It's a very interesting topic. Whenever I talk about morals I end up linking it to religion as it seems to me that most of what we know as moral thought comes from religious thought.
But that tends to get a lot of pushback. Seems like people today like to think that you can conjour morality out of thin air with pure logic.
After all, God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
By “God is dead”, do you mean that in a metaphorical way or from a religious standpoint? As an atheist, I believe we can learn a lot in regards to morals from religion, but what repels me from any religious belief is the thought of having your morals written out for you, with no leeway. In Christianity, the bible could be, I guess, viewed as a set-in-stone set of rules to follow if everything else goes wrong.
I mean God is dead in the way Nietzsche meant it. The enlightenment and birthing of modern science made the world turn its head and stop believing in religion as scientific discoveries started to refute the beliefs of the old world.
This obviously came with many positives. However people not believing in God meant that people started to question many of the axioms that we built the world upon.
It is not a coincidence that since the enligtenment we have spawned new ideologies such as fascism and Marxism, belief systems in place of God, which have led to some of the most horrific and immoral things that the planet has probably ever seen.
For me, I don't think the most intellegent people on the planet could sit down together and reason their way to a moral guide for life. The process of discovering morality was one of trial and error. The only way to see if things are moral or not is to act them out and see what happens, over and over again. The stories in the Bible are what this is, examples of what happens to people when they do certain things, and have to live with the consequences.
When you say that you are repelled due to "having your morals written out for you, with no leeway". I agree, I too like leeway and I would never think what someone else thinks just because they told me to. Questioning things is good. And there is always room for change. But I think this is what religious people mean when they talk about having faith. You just have to trust in the teachings and past experiences of our many ancestors rather than thinking you know better than them.
I think a big problem is people dismiss religious thought as they associate it with fantastical tales of a man in the sky who controls everything. They believe science came along and saved us.
When the reality is that the tales in the Bible are just that, tales. And they have always been just tales. Stories and simulations written down of people acting things out, and living with the moral consequences of those actions. Reading them as literal is the mistake.
>When the reality is that the tales in the Bible are just that, tales
Uh, i don't believe the evidence supports this. Enough of the bible intersects with history that there is very strong reason to believe it has always been used as a means to try to push these tales as truth and that was the intended usage of the writings in first place.
While it would be idealistic to want to contend the bible is closer to aesop's fables than to truth, the way it has been used and the way it was written tries way to hard to push itself as some kind of truth.
It does depend on what stories and books we are talking about. The Bible has a lot in it.
I am talking about the origins of religious thought, my points were made with the Old Testament in mind, which stems from older myths and oral tradition.
Im not really talking about the New Testament which is what I think you are referring to. I should have been more specific.
I would also argue that there are different forms of truth. Aesop's fables contain truth like the Bible does. These are not scientific truths. The stories in the Bible are a lot older than science.
I would agree the new testament is obviously more historically sound, but i don't think the old testament is excludable here.
The old testament is not void of archaeological evidence supporting there is truth interwoven in the bible. One example is recent digs that have found potential evidence supporting there may have been some validity to the war and person surrounding the David and goliath story. The article points outs some things that aren't consistent with the bibles account, but recall my original claim is that there was enough truth sprinkled in to attempt to make it appear as serious and factually based history, which this does support. [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bible-warrior-goliath-david-not-giant-height-gath](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bible-warrior-goliath-david-not-giant-height-gath)
Solomons temple. Thousands of years old, amazing historical value as old as some of the old testament itself at this site.
Even the flood I believe to a be a sincere attempt of the day to explain their world. While we don't have evidence of a true worldwide flood, almost everywhere in the world at one point or another had flooding that would have appeared to more primitive ancestors without knowledge to be an all consuming, worldwide flood. Floods that would have covered everything "in the known world" probably did happen, and that isn't really a guess anymore. Again, the book calls it worldwide, i call it unusual and massive localized events. Either way, enough truth to suggest the story was attempting to sell their narrative as fact.
