Question for you Religious types

[mike]

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proof ?

 

[CapnG]

Therefore, black=white.

 

[Capnkumquat]

Brandon,

Here is some evidence that the ancients believed gave evidence for the nature of God. BTW...this is a very very difficult subject to talk about in such a limited way as sound bytes on a bulletin board but here goes nothin'.

The ancients believed in something called the law of human nature. It stated that no matter what we as people actually do, we all know the difference between good and evil. If you have ever felt guilty for doing something you shouldn't have done...that is the law pressing on you. While there may be sociopaths out there with no conscience, the vast majority of people know that they should do "good" and oh, so often choose to do something else. And yet, they may feel guilty about it for years even if no one finds out or even gets hurt by their actions.

This knowledge of good and evil and a predilection for one over the other seems to support the idea that we were built to do good. Why would a malignant or indifferent God give us a "good-o-meter"? Of course, most of what we do is probably not good and in direct opposition to a "Good" God. Thusly we find ourselves in the world of shit we make for ourselves...Good ol' freewill.

--------------------------
Ron,
I think you are trying to make a party game out of the nature of God. God as I imagine him would not take part in such petty scenarios as you set up. I guess, I don't quite know how to answer your word game designed to make a paradox. I guess, I'm just not smart enough to see what you are driving at. Maybe you should read a little Plato or Aristotle or Thomas Aquinus, or even C.S. Lewis if you need something lighter weight and more accessible.

Those guys were pretty smart and they thought long and hard about such questions...A real skeptic would dig these guys as most of them were skeptics, atheists, and strict logicians who did a lot of thinking on the nature of God.

 

[mike]

While there may be sociopaths out there with no conscience, the vast majority of people know that they should do "good" and oh, so often choose to do something else. And yet, they may feel guilty about it for years even if no one finds out or even gets hurt by their actions.

i resemble that remark lol, as a confirmed sociopath its my belief we are born evil. put two todlers in a sand pit and add one toy........

we have to be "taught" to share, not to hit and to say please and thank you.
these are taught to us by our predecessors because they are neccessary for our survival in a society.

as a sociopath when i do "good" like donate to a 3rd world charity im honest enough with myself to realise i ultimatly do it because i like how it makes me feel, that if i was really serious about starving kids id do a mother theresa and dedicate my whole life to fixing it. its the same when i rescue an injured animal from the side of the road and pay for vet care, if the animal dies i dont feel bad, i feel good that at least it had a fighting chance

we do good because it gives positive feedback which we enjoy, not because some god programmed it into us
the world has seen plenty of truly evil men, watch a doco on the nazi death camps and you soon realise good is not always "inbuilt" in man

its a learned condition not a natural one

 

[Rick Deckard]

Some people do good things because they've been told it's their pathway to 'heaven'.

Some people do bad things because they've been told it's their pathway to 'heaven'.

It's the perpetuation of religious practises and beliefs that is holding back the development of the human race.

Prayers don't work - how could they? A positive mental attitude will get you a lot further in life.

If God has a plan, why is He so cryptic about it? If He wants me to follow 'the plan' then why doesn't he just tell me what it is and I'll think about following it.

I've felt for a long time that the concept of God is entirely constructed by the human brain and is merely a 'sticking plaster' to cover the enormous holes in our current understanding of the Universe.

 

[Brian Now]

Brandon,

Here is some evidence that the ancients believed gave evidence for the nature of God. BTW...this is a very very difficult subject to talk about in such a limited way as sound bytes on a bulletin board but here goes nothin'.

The ancients believed in something called the law of human nature. It stated that no matter what we as people actually do, we all know the difference between good and evil. If you have ever felt guilty for doing something you shouldn't have done...that is the law pressing on you.

Oh my friend, you just hit one of my pet peeves with New Agers (not that I am calling you one). I know I am going to sound rude, but I have to respond to this. Who were these "ancients"? What time period are you talking about? Does this encompass all ancient cultures or just the ones famous in the West? Where did you get this term "law of human nature"?

This reminds me of the misperception that all Native Americans worshiped the "Great Spirit", carried tomahawks, and lived in teepees. It's the simplification of culture(s) into a comfortable, manageable bit-sized morsel.

