I no longer think religion is essential for morality

I think that’s a great point, and we should use that as you say in testing the spirits. CS Lewis has a good point in his book the last battle, where the Narnians are unsure how to assess the fake Aslan. The fake Aslan is cruel, and very much unlike anything that they know of from the real Aslan.

I heard of a book that describe the three major character types in a church that lead to Schism. The first is interested in rules and regulations, to the exclusion of compassion and the gospel. The second, interested in compassion, but wants to ignore rules and the gospel. The third, is interested in the gospel to the exclusion of rules and compassion. However, I do think, particularly in today’s climate where we expect Justice and people to live longer, and are not used to having our environment control Our lives, we expect God to be just. that frightens me because it indicates how much we allow our environment to interpret our view of God.

Hello Mark,

Abraham Lincoln, when asked why he signed the Emancipation Proclamation reportedly said, “because God told me to”. But a believer almost never means that they heard a voice, it’s more, “God moved my heart”.

I think the creator of the universe can make it clear that He is speaking to us.

while I can never say that God can’t do something, I would personally be very skeptical about that. Haddon Robinson, in his book “Decision Making by the Book,” from Radio Bible class, said that God very seldom ever talks to us directly. He uses wisdom, reading the scriptures, and the God-given intellect that we have to direct us in most things… I remember my own mother-in-law telling me that when she was in Bob Jones, someone came to her and said that God told him he would marry her. Needless to say, she told him that God had not told her anything like that yet. He also is not my father-in-law! my own parents always told us to be very careful about anybody who told us that God had directed them to do something about our lives.
James Dobson is a psychologist from Focus on the Family. despite the fact that I disagree with him in many things, I do appreciate that he warns that significant stress can cause us to misinterpret promptings which come from our anxiety as voices from God. I believe that we have spoken about how Pentecostal and charismatic believe they have heard from God. Those in other religions who go into ecstasy, such as sufis, similar to Pentecostals, think that God directs them personally. @MarkD

I suspect that @Richard_Wright1 also thinks that God only prompts things in rare occasions, but that is my take. Thanks.

1 Like

Hi Richard

Do you have a citation for that? I don’t recall hearing it.

Hi John,

It was from a humongous 2-volume book on Lincoln written by a pastor in the 1920s or so. I can’t remember the name of it. Sorry.

This turned out to be an interesting summary. There were some comments connected to the proclamation, but not yours. This book is mentioned further on; I suspect it may be yours and the quoted portion of it in the wiki shows an attention to accuracy.

William Eleazar Barton quotes this version in The Soul of Abraham Lincoln (1920),

1 Like

I appeal to the sense of morality that we all have.

If we are going to claim that morality is objective, then we would need objective evidence to support this belief. Otherwise, it boils down to the subjective opinion that this is how God is.

In the realm of subjective v. objective, who you put your trust in would be subjective.

There is also an obvious undercurrent to the Christian argument for morality. It is argued that God is good because of what God has done. This is an appeal to the subjective sense of morality that humans have which makes subjective morality the basis for human morality.

We are 50+ posts in, so I feel safe in playing the Godwin card of the Nuremberg defense. “I was just following orders” is not a valid defense for immoral acts. The foundation of human morality is that each of us is a moral agent and are capable of determining morality for ourselves, and we are held to account based on that human based sense of morality.

1 Like

I think you are right about not being able to say we are just following orders. However, there is also mental incapability to a certain extent. We call ourselves responsible, but we are only limited organisms. Crowd mentality, lack of maturity or intelligence, ignorance, etc can be mitigating factors.

But–I agree with your premise.

We also allow insanity pleas in court cases. This is where someone’s moral sense is or was lacking. We believe, as a society, that a normal human being is capable of determining morality on their own, and we are also capable of recognizing when that ability is compromised in our fellow human beings. In other words, our entire legal system is based on subjective morality.

1 Like

I had no idea Lincoln was such a freethinker. My Christian elementary school history books implied he was driven strongly by faith.

His struggles sound like he was very human. I like him the more for reading this.

