The Nature of Morality

[Pixel--Dude]

@MrMan
@fschmidt
@Lucas88
@willymonfrete
@WilliamSmith
@Winston
@publicduende
@MarcosZeitola

I've been thinking about the moral arguments for God and how they're actually exploitative and so I'd like your feedback on a few points here. Usually there are three arguments used by Christians to explain how God and morality are tied.

1. God is the basis of morality.

2. Morality cannot arise naturally.

3. Without God there is moral decline.

Let's suppose for a thought experiment that you existed alone on the planet with no other people or living things like animals or plants and you got all your energy from the sun. In such a scenario all your behaviour would be completely neutral because morality is contingent on more than one living thing and cannot exist if there is no interaction going on. If there is no interaction it means no transgression can be committed and if there's no way to transgress then there is no moral concern for you to violate. Similarly, there would be nobody for you to love or help.

So what does this thought experiment tell us about the nature of morality? It tells us that morality cannot be created by one thing, but morality is emergent from the interaction of several things.

But could it be that God, or Yahweh, is the source of the ideal for these interactions? Is something good because God says so, or does God say so because it is good? Christians will often avoid this question by saying that God by his very nature is good. But that leaves us with a couple of problems such as who gets to decide what God's nature is, then morality is still arbitrary because God said so and if not then morality was not decided by God and exists apart from him.

To be honest, people who say something is right just because God says so are terrifying. These people are just authoritarians who are "just following orders". So for example if God said child rape was good then these people would be forced to leave their brains at the door, mindlessly obey and accept child rape was good because God said so. This makes people of this mindset particularly vulnerable when it comes to people who.claim to speak for God. Remember that God never really speaks for himself.

Christians always claim God has morally sufficient reasons for causing or allowing this or that. That implies that the reasoning is the source of morality and not God himself. It impies that "if you only knew the reasons you'd agree." But would that mean you invented morality? No it would just mean that you have an opinion just like God would.

Christians will also mention the free will argument to justify the existence of evil and suffering, which is flawed for a few reasons. As I pointed out to @Outcast9428 in another thread, if there is free will in Heaven then God can create a world with both free will and without evil. Another flaw with this argument is that it would suggest that God favours the free will of evildoers over the free will of their victims, which is far from benevolent. God didn't have any issues interfering with free will during the times of the Bible, so why would he suddenly stop caring in the modern age of cameras and mass communication?

So why wouldn't a perfectly benevolent God prevent the suffering we have here on Earth, which is totally gratuitous? The Christian will argue that the child who suffered and died a horrific painful death did so because it was all part of God's mysterious plan. Except that God's plan was never mysterious. Its explicitly laid out in the Bible. We know that the end game is that a tiny minority of humanity will be saved and live forever worshipping God while the vast majority is either destroyed or tortured forever.

With the above paragraph in mind I ask you all whether you think the end justifies the means? Because I would content that not only is there no compensation adequate enough to justify all the suffering of our world, but those ends in and of themselves are completely immoral and unjustifiable. So if you believe in the Bible and you've studied it you should be in a good position to know whether or not God has good reasons to allow the immense suffering and misery in this world and if everything in the Bible is true then those reasons are not wholly inadequate but they're extremely immoral and only made worse through the allowance of suffering.

If suffering is allowed to facilitate the ends spelled out in the Bible then it's essentially saying that God needs to let children suffer with cancer, animals to burn to death in forest fires and people to be killed painfully in natural disasters because such suffering will somehow facilitate God's ultimate genocide of everyone who doesn't belong to the religion if Christianity. And we're expected to listen to such delusional foolish Christians about what is or what isn't f***ing moral

[galii]

@MrMan
@fschmidt
@Lucas88
@willymonfrete
@WilliamSmith
@Winston
@publicduende
@MarcosZeitola

I've been thinking about the moral arguments for God and how they're actually exploitative and so I'd like your feedback on a few points here. Usually there are three arguments used by Christians to explain how God and morality are tied.

