I'm a total hypocrite in this as I was brought up a catholic and still participate in catholic celebrations and events - I guess you could call me a cultural catholic. I hope this doesn't sound condescending, but if you had a relgious yet happy childhood, it makes you feel understanding towards religious people at large. My nan will always defend the pope's beliefs but she still told the priest who came round to ask her why she didn't have more kids when she stopped at two to feck off and she loves one of my best friend who's a raving homo to death. I think this is the reality for many religious people. In their own circles they will be plenty critical of their religion, and their religion's leaders, but as it's so much a part of their lives they will defend it against the outside world. It's similar to having a bastard of a parent. You and your sisters and brothers will slag him off no end, and you might even go to a psychiatrist to heal the damage he's done, but when an outsider criticises him, you'll stand up for him. I think it's total nonsense that people need religion as a moral guideline, you have to find morals within yourself. But I also think it's completely natural for people to want some class of spirituality in their lives. Compare the atheist funeral to a catholic funeral, for example. A catholic funeral gives you days to grieve and contemplate about the person you lost. Religion gives you time to contemplate full stop. That's precisely the value religion brings that many atheists underestimate.
In the US, an adult having sex with a 16 year old would be a sex offender. In the UK, it'd be perfectly legal. Is the UK less moral? For a more extreme example, in war times, people who'd never harm anyone else will willingly kill people. More extreme still (from a moral point), in war times, many have seen the ability to rape as being spoils of war. People will hail "thou shalt not kill" when campaigning against abortionists, but support the death penalty for murderers. Things we see as absolutes clearly aren't, given the "correct" context.
the problem with relativistic moral guidelines ultimately is that anyone can decide what's OK from a moral standpoint and rationalize it to the nth degree, and you can only argue that the predominant cultural norm opposes the behavior, not that it's really wrong. the twist here is that it's always the case that people will point out the most egregiously depraved behavior as an example, like child molestation, or they will cite "thou shalt not kill" -- when the word in TTC is "murder", not kill -- and point to war as immoral because there's killing. or people who don't understand the hermeneutics involved in "turn the other cheek" will wrongly cite that verse. here's the deal: if you are on the receiving end of wrong-doing, overwhelmingly you want a standard that makes what wrong was inflicted on you absolutely wrong. if you're the accused, or best friend/lover/relative of the accused, you want moral relativism applied. this is one of the reasons that God-fearing people want the standard to be absolute. it begs fewer questions...or at least that's the way black and white issues seem.
I completely disagree with this, based on what Johan meant, I don't think he was talking about relativism. You do not need a book to tell you what is wrong, what is right and how you ought to behave. It may simply be the case that moral oughts are part of our nature and we comprehend morality intrinsically. Now, this leads to a fine distinction. For this morality to be objective and for people to have an obligation and duty to fulfill it, metaphysical naturalism must be false. If metaphysical naturalism is true, then we are left with relative morality and no objective obligation and duty. This statement completely begs the question. If you are on the receiving end of a wrong doing, then the act, has to be wrong (or else the first part of the statement does not follow). If you are trying to say that you are on the receiving end of an action and therefore, want to say that it is wrong, then that is another thing all together. There is also a huge problem with taking your morality from a sacred book and that is that a lot of religious people now have a very literal interpretation of the bible. I can guarantee that one can come to a moral conclusion based on the bible, that you would disagree with.
I think part of the problem is that extremists tend to have the most literal word-for-word hardline belief of their particular "written word". The more they believe their holy book, the more extreme their behaviour. The bible apparently (I don't think the site this is from had the most balanced viewpoint) states... For a woman who is not a virgin on her wedding night If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her ... and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid: Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel's virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate: And the damsel's father shall say ... these are the tokens of my daughter's virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. ... But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die. Deuteronomy 22:13-21 Now if true, the bible is clearly saying that women who have sex before marriage should be stoned to death. Now, I'm sure the number of christians advocating that must be tiny, yet why is that instruction in the bibe any less valid than any of the others? How can that be dismissed as an "extremist viewpoint" without saying that part of the bible is wrong? Atheism, on the other hand, can never have any such extremism, as there are no rules which must be obeyed.
