I’m guessing you haven’t lived in the UK. The place is a f’ing disaster, held together mostly by older people who actually received an education, and/or coasting along on the economic inertia of past glories. Try talking to policemen, doctors or social workers who actually deal with the reality and have their own much more relevant statistics. Government crime reductions are achieved simply by redefining what wrongdoing is.[/quote]
So you are saying more and more people are being killed, the government is lying about it, and nobody notices? Sorry , you’re slipping into rowland territory here. And actually, I have talked to a British social worker- my sister, who’s spent 27 years in some of the roughest areas of Manchester, and who tells me things are better than they used to be.
So on the one hand we have, y’know, actual facts plus personal testimony,and on the other- the Murdoch press?
[quote=“finley”]
Anyway, not really the point. I was suggesting to TG that his “logical” moral viewpoint is by no means universal. He’s quite right that religion can be used to justify immoral behaviour. We don’t need to look too far back in history to see that. However, without any philosophical underpinnings, any moral code is completely at the mercy of what rowland calls fashion. It’s adrift; unmoored. Absolutely anything can determine what’s right and what’s wrong. Hence the situation in the UK. TG’s flippant response - that morals vary from place to place - simply proves the point. Other places are merely different; not better, not worse. Humanity has no inbuilt moral reference. Left to its own devices, it sinks to the moral bottom.[/quote]
Leaving what I think alone for a minute, you seem to be asserting that it’s been happening anyway until now. Are you saying that now, after thousands of years of the existence of well-known religious moral codes, religion is our only chance of establishing a true morality, of saving us from the moral bottom?
[quote]
Because, in a completely secular context, any assault on a society’s moral code is never measured against anything (except popular opinion). Any idea is as good as any other. The pin is hit this way and that and eventually has to fall over.[/quote]
There are such things as “laws”. These can provide a long-term base for morality as well as any book one may unilaterally assert is the measuring stick. A good sight better if done through democratic processes, IMO.
[quote] The UK has come in ahead of Germany, the United States and Japan as the best place to live and work, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, although inequality has risen faster in Britain than in other countries since the outbreak of the financial crisis.
The Paris-based thinktank has measured wellbeing in 34 industrialised nations, weighing up factors including incomes, education, housing and security.
It says the UK ranks above the OECD country average on measures such as environmental quality, personal security, jobs and earnings and housing. It is close to average for work-life balance, but below in education and skills.
Nonetheless, that performance puts the UK alongside Switzerland, Australia, Nordic European countries, Canada and New Zealand in a clutch of highest-performing countries on the OECD’s Better Life Index.[/quote]
[quote=“Tempo Gain”]
There are such things as “laws”. These can provide a long-term base for morality as well as any book one may unilaterally assert is the measuring stick. A good sight better if done through democratic processes, IMO.[/quote]
Oh, boy. One can of worms after another.
I’ll concede that the rule of law is far better than nothing. Also preferable to tyranny. But the law is not stable, nor is even the rule of law all that stable. Republics perish.
[quote=“rowland”]
Oh, boy. One can of worms after another.
I’ll concede that the rule of law is far better than nothing. Also preferable to tyranny. But the law is not stable, nor is even the rule of law all that stable. Republics perish.[/quote]
It’s stable enough to be the kind of basis Finley says we would lack. More to the point, it can’t be fully stable because accepted standards of morality change over time. Imagine if we had to be stuck with oh say the Bible because we wanted complete stability? Jesus wept! Maybe that wouldn’t go far back enough. We could go back to the time when people clubbed each other over the head with rocks because they had a leg of lamb they wanted and find an etching on the wall of a cave that would tell us what to do.
[quote=“Tempo Gain”][quote=“rowland”]
We could go back to the time when people clubbed each other over the head with rocks because they had a leg of lamb they wanted and find an etching on the wall of a cave that would tell us what to do.[/quote][/quote]
The Cradle of Civilization is at more or less that level right now. Hadn’t you heard? Hammurabi would have been aghast at ISIS.
My proposal is a bit more modest than that. I’m certainly not saying religion per se is necessary, or that any religion is better than no religion. As I said, religions preserve - or fossilise - certain moral codes. When those codes are (objectively) evil, society is doomed. Hinduism, Islam, and Catholicism all have horribly dysfunctional memes embedded in them: Hinduism has the caste system, Islam has its concept of subhumans (infidel) who can be culled at will, and Catholicism places the responsibility of human salvation in the hands of a fallible, corruptible priesthood. The thread is specifically about Christianity - the philosophy of life taught by Jesus - which carries (in my opinion) memes which can be used as the basis of a practical morality and a strong state.
