(February 28, 2015 at 12:29 pm)whateverist Wrote:

(February 28, 2015 at 10:34 am)Ignorant Wrote: I have actually been giving morality a great deal of thought. ... What I have also found is that, having accepted these moral concepts and principles as "simply" true or "commonly" held, most people don't know how to articulate exactly what they mean by those terms.

Well that is pretty ignorant. [Sorry but I always go for the obvious pun, is that not good?]

Seriously though I wonder what difference it truly makes to articulate a crisp definition of what are morally good and bad acts. Should we then make it our reason for living to do 'the good' and 'avoid the bad'? Who would call that a 'good' life? To me it all seems too self-conscious and myopically focused. Life is more complex than that.

I will often enough choose the expedient at the expense of the virtuous. Who doesn't? Does that mean I will throw people under a bus to save five minutes ore five dollars? No. But neither do I need to anticipate every possible set of choices and how I could/should respond in advance. Whatever decision I would reach now, I could reach then and there is something to be said for spontaneity.

Heathen!

(February 28, 2015 at 12:29 pm)whateverist Wrote: Well that is pretty ignorant. [Sorry but I always go for the obvious pun, is that not good?]

Seriously though I wonder what difference it truly makes to articulate a crisp definition of what are morally good and bad acts. Should we then make it our reason for living to do 'the good' and 'avoid the bad'? Who would call that a 'good' life? To me it all seems too self-conscious and myopically focused. Life is more complex than that.

I will often enough choose the expedient at the expense of the virtuous. Who doesn't? Does that mean I will throw people under a bus to save five minutes ore five dollars? No. But neither do I need to anticipate every possible set of choices and how I could/should respond in advance. Whatever decision I would reach now, I could reach then and there is something to be said for spontaneity.

Agreed. We tend to go by heuristics rather than strict algorithms in our everyday lives, especially with matters of morality.

(February 28, 2015 at 10:34 am)Ignorant Wrote: Your evolving description and even the utilization of an online dictionary demonstrates what I mean (which moral philosopher have you read who resorts to the dictionary in order to describe goodness and morality based on rights language?).

I'm sorry, but you seem to be confused about me. I'm not a moral philosopher, and I don't really appreciate being insulted as such.

Additionally, would you prefer I use a hard-copy dictionary online, and if so, do you have any suggestions as to how I might go about such a task?

(February 28, 2015 at 10:34 am)Ignorant Wrote: Most people who have given morality "much thought" know fully well that the dictionary can tell them what the term "right" is meant to signify. It is another thing all together to provide an adequate account of "what" exactly it is and why people have them. Your brushing attempt at it (6 sentences) and your fumble over legal vs. natural/inherent rights shows either a lack of knowledge regarding its fundamental principles, or else a lack of desire to go into those depths.

Or, it could indicate an impatience with such excruciating obtuseness.

I use words as they are defined. To pursue "right" further: it is a freedom of action, or from action, granted by the social contract. As for natural or inherent rights, there are none. Life does not owe me my next breath. My neighbor, however, owes me the right to pursue that breath without impediment from him.

(February 28, 2015 at 10:34 am)Ignorant Wrote: But to pretend that moral "rights" are self-evident principles is naive. I know this because I found myself in the same position 4-5 years ago, and I wanted to change that. That is ok. All I ask is that you be patient with me. Usually people talk about things to understand each other better. That is all I am trying to do.

I'd suggest you learn how to read, then. I stated clearly that I accept them as axiomatic, yet here you are trying to portray my point as being that they are "self-evident". Those are two different terms, two different meanings, and I don't believe you are confusing them accidentally.

(February 28, 2015 at 10:34 am)Ignorant Wrote: I have no problem understanding the meaning of your formulated ethical imperative. What I had trouble understanding are the implications which that imperative has for real human action. My questions explore those implications in an attempt to understand you more.

It seems to me I've already answered that question, too, when I wrote "leave the world a better place than I found it."

I will assume you know what the word "better" means.