1 Like

I don’t mean to say that faith is a bad thing to drive him; especially the desire to do unto others (service) as one believes Christ has done for us. . I just really appreciate his down-to-earthiness. It’s easier to sympathize with someone who also struggled.

@John_Dalton

I’m not so sure how much of a free thinker Lincoln was. He never joined a church, but was influenced by 2 groups that went door-to-door to teach the bible, including the restoration movement Campbellites, who were foundation of my church (International Churches of Christ). We know he purposely stayed a virgin until marriage because of Christian beliefs. His secretary (assistant in modern terms) stated that Lincoln kept a bible on his presidential desk that was, “often open”.

1 Like

I am not saying that faith is a bad thing, either. Faith alone can be bad if it leads to blind obedience, but in my experience this isn’t how Christians function. Although some Christians may not agree, I tend to think that most Christians believe God is moral because they judge God’s actions to be moral using their own sense of morality.

1 Like

Yes. And where did we get that sense from? It wasn’t instinctual, but had to be taught us by our parents and culture, who themselves were taught it … and on an evolutionary outlook it took eons for any of that moral sense to develop. Some might say it’s ultimate refinements and definitions finally surface in the pages of some really old sacred texts, which themselves even show it still developing.

I’m claiming it exists in some objective form (even if my own apprehension of it is necessarily subjective.) Why do I need to provide objective (read: empirical or scientific) evidence for it? Methinks you are confusing my faith assertion with a submission to a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Ahhh --but it’s not our own. Even on your reading (i.e. --without any explicit appeal to God or sacred texts) you had to be taught your morality by parents, culture, etc. And they in turn inherited it from others before.

1 Like

@T_aquaticus, @Mervin_Bitikofer

We’re not talking about any god, we’re talking about the god of the bible. This god sent His Son to be tortured and murdered as a sacrifice for people’s sins, knowing the vast majority would reject him.

It depends on whom we trust. I trust a god who sacrificed His Son for me. You trust the intuitions and philosophical arguments of yourself and others, meaning flawed sinners. And really meaning you’ll trust those whom you happen to agree with.

For one, only the bible and the qu’ran have a creator god giving moral codes. The other world religions either are atheistic, pantheistic or multi-theistic.

Two, the existence of multiple faiths doesn’t preclude the possibility of a true god who communicated an objective moral code. In the Christian worldview there is loving, creator God and an opposing, spiritual force. That IMO best describes this human experience.

One, and even Novella concedes this, that the moral vibe of yourself and Western philosophers’ has been influenced substantially by the teachings of Jesus Christ, so your, “2 computers in the night discussing morals” narrative is really fiction.

We all agree that murder and stealing is wrong. How about adultery, or about having more than one wife, or about pre-marital or homosexual sex? The fact is that there are very different opinions in the non-religious world on those things.

It boils down whether or not God exists. Most instinctively recognize that a 100 billion lightyear-sized entity that produced conscious, intelligent life that appeared from ontological nothingness is objective evidence of a creator. The existence of love, purpose, order, beauty and good compel most theists to accept that God is essentially good but is opposed by a malevolent force, which agrees with what Jesus taught. IMO that can be considered objective evidence for the god of the bible. And theists don’t accept that God can be bad or neutral because it doesn’t match the human experience to them.

Your rejection of Christ is also an appeal to a subjective moral sense.

This is an obvious false equivalency. The Nazi’s didn’t claim to follow a god. In fact, they consciously rejected Jesus as a lame, weak and passive god. The Jews of the OT had seen God stop the flowing of the Jordan river and had seen or their parents told them about the miracles in Egypt, including the parting of the Red Sea. That is why they obeyed the orders, trusting that this god who had just delivered them from the pharaoh must have had a legitimate reason for the order.

Again, it ultimately comes down to what we put our faith in. Atheists have faith that an unthinkably large universe that produced conscious and intelligent beings, love, good, beauty, order and complexity from ontological nothingness does not necessitate a creator. That’s really the disagreement. Once you recognize the need for a creator, which the vast majority do, then it only makes sense, to most of us, that the creator, based on human experience, is good and is opposed by a malevolent force. If God is good, then it only makes sense that he would communicate a moral code.

