Hoo boy, Im on a road trip so Im typing this on a tracphone. Consider this a placeholder of sorts.
Judith my point of view is that god was created in the image of people so it would follow that a persons image of god tells us a lot about their image of themselves.
What mihht save this from the charge of psychologizing is to ask, what image of god thats ever been is not a reflection of some aspect of human personality?
George Carlin was asked how he recognized art. “It cant be something I could have done.” Where is the portrait of god that no human being could have created?
Sorry my typing finger is failing.
Stephen, if you are coming south, be forewarned it’s our hottest month. Storms in August provide breaks. Not so in July.
Scratsti wants to know if Gods were real in historical antiquity. Are any of his following questions answerable? Well, for
those of us who are believers, God is not only real, He is everywhere and can present as anything (or even anyONE – George
Burns in “Oh,God!”) George Carlin (Am a fan!) couldn’t do that.
Aware that I may be the only believer, I do feel embarrassed when slipping with a response and all of you so very academic.
The tolerance shown makes me wonder if you are believers at heart yourselves. 🙂
Judith I have indeed headed south but now enjoy the comfort of a beautiful companion, an attractive place to rest, and an actual full-sized keyboard! I am not an academic. In my experience it is the skeptics who tend to tolerance. It is the skeptic who realizes that no one has all (or even most) of the answers. It is the skeptic who can live with not knowing.
God is real to you. I am not attempting to convert you. What is real to me is the ineffable mystery that lies behind the existence of being itself. You certainly may call that God but I prefer to leave all those worn concepts behind. Let nature reveal its secrets unfiltered by preconceptions. This assumes that nature is all there is. I am happy to be disabused of that notion. But so far…
Robert, if I understand what you’re asking, there are many conceptions of god in the Hebrew Bible. When I mock Yahweh and Zeus it is the idea that these Bronze Age tribal deities can be responsible for the universe revealed by science. Yahweh, who flies into homicidal rages when his gimcrack holy apparatus is touched, and Zeus, the divine horndog who spreads his seed far and wide among the willing and the unwilling.
The idea of the autonomous individual as a nexus of rights and responsibilities, with needs and desires apart from preconceived social roles, is a modern invention of the West. There was a time when this idea, which our culture has thoroughly imbibed, did not exist, and indeed does not exist in many parts of our world today. C S Lewis once made a statement that I wrestled with for a long while until I understood. “The New Testament knows nothing of solitary religion.” How many times growing up did I hear a call in the church for faith in Jesus, to make him our “personal” savior? In the NT you are saved because you are part of the Body. The apostate is the one who has left the Body. (The innovation of Christianity was that the Body was not identical to a specific ethnicity.)
In the ancient world you were identified by your culture, your tribe, your family. There was no life apart from these communities. No identity. We have completely lost the ancient terror of exile. To be cast adrift, homeless, nameless. Exile used to be a terrible punishment. A kind of death sentence. In some ways worse. Now days we want to go out into the world. We carry our identity with us when we go. (Simultaneously of course we long for community. We envy to a degree other cultures’ sense of communal identity.)
When I say the individual was an invention I don’t mean a bunch of folks got in a room and consciously created it. It developed, for reasons scholars still debate.
It is interesting to speculate if we ever encounter ET how much if any similarity there might be between us. Will they even understand a concept like god? What if their social structure resembles an ant colony? Many myrmecologists think it is better to think of an ant colony as a single organism. Does everyone know about the siphonophore? A corporate oceanic organism whose organs reside in separate individuals. What would the spirituality of a sentient siphonophore be like? More interesting perhaps, what if we encounter aliens who have no concept of god at all? Could the god concept be a peculiarity of homo sapiens? In such a case would our homegrown bible thumpers be obligated to convert them?
How moral was it for God not to come through with Jewish Apocalypticism?
How moral was it for God to mislead Jesus on Jewish Apocalypticism?
How does God enforce morality? “I’m not going to let you stay in heaven, after you die.”
How moral is justice delayed until after death? “Justice delayed is justice denied.”
Believe in God? Jesus’ God?
Abortion, Death Penalty,
and Human Trafficking (including children).
God enforced his thou shalt not have homosexual sex or I will destroy your city.
Did God destroy Ancient Athens, Greece?
Did God destroy Renaissance Florence?
Objective Morality:
Objective morality is the idea that right and wrong exist factually, without any importance of opinion. It’s the concept that some actions and beliefs are imperatively good or inherently bad, and that the goodness or badness of those things holds true no matter who you are or what else you believe in.
The example was in the video above your post:
Thou shalt not kidnap then prostitute children; for example, thou shalt not take a prepubescent boy and sell him to adults for sex and when he is no longer fresh, sell his organs.