I'm not arguing with the spirit of what you're saying here. It just sounds like you've been reading some really simplified, New Agey nonsense that people like Gregg Braden serve up.

 

[BrandonD]

Brandon,

Here is some evidence that the ancients believed gave evidence for the nature of God. BTW...this is a very very difficult subject to talk about in such a limited way as sound bytes on a bulletin board but here goes nothin'.

The ancients believed in something called the law of human nature. It stated that no matter what we as people actually do, we all know the difference between good and evil. If you have ever felt guilty for doing something you shouldn't have done...that is the law pressing on you. While there may be sociopaths out there with no conscience, the vast majority of people know that they should do "good" and oh, so often choose to do something else. And yet, they may feel guilty about it for years even if no one finds out or even gets hurt by their actions.

This knowledge of good and evil and a predilection for one over the other seems to support the idea that we were built to do good. Why would a malignant or indifferent God give us a "good-o-meter"? Of course, most of what we do is probably not good and in direct opposition to a "Good" God. Thusly we find ourselves in the world of shit we make for ourselves...Good ol' freewill.

We may have a predilection to follow our own personal idea of "good", but that idea of good is formed from the culture one is raised within. So we are being "guided" by a subjective social construct, and not a universal divine law.

I'm not an atheist, but our ideas of good and evil do not reveal god any more than our preference for coke over pepsi.

 

[mike]

Therefore, black=white.

"i see said the blind man, but they both sound the same to me"

 

[Capnkumquat]

A few random thoughts and answers to my detractors.

I am not a new ager.
The ancients I am referring to are several greek philosophers, it was recognized as part of roman law, Thomas Aquinus spoke a great deal of it, C.S. Lewis makes some great arguments about the nature of moral law, and most recently Kant talked a great deal of moral law seemingly walking a very fine line between belief in God and man standing alone on his own moral constructions. Don't believe what I say, do your research you supposed skeptics...take a class in ethics or philosophy.

------------------------------

I did not say we do good for any particular reason...I said we have a good-o-meter built in TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE. Brandon made the assertion that if God existed he thought he was at best indifferent and at worst malignant. My response was to show that there is evidence if God exists he gives us the tools to know good when we see it. Some would say (jokingly) that good-o-meter was in the apple at the garden of eden, elevating man to being "like god" to know something other than instinct.

Others respond that they do good because of social learning and that it gives them a warm fuzzy feeling. How about this though. (I'll steal from C.S. Lewis now) . You're walking along and hear a cry for help. You rush to a nearby lake and you see that a young boy is way out into the deep water and obviously in process of drowning. Your swimming skills are ok but he is way out there and you know you will likely risk your life if you go to save him. Evolution built instinct for self preservation, evolution likewise built instinct to protect other human life. No matter what you do in such a situation, you know/feel what you "OUGHT" to do. That is the moral law (the law of human nature) pressing on you to do something against self preservation...even for someone you don't know or are related to. If evolution provides instinct to save the boy and instinct to not save the boy (self preservation) then the thing that tells you what you know you "OUGHT" to do is probably not instinct but something higher and more refined.

Again, such deep philosophical constructs are difficult to discuss via forums so I am doing the best I can. It is very easy to go around throwing monkey philosophical monkey wrenches but far more difficult to give good and concise explanation without leaving big holes.

----------------------

Mike,

We as a society believed that the Nazi's that built the death camps DID know that they were doing evil . If we did not believe that the Nazi's at rock bottom did not know right from wrong, while we may have still had a war to stop them, how could we have punished them after the war? Punishment implies that the person should know that what they were doing was wrong/bad/evil. We hung many Nazi's after the war was over because the world thought anyone would know genocide was WRONG.

The gas chambers of Auschwitz are the direct outcome of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and breeding. That industry of death was not invented by religious hatred, or by the ministry of defense, but came out of the minds of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.
–paraphrased from a former Jew freed from Auschwitz

Peace,
My fingers are tired now.

