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Author | Topic: Atheism Cannot Rationally Explain Morals. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
That isn't about morality. It's a social contract: Eat others as you would have others eat you.
IOWs, if it's OK to eat another living thing and it's not murder, why could people not kill and eat other people on a regular basis and it not be murder
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ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Dawn bertot writes:
Well yes, morality does change to suit the purposes and circumstances of the society involved.
... you change the word moral and it's meaning to suit your purposes Dawn Bertot writes:
No absolute morality, no. In fact, it's people who believe in absolute morality who have no actual morality. All you're doing is following orders. There's a reason why that isn't an excuse for flouting actual morality.
HENCE NO ACTUAL MORALITY
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ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Dawn Bertot writes:
Then it isn't rational.
You act morally because of the intrinsic law put inside of you by the creator.
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ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
There would be no absolute value. I agree. In your Naturalistic worldview, nothing of which you just said has any real meaning, because there is no value in that world view. But you're assuming that absolute values exist - i.e. that your conclusion is true. That isn't rational.
Dawn Bertot writes:
Present a rational argument and we'll see.
If I disagree with your above statement, which of us is correct right or wrong. Dawn Bertot writes:
I'm not following orders. I'm abiding by my side of the social contract. It's like paying your bills or agreeing which side of the road to drive on. It would be ridiculous to pretend that there's an absolutely correct side of the road to drive on, wouldn't it?
So if your follow the laws of your land, which I assume some you believe to moral, your a evil person for following orders?
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ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Phat writes:
By his fruit ye shall know him.
why must the Priest be mad?
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ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Dawn Bertot writes:
Are you following your wife's orders? Is she following yours? It's a social contract. Compliance is voluntary.
Sounds to me like your following orders. Dawn Bertot writes:
I'm saying that ALL morals are subjective, including yours. You subjectively believe in a subjective God who tells you what to do. And you subjectively decide what He means. There are thousands of brands of theism, all thoroughly subjective.
But I think u are demonstrating my point about the subjective nonsense of your so called morals. Dawn Bertot writes:
Ever hear of democracy? WE set up the social contract. We're not taking orders from an alien overlord like you are.
You cant even admit your following orders, which someone else set up.
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ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Phat writes:
Only the beginning of wisdom. Back up a verse:
But this is what the book clearly says.
Prov 9:10 writes: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding." Prov 9:9 writes:
Don't park your brain at the door. Don't dwell on "absolute" truths. Wisdom is a journey, not a destination.
Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser: teach a just man, and he will increase in learning.
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ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
There's nothing ambiguous about it. The relationship begins before any formal contracts are signed. The state doesn't enter into it at all until after the deal is done. The state is only a backstop for negotiations between signatories of the social contract.
It does not matter what ambiguous pattern you and your wife have going, you signed a legal contract by the state. Dawn Bertot writes:
Morality changed, even IN the Bible:
It's still just what it is, that never changes.quote: Dawn Bertot writes:
Of course YOU have found something better than blind adherence to "absolute morality" too. If you think you've found something that is better than that or that will superceed that, you will have to let us know. Take "Thou shalt not kill". Is that "absolute" or are there exceptions? My guess is that you have more exceptions than I do.
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ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Dawn bertot writes:
You're looking at it backwards. It isn't that the social contract "is moral". It's that morality is a social contract. It's something that you comply with voluntarily in your day-to-day life, not just an edict from an alien overlord that you must obey. You comply because it makes your interactions with your fellow humans easier.
So this social moral contract you reference, is it moral, should you obey it. Dawn Bertot writes:
Again, you're assuming that there is an absolute right and wrong. There isn't. Somebody else can disagree with you until the cows come home but that doesn't make either of you "right" or "wrong". If someone else, human that is,disagrees with your answer,are you right and they wrong,or something else? Morality is more about what works or doesn't work than about "right" or "wrong".
Dawn Bertot writes:
And He didn't. So how is stoning "right"?
Jesus purpose here was not to indicate that adultery was not wrong, or that it should not be punished by stoning. His purpose was to teach a more valuable lesson, within morality. The lesson was forgiveness and to recognize that all but him there could NOT cast the stone. Dawn Bertot writes:
Indeed. And if it can be set aside, how is it absolute?
It was not that adultery was not wrong then or still wrong, only that the Law Giver was present, to set it aside, to teach a more important principle than punishment. Dawn Bertot writes:
On the contrary, forgiveness is about the forgiver, not the forgiven. It is often about letting go of imagined offenses. Forgiveness is about getting past the idea that somebody wronged you.