1. God is the basis of morality.

2. Morality cannot arise naturally.

3. Without God there is moral decline.

Let's suppose for a thought experiment that you existed alone on the planet with no other people or living things like animals or plants and you got all your energy from the sun. In such a scenario all your behaviour would be completely neutral because morality is contingent on more than one living thing and cannot exist if there is no interaction going on. If there is no interaction it means no transgression can be committed and if there's no way to transgress then there is no moral concern for you to violate. Similarly, there would be nobody for you to love or help.

So what does this thought experiment tell us about the nature of morality? It tells us that morality cannot be created by one thing, but morality is emergent from the interaction of several things.

But could it be that God, or Yahweh, is the source of the ideal for these interactions? Is something good because God says so, or does God say so because it is good? Christians will often avoid this question by saying that God by his very nature is good. But that leaves us with a couple of problems such as who gets to decide what God's nature is, then morality is still arbitrary because God said so and if not then morality was not decided by God and exists apart from him.

To be honest, people who say something is right just because God says so are terrifying. These people are just authoritarians who are "just following orders". So for example if God said child rape was good then these people would be forced to leave their brains at the door, mindlessly obey and accept child rape was good because God said so. This makes people of this mindset particularly vulnerable when it comes to people who.claim to speak for God. Remember that God never really speaks for himself.

Christians always claim God has morally sufficient reasons for causing or allowing this or that. That implies that the reasoning is the source of morality and not God himself. It impies that "if you only knew the reasons you'd agree." But would that mean you invented morality? No it would just mean that you have an opinion just like God would.

Christians will also mention the free will argument to justify the existence of evil and suffering, which is flawed for a few reasons. As I pointed out to @Outcast9428 in another thread, if there is free will in Heaven then God can create a world with both free will and without evil. Another flaw with this argument is that it would suggest that God favours the free will of evildoers over the free will of their victims, which is far from benevolent. God didn't have any issues interfering with free will during the times of the Bible, so why would he suddenly stop caring in the modern age of cameras and mass communication?

So why wouldn't a perfectly benevolent God prevent the suffering we have here on Earth, which is totally gratuitous? The Christian will argue that the child who suffered and died a horrific painful death did so because it was all part of God's mysterious plan. Except that God's plan was never mysterious. Its explicitly laid out in the Bible. We know that the end game is that a tiny minority of humanity will be saved and live forever worshipping God while the vast majority is either destroyed or tortured forever.

With the above paragraph in mind I ask you all whether you think the end justifies the means? Because I would content that not only is there no compensation adequate enough to justify all the suffering of our world, but those ends in and of themselves are completely immoral and unjustifiable. So if you believe in the Bible and you've studied it you should be in a good position to know whether or not God has good reasons to allow the immense suffering and misery in this world and if everything in the Bible is true then those reasons are not wholly inadequate but they're extremely immoral and only made worse through the allowance of suffering.

If suffering is allowed to facilitate the ends spelled out in the Bible then it's essentially saying that God needs to let children suffer with cancer, animals to burn to death in forest fires and people to be killed painfully in natural disasters because such suffering will somehow facilitate God's ultimate genocide of everyone who doesn't belong to the religion if Christianity. And we're expected to listen to such delusional foolish Christians about what is or what isn't f***ing moral

Morals come from morus which is basically 'tradition'. How things were handled in the past. In the past if you did not put God into the mix nobody cared about your rules. So people put God into the mix. Nowaday we try to use our reasoning to solve problems but it is still very hard for our monkey brains. So some operate still on the old system. It is more simple and robust. Think of Russian weapons they might be less sophisticated but more reliable.

[Lucas88]

Remember that God never really speaks for himself.

God just so happens to speak through a tribe of goat herders with small hats – a self-professed chosen people with delusions of grandeur and a vision for world domination –, or so we are supposed to believe. 2000 years later and some goyim are still retarded enough to believe this crap.

We know that the end game is that a tiny minority of humanity will be saved and live forever worshipping God while the vast majority is either destroyed or tortured forever.

To be honest, I really don't understand the appeal of Christianity. It's just a creepy little fruitcake cult with a message of "believe in our cult or go to hell for eternity". Such is the "Gospel".

The Christian doctrine of salvation and damnation is just a variation of the same Jewish and Kabbalistic crap about everybody outside of Yahweh's elect being of the dark side or sitra achra and therefore deserving destruction. It's just another Middle Eastern death cult.