 

[mike]

i still think good is a external construct and not inbuilt, its all relative.
most people who eat at mcdonalds would agree the death camps were a great evil , but i have a vegan freind who see's slaughter houses in the same way.

good and evil are different things for differnt people, a lot of the people running the death camps thought no more about it than those who use the drivethru everyday.

 

[BrandonD]

Others respond that they do good because of social learning and that it gives them a warm fuzzy feeling. How about this though. (I'll steal from C.S. Lewis now) . You're walking along and hear a cry for help. You rush to a nearby lake and you see that a young boy is way out into the deep water and obviously in process of drowning. Your swimming skills are ok but he is way out there and you know you will likely risk your life if you go to save him. Evolution built instinct for self preservation, evolution likewise built instinct to protect other human life. No matter what you do in such a situation, you know/feel what you "OUGHT" to do. That is the moral law (the law of human nature) pressing on you to do something against self preservation...even for someone you don't know or are related to. If evolution provides instinct to save the boy and instinct to not save the boy (self preservation) then the thing that tells you what you know you "OUGHT" to do is probably not instinct but something higher and more refined.

Hi, I appreciate your responses but in my opinion you're still assuming quite a bit.

Here's a story to illustrate my point of view:

A man was having his bath in the river. Then he noticed a scorpion almost drowning. He didn't want it to die, so he lifted the scorpion and put it on the ground. But before he could put it on the ground, the scorpion stung his hand.

He cried out to the scorpion, "You evil thing, how could you do that after I saved your life?"

The scorpion replied, "You act according to your nature and you consider it good. I act according to my nature and you consider it evil."

No one can do good or evil. Machines can only do what is in their nature to do. If I save the drowning boy, that's because it's the only thing that can happen. Placed in that exact situation a million more times, and I'll respond exactly the same. If saving the boy is the only thing that can happen, then how can I honestly claim that I'm doing good?

I might sound like some ultra-materialist Richard Dawkins worshipper at this point but I'm really not. But I'm guessing that we probably don't agree on this particular issue.

 

[Tommy Allison]

A friend of mine passed away in the night on Monday.

I was working and my cat started acting out. I was overcome with this sadness, and relief for no reason what so ever.

I got word that he had passed in the night.

I have maintained that I am a skeptic of most things. I don't believe what I see on TV, nor do I believe most of the stuff that's on the web, or in books about the afterlife.

I believe that we're all plugged in on some level, and that the friendships we make make the connection stronger in some regards, and we know when those connections are gone. I believe my friend has gone on to a better place, but I wouldn't venture a guess as to where, because I don't pretend to know that much.

The same thing happened when my mom died. I was in the middle of a job interview, and felt this overwhelming emotion wash over me. I had to stop the interview, and actually leave. When I got home There were a dozen messages from family telling me that my mother had passed.

We all have this little thing inside us that tells us what right and wrong is, good and evil, and what we nurture makes us who we are. It's that intangible part that is connected to everything.

I'm not a new ager. I don't believe in a lot of bullshit, but there is one thing I do know for a fact is that we all have the ability to be so much more than what we are. It's the conscious choice to be more than what we are that makes us truly human.

 

[Tommy Allison]

Others respond that they do good because of social learning and that it gives them a warm fuzzy feeling. How about this though. (I'll steal from C.S. Lewis now) . You're walking along and hear a cry for help. You rush to a nearby lake and you see that a young boy is way out into the deep water and obviously in process of drowning. Your swimming skills are ok but he is way out there and you know you will likely risk your life if you go to save him. Evolution built instinct for self preservation, evolution likewise built instinct to protect other human life. No matter what you do in such a situation, you know/feel what you "OUGHT" to do. That is the moral law (the law of human nature) pressing on you to do something against self preservation...even for someone you don't know or are related to. If evolution provides instinct to save the boy and instinct to not save the boy (self preservation) then the thing that tells you what you know you "OUGHT" to do is probably not instinct but something higher and more refined.

Hi, I appreciate your responses but in my opinion you're still assuming quite a bit.

Here's a story to illustrate my point of view:

A man was having his bath in the river. Then he noticed a scorpion almost drowning. He didn't want it to die, so he lifted the scorpion and put it on the ground. But before he could put it on the ground, the scorpion stung his hand.

