If the only reason you are a good person is because you fear punishment then you are not a good person.
Or blind loyalty to a leader, real or imaginary.
They exercise a fascinating amount of cognitive dissonance by simultaneously holding that Christianity is based on moral dictates of god–the ten commandments–yet ignore, or are conveniently excused by the New Testament, the other 603 dictates.
Their morality extends only so far as it is convenient, and then the rest are “well those morals were written for a different time”. No dude, according to your moral code derived from your religious text–that’s the way it’s supposed to always work, and your willful ignorance of them won’t get you into your concepts of paradise.
The natural result here is that anyone not 100% compliant with the dictates of the sky wizard are going to hell, or–more reasonably–it’s all made up and revised as periodically needed.
It’s just a way to project and sync their ego for the followers. They just have to try their best and can faith their sins away if you are in it, yet for outsiders they act like it’s the most solid belief system ever and demand a completely different standard they don’t hold themselves to.
Concur. It’s a system that (still!) relies on people not actually reading the the text. Even a cursory review reveals these flaws. But organized religion is generally specifically known for discouraging questions.
This part of history is crazy to me… and even crazier is that there are still a lot of people with thise beliefs
There’s actually a great podcast by radiolab about morality: https://radiolab.org/podcast/91508-morality
The classic Dawkins response to this: https://youtu.be/VgHoyTvyh4o
Let’s also remember that Steve Harvey would say that himself about atheists. There’s so many more.
There’s a ting called “society”, which defines morallity…
In some societies genital mutilation is accepted, I dont think you will agree that means it is moral and ok if they practice it. Saying society defines morals also means if you lived when slavery was accepted you would have to say abolitionists were wrong.
They think it’s moral, which is the point. Morality is fluid, not objective. Do I think genital mutilation or slavery are moral? Absolutely not, I think they violate basic standards of human rights. But those standards are, themselves, human inventions and not objective truths.
Almost no one thinks they’re the bad guy in the story.
I haven’t missed the point, what I’ve given are stock responses to moral relativism. I got them from ethicist Russ Shafer-Landau’s books “The Fundamentals of Ethics” and “Whatever Happened to Good and Evil.” If my comment doesn’t make sense do read it, the chapters on relativism are short.
I will try to repeat. If morals are made true by the perspectives of societies, you are absolutely wrong in saying genital mutilation is wrong for them. It is only wrong for you, because your society says so. You must admit they are correct in saying it is something moral for themselves. A ridiculous conclusion.
I’d like to hear why you think there aren’t objective moral facts. I’m an atheist myself and think they can exist.
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Sorry to disappoint you but all I have is “we use reason to figure out loads of other incredibly complicated things, why not moral issues”. I’ve edited my comment to reflect what I can try defending.
I’ve mostly been focusing on reading how it can be possible for morals to exist at all without a god, looking at objections from both religious people and atheists (stuff like disagreement meaning they dont exist, god needing to create moral facts, etc.) . I will be going from ‘it can exist’ to ‘heres how we can gain knowledge of it’ later, since I need to know if the first is possible before doing the second :)
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But people can apply their own reasoning that will have a different result. In another comment the Holocaust was mentioned as a universal wrong, but I’d argue the Nazis believed it was the morally correct action that was necessary to save their country from their supposed enemies. Propaganda set the foundations for them to work off of, but it’s still a rationale for actions the world over considered morally disgusting. Obviously some of them didn’t believe that and just followed orders, but there were absolutely true believers that saw their actions as moral when considering the world they wanted to build. A sort of “you either deal with the problem for good or allow the enemy a chance to fight back,” kind of thing.
Just so we’re all clear: I’m not defending their decisions and I don’t like the implications of moral relativism, but I do think it’s a thing.
I think the issue with that is we can apply it to science too, a field we don’t disagree there are facts in. There are conspiracy theorists and small minorities of scientists who go against views that there are actually consensus on. It appears they have, as you expressed it, applied their own reasoning and gotten to different results. But if that isn’t enough to reject the possibility of getting scientific knowledge, why should it for moral knowledge?
