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Spirituality part of morality?
#11
RE: Spirituality part of morality?
(July 21, 2014 at 3:06 pm)StealthySkeptic Wrote: My theist girlfriend has tried to tell me that she feels that because I'm a good person that she feels that she likes my spirituality. But I've told her pretty flatly that spirituality either means believing in the "supernatural" (as in, the actual definition of what the words mean) or it is a useless term (as it seems to be since it is vaguely applied in New Age terms to almost everything). I just try to follow the Golden Rule. That's it. No more, unnecessarily complicated, "divinely originated" rules required.

Not useless, spirituality can be used to describe knowing your own self and being at peace, with a metaphorical meaning. just like 'you have no soul' can be used metaphorically and not to claim a soul really exists.

What's your girlfriend's religion?
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you

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#12
RE: Spirituality part of morality?
'Morality' is coded into the DNA of Homo Sapiens. While most of the species comports itself with the overall shared DNA which supports a 'relative' morality, and is generally considered to be 'acceptable' or 'superior' to less favored models, there are those within the species who also have more of a 'subjective' morality based upon various genetic, and environmental features.

Until such a time when the word 'spirit' or 'spirituality' can be clearly defined, I see no value in placing the vague notion of spirituality onto something as simple and as practical as Human DNA and its relative functioning within the species as a whole.

I don't doubt that it brings some strange comfort to those who believe in spirits, but I personally find great comfort in not allowing the chemical recesses of my mind to re-construct reality into a fantastic system of unfounded and un-provable beliefs.

I am 'good' and 'moral' because those are the words our species has agreed upon to best represent one who comports himself within an accepted model of behavior - a model shaped over thousands of years, and written onto our DNA.
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#13
RE: Spirituality part of morality?
(July 21, 2014 at 3:07 pm)Blackout Wrote:
(July 21, 2014 at 3:06 pm)StealthySkeptic Wrote: My theist girlfriend has tried to tell me that she feels that because I'm a good person that she feels that she likes my spirituality. But I've told her pretty flatly that spirituality either means believing in the "supernatural" (as in, the actual definition of what the words mean) or it is a useless term (as it seems to be since it is vaguely applied in New Age terms to almost everything). I just try to follow the Golden Rule. That's it. No more, unnecessarily complicated, "divinely originated" rules required.

Not useless, spirituality can be used to describe knowing your own self and being at peace, with a metaphorical meaning. just like 'you have no soul' can be used metaphorically and not to claim a soul really exists.

What's your girlfriend's religion?

Baha'i Faith. Ever heard of it?

And I meant useless as an actual descriptor of one's morality- you can definitely use it as a metaphor in the same way "spirit" can be used, but other than that I don't see its effectiveness.
Luke: You don't believe in the Force, do you?

Han Solo: Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen *anything* to make me believe that there's one all-powerful Force controlling everything. 'Cause no mystical energy field controls *my* destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
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#14
RE: Spirituality part of morality?
(July 21, 2014 at 4:00 pm)StealthySkeptic Wrote:
(July 21, 2014 at 3:07 pm)Blackout Wrote: Not useless, spirituality can be used to describe knowing your own self and being at peace, with a metaphorical meaning. just like 'you have no soul' can be used metaphorically and not to claim a soul really exists.

What's your girlfriend's religion?

Baha'i Faith. Ever heard of it?

And I meant useless as an actual descriptor of one's morality- you can definitely use it as a metaphor in the same way "spirit" can be used, but other than that I don't see its effectiveness.

I don't see a reason why one has to be a spiritual person to be moral. Yeah I've heard of it, there's one baha'i on the forum, but I still haven't searched about it
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you

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#15
RE: Spirituality part of morality?
(July 21, 2014 at 4:00 pm)Blackout Wrote:
(July 21, 2014 at 4:00 pm)StealthySkeptic Wrote: Baha'i Faith. Ever heard of it?

And I meant useless as an actual descriptor of one's morality- you can definitely use it as a metaphor in the same way "spirit" can be used, but other than that I don't see its effectiveness.

