RE: True Christian (TM) Answers Your Questions
April 10, 2017 at 3:18 am
(This post was last modified: April 10, 2017 at 3:38 am by Fake Messiah.)
(April 9, 2017 at 12:32 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: Circumstances change the application of objective morality. With changing circumstances, we are more in need of Guidance from God and a Guide from him, because we can apply moral laws totally wrong from the past or we can lose foresight of a wisdom of a law that is meant to apply in our circumstances.
There is no doubt a need of that navigator and leader that steers the just city (or world) on course if we are ever going to establish justice.
Are you saying that without god and religion you would run amok?
When religious people talk of morality based on religion my guess is that they're talking that rewards and punishments make behavior moral. But let me introduce you to psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development: reward-and-punishment thinking is the lowest stage, far below reflective or principled behavior. I do recommend you to read his books.
Even worse for the Theist, over two thousand years ago it had already been shown by Plato that the moral argument for god(s) was flawed. It went like this: is an action good and just and honorable because the god(s) ordain or prefer it, or is it ordained or preferred by the god(s) because it is good and just and honorable? If the former, then morality is arbitrary, since whatever the god(s) would ordain or prefer would be accepted as moral by humans, even if that included killing (as it often did in the Old Testament and often does today in practice). If the latter, then certain actions are 'naturally' or 'objectively' good and just and honorable, and therefore deity itself is bound by this 'natural morality' and subject to it, not the author of it, and humans by their own efforts and reason could arrive at this objective morality without the aid of god(s).
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"