Technical detail if one wants to chase more information: Marduk is a Mesopotamian version; Baal-Hammon was the Carthagenian. Broad similarities as storm gods and general Fertile Crescent interchanges of beliefs, but individual idiosyncrasies.
Your point, however, is correct; the Carthagenians practiced child sacrifice. But that is the problem with appealing to getting together and agreeing on ethical standards. You are claiming that one morality is better than another. That implies that there is some sort of overall standard. âLetâs get people together, get them to agree, and go with thatâ is assuming that agreement and working together are good things. Itâs still claiming a universal âoughtâ that canât be inferred merely from physical data. And what if someone, e.g. Nietzsche, disagrees with the basic principle of seeking whatâs best for ordinary individuals?
Sometimes a committee of one will agree on a system of moral standards; larger numbers of opinions, however, have clashes. Utopian societies donât tend to last well. Human sacrifice was, historically, accepted quite widely across many societies over many generations. One can argue whether genocidal rulers or those promoting suicide attacks might deserve the label of advocating human sacrifice today (Sacrifice - Despair, Inc.). âSome people agreed on thisâ is not a great incentive for my going along if either I sincerely do not think itâs a good idea or I am out to grab what I can and see a way to get ahead by bending or flouting the rules.
Iâm not claiming that one morality is better than another in an objective sense, nor that there are overall or universal standards. What I am saying is that we argue over morality, and that argument is based on human subjectivity. This means morality can change through time, just as it actually has changed through time. We donât view our modern moral codes as being better because we have access to better facts. We view them as better because we subjectively believe that human well being is improved in modern society.
I think the only reason the church has not formally ruled against such things as gender and homosexuality is because they are afraid to be seen as stuck in the mud or unreasonable. People are claiming that their orientation is from birth which the church would see as being direct from God, and cannot prove otherwise. IOW they are forced to go along with public pressure.
So we get back to the inevitable question about whether Scripture reflected the morals of the day or God. (And I would rather not reopen that can of worms)
That wasnât the case in the past, but I do see what you are talking about. The UK may be a bit different than the US, though. I think you will find much more traditional positions in Bible Belt evangelical churches here in the US, and many people are not shy about them.
In my lifetime (born in the 70âs) I have seen a big shift in social attitudes, and I am sure you have seen the same. I can definitely see how some traditional Christian beliefs about morality face a difficult landscape in modern society. For me personally, I have no issue with those traditional views within the church because it really isnât my business as a non-Christian. All I ask is that those religious rules donât become law.
Iâm not even going to look in the general direction of that can.
Of course many of us do not think that. Most? I personally havenât conducted a worldwide poll of Christians. But atheism is not a good thing. Rejecting God is no more a good thing than sinning is. I suppose when some Christians think everyone is saved or hell doesnât exist or basically reject most of Orthodox Christian teachings and Jesusâs exclusive teachings and warnings of judgment, as many on this forum clearly seem to do from my perspective, atheism is no big deal. As long as it makes someone happy and doesnât hurt anyone, right?
Afraid? I think many Christians are probably more appalled by what they perceive as a spineless Christianity that is more worried about the peer pressures of modernity than adhering to orthodox Christian teachings. Personally, I share Ratzingerâs view of relativism:
Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be âtossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrineâ, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of oneâs own ego and desires.
We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An âadultâ faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth.
I think âdictatorship of relativismâ is a wonderful way of describing modernity.
Materialism is undeniably a worldview. It is quite clear I was talking about atheism that is synonymous with materialism. You even quoted me directly on this point:
So please stop with the idea that atheism here is just a lack of belief in something and responding to me in that fashion when I was quite explicit in the specific type of atheism I was discussing. If you want to be a non-materialist atheist and believe in platonic forms, have at it. Yes, atheists come in different types. I am more interested and talk about the versions that embrace scientism/materialism because I find them more relevant to contemporary thought.
Maybe we can have subjective growth within the context of subjective opinions. But in the end that is all just made up. We canât even tell the Naziâs or slave traders what they did was wrong and justify our assertion beyond âthis is my opinion.â Itâs just opinion vs opinion, like arguing which flavor of ice cream is the best. There is no way to show that progress towards a made up opinion is actually moral growth and not us going backwards. There will also always be a circularity in these discussions for atheists as @paleomalacologist keeps pointing out.
Iâll bite. What are these objective moral codes? Hopefully I donât hold my breath for an ad populum argument.
