This is demonstrably incorrect, since people invent meaning all the time with new words having new meanings. And it is not just words, but many other things which people invent, which people quite often find to provide many different meaningful ways to spend their time and live their lives.
Frankly this looks like a rather preposterous way of some people have decided to declare and insist that only the way they have chosen to live their life is meaningful. I must stand in opposition to this in the strongest way possible.
Both horns of Euthyphro dilemma are problematic (to use your terminology “nonsense”). It’s a false dilemma. What is objectively good in the world stems from our natures and that is the same thing as what God wills for us. Given our nature, neither could be other than they are.
There can be no question then, either of God’s having arbitrarily commanded something different for us (torturing babies for fun, or whatever) or of there being a standard of goodness apart from Him. Again, the Euthyphro dilemma is a false one; the third option that it fails to consider is that what is morally obligatory is what God commands in accordance with a non-arbitrary and unchanging standard of goodness that is not independent of Him… He is not under the moral law precisely because He is the moral law." Feser
This is the kind of goofy reasoning which renders any claim that God is good to be utterly meaningless. I could say it is very useful for the devil who wants to be your god, but more realistically it is very useful for those using religion to get people to do whatever they want.
So again this is a way of thinking I must completely stand against in my opposition to bad religion.
Objective meaning? That would be meaning you can demonstrate. And yes you can invent this because you can invent things which can then demonstrate their meaningfulness. This is kind of the foundation of the use of technology in the modern world. You don’t have to believe in cell phones in order for them to work, be useful, and thus be meaningful. These are quite capable of being demonstrated.
What meanings are you calling “objective?” I am somehow doubting that I would see the word “objective” as being applicable.
I’m not sure how saying that someone is worshipping the devil (!) aligns with the guidelines on gracious dialogue and respectful discussion — but I could be wrong.
Especially because he said
That certainly doesn’t align with the idea that God could command someone to rape his own daughter and that it would become morally good simply because God commanded it. If I’m not mistaken, that reflects an Islamic view — the belief that God is absolutely arbitrary and that whatever He wills becomes good by virtue of coming from Him. This is certainly not a Christian belief, and, if I understand correctly, it’s definitely not what Vinnie was implying either.
It’s funny because just a week (I think) ago, some of my posts were removed after I argued with another user that abortion and defending abortion is incompatible with following Christ in any way, shape, or form. That was deemed a violation of the guidelines on gracious dialogue…
“Seeing is believing” sounds like an equivalence which is a shorthand for both:
If you see then you believe
and if you believe then you see.
I think second is more true than the first. Psychologists have demonstrated that perception is not independent of belief. In the first, we often see things we do not believe, like in magic shows. If we add more precision, more controlled conditions, and extend to demonstration like we have in science then this works better. That at least provides a reasonable expectation that others should believe. But we know this is not always the case even then.
It most certainly does not align with the guidelines. I said nothing of the kind. I take no responsibility for you leaping over the enormous gap from one to the other. The point is that defining good as simply what someone dictates is not only very useful for any evil dictator but it is the basic “might makes right” philosophy by which they typically operate.
As I said, that’s a Muslim view, not a Christian one. The idea that God’s will is absolutely arbitrary and that He can change right into wrong has nothing to do with Christianity.
Well I don’t think the statement you quote is correct even in theological frameworks I don’t agree with. Furthermore it is a statement so full of different premises and complications that it is rendered practically meaningless for the discussion.
Questioning whether someone is Christian based on controversially political issues is not tolerated on this forum. There are a number of reasons for this, but I think the biggest is because it is just too divisive – capable of exploding so much that it demolishes the purpose for which the forum exists.
I don’t know if that is the “Muslim view.” I suspect there is diversity on that issue, at the very least. Well… the first internet search response agrees with you, but digging deeper reveals diversity on the issue.
If there is no standard of good independent of God’s will then I don’t know how you can even say something is “arbitrary.” Frankly, I am only concerned with the practicalities of how it can be used in bad religion according to Weinberg’s claim, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.” The flaw in what he said is frankly what non-religious/anti-religious ideologies can do (and have done), not just religion, AND I think what enables this in religion can be removed from it.
I was simply pointing out that you completely misunderstood the point, and that no one was trying to portray God as an arbitrary tyrant. That was a serious misrepresentation of what was actually being said.
Except I didn’t question whether he’s a Christian — I simply said I believe he’s wrong in thinking that following Jesus can be compatible with defending abortion. I don’t view Christians who believe that as non-Christians; I see them as Christians who are deeply mistaken on a very important issue.
Also, I don’t think this is merely a political issue — at least not for Christians. It’s similar to how, in ancient Rome, a Christian refusing to burn a pinch of incense before a statue of the emperor wasn’t just being disloyal to the state (as they were accused of); it was far more than that.
I won’t dwell on this topic any further, but I just found it ironic that saying that it’s wrong for a Christian to defend abortion is considered out of bounds, while saying someone is worshipping the devil (“the devil who wants to be your god”) is apparently acceptable. That’s all.
