How could God actually be any more crucial here?

But my point is that if, hypothetically, America and England were to merge, there would not appear to be a way in which to determine objectively [sans God] whether driving on the left or right side of the road is more or less inherently good or bad.

And that, if, hypothetically, this particular convention was of interest to God on Judgment Day, different denominatins might have conflicting assessments regarding that which constitues a sin here.

In other words, driving on the left or the right side of the road would become just one more behavior to take into account re the OP.

Well, in a nation where democracy and the rule of law prevailed, those conventions would revolve to one degree or another around moderation, negotiation and compromise. The whole point being that if an objective truth cannot be pinned down regarding any particular behaviors, what other recourse is there. Aside from, say, might makes right.

The difficulty arises only when in a No God world “perfectly reasonable” means many different things to many different people in any one particular historical, cultural and experiential context.

Which clearly seems to be why so many feel the need to invent Gods in the first place.

Folks on both sides of the conflicting goods keep insisting that they and only they “use their brains”.

I’m not arguing that in a No God world people can do anything. I am suggesting only that the things they choose to do are embedded in ever shifting and evolving historical and cultural contexts precipitating ever shifting and evolving moral narratives and political agendas.

And that these existential contraptions revolve around the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. In a world bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change. In any one particular context involving actual choices that we make.

And, on this thread, the manner in which the religious among us choose particular behaviors and react to others embedded in a frame of mind that connects the dots between “here and now” and “there and then”.

The consequences of our behaviors are obviously not dependent on the existence of a God, the God, my God. Nothing stops them.

But what of being rewarded or punished regarding particular behaviors in a No God world? Given the manner in which different people react differently to those consequences?

A remarkable post. Very educational.

Iambig : “What on earth does that have to do with my point though?”

What indeed?

When Iambig wrote “Not sure exactly what you mean by this …”, I interpreted that as a request for an explanation. Therefore, I wrote more about what I had meant by “God says so” moralities being less objective. But actually, he’s not interested in anything that I have to say about it. He wants someone to talk about what he wrote and what he thinks is important. He’s not even interested in the contents of the response, as long as they are discussing his stuff.

Iambig : “Again, the whole point of this thread is to bring assessments like this down to earth. To imagine actual observable actions in actual contexts that allow folks to connect the dots between here and now and there and then.”

Attempting to control the entire discussion. Everything in this thread has be exactly about what he wants it to be about.

Iambig : “But: Being caught and being punished is the whole enchilada in discussions of this sort.”

Yup. We’re only allowed to discuss morality, God and religion in terms of punishment and eternal damnation. Everything else is off the table.

Iambig : “But my point is that if, hypothetically, America and England were to merge, there would not appear to be a way in which to determine objectively [sans God] whether driving on the left or right side of the road is more or less inherently good or bad.”

Again, ignoring the point in the original quote and my response to it. Instead we are required to only deal with Iambig’s hypothetical tangent.

Iambig is completely egocentric. There is no reason to continue responding to him.

And even if it does respond, but not in a way he likes. And even if it fits the OP better. Even if it is someone else’s thread and he is the one off or more on a tangent.

Yes. And the response is not really a response. It is a reassertion of his position. He did not interact with your ideas. He does not justify the continuation of saying that sans God is so different from avec God, around determining what to do, GIVEN what you wrote. Reassertion posing as critical response. Been there suffered that.

But he cannot give up saying there is a radical difference between sans God and avec God. The latter must solve all the problems, otherwise what is the point of this thread and others. What reason would there be to bait theists into the rabbit hole of never really being responded to discussions that give opportunities for him to say that they have failed to convince him.

Of course many theists agree with him. So, he should have his autumn and winter years filled with the same activity.