This is a non sequitur. Oneâs behavior does not have to be consistent with their worldview or intellectual musings. This is obvious since many donât practice what they preach. I never said atheists are not fond of science or do not do science well. In fact, there is a whole context to this discussion involving T and Marty about gaps being science stoppers that you seem to be missing in your haste to nitpick.
Materialism. That is a text-book worldview and personally itâs the only form of atheism I care about discussing as itâs relevant to my interests in science and philosophy. This brand of atheism offers us no reason to even do science or even genuinely chastise those who do bad science. In fact, I might say even say that if believing in bad science makes someone happy, I guess that is okay too. But atheists who believe morality is made up human opinion often do get really triggered by bad scienceâŚ
I have clearly distinguished between a personâs actions and their intellectual philosophy. Try reading what someone actually writes with grace and humility instead of trying to nitpick and having a measuring contest. In other words, stop playing the village atheist. Atheists have Godâs law on their hearts and are moral individuals. But their worldview (for the materialists) is inconsistent with objective morality. That is why T is here defending subjective morality.
Canât we just do something because it is the right thing to do and not because itâs pragmatic or practical? Often times the right thing to do is not pragmatic or practical.
I wonât comment on the last sentence here but Euthyphroâs dillemma isnât that much of a dilemma as it is a misunderstanding. Feser has addressed this here:
Actually, we donât, because the dilemma is a false one â certainly from the point of view of Thomism, for reasons I explain in Aquinas. As with all the other supposedly big, bad objections to theism, this one rests on caricature, and a failure to make crucial distinctions. First of all, we need to distinguish the issue of the content of moral obligations from the issue of what gives them their obligatory force. Divine command is relevant to the second issue, but not the first. Second, it is an error to think that tying morality in any way to divine commands must make it to that extent arbitrary, a product of capricious divine fiat. That might be so if we think of divine commands in terms of Ockhamâs voluntarism and nominalism, but not if, following Aquinas, we hold that will follows upon intellect, so that God always acts in accordance with reason. Third, that does not entail that what determines the content of morality and Godâs rationale for commanding as He does is in any way independent of Him.
The actual situation, then, is this. What is good or bad for us is determined by the ends set for us by our nature, and given the essentialist metaphysics Aquinas is committed to, that means that there are certain things that are good or bad for us absolutely, which even God could not change (since Godâs power does not extend to doing what is self-contradictory). Now God, given the perfection of His intellect, can in principle only ever command in accordance with reason, and thus God could never command us to do what is bad for us. Hence the first horn of the Euthyphro dilemma is ruled out: God can never command us to torture babies for fun, because torturing babies for fun is the sort of thing that, given our nature, can never in principle be good for us. But the essences that determine the ends of things â our ends, and for that matter the end of reason too as inherently directed toward the true and the good â do not exist independently of God. Rather, given the Scholastic realist understanding of universals, they pre-exist in the divine intellect as the ideas or archetypes by reference to which God creates. Hence the second horn of the Euthyphro dilemma is also ruled out.
If morality is subjective why should they have known what they were doing is immoral (there is no objective standard you or they can appeal to). Morality is just their subjective opinion and they behaved morally in light of it. Children probably werenât as important or intrinsically valuable then. That is why girl babies could be cast out in many societies. The real issue is that morality is objective and sometimes people do opposite of what they think is right, sometimes they do what they think is right when it is in fact very very wrong (objectively) like throwing a baby girl in a river or leaving it outside for wild animals to eat. We canât say that in a subjective framework. You are seemingly appealling to some objective standard. I appreciate your candor but how I see your response is as follows:
In no way, shape or form can a very a rational and sane person such as yourself say or admit that child sacrifice can or was moral in ancient societies as long as the majority believed it despite morality being subjective social opinions. Now some people, a small percentage, will follow their beliefs logically through and admit this but the majority of people absolutely will not because its a horrifying thought. So they engage in apologetical harmonization and ad hoc reasoning. Personally I am glad you do here. Killing babies is objectively immoral and if someone ever said otherwise, in the eyes of most people they discuss things with, outside a small minority of weirdos on the internet, this would just invalidate their beliefs and most everything they say and argue for. They would be summarily dismissed as crazy and people just wouldnât take them seriously. But your view just cannot be substantiated under subjective morality. We canât tell the Nazis or slave owners they were genuinely wrong in what they were doing. In the realm of subjective morality, they acted just as appropriate in their actions as Mother Theresa did in hers. The glaring absurdity of this, in my mind, is enough to render atheism false in and of itself.
