I no longer think religion is essential for morality

Hi, Richard!

Well, yes and no. The voice from heaven certainly was intended to convey a message, but only some individuals truly understood that message. I’m only cautioning that the disposition of the heart affects the reception of the message, and people often mistake their their own desires for a “message” from God. As well, many wolves make false claims to mislead the sheep, so I prefer caution in this area.

It’s not a problem for Christian morality. However, you seemed to be suggesting that the “problem” of morality did not exist prior to Christ, so I was just pointing out the historical fact that Hammurabi’s Code predates the Christian worldview. I apologize if I misunderstood.

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Not playing golf is one of my favorite sports, actually – and I think I’m a real contender this year. I have diligently not practiced on virtually every nice day this spring, and I’ve made it a point not to order the best clubs that money can buy. In fact, I’ve already got it on my calendar to not be at this year’s PGA. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Sorry – I’m just making schput here at the moment since I’ve already been around the block a few times with T on this one. But don’t mind me – carry on! Besides, I’ve got a golf game to miss.

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To carry on with the analogy, making atheism into a belief system would be like making golf in to a belief system due to the simple fact that golfers have beliefs. Christians and theists in general have very important beliefs in their lives, so it is very natural that they would project this view onto atheists and think that atheism is a pillar of their worldview. Quite frankly, it isn’t, but I think it is understandable why that misconception exists. Also, atheists do have beliefs, but they aren’t “atheistic” beliefs in any meaningful way.

Oh, and some atheists like a good debate. There’s that, too. :wink:

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Hi Jay,

I’m also cautious on God communicating messages. For the record, I don’t believe God has talked directly to anyone since the biblical period. This particular debate started in an interchange between @MarkD and myself when he said Abraham just could have imagined that God wanted him to sacrifice Isaac, as in hearing a voice in his mind. My point is that if God wants to get His message across in a clear way He is more than capable of that, and there would be no confusion, which I’m sure you agree with. I brought up Acts 9 because Jesus communicated a message to Paul even though he was with a crowd, with Paul understood everything Jesus said while the others heard, “the sound”.

Yes, there was a misunderstanding, thanks for the apology. The, “problem” was the question of whether or not there can be objective morality.

Yes, I went off on my own tangent and forgot to return to the central question of Abraham. The sacrifice of Isaac comes near the end of Abraham’s life, and he had by that time a long history of dealings with God. What I think is interesting about the Abraham narrative is that he continually attempts to bring about the fulfillment of God’s promises by his own efforts, often involving manipulation and deception.

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There are other things impressed in the human psyche at deep levels, along with empathy, and our ability to reason, which impact on morality. The Nazis make a good example: they manipulated these factors at every opportunity. They played on people’s sense of disgust, loyalty, fairness etc. through constant propaganda. They also explicitly instructed people to ignore their natural empathy for their unfortunate neighbours. Even still, only the war gave them the cover (both domestically and internationally) to commit their most vile crimes. The industrial methods of murder they eventually adopted were in part a response to people being driven mad by more direct involvement in mass murder–a function of empathy.

As for the core group of Nazis themselves, I wonder how far they would have ever gotten without the one demonic man at their head.

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Hello T,

Is it a subjective opinion that my mother is a loving mother? I realize the question of God being loving is different, but my point was that most in our neck of the world instinctively recognize and accept a loving god first, then become obedient.

Then you must recognized that your moral system developed in a world seeped in Christian thought and practice.

I guess I just disagree with that. Maybe an Intel chip in the night might come up with that idea, but in this existence, with a universe this big that displays morality, love, justice, beauty, sacrifice and order, I see this compelling, if God exists, a moral God.

Where exactly is the judgement? If God exists He is an awfully powerful God, and if he were immoral, how could anyone have a good life? If God exists, and there is morality and love, those things must come from God and that makes him a loving, moral God. There really isn’t a lot of judgement involved. The only option you would have is that maybe God’s, “kind of moral, and kind of not”. Again, the judgement is whether God exists or not.

Nor my intent. I just wanted to show that there is historical evidence for Christ.

One, that’s not the point. You equate obeying the Old Testament god to obeying Hitler. My point is that if the Exodus narrative is true, then the Hebrews slave nation observed God delivering them from the oppressive Egyptians by creating plagues, opening a sea, stopping a river, destroying an army that was about to slaughter them, guiding them in the night by fire and providing food and water in the desert. They had objective, powerful reasons to trust that no modern can imagine. There were no such reasons to obey Hitler.

Two, if someone did perform a miracle, then most would understand instinctively that the God that he had access to must be in every way so far beyond what humans can imagine that it must have a moral character, since the world that this God created displays morality.

Atheism is a belief system IMO. That’s because we’re not Intel chips in the night. We’re evolved humans who live in a universe that has not always existed, and most people want/need/are compelled to search for answers for existence, including atheists. This universe displays love, morality, good, justice, beauty, order and complexity - a fact which also compels people to look for answers to explain the nature of our existence. Those who reject the existence of anything beyond the physical come up with a set of beliefs to explain our existence, which is a belief system.

Hello John,

Your response fails the get to the root of what caused actions of the 3rd Reich. You merely listed the logistics of how the holocaust played out. The question is, what prompted Hitler to spend the time, energy and resources to kidnap and murder millions of innocents, many of whom were leaders in the military, industry and government, when they were planning and during a war? How could one see that as, “good” for the country? And we can’t even say he was deluded as to how the world would view their actions - they had plans for suicide if caught. This existence of this level of evil, I think, is one of the strongest arguments for the spiritual realm.

That doesn’t change the fact that it is a subjective opinion.

Christian thought and practice developed in a world full of human thought and practice.

