Atheists Debate How Pushy to Be

No worries, its the Big Soccer effect.

Every culture has values and morals. Morals aren't exclusive to religion, which if you go back to the earlier post of mine, was actually my point. Atheists have morals, and make moral statements. Giancarlo seemed to be asserting that they don't, and then was asserting that atheists don't derive any moral or value currency from religion. While I do think that some atheists can and do live completely extricated from any such value, I think most still live (in the Western world at least) with basically Judeo-Christian values. I don't necessarily believe that these values are exclusive to Judeo-Christian thinking, but if you look at the development of Western society and culture, these values and Christian theology specifically have had a huge role to play. Of course its an extremely complicated thing to unravel, and really Western culture is highly blended, mix mash, intertwined, co-dependent, reactive mix of a bunch of stuff. People often want to reduce Western history in to a kind of baseline of simplicity. Roman world was great, then Christianity came along and it was bad, and then the Dark Ages were bad, and thankfully it was rescued by the Enlightenment, etc. etc. The problem is that none of these movements happens in a vacuum, nor do they happen instantaneously, they are slow movement affected by history, culture, philosophy, weather, disease, and a myriad of other things.

I think that the Judeo-Christian value subset or whatever you want to call it, certainly changed history and much of Western thought and set a course for where we are today. It wasn't the only thing, but at times (right or wrong, good or bad) it has been the prime mover, of course influenced by many other things.

I am not trying to judge other people's values per se, unless they need to be judged, things like infanticide, slavery, etc.

I think that Christianity and by extension Judaism did inject (whether it mean to or not) certain values that became important to Western society, principally that all men and women are made in the image of God and are worthy of respect, dignity, and equality. I am not saying that Christianity came up with this, and not that it has always lived out this mandate well. But, I am not sure of any other religious movement prior (Judaism of course excluded) that gave humanity such value in equality. I may be wrong, but certainly Christianity set some of the epistimological framework for Western values. In certainly wiped out paganism quite quickly, elevating the role of women for a time, and ending infanticide, and certainly moving the culture aways from some of its more barbaric tendencies. Now I am not arguing that Christianity was some kind of cultural panacea that saved Western society. It came in ebbs and flows and was more cumulative. Of course, culturally it was diverse and had to accommodate.

In any case, Christian values in the way I was using them was in the very broad sense, not like evangelical values, which could be something different. More the philosophical underpinnings and how those were developed over time and history.

 

But, the Enlightenment didn't just appear out of nowhere. Nor was it entirely non-religious. I mean, even the term Enlightenment and our entire understanding of it, is a modern, hindsight narrativization of the epoch, and at times a highly simplistic one.

While some thinkers were trying to throw off religion, that does not characterize the entire era. And even if that was the case, they still had to stand on the shoulders of the thinkers before them.

We have had this discussion before, but you are straw manning the Bible and Christian theology. Jesus said the two greatest commandments were Love your God and then love your neighbor and your enemy. That supplants everything. Moreover, he was clear in his teaching about where the Jewish law fit in and Paul continued this line of thought, essentially making it null and void. And since I don't know, nor know of in history, any serious Christian community of thinker who advocated not eating shellfish or stoning them as such, I have a hard time understanding the argument.

 

Actually yes, not a lot, but some.

Mohawk culture places a high value on sneaking into your best friend's room at night and forcing his wife to have sex with you, while your buddy is sleeping. Its the highest form of pranking.

Somali culture places high values on lieing and stealing, which is why they are somewhat incredulous to the world being frustrated with their piracy problems.

I could go on. Typically nativist, ancient cultures tend to have values that are very contrary to Western ones. They phase out a bit, over time because of the homogenizing factors of Christianity, Islam, and Western influence in the world, but they still do exist.

As I mentioned Christianity ended things like infanticide in the Roman pagan world, and sati in India and not that long ago.

 

Of course the Enlightenment took place in Europe which was Christian at that time. Did it have to be that way? Who knows... But no matter what you think about it, you can't credit Christianity for Enlightenment values any more than you can credit paganism for Christian values.

I'm certainly not strawmaning the Bible. All the bad stuff is actually in there, whether you like it or not. And neither did I claim that Christians act (or acted) that way, I clearly distinguished between the Bible and tradition.