Despite your statement to the contrary above, I guess you really do like possibilities. How is this nothing more than just a case of you thinking your morals are correct as every other society has done so? And what makes modern society so great? Are we airbrushing all the evils we take for granted and do nothing about in our lavish modern society? To mention one, arenât there almost 50 million slaves worldwide while we sit here discussing this? And I guess this all begs the question of why those of us who think, for example, to highlight just one modern type, that owning sex slaves is a great moral evil are actually right, while those who peddle them donât seem to have the same problem with it. Just one subjective opinion vs another. Iâd sooner believe there was a metal dome in the sky and and that space science is made up before I would claim that itâs only a subjective opinion that the owning of sex slaves is morally wrong. Atheism is more detached from reality than young earth creationism or any flat earth society in my mind.
Good read. There are serious challenges. I do wonder, however, what âintelligent designâ brings to the table in this regards. Honestly, that has been one of the big questions Iâve had about ID over the years.
This topic has surfaced here (Finland) because of what happens within the Finnish Evangelic-Lutheran church. Those discussing and presenting information have been members of the church, I have just listened and tried to learn.
The church historically included more than 90% of the Finnish population but the percentage has been dropping at about 1% per year for the last decades. Many active members in the church are worried and there are competing opinions about what should be done to stop the decline.
Many sincerely believe that conservatism drives people away from the church and the church should therefore adjust the teachings to such that do not drive the liberal modern persons from the church.
The opposite side (minority) thinks that the church should return to itsâ roots, the teachings in the Bible and the Lutheran confessions, because spineless Christianity looses itsâ salt and purpose in the society.
It would be a long story to tell all the plot twists but an interesting piece of information have been the statistics about what happens in the Lutheran churches globally.
It seems that the most liberal Lutheran churches are loosing members faster than the more conservative ones. In countries where there are more than one Lutheran church (like USA), the most liberal church is declining more rapidly than the other churches.
One possible interpretation of the statistics is that liberal churches become just one more charitable organization within the society. Most of the liberal members do not see a reason to continue supporting that kind of organization with their money and time. That church has lost itsâ salt and original purpose. Persons becoming believers search another home, from a more conservative church or movement.
The counterside of the coin is that the conservative members are more prone to accept teachings like YEC. The liberal ones are not vulnerable to such teachings that lack believable evidence. The conservative ones that retreat to the biblical basis tend to accept interpretations told by the other conservative believers, unless there are other conservative believers that counteract those spreading baseless interpretations.
It is over simplistic and even a little deceptive. Liberals may not condemn YEC, but it does not mean that they automatically accept it.
Extremes will always have an attraction, and that includes what you are calling conservative. I would say it was more intolerance and dogmatism.
There is an underlying assumption about how people reach faith, and who they listen to. If you ultimately listen to yourself you are more likely to get a firm faith. Secondhand faith is shallow. Personal faith involves weighing up everything rather than sticking stubbornly to a single viewpoint.
As I have been saying here recently. if you do not even attempt to understand why someone believes what they do you can neither argue effectively against it, or accept it as at least possible.
People here arguing against YEC show little or no understanding about the beliefs themselves which is why they just get rebuked or argued against. All they see is their own incredulity and disbelief. I doubt they even read the sermons @adamjedgar repeats.
The meaning of âconservativeâ, âliberalâ and other labels vary depending on the context. For this reason, they may sometimes be misleading labels. Maybe I should have clarified what I mean with the labels. An attempt to keep the comment short weighed so much that I did not explain the details.
In the context of my story (Lutheran church), conservatives are those who think that the church should stay on the fundamental basis that was/is told in the official doctrine of the church. That means that all doctrine should be based on the teachings in the biblical scriptures and what is written in the old Lutheran confessions and catechism.
Liberals are members who usually think that âloveâ is a more important principle than what is written in the old scriptures or church documents. The church should have walls that are far apart and a roof high up in order to give space to different kinds of opinions and life styles. Condemning someone because of how that person lives is mostly a no-no behaviour - sometimes it feels that the fundamentalist conservative persons are the only group that can be openly condemned because these lousy conservatives dare to judge the life styles of the other members.
The general trend has been that liberal opinions have become more and more common through decades. It seems to be just a matter of time before the âtoo restrictingâ old doctrines will be abandoned.
When the liberals get a victory in a voting, there are promises that the alternate (conservative) opinions will be respected and both the liberal and conservative can live and serve together. It seems that such a promise may hold up to 10-15 years, sometimes a bit longer. After that, those sticking to the conservative interpretation are gradually pushed away.