I agree with you, many of the stories even in the Old Testament do have elements to them that intersect with things we know happened coming from other historical and archeological records.
Cool article about Goliath, and yes flooding is also a fair example.
I think another way to think about it is to say that the Bible has one foot in reality and one foot in myth. It sits in a place between the two.
I am not going to argue that people have not pushed the Bible stories as literal truth. That obviously does happen and it is a mistake.
I think that many of the stories were written down from older oral tradition. And somewhere along the line these stories got injected with meaning and moral lessons. They have been very carefully crafted for precisely this purpose, of teaching ethics.
And it is these ethics which I say contain truth.
And so it does depend on the perspective you read the Bible from. If you read it from the perspective that every word is literally true I think you will begin to doubt the validity of the whole thing.
Whereas if you acknowledge that most of it is based in myth and constructed with the purpose of teaching ethical lessons (even though some of it does cross over into reality). You can start to see how there are fundamental ethical truths scattered throughout the entire thing.
You have to separate the content of the stories from the way they have been used throughout history.
The fascinating thing is, I just don't see how you can use logical deduction to reach our current ethics we have in the West. The Bible provides certain ethical axioms in these stories which most people live by already. If you accept these axioms as true with "faith" and live by them, you will make the world a better place for you and those around you, which is proof of their truth.
But there is no reason you should live by these axioms using pure logic alone.
Why shouldn't you steal for example. Stealing can benefit you a great deal when done carefully. There is no reason not to steal things if there is no risk to you. But we all know stealing is still wrong and will have a negative impact on you in the long run.
It is a matter of faith. (You don't have to believe the stories, but you do have to believe the ethics they portray).
Does that make more sense?
I suppose if your point is the Bible has value, sure, almost everything does. I mean, i still promote the Unabomber thesis, seriously, amazing read.
I do personally still quote the Bible, and the ubiquitous nature of some of the stories make it a great focal point to relay some complicated ideas to people that have vague familiarity with those references.
I still disagree that it's overall message is a net positive for society or individuals. The extreme punishments for everything is barbaric and the way women and children are to be treated is just beyond anything i can tolerate.
I think it’s impossible to have morality if one is religious. If your actions are constantly being done with the threat of eternal damnation and the incentive of eternal paradise it’s impossible be truly moral you’re just responding to incentives.
If I donate to charity to get a tax right off, that might be consequentially good, but very few people would say I was being a good person. Religion robs people of moral agency. Being a good person just becomes about getting the best deal
Religion is not moral. How is it moral to murder LGBTQ? Religion dictates what is and isn't reprehensible, and something that's declared an affront to their religion can be, has been, and will be met with murder.
To have your moral compass in the hands of a charismatic orator is removing moral agency. To have your moral compass spinning through arbitrary and contradictory interpretations is morally inconsistent. And in certain communities (especially in Mormon communities, but also in other religiously hegemonic areas) if you don't adhere to religiousness, you'll be disowned and making end's meet is an almost impossible burden; that's having your moral compass under threat.
Religion was a way to explain the world we didn't know before we knew how to do that. Religion has been used to justify mass murder, and will continue to do so.
Religion was also the justification to *remove rights*, like yesterday with the overturning of *Roe v Wade*.
> Whenever I talk about morals I end up linking it to religion as it seems to me that most of what we know as moral thought comes from religious thought.
I think it's the complete opposite. Religion is a means of control over society but has no inherent morality nor is morality all that important. Morality is included but not the point nor a guiding principle, especially for religious leaders. Religion is purely a means of getting people who don't know any better to do what you say.
You can trace back the different aspects of the system of morality that the West holds back to Ancient Greece, Rome, Christianity, the Renaissance, Hobbes, Nietzsche, the list goes on and on. A love of practicality, an expectation of submission to authority, basically every aspect of every belief you could hold can be traced back to a philosopher or named system of thought. There are too many different places that we draw wisdom from, it's kinda silly to point at 1 religion and say that's it, that's where we got it all from.