Again, those are subjective opinions. If we are looking for an objective morality then we need something beyond subjective human opinions.

The subjective judgement is that humans live a good life. We are using our own subjective opinions to determine that our lives are good.

So might makes right? What Hitler did was immoral simply because he wasn’t as powerful as God? If Hitler killed the first born of every Jewish family it would have been moral if Hitler could also perform miracles?

I really don’t see how might makes right, or how doing supernatural miracles automatically makes your actions moral.

Atheism isn’t an answer to why we exist, so I don’t know why you would label it as such. Atheism is simply a lack of beliefs in deities. Nothing more, nothing less.

War gives a whole lot of cover or “justification” for the worst of our vile impulses. Which is why it is so scary to me that we here in the U.S. have effectively sold ourselves over to a “perpetual war” mentality now. “Fear of other” is a very cruel god indeed, and too many now pledge their allegiance to it.

Here might be an interesting twist on the O.P question: Is religion necessary before one could have or recognize immorality? I had inquired of Taquaticus before whether or not he believed in evil, and I don’t think he ever responded. Perhaps we’ve covered this before and I’d just forgotten. But do you think there is such a thing as sin or evil, John?

I must have missed it or skimmed over it. My apologies.

If evil is people doing immoral things to others, then I think there is evil. Evil implies intent, at least in my view. Things like earthquakes and the HIV virus don’t have intent, so what they do is not evil. If someone falls asleep behind the wheel and kills a family in another car, that is just really bad judgment, but it isn’t evil. If someone purposefully and knowingly rams their vehicle into a group of people and kills some of them, that’s evil. In other words, evil is knowing that what you are about to do is really, really wrong, and doing it anyway.

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Hello T,

Good response on evil. I would like to see how you would answer a question I had for @John_Dalton which, for the 2nd time, he has chosen not to answer. I’ll include the whole exchange for context.

We were talking about some of the implications for morality, not root causes. I actually did though by asserting that without Hitler, the Nazis never go anywhere.

His and their reasoning is well documented. Why do you think it has to do with a spiritual realm? Hatred of other peoples isn’t unusual. The horrible lengths to which the Nazis went were, but the 20th century was a unique period of time in human history.

I think people could certainly have a sense that some things are wrong without religion. It’s only a step to a concept of “immorality” from there, with only a very simple philosophy required. It’s possible the earliest such efforts involved rudimentary religious thought.

I don’t think we have! But we might have I guess :slight_smile: Outside of a religious context, I’m not sure “sin” has any meaning. “Evil” is a label we put on bad things–I don’t think it has any kind of independent existence.

Sorry, what question? Have I answered it now?

There’s a whole deep cauldron of discussion stuff we could draw out of those sentences. But just to pick up on one thing … it sounds like many of us could agree that “immorality” is much more easy to identify and agree upon (by anybody, religious or not) than morality. We may dicker around about what does or doesn’t make for true altruism or even whether such a thing really exists at all … but nobody beats around the bush in denouncing the person who just stomped on their toe or took a sledge hammer to the hood of their car. Regarding that miscreant, the verdict is in and it is unanimous.

So even if non-religious people don’t know what to do with the “sin” word itself, they very much do have that category, and have it well stocked. And it is not an empty set: racism and sexual oppression, for example are solidly and emphatically recognized as bad to an extent that would do the Puritans proud (or our caricature of them, in any case).

That it is so easy to recognize many [some?] evils, or whatever equivalent of that word that secularists can accept, must say something about our subject.

I’m not so sure. Those are obvious because the harm caused is obvious. But people still disagree about what immorality is for many other things.

I guess it’s a question of labelling here. We can call things bad, wrong, immoral, sin, evil, etc. But “sin” to me suggests a crime against some kind of religious figure or concept. The other words above don’t necessarily carry that baggage.

I’m not sure what. If we have no sense of right and wrong, we can’t have a morality at all. Simply discussing morality presupposes that we can make such delineations.

Your not sure!!! Really? So a stranger can casually saunter into into your abode, cart off your valuables under your nose declaring that he thinks they should belong to him now … and you would be okay with that??? [if so … you must have Christian living down better than I do… a lot better … make sure to private message me with your physical address. And maybe an inventory of your worldly goods with special attention to electronics, furniture, and appliances. (Knowing dimensions of larger furniture might be handy …) :sunglasses: ]

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You’ve misunderstood me. The harm done to me in that case is also obvious, and I think everyone would agree it’s immoral. But people might disagree about many more nuanced situations, sexual morality, etc. So immorality is not necessarily easy to agree on, as you said. That’s what I’m not sure about.

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I would suspect that there have been hundreds of books written on this subject. Two decades ago I took at college course on 20th century history, and it was a big part of that course as well.

From my reading and poor recollection on the subject, World War I is what gave birth to Hitler. Many Germans felt betrayed by their government when they surrendered in WWI, and the harsh Treaty of Versailles that followed bankrupted and neutered the former German Empire. It was out of this foment that Hitler rose, and he incorporated already existing anti-Semitism and German ancestral myths into his movement. As Germany conquered surrounding nations they didn’t simply take over the population. The idea was to replace those populations with Germans, and death camps were a part of that strategy. Germany also used mass starvation to that same end.

All in all, we have a mix of revenge, greed, dehumanization, and tribalism. It also shows us how powerful the mob mentality can be and how we have to guard against it. I don’t know see how you go from “people do really terrible things to other people” to “there’s a spiritual realm”, but I it would certainly be an interesting line of reasoning.

I think there is a lot of truth in that statement. The same could be said about Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia or Mussolini and the rise of fascism in Italy around the same time. Political movements often form around a charismatic leader. These movements are like a wild fire where the fuel is the populous and the leader is the match.

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