He cried out to the scorpion, "You evil thing, how could you do that after I saved your life?"

The scorpion replied, "You act according to your nature and you consider it good. I act according to my nature and you consider it evil."

No one can do good or evil. Machines can only do what is in their nature to do. If I save the drowning boy, that's because it's the only thing that can happen. Placed in that exact situation a million more times, and I'll respond exactly the same. If saving the boy is the only thing that can happen, then how can I honestly claim that I'm doing good?

I might sound like some ultra-materialist Richard Dawkins worshipper at this point but I'm really not. But I'm guessing that we probably don't agree on this particular issue.

There's a better version of that story about a woman, a snake, a woodpile in winter. She takes the frozen snake inside warms it up, feeds it a mouse, and of course it bites her. The snake's response when she asks why it bit her "You knew I was a snake when you brought me in here, what did you expect?"

 

[Brian Now]

A few random thoughts and answers to my detractors.

I am not a new ager.
The ancients I am referring to are several greek philosophers, it was recognized as part of roman law, Thomas Aquinus spoke a great deal of it, C.S. Lewis makes some great arguments about the nature of moral law, and most recently Kant talked a great deal of moral law seemingly walking a very fine line between belief in God and man standing alone on his own moral constructions. Don't believe what I say, do your research you supposed skeptics...take a class in ethics or philosophy.

I did, but we had more succinct terms for people of this type than "the ancients".
I know, I know...I'm obnoxious.

 

[Capnkumquat]

Good and evil are different things to different people. Lets examine...

Rarely around the world do you find situations in which good and evil are radically disagreed upon. Despite huge cultural swings and 10 thousand years of social change we all agree way, way more than we disagree on good and evil. Can you actually imagine a society in which pedophilia is considered useful, practical, and good? What about people being cheered and given medals for running away in battle? How about a culture based on stabbing your friends in the back so you can move ahead in social ranking? (ISS enterprise anyone). These are scenarios where good and evil are manufactured external constructs, and they don't sound like any societies I am familiar with.

These aforementioned societies sound outrageous because we as human beings have an innate sense that such things are disturbing, and not wanted. Sure we disagree on certain things like...which animals are proper to harvest, or how many wives or women one is allowed, or when we are allowed to kill someone. But almost universally we all agree some animals are ok to be used for food or other items, one may not just take any woman he wants, and you can't just go around killing anyone you want. Such common sense good and evil exists throughout all mankind and is NOT PART OF AN EXTERNAL CONSTRUCT.

So in general good and evil are not external constructs, but we do make rules among ourselves to clarify where the boundaries lie.

----------------------

Your vegan friend has constructed a sin for herself that it would be difficult to explain to anyone else and sound rational...lets examine.

1. Murder in the biblical sense only relates from man to man. (Murder being defined as the intentional, unjustifiable killing of an innocent)Animals cannot be murdered only killed. Besides, very few major religions discourage the eating of ALL animals and even those have no problem with eating milk, yogurt, cheese, or eggs.

2. Animal protein is craved by the human young (mothers milk), and would your vegan friend deny animal protein to her own children? If so, prepare for a lifetime of health issues including alergies, immunity issues, low weight, and anemia. (now who's evil?)

3. Man has spent the last few million years as an omnivore rising up to have a huge brain case because of his varied diet making large brain growth even evolutionarily possible (fish especially were helpful here). Even our closest relatives the primates eat meat whenever they can get it (insects, lizards, etc..)

3. We all have canines...nuf said.

Your friend thinks they are being rational, but as she grows gaunt, grey, and anemic with osteoporosis in old age, she may wish she had had a chicken breast and a glass of milk once in a while.

 

[Tony2013]

Your friend thinks they are being rational, but as she grows gaunt, grey, and anemic with osteoporosis in old age, she may wish she had had a chicken breast and a glass of milk once in a while.

Right, so everyone who eats a vegan diet is headed straight on a one-way train for osteoporosis. Stop being foolish.