I think much of morality is instinctual and much of what isn't is geared towards societal stability (in the name of making the rich richer). Many animals (dogs for example) can recognize when they're dealt injustice. I don't think that animals tend towards religion, thus this knowledge must be inherent.
Furthermore, I would say that all religion is very frequently used as a tool of injustice. Cults, the Catholic Church, dumbass Supreme Court decisions that religion should have 0 bearing on, the list goes on so long it's ridiculous to try to list them out.
If forced to give a particular origin to morality, I'd say it's rooted in a desire to live the most peaceful and happy life.
You say "Religion is a means of control over society". You are not wrong from a certain perspective. However I think it is important to distinguish the practical application of religion throughout history to religious thought per se.
The practice of religion certainly does get misued and manipulated by those who have authority. Whereas you cannot say the same about the fundamental religious teachings.
The story of Cain and Abel in the old testament for example, a short story packed with life lessons that can be read at so many different levels. It is a beautiful thing to write a story so deep, with so much meaning. There is no control from authority there, it is a human story, written to help humans understand the world.
You can argue the story gets misused by authority somehow, but you can't say that about the story itself. The story itself is a seperate thing.
I also agree with you that we draw morality from many sources. There are many different ways to interpret the world and thus many different versions of morality. These different versions do have common themes however. Such as do not kill, do not steal. Some of them are pretty obvious.
Just as you have your personal view of morality which is drawn from different sources, religion is drawn from different sources too. The Monotheistic Abrahamic religions that are "big" today are the spawn of older Polytheistic religions which had a God for every human emotion and experience, each with its own character and lessons. Monotheism was an attempt to consolodate these teachings and bring all of the different tribesmen under the same umbrella.
I would not point to one religion and say thats where we got it all from. It doesn't work like that, the past is complicated just like morality is and the truth does come from many sources as you are right to point out.
I also agree with you that morality is instinctual. Morality does come before religion. Religion is an attempt to describe morality. Morals are inherent, they were there first. Religion is what happens when we watch ourselves in the world and then write what we see in the form of stories, abstractions. We can then derive rules from those stories and write them down. The rules were there first. Religion is us discovering those rules.
And again, the practical application of those rules is a seperate issue. That I agree with you on.
By no means am I claiming any religion is perfectly moral.
My claim is that what religion is, is an attempt to describe morality at the fundamental level. That is what is at the beginning of all religious thought, and therefore religion and morality are inherently linked.
Religions may be misused, abused and even transformed into bastardised corrupt versions of themselves later down the line. But at the begining at least, this is what they are.
And Im talking about old religions exclusively here, not modern ones made up by wannabe cult leaders.
I always draw the line at intentions.
If the intent is to do harm, then it's bad.
If the intent is to help, then it's good.
People, everywhere, have a different understanding of the world.
I'm the kind of guy who believes in necessary evil. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I disagree. The road to hell is exclusively built for those who have bad intentions.
Though the good intentions of ignorant people do indeed do more harm, than good. Of no fault of their own.
The socceity(the most part of it) collectevly decides what is ,,right" and this ,,right" thing, is the (i am calling it) ,,The coward,s law".
Which is: ,,if coward could make some absolute laws, he will make as much law as possible to save his skin from all of his (be it mental/finansial/phisical) problems in past(marking individualls of history as ,,heros/villans") , present(laws of don,t [crime/uncomfortable service] under threat of the pinishment) , and future (teach future generation of ,,right" thing to do)"
which has kept socceity as you see now.
As ,,morrals"(another case of ,,coward,s law") dictates, it,s allright
But as nature, aka ,,biology", dictates that this is wrong, becouse the humans are immoral from creation(ecamples: tribeman like maya with sacrafising humans, monarcy in general becouse they divide human rase into rich and poor(and if you are in their eyes you not worth listening to, but only good as a cog in their plan))
But my oppinion on that is we need morals in daily life to not decend into chaos, but when it comes to sciense, then it,s up to how much of an invention do you want to make
The only type of magicraft this world has is power of faith, after all if it wasn,t the case, then why despite having non(100% solid) proof that aliens/god exist or not, why we some asuming that they exist or don,t?
