The Nature of Morality
Posted: October 12th, 2023, 12:33 am
@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
@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