It goes without saying that you don’t have to be a Christian (that is, you don’t have to accept Christ as God or the source of redemption) to adopt some or all of Christian philosophy. Just as people can call themselves Christians but behave like assholes (thus negating their verbal assertion), an Atheist can behave according to Christian-like morals simply because he thinks they’re useful. Religions never bothered to trademark their philosophies.
The one thing Jesus never made much of - and I wish he had - was respect for the natural world. It was somewhat implied by his version of The Golden rule, but he never explicitly said: look, can you take care of this world I gave you, and the other animals in it, and stop making such a bloody mess? Maybe he didn’t need to because a sparse population wouldn’t have understood. Or maybe they took it as read (the Genesis story gave us responsibility for the planet). Still, that particular omission has had tragic results.
Of course. But, again, any legal code must be based on some philosophy; a worldview. This philosophy is sometimes explicitly described in a Constitution; for example, the Constitution of the US borrows heavily from Protestant tradition (free will, equality before God and therefore the state). The Constitution of the Philippines borrows heavily from Fascist ideology (racial purity, a patriarchal state, and the sanctity of the family unit). The results are plain to see. For countries without a Constitution, the law can be a lot more fluid, as in the case of the UK, where the law has changed out of all recognition to keep pace with a very different moral zeitgeist.
I completely disagree. People, mostly, are f’ing stupid and vile. The last thing you want is the great unwashed deciding what the law is. That’s what happened to England.
Seriously? Of course the government is lying. That’s what governments do. The only thing that changes is the size and character of the lie. I don’t read the press or watch TV news, Murdoch’s or otherwise.
I guess we’re looking at the same scene and seeing different things. My ex-gf was also a social worker and is now a teacher. She thinks 70% of British kids are irredeemable little shits, mostly because their parents are irredeemable little shits. Of course there are plenty of decent people - no society is homogeneous - but there is always one class that exerts more influence than another. Today, that class is the one with no morals, and the other class makes accommodation for them on the dubious basis that it’s not their fault.
[quote=“finley”]
My proposal is a bit more modest than that. I’m certainly not saying religion per se is necessary, or that any religion is better than no religion. As I said, religions preserve - or fossilise - certain moral codes. When those codes are (objectively) evil, society is doomed. Hinduism, Islam, and Catholicism all have horribly dysfunctional memes embedded in them: Hinduism has the caste system, Islam has its concept of subhumans (infidel) who can be culled at will, and Catholicism places the responsibility of human salvation in the hands of a fallible, corruptible priesthood. The thread is specifically about Christianity - the philosophy of life taught by Jesus - which carries (in my opinion) memes which can be used as the basis of a practical morality and a strong state.[/quote]
Christianity has the concept of a man being tortured and killed to atone for a purportedly intrinsic “sin” the existence of which is based solely on assertions contained in arbitrarily selected and rather silly writings.
Leaving his religious pronouncements aside, I’ll agree though that Christ had many good moral ideas. Not all of them, but many. The key word you use is “basis.” We still have to build on it to have a workable moral system. This requires moral judgments which IMO as easily occur without Christianity.
If this thread was specifically about Christianity I probably wouldn’t be participating; it’s not an issue I care that much about. I came to take part purely because of the comment you made here:
Has it? I agree it’s a desirable component of a moral system–a judgment on my part. Have Jesus’s other statements been followed that closely though?
Legal codes build over time and change over time. One could be based on basic moral concepts and build from there entirely exclusively of any religion, easily, IMO. As you’ve said, religion doesn’t have a copyright on such concepts.
And I completely disagree with you Who decides then? Which mostly stupid and vile people? Someone is going to have to build on your basis at least. I agree with Churchill’s well known remarks about democracy and any other potential system here.
Actually, it’s based on everyday experience. There’s no way a rational person can look at humanity and not see intrinsic sin. For example, people are routinely tortured and killed for no good reason at all, aside from the intrinsic sin of their murderers. This is the reality of human nature. It’s ugly, but there’s no hope for redemption unless we face it squarely.
The Bible doesn’t assert that humanity is vile; it points to the self-evident fact that humanity is vile and then asserts a theory on what to do about it. If there are valid arguments against Christianity to be made, it’s not the secular humanists who are making them. Christianity is faith, but faith in human nature is nothing short of denial.
[quote=“rowland”][quote=“Tempo Gain”]
Christianity has the concept of a man being tortured and killed to atone for a purportedly intrinsic “sin” the existence of which is based solely on assertions contained in arbitrarily selected and rather silly writings.