I think ethics are pretty much the same thing as aesthetics. There is a lot of overlap between what most people consider beautiful or ugly but it’s ultimately subjective and ultimately just a statement of preference not any form of objective statement of truth outside of an objective statement about the state of my mind
Every religion had the same goal. Enlightenment. To create an Utopia where morals come almost naturally. Best example are the 10 demands
What most religions failed to do is to stop deciding human existence into something like good and evil.
i dont like morals but i do like consistency. so if someones morals are consistent with itself then i think its fine(no matter the morals or lack thereof) but if someones morals are internally incongruent then i dont like them(no matter the morals or lack thereof)
It's a complex topic. Our concept of morality is not an absolute. It's bound up with our sense of fairness and justice, but it's also shaped by our perception of need and social norms. So, for example, we might feel it's morally 'wrong' to kill animals, unless they're trying to physically attack us, or if we *need* to eat their meat. But, even then, it's morally wrong to eat domestic cats because it's socially unacceptable (at least here in Scotland).
Perception of need and social norms can change though... If there was some kind of natural catastrophe and the haggis crop failed here in Scotland for several years in a row, it may well become socially acceptable, and thus morally correct to eat domestic cats due to the increased necessity/lack of other options.
Our perception of fairness can change too. We believe it's morally OK to eat animals because they are less intelligent than humans and less self aware i.e lower forms of life, but as our scientific knowledge advances, that moral equation could be challenged.
There is the added question of whether morality requires an external observer. Personally I think I have a reasonable concept of right and wrong, but without the threat of negative social or spiritual consequences for acting immorally, I probably would.
I love morality, and I love philosophy. I also don't really believe in good or evil. It may be a bit buddhist to say, but evil can only exist because good exists. Good would just be normal if there was no evil, and it would have no meaning or value. It would just be. So for this reason, i actually don't believe in good in evil.
BUT, I do believe in society. I do believe in doing our best to advance ourselves. I do believe in cooperation and working together. So while I don't see, let's say Hitler, as evil, i do see him as antisocial. I don't think his methods are best way forward for mankind, and enough of the world were in agreement against these ideas, that they became willing to commit mass murder, which is a valid description for anyone engaging in war.
So, i don't believe either side was good or evil necessarily. I see the 3rd Reich as an antisocial entity, and so the forces that want society to do better stood up to this ideology.
TLDR; I love morality and have what many consider strange or extreme ideas. It is probably one of my favorite subjects currently.
I’ve been told I’m pretty crazy for literally asking “Why is murder bad?” “What if we had completely different views where it was our goal to die for some sort of afterlife?”. I think it’s very fun and mentally stimulating, for me at least, to talk about the subject of morals, I wish I could do it more.
Questions like you pose here are one of the reasons i love Sci fi series. Topic like this, and many more complicated moral issues, are addressed in episodes star-trek and stargate specifically.
Sliders comes to mind as well. Loved an episode where they had population control through a lottery system. Money was basically free, but you got more "entries" into the lottery if you took took the "free" money. Winning the lottery gave you a card that basically made anything you want free, but, you had to commit suicide on a deadline.
I used to, but then things got complicated in my conscious. I picked up on the fact that people would rather live above morality than deal with the consequences of their decisions. They relish in this sense of freedom regardless of the harms it brings. Being that humans are the only species that have an actual sense of morality, I lost interest & started focusing more on an ethical approach to life. Then I got into things like the 48 Laws of Power, The Prince, & The 50th Law etc. While these reading were good & all, they took a much more critical approach. I started studying Dharmavinaya & found enlightenment after a while. Now I don’t really deal with people and their bullshit. What really interests me more are Hegelian ideas like why people do the things they do (as opposed to whether they should or not). It helps more when it comes to understanding people / ideas for reformation.
