"Why Believe in God" ad campaign

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Visible Mojo for Alex and GD for wonderful posts.

[Prudence]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

Otherwise, how do you expect people to come to rational conclusions on new moral challenges that are not explicitly covered in their choice of god handbook?

This is the facet of religion with which I currently struggle. So many of the "instructions" were clearly (from our modern perspective) designed to address social issues of the time. And we have no trouble, as a (western) society, dismissing the rules about stoning and selling daughters and whatnot. But the other rules society swears are the unerring Word of God and must be obeyed blindly.

It's not like Leviticus, to use the previously mentioned example, has some sort of list where rules from column A must be obeyed until the advent of the internal combustion engine and rules from column B must be obeyed in perpetuity. I see them as rules with a purpose - and when the purpose is no longer relevant, the rules need no longer required blind adherence.

Major religious figures themselves are often philsophers of a sort, exploring the meaning of truth and faith and societal compact - reorganizing (sometimes to radical effect) the everyday practices supporting one religious sect or another. How can you be a philosopher and not question? How can you follow a philosopher and not emulate their questioning?

And yet, the modern questioner finds themselves frequently on the outsides of both camps - devout believers and devout nonbelievers. The believers expect the blind obedience to bearded, be-robed imagry they've been trained to worship -- all else is heresy. And the nonbelievers likewise point to the questioning as proof that the belief system is complete poppycock with nary a shred of truth nor utility.

How am I supposed to find truth if I don't look for it?

[SzczerbiakManiac]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

The golden calf was never brought to the temple it was made in the desert at the foot of Sinai while Moses was receiving the 15 10 Commandments.

VGDM from Mel Brooks.

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Prudence

And the nonbelievers likewise point to the questioning as proof that the belief system is complete poppycock with nary a shred of truth nor utility.

I don't say that there is nary a shred of truth nor utility. Just that the truth and utility is available outside the framework of religion or spirituality.

If you, in your personal quest for "truth" feel it is found in a religious framework, I really don't care. It is when those who have found it there declare that because that is where they found it, it is the only place it can be found that I have issues. (Or when they claim real world proof for their faith, then yes I'll probe that reality.)

Originally Posted by flippyshark

Altruism has been observed in other animal species. Does this mean that our own sense of altruism evolved, or is some supernatural agency granting an awakening morality to a few other primates? I'd say more likely the former.

I've been very consciously keeping my responses in the language of free will. Obviously (if you're aware of my past here), I don't really believe that. We're just biological machines running on an electrical power source with a chemical operating system. The selfishness I've described (I originally used the word narcissism in my post above before changing it; wonder how that word choice would have altered things) isn't something I think we choose; it is just evolved into us and, I would argue, that produces a very general framework of morality that is pretty common across human time and space, though in specifics there is a fair amount of diversity.

Originally Posted by David E.

Pointing out awful practices that members of a group did does not mean their value system is bad unless those things are proclaimed to be an integral part of it.

Why do you grant the privilege of this cop out to religion, but not to secularism?

[alphabassettgrrl]

I tend to think selfishness is the only reliable motivator. If I know how it benefits someone, I can guess what they will do. I can be wrong, but even altruism has self-interest at its heart.

I do what I do because it creates the world that I want to live in. I like a world where people use their turn signals, where people help other people when it's necessary, and where people are honest and hardworking. There are many things I want in a society, and I don't always hit the mark, but I do try.

I'm really enjoying this conversation.

[flippyshark]

I'm back for a minute or two, and I am also enjoying this discussion.

I tend to use the term "self-interest' instead of selfishness, as the latter has a somewhat negative connotation, trained into us from childhood. "Enlightened self-interest" is perhaps even better, and includes the idea that serving the interests of others aids in furthering one's own interests, which I think is not only true, it's a pretty good basis for personal ethics. It's also entirely rational and non-dependent on revelation.

"Selfishness" often connotes "unenlightened self interest" - in other words, inconsiderate, myopic greed and disdain for the well-being of others. I presume that this has not been the intended usage of it in Alex and GD's posts.

My few minutes are almost up - I'll throw in a quick and almost entirely irrelevant anecdote. I just returned from performing an interactive murder mystery. Our audience was a local Christian private school, and the kids were mostly high school age. (Our show was their reward for doing well in their "Academic Olympics.") Anyhow, during the Q&A section of the show, where the audience gets to question the actor/suspects, one of the students, a young lady of I'm guessing sixteen or so, demanded of the detective character, "Did you vote for Obama?" The actor playing the detective said, 'I don't know what that has to do with the murder, but yes, I did." The girl looked right at him and said, "How dare you!" Then she sat down. The room got real quiet, until the detective went on to the next table. Awkward.

Anyway, neither here nor there, but it just now happened, and I wanted to share. I'm off to my next show. Check back in later.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

It's times like this where I wish The Hedonist Manifesto were a completed reference work that I could quote at will

[David E]

Happy New Year to everyone.

To summarize, I am an agnostic and I am using using logic to argue for faith, and that the concept of good God is necessary for a predictable morality with good results. By good results I mean now, as exemplified by the US, not the middle ages! I tried to put the evil religion has done in perspective by pointing out that the number of people murdered in the inquisition in 4 centuries was in the tens of thousands, whereas secular ideology has murdered about 100 million in the 20th century alone. Also, I am not saying it’s great in all cases, just better than the alternative.

