Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
The person who I quoted...
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"No evidence of God" = Is a bad argument against God
- Thread starter Starlight
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mikkel_the_dane
My own religion
Yes and my program works for me.
mikkel_the_dane
My own religion
I got that person on ignore. Thanks.
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
A lot of people don't understand wildlife management today... they want to keep man out of it and let animals suffer. I've seen how that goes... it's better to harvest the excess than have extreme boom and bust cycles.
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
Because letting children live is being cruel? Weird.
Perhaps I was unclear. I kill nothing deliberately with my own hands apart from the exceptions I mentioned. I find the act repulsive. I apologize to the cockroaches for killing them, and grieve when I do so. It seems unfair to me, I'm so much smarter and stronger. If the situation were reversed, I'd want to be spared, so I am violating the Golden Rule.
But my wife is terrified of and disgusted by them, and I have a moral duty to her and her wellbeing as well, one which supersedes my duty to the cockroach. It wasn't a choice or a conclusion. It was a discovery about myself. It's how I'm wired.
Yes, I am the consequence of the external factors that made and shaped me. It doesn't matter to the claim whether I am reasonable or empathetic myself.
But I do consider myself reasonable and empathetic, and I trust my moral intuitions because they have served me well. I don't lie or steal because I have no desire to do so. It feels wrong. It violates the Golden Rule. Those who don't feel that way will often pay a price socially, spiritually, or both. If I stole $50 from you, I would feel guilt, and if we had been friends and you found out, add shame, remorse for having harmed you, and regret for damaging the relationship.
Morality is opinion, ideally one's own and from a healthy conscience - not that received from the past through a book or priest. Whether you get your moral direction from a conscience or receive it from a guru or a book, it's still just an opinion.
And calling received morals objectively correct is to misunderstand where moral intuitions come from. They don't come from the sky or any other source but that of a conscious moral agent at best, or from people trying to exploit others at worse. Christian morality is not only not objectively correct, it's flawed. When somebody teaches, 'blessed are the meek and the longsuffering who turn the other cheek, for their reward is coming after death,' they are not your friend. When they teach you to suppress reason, that faith is a virtue, that they have the truth including the moral truth, that you should submit to priests speaking as gods (and kings, and slavers if you're a slave, and husbands of you're a wife), obey, and pray for forgiveness and salvation from perdition, they are not your friend. This is slave morality, what you teach to people you wish to exploit without them rising up. I'm not the only or first person to recognize this:
- "How can you have order in a state without religion? For, when one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares 'God wills it thus.' Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet." - Napoleon Bonaparte
- "If you want to control a population and keep them passive ... give them a god to worship" ~ Noam Chomsky
- "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." -Seneca the Younger
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
So you hire your killing done for you. You have just as much blood on your hands, but you just choose to pretend otherwise.
I'm more honest. That's why I like hunting. When the blood on your hands is literal, you better know what you are, and where you fit into the scheme of things.
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
Which is irrational in a world created by survival of the fittest.
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
Animals don't have a conscience. If you are an animal you are being irrational here.
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
That would be God, not any other source.
If you like hunting, it's because you don't mind killing, perhaps even like it like the people who join the police or military to get a chance to kill or otherwise persecute people with impunity.
Moral intuitions are nonrational. They are not derived from reason. Some of the same ideas can be derived from reason, such as not lying or stealing because it's a poor strategy in life that costs more than it yields, but that's not a moral judgment.
I am an animal, and I have a conscience.
And I'm not sure why you keep returning to reason. Reason is for deciding what is out there, how the world works, and the likely outcome of choices - not what one finds moral or immoral. One simply discovers those intuitions if he has them. He does not derive them.
Rational ethics involves the application of reason to those intuitions to convert general moral intuitions like utilitarianism and the Golden Rule into practical rules to facilitate those preferences. So, if one feels that it is wrong to harm others, he must put on his thinking cap and resort to empiricism (experience) to decide what rules facilitate minimizing harm for the most people. Sometimes there are unintended consequences as with prohibition, we empirically discover that, and apply reason to correct the error. But the desire to prevent harm precedes reason. If you don't discover that in yourself, your only reason not to harm others is the expectation that you will harm yourself if you do.
Look at the many immoral Americans in the news now. That's how they think (in case you're wondering, I'm talking about Trumpworld). They just lie and steal as much as they can, showing restraint only where they think that there may be a cost for them, like the Soprano crime family. They never think, "this is wrong," just "we might not get away with this one."
I have no reason to believe that my moral intuitions come from the Christian deity. Besides there being insufficient evidence to believe that it exists, despite the evidence that the deity of the Christian Bible does not exist, the morals claimed for that deity don't align with my own. They aren't the same. I find that character to be immoral as described.
Tiberius
Well-Known Member
Oh, let's not get into the whole predeterminism thing...
But even if I were to accept your premise, what makes you say that a standard from God is objective? If God lays down rules about morality, aren't they just God's opinions? That would leave them just as subjective as any rules about morality that we come up with.
And if that knowledge about morality comes from outside God, then we don't need God to tell us that knowledge, since we could discover it ourselves.
Tiberius
Well-Known Member
Ah yes, that would be it.
Tiberius
Well-Known Member
There's morality, just no objective morality. All we have is subjective morality.
And that's why some people can think executing criminals like rapists, serial killers, etc. is morally acceptable, and other people think that executing any criminal is morally wrong. Because there is no objective morality that can be used to prove that one particular moral viewpoint is correct and all others are demonstrably false.
Tiberius
Well-Known Member
That's not what "survival of the fittest" means...
Denying the basic humanity of pregnant people and eefusing them rughts we even grant to corpses is cruel.
My moral intuition says that quite a few things in your worldview are evil. Interesting that you would attribute this to God.
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
The same applies to you eating animals then. You are killing them just as surely as if you did it yourself.
Hunting is not about killing BTW. It's so much more. Good hunters know and respect the animals they hunt.
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
The " opinion" of the only being with perfect knowledge? Of course his laws are perfect.
Tiberius
Well-Known Member
That's making several assumptions.
It assumes he exists.
It assumes he has perfect knowledge.
It assumes he is telling us the truth.
In any case, having perfect knowledge wouldn't make his opinion objective.