But forgiveness would make no sense if they're were no sin to forgive. Dawn Bertot writes:
See above. Jesus was pointing out that the man's "sins" were in the imaginations of the people whom he had supposedly "wronged", that if God could forgive, so could they.
Jesus was saying I'm the standard of morality to forgive sin, absolute wrong doing. Notice he did not say, it doesn't matter or there is no such thing as sin, or there is NO standard, in fact he corroborated this fact,by demonstrating there is a standard. Dawn Bertot writes:
That shows that God's standards are relative too. Then in the ultimate example of absolute morality, God says even though you've broke my law, absolute in reality, due to sin, a reality, I'll forgive it You didn't answer my question: Is "Thou shalt not kill" absolute? Or are there exceptions?
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ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
That's a false dichotomy based on your unfounded assumption about absolute truth.
Well this statement is either contradictory from start to finish, or it is correct From start to finish. But how would we know given your statement. Dawn Bertot writes:
So you're saying that only God knows right from wrong. That would explain the high rate of incarceration among believers. They have no moral compass of their own. That law is absolute in character. But the only way to distinguish between manslaughter and negligent homicide are of course something different, but to make that distinction, you would need infinite knowledge. So you are asking the wrong being. You're shooting yourself in the foot. You're admitting that your own morality is not rational.
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ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
Since you're not omniscient, how can you know with absolute certainty what God's morality is? At best, you can guess at an approximation.
It's not my morality,, it's God's... Dawn Bertot writes:
Not at all. From my position, people have signed on to a social contract which makes their lives easier if they comply. But from your position those people are in cages unjustly because morality doesn't exists and Sin is just a myth. From your position, it's a one-way street with your alien overlord telling you what to do and it's the Eternal Frying Pan if you don't comply. The catch is that you're not omniscient so you don't know exactly what your alien overlord is thinking so it's impossible to avoid every pitfall.
Dawn Bertot writes:
The real judges - that is the other members of the community - understand that it IS all relative. You're the one who doesn't. Maybe you can get them OFF with that defense if you speak to thier judges. Hey jugie whugie, it's all relative, forget about it Relative goes hand-in-hand with rational. If the premises change, the conclusion changes. If the circumstances change, the behaviour changes. On the other hand, absolute goes hand-in-hand with irrational. Absolute conclusions don't need premises at all. The conclusions never change so there's no scope for reasoning.
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ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
The point is that it might "be" correct - absolutely correct and inviolable in any way - but YOU have know way of knowing exactly what is correct because YOU don't have all of the information.
I don't have to be omniscient to know that for a moral to be correct and consistent, it would need to be that no more information could be added to it to make it more correct. Dawn Bertot writes:
See above. God might know exactly what is right or wrong but YOU don't because you're not God.
If God exists, and there were something he didn't know that is knowable, then he wouldn't be God, correct Dawn Bertot writes:
I did. Relative conclusions from real-world observations require reasoning. They require new reasoning as new circumstances are observed. You need to demonstrate that rational goes hand in hand with relative, You, on the other hand, haven't shown that any reasoning is required for absolute morals.
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ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
Of course that's my position: There IS NO "correct" in any absolute sense. Even if something was "absolutely correct", neither you nor I could know because we're not omniscient. I've repeated that numerous times in this thread. Don't you get it yet?
Or is your position that neither you or I can be correct? Dawn Bertot writes:
It isn't "absolutely rational" because rationality has nothing to do with the absolute. Rational conclusions are made using real-life observations as premises. If we observe that all horses are white, the conclusions we derive from that observation are rational even if they are not "absolutely correct".
Let me know, how what you establish as rational is actually rational Dawn Bertot writes:
But you would have to know everything to know everything that does exist - and that includes all of the possible exceptions to your "absolute morality". As long as there's anything you don't know, that something could pertain to morality and your understanding of morality would be incomplete. Therefore, even if there "is" an absolute morality, you can't know for sure what it is.
I don't need to know everything to know absolutley that things exist. Dawn Bertot writes:
Yes.
Is tastiness a relative conclusion. Dawn Bertot writes:
Yes.
Is happiness a relative conclusion. Dawn Bertot writes:
I already asked you about killing people. If there are exceptions to "Thou shalt not kill", it's relative.
Give me an example of a relative conclusion that is actually moral. Dawn Bertot writes:
If somebody else doesn't see it as moral, then it definitely is relative.