[fschmidt]

I wish everyone here had a background in formal math. Anyway...

1. God is the basis of morality.

God is defined as the basis for everything, so what does this even mean?

2. Morality cannot arise naturally.

God is defined is natural, so what does this even mean?

3. Without God there is moral decline.

Do you mean "belief in God"? Anyway, history proves that without religion there is moral decline. But the religion doesn't have to be based on God.

Let's suppose for a thought experiment that you existed alone on the planet with no other people or living things like animals or plants and you got all your energy from the sun. In such a scenario all your behaviour would be completely neutral because morality is contingent on more than one living thing and cannot exist if there is no interaction going on. If there is no interaction it means no transgression can be committed and if there's no way to transgress then there is no moral concern for you to violate. Similarly, there would be nobody for you to love or help.

So what does this thought experiment tell us about the nature of morality? It tells us that morality cannot be created by one thing, but morality is emergent from the interaction of several things.

No, actually this story tells us nothing. The skill of driving a car is taught. If you live where there are no cars then the skill of driving is meaningless. But the appearance of cars doesn't make driving skill emergent. It is created by being taught.

But could it be that God, or Yahweh, is the source of the ideal for these interactions? Is something good because God says so, or does God say so because it is good? Christians will often avoid this question by saying that God by his very nature is good. But that leaves us with a couple of problems such as who gets to decide what God's nature is, then morality is still arbitrary because God said so and if not then morality was not decided by God and exists apart from him.

All of this is nonsense. If God created goodness, then something is good both because God says and because it is good. God defining morality doesn't make it arbitrary at all.

To be honest, people who say something is right just because God says so are terrifying. These people are just authoritarians who are "just following orders". So for example if God said child rape was good then these people would be forced to leave their brains at the door, mindlessly obey and accept child rape was good because God said so. This makes people of this mindset particularly vulnerable when it comes to people who.claim to speak for God. Remember that God never really speaks for himself.

Morons can always be manipulated, but the most terrifying thing in the world is a moron who tries to think for himself. He will certainly come to all the wrong conclusions. At least following what God says gives him some chance of being right. This can be manipulated by those who claim to speak for God, but still scripture serves as a constraint on how far this can go. Without religion, either morons try to think for themselves or they follow sociopaths who are unconstrained by scripture, so they can tell morons to do anything.

I will skip more bad arguments.

So if you believe in the Bible and you've studied it you should be in a good position to know whether or not God has good reasons to allow the immense suffering and misery in this world and if everything in the Bible is true then those reasons are not wholly inadequate but they're extremely immoral and only made worse through the allowance of suffering.

There isn't nearly enough suffering in this world. Most of modern humanity deserves to be tortured to death. My only complaint against God is that He isn't destroying these people fast enough. Psalm 94 covers this topic.

[publicduende]

@Pixel--Dude

Interesting topic indeed. As the Prime Mover, God may well be considered the source of morality. Morality is innate. Even a small child knows they are not supposed to harm another child.

As we grow as social beings and member of a community, morality is replaced by its socially-encoded equivalents: ethics, the legal system, family upbringing, and the myriads of social contracts and conventions on what's acceptable and what's not. That's where the problem lies. We are distracted from the essence of what's universally Good and Wrong, by all these superstructures.

Then some of us, many in certain communities, are led to believe they hold and profess the God-given morality simply because they belong to a church, or follow their Pastor's instructions to a tee.

In metaphisical terms, we are borne out of God and we are not precluded access to His Truth, which includes matters of universal morality. Pratically, the road is paved with obstacles, which we as a species create for ourselves. As limited, fallible, fragile beings, we usually end up embracing one system of ethics, one moral convention, maybe 2 or 3 during our lives. That is, if our free will will lead us to something good. We may well be swayed to the opposite direction.

[publicduende]

There isn't nearly enough suffering in this world. Most of modern humanity deserves to be tortured to death. My only complaint against God is that He isn't destroying these people fast enough. Psalm 94 covers this topic.

This guy is a good example of someone who think he holds the Truth because of his fringe interpretation of Judaism. His scholarly attempts might be laudable in principle, but then gems like above appear, showing everybody that, whatever his intellectual and spiritual journey, he hasn't grown an ounce of compassion and, well, morality.