(February 28, 2015 at 10:34 am)Ignorant Wrote: Yes, I know what a mental illness is. Many people would take great offense to your equating mental disorder with an inability to agree about "what other people should do to them". Mental illness does not amount to lack of correct moral judgment. For example, a person with Bipolar Disorder or Bulimia Nervosa (These are both defined by the DSM-IV and the ICD as mental disorders. I googled it for you: HERE) can't be said to be without the moral judgment necessary to agree with society about what they would like other to do to them.

Firstly, you're misrepresenting what I said -- again -- about what we call the Golden Rule; it is not about what other people should do to the subject in question. Secondly, it is obvious that unsound minds often do have impaired moral sensibilities, your cherry-picking notwithstanding. I notice you studiously avoided the descriptions of borderline personality disorder or sociopath, for example, both of which do indeed affect moral judgement and are in the panoply of "unsound minds". I'm not a lawyer and am not going to fill my posts with caveats in order to please your craving for unnecessary detail.

Just about everything in life has exceptions. I'm not going to litter my conversation with those exceptions.

If any members here are offended, please say so.

(February 28, 2015 at 10:34 am)Ignorant Wrote: Are there specific types of mental disorders that severely distort the reality by which a human being judges what is good? Certainly. Does "sound mind" adequately account for that distinction? Definitely not.

I'm not writing a law. I'm offering my opinion. And this idea of yours that I must explore every caveat is irritating in the extreme, as I prefer conversations between people and not lawyers.

(February 28, 2015 at 10:34 am)Ignorant Wrote: Sure. Can you think of a particular set of circumstances and agents in which one of those agents, by applying the imperative to those circumstances, would actually act in a way which is bad?

You missed my point, which is that I'm uninterested in sitting here and running down every possible scenario "ever", because that would of necessity take forever itself. Yes, I could imagine situations in which someone would think they are doing good deeds but by my lights are doing evil.

(February 28, 2015 at 10:34 am)Ignorant Wrote: In summary, I am familiar with the genre of ethics to which your descriptions seem to subscribe. Do not mistake my questions as coming from ignorance of ethics in general. My questions come from a desire to know how you understand your own ethical framework and the way by which you describe it. You may be surprised to know that not everyone who begins with a reflexive moral imperative explain the rest the same way that you do.

I doubt I'm so fascinating as to evoke such deep curiosity from a complete stranger online. I doubt your sincerity and don't think I'll be replying to you any more. Even if you are earnest, this sort of conversation, with someone invested in being willfully obtuse, is not my cup of tea.

Have a nice day.

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(February 28, 2015 at 12:29 pm)whateverist Wrote:

(February 28, 2015 at 10:34 am)Ignorant Wrote: I have actually been giving morality a great deal of thought. ... What I have also found is that, having accepted these moral concepts and principles as "simply" true or "commonly" held, most people don't know how to articulate exactly what they mean by those terms.

Well that is pretty ignorant. [Sorry but I always go for the obvious pun, is that not good?]

Seriously though I wonder what difference it truly makes to articulate a crisp definition of what are morally good and bad acts. Should we then make it our reason for living to do 'the good' and 'avoid the bad'? Who would call that a 'good' life? To me it all seems too self-conscious and myopically focused. Life is more complex than that.

I will often enough choose the expedient at the expense of the virtuous. Who doesn't? Does that mean I will throw people under a bus to save five minutes ore five dollars? No. But neither do I need to anticipate every possible set of choices and how I could/should respond in advance. Whatever decision I would reach now, I could reach then and there is something to be said for spontaneity.

There's also something to be said for a process that doesn't need a fully-explicated list of possible scenarios in order to arrive at a first-approximation answer quickly.

Most of the time, the conundrums in life don't permit us time to climb up one's ass in a fit of philosophy in order to arrive at the right answer, exploring every excruciating possibility.

Thus, my impatience with ivory-tower bullshit.