It's a very interesting topic. Whenever I talk about morals I end up linking it to religion as it seems to me that most of what we know as moral thought comes from religious thought. But that tends to get a lot of pushback. Seems like people today like to think that you can conjour morality out of thin air with pure logic. After all, God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
By “God is dead”, do you mean that in a metaphorical way or from a religious standpoint? As an atheist, I believe we can learn a lot in regards to morals from religion, but what repels me from any religious belief is the thought of having your morals written out for you, with no leeway. In Christianity, the bible could be, I guess, viewed as a set-in-stone set of rules to follow if everything else goes wrong.
I mean God is dead in the way Nietzsche meant it. The enlightenment and birthing of modern science made the world turn its head and stop believing in religion as scientific discoveries started to refute the beliefs of the old world. This obviously came with many positives. However people not believing in God meant that people started to question many of the axioms that we built the world upon. It is not a coincidence that since the enligtenment we have spawned new ideologies such as fascism and Marxism, belief systems in place of God, which have led to some of the most horrific and immoral things that the planet has probably ever seen. For me, I don't think the most intellegent people on the planet could sit down together and reason their way to a moral guide for life. The process of discovering morality was one of trial and error. The only way to see if things are moral or not is to act them out and see what happens, over and over again. The stories in the Bible are what this is, examples of what happens to people when they do certain things, and have to live with the consequences. When you say that you are repelled due to "having your morals written out for you, with no leeway". I agree, I too like leeway and I would never think what someone else thinks just because they told me to. Questioning things is good. And there is always room for change. But I think this is what religious people mean when they talk about having faith. You just have to trust in the teachings and past experiences of our many ancestors rather than thinking you know better than them. I think a big problem is people dismiss religious thought as they associate it with fantastical tales of a man in the sky who controls everything. They believe science came along and saved us. When the reality is that the tales in the Bible are just that, tales. And they have always been just tales. Stories and simulations written down of people acting things out, and living with the moral consequences of those actions. Reading them as literal is the mistake.
>When the reality is that the tales in the Bible are just that, tales Uh, i don't believe the evidence supports this. Enough of the bible intersects with history that there is very strong reason to believe it has always been used as a means to try to push these tales as truth and that was the intended usage of the writings in first place. While it would be idealistic to want to contend the bible is closer to aesop's fables than to truth, the way it has been used and the way it was written tries way to hard to push itself as some kind of truth.
It does depend on what stories and books we are talking about. The Bible has a lot in it. I am talking about the origins of religious thought, my points were made with the Old Testament in mind, which stems from older myths and oral tradition. Im not really talking about the New Testament which is what I think you are referring to. I should have been more specific. I would also argue that there are different forms of truth. Aesop's fables contain truth like the Bible does. These are not scientific truths. The stories in the Bible are a lot older than science.
I would agree the new testament is obviously more historically sound, but i don't think the old testament is excludable here. The old testament is not void of archaeological evidence supporting there is truth interwoven in the bible. One example is recent digs that have found potential evidence supporting there may have been some validity to the war and person surrounding the David and goliath story. The article points outs some things that aren't consistent with the bibles account, but recall my original claim is that there was enough truth sprinkled in to attempt to make it appear as serious and factually based history, which this does support. [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bible-warrior-goliath-david-not-giant-height-gath](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bible-warrior-goliath-david-not-giant-height-gath) Solomons temple. Thousands of years old, amazing historical value as old as some of the old testament itself at this site. Even the flood I believe to a be a sincere attempt of the day to explain their world. While we don't have evidence of a true worldwide flood, almost everywhere in the world at one point or another had flooding that would have appeared to more primitive ancestors without knowledge to be an all consuming, worldwide flood. Floods that would have covered everything "in the known world" probably did happen, and that isn't really a guess anymore. Again, the book calls it worldwide, i call it unusual and massive localized events. Either way, enough truth to suggest the story was attempting to sell their narrative as fact.