The egg obviously... (this was easy) So are you telling me that you should stone your daughter to death when it turns out that she's no longer a virgin out of "the binding principle of love"? Who is cherry picking here? So you admit that THE LAW is not absolute. It was all right under different circumstances, but it's not anymore. It used to be the right kind of thing to stone a raped woman to death because she didn't scream loud enough at some point in the past, but it's not anymore. Tell me, was it ever the right thing to do to stone a rape victim to death? You can't have it both ways. Either the morals change with the New Testament, in which case they're NOT absolute, or they don't change, in which case you have to live with all the cruelties of the OT. But since the NT doesn't mention that the laws change (rather the opposite) I think you're stuck with the second scenario. You try to weasel out by claiming that the underlying reason for following the law has changed, but this is a non-sequitur. Also, you can find plenty of immoral stuff in the NT as well: 1 Timothy 2 11A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. 12I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. And it's not as if god isn't clear about his wishes in the OT. Most of the examples here are from Deuteronomy which is probably the most vile book in all of the Bible. Here's what it also says: Deuteronomy 28 15 However, if you do not obey the LORD your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you: 16 You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country. 17 Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed. 18 The fruit of your womb will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks. 19 You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out. 20 The LORD will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking him. [...] 25 The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. [...] 30 You will be pledged to be married to a woman, but another will take her and ravish her. ... and it goes on and on...so did God change his mind on this? Or is it still true and he still causes the wifes of people who eat pork to be raped? Or has it never been true? It can only be one of those options, so which one shall it be? As I said, I could construct a scenario where this is the case. It'd be a very artificial one but non the less an entirely possible one. Moral absolutism simply cannot work. At one point or another you're bound to run into a moral dilemma where moral absolutism just can't do it any justice. And yet the most Christian country in the Western world is the only one which still has it. So because you're uncomfortable with it, you refuse to call a spade a spade? Of course it's more difficult to not have absolute morals. It makes decision making a lot harder. But please assume for a second that there really are no absolute morals. Wouldn't it be better to struggle with moral relativism than to simply adopt a random set of rules and call them absolute? There are two people in my immediate surrounding who are openly gay. One's an atheist, the other one's a Lutheran minister. You can believe me that the minister has a lot more problems regarding her sexual preferences within her surrounding than the atheist has within his. And it's quite obvious that this is because of the teachings in the Bible. The gay minister obviously has a different interpretation of the Bible than many of her colleagues, but this only goes to show that Christian morals really are relative because the interpretation of the law is relative. So we're back at what I said earlier: Everybody reads his pre-existing moral ideas into the Bible. So what you're saying is that everything that has changed is not about morals, but about culture. That's a convenient cop out, but I don't see the difference. Today, I think we'd agree that stoning a rape victim is immoral. If this was absolute, then it has always been immoral. Yet the Bible demands that treatment. Wouldn't that make the Bible immoral, regardless of whether it was a cultural thing or not and regardless of the times? I've never heard of historians who accept the Bible as truth. They might accept parts of it, but certainly none of the supernatural stuff. Then there are theologians who specialize on the history whose work on the Bible is also important. In many cases they obviously believe the Bible, but I've never heard that any on them could actually make a case for the historicity of the bible that would hold up to standard scrutiny. In the end, the argument is always: "Well, you can't DIS-prove it and my faith is strong enough to believe that it's true." I don't know why or if it really was the case at all. People of all times have believed in all kinds of things. That doesn't mean a lot. We have to look at the evidence that is available to us. That of course includes the Bible, but we have to see it in context, just like every other source that claims to attest to supernatural or indeed natural events. We can't just take something for granted only because it's written in some book... Nope, I merely replied to the question why I should care about these things. Beliefs inform actions and some of these actions are quite problematic, even within Christianity. False beliefs can be very detrimental to all of us, that's why I care what people believe.
Exactly. Call me cynical but all mankind needs to do 'good' in the free western world is a payoff. In other words when it pays off to be 'good', people generally are. People don't generally turn to crime because they're not religious, but because they don't see an alternative in life that can give them instant rewards like crime does. I guess religious people consider the promise of ending up in heaven (or the equivalent thereof) as the ultimate pay-off, and that's what makes them religious in the first place. Maybe religious people feel they, or indeed people in general, need that added pay-off of a better after-life.
I agree that atheists aren't typically extremists, but they're not all exactly liberal or even libertarian either. There are plenty of atheists who are against state-funded religious schools, for example. I think that's what Dig is hinting at. Atheists shouldn't expect that they get accepted by religious people if they don't accept there are people with different points of view and vice versa. Religious people in turn should accept that the law of their land will always be above the law of their religion.
Again! There is no such thing as Christian morality. There are men and women who describe themselves as Christians who vary in their way of dealing with moral issues. The same is true for any selection of people who can be labeled as Dutch or civil engineers or dry cleaners. You just don't get it that God said "These things are wrong" back in the days of Moses and they are still wrong. The difference between then and now is that a person who is following Jesus does not have to obey all of the 600+ articles of The Law to be viewed as "righteous" or "sinless" in God's eyes. It's still wrong to murder and covet and lie and worship gods other than YHWH. But if you do any of the wrong things, you can be forgiven. How? Ask the Father to forgive you on the basis that Jesus paid the penalty for your sin and commit to following his example. Obviously, it would be extremely unusual for anyone to exactly duplicate what he did, but that's the goal. And if you miss the mark, as all do, you continue to ask for forgiveness and for cleansing. The best way to avoid falling into the same bad habits is to train good habits in. --------- If you don't know what the truth is, you cannot know what's false.