(February 28, 2015 at 12:19 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: Couldn't it be said that these things that we judge to be good, are entirely dependent upon our recognition that there are less desirable options? I'm not supporting moral relativism on a macro level, but with regard to conscious brain states, there are certainly some that are better than others, and each experience triggers one or another. If they were all the same, we wouldn't need descriptive concepts such as "good" or "bad"...right?

Why must "less desirable options" be available in order to judge that some one thing is desirable under a particular aspect? If you are hungry, you don't need to encounter both an apple AND a rock to judge that the apple is desirable/good. Any judgment, however, which compares the goodness of things OBVIOUSLY requires the presence of different objects.

I'm not sure what you meant when you wrote "if [conscious brain states triggered by particular experiences] were all the same". Is this an expression of Sam Harris's approach in The Moral Landscape? I am just not sure what you mean.

(February 26, 2015 at 12:58 pm)Ignorant Wrote: Yes, but I think I would say that all things in the universe that are perceived to be good or bad, require a conscious mind to make them so.

I agree. Goodness is an inherently subjective concept.

Quote:And the meaning of anything good can only have meaning by the recognition of something less desirable which we tend to recognize and describe as bad.

Why is that the case? Why does desiring a thing require a comparative judgment of goodness? Things must first be judged individually before they can be compared as more or less desirable than other things.

Quote:But the two words seem entirely conceptual and do not seem to have any practical use beyond their descriptive application. A rotten egg and a rose both trigger different neurological responses. And it may be that there are some who prefer the response caused by a rotten egg, but this anomaly would not prevent us from making an accurate predictive model that shows us which one is commonly desired. And through research, we may even discover the cause of the anomaly. The subjective description of what each person experiences while smelling may not be something are useful when paired with the third person understanding of the underlying brain states which give rise to them.

I agree with that first sentence. Aren't we describing practical actions (i.e. human action, and even supposed divine action) as either good or bad?

The neuroscientific investigations don't surprise me either. I am actually encouraged by them. I expect very much that different people desire different things. One person prefers the scent of a rose, another, the scent of a rotten egg. Don't confuse my use of desirability with pleasure (which brain states represent). Desirability (i.e. goodness) according to my use always implies teleology. Things are desired FOR some other reason than the thing itself.

Two people have a desire for pleasure. One sates that desire by smelling roses. Another sates that desire by smelling rotten eggs. So what? Do you think I am trying to say that, objectively, the smell of rotten eggs is bad? I assure you that I am not.

No consider the same two people. The first person directs every action in his or her life toward the one and only pleasure of smelling roses. The second person directs his or her actions towards a "healthy" mix of nourishment, growth, reproduction (maybe), meaningful relationships, and the common good, with an occasional pleasure in the scent of rotten eggs. I think that the first life is a humanly empty one which misses out on a great deal of what it means to live well. The second one, even while it enjoys something which I do not, seems to me a much fuller human life. I also would predict that, if those two people were subject to a neural examination toward the end of their lives, there would be more evidence of "happiness" (if Sam Harris's neural mapping ever comes to fruition) in the rotten egg person than the rosey one.

Quote:There seems to be no reason to believe that a similar model of morality cannot be understood in the same way. And while there may not be any single right answer to a moral question, there may be several.

More than several. There would be as many as there are people. However, the common human experience would almost certainly (as it certainly has already) arrive at converging answers to which things and which sorts of actions actually lead to human fulfillment (which would make the accumulated wisdom of tradition important). Why? Because human beings are rational. As such, they can discover true things about reality, and their relationship with it.

Quote:And by establishing answers that are good in principle, in comparison, there are several others that we can say are objectively wrong. All of this is entirely dependent whether or not we admit that the objective of our inquiry is to maximize the quality of conscious experience of creatures who are capable of possessing it.

I couldn't agree more (assuming we agree about what "quality of conscious experience of creatures is"). The fullness of a human life is the goal of ethical inquiry. Sam Harris is on to something in that regard. The challenge that he will encounter is in the measurement and quantification of that quality of consicousness. That quality varies a great deal over a human life. How do you quantify and evaluate a continuum of brain states rather than snap shots? Some of the happiest people I have met first endured extremely unhappy times. How will those be evaluated? Things of that sort are a difficulty, but not an impossible one to overcome.