Also, something being objective means that it is true irrespective of what people think. These facts doesn’t care what you think. What is the case, is the case. The same for morals. Its a fact 2+2=4 even if you can’t count, its a fact evolution happened even if you didnt take biology, its a fact the holocaust was wrong, even if nazis were convinced otherwise.
And I do think its reasonable you think morals are relative. Each culture really has just made up lots of stuff. We also are biased to our cultures, and just defend whatever our religions say. But I want to try to defend the possibility of doing ethics if done right.
Morals are human constructs. Human constructs are not objective facts.
I think you would agree there are epistemic norms like 'if we dont have enough evidence for something, we shouldnt believe it" or “if a view has contradictions, we should reject it”. These are rules that tell us how we should reason, and they are objective facts we didnt create. Moral facts are just like these but tell us how we should act. An argument to to you is (“companions in guilt” arguments): I think its likely you accept those like the former are objective and not made by us, so you should accept the latter can be so too.
Morals imo aren’t created by humans. Some are, but real moral facts like ‘the holocaust was wrong’ or ‘torturing babies for fun is wrong’ do exist. They are things to be discovered (not as easily as the obvious ones I listed), not created, just like epistemic norms are.
What is a moral fact? State one please. I would like to hear about this universal moral. Does it apply to the Aztecs or were they universally immoral?
Um, yes? Except if i knew better. Morals are bordered by your horizon.
Yah mon
To be honest there really is nothing to be the base of anything, if we dont take religion as base. Since religion is a given idea by a being which is ontologically higher than us, it is logical to base everthing on it; but first you have to accept it, where the problem begins.
This mat seem too much skeptic, indeed radically skeptic but you can not justify any premise you make. Even the basic logic like, a is equal to a. Many things may seem intuitionally true but when you try to justify it, you cant.
But here we are, i have a stomach which wants food, i have a mouth which wants to talk, i have dick/pussy which wants to fuck. We are a society, and we are here, we want to be together. So we need some limits to live together. Thats how we create our fucking morals.
Statements like a=a, the law of non-contradiction or mathematical facts are called “necessary truths” (as opposed to contingent truths), they don’t depend on anything like a god to be made true and will always be true. This is very basic stuff.
Another reason you cant base it on Gods is because you need logic and other things we use to reason to decide on the very question of the existence and nature of the Gods. You have to use it before you can even justify it.
Analytical truths are by definiton are true and independent of any emprical evidence or observation. So let me tell it more simple: we accept they are true. Saying they are true without depending on anything or this is basic stuff doesnt make them true. Let me ask a simple question, why do we define them true without dependence on anything. You can not answer it becuase this is the limit of where our comprehension stretch out.
I said we cannot find anything to be the base of our morals except religion. And I especially state that you have to believe them, not logically prove them to take them as your base for morals. You can take anything as your premises, like religion or analytical truth or synthetic truths; its upon you. To me the most useful one is to take analytical truths as base.
You have a dick/pussy?
Sex with you must be very strange.
a is equal to a only because we define it to be. Bad example tbh.
That was kinda the point. I gave the most simple example came to my mind, something that we all accept without questioning
Yeah, cause all religious people are KKK members 🤦♂️
Thanks for missing the point, which is that religion doesn’t automatically grant you morality either.
Atheists has 🤦♂️
Christ help me.
Listen, I get it… I’m just getting tired of the straw man memes in this sub. Yes the KKK uses a religious shield, but it’s projected onto a framework that isn’t inherently racist. As someone who was raised Christian there’s plenty of legitimate fodder to aim at.
For instance god laying a plan and designing a universe where most beings who ever exist will be tortured in a lake of fire for eternity, and that’s not all. There’s some very low hanging fruit that no one seems to be grabbing.
Oh come on, its not a strawman, this is the MO of christianity as a whole throughout history. Christianity has always been used as the basis to justify hatred and cruelty. I mean thats the entire reason the bible is so vague in its wording, so it can be interpreted any way the community/cult/church leaders say it should be. People claiming their morality is based on their religion, just mean that they’re told on a regular basis by some other sick fuck what their morals are supposed to be for that week.
Doesn’t the old testament encourage you to take slaves from the other nations and beat them until they’re nearly dead, but ‘mercifully’ not actually kill them?
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