RE: What does God deserve?
July 18, 2011 at 4:21 am
(This post was last modified: July 18, 2011 at 5:57 am by Anymouse.)
(July 18, 2011 at 2:40 am)Pel Wrote:
Godschild Wrote:Without a standard for moral and decent who is to say who or what is moral and decent and how would you know that a person that acts moral and decent by their own standard does not have another agenda for their goal that is outside their so called standard.
I have written this so many times, I should save it as a file so I can simply CTRL-C, CTRL-V it into a message. Yet it is never answered: why are there moral people who yet do not have nor need either a religion or religious text?
So GC, do you follow the standards of the OT Leviticus on how to kill the heathens in your midst, or the NT standards on women keeping silent, abandoning your family to follow God or the NT Philemon standard on returning slaves to their masters? Or do you cherry-pick which scriptural standards you will follow? And you failed to mention which standard model of the Bible you use as your standard. Or has the Bible been revised and updated for the times? (Nope, still using the ol' abridged version of the KJV with four hundred year old English few people understand anymore.) If it is a standard, it must be followed. That is the nature of a standard.
If there were no written standard, and you did not like my behaviour, you would not associate with me, and you would tell your friends and family why. If my behaviour continued to be reprehensible, I would soon find myself with no friends. There is a standard right there, everyone agrees pretty much with it, and it does not need to be written down to be followed: that people treat others with the same respect they want. Respect must be earned, it cannot be commanded by a book.
"I believe what I believe" (from Pel's quote above) is a variant of the logical fallacy "agree to disagree." It is a logical fallacy because on the face of the statement it presupposes that both arguments are of equal worth, when two differing opinions rarely are. Morals are morals: good does not derive from a book or an outside force; good derives from a desire to do good, nothing else. Doing good because God or a book tells you you must is simply covering your six. Such behaviour is neither good nor moral: it is fear.
And intuition does not require a deity to understand the difference between immoral and moral behaviour, nor right and wrong.
This has been discussed before, by me even. We can presume that I do not wish to be stolen from by my neighbours. Therefore, if I wish to keep my stuff, it behooves me not to take theirs.
Likewise, I do not wish to be killed. If I kill, it becomes the paramount interest of the entire village to kill me, before I can kill another. These simple truths predate religion. However, one can codify them into a set of Commandments, then the original reason they were obeyed is lost in the mist of time, and people then only follow the moral code because they are told to, not because the want to. Religion removes moral behaviour. It does not promote it.
If I operate a business, I wish to make a profit. If I do that by cheating my customers, soon I will have no customers. It behooves me to not cheat my customers.
I don't covet my neighbour's wife (I really don't), because I don't want him coveting mine (and I don't think she believes she is a piece of property to be coveted and possessed, anyway. You'll have to ask her though.)
Charity, goodness, justice, honour, loyalty, love, altruism: these and many other "good" qualities are found in all societies. They transcend all religions.
These ideas are universal: they are found in virtually every society on Earth. They are also incorporated into most of the major religious works. This leaves the Christian in a bit of a spot:
1] He can admit that these universal tenets are found in most major religious works, and then has to demonstrate why his religious work is superior to the Koran, or the Vedas, or the Torah, and why those others are false when they contain the same universal truths.
2] He can admit these universal tenets were handed down to all faiths. This admission is the same as admitting there are more deities than the Christian God. He then has to demonstrate why the Christian God is superior to other gods, without resorting to "the Bible says so." That statement can be reduced to "a=a." It does not address b, c, or d.
3] He can admit these universal tenets transcend religious texts: they are human traits, not divine ones. That leaves one in the position of "what is God for, then?"
Not that it is a particular advantage or special pass to my own faith, but we have no religious text. No scripture. Our religion is molded by us, for our needs. It is a rare religion in the world that uses no religious text, and a threat to established religions, because we have a moral and good society without religious texts.
The only exception to this is when you throw religion into the mix. My neighbours are all Christians. They see a pagan in their midst (me). What they would never consider if it were just the activities of two people (snubs, insults, threats) because they do not want to be treated the same in their turn, suddenly becomes acceptable, because their scripture tells them to smite the heathen. What they would never do in their own name, they will do in the name of their God.
Because of such attitudes, I have moved to protect my skin before. I left Virginia Beach because of pickets at my house and threats to my (then) Christian wife and my (then) infant son, because I ran a Wiccan bulletin board service on a Commodore 64. I left Oklahoma over discrimination. I probably will move again someday. Not because I am evil, but because a millenias-old book says I am evil, not to be tolerated, driven from their midst, destroyed if nothing else works. Millions have died because of this moral philosophy. People die even in first world countries like the USA today because of it.
My new neighbour cannot even fathom Wicca. She at least understands my wife's atheism: to her she is simply evil. She has to be converted at all costs.
The Inquisition was not a perversion of Christianity, it was an expression of Christianity. If the game is for your immortal soul, what is a little suffering on Earth to make you repent by comparison to the everlasting fires of Hell?
Tell me again, which is moral: doing what a book tells you to do (a written standard that is inflexible and countenances evil acts by good people and threatens everlasting torment), or doing good because you want to and you want to be treated that way?
The Golden Rule is corrupt: if I am a masochist, should I beat you because that is how I want to be treated?
Several atheists here have variations of the Wiccan Rede in their taglines, though I doubt it is an endorsement of my own faith. Rather, it is a logical premise: If you harm none, do what you wish.
James
"Be ye not lost amongst Precept of Order." - Book of Uterus, 1:5, "Principia Discordia, or How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her."