Then show me how you established it as moral, given the fact that, every other person may not see it that way. Dawn Bertot writes:
Of course I'm right back where I started. I started by saying that morality is subjective and you keep agreeing with me.
if your example ends up being subjective, then you right back where your started. Dawn Bertot writes:
No. You insist that absolutley morality cannot actually exists, then you turn right around and suggest that the only morality that does exist is subjective, which is in itself stating an absolute. First, I have not said that absolute morality can not exist. I have said that if it did exist, nobody could know what it is because we're not omniscient. We can't know anything absolutely. Therefore, for all intents and purposes, in every day life, the morality we live is not absolute. Second, I have not stated anything absolutely.
Dawn Bertot writes:
If anything is absolutely true, you can't know unless you're omniscient. It's like shooting blindfolded. You might hit the bullseye by sheer coincidence or you might hit the target near enough for practical purposes or you might miss the target entirely and shoot yourself in the foot. When it comes to morality, practical purposes are the best we can hope for.
Is it absolutely true that subjective morality, is the only way morality exists? Dawn Bertot writes:
You haven't shown that your process is objective.
The fact that I can objectively state that subjective morality is nonsense....
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ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
Yes, that's what I've been saying all along. Morals don't have to "exist" like a banana.
There is no eqivolent in the natural world for a thing called good or bad, good or evil, thus the brain , if your position were true, manufactures it. It's an imagination of the mind that does nor exist. Dawn Bertot writes:
But that's practically the definition of a subjective moral; one that is not based on concrete facts but on abstract thoughts. What do you think subjective means?
There is no eqivolent in the natural world for a thing called good or bad, good or evil, thus the brain , if your position were true, manufactures it. It's an imagination of the mind that does nor exist. Thus it is not even possible for,you to have a subjective moral. Dawn Bertot writes:
Yours, of course.
You want me to,answer a question from the Bible using who's worldview, yours or mine. Dawn Bertot writes:
Incorrect. If,yours, then the question is irrelevant, there's no moral to begin with, correct? According to my worldview, morals are subjective - i.e. they vary from society to society and from situation to situation. That applies to your morals as well as mine.
Dawn Bertot writes:
But how do you know what to obey? You can't read the instructions with 100% accuracy because you're not omniscient. (If you were omniscient, you wouldn't even need the instructions.) If my world view, only God can define the parameters of murder, because he's infinite in knowledge. Happily I don't need to decide, just obey. So answer the question: When God tells you, "Thou shalt not kill," how do you obey? Do you oppose capital punishment? Do you oppose war? What specific instructions do you have that apply to every possible situation?
Dawn Bertot writes:
I don't know why you think you're disagreeing with me. That's my position exactly. As I've demonstrated absolutely, you cannot actually have a good and bad in reality, they can't exist in a strictly Naturalistic world. They can only exist as an imagination. Imaginations with no equivalency in the real world, dont actually exist. You could not possibly provide an example of an actual moral, that could not be described as anything less than matter in motion Rational thinking is all about matter in motion. Unless your reasoning relates somehow to matter in motion, it's just meaningless mumbo-jumbo. Edited by ringo, : Fixed quotes.
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ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dawn Bertot writes:
There is nothing that is absolutely good or bad, moral or immoral. What we think is good or bad, moral or immoral is made up in our heads. Different people in different situations have different ideas of what is good or bad, moral or immoral. My point was that if there is nothing that is good or bad, moral or immoral, then obviously you can't have or explain morals. As I have mentioned before, doing unto others as we would have them do unto us is easy enough to explain - it's good for the group and good for the individual.
Dawn Bertot writes:
Exactly. Musical notes have no "meaning" outside our brains and neither do ideas of morality.
To use Modulous example of music. if I were to imagine that musical notes had meaning outside some vague interpretation I gave them, they would still just be, meaningless sounds to the universe, the alleged creator of your biological brain Dawn Bertot writes:
Absolute meaning doesn't exist (or if it did, you would have no way of knowing what it was).
You would need to show how it and your entire life has meaning for actual meaning to exist. Dawn Bertot writes:
That's not an instruction at all. It's just a vague empty statement that isn't even in the Bible.
The first specific instruction I have is that God is infinite and thus his morality is absolute as a result of that. Dawn Bertot writes:
Since you're not omniscient, how do you know the source is accurate? But if the same source tells me he is infinte in knowledge, then it not required for ME to know what the exact line of what constitutes murder, to understand he does understand You keep demonstrating that you DON'T know what absolutely is right or wrong. You can't tell us when it is right to kill another person and when it is wrong. Deciding whether a person had malicious or deceitful intent requires just as much finite wisdom from you as it does from anybody else.
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