[/quote]
Actually, it’s based on everyday experience. There’s no way a rational person can look at humanity and not see intrinsic sin. For example, people are routinely tortured and killed for no good reason at all, aside from the intrinsic sin of their murderers. This is the reality of human nature. It’s ugly, but there’s no hope for redemption unless we face it squarely.[/quote]
TG: it wasn’t God doing the torturing and killing, was it? It was people. And not just one person. A whole lot of them baying for blood. My take on his death (and resurrection) is as follows:
A lot of people have trouble (as rowland said) accepting that humans are not very nice. Jesus’s execution was prima facie evidence of what he’d been saying all along: it was the most in-your-face possible method of saying: just look at yourselves! The most awful thing Jesus ever apparently did was to get mad at a tree for having no fruit. He entire existence was as innocent as it gets. And for having the temerity to do that, a lot of his compatriots figured he had to go, in the nastiest way possible. I don’t believe God/Jesus set this up to happen. He simply knew that it was inevitable, because given the chance and the motivation, that’s the sort of thing people do, sure as eggs is eggs.
I don’t think there is some grand cosmic law that says someone has to die for sin, an unbendable rule that even God has to obey (others will disagree - this is just my interpretation). I think Jesus just knew that people would grasp the concept of sacrifice and atonement - especially in those days, when sacrifice was very much a “thing”, and the death penalty was meted out for relatively minor ‘sins’ against the various powers-that-be. It was the most human way possible of conveying something outside of human experience or understanding. And it worked, didn’t it? Even outside of it’s cultural context, a lot of people still “get it”.
As for intrinsic sin, I argued elsewhere that this is a natural consequence of free will (a pretty mainstream explanation, I think). He gave us a whole world to play with, and inevitably the whole range of human behaviour would emerge. However, I do agree that an Atheist cannot logically have any concept of sin. It makes no sense within his worldview. Nothing is good or bad except what he chooses to be so, on whatever arbitrary basis he can dream up.
What he said.
Yes, it has. Some nominally Christian sects - I’m going to point the finger at Catholics again - have taken a couple of verses from Genesis (dominion over the earth, and “go forth and multiply”) and used them as an excuse to (a) fuck up the planet and (b) breed like rabbits. Neither idea is very Christian. In the first case you could argue that “dominion” simply means that we have been given the power of administration - with the implication that we’ll use that power wisely, instead of like a rapacious dictator. In the second, you could argue that ‘love thy neighbour’ applies to your children as well as your neighbours (perhaps more so) and you therefore shouldn’t produce them if you can’t feed them or provide them with any kind of future; neither should you populate the earth with oxygen thieves if they will cause grief to ‘thy neighbour’.
Accept? It’s … interesting. Because it’s all written in symbolic language you can, unfortunately, place all sorts of interpretations on it. On the subject of Hell, Revelation suggests it’s there specifically for Satan, and possibly for people who choose to go there. Everyone else simply experiences “a second death”; they die. Which doesn’t seem too harsh, since they were dead in the first place. But it’s all pretty trippy stuff, and I don’t stay awake at nights contemplating Revelation.
I think there probably is a hell and a Satan who rules it. I’ve met people who actively worship him (or something like him), and I once met a girl who said she was possessed by Satan because she’d asked him to (she thought it might be cool and awesome and then instantly regretted it - she was in a terrible state, I never did find out what happened to her). Fucking scary stuff, I kid you not.
[quote=“finley”]
As for intrinsic sin, I argued elsewhere that this is a natural consequence of free will (a pretty mainstream explanation, I think). He gave us a whole world to play with, and inevitably the whole range of human behaviour would emerge. However, I do agree that an Atheist cannot logically have any concept of sin. It makes no sense within his worldview. Nothing is good or bad except what he chooses to be so, on whatever arbitrary basis he can dream up.[/quote]
Absolutely. An atheist can judge on whether something hurts another being, but not say something is good or bad based on the whims of some self-appointed holy man.
Speak for yourself- I actually believe most people are middling. They’ll be mostly sociable if they have enough to eat; they do tend to gt riled up in groups when following some prophet or flag.
[quote]
Yes, it has. Some nominally Christian sects - I’m going to point the finger at Catholics again…[/quote]
You keep pointing to the evils of those who are NOT Christians, while neglecting to specify who is. From your earlier statements you seem to believe there is something especially Christian in the societies established in the Protestant countries of Northern Europe and their settler colonies ( at least up until the Beatles).
