Objective Morals. Are they any better?

[Moz]

We've had enough banter on these forums about whether religions have or have not been instrumental in so many conflicts such that I will leave it here. How anyone can just shrug off religious conflicts and blame it all elsewhere is beyond me.

Okey Dokey... but... to my post earlier where i wrote .......It seems that without religion war is just as prevalent so maybe religion was not the cause of those other wars.

You answered .................................................................. Then the reverse is necessarily also true. You can't have it both ways. You admitted here that politics is just a culpable for the bloodshed yet in your post you backtrack again. Why is it so hard for you to admit that politics has used religious fervor to its own ends. It is common knowledge, it is common sense it is the history of the world.

 

[danieldemol]

Ok.... for the sake of argument postulate a mental exercise and imagine a severe economic reverse of fortune for the west. Things are pretty easy to mitigate when you print trillions of dollars worth of bad money and dare the system to call you on it.... but nothing is free and a consolidation will come..... how will your secular morals and rights hold up then do you think?

I think that once one has a knowledge of the genetic predisposition of humans to struggle for survival one will realise upon honest reflection that the same moral outcomes would occur between secular peoples as would occur between Christians in a bad situation - that is if supply of humans outpaced supply of basic resources struggle for survival would break out amongst them.

And this would have nothing to do with their ideology whether Christian or non-Christian, but rather to do with the genetic predisposition of humans to survive.

Hence the reason any ideology which encourages unchecked breeding of humans is worthy of discouragement.

 

[Moz]

I think that once one has a knowledge of the genetic predisposition of humans to struggle for survival one will realise upon honest reflection that the same moral outcomes would occur between secular peoples as would occur between Christians in a bad situation - that is if supply of humans outpaced supply of basic resources struggle for survival would break out amongst them.

And this would have nothing to do with their ideology whether Christian or non-Christian, but rather to do with the genetic predisposition of humans to survive.

Hence the reason any ideology which encourages unchecked breeding of humans is worthy of discouragement.

I think that once one has a knowledge of the genetic predisposition of humans to struggle for survival one will realise upon honest reflection that the same moral outcomes would occur between secular peoples as would occur between Christians in a bad situation -that is if supply of humans outpaced supply of basic resources struggle for survival would break out amongst them.

Well thank you for the honest reflection. You obviously do not see how much that undermines your argument.
.................................................
And this would have nothing to do with their ideology whether Christian or non-Christian, but rather to do with the genetic predisposition of humans to survive.

Well that is patently untrue. The twentieth century example is that it is predominantly religious people who stood against the chaos. Google conscientious objector and see how many of them are religious. I can think of one Christian group numbering in the millions that would stand against the chaos regardless of the danger or cost. The Gulags and concentration camps had plenty of people who were there because their religious beliefs meant they could not follow the state into genocidal madness.
..........................................
Hence the reason any ideology which encourages unchecked breeding of humans is worthy of discouragement.

You are young so i will cut you some slack but this is truly appalling ..... I assume this is something you picked up at Uni. I would also assume that you have no idea where the idea originated, of the club of Rome and their ilk.. For someone who claims no affiliation with communism you are stepped in Marxist thought. Your altruistic sounding comment hides some of the most reprehensible thinking possible. Especially on a thread discussing morality, you think socially engineering population control is a good goal. Encourage is a very innocuous term... but the state has a poor record at encouraging, they tend toward the enforcing side of things. You need to look to the roots of the ideology that you seem to have embraced and see where it leads.

Btw.... if you embrace the collectivist mantra that's ok but you should at least acknowledge where it comes from and that you are in that ideological milieu. Look at the results of the ideology to date, postulate a future path using the examples we have and at least make a decision with full knowledge so that when they are recruiting the thought police you can gain a honored position in the party. as a fully indoctrinated member of the righteous. A bit Orwellian but that is the world you want even if you don't know it.

 

[Moz]

I think that once one has a knowledge of the genetic predisposition of humans to struggle for survival one will realise upon honest reflection that the same moral outcomes would occur between secular peoples as would occur between Christians in a bad situation - that is if supply of humans outpaced supply of basic resources struggle for survival would break out amongst them.

And this would have nothing to do with their ideology whether Christian or non-Christian, but rather to do with the genetic predisposition of humans to survive.

Hence the reason any ideology which encourages unchecked breeding of humans is worthy of discouragement.

Hence the reason any ideology which encourages unchecked breeding of humans is worthy of discouragement.