 

[Tony2013]

If I am a geneticist and devout (insert theistic title or nomanclature here) and in the course of doing my work I run into some problems. Despite my best efforts and those of my team, I can not technically figure them out, so I prey for divine inspiration to help me. I then stumble onto a major breakthrough.

Q 1 - Is this breakthrough attributed to the divine inspiration and a direct answer to my prayer or unabashed luck?

Now suppose that my original goal was to create living brain cells and nerve cells from inert material to help quadriplegic's use their limbs again or the blind see again.

Q 2 - If these cells are incorporated into the brain and actually help the person in the intended way, is this not part of "Gods Plan"?

Now, lets say that someone else uses this technology to grow an entire brain and hook it to eyes and a spine. Lets firther suppose that we are able, through further manipulations, to engineer that brain to function at a diminished intellectual capacity but at a high dexterous capability. We then use this new being to do the "dangerous" jobs thereby sparing the lives of honest parishioner's. (yeah, I know there are some leaps here but the tech stuff isnt the point.)

Q 3 - Is this part of "Gods Plan"?

Q 4 - Does this entity have a soul?

Q 5 - Does this not make us Gods?

Just curious of your thoughts.

Oh, and you need not be religious to take part.

Q1 - Who's to say? That situation right there is one of the biggest mysteries of who we are. To just experience this is, in my opinion, one of the highest states of being we could achieve. I'm sure many camps have their own spin on it, but do they have the complete answer? I don't think so.

Q2 - Many believe that the sole reason you were able to accomplish something like this is because there is a god from whom the idea originates. "God's Plan" is a fairly nebulous statement so I'll take it to assume you mean the idea of fate or the unavoidable. Thing is, if you're a brilliant scientist, isn't this kind of scientific feat a natural product of your work? Seems reasonable to me.

Q3 - This is essentially the same question as Q2, especially if in your scenario one follows naturally from the other.

Q4 - I dunno, does this entity, person, thing, etc have the capability, without any extraneous scientific manipulation, to discern between good and evil and feel the presence of things that may not be physically present? If yes, then...

Q5 - Do you think you are? Much of what you're asking boils down to a state of mind.

 

[BrandonD]

Rarely around the world do you find situations in which good and evil are radically disagreed upon. Despite huge cultural swings and 10 thousand years of social change we all agree way, way more than we disagree on good and evil. Can you actually imagine a society in which pedophilia is considered useful, practical, and good?

That is a completely false statement but a very common view of religious people who live in gated communities, and are in the luxurious position of being exposed only to people who think exactly like they do. Not that you're necessarily one of those people, but you do share their point of view.

Such "evil" societies as the ones you describe do exist. When a child is married off at age 12 or 13, that is pedophilia from our perspective. And it happens in ALOT of non-western cultures.

Even the term "pedophilia" itself is ultimately a meaningless word, because there is no real definition of what a child is. Is a 12-year-old a child? Sex with a 12-year-old would be considered sex with a child, and yet 12-year-olds are frequently tried in court as adults. The definitions can be easily twisted to serve self-interest, and the reason they CAN be twisted is because they *don't actually exist*.

Morality is a cultural phenomenon. Even if US and European imperialists eventually succeed in smashing the entire world under their thumb and everyone thinks the same way, intelligent people still won't be fooled into believing the western model of morality is the "real" one.

So in general good and evil are not external constructs, but we do make rules among ourselves to clarify where the boundaries lie.

We make rules and argue among ourselves where the boundaries lie because *those boundaries don't exist*. The less that someone is able to determine where something IS and IS NOT, in other words where its boundaries are, the more likely that this something does not actually exist.

I've never had an argument over where the boundaries of my volkswagen are.

Even your example of murder doesn't work. People have found every conceivable way to justify murder, even the murder of children and innocents. In a fairly recent interview Bush's wife publicly stated that she considered the slaughter of thousands of innocents in Iraq to be a justifiable consequence of our occupation. And MILLIONS of people agree with her. The murder of innocents is considered OK in many circumstances.

People generally hate the idea of the non-existence of a universal moral compass in human beings because (in the words of a co-worker) "If there is no good and evil, what is keeping you from just raping and killing whoever you want?"