Quote:Give me an example of a question regarding good or bad that exists apart fro such beings, and I'll begin considering whether or not this "absolute good" is a coherent question. At the moment, I'm inclined to say that it is not.

Well, and I am not convinced about what follows, there IS another sense in which goodness is understood, and that is its concept as synonymous with "being". According to this sense, rather than considering between a rose and a rotten egg, a person considers between two or more roses or two or more rotten eggs. In such a case, the person is judging subjectively about which rose is more able to satisfy the desire for "olfactory pleasure". The judgment is translatable to a judgment about which rose is more "rose-like" (i.e. which rose is MORE a rose, which rose has more of what being a rose means). As such, it is a judgment about the "goodness" of the thing considered in itself, rather than the goodness of the thing considered as able to fulfill some human desire. The reason why I am not completely convinced by this is because it is based on an Aristotelian physic and metaphysics which desperately needs revision.

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(February 28, 2015 at 12:29 pm)whateverist Wrote: Seriously though I wonder what difference it truly makes to articulate a crisp definition of what are morally good and bad acts. Should we then make it our reason for living to do 'the good' and 'avoid the bad'? Who would call that a 'good' life? To me it all seems too self-conscious and myopically focused. Life is more complex than that.

Have you followed any recent political discussion? Politics is about little more than what is rationally good for people and their society, and the state of our political discussion is everything BUT rational. There are people who don't know what in the world "the common good" actually would be and yet they make laws about it anyway based on very little rational discussion. I don't think they need to sit around acting like Plato and Socrates, but someone should.

I do not expect everyone to go around stopping to contemplate the realm of the forms before they decide if it is wise to spend an extra 30 seconds in the shower. But when people go to an online discussion forum about whether or not God is good, I expected a little more openness to a philosophical discussion about what it means to say something is good. It wouldn't be the first false expectation of my life, and I am sure it won't be the last.

Quote:Does that mean I will throw people under a bus to save five minutes ore five dollars? No. But neither do I need to anticipate every possible set of choices and how I could/should respond in advance.

That would be an impossible task. I certainly don't expect that of myself, much less for any of you. However, when there are numerous and quite confident assertions that some thing (e.g. god) is NOT good, you would hope that there is an adequate description of what that means in the minds of those making the assertion. It might indeed be true that the god of the Bible is NOT good, but it would be helpful to know what that even means.

Quote:Whatever decision I would reach now, I could reach then and there is something to be said for spontaneity.

I agree. Often our "pre-made" decisions did not consider things that only being "in-the-moment" could reveal. That, however, wouldn't alter what actually happens in those moments, i.e. a judgment about the "best" way to act.

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(February 28, 2015 at 1:22 pm)Parkers Tan Wrote: I doubt your sincerity and don't think I'll be replying to you any more . . . Have a nice day.

Thank you for your consideration and time. I hope yours is nice as well.

(February 28, 2015 at 1:39 pm)Ignorant Wrote: Why must "less desirable options" be available in order to judge that some one thing is desirable under a particular aspect? If you are hungry, you don't need to encounter both an apple AND a rock to judge that the apple is desirable/good.

That's the wrong way to view the question. The existence of options is not what defines that which compels us to choose. Hunger is not defined by apples or rocks. Hunger is a feeling we use to describe our desire to eat. And there are better and worse answers on how best to satisfy that desire. You say "we don't need to encounter both an apple and a rock to judge that the apple is better", but you do need to encounter what it feels like to be hungry and what it feels like to be satisfied. And these feelings give the options relevance in that sense. Apple and Rocks do not have any inherent "food" meaning to them. We give the meaning to the objects as they correlate to our desires.

(February 28, 2015 at 1:39 pm)Ignorant Wrote: Any judgment, however, which compares the goodness of things OBVIOUSLY requires the presence of different objects.

Why do you think that is? If all that existed was a single option, how might you classify that? What meaning does the word "classify" or "judgement" have when there is no basis to compare anything?