• “All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
– Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution

• “Mankind is the most dangerous, destructive, selfish and unethical animal on the earth.”
– Michael Fox, vice-president of The Humane Society

• “Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.”
– Sir James Lovelock, Healing Gaia

• “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”
– Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point

• “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”
– Prof. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb

• “A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible.”
– United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment

• “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
– Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor

• “… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.”
– Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind

• “One America burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say in order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.”
– Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier

• “If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
– Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, patron of the World Wildlife Fund

• “I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
– John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

• “The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.”
– Christopher Manes, Earth First!

• “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”
– David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club


So the elimination of 7 000 000 000 people is needed to get to where the ideological drivers of the thought you expressed think mankind will be comfortable. If you disagree then what the hell do you think encouraging population decline actually means in practice. I'm sure you will protest that this is not what you meant but it's what would happen.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Okey Dokey... but... to my post earlier where i wrote .......It seems that without religion war is just as prevalent so maybe religion was not the cause of those other wars.

You answered .................................................................. Then the reverse is necessarily also true. You can't have it both ways. You admitted here that politics is just a culpable for the bloodshed yet in your post you backtrack again. Why is it so hard for you to admit that politics has used religious fervor to its own ends. It is common knowledge, it is common sense it is the history of the world.

I'm not claiming that religions are the major cause of wars. I am saying that religion has been a major cause of conflict between peoples, and continues to do so. It seems inevitable when religion is often such a fundamental belief for some, such that apart from nationality issues, it comes close to the top of reasons why conflict occurs.

 

[Moz]

I'm not claiming that religions are the major cause of wars. I am saying that religion has been a major cause of conflict between peoples, and continues to do so. It seems inevitable when religion is often such a fundamental belief for some, such that apart from nationality issues, it comes close to the top of reasons why conflict occurs.

It is and it isn't and it's close to the top reason.

Ok...... I'm out.

 

[Augustus]

I am saying that religion has been a major cause of conflict between peoples, and continues to do so. It seems inevitable when religion is often such a fundamental belief for some, such that apart from nationality issues, it comes close to the top of reasons why conflict occurs.

People tend to massively overestimate the contribution of religion to human conflict throughout history due to popular narratives and availability bias.

It's been estimated that religion has been the primary motivation in somewhere between 6 and 9% of wars (and this includes the Arab conquests which, imo, were more imperial than religious). Religious divisions consistently map to other ethno-cultural-linguistic divisions too, which makes identifying 'religious' conflicts even more difficult.

With 91-94% of human conflict being non-religious, it's clearly not one of the top reasons why conflict occurs though.

In addition, religion unites as well as divides. Many people tend to assume absent religion there would be more unity, but this is certainly not self-evident as humans are naturally divided as a species and religion has been one of the most unifying forces in human history. Logically, this unifying force must have prevented an unknown number of conflicts also.

Another issue is that people tend to compare religious conflict against a baseline of zero. So if, hypothetically, there were 1000 religious wars, they assume that absent religion there would have been 0 wars between these states. The problem is if you remove religion you create a vacuum that must be filled by a different guiding ideology/belief system. We have no way of running an alternative history with dozens of new ideologies to see how many wars these caused. If we look at all kinds of societies across human history though, there is no reason to believe they would have been predominately peaceful.

Ultimately, we have no way of knowing religion's net contribution to violence in terms of violence fomented and violence prevented. At worst it has caused 9% of wars (and a smaller percentage of deaths), but, in theory, could have actually been responsible for a net decrease in violence although we can never know this one way or the other.

Many people (not you, I'm generalising about 'New Atheist' types) want to blame religion as they see violence as some kind of error or distortion of human nature (inhuman animals!) and thus need to identify the culprit. Many Humanists (as belies their Christian heritage) see religion as filling the role of the devil, with Reason (i.e Divine Providence) set to deliver us from evil in their secular salvation narrative. This is why their view of religion in history is completely out of step with the views of historians and secular academics and is more a secular version of evangelical Protestant preaching than it is the impartial and reasoned analysis they purportedly favour.

 

[Mock Turtle]

People tend to massively overestimate the contribution of religion to human conflict throughout history due to popular narratives and availability bias.

It's been estimated that religion has been the primary motivation in somewhere between 6 and 9% of wars (and this includes the Arab conquests which, imo, were more imperial than religious). Religious divisions consistently map to other ethno-cultural-linguistic divisions too, which makes identifying 'religious' conflicts even more difficult.