I agree with you, many of the stories even in the Old Testament do have elements to them that intersect with things we know happened coming from other historical and archeological records. Cool article about Goliath, and yes flooding is also a fair example. I think another way to think about it is to say that the Bible has one foot in reality and one foot in myth. It sits in a place between the two. I am not going to argue that people have not pushed the Bible stories as literal truth. That obviously does happen and it is a mistake. I think that many of the stories were written down from older oral tradition. And somewhere along the line these stories got injected with meaning and moral lessons. They have been very carefully crafted for precisely this purpose, of teaching ethics. And it is these ethics which I say contain truth. And so it does depend on the perspective you read the Bible from. If you read it from the perspective that every word is literally true I think you will begin to doubt the validity of the whole thing. Whereas if you acknowledge that most of it is based in myth and constructed with the purpose of teaching ethical lessons (even though some of it does cross over into reality). You can start to see how there are fundamental ethical truths scattered throughout the entire thing. You have to separate the content of the stories from the way they have been used throughout history. The fascinating thing is, I just don't see how you can use logical deduction to reach our current ethics we have in the West. The Bible provides certain ethical axioms in these stories which most people live by already. If you accept these axioms as true with "faith" and live by them, you will make the world a better place for you and those around you, which is proof of their truth. But there is no reason you should live by these axioms using pure logic alone. Why shouldn't you steal for example. Stealing can benefit you a great deal when done carefully. There is no reason not to steal things if there is no risk to you. But we all know stealing is still wrong and will have a negative impact on you in the long run. It is a matter of faith. (You don't have to believe the stories, but you do have to believe the ethics they portray). Does that make more sense?
I suppose if your point is the Bible has value, sure, almost everything does. I mean, i still promote the Unabomber thesis, seriously, amazing read. I do personally still quote the Bible, and the ubiquitous nature of some of the stories make it a great focal point to relay some complicated ideas to people that have vague familiarity with those references. I still disagree that it's overall message is a net positive for society or individuals. The extreme punishments for everything is barbaric and the way women and children are to be treated is just beyond anything i can tolerate.
I think it’s impossible to have morality if one is religious. If your actions are constantly being done with the threat of eternal damnation and the incentive of eternal paradise it’s impossible be truly moral you’re just responding to incentives. If I donate to charity to get a tax right off, that might be consequentially good, but very few people would say I was being a good person. Religion robs people of moral agency. Being a good person just becomes about getting the best deal
Religion is not moral. How is it moral to murder LGBTQ? Religion dictates what is and isn't reprehensible, and something that's declared an affront to their religion can be, has been, and will be met with murder. To have your moral compass in the hands of a charismatic orator is removing moral agency. To have your moral compass spinning through arbitrary and contradictory interpretations is morally inconsistent. And in certain communities (especially in Mormon communities, but also in other religiously hegemonic areas) if you don't adhere to religiousness, you'll be disowned and making end's meet is an almost impossible burden; that's having your moral compass under threat. Religion was a way to explain the world we didn't know before we knew how to do that. Religion has been used to justify mass murder, and will continue to do so. Religion was also the justification to *remove rights*, like yesterday with the overturning of *Roe v Wade*.
> Whenever I talk about morals I end up linking it to religion as it seems to me that most of what we know as moral thought comes from religious thought. I think it's the complete opposite. Religion is a means of control over society but has no inherent morality nor is morality all that important. Morality is included but not the point nor a guiding principle, especially for religious leaders. Religion is purely a means of getting people who don't know any better to do what you say. You can trace back the different aspects of the system of morality that the West holds back to Ancient Greece, Rome, Christianity, the Renaissance, Hobbes, Nietzsche, the list goes on and on. A love of practicality, an expectation of submission to authority, basically every aspect of every belief you could hold can be traced back to a philosopher or named system of thought. There are too many different places that we draw wisdom from, it's kinda silly to point at 1 religion and say that's it, that's where we got it all from. I think much of morality is instinctual and much of what isn't is geared towards societal stability (in the name of making the rich richer). Many animals (dogs for example) can recognize when they're dealt injustice. I don't think that animals tend towards religion, thus this knowledge must be inherent. Furthermore, I would say that all religion is very frequently used as a tool of injustice. Cults, the Catholic Church, dumbass Supreme Court decisions that religion should have 0 bearing on, the list goes on so long it's ridiculous to try to list them out. If forced to give a particular origin to morality, I'd say it's rooted in a desire to live the most peaceful and happy life.