(February 28, 2015 at 1:39 pm)Ignorant Wrote: I'm not sure what you meant when you wrote "if [conscious brain states triggered by particular experiences] were all the same". Is this an expression of Sam Harris's approach in The Moral Landscape? I am just not sure what you mean.

I mean that that if you are hungry and you eat a rock, you will experience a brain state...

If you eat an apple, you will trigger another.

..and that one is certainly more desirable than the other. Obviously, this isn't something that you would personally consider before weighing out which option is best to satisfy your hunger, but you've been doing this very thing since the moment you were born.

Quote:Yes, but I think I would say that all things in the universe that are perceived to be good or bad, require a conscious mind to make them so.

(February 28, 2015 at 1:39 pm)Ignorant Wrote: I agree. Goodness is an inherently subjective concept.

In principle, not in practice. Stick your tongue in an electrical socket. I'd say that's an objectively worse way to live a fulfilling life.

Quote:And the meaning of anything good can only have meaning by the recognition of something less desirable which we tend to recognize and describe as bad.

(February 28, 2015 at 1:39 pm)Ignorant Wrote: Why is that the case? Why does desiring a thing require a comparative judgment of goodness? Things must first be judged individually before they can be compared as more or less desirable than other things.

Explain to me how you might first make a billboard top 40 list of songs without first having music? and before that, you would need the creative inspiration that gives rise to it, would you not? The appraisal of what comes later is only after you have samples to compare. You're putting the cart before the horse...

(February 28, 2015 at 1:39 pm)Ignorant Wrote: I agree with that first sentence. Aren't we describing practical actions (i.e. human action, and even supposed divine action) as either good or bad?

Yes. And that is because we are capable of cognitive responses to "practical actions". And each "practical action" will trigger a different cognitive response. If our brain was static, and perceived everything equally, there would be no meaning behind the word "good". The word good becomes relevant as soon as you go from the very first cognitive experience to the second.

I'm reminded of Socrates here...

Is a bag carried because it is being carried? Or does the bag possess some intrinsic quality of carriedness even if it were sitting on the ground?

In this case, it's carried IF it is being carried, and as soon as it hits the floor, it is no longer carried. An apple is an apple. It is food if it can be healthily ingested. As soon as there is nothing on this planet to consume this apple or assign additional meaning to it, it just is what it is.

I'm not really sure what to say any more, ignorant. You seem to be roughly agreeing that general common sense morality is best, but are trying to somehow credit it to Christianity. I don't understand how. I see you don't take the bible to be the word of God, well that is good. However, to be intellectually honest that leaves you the problem of validating anything it says. Which is impossible, regarding the supernatural claims at least. So what have you got left of Christianity? Oral traditions, and every christian just making up whatever they want, picking and choosing. I don't get the benefit, or really what your point is. I appreciate you trying to explain it and I'm not trying to be difficult, but I feel you're trying to just point at Christianity as something special when atheists manage just fine with their morality, and christians don't actually act much differently (except when the bible lines up with their prejudice).

(February 27, 2015 at 5:24 pm)Chad32 Wrote:

(February 27, 2015 at 5:21 pm)Godschild Wrote:

---

Sonny boy you ever study WWII, you know what they actually did to our soldiers, unprovoked attack on a sleeping navy without a declaration of war. The Bataan Death March, which came after a undeclared attack on the Philippines.
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/bataandeathmarch.htm

The Japanese were as brutal if not more than the Germans, they deserved everything that came their way. Water torture was only one of many charges against Japanese soldiers the water torture they used was a more harsh treatment than that used to day. Go look at the trial records as I did and see what they did. I know about WWII, I had uncles there, even one at Pearl Harbor the day they attacked. I saw what those days did to men.

GC

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Yes, I know what they did. Whether they deserved to be executed or not wasn't my point. I'm just demonstrating that one of the things we executed them for is water torture, but when we start doing it to other people, suddenly they tell us it isn't torture. Morals change when someone is from outside of the group. Just the fact that you got defensive about it helps prove my point. We do it to a lesser degree than they did it, so it's ok.

