"Why Believe in God" ad campaign

[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.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by David E

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.

So you're saying that, without personally holding a belief in an omniscient, omnipotent entity, you desire morality. You have an internally motivated desire to act morally, and you have a desire that the people around you act morally. Would you agree with that assessment?

Assuming you do, I'd have one more set of questions. Do you consider yourself abnormal? Do you consider yourself significantly different than a large percentage of the population? Is that internally motivated moral desire something that you think is largely unique to you?

[Alex]

Originally Posted by David E

So you are saying murder is wrong because the person being killed does not want that to happen?

No, I didn't say that.

Then you gave selfishness as a second reason. Now you are into the business of saying an act is wrong because of the thinking or motivation of the perpetrator.

No, I didn't say that.

So it would not be wrong if the killer had an altruistic motive? The 9/11 murderers did, even giving their lives for the cause.

That would be up to the societies involved to collectively decide. There are many examples where killing for altruistic (or other) reasons is considered acceptable. The views of individuals aren't individually relevant.

selfish=wrong, then everything would be wrong.

You don't seem to have read what I wrote very well because I never suggested such logic as "selfish=wrong".

Still wondering what is wrong about murdering.

Inherently? Nothing. Subjectively? It's only wrong when you're murdering me. Pragmatically? I'm willing to pretend it is wrong if you're murdered for the side benefit of everybody else pretending they think it is wrong for me to be murdered.

Maybe not so silly if you learn the background and wisdom behind some of the practices.

If you, in order to continue the traditions pretend that the god no longer believes to exist actually exists then yes, perfectly silly. Regardless of the merit of the practice.

As I've said I make no beef with many aspects of religion, I just think that generally religion co-opted them rather than creating them and the same positions can be achieved without religion.

Without the notion that something transcends our physical existence, this human tragedy more easily becomes an acceptable cost of attaining your utopian vision for society on earth, because there is nothing else but that.

I'd rather that than lying to ourselves (not that I am accepting your larger argument). If the only reason we are generally good to each other is because of a giant invisible mommy in the next room who'll ground us, then I'd rather we accept that and work on it and just get rid of the invisible mommy.

But as has been asked several times in this thread, if religious morality is what we need then which religious morality are you advocating? It seems to be judeo-christian, but in that case which judeo-christian morality, and how forcefully to we impose it on the non judeo-christians? And, almost as importantly, what do we do about the fact that the judeo-christian mommy is, as described in available texts, a major dickhead subject to incredible mood swings?

[David E]

Originally Posted by Alex

But as has been asked several times in this thread, if religious morality is what we need then which religious morality are you advocating? It seems to be judeo-christian, but in that case which judeo-christian morality, and how forcefully to we impose it on the non judeo-christians?

I understand your questions. What I need to clear up about my argument is that I'm talking about the value system, not the theology. Theology can be a personal choice, but it's values that determine behavior, and that morality has to be universal and therefore not a personal choice.

For example, you can believe in the Holy Trinity and I can believe that the Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of the first Buddha. But we both share the common value that stealing is wrong. There is actually a lot of overlap of values between the Buddhist value system and the JudeoChristian (JC) one, and that's fine.

The reason I don't advocate for Buddhism is that it doesn't value fighting wrongdoing like the JC one does, and therefore will eventually be destroyed or subjugated to regimes that perpetrate more evil, as we are seeing already. The result is a worse world. To many, physical violence even in self defense is wrong. This is a major difference with JC and in fact is a more and more a shared value with the Western European Secular system (WE).

In this regard, the WE system is worse, because many don't even believe in a universal concept of wrong to begin with; it's a personal choice. They seem to have a problem identifying evil and even doubt its existence. This is emblemized by Sweden, who could not see any moral difference between the Allied and Axis powers in WWII, nor between the US and Soviets in the Cold War, or the Israelis and Palestinians today. I think this is because they have put the value of equality above all else, to the point that humans are all the same inside (regardless of their outside behavior apparently), terrorists are freedom fighters or justified because those who they attack enabled them, animals have the same worth as people, etc.

Now, I understand that not everyone falls neatly into the WE or JC category and we all have a certain combination of these beliefs. This is because the WE people's grandfathers who built their cities and societies came from the JC tradition, and it has evolved and morphed from there into WE secularism. I point to the Scandinavian examples because the process is more advanced in Europe and the US is far more religious still.

In the JC system, fighting both in self defense and in aid of others who arevictims of wrongdoing is not only permissible, it is an obligation, which is one of the reasons the US has always had an interventionist foreign policy. I am not saying it's perfect and doesn't often make mistakes. My point is that the benign, "enlightened" secular world has done harm by enabling the harmful forces, both secular and radical religious.

Just because I am not religious myself, doesn't mean that I can't acknowledge the real world consequences of important differences in these ideologies.

[David E]

Strangler, I enjoyed reading your post. With regard to your examples of Hillel and the Constitution (which I also hold in high esteem), it seems to me that you are going out of your way to extract the God part and leave everything else. (Maybe you are not personally adverse to it, but you are doing it to respond to my arguments to test if God is necessary to them, which I hope is the case). Whether or not these depend on God for validity, it just happens to be historically true. Picasso’s sketches were criticized by those who said that an eight year old child could have drawn them. His response was: “Maybe, but the eight year old didn’t.” I am trying to build my case on results, not theory.

But now that you bring them up, it seems that God is rather integral to them:

Hillel didn’t attribute the golden rule to himself, but rather the God of Abraham and the introduction of monotheism to the world. And the founding fathers did not say that Washington or Madison were conferring rights on those they governed; they had the vision that they themselves were blessed by that same God and they wanted to affirm that for everyone. (An earlier version of the US Seal they designed depicted Moses leading the Jews to Freedom, and the Liberty Bell in Philly has an inscription from the Torah on it). I’m not sure if the idea of specific rights can even exist without someone conferring them to someone else – can molecules or matter or give us rights?

[Strangler Lewis]

Perhaps it's a slight diversion, but I must interject. While it's interesting, and while I agree at some level, I don't find it terribly pragmatic to tear apart terms like selfishness and free will--terms which everybody should agree have recognizable moral connotations in the social context in which we live.

Put another way, if I said to one of my kids, "Don't you think you're being a little selfish," and they came back at me with, "well, so are you with your criticisms," I would not reward them with an ice cream for brilliant philosophy.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Good thing we're not talking to children.

[Ghoulish Delight]

I didn't say that all selfishness is morally neutral. All I'm saying is that selfishness is not inherently bad in all cases.

[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?