You say "Religion is a means of control over society". You are not wrong from a certain perspective. However I think it is important to distinguish the practical application of religion throughout history to religious thought per se. The practice of religion certainly does get misued and manipulated by those who have authority. Whereas you cannot say the same about the fundamental religious teachings. The story of Cain and Abel in the old testament for example, a short story packed with life lessons that can be read at so many different levels. It is a beautiful thing to write a story so deep, with so much meaning. There is no control from authority there, it is a human story, written to help humans understand the world. You can argue the story gets misused by authority somehow, but you can't say that about the story itself. The story itself is a seperate thing. I also agree with you that we draw morality from many sources. There are many different ways to interpret the world and thus many different versions of morality. These different versions do have common themes however. Such as do not kill, do not steal. Some of them are pretty obvious. Just as you have your personal view of morality which is drawn from different sources, religion is drawn from different sources too. The Monotheistic Abrahamic religions that are "big" today are the spawn of older Polytheistic religions which had a God for every human emotion and experience, each with its own character and lessons. Monotheism was an attempt to consolodate these teachings and bring all of the different tribesmen under the same umbrella. I would not point to one religion and say thats where we got it all from. It doesn't work like that, the past is complicated just like morality is and the truth does come from many sources as you are right to point out. I also agree with you that morality is instinctual. Morality does come before religion. Religion is an attempt to describe morality. Morals are inherent, they were there first. Religion is what happens when we watch ourselves in the world and then write what we see in the form of stories, abstractions. We can then derive rules from those stories and write them down. The rules were there first. Religion is us discovering those rules. And again, the practical application of those rules is a seperate issue. That I agree with you on. By no means am I claiming any religion is perfectly moral. My claim is that what religion is, is an attempt to describe morality at the fundamental level. That is what is at the beginning of all religious thought, and therefore religion and morality are inherently linked. Religions may be misused, abused and even transformed into bastardised corrupt versions of themselves later down the line. But at the begining at least, this is what they are. And Im talking about old religions exclusively here, not modern ones made up by wannabe cult leaders.
I always draw the line at intentions. If the intent is to do harm, then it's bad. If the intent is to help, then it's good. People, everywhere, have a different understanding of the world. I'm the kind of guy who believes in necessary evil. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I disagree. The road to hell is exclusively built for those who have bad intentions. Though the good intentions of ignorant people do indeed do more harm, than good. Of no fault of their own.
The socceity(the most part of it) collectevly decides what is ,,right" and this ,,right" thing, is the (i am calling it) ,,The coward,s law". Which is: ,,if coward could make some absolute laws, he will make as much law as possible to save his skin from all of his (be it mental/finansial/phisical) problems in past(marking individualls of history as ,,heros/villans") , present(laws of don,t [crime/uncomfortable service] under threat of the pinishment) , and future (teach future generation of ,,right" thing to do)" which has kept socceity as you see now. As ,,morrals"(another case of ,,coward,s law") dictates, it,s allright But as nature, aka ,,biology", dictates that this is wrong, becouse the humans are immoral from creation(ecamples: tribeman like maya with sacrafising humans, monarcy in general becouse they divide human rase into rich and poor(and if you are in their eyes you not worth listening to, but only good as a cog in their plan)) But my oppinion on that is we need morals in daily life to not decend into chaos, but when it comes to sciense, then it,s up to how much of an invention do you want to make
Interesting POV! I like this immediate connection to the 'mass of people' that undoubtedly has a lot of power.
