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Author | Topic: Christianity is Morally Bankrupt | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
It is my hypothosis, one that I would like to debate, that Christianiy although it indeed has some tenants ... You mean "tenets". Tenets are premises; tenants rent premises.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
I find your worries about judgment to be completely incompatible with your claimed lack of belief. He didn't say he was worried that it would happen, but that it's immoral to think that this is what should happen. (After all, I can say that it would be painful if a flying pig fell on me without considering this to be at all a likely contingency.)
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
The way I look at it, we essentially torture ourselves. I don't, I pay a big Swedish woman to do that for me.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
How can a God be unfair by our standards and still be regarded as moral by us? If morality is defined as anything a god decides is moral for him, it serves no purpose for us. "Do as I say, not as I do" is not nomally regarded as the Christian message. That depends who you ask. Zwingli, for example, the father of the Swiss reformation, wrote: "When God makes angels or men sin, he does not sin himself, because he does not break any law. For God is under no law, and therefore cannot sin."
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Instead of showing where the evidence is faulty you just dismiss it and don't provide any evidence for the atheistic position. What evidence do you have for atheism? Well, you know the evidence for aporcovolantism? The same evidence does for both.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
For example: "Susan is suicidal. She just wishes that somebody would shoot her and put her out of her misery. The principle of Do unto others says that she could permissibly go around shooting others, since she would not mind if somebody else shot her." I think this is trivially stupid. That interpretation of "do unto others" would appear sane only to someone who was acutely autistic. For the rest of us, we would reason that since I want other people to do things that make me happy, therefore by the Golden Rule I should do things to other people that make them happy. Obviously a certain amount of abstraction is required. And we do, after all, know what it actually means. You are not genuinely confused, such that you think that Jesus really meant that if you're a masochist you should go around whipping people. You're just being disingenuous. And I think this is shown by how people have in fact interpreted the Golden Rule. People have interpreted the Bible in horrible hideous ways, and used it to justify war and genocide and slavery and whatever. But I can't think of any case where someone said: "Well, the Bible says love thy neighbor as thyself, so since I'm kinky and like being tortured, I tortured my neighbor." No-one has ever misunderstood Jesus that way, even with a motive, even as an excuse --- so I think when you misunderstand him this way you're doing it deliberately. Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Science may find a chemical way of starting some form of life, but that will only be further evidence that it took intelligence to make it happen. No. If experimental petrologists make marble out of limestone in a laboratory, is that evidence that it took intelligence to make naturally-occurring marble? No, of course not. The petrologists are merely simulating naturally-occurring non-intelligent processes, and their results show that such processes are sufficient to account for the phenomena, thus supporting a naturalistic non-intelligent cause for all the marble that wasn't made by geologists. Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
I don't see that as being a parallel situation at all. The parallel is that this and the hypothetical situation you describe both involve doing something in a laboratory. If this shouldn't generally lead us to conclude that the process they're simulating was originally performed by intelligence, then I see no reason to do so in any particular case. N.B: because you'd like to is not really a reason.
We can see in nature the on-going process that results in limestone becoming marble ... We can? Where? Can you give me a reference, and I'll add it to my thread about geology.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
The difference is that in the one case we are going from one inanimate object to another. It is a different thing altogether to go from inanimate chemical to cellular life. But not in any way that affects the epistemological question.
If however it doesn't happen in nature then again it makes my point that it took intelligence to make it happen. Wait, have I inadvertently convinced you that marble is made by intelligent Metamorphosis Kobolds?
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
I don't agree. We aren't talking absolute knowledge. We are talking plausibility. Your marble example is more than plausible. The knowledge of how and why we exist at all is not anywhere near as simple. When we look at the complex structure of one single cell and then consider the evolutionary process that resulted in you we have to consider which is more plausible. Is this all the result of a chance combination of mindless particles or is there an intelligent agent or agents responsible for your existence? IMHO the latter is by far the most probable. I'm not saying that is an argument for the God of Christianity but it is a starting point. But none of this addresses the point I was actually discussing.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
I guess you'll have to dumb it down as I don't get the your point. That the ability of scientists to synthesize something in a laboratory has in itself no bearing on whether the original that they're copying had intelligence involved in its production.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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I agree but the converse is true as well. Many times on this forum I have observed atheists argue that science is close to being able to bring about life in a Petri dish and when they do they will have proven that we had naturalistic origins. To what extent that's true depends on how they do it. If they simulated the early Earth, and life arose without any nudging on their part, then to see life arise would be evidence for the natural origin of life. If, on the other hand, the make life by sticking the bits together themselves, it wouldn't prove anything one way or the other (unless there are still some vitalists out there, it would sure show them).
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
We typically call people who act on such a standard psychopaths. And we don't need the Bible to tell us to do so. Well, I think Sombra is a Buddhist or something. Sombra is following a respectable ethical tradition. She's saying that we should seek happiness. Now, you want to object to this because (for example) you don't want serial killers to be happy by doing serial killing. But a further examination of what Sombra thinks would reveal that she thinks that serial killers must be utterly miserable. They are among the "unskilled people" who haven't worked out how to be happy. And indeed I believe that this is factually true. But whether it's true or not, it is certainly true that many people have advocated ethical hedonism without advocating psychopathy. For example, Epicurus taught that the goal of life was happiness, but he also said:
It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Plato said similar things. Advocating the pleasant life is not, therefore, advocating immorality, if one also says that the pleasant life can as a matter of fact best be achieved by living morally.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Again, thanks for satisfying my curiosity with this discussion. And by the way just to clear things up I am a male. I read Dr Adequate refer to me as a female. 'Sombra' means shadow in spanish, its just a nickname I got on the basketball courts! I see. Being English, I still have trouble reconciling the fact that a guy is male with his having a nickname which is grammatically feminine. But I suppose if people called you "Sombro" that would no longer mean "shadow".
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 274 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
OK, so back to the morality.
I think the problem with hedonistic systems of ethics is that they tacitly presuppose that people have a choice as to what will give them pleasure. It is, I think, perfectly true that if (for example) a serial killer enjoyed the same things as I do instead, then he would be happier than he is now. But he doesn't, and maybe he can't choose to do so. So then we have to ask: given that he's a loony, what would make him happier, killing people or not killing people? If the answer is "killing people", then he is in fact "skillfully" getting as much happiness as he can out of life. I'm convinced that that's not very much happiness, but it may be the most he can get, being what he is. So then we have the merely empirical question: can he seek and attain greater happiness by voluntarily changing his own preferences? The evidence suggests that he cannot. Where does that leave ethical hedonism?
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born, Every morn and every night Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to sweet delight,Some are born to endless night.
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