Christians will normally tell you that the law of their "religion" supersedes the law of the land. If obeying Man's law requires them to violate God's law, they know they ought to obey God's law. It's roughly akin to a soldier not obeying an order he knows to be immoral.
I'm using the term the same way people use it who claim that our culture is based on Christian values. Are you saying that there are no Christian values? So when God said back in the days of Moses that rape victims should be stoned, then this is still imperative, it's just that god forgives us for not doing so? Then why doesn't god tell us the truth? Clear and unambiguous?
Judeo-Christian values, maybe. Jesus fulfilled all the requirements of The Law. The Levitical code -- stoning of virgins, etc. -- applied to the Jews/Hebrews, but it's really TTC which are always "in play". he did: Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life...No one comes to the Father except through me." is there anything ambiguous about that, as far as you're concerned?
So apparently god can change the rules as to what's right and what's not: Stoning used to be the right thing to do for this group of people, but now it's not right anymore. So much for absolute morality... Apparently it is. According to Wikipedia, there are roughly 38,000 Christian denominations out there. If the message was clear and unambiguous, you'd expect only one.
So you are saying the bible is wrong? How do you decide which bits of the old testament can be ignored, and which bits should be taken as fact?
when a child disobeys his parent and is sent to his room and cannot watch TV, the withholding of TV watching only applies to the time that the child is in his room. the punishment only applies to that child and for that time. the principle here is that God can apply whatever "penalty" he chooses for whatever misbehavior for whomsoever has violated his statutes. you're using stoning as the rule. it's not the rule. it's the consequence for violating the rule. why? i bet there aren't more than a few dozen completely distinct expressions of Christianity. 38,000 denominations means that there are groups of people who say that they are a denomination. their "doctrinal statement" may be virtually identical to dozens of others but those others are in different countries or speak different languages.
You're trying to use semantics to weasel out of the uncomfortable situation you're in. Stoning is both, the consequence for violating the rule, but also a rule in its own right. The Bible clearly says that god demands this specific punishment for all kinds of things. He could have just said that someone who is raped in a city is breaking a rule (I really don't see the logic, but well) but he says more, he says that these rape victims must be stoned. So he creates a new rule, and if you don't stone them, he causes your wife to be raped (on top of some other unpleasant stuff). So let's make this simple: Has stoning rape victims been the right thing to do in the past, but it's not anymore? Has it always been the right thing to do and it still is? Or has it never been the right thing to do? Even if some of those 38,000 have very similar doctrines, that still leaves A LOT more than one denomination.
you've made a false assertion and i'm clarifying it. semantics? not so much. you want to make up a system to fortify your contention, i guess i can't stop you, but the consequence to something isn't an element of the morality. it's the result of the immorality. that's two different things. sorry. whether it was "the right thing to do" isn't my call. it's not what is called for now. i don't think you explained why you think -- despite the fact that there are dozens and dozens of different cultures -- there should only be one denomination. let's start with that...
The point is, in the Bible god clearly demands inner city rape victims to be stoned. I don't care how you want to call it. I'm asking you whether you think it's the right thing to do. But obviously you refuse to answer. You claimed that Jesus taught us the truth, clear and unambiguous. But if that was the case, you'd only get one denomination, because everybody who believes would agree on the doctrine (as it is so unambiguous).
to repeat an earlier question, so you are saying the bible is wrong? How do you decide which bits of the bible are for "now" and which bits aren't?
you presume to judge God from a distance that prevents you from knowing virtually any of the particulars. there is no way i can do that. what the Hebrews needed in terms of accountability having come from Egypt and complaining for 40 years about how God was treating them i cannot say. you allow yourself the latitude to say that God should not set down standards for them that are different from the conventional standards for our time. and to add to this, Jesus came to us and rectified hundreds of years of misuse of the spirit of the Law. you recall that a group of Jews were ready to stone an adulteress, but Jesus intervened and challenged them to examine their own conduct before condemning her. it's crucial to any discussion of moral absolutes that we recognize that the application of consequences for violating the rules/laws doesn't nullify the laws themselves. in God's economy, mercy is more valuable than pure justice. what we deserve is trumped by grace.
people have been wrongly applying scripture for more than 1500 years. the Bible isn't wrong. there is a thing called dispensationalism, a concept that i haven't studied. it generally describes a phenomenon whereby God makes deals with Man in stages or dispensations. i provided the link, above. i haven't paid much attention to this kind of doctrine, but many people think it's crucial.