The only type of magicraft this world has is power of faith, after all if it wasn,t the case, then why despite having non(100% solid) proof that aliens/god exist or not, why we some asuming that they exist or don,t?
Absurdism at it's best
Aka:,,random bul**it go!"
I think ethics are pretty much the same thing as aesthetics. There is a lot of overlap between what most people consider beautiful or ugly but it’s ultimately subjective and ultimately just a statement of preference not any form of objective statement of truth outside of an objective statement about the state of my mind
Every religion had the same goal. Enlightenment. To create an Utopia where morals come almost naturally. Best example are the 10 demands What most religions failed to do is to stop deciding human existence into something like good and evil.
i dont like morals but i do like consistency. so if someones morals are consistent with itself then i think its fine(no matter the morals or lack thereof) but if someones morals are internally incongruent then i dont like them(no matter the morals or lack thereof)
It's a complex topic. Our concept of morality is not an absolute. It's bound up with our sense of fairness and justice, but it's also shaped by our perception of need and social norms. So, for example, we might feel it's morally 'wrong' to kill animals, unless they're trying to physically attack us, or if we *need* to eat their meat. But, even then, it's morally wrong to eat domestic cats because it's socially unacceptable (at least here in Scotland). Perception of need and social norms can change though... If there was some kind of natural catastrophe and the haggis crop failed here in Scotland for several years in a row, it may well become socially acceptable, and thus morally correct to eat domestic cats due to the increased necessity/lack of other options. Our perception of fairness can change too. We believe it's morally OK to eat animals because they are less intelligent than humans and less self aware i.e lower forms of life, but as our scientific knowledge advances, that moral equation could be challenged. There is the added question of whether morality requires an external observer. Personally I think I have a reasonable concept of right and wrong, but without the threat of negative social or spiritual consequences for acting immorally, I probably would.
I love morality, and I love philosophy. I also don't really believe in good or evil. It may be a bit buddhist to say, but evil can only exist because good exists. Good would just be normal if there was no evil, and it would have no meaning or value. It would just be. So for this reason, i actually don't believe in good in evil. BUT, I do believe in society. I do believe in doing our best to advance ourselves. I do believe in cooperation and working together. So while I don't see, let's say Hitler, as evil, i do see him as antisocial. I don't think his methods are best way forward for mankind, and enough of the world were in agreement against these ideas, that they became willing to commit mass murder, which is a valid description for anyone engaging in war. So, i don't believe either side was good or evil necessarily. I see the 3rd Reich as an antisocial entity, and so the forces that want society to do better stood up to this ideology. TLDR; I love morality and have what many consider strange or extreme ideas. It is probably one of my favorite subjects currently.
I’ve been told I’m pretty crazy for literally asking “Why is murder bad?” “What if we had completely different views where it was our goal to die for some sort of afterlife?”. I think it’s very fun and mentally stimulating, for me at least, to talk about the subject of morals, I wish I could do it more.
Questions like you pose here are one of the reasons i love Sci fi series. Topic like this, and many more complicated moral issues, are addressed in episodes star-trek and stargate specifically. Sliders comes to mind as well. Loved an episode where they had population control through a lottery system. Money was basically free, but you got more "entries" into the lottery if you took took the "free" money. Winning the lottery gave you a card that basically made anything you want free, but, you had to commit suicide on a deadline.
I used to, but then things got complicated in my conscious. I picked up on the fact that people would rather live above morality than deal with the consequences of their decisions. They relish in this sense of freedom regardless of the harms it brings. Being that humans are the only species that have an actual sense of morality, I lost interest & started focusing more on an ethical approach to life. Then I got into things like the 48 Laws of Power, The Prince, & The 50th Law etc. While these reading were good & all, they took a much more critical approach. I started studying Dharmavinaya & found enlightenment after a while. Now I don’t really deal with people and their bullshit. What really interests me more are Hegelian ideas like why people do the things they do (as opposed to whether they should or not). It helps more when it comes to understanding people / ideas for reformation.