With 91-94% of human conflict being non-religious, it's clearly not one of the top reasons why conflict occurs though.

In addition, religion unites as well as divides. Many people tend to assume absent religion there would be more unity, but this is certainly not self-evident as humans are naturally divided as a species and religion has been one of the most unifying forces in human history. Logically, this unifying force must have prevented an unknown number of conflicts also.

Another issue is that people tend to compare religious conflict against a baseline of zero. So if, hypothetically, there were 1000 religious wars, they assume that absent religion there would have been 0 wars between these states. The problem is if you remove religion you create a vacuum that must be filled by a different guiding ideology/belief system. We have no way of running an alternative history with dozens of new ideologies to see how many wars these caused. If we look at all kinds of societies across human history though, there is no reason to believe they would have been predominately peaceful.

Ultimately, we have no way of knowing religion's net contribution to violence in terms of violence fomented and violence prevented. At worst it has caused 9% of wars (and a smaller percentage of deaths), but, in theory, could have actually been responsible for a net decrease in violence although we can never know this one way or the other.

Many people (not you, I'm generalising about 'New Atheist' types) want to blame religion as they see violence as some kind of error or distortion of human nature (inhuman animals!) and thus need to identify the culprit. Many Humanists (as belies their Christian heritage) see religion as filling the role of the devil, with Reason (i.e Divine Providence) set to deliver us from evil in their secular salvation narrative. This is why their view of religion in history is completely out of step with the views of historians and secular academics and is more a secular version of evangelical Protestant preaching than it is the impartial and reasoned analysis they purportedly favour.

Seen all this before. It doesn't impress me. What other belief system has such a hold over people apart from nationality or culture that tends to make some kill others when they have no real basis for this? If it's nationality it usually means we are conscripted and don't have a choice - as in wars. Does a difference in culture drive us to war? Look at all the trouble spots around the world. No religion involved?

 

[Shad]

Seen all this before. It doesn't impress me. What other belief system has such a hold over people apart from nationality or culture that tends to make some kill others when they have no real basis for this?

A lot of conflict involving religion in Europe was secular nobility fighting the Church over money, power and land. For example the English Reformation started over a lack of a male heir not religion. Church land was seized to pay off Henry 8 debt as he was a reckless spender that would kill people that told him "No". The land was sold off to rich but landless upper-class creating a whole new non-feudal generation of nobility tied to the Crown. This nobility became boot lickers of the Crown. Any sort of reversal or acknowledgement of error would be a risk to their land thus position in government. Ergo they became anti-Catholic as it was in their interest in doing so. The masses' standard of living in England drops to Black Plague levels without any of the major conflicts seen on the mainland. Yet the story told was that the Catholics oppressed the masses, blah blah blah. Reality was people were worse off under the secular leadership for centuries.

A lot of history was written by the upper classes often those that won. Tudor history for centuries was propaganda with babble about Catholic conspiracies and revolts manufactured by the new elite. It took English historians centuries to even dare to challenge the idea that Tudors like Elizabeth were among the worst leaders in English history.

 

[Koldo]

The purported source of the morals is not really important, what matters is the real world efficacy of the moral code.

What is that supposed to mean ?

 

[Augustus]

What is that supposed to mean ?

It doesn't matter if you claim your morals come from god/reason/tradition/etc, what matters is how your morals impact your behaviour.

 

[Shad]

How do they compare with citizenship laws in Middle-East?

Most ME nations have blood birth citizenship. However there is no ME nation at this time that is even comparable to those listed being 3rd world nations.

My point was Japan has laws that would set it below those nations.

Also something to consider. Those listed nations are very homogeneous especially Japan. Food for thought.

 

[Mock Turtle]

A lot of conflict involving religion in Europe was secular nobility fighting the Church over money, power and land. For example the English Reformation started over a lack of a male heir not religion. Church land was seized to pay off Henry 8 debt as he was a reckless spender that would kill people that told him "No". The land was sold off to rich but landless upper-class creating a whole new non-feudal generation of nobility tied to the Crown. This nobility became boot lickers of the Crown. Any sort of reversal or acknowledgement of error would be a risk to their land thus position in government. Ergo they became anti-Catholic as it was in their interest in doing so. The masses' standard of living in England drops to Black Plague levels without any of the major conflicts seen on the mainland. Yet the story told was that the Catholics oppressed the masses, blah blah blah. Reality was people were worse off under the secular leadership for centuries.