What is the alternative? In the quote below, FlippyShark made a pretty good case for it: Enlightened Self Interest (ESI) as exemplified by Scandinavian countries who have not attacked others as he has pointed out. He is right, really all of Western Europe (WE) has become secular. Most LOT folks and about half of the US sees that as a better and more evolved value system than the JudeoChristian (JC) one our country was founded upon.

Originally Posted by flippyshark

...Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot are always brought up by religious apologists to rub in the faces of the secular... These abusive regimes are a long way away from secular liberal democracies, which currently seem to be exterminating hardly anyone in Scandinavian countries, for instance.

My response is this: looking at a map of the world, I see a lot more Cambodias than Swedens, and when one goes up against the other the Cambodias will prevail because the Swedens have neither the ability nor the will to defend their value system, partly because they don’t have a strong sense of what it is.

They don't need to keep an army to defend themselves because they are part of NATO which means they will be defended by the US military, whose armies defended them against Nazism, and whose missiles defended them against Communism, yet they did not speak out against either. In fact, Sweden and Switzerland made a big point of being neutral instead of helping to defeat these threats. A more recent example is German soldiers' rules of engagement in Afganistan: only fire at the enemy in self defense. I have heard it said that Germany took the wrong lesson from WWII: Instead of learning to fight evil, they learned it was evil to fight.

Now partly due to this very attitude and their commitment to ZPG (in fact, their population continues to decrease), a third threat is emerging to this secular culture - the growing Islamic population, who is very committed to their own culture and values, and willing to fight for them. I am not saying they are a necessarily a physical threat (although more than a hundred thousand cars were burned in France by Muslim protestors in 2006). But if current trends continue, they certainly will supplant a culture whose primary value is tolerance of other cultures.

Although WE are not a threat to other good societies, the problem is they are not a threat to bad ones either. WE has the same pacifism problem as Buddhism, where secular forces (who have apparently disregarded ESI) have slaughtered and consumed Myanmar and Tibet, who were never a threat to them.

While ESI seems to make sense theoretically, it doesn’t seem to play out reliably in the real world from either a biological or logical sense. Both people and societies benefit often from stealing and murdering. Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe benefitted by murdering their opponents and Arafat stole more than $1 billion to personal accounts in France and was revered as a hero by many. We hear about people who steal in corporations because they get arrogant careless and get caught, but how many more will we never know about?

We know from WWII accounts that Jews in danger would first go to the house of a priest or nun as they were more likely to be hidden than if they knocked on the door of a lawyer or professor. The neutral secular countries don’t have the same record of putting themselves at risk, and it seems that there are sound logical and biological reasons for it.

I leave you with a graphic of the US stamp honoring the 4 chaplains (2 ministers, a priest and a rabbi) who drowned because they gave their life vests to sailors when the SS Dorchester was sunk. Seems like their JC ideology trumped their biological imperative for survival or the logical one which would argue that 4 sailors out of hundreds would be more expendable than the few chaplains who were there to give sustenance to many.

[David E]

Originally Posted by David E.
Pointing out awful practices that members of a group did does not mean their value system is bad unless those things are proclaimed to be an integral part of it.

Originally Posted by Alex

Why do you grant the privilege of this cop out to religion, but not to secularism?

Not sure why you call this a cop out. I think I'm just stating a fact. To give a simple example: millions of people go to places of worship and hear the teachings, among which murder and stealing are prohibited. Some of them still go and commit awful murders. Does the fact that people can't live up to the teachings mean they are wrong or that the deviation becomes the badge of that religion?

As far as me not granting this to secular ideology, what did I write that makes you think this? I don't think I have painted secularism by pointing out the few aberrations. Funny, there is not a really a formal ideology that secular people hold up as a model, so I can't even say they are not living up to their standards because each person might have their own version.

-----

Alex, regarding the why is murder wrong question, you pointed out that I was not understanding what you wrote, in which case I still don't. Seemed like you were saying you thought murder was wrong in your case, but that it might not apply to others. Is that right, or do you agree with Flippyshark's answer which was a universal societal one, Enlightened Self Interest?

[Strangler Lewis]

As to a secular value system, the story goes that the great sage Hillel was asked if/or said that he could teach the whole Torah while standing on one foot. Challenged to do it, he stood on one foot, recited the golden rule and declared, "That is the whole of the law. The rest is commentary. Go forth and learn." Since you are an agnostic, I assume you have no trouble agreeing that this moral principle--which sounds a lot more moral than enlightened self interest--predates its clever attribution to a divine source. I think the "self-evident truths" set out in the opening to the Declaration of Independence states some key principles as well (minus the endowment by the creator part).

I'm not sure that the Dorchester story is terribly useful in a world where our enemies blow themselves up for the greater bad all the time. Further, in "Band of Brothers," the point was made that the bond among the men was such that they killed themselves for each other all the time, without particular regard for the objective at hand and, presumably, without consideration of Judeo-Christian principles.

That said, I do wonder if the story really played out as we're led to believe: with angelic music and lighting and an exchange between Bobby Jordan and Pat O'Brien.

Sorry, son.
Dat's okay, fadda.
Here, take moin.
Tanks, fadda, I'll never ferget ya.

Or was there, perhaps, a bit more persuasion exerted on the chaplains?