Now I don't want to get into a theological debate, so I'll only say this: To claim that the OT is in effect null and void is a very strange notion. You can take Paul's notions to that extreme, but that would directly contradict the gospels where Jesus is quite clear about the Jewish Law still being effective. If anything, Jesus wanted to go beyond the Law, be even stricter than the law, not abolish it. Plus, should you take Paul to that extreme, then the much cherished Ten commandments would also be null and void. You could steal, murder and rape and still be justified through belief. That's why nobody does it.

 

No, I don't deny that at all. All I'm saying is that today's values don't have much to do with either Judaism or Christianity. They might have evolved out of those religions, but now they're different. Just like Jewish values grew out of pagan religions and so on. So if we wanted to credit the original source for the values we have today, we'd have to go back somewhere into the stone age or before that, when people (or their animal precursors) first came up with a moral code, because everything came from there.

I guess the question is: At what point do we have to call it by a new name. And if todays values are Judeo-Christian, then how do we call the medieval values?

As for the sex question, I'd say that today in the West we're actually closer to the ancient Romans' take on sex than on the pre-Enlightenment Christians' take on it. The major difference is that we don't have slaves anymore, but that's a separate issue and one that's not linked to Judeo-Christian values either, rather to Enlightenment values.
But other than that, two consenting Adults can have any kind of sex at any time and nobody cares. I can go to a brothel of my choice and pay for sex without any problems. Prostitution is a job like any other where you have to pay taxes and get social security like public health care or pension insurance.
Legally the US might not be as liberal as Europe in that regard, but it's a fight against windmills, because society has progressed.

Also, AFAIK, in pre-civil war America it was also to be expected that a master would have sex with his slaves...didn't Thomas Jefferson himself have several children with his slave mistress?

 

You are repeatedly confusing the political values and personal values. For example, you can go to a brothel and pay for sex, yes. (Its still illegal in most places, mind you.) But society doesn't look at it and say "oh, well, no big deal". In fact, if I started telling my friends I go to brothels all the time and have sex with prostitutes, they would look at me very strangely. And regard me as strange. But that's not eternal nor universal. In Assyria, temple prostitutes were regarded as women of a holy vocation. I don't see too much of that anymore.

Meanwhile, without going into too many details, the language I bolded above is fundamentally false. We are not close to what you imagine Roman mores on sex to have been. (Homosexuality was a crime technically punishable by death in Rome for most of its history.)

Finally, I don't see how you can possibly argue that today's morality evolved out of Judeo-Christian morals but doesn't have a lot to do with them. Really? And again, we are not talking about wearing clothes with two types of material or eating shellfish. Those are not values.

 

And, frankly, even if you didn't call yourself a Christian, as many people don't, your personal experiences and theirs wouldn't be all that different, and neither would your values. Which is, of course, my point - this isn't an argument over which set of morals is better or who gets "credit" for coming up with them. They are what they are. And if we didn't have Judeo-Christian values, we would have had something else - which probably would have looked similar - though its hard to know how similar. For all that we consider Greeks the forerunners of Western Civilization, do many of us considering ********ing 10 year old boys perfectly acceptable? I hadn't thought so.

 

Hmmm.... is sexual morals what is meant by "Christian values?" Or is that part of it?

I'm not denying, at all, that our culture's moral outlook and many of our values are heavily influenced by Christianity. I agree with you on that.

I'm just breaking down this phrase, "Christian values." I don't think it means "our shared culture morals and values which are heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian traditions." I think it means "values which are unique to, and characteristic of Christianity." That's quite a can of worms to break down.

 

I dunno, maybe the US is still more prudish despite its big porn industry and all...but I could tell my friends that I go to the brothel and I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't regard me as strange. In fact, I do have some friends who do exactly that...actually, thinking about it, the Americans I've met so far were also quite open about that kind of thing without much fear of being regarded as strange, something like "When I'm in Amsterdam, I'm gonna..." well, you can imagine the rest...sex, drugs and rock'n roll and all that...And when I was studying abroad, none of the Americans there had problems talking about their sex life, they were exaggerating if anything. It's just not that big of a deal as long as you're not in a serious relationship.

But even if we go away from boasting males and look at everyday public life, there's sexual imagery everywhere: in magazines, in TV commercials and on roadside ads, even though that doesn't jive very well with traditional Christian values. So obviously the positive effects of these ads are bigger than the negative ones, which is another reflection of society.