Some conservatives have already switched to some other church, others are starting to openly talk that one day they have to leave the church although that option has been a terrible and avoided one so far.
After more and more conservatives leave the church, the liberals get more and more power and can more easily lead the church towards the direction they prefer. The loss of conservatives may sometimes be seen as a good development - the conservatives are a minority and getting rid of them may just make everything easier.
I guess I am a liberal by your definitions, so I am feeling disapproval from you for it. I have no desire to just eliminate what you would call conservative, at least, not on a personal level. However, I have issues with strict biblicalism and fundamentalism.
What I see is a disregard for the consequences of the beliefs outside the faith and a selfish concern for future wellbeing over living in the here and now.. I am a believer that Christianity is more about lifestyle and worldly values rather than concentrating on redemption and the perceived separation from God.
The other aspect is whether faith can be personal or whether it is conformed. IOW is it God who dictates what we must believe or is it the church. My view is that God is more flexible, being more concerned with intent than substance, hence the willingness to forgive.
What I am saying is that we take a pragmatic approach to figuring out what is the right thing to do.
The key part of that quote is this (IMO)
If we root morality in human nature then morality is subjective as it is based on the subjective needs and wants of humans. If God shapes morality to fit our subjective needs and wants then that is the subjective standard of morality.
If morality is objective, then how could they have been behaving immorally since they were following an objective morality laid out by the god they worshiped?
On what basis do we think they behaved immorally? I would contest that we judge them based on our own inner sense of morality, a subjective morality.
God orders the killing of children in the Old Testament.
I certainly think Western society is in a better place than it has been in the last 2,000 years. To each their own, I guess.
That would probably depend on where you are looking from. The trouble is that those in need are less obvious and those who are selfish are able to thrive because of it. Most of the rest are oblivious just trying to live and find pleasure when they can. Too much attention and blame is put onto government and politics so that people like Farrage and Trump can thrive.
At least in my estimation, the current Western democracies are far better than the feudalism of Medieval Europe. If you want a good example of the have and have nots, that would be a good place to start.
Its a matter of perspective. Yes there was a division but there was little or no destitution. A bit like Communism. There are, or were, many in the liberated Eastern block who have found that independence does not mean better, When I went to Estonia there were many who said that although Communism was oppressive, at least they had a guaranteed home and food, A bit like the Israelites in the wilderness, you do not always appreciate what you have until you lose it, and sometimes freedom is not quite the joy it should be. You may be free to live but you are also free to die.
One is always free to die. Granted, I donât want to live in the libertarian Shangri-La where youâre left to die if you run out of savings for medical treatment.
Let me start my comment with a story I experienced yesterday:
I discussed with a buddhist having been trained on the way of meditation. A nice, rational person who was also a scientist. He told that his mentor reached enlightened state and in that state, the mentor teached that all the religions and faiths were ways towards the same, universal goal that is the god (or universal something/universe - that part remained a bit unclear for me). He asked a lot of questions about what Christianity teaches and after that, told about his esoteric understanding about Jesus, a great esoteric teacher that spread not just words but also energies to those around him. He wanted to know what I was thinking of this esoteric Jesus.
My answer was that if I want to know if these esoteric claims are something that can be true, I can search for evidence from several sources. Jesus was a Jew who lived according to the teachings of the Hebrew scriptures, so I could search what these Hebrew scriptures are teaching. The second source are those teachings of Jesus that were written down. The third source is what those sent by Jesus (his apostles) wrote, possibly supported by what the tradition tells.
In all these sources, I find nothing that would support the claims about the esoteric teacher Jesus. What should I believe, what the esoterics are claiming or what the evidence in the scriptural sources tell?
There is something similar in my attitude towards the conflicting claims circulating among Christians than in my response to that buddhist scientist. I appreciate these people and note all the good and positive these people intend and do. Yet, when I hear conflicting claims, my reaction is to look how well the claims fit to what the sources I have tell. The persons telling the claims may be fine, respectable people that do a lot of good deeds but if what they claim is in conflict with all the sources I have, I need to decide whether I trust these fine people or what the most reliable sources tell about the teachings that Jesus and his messengers (apostles) followed and teached.
I may love the persons telling the claims but I love the truth even more, especially when both truth and mercy walk hand in hand. As I do not have better sources, I take what the scriptures tell and try to understand it. I believe that the biblical scriptures reveal more about the will of God than the subjective opinions of some human, be it me or someone else. If you have issues with that, I do not feel that it is my problem, except possibly in the sense that maybe I should have told my conclusions in a more respecting and humble way.