A lot of history was written by the upper classes often those that won. Tudor history for centuries was propaganda with babble about Catholic conspiracies and revolts manufactured by the new elite. It took English historians centuries to even dare to challenge the idea that Tudors like Elizabeth were among the worst leaders in English history.

Perhaps if we had a rerun of history without religions being so dominant we might get different results. Who knows? The powerful will always tend to use whatever they can to further their own interests so it's perhaps inevitable that religions have been used as such.

 

[Shad]

Perhaps if we had a rerun of history without religions being so dominant we might get different results.

Politics would just replace religion like it did in the 20th century. Although as I said religion was just the facade to cover for political motivations in a lot of European wars.

Who knows? The powerful will always tend to use whatever they can to further their own interests so it's perhaps inevitable that religions have been used as such.

Just take modern politics in the West for an example. A lot of our focus is now on money related issues. Who pays for healthcare? What are the tax rates of party A and party B. National debt. Student debt. Standards of living. Wages. etc

 

[Augustus]

Seen all this before. It doesn't impress me. What other belief system has such a hold over people apart from nationality or culture that tends to make some kill others when they have no real basis for this?

'Pound for pound' non-religious ideologies probably (well almost certainly) have a worse record for violence than religious ones: Nationalism, Fascism, Communism, Jacobinism, Baathism, Futurism, (Russian) Nihilism, Anarchism etc. Yet 'rational' people still remain absolutely certain that religion is unique in its ability to cause violence.

If religion is man-made why do you think it is fundamentally different from all other kinds of man-made ideology?

Look at all the trouble spots around the world. No religion involved?

And if we looked around the world 75 years ago or 45 years ago we'd see non-religious ideologies causing most of the trouble.

 

[Augustus]

Perhaps if we had a rerun of history without religions being so dominant we might get different results.

Do you believe there is a possibility that such a history could turn out worse?

 

[Aupmanyav]

Those listed nations are very homogeneous especially Japan.

That is nice. Less problems. Diversity brings its own problems. Look at India.

 

[danieldemol]

I think that once one has a knowledge of the genetic predisposition of humans to struggle for survival one will realise upon honest reflection that the same moral outcomes would occur between secular peoples as would occur between Christians in a bad situation -that is if supply of humans outpaced supply of basic resources struggle for survival would break out amongst them.

Well thank you for the honest reflection. You obviously do not see how much that undermines your argument.
.................................................
And this would have nothing to do with their ideology whether Christian or non-Christian, but rather to do with the genetic predisposition of humans to survive.

Well that is patently untrue. The twentieth century example is that it is predominantly religious people who stood against the chaos. Google conscientious objector and see how many of them are religious. I can think of one Christian group numbering in the millions that would stand against the chaos regardless of the danger or cost. The Gulags and concentration camps had plenty of people who were there because their religious beliefs meant they could not follow the state into genocidal madness.
..........................................
Hence the reason any ideology which encourages unchecked breeding of humans is worthy of discouragement.

You are young so i will cut you some slack but this is truly appalling ..... I assume this is something you picked up at Uni. I would also assume that you have no idea where the idea originated, of the club of Rome and their ilk.. For someone who claims no affiliation with communism you are stepped in Marxist thought. Your altruistic sounding comment hides some of the most reprehensible thinking possible. Especially on a thread discussing morality, you think socially engineering population control is a good goal. Encourage is a very innocuous term... but the state has a poor record at encouraging, they tend toward the enforcing side of things. You need to look to the roots of the ideology that you seem to have embraced and see where it leads.

Btw.... if you embrace the collectivist mantra that's ok but you should at least acknowledge where it comes from and that you are in that ideological milieu. Look at the results of the ideology to date, postulate a future path using the examples we have and at least make a decision with full knowledge so that when they are recruiting the thought police you can gain a honored position in the party. as a fully indoctrinated member of the righteous. A bit Orwellian but that is the world you want even if you don't know it.

So let’s invent a hypothetical supposedly pacifist religion which encourages the overproduction of humans and call it ectoplasmianity.

Ectoplasmianity causes its followers to breed over a billion strong, easily outpacing available resources and creating conditions ripe for violent conflict.

Of those billion strong ectoplasmians an insufficiently significant proportion (consisting of some millions) find that they either don’t have the same genetic drive to survival that most have according to the general rule, or are somehow able to so overpower their genetic drive to survival using their pacifist philosophy such that they starve to death rather than fight for their share of an insufficient resource pool to live.