Yes it is an upsetting thing to conceive, but it doesn't change the fact that this non-existent set of rules is only placed there to help us feel safer in this incomprehensible and frightening world.

 

[Capnkumquat]

Tony,

Thats all you got out of my comment on the Vegan mentioned in Mikes Post? Mikes friend thinks anyone who eats meat is EVIL. I said anyone who doesn't eat meat is living in defiance of a few million years of evolution. If I choose to live in the way my upper paleolithic hunter gatherer body is built to live, I cannot stand by while someone ridiculously calls it evil.

I merely pointed out problems with the vegan lifestyle to support my argument of ridiculousness and you somehow focused on one teeny tiny thing in the whole explanation...oh and then call me foolish.

I don't think this thread has had even one name calling incident until now, despite the ticklish nature of the thread. Thanks for being there.

-------------------

Brandon,

1.
C'mon man, surely you can see the point that we may not all agree on where pedophilia begins, but ALL SOCIETIES have an age of consent. Usually the age of consent rises as the lifespan of its populace rises (usually along with industrialization and modernization). If your average lifespan is 35 years old (sub-saharan Africa), chances are you are going to procreate like rabbits and at earlier ages to try and outrun the grim reaper. We in the west have the luxury of living until 75+ and seek only replacement populations for the most part.

Can you imagine any sane person condoning and encouraging pedophilia with a 1 year old? Hell no! Surely you would agree that we as humans would almost universally be revolted by such an act. Why? Could it be that we all, regardless of societal norms, understand such an act as EVIL.

All I have to do is show some "seed" idea that we all (all 6 billion of us) understand as wrong and that is the minimal threshold of the "good-o-meter". The rest is academic. If no such threshold exists, then perhaps you are right, its societal and we are just meat machines existing only to suit ourselves.

2.
No sane person believes murder is just hunky dory and that we should just murder our little asses off to the betterment of our society. Any society that believes wholesale murder is a good thing or beneficial is either at total war, or in total meltdown...effectively insane.

Even in war, when the men come home with perfect justification for war (fighting NAZI Germany for example), their lives are often haunted with their own deeds. Their good-o-meters have taken an awful pounding, often leaving them broken, depressed, suicidal, and anti-social. Why would one become so hurt over something so justifiable, unless human slaughter goes against the very nature of humanness? You cannot break a part of the human machine that did not exist in the first place.

The concept of Murder has been universally reviled in law since the code of Hammurabi, singled out by Confucius, and finally codified in the 10 commandments by Moses. To point out that people still do murder, doesn't change the fact that all societies from the dawn of time have universally regarded it as an EVIL. Individuals can quibble over the terms of justification, and innocence but we still understand the core concept and we recoil against it.

You, yourself (Brandon) seem to revile murder and heap contempt upon those who would falsely justify the deed (our government for example). Isn't that your good-o-meter going off in reaction to the government desperately try to appear GOOD by covering up their EVIL. You know the difference and so do they, otherwise why cover up?

People try and justify the unjustifiable to cover up the fact that given a choice between Good and Evil, they chose Evil. If we all did not have an innate sense of Good and Evil, no justification (false or otherwise) would even be necessary. Even brutal Stalinist dictators want to be perceived as GOOD. They make any justification to try to cover their EVIL acts, because deep down, even they, want to be GOOD.

Thats as good an explanation as I am capable of giving. Stick a fork in me I'm done.

Peace

 

[Capnkumquat]

The first day of ethics class (oh so long ago) someone asked, is there a philosophy that if universally applied would make us all get along? The answer was...What do you mean by get along?

Philosophy is not a discreet object like your Volkswagen, we have to agree that there are fuzzy edges to things and we have to muddle through.

Descartes is the only philosopher I can quote, who could deal in absolute truths and those truths are pale and weak by comparison to what we are talking about. I mean " if a thing is yellow then it has color" or " if A is greater than B and B is larger than C then A is larger than C" is not exactly inspiring truths. However, it does show that there ARE absolute truths to be had, an that all people would universally agree to be true.

Anyhow, thats all, I promise.