Then what's specifically Christian about our values regarding sex? AFAIK, Homosexuality was a crime in the Western world until recently as well. In Germany it was only officially legalized around 1970 (although punishments weren't enforced for some time prior to that), and I'd suppose that this is similar elsewhere in the West.

For the same reason that I can say that mammals don't have a lot to do with fish, even though they evolved from fish.

 

If you are happy with the former, that's fine with me. I am not trying to claim that Judeo-Christian values are inherently unique.

You know, defending the place of Christianity in our cultural sphere is not what I expected to do on this thread

 

Now I understand our miscommunication - you have a fundamentally incorrect view on what most Americans believe. If you think most Americans are hunky dory about the concept of sleeping with hookers, you don't understand Americans.
Also, the fact that porn is omnipresent doesn't mean Christian values are long gone. Rather, the fact that porn stars are ostracized for being porn stars (not a single one has every made any "mainstream" impact) suggests that, in a very Christian way, we like a giddy little thrill, but certainly wouldn't condone it.
Unless you're telling me that you'd be cool with your daughter being a porn star. I don't have any kids, but I sure as hell wouldn't be OK with it.

 

I just want to make clear that I completely agree with both of these statements in principle. My only problem is with calling the western values "Judeo-Christian".
It exaggerates the religious contribution, just like calling people fish exaggerates the fish aspect of all of us. Yes, the fish past was a very important period in our evolutionary history, but there were stages before our ancestors were fish and there were stages afterwards and today we're something different.
Same with our values: The Judeo-Christian past was very significant, but there were stages before and after and now our values are something different.

 

Granted, I wouldn't be ok with it either. But is that a Judeo-Christian thing? Do you think I'd feel differently if I was Japanese and had Buddhist-Shintoist values instead? Or is this maybe a universal thing, shared by all of humanity?

And I didn't specifically mean that porn is omnipresent. Even a regular ad for some random phone company has a sexy woman in it. It's this everyday stuff I was talking about.

And my point was not that there's absolute sexual liberty in western societies (regarding personal values)...obviously there isn't.
The point is rather that relative to traditional Christian values, this is still radically liberal. If John Calvin was in charge today, the majority of people in the West would probably be burning at the stake.

 

Why are we using John Calvin as the determinist for Christian values? John Calvin was a theologian. And, again, you keep talking about political rather than personal values. They're not the same thing. Who John Calvin would burn at the cross is not relevant!
Also, prostitution is not regarded the same as it was 2000 years ago in the West. I'd wager that Christianity had quite a bit to do with that.

 

Ask Lawrence Fishborne. lol! (The dude from the Matrix) I may have misspelled his name.

 

I know - what a nightmare! Imagine if you were famous and your daughter came out and said "Dad, I have sex on camera for money - tell the country you're cool with it." Yikes.

 

If Calvin's message wouldn't have had any appeal, there wouldn't have been anyone subscribing to his theology. So his personal values (which became political in parts of Switzerland) were shared by many, hence it is relevant.

Don't you think that for the average medieval Christian our world would be a cesspool of vice?

So a roman citizen would have been ok with his daughter becoming a prostitute?

 

Anachronisms and values aren't the same. To some Christians today the world is a cesspool of vice. So what?

That rather depends on where she was on the economic chain.

 

and why, pray tell, would it matter whether they had read their scriptures...???

 

everyone view the world thru their own particular lens. it's inescapable. your lens and my lens have some things in common. we live in the US of A. we have a level of education that has informed us thus and so, etc.

and we are markedly different in various ways. you don't respect my views. you say things like "people like yourself put us through a lot", as if the very fact that our views differ on some important matters means i have subjected you to any personal indignity.

 

Wait a second. Where did I ever say atheists don't have morals? LOL. That would be contradictory to my own thoughts. I think atheists are moral people, but what I was arguing was that morals do NOT NECESSARILY come from religion. It's possible to live morally and not have your life based on religious morals.

If you talk to a lot, many don't. And certainly not Judeo-Christian values.

That's all I will really say, clarifying my thoughts.

 

Sure. They do view the world through their own mindsets, but certain mindsets allow for a greater open mind then others... it's inevitable. Some world views call for my execution (this is fact). These world views are without merit.

By the way, where you get education (even in this country) matters. You can get a greatly secular education, or one based on religious tenants.

You don't respect my views either I feel.

 

Well, today they're obviously the minority and not the ones defining our societal values. In the past this was different. That's the point.

Then maybe the main difference is that today the economic chain doesn't go as far down as it used to...