And on this you can’t retreat into the “well they’re not really Christian either”; you’ve definitely claimed that these countries have superior moral systems based in your version of Christianity. Yes?
I had what I think is a great epiphany about the Bible recently, which I think is better than all of my other interpretations and theories. I can’t write it up right now but eventually I’ll give it a new thread. It’s based upon the divine right of kings and what that says about the wrath of God, Christian history and biblical interpretations and how they were changed over time once governments became secular and how that encouraged a completely different interpretation of the bible.
Thing is, even though people today read the Bible wrong (or so I believe) it still tends to produce the most successful people in our civilization when it comes to finances and family. Another way to put it is that even a wrong reading of the good book is still producing our best people.
Technically, Jesus was killed for blasphemy. He started out preaching against the Jewish collaborators to the Romans (Philistines) who then try to set up a bunch of traps for him and get him into trouble so that the Romans will take care of him for them. After that fails, Jesus starts saying he’s the son of God which is blasphemy. Did he just start saying it because he knew they were going to set him up anyway? Or did he say it because he really was the Christ? I’m getting into the secular history here of course but it’s an interesting subject.
Point being is that Jesus wasn’t tortured and killed for no reason, he was tortured and killed for violating Roman (and/or Jewish) law and if you don’t accept the biblical account of what he did then it’s basically impossible to pinpoint what it was for since the secular records are sparse. The forgiveness of sins part does refer to an OT prophecy that Jesus is said to have fulfilled.
No, technically the J-man was executed for rebellion against Rome. While he may not have received what we would recognize as due process, the gospels describe him committing what anyone would consider to be criminal acts, such as his attack on the money-changers. The “son of God” motif is unlikely to have come from Jesus, or any of his Jewish followers, and it is difficult to know even if he claimed to be the messiah. (In Mark it is explained that this was a secret, which may be true, or it may be Mark’s way of explaining why nobody ever heard him talk about this.)
What makes you think the best (i.e. most successful and finance and/or family) people in our civilization are biblicists? This seems to lump together a number of differently-performing groups (Orthodox Jews, backwoods Baptists), and overlooks successful non-biblicists (some of them very nearby).
Your epiphany about the divine right of kings promises to be entertaining. Meanwhile, I hope you are not storing your treasure where thieves break in and steal, but are using strange new electronic monetary instruments instead, just like Jesus would have wanted! (On second thought, maybe he’d come at YOU with that whip!)
“Whose image is this? A dog’s…? Then give to the dogs what is the dog’s…”
[quote=“Zla’od”]No, technically the J-man was executed for rebellion against Rome. While he may not have received what we would recognize as due process, the gospels describe him committing what anyone would consider to be criminal acts, such as his attack on the money-changers. The “son of God” motif is unlikely to have come from Jesus, or any of his Jewish followers, and it is difficult to know even if he claimed to be the messiah. (In Mark it is explained that this was a secret, which may be true, or it may be Mark’s way of explaining why nobody ever heard him talk about this.)
What makes you think the best (i.e. most successful and finance and/or family) people in our civilization are biblicists? This seems to lump together a number of differently-performing groups (Orthodox Jews, backwoods Baptists), and overlooks successful non-biblicists (some of them very nearby).
Your epiphany about the divine right of kings promises to be entertaining. Meanwhile, I hope you are not storing your treasure where thieves break in and steal, but are using strange new electronic monetary instruments instead, just like Jesus would have wanted! (On second thought, maybe he’d come at YOU with that whip!)
“Whose image is this? A dog’s…? Then give to the dogs what is the dog’s…”[/quote]
Are you a disgruntled ex-Christian? I have no time for people who study a religion just so that they can try to troll its adherents over the internet. You might be in some serious need re: assessing your life and what you’re doing with your time.
The gist of my argument, which you so gracefully invited me to set out although I don’t have time to write up in full right now, is that when the Bible was written it had two main contexts. The first was the divine right of kings – the rulers were said to get their authority to rule from the divine. If they messed this up then they were failing the divine and from the Christian point of view, could even be the anti-christ. What this means is that when Christians talk about not taking personal revenge and making way for the wrath of God, the government was considered to be an extension of the wrath of God. So what they were really saying was to handle your disputes through the legal system. After governments secularized, it started to look like a call to procedural pacifism, which it was not.
The second context is that of Roman oppression. Concepts like “turn the other cheek” are vastly over-used because even a pacifistic reading of it would acknowledge that the back-handed slap is a challenging act done by an oppressor, yet someone has to be your oppressor before they can get away with slapping you across the face. This means, for example, that I don’t “have” to turn the other cheek towards someone like you because you have no authority over me to begin with.