This doesn’t mean that God can contradict Himself and turn evil into good simply because He is God. That’s the unchristian view I was criticizing — and also the view you mistakenly thought was being defended in the previous post. It’s clear you were opposing that idea, as you rightly pointed out how it’s useful for those who seek to dominate others through religion. But the issue was simply a misunderstanding on your part. For the record, I completely agree with Feser on this
I will highlight the (imho) most important parts
“It’s clear enough that the moral ideals that Western secularists value had – as a matter of historical fact – a theological origin. But could they not be given a foundation instead in some other, non-Judeo-Christian religious tradition – or in a purely secular philosophy? It doesn’t appear so. For the dignity that the Western tradition has attributed to human beings derives entirely from the idea that their distinctive attributes-reason and free will, personhood and moral choice-reflect the very nature of the ultimate reality that is God Himself
. Non-Western religions typically downgrade the significance of human beings and of the personal attributes that distinguish them from the lower animals. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism tend to see ultimate reality neither as a heavenly Father nor as a moral lawgiver and judge, but as an impersonal absolute existing beyond good and evil and indifferent to human concerns. Salvation, as viewed by these religions, tends to be understood not in terms of the continued existence after death of the person, in a perfected form, but instead as something close to the opposite: the extinction of the self-indeed, the disappearance of the illusion that any genuine self ever existed at all.
Even Islam, despite its historical relationship to Judaism and Christianity, has a very different conception of God. Allah is not a heavenly Father whom the believer may approach as a son or daughter, but a forbidding and over-powering Will to which one simply submits as to an irresistible force. Neither the idea of man as made in God’s image nor the notion of free moral choice is much emphasized, and is often even regarded with suspicion. Salvation, accordingly, is not a matter of becoming more fully God-like and attaining the Beatific Vision, but mainly of gaining access to an everlasting cornucopia of decidedly creaturely delights – food, drink, and the company of beautiful women (albeit some Muslim theologians would give these a symbolic interpretation).
It is no surprise, then, that the concept of the dignity of man as unique in all of nature and the bearer of inviolable natural rights did not develop within these non-Western religions. Nor is it obvious, given their conceptions of human nature, that this concept could easily take root if transplanted into such alien soil.
Might some purely secularist justification for this ideal nevertheless provide a common basis on which all could support it? Here too there are serious difficulties, especially since the concept of human nature endorsed by most contemporary secular theorists seems closer to that of the religions outside the Judeo-Christian framework than to the one enshrined within it. Ever since Darwin (if not before), secular thinkers have been increasingly prone to assimilate human beings to the lower animals and to debunk any suggestion that their capacities for reason and will are qualitatively different from the capacities of other creatures. Indeed, the very idea that human beings have an objective, fixed nature or essence and a natural end or purpose – the core presuppositions of traditional natural-law theory – is derisively rejected by such theorists.
Philosopher Derek Parfit speaks for what might be a majority of contemporary secular intellectuals in holding that there is no objective reality corresponding to the traditional understanding of the concept of a “person.” Human beings exhibit certain continuities in their psychological and bodily characteristics over time, and certain discontinuities. Sometimes the discontinuities are minor, and sometimes – as in brain damage, mental illness, sex-change operations, and so forth – they are great. In neither case, though, is there a permanent abiding “self,” much less a soul, underlying these various characteristics. As in Buddhism, the notion of the self, or of an immortal soul destined for eternal life in heaven or hell, is an illusion.
Such trends in modern thought have led Columbia University legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron (who is by no means a member of the so-called religious right) to suggest that it is a very serious question whether the Western ideal of equal human rights can be given a secular justification. In his book God, Locke, and Equality, Waldron notes that even Locke – who, as an Enlightenment-era Protestant, abandoned the medieval Scholastic notions of an objective human essence and natural ends or purposes, and with them the traditional foundations of belief in natural law and natural rights – faced a grave problem of how to justify belief in human equality. Locke’s solution was to appeal to the idea that even if there are no fixed boundaries to human nature, human beings at least have a capacity for reason that is adequate to lead them to a belief in God, and thus to grasp the idea that they are His creatures and responsible to Him for how they treat others.
…
It should be emphasized that nothing said here is meant to imply that the irreligious cannot believe in human dignity, justice, and rights. Nor is it denied that some societies outside the Judeo-Christian tradition do indeed have free social and political institutions. It does seem, though, that where those institutions exist outside the West, they have either been imposed by the West, or imported from it on the basis of their perceived economic benefits. Moreover, where certain specific freedoms do not seem essential to the economic benefits, they have often been abridged-as in newly capitalist China, Singapore, and other exemplars of the ideology of “Asian values.”
The idea that all human beings as such have an inherent dignity – and that this entails a doctrine of objectively valid, absolute, and universal human rights – seems to exist only in the Judeo-Christian West, and the moral (as opposed to economic or political) pressure other societies might feel to conform to this idea seems to come only from the West. Those who value these ideals, even if they are not personally religious, would seem therefore to have an interest in the continued health of the Judeo-Christian tradition; for whatever basis this or that individual person might have for endorsing these values, it is not at all clear that they can be maintained at the societal and global levels in the absence of that tradition.”
stop referring to atheists that “lack belief in God,” which is a mischaracterisation because atheists reject all religions, not just Christianity, and instead refer to atheists as ‘lacking belief in gods’.
On the contrary, @Roy this seemingly pedantic definition hides a subtle rhetorical trick. It conflates the concept of the “One God” which religions can disagree over “Gods qualities” with a pantheistic concept of the “god", which religions can disagree over “a particular god’s existence.”
I used to think this rhetoric was intentional, but actually I think in many cases the Athiest in question only understands the latter conception of “god" and always has… even when (or if) they were a Christian…. and this failure of understanding led more or less directly to their Atheism.
One of my professors called it a false dichotomy. Martin Luther criticized the question the same way saying that God is and good is God, so asking the question reveals a failure to understand.
I do believe that the body will share in the beatitude after the final resurrection — otherwise, there would be no point in it. However, Islam has certainly gone off the rails in various ways. While Christianity has at times overemphasized the spiritual aspect of Heaven, overlooking the fact that there will also be a bodily resurrection in a glorified form (which means that there will also be bodily beatitude), Islam has taken the opposite approach — and done so in a way that borders on the absurd.