Meanwhile the rest of the billion strong ectoplasmians fight to the death as per their genetic drive to survival until equilibrium between population and resources is achieved.

Now consider that all this violent warfare and death by starvation could have been prevented by contraceptive use in the place of encouragement to overbreed.

Would you consider the presence of an insignificant number of passive ectoplasmians doomed to die anyway a sign of the triumph of ectoplasmianity as a philosophy?!

I know I sure wouldn’t. I would call the preventable failure of so many ectoplasmians a sign that the encouragement to overbreed should be modified.

I think the real tragedy of your post #64 is that you don’t see the monsters amongst those you listed as the inevitable creation of overpopulation, but perhaps you are too blind to see that.

 

[Segev Moran]

Personally, I find it ridiculous when a religious person defends their morals as being the better ones.

Don't.
It is not ridiculous. Maybe false, but certainly not ridiculous.
This belief led to groundbreaking benefits to humans many times.

The main argument a religious person uses to defend this claim is that their morals come from God.

Not all religious people. Actually, many of them do not (from my experience at least).
Those who do, will usually agree if you explain to them what objective really means.

I don't quite understand why a moral coming from God is called "Objective".

As God is an objective concept, the notion is that everything that was decided by it, is considered as "Objective".
The correct term should be "Beneficial to humans".

Maybe because in the eyes of a religious person God is impartial and has no reason to favor any of the sides, one way or the other.

This will contradict the fact we have multiple religions

That's what I think they believe, not sure that is correct.

In some religion God does not prefer.
In some, it is depicted as a "Discriminating" God.
In the Jewish religion, God does not favor any group. Actually, the "Chosen people" concept is very much misinterpreted.
The idea of chosen people is a "job", not a "benefit".

Anyone can take this job.
For those who are not Jewish, the job is much much easier for the same benefits

There is a problem with that logic:
How can the morals from a "Subjective being" be consider "Objective"?

I Think this is what you fail to understand.
God is the objective concept. not its morals.

You believe in an unproven God but the morals taught by this unproven God are proven (objective).

While the reality is the other way around.
We accept subjective morals as objective because we understand we lack the ability to understand the "big picture".

I hear that all the time from very educated people who engage in long and intricate discussions trying to corner the opponent in logic traps trying to prove their point.

Shame.

For the purpose of this discussion:
Subjective means beliefs not proven.
Objective means proven facts.

How are objective morals better than subjective ones?

Objective morals are proven to make humans a better, more successful society assuming our goal as humans is to exist and not suffer.

Are morals from God better than morals from atheists or non-believers?

Depends on the atheist (or none believer).

Any proof of that?
Better for whom, just believers?

Assuming your question was, are God's morals better than the human invented morals?
From the Jewish (and my ) POV, without a doubt.

 

[Moz]

So let’s invent a hypothetical supposedly pacifist religion which encourages the overproduction of humans and call it ectoplasmianity.

Ectoplasmianity causes its followers to breed over a billion strong, easily outpacing available resources and creating conditions ripe for violent conflict.

Of those billion strong ectoplasmians an insufficiently significant proportion (consisting of some millions) find that they either don’t have the same genetic drive to survival that most have according to the general rule, or are somehow able to so overpower their genetic drive to survival using their pacifist philosophy such that they starve to death rather than fight for their share of an insufficient resource pool to live.

Meanwhile the rest of the billion strong ectoplasmians fight to the death as per their genetic drive to survival until equilibrium between population and resources is achieved.

Now consider that all this violent warfare and death by starvation could have been prevented by contraceptive use in the place of encouragement to overbreed.

Would you consider the presence of an insignificant number of passive ectoplasmians doomed to die anyway a sign of the triumph of ectoplasmianity as a philosophy?!

I know I sure wouldn’t. I would call the preventable failure of so many ectoplasmians a sign that the encouragement to overbreed should be modified.

I think the real tragedy of your post #64 is that you don’t see the monsters amongst those you listed as the inevitable creation of overpopulation, but perhaps you are too blind to see that.

That is probably the most outright evil post i has seen on this forum.
You are defending the death of Billions. The restriction of the most basic right we have, procreation. All in the name of the Utopia. Your ideas lead us directly to the Gulags. Oh yeah your moral compass is fine and Dandy.