I don't see a reason why one has to be a spiritual person to be moral. Yeah I've heard of it, there's one baha'i on the forum, but I still haven't searched about it

It's definitely more progressive than, say, Islam, and was ahead of its time for the 19th century, but has plenty of problems as well. For instance, they still don't support gay marriage, think that people who have premarital sex are inevitably headed for disaster, and think that this world will give way to a theocratic one world government. And that's just the very tip of a very bizarre iceberg.
Luke: You don't believe in the Force, do you?

Han Solo: Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen *anything* to make me believe that there's one all-powerful Force controlling everything. 'Cause no mystical energy field controls *my* destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
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#16
RE: Spirituality part of morality?
Quote:Where does morality come from? The two most common answers have long been that it is innate (the nativist answer) or that it comes from childhood learning ( the empiricist answer). In this chapter I considered a third possibility, the rationalist answer, which dominated moral psychology when I entered the field: that morality is self-constructed by children on the basis of their experiences with harm. Kids know that harm is wrong because they hate to be harmed, and they gradually come to see that it is therefore wrong to harm others, which leads them to understand fairness and eventually justice. I explained why I came to reject this answer after conducting research in Brazil and the United States. I concluded instead that:
  • The moral domain varies by culture. It is unusually narrow in Western, educated, and individualistic cultures. Sociocentric cultures broaden the moral domain to encompass and regulate more aspects of life.
  • People sometimes have gut feelings— particularly about disgust and disrespect— that can drive their reasoning. Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication.
  • Morality can’t be entirely self-constructed by children based on their growing understanding of harm. Cultural learning or guidance must play a larger role than rationalist theories had given it.

Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (pp. 30-31). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Quote:I also read Descartes’ Error, by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. 22 Damasio had noticed an unusual pattern of symptoms in patients who had suffered brain damage to a specific part of the brain— the ventromedial (i.e., bottom-middle) prefrontal cortex (abbreviated vmPFC; it’s the region just behind and above the bridge of the nose). Their emotionality dropped nearly to zero. They could look at the most joyous or gruesome photographs and feel nothing. They retained full knowledge of what was right and wrong, and they showed no deficits in IQ. They even scored well on Kohlberg’s tests of moral reasoning. Yet when it came to making decisions in their personal lives and at work, they made foolish decisions or no decisions at all. They alienated their families and their employers, and their lives fell apart.

Damasio’s interpretation was that gut feelings and bodily reactions were necessary to think rationally, and that one job of the vmPFC was to integrate those gut feelings into a person’s conscious deliberations. When you weigh the advantages and disadvantages of murdering your parents … you can’t even do it, because feelings of horror come rushing in through the vmPFC.

But Damasio’s patients could think about anything, with no filtering or coloring from their emotions. With the vmPFC shut down, every option at every moment felt as good as every other. The only way to make a decision was to examine each option, weighing the pros and cons using conscious, verbal reasoning. If you’ve ever shopped for an appliance about which you have few feelings— say, a washing machine— you know how hard it can be once the number of options exceeds six or seven (which is the capacity of our short-term memory). Just imagine what your life would be like if at every moment, in every social situation, picking the right thing to do or say became like picking the best washing machine among ten options, minute after minute, day after day. You’d make foolish decisions too.

Damasio’s findings were as anti-Platonic as could be. Here were people in whom brain damage had essentially shut down communication between the rational soul and the seething passions of the body (which, unbeknownst to Plato, were not based in the heart and stomach but in the emotion areas of the brain). No more of those “dreadful but necessary disturbances,” those “foolish counselors” leading the rational soul astray. Yet the result of the separation was not the liberation of reason from the thrall of the passions. It was the shocking revelation that reasoning requires the passions.

Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (p. 39-40). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Quote:Our plan was to increase the amount of dumbfounding by having Scott play devil’s advocate rather than gentle interviewer.....

...In the second scenario, Scott offered subjects $ 2 if they would sign a piece of paper that said: I, ________, hereby sell my soul, after my death, to Scott Murphy, for the sum of $2. There was a line for a signature, and below the line was this note : This form is part of a psychology experiment. It is NOT a legal or binding contract, in any way. 27 Scott also told them they could rip up the paper as soon as they signed it, and they’d still get their $ 2. Only 23 percent of subjects were willing to sign the paper without any goading from Scott....

