Christian morality delusions

[Angrboda]

First, I'm going to avoid the terms "subjective" and "objective" as misleading. But I do agree with your view that there is a personal set of morals, and (for Christians) the belief in an over-arching Good. 

I'd like to know in what way you feel these terms are misleading. I hear people say similar things, sometimes because they don't want to defend their views along substantive actions, but regardless, such complaints have always come across to me as a bit silly. Even if the terms were by themselves misleading, that doesn't mean that they couldn't be suitably defined and understood so that they aren't misleading, so avoiding them on that account seems to be a dodge which immediately makes me very suspicious about the substance of your positions and your willingness to defend them honestly overall.

The personal is just what we feel we ought to do, in order to be good people. Christian history says (unfairly to the Jews) that the 613 commandments of the OT were for beginners who didn't know enough. It's as if you have a kindergarten kid and you tell him details instead of general rules: "don't ride in any cars," "come straight home," "don't talk to strangers." This is the kind of detail that a kid needs. If you just say "be good" to a 6-year-old he doesn't understand. Jesus, though, changed things from a set of detailed rules to one big rule: be good. This is what is meant by "fulfilling" the law.

I need a citation here. He may well have said be good, but what he seems most famous for is commanding us to love thy neighbor as one loves thyself and to love (have agape for) god. Neither of those is a commandment to be good, unless you're simply defining that to be being good, in which case you could say that about anything, such as when he says to pray in his name he then, too, is commanding people to be good. The list of things you can simply define as being good by that maneuver is endless, from tying your shoe to spitting on the sidewalk.

It is no longer in a book; it is supposed to be in our hearts. So we have a general sense of what we should aim for.

It never was in the book to begin with. If I follow tack's lead, it always existed as a fact of God's perfect nature. The things in the book were a reference to those things. And similarly, that which is in our heart is made real by referring to that transcendent source. Having something arbitrary and subjective in one's heart is not what they meant when they said that such was written in our hearts. Statements embodying the good and judgements may be capable of being formed by a natural faculty of the heart, but the substance of them is what they refer to, and that is not in the heart. If it were in the heart in a fundamental sense, then it could be dismissed as subjective and therefore not binding.

There is universal morality (possibly)- things that rational people of any time and any place find right or wrong
There is objective morality- A being I call God exists outside the universe that influences us through the Holy Spirit to inform of objective morality.

These, I think, are the same. Or they would be if we understood them well enough. 

In the view of traditional classical theology, God is not a person-like rule-giver. God is just the Good. It doesn't make sense to ask where God got his morals from. He himself is the Good. Morality means aiming toward him. Sin is what distracts us from that direction. 

I think, from what I understand, there are significant differences between the idea of universal morals and objective morals. If you feel they are the same, then you need to explain why you think they are the same, because your view is not the conventional one. While I appreciate the aiming for God metaphor, I think for it to have any value it needs to be cashed out in literal or metaphysical terms. I don't offhand know what it means to aim towards something immaterial that I've never seen and probably couldn't hit given my miserable skill with a bow and arrow. In addition, you've introduced the notion that God is the good. If you mean this in terms of a Neo-platonic notion, that is fundamentally different from many traditional conceptions of God and needs explication if it itself is going to avoid being misleading. I don't think saying that God is the good, or as tack did, that God's nature is good, either one, holds up to scrutiny for the reasons I have stated. If you disagree then I'd like to see your reasons why. Otherwise saying that God is the good is just a vacuous nominalistic move. He becomes good in name only as nothing more than a linguistic token which has no meaning on its own. And while you're at it, justify the metaphysics in terms of my prior example of the innocent man who has done no wrong still being considered evil because one can have a morally valenced nature independent of one's actions. I find that, at the very least, at odds with common usage, if not simply wrong.

The important thing about this, for me, is that it demands extreme humility. No living person can know what the full ramifications of his actions will be. We do our very best, but because none of us is God, none of us can see the Good (or, more properly be the Good). And I think this is not a bad lesson for non-Christians as well. But of course I get annoyed when I hear non-humble people -- Christian or otherwise -- who think they know anything for sure.

That's nice.

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Khem, (let me know if you don't want me calling you that), give me another example of something intangible (not physical) that can objectively exist other than morals.
I'm trying to get my head around it like wyzas.

Numbers, mathematical truths, a priori reasons, the rules of logic, the idea that things like statements can be either true or false....