A truly grounded discussion of religion could only have experiences in it. IOW it would involve attempted participation on his part and then a sharing of specific experiences they each had with religious practice and then likely experiences that just arise. Of course this might not solve the gap between him and theists, but the really odd thing is he think that he can understand a theist’s world without actually experiencing any of it. And without then trying to see if what a theist bases his or her experience on has parallels to what he bases decisions, actions, attitudes and beliefs on. That’s the second step, one which few active non-theists takes…first participate, then compare the actual bases for decisions, actions, attitudes and beliefs that it seems like theists have, with his or her own bases for those things. IOW if you really want a Christian to show you why they believe what they believe, you can talk until you are blue in the face, or you can go to mass, read the Bible, and spend time on that. You can also go deeply into how they arrived at their beliefs, probably best talking to people who went from atheism to Christianity. Find out exactly what experiences they had, practices they engaged in, and at least pursue these a bit yourself. Also, once you begin to understand the make up of their process, see if, in fact, it mirrors processes in your own arriving at beliefs, attitude, choices, actions. They may be more similar, as far as epistemology than one realized. This could lead to thinking there would be no loss in continuing the day to experiencing of a religion. Other religions could also be experienced in this way.

So of in the spirit of the first approach below from the OP
My emphasis added…

Now that is a false dichotomy. Even this thread is neither one of these processes, so there is at least a third. But note the importance of experiencing in learning.

Reading arguments, even with specifics, is not doing this. It is a forumula for repetition.

From my frame of mind, this is basically the route that KT takes: Making me the issue.

Switch the discussion from the extent to which you do address my point above, to a discussion of what I am doing here. Once I am exposed to be what you claim that I am in these discussions, the substantive discussion itself is beside the point.

So, I can only leave it to others to decide for themselves which of us is closer to whatever the whole truth here might possibly be.

Guilty as charged if I am being accused of focusing the exchange on the actual points being raised in the OP.

That’s what creating other threads is for, right? This thread allows those who do believe that the behaviors they choose on this side of the grave will reconfigure into their imagined fate on the other side of the grave.

But what does that mean when he or she encounters others who challenge the behaviors they choose. Either because their God has a different set of Commandments or because they do not believe in God at all.

Something [God or No God] is “in their head” “here and now” that prompts them to choose one set of behaviors rather than another. With zinnatt, I was interested in exploring both the manner in which he himself connected the dots here, and the manner in which he reacted to the components of my own moral narrative.

You’ll have to be more detailed here. I don’t even know what this is actually in reference to. Start from the beginning. What original quote, what response to it? What hypothetical tangent?

I was merely reacting to your driving on whatever side of the road “convention” by bringing it down to earth. What if a nation driving on the left merged with a nation driving on the right. And what if this behavior was a factor in regard to the OP. A behavior, in other words, that a God, the God, my God judged.

Or, for that matter, what if the merger involved a more controversial issue, like the death penalty. England abolished it in 1999, not so in any number of jurisdictions in America.

Does your own God include capital punishment in the commandment “thou shalt not kill”?

Right, like someone is forcing you to respond to me.

And one thing still has not changed: You have your God, you have your objective morality, you have your comfort and consolation.

So, for all practical purposes – and you know how important that is to me – you win. I have none of that.

Just thought of something…

You have your God, KT does not. You have your objective morality, KT does not. So, you have a frame of mind that begets a level of comfort and consolation that might be compared and contrasted to the comfort and consolation that KT’s pragmatism begets.

Why don’t the two of you beget a new thread. Discuss this given a context that most of us will be familiar with.

Not only to explore in more depth your own respective comforts and consolations, but to provide all the rest of us with an example of an exchange that entirely avoids all of the narcissistic pratfalls that my own posts exude.

Why would I want to do that? :-k

I think that your ideas about our “comfort and consolation” are bullshit. They don’t make sense to me. They are not applicable.

I got thrown into this world and there are things in it that I like and things that I don’t like. I try to avoid and/or change what I don’t like and enhance what I do like.

I think that God is a good explanation for some things that I have observed. That’s why I think God exists.

I don’t think that there is an afterlife. I’m living this life. But I don’t piss on people who think that there is an afterlife.

Humans have needs, wants, likes and dislikes which are founded on their biology. That’s where objective morality comes from - human biology.

It’s that simple.