...For the majorities who said no, however, Scott asked them to explain their reasons and did his best to challenge those reasons. Scott convinced an extra 10 percent to sip the juice, and an extra 17 percent to sign the soul-selling paper. But most people in both scenarios clung to their initial refusal, even though many of them could not generate good reasons. A few people confessed that they were atheists , didn’t believe in souls, and yet still felt uncomfortable about signing.

Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Quote:Yet moral judgments are not subjective statements; they are claims that somebody did something wrong. I can’t call for the community to punish you simply because I don’t like what you’re doing. I have to point to something outside of my own preferences, and that pointing is our moral reasoning. We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.

Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (p. 52). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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#17
RE: Spirituality part of morality?



Interesting research: I'll definitely have to have a look.
Luke: You don't believe in the Force, do you?

Han Solo: Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen *anything* to make me believe that there's one all-powerful Force controlling everything. 'Cause no mystical energy field controls *my* destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
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#18
RE: Spirituality part of morality?
(July 21, 2014 at 4:43 pm)rasetsu Wrote:
Quote:Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication.
"God did it"
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#19
RE: Spirituality part of morality?
Quote:To illustrate the principle, I described a study I did with Thalia Wheatley, who is now a professor at Dartmouth College. 3 Back when Thalia was a grad student at UVA, she had learned how to hypnotize people, and she came up with a clever way to test the social intuitionist model. Thalia hypnotized people to feel a flash of disgust whenever they saw a certain word (take for half of the subjects; often for the others ). 4

While they were still in a trance Thalia instructed them that they would not be able to remember anything she had told them, and then she brought them out of the trance. Once they were fully awake, we asked them to fill out a questionnaire packet in which they had to judge six short stories about moral violations.

For each story, half of the subjects read a version that had their hypnotic code word embedded in it. For example, one story was about a congressman who claims to fight corruption, yet “takes bribes from the tobacco lobby.” The other subjects read a version that was identical except for a few words (the congressman is “often bribed by the tobacco lobby”). On average, subjects judged each of the six stories to be more disgusting and morally wrong when their code word was embedded in the story. That supported the social intuitionist model. By giving people a little artificial flash of negativity while they were reading the story, without giving them any new information, we made their moral judgments more severe.

The real surprise, though, came with a seventh story we tacked on almost as an afterthought, a story that contained no moral violation of any kind. It was about a student council president named Dan who is in charge of scheduling discussions between students and faculty. Half of our subjects read that Dan “tries to take topics that appeal to both professors and students in order to stimulate discussion.” The other half read the same story except that Dan “often picks topics” that appeal to professors and students. We added this story to demonstrate that there is a limit to the power of intuition. We predicted that subjects who felt a flash of disgust while reading this story would have to overrule their gut feelings. To condemn Dan would be bizarre.

Most of our subjects did indeed say that Dan’s actions were fine. But a third of the subjects who had found their code word in the story still followed their gut feelings and condemned Dan. They said that what he did was wrong, sometimes very wrong. Fortunately, we had asked everyone to write a sentence or two explaining their judgments, and we found gems such as “Dan is a popularity-seeking snob” and “I don’t know, it just seems like he’s up to something.” These subjects made up absurd reasons to justify judgments that they had made on the basis of gut feelings— feelings Thalia had implanted with hypnosis.

Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (pp. 61-63). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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#20
RE: Spirituality part of morality?
(July 21, 2014 at 4:11 pm)StealthySkeptic Wrote:
(July 21, 2014 at 4:00 pm)Blackout Wrote: I don't see a reason why one has to be a spiritual person to be moral. Yeah I've heard of it, there's one baha'i on the forum, but I still haven't searched about it

It's definitely more progressive than, say, Islam, and was ahead of its time for the 19th century, but has plenty of problems as well. For instance, they still don't support gay marriage, think that people who have premarital sex are inevitably headed for disaster, and think that this world will give way to a theocratic one world government. And that's just the very tip of a very bizarre iceberg.

Is there a holy book? I'd like to check it out
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you

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