How did you determine that human morality is not instinctual? From what I can see, human empathy is an innate ability that we seem to be born with, as is the ability to reason. These form the foundation of human morality. Even in other species we see innate and instinctual social hierarchies, be it a wolf pack or bee hive.

If you are claiming that morality is objective then you are making a factual statement, not a faith based one.

You are depending on yourself to make the right choice on who to trust, and you are a flawed sinner by your own description.

There is no evidence to include the Christian view of morality as being an objective one, which would be the main point. I don’t see how any one religion can claim to have authority over another, so what we are left with is a bunch of claimed objective moralities that contradict each other.

I would suggest that it is the other way around. Human culture and morality has greatly influenced Christian teachings.

I think you might be a little too focused on your own religion. There are many religious traditions throughout history that had immoral creator gods. I really don’t see why God would be incapable of being immoral if God so chooses, nor do I see why anything God commands would be moral by God simply uttering it.

I don’t reject Christ. I don’t accept Christ because there is a lack of evidence for the claims made about him.

Again, I don’t see why deities make a difference here. All someone has to do is say they believe everything Hitler commanded was moral because they trusted him, and they are on the same footing as the moral position you are describing. From that point onward, anything Hitler commanded was moral by definition. That’s the problem with replacing morality with obedience.

I am an atheist and I have no faith or beliefs as to the origin of the universe. You seem to be a bit confused as to how atheism works.

There is nothing exclusive about faith and fact. I can make faith-based statements about alleged facts. They might be wrong, or perhaps my faith is unwarranted or in something that proves untrustworthy. But the claim made would indeed be a factual one.

Well – okay. I made no such determination; and in fact should not have stated that with the apparent certainty my words conveyed. You could be right that there are some instinctual or built-in components to morality. I have no beef with that one way or the other. Instinct doesn’t get you “all the way”, obviously. That is what I would object more strenuously to.

Where I will push back, though, is on your assertion that reason is a component that leads you (or helps lead you) to morality. Reason doesn’t get you to any morality any more than science does. Reason needs a set of premises to work on first (just like science needs observations and data). Without any premises to work on, there is nothing for logic to work with.

Reason may help us see that if I spend my time hating my neighbors, they will probably hate me back, and this will make for rotten community life. But for us to recognize any moral problem there we first have to admit the premise that people ought to care for each other in community units and do things to foster the health of that particular social unit. Without admitting these value-assigning premises entirely prior to any reasoning or any science, you can’t reach any “ought” statement whatsoever. Perhaps you might suggest that survival of our species should be a premise. One can still ask “why so?” and reason helps you out not one iota. There is no way to escape the faith-basis of morality.

2 Likes

You can make any statement you want, but merely making a statement does not make it objective. There are certain requirements for a statement to be objective.

I would definitely agree with that.

Perhaps I can change your mind.

What I am arguing is that morality and reason work together, not in isolation. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to have a basic understanding of their emotional state. You can know from your own experience what those emotions are like. You know what it feels like to be mistreated or be the victim of injustice. Reason allows us to predict how our actions affect others. In a way, it is a cause and effect type of relationship. Empathy allows us to measure the effect. Reason allows us to figure out the cause, and perhaps prevent bad effects.

1 Like

I like your reasoning here. [And if we were to choose some favorite candidate for an instinctually “built-in” moral tool, I would vote for empathy and love the thought that this God-instilled capability finds a natural home in us.] I will even agree that reason can help … once it has some premises to work with. The problem with an assertion that you can get there with reason alone is this: I have lots of other “built-in” competing instincts I can pander to as well. What makes you select empathy from out the panoply of other instincts (lust, greed, pride, pleasure …) that you could have chosen from? You must have some idea for where you want to go … if I act on my personal lusts or greeds, community doesn’t end up faring so well, you might say … and so my experience coupled with reason should lead me logically to act on empathy instead. Well – okay; but notice that this already admits a premise of faith: that perhaps community should be prioritized over personal or familial interests. So the question comes back … why? There is always some teleology creeping in through your back door, and only after you have admitted it, can you set your reason and logic about their work.

1 Like