Wikipedia: A religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence.
Do you think Atheism doesn’t fit that definition? Certainly Atheism can be a lot broader than most religions, but it is nevertheless a belief system that has certain essential features (ie., a belief in no God) and “relates humanity to an order of existence”.[/quote]
Thanks for the reply.
Weak atheism doesn’t fit that definition at all - it doesn’t have even one belief, let alone a collection of them. We don’t have ‘a belief’ in no God, we simply don’t have any belief at all. The whole God thing is your turf, not ours. My parents never once sat me down and told me There is NO God let alone subject me to weekly instruction on the matter. My parents simply never mentioned it. And so, living day to day, the thought never occurs to me, unless I happen to strike up a conversation with a theist, but even then I really have no idea what theists mean by the word since it is, usually, given no definition and is spoken about only in meaninglessly vague terms.
Perhaps think about it this way - imagine you arrive in Taiwan for the first time and meet a local who asks you if you believe in ghosts. You answer no. Your no is not an organized collection of beliefs, a cultural system and a world view that relates humanity to an order of existence. And from your simple answer of no the local man would not be able to deduce your particular belief system, if indeed you do follow one at all, because Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and secular humanists, to name but a few, might all answer no.
An atheist might be a Buddhist, a Shintoist, a humanist or a nihilist. And so on the question of God a Buddhist no is not the same as a Shintoist no, or a nihilist no, or my no. You cannot deduce an organized collection of beliefs from, merely, no.
Didn’t everybody’s sixth-grade teacher used to tell us to begin an essay by quoting the definition of something in Webster’s? (I guess this would only apply to Americans of a certain age.) Now it’s Wikipedia. God help us.
Oh, I don’t know, I don’t really think in those terms. FYI I was raised Episcopalian, but kind of lost interest as a young teenager, then later gravitated to New Age type stuff (often with dissident Christian themes). I like some aspects of the religion (e.g. church fathers, monastic spirituality), but wouldn’t call myself a believer in it. And sure, there’s much to be disgruntled by (although the same would apply to any religion).
Wisdom, let us be attentive!
The words of a god, not of a man!
You’re quite right to emphasize the Roman context, but keep in mind that the early Christians (around whom the gospels coalesced) were basically bending over backwards to reassure the Romans of their loyalty (think St. Paul’s admonition to “pray for those in authority”), despite having been founded by an executed criminal. Thus Pilate is excused, while “the Jews” / “the Pharisees” get blamed. So yes, there is this submissive strand within Christianity, although there are (as you said) other strands which critique evil (anti-Christian) authorities, such as Nero in Revelation (or whatever 666 was really about).
The scourging of the money-changers may or may not have really happened–it is just the sort of detail that might have been invented in order to make Jesus seem to fulfill prophecy–but the mere fact that he attracted crowds would have been enough to get him killed. Still, “the King of the Jews” is suggestive, as is the whole “triumphal entry” tradition. If anybody tried that today, even in modern Israel, they’d definitely get arrested.
[quote=“Il Ðoge”]
Are you a disgruntled ex-Christian? I have no time for people who study a religion just so that they can try to troll its adherents over the internet. [/quote]
As you did on the “Secular Humanism” thread?
You might have noticed the section of Forumosa the “Religion and Spirituality” sub-forum is listed in entitled “Discussion”. If you don’t want people to discuss what you post, don’t post in a section clearly labelled “Discussion”.
This is not a Christian forum. If you wanted to post your ideas on Kingship in a specifically Christian forum, set up for Christians to discuss their ideas, then someone who came in to criticise from a non-Christian perspective could be a troll, depending on the site’s code of conduct. Here, criticism of your ideas is not trolling.
If you simply want to expound your ideas to an audience, set up a blog where you can either ban comments entirely or delete or block people who disagree with you. (As I recall, just before the Great Shutdown you were complaining that other posters had dared to criticize your pretty picture.)
As might someone who posts his ideas on discussion forum but insists people shouldn’t discuss them.
You’re a newbie here, and it somtimes takes a while to get a hold of the generally accepted standards and unwritten rules of a site. Forumosa generally has a pretty relaxed tradition of posts going off-topics or people replying to particular points and them following them where they lead, compared with some other forums. Relax, go with the flow- you can end up in some interesting places.
Who decides then? Which mostly stupid and vile people? Someone is going to have to build on your basis at least. I agree with Churchill’s well known remarks about democracy and any other potential system here.