May God, or Yawveh, or whoever else, have mercy of your soul, because it looks like your brain can no longer be saved

[fschmidt]

There isn't nearly enough suffering in this world. Most of modern humanity deserves to be tortured to death. My only complaint against God is that He isn't destroying these people fast enough. Psalm 94 covers this topic.

This guy is a good example of someone who think he holds the Truth because of his fringe interpretation of Judaism. His scholarly attempts might be laudable in principle, but then gems like above appear, showing everybody that, whatever his intellectual and spiritual journey, he hasn't grown an ounce of compassion and, well, morality.

May God, or Yawveh, or whoever else, have mercy of your soul, because it looks like your brain can no longer be saved

The responses I got in My "Reactionary Software" website thread should provide a self-explanatory example of why I feel the way I do about modern humanity.

[publicduende]

The responses I got in My "Reactionary Software" website thread should provide a self-explanatory example of why I feel the way I do about modern humanity.

It's all well written and articulated. It's not the method, that I criticise, it's the contents.

[publicduende]

So why wouldn't a perfectly benevolent God prevent the suffering we have here on Earth, which is totally gratuitous? The Christian will argue that the child who suffered and died a horrific painful death did so because it was all part of God's mysterious plan. Except that God's plan was never mysterious. Its explicitly laid out in the Bible. We know that the end game is that a tiny minority of humanity will be saved and live forever worshipping God while the vast majority is either destroyed or tortured forever.

With the above paragraph in mind I ask you all whether you think the end justifies the means? Because I would content that not only is there no compensation adequate enough to justify all the suffering of our world, but those ends in and of themselves are completely immoral and unjustifiable. So if you believe in the Bible and you've studied it you should be in a good position to know whether or not God has good reasons to allow the immense suffering and misery in this world and if everything in the Bible is true then those reasons are not wholly inadequate but they're extremely immoral and only made worse through the allowance of suffering.

If suffering is allowed to facilitate the ends spelled out in the Bible then it's essentially saying that God needs to let children suffer with cancer, animals to burn to death in forest fires and people to be killed painfully in natural disasters because such suffering will somehow facilitate God's ultimate genocide of everyone who doesn't belong to the religion if Christianity. And we're expected to listen to such delusional foolish Christians about what is or what isn't f***ing moral

I deeply believe that God is benevolent, like a father. He gave us our souls, our intelligence, our free will. He gaves us an entire planet, full of wonderful expressions of His benevolence: Mother Nature, countless ways to harvest Her resources and thrive as a species.

Like a father, his generosity and benevolence has a stop. As symbolised by the fall of Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden, mankind chose to take their own path to life, empowered and crippled by their free will in equal measure.

The problem is not with a benevolent God, sign of His own perfection, but with an imperfect Man. You named natural tragedies, global tragedies including war and genocides, personal tragedies including cancer and other unbearable illnesses, down to the pretty miserable jourrney of life that inevitably ends with us as semi-useless elderly, then dead. Apart from the latter, the inevitable cycle of life which does embody its own brutality, how many of these tragedies are caused by Men's actions, in one way or another?

You might say "how can God not intervene when something as hideous as, say, Palestinian or Israeli children been brutally killed, happens?"

I might say "why does MAN not intervene? Where is our innate morality? Where's the strength of our free will?" The news of brutalized Palestinian and Israeli children reaches the media fat pipeline for a burst or two, just in time to extract a few tears. Then, I can promise you, global attention will be back to the Kardashians' antics, or the next crypto pump.

Our free will is exercised via discipline, @Pixel--Dude, sacrifice and hard work on our selves. The vast majority of us is simply too spoiled to look for the Truth, to seek and demand expressions of universal Morality, or even, simply, Ethics. Those Middle Eastern kids might receive our indignation for a moment, a fleeting thought of what every one of us should be doing, or feeling.

A moment later, our free will will choose, once again, to get back at what's good for us, and us alone. Indifference, what many sociologists call the "normalcy bias", is a common human behaviour: reasoning about morality and ethics, let alone elevate our spirits and bodies to the point where we can leave a positive mark on the world, drains us of energy.

Given a choice, we shall always rebound to the path of minimum resistance: what's good for us, maybe for a few loved ones.