(March 28, 2013 at 4:29 pm)jstrodel Wrote: So the most evil governments in history had moral legitimacy, so long as they had military power? That is nihilism.
You have just accepted the obvious fact that atheism entails nihilism.
Let's clear up the misrepresentation first. You asked "
How do you know which societies laws have legitimacy and which do not?" I answered "force." You then turned that into "
moral legitimacy" to try and make a point that wasn't there. I hope that this bit of dishonesty is inadvertent, but I am starting to sense a pattern.
You also asked "
How do you know when you should submit to the horrible leaders of the world and when you should not?" And that, I presume, is the question that leads to the issue of moral relativism as you see it. Without an 'objective' moral guide, you presume a person will pick and choose morals subjectively and that this entails nihilism. Well, let's consider the question a bit more comprehensively:
As I said, rulers and governments legitimize their laws by force, regardless of whether that law is moral or not, good or not, ethical or not, fair or not, etc. This has, as far as we can tell, always been the case. A person may choose to submit to those laws or not, and their success may be contingent on cooperating with or overcoming that force. Some societies provide options for the laws to be amended or changed, and some have been changed when people challenged them. But even civil disobedience relied on enforcement of the law, both before and after the laws were changed. In other cases, the rulers were overthrown by force and the new rulers now legitimized their laws because now
they had the force to do so.
(This next part assumes that the god of the Bible, as interpreted in the modern day, is real.)
The difference between those rulers and god is that god is supremely powerful, and no other being can challenge him. Like any other ruler, his law is legitimized by force.
Unlike any other ruler, god cannot be overcome by force. This is why we hear arguments that claim that god is always good. Always ethical. Always moral. Always right. No one has the power to turn back his word, thus his word always has the ultimate force behind it. God is moral and good because he can crush you like a gnat if you believe differently.
The Pharaoh of Egypt gets a taste of this in Exodus. God sends Moses to demand the release of the Israelite slaves. When Pharaoh denies the demand, god visits plagues upon Egypt. The Biblical account tells us that there comes a point where god hardens Pharaoh's heart, so that he continues to refuse to release the Israelites. So we are to understand that Pharaoh may have been willing to release the slaves once he understood that he could not withstand god's judgment, but god forced him to accept further punishment just to make it clear who he was dealing with. In the end, when the Egyptian ruler decided to chase after the freed Israelites, god punctuates the narraive by
dropping the sea on him. Have a bit of
force, you little Egyptian twit.
Job got a lesson in god's morals as well. In the story of Job, the only wrong that Job does is that when professing his innocence he expresses an expectation that god will explain himself. That god will tell Job why he has treated him so unjustly. Near the end of the story, god delivers a scathing sermon to Job, the topic being "I am god, and just who do you think YOU are?" God reminds Job that he was spinning galaxies off of his fingertips before Job was a gleam in his creator's eye. Sure, he rewarded Job's loyal service to him by allowing Satan to turn his life into pure steaming hell, but that didn't mean that Job had any right to expect god to justify himself. If Job was so inclined, he was free to try and force god to apologize, but he probably couldn't even pick his disease-ravaged husk off of the ground at that point.
God, then, is the ultimate moral relativist. His morals are whatever he happens to feel that they are at any given time, and if we don't like it, too bad. We have absolutely no power to stop him, and he can end our existence with barely a thought. God is the ultimate good for the same reason. Oh, you think he's wrong for ordering the slaughter of women and children, and the rape of young girls? He thinks you're
sooo cute for saying so! And by the way, here's your ticket to eternal suffering, buh-bye! Be sure to say "hi" to all of the other moral crusaders who disagreed with him when you get there! <3
I guess the only question left is: if god is the supreme moral relativist, is he also the supreme
nihilist? And would that make god
an atheist???
Obviously, this is all hypothetical. God's morals and goodness and ethics don't exist any more than he does. Everyone's morals are based on human considerations of what is or isn't moral. Most people base them on the morals that humanity seemed to have figured out thousands of years ago. Some people have made refinements to them as we become more and more civilized and less and less stupid.
And a final aside: It should be noted that Job may be the most shabbily-treated person in the Bible, and that's saying something. After having Satan visit all of those torments upon him, god then verbally bitch-slaps Job for the wholly understandable desire of wanting an explanation for what was done to him. At the end of this mauling, Job has two options: (A) he can tell god to take his sanctimonious BS and shove it up his holy glory hole and accept his ticket to Sheol with his new-found dignity intact or (B) he can double down on the bet that
got him in this predicament in the first place. He completely pusses out by taking option B, even though it means he'll live the rest of his life knowing that there is nothing to stop god from turning his life inside out again on a whim and that his only recourse would be to bend over and pray for some lube.
But that's not all! You remember those false friends? They tormented Job, telling him that he must be a filthy little sinner because god is a just and demanding god who does not withhold punishment from wrongdoers. God threatens judgment upon them, but agrees to forgive them...
if Job intercedes on their behalf. And Job, although he probably realizes that this is yet another humiliation heaped upon his diseased little head, pusses out again and does so. If there is any doubt about just how thoroughly god can crush the spirit of a man who did his best to serve him as he thought was acceptable, the story of Job should dispell them. And it was the
totally moral thing to do!