I got defensive because of my knowledge of WWII and what they did to my fellow countrymen. People reacted differently to actions taken then because of the atrocities committed against the innocent around the world, we had just finished with the brutality of the Germans and the emotions were running high. All of what went on has to be taken into account, I know personally what those fillings were, they were expressed to me through my family and others involved in the war. The statement, I guess you had to be there, fits this situation. Also the water torture they used would actually drown people, they poured the water directly into the nostrils slowly until they had to breath, what they breathed was water.

GC

(February 28, 2015 at 2:44 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: Apple and Rocks do not have any inherent "food" meaning to them. We give the meaning to the objects as they correlate to our desires.

I agree. Did I speak of "foodness" before? I don't recall that I did.

There is nothing in a thing, upon first sight, that conveys which desire it satisfies best. If I see an apple for the first time, I will not be able to "abstract" any goodness it may have to satisfy my hunger. If that has come across as my meaning, then I apologize, but I am not sure that I have put it this way. Like you said, we must first experience both the desire and its satisfaction to learn which things satisfy them best.

(February 28, 2015 at 2:44 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: If all that existed was a single option, how might you classify that?

Could you classify it? No. Could you judge it as either causing an increase or a decrease in desire upon obtaining it? Yes. When did "classify" begin to mean the same thing as judge? Perhaps that is our confusion.

In order to classify something, it MUST be done in reference to judgments about it and other things. In order to judge something as good, bad, whatever, it does not require other things. It merely requires the test of satisfaction or not satisfaction.

(February 28, 2015 at 2:44 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: I mean that that if you are hungry and you eat a rock, you will experience a brain state...If you eat an apple, you will trigger another...and that one is certainly more desirable than the other.

Indeed

(February 28, 2015 at 2:44 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: In principle, not in practice. Stick your tongue in an electrical socket. I'd say that's an objectively worse way to live a fulfilling life.

Well of course, HA! By calling goodness "inherently subjective" I do not also mean "entirely" subjective. So goodness is subjective BOTH in principle and in practice, AND it is inherently OBJECTIVE in BOTH principle and practice. That is actually what subjective and objective mean. They are not mutually exclusive terms. There are active and judging subjects that encounter and try to make sense of the objects in the world, and there are the objects in the world whose reality is encountered by acting and judging subjects.

The objects have a true reality about them. Call it objective reality (i.e. the truth about the objects). Human beings, considered as objects (i.e. considered as an encountered object), have a truth about them are as well.

From our individual perspectives (i.e. our subjective experiences of the world), we view the world as acting and judging subjects. We encounter objects, and as rational things, we try to make sense of them and to understand the truth about them.

The description of how our own subjective experience (as conscious creatures) relates with objects in the world and their effects on us is one way of explaining ethics. The more we know about the objects, and about ourselves (e.g. the neuroscience of happiness), the more we can reform our own subjective experiences to correspond to the reality of the objects.

(February 28, 2015 at 2:44 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: Explain to me how you might first make a billboard top 40 list of songs without first having music?

You can't. "Things must first be judged individually before they can be compared as more or less desirable than other things." (My last post). And things must exist before they can be judged.

(February 28, 2015 at 2:44 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: and before that, you would need the creative inspiration that gives rise to it, would you not?

Well sure.

(February 28, 2015 at 2:44 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: The appraisal of what comes later is only after you have samples to compare. You're putting the cart before the horse...

I don't understand how this:

1) A things must first exist before they can be judged
2) Things must be individually judged as satisfying in order to be ranked according to the degree of satisfaction they bring.

is different than this:

1) Different musical pieces must first exist before it can be included on a list of "best" music.
2) Then those pieces must be arranged individually as more or less pleasing to hear in order to be ranked.

Have you ever said that a song is good without reference to some other song? I know I have.