An objective morality is a set of moral norms that have the status of objective facts, such that a person’s moral beliefs, at least in principle, are open to assessment as objectively true or objectively false (just like a person’s scientific beliefs). This also implies that a person’s acts can be evaluated objectively as right or wrong. It does not, however, necessarily imply that culpability is not subjective; so you could accept the idea of an objective morality, and further determine that a person’s action was objectively, morally wrong, and still think the person is faultless because he didn’t understand what he was doing at the time or wasn’t fully free in performing the act.
Alternatives that would reject an objective morality include:
Moral relativism: Morality is entirely determined by culture or (depending on the version) the individual, thus in principle we can’t judge other ethical systems as true or false. Fratricide might be wrong in my society’s ethical code, but it might be morally licit in the Ottoman empire, and in principle there is no way to arbitrate between the two codes.
Error theory: There is no fact in moral norms. Despite appearances, expressions like “murder is wrong” do not express facts (maybe they express the speaker’s tastes, as in expressivism) and so it is a category error to attempt to evaluate moral norms as true or false or to argue about them (just as it is a category error to assess utterances like “broccoli is delicious” as true or false or to argue about them–de gustibus non disputandum).
Can’t you provide an example more relevant to the way most people live? Some more common moral precept you consider objective.
I think a number of the ten commandments would be easy candidates: thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Obviously these would require proper definition to deal with edge cases (e.g., is divorce and remarriage adultery or not? Is “stealing” food to feed your starving children actually stealing in the proscribed sense?)
I sense a trap in your questions: Where is this going?
Also, thou shalt not kill is quite relevant, depending on how we understand “kill”.
People generally agree that cold-blooded murder is generally wrong, but the edge cases are expansive, touching every person’s life.
Does supporting the death penalty violate this norm? Does procuring (or assisting another in procuring) induced abortion count? What about working for broader access and more expansive abortion rights? How about assisting someone in commiting suicide? What about eating animals that were raised and killed for food?
It’s one thing to say such questions don’t have clear answers and that reasonable minds can and do disagree. It’s something else to say there are, in principle, no right answers to those questions for us to discover and that it is therefore useless to try to figure out whether those acts are licit or no, or to try to reason out answers to them. To say there is no objective moral truth that murder is wrong in the first place, so arguing about what does or doesn’t count as murder is purely semantic and makes no difference.
By the way, I personally am persuaded that Jill is right to give the golden rule as an example.
I think it is a truly objective and foundational moral truth, I think that denying its truth leads inevitably to contradiction (think Kant here). Of course the problem with that is that it is so tremendously vague it is, famously, hard to use to answer specific moral problems.
I’m not sure if that was purely lighthearted, or if it was meant to pose a genuine challenge, but just in case . . .
I think the golden rule is objective in the sense that it is not able to be rationally and consistently denied. As weak evidence for this claim, note that some version of it is found across cultures.
That said, it is overtly subjective as to its content. I think it gives us the objective *form* of correct moral judgement, but not the *content*. Which is why it is famously hard to use.
But I agree that there is something unexpected and almost paradoxical about it. A fun, unexpected observation; a lot of professional Christian ethicists are allergic to putting any serious metaethical weight on the golden rule. It really doesn’t figure prominently in many contemporary systems of philosophical ethics.
Objective morality is the idea that right and wrong exist factually, without any importance of opinion. It’s the concept that some actions and beliefs are imperatively good or inherently bad, and that the goodness or badness of those things holds true no matter who you are or what else you believe in.</I.
An objective morality is a set of moral norms that have the status of objective facts, such that a person’s moral beliefs, at least in principle, are open to assessment as objectively true or objectively false (just like a person’s scientific beliefs).
I wasn’t setting a trap, just checking to see if we’re all talking about the same thing. What is morality? The Rules? A measure of the correctness of our actions? Based on some unimpeachable and unassailable authority?
I would claim that the concept of “objectivity” in the sense being used here is itself incoherent. Science does away with certainty and absolute authority right from the start. Scientific conclusions are always subject to modification and disconfirmation as we increase our knowledge. “Facts” are simply conclusions with very high probabilities.
So what’s my point? Humans evolved as a social species. Morality is a description of the relationships and interactions between members of a social species. These relationships and interactions change over time. This is not simply moral relativism because some courses of action really do contribute to human flourishing, and thus, sustainability, just as some mitigate against it. (Like the idea of “objectivity”, the idea of “subjectivity” in the sense being used here is incoherent.)
I suppose now would be the time to show my cards. I’m a materialist and thus a determinist. There is no “ought” – there is only what happens and our description of it. Codes of ethics are descriptive not prescriptive. Their precepts codify values a society already possesses not ones they have yet to be taught. Laws against murder or theft do not prevent murders or thefts but they do proclaim the accepted values of the society.
I realize this is not a particularly romantic point of view. I’ve said some, hinted at some, and left a lot unsaid.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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