(February 28, 2015 at 2:44 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: I'm reminded of Socrates here...Is a bag carried because it is being carried? Or does the bag possess some intrinsic quality of carriedness even if it were sitting on the ground? In this case, it's carried IF it is being carried, and as soon as it hits the floor, it is no longer carried. An apple is an apple. It is food if it can be healthily ingested. As soon as there is nothing on this planet to consume this apple or assign additional meaning to it, it just is what it is.

I agree with all of this. How many times must I affirm that I am not a Platonist? There is no such thing as "foodness" or "carriedness" existing out there somewhere. When we speak of goodness, we are not looking at a "characteristic" or "part" of a thing or an action. As I have said, goodness means desirable(subjectively)/able to satisfy(objectively).

I made reference to another use of which I am not yet convinced, or else still trying to figure out, exactly, what it would mean. That is goodness as used interchangeably with "being". According to this use, the more a thing IS what it is, the "better" it is, the more "goodness" it has (because goodness just means being). In other words, there is something common to the fullness of humanity for every individual human being. The more of that common fullness any of us has, the "better" human being we will be. You said that when there is nothing left to assign meaning to the apple, it will just simply be an apple. This understanding of goodness would say, the more that apple fully IS an apple, the better it is. This understanding, however, IS based on Aristotelian (and therefore some Plato) physics and metaphysics, and I have already said that these are in need of revision. When I said my position is like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, I said it was close, and a lot of my framework comes from them. However, I can hold many of their positions while simultaneously recognizing the shortcomings of many other aspects. That is why I am here talking it out.

(February 28, 2015 at 5:16 pm)Godschild Wrote: Also the water torture they used would actually drown people, they poured the water directly into the nostrils slowly until they had to breath, what they breathed was water.

GC

What does you make an expert on how water torture is handled by the CIA? And even if it turns out to be a bit different, does it make it all right then?

And before you ask, my family also lived through WWII and it's atrocities. As fugitives from Hitler. If anything it makes me more sensible to hypocrisy. Such as hiring Wernher von Braun or japanese scientists, who did biological experiments on humans because their knowledge on how to kill people efficently by using germs might prove useful some time.

(February 28, 2015 at 3:50 pm)robvalue Wrote: I'm not really sure what to say any more, ignorant. You seem to be roughly agreeing that general common sense morality is best, but are trying to somehow credit it to Christianity.

No. Subjective moral judgments constantly revised and improved by the developing knowledge of objective reality is best. I do not credit that to Christianity. I credit it to the ancient Greeks.

"Common sense" however, would make for a different discussion.

Quote:I see you don't take the bible to be the word of God, well that is good.

But I do take it to be the Word of God. It is the Word of God spoken in human language. The fact that I do not understand it to mean what most Christians you have spoken with suggest it to mean is no surprise. I am not a fundamentalist. You might be happy to know that the fundamentalist hermeneutic is not the only one!

Quote:However, to be intellectually honest that leaves you the problem of validating anything it says. Which is impossible, regarding the supernatural claims at least. So what have you got left of Christianity? Oral traditions, and every christian just making up whatever they want, picking and choosing. I don't get the benefit, or really what your point is.

Well, like I said before, I am not really here to make a point. I am here to talk with people who don't just parrot my opinions back at me and pretend to call that a discussion. I enjoy discussing things with people who do not share my views, and I do not do so by presenting arguments.

Quote:I appreciate you trying to explain it and I'm not trying to be difficult, but I feel you're trying to just point at Christianity as something special when atheists manage just fine with their morality, and Christians don't actually act much differently (except when the bible lines up with their prejudice).

Well I am not trying to do that. You asked me about Christians, and I gave you an honest answer about what I think, as a Christian. Seeing as my description of goodness and good action has dealt purely with human desire and satisfaction, I was hoping non-theists would help me understand my own thoughts better. As far as atheists with their morality, I agree. Most atheists I know are very decent people who seek the good of others. So what? Atheist or Christian, we are all human beings. I am not of the position that without Christianity a human being is left without some inherent moral compass. The facts just don't correspond to that idea. I am sorry if I have given you any other impression.