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....

[tackattack]

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That nature is by definition not arbitrary. His nature is defined in scripture and through experience. His nature constrains his actions no more than your do you. You could never not be you even though who you are changes. It has nothing to do with free will. Volition and choice are free and how we were made in his image.

You don't have to tell me. I agree morals of a determined automaton are not moral nor are arbitrary morals. I agree Morality requires a free agent. You can act morally. God can act morally to. It's not arbitrary, it may not be fully understood (I believe you're heading into the PoE, which would be for another thread) but not arbitrary.

It is asserted by theologians that it is not arbitrary, but by the definition of arbitrary it is.  You can't just define a fact into existence.  If God's morals do not depend upon anything but himself, that, by very definition, makes them arbitrary.  Theologians are simply wrong.  If Gods morals are not arbitrary then they would necessarily have to be based on something which would establish that they have an orientation, instead of being random.  But since God's morals aren't based upon anything but himself, they are random, and that is the definition of arbitrary.  I've had theists repeatedly tell me that God is by definition good, but describing anything as good solely because it has that character is arbitrary, and therefore 'good' in the theist system is a free floating and unconstrained fact.  It is simply incoherent to assert that God is good because he is arbitrary, so the theist assertion is simply meaningless posturing.

And no, I'm not headed into POE territory.  As an example above, let's suppose that according to God's nature, rape is moral.  All the typical arguments you hear then follow.  God is still good, by definition.  God's morals depend upon his nature, so there is an objective foundation for his morals.  And so on.  There is no difference whatsoever between a world in which rape is moral because it is consistent with God's nature, and a world in which rape is not moral because of God's nature.  There is essentially no way to determine which of those two hypothetical world's we inhabited if in fact we inhabited them, and in both worlds the theists would assert that God is good by definition and so on.  If there is an inconsistency between those worlds it has to be accounted for, or else the inconsistency points out that the theist logic doesn't yield a definite conclusion and any and all morals one might imagine would be consistent with the theist's assertions if we inhabited that world.  But only one of those world's can be moral or else we have a logical explosion because of the inconsistency, yielding the assertion that all things are true.  Such an absurdity, and the inability of the theist logic of asserting that God is good by definition to pick out the actual moral world demonstrates conclusively that defining morals that way is arbitrary.  That's something of an our-world-centrism in that, whatever world you happen to be in, that world is the right world, and the morals in that world are the right ones.  The existence of two mutually inconsistent worlds, embracing opposite conclusions, using the same logical forms, is an absurdity, and points to an error in the logical forms.  I think the error is in assuming that you can make God's nature be good by simply defining that as an axiom of your system.  Doing so simply yields a contradiction, so something is amiss in your axioms.  (Unless you want to embrace dialetheism, or engage in a similar maneuver.  I have no idea off the top of my head what happens then.)

So, in a nutshell, I understand you are sincere when you assert that God is good by definition, but that simply leads to absurdities, so that assertion, or something in its orbit, must necessarily be abandoned.  To do otherwise is simply to embrace unreason.  Theologians have asserted it since time immemorial and I'm sure its been a part of your standard worldview as a theist but it simply doesn't pass muster.

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The goodness of God is definitely another thread. First could we tackle definitions. I think I see where people misinterpret arbitrary:
Do you define it as subject  to  individual   will  or  judgment   without   restriction;   contingent   solely   upon   one's   discretion? The point is that it is with description. Look at all the other definitions for arbitrary

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2. decided  by a  judge  or  arbiter   rather   than  by a  law  or  statute.
3. having   unlimited   power;   uncontrolled  or  unrestricted  by  law;   despotic;   tyrannical:
: existing or coming about seemingly at random or by chance or as a capricious and unreasonable act of will
: based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something

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God is constrained by his nature. Your definition stated above "depend upon anything but himself" to atheists reads as subjective, but to theists reads as random. Thought exercise: Are your decisions arbitrary? No of course not, they're based on who you are and what you believe, by your nature. Do you have arbitrary thoughts? Probably, but thoughts without will or action do not equal anything demonstrable.

I'm not a trivialist or using God as a self referencing answer to my moral code to create some nonsensical loop in logic. I also don't believe God's morals reflect my personal morality so I'm up for a thought experiment if you can dumb it down for me. I wouldn't want to have any cognitive dissonance  left to resolve. Please assist me in knocking some stragglers out of orbit and convincing me otherwise.

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Fun q for the theists in the thread.  Notice how many questions I've responded to without a single reference to a god?  Ask yourselves this...what would the addition of a god do for any of my answers?  What would the subtraction of a god cause to be lost?

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I like the way you play devil's advocate... see there I go again referencing imaginary beings in casual conversation...
On the serious tip though, the subtraction of God from any equation, if He doesn't exist, would simplify communication. It would do the same even if He does exist, but would miss the point. You're completely entitled to live out an entire lifespan without God and can live a perfectly moral and societally productive life positively impacting all those around you without once needing God. My point was 200 years down the road will that impact mean the same thing to people in their rearview? Maybe you support the death penalty but in 200 years society sees it as atrocious and sees you as amoral. I posit a more objective morality than personal and societal morality. It can be a flying spaghetti monster, Satan, Rosanne or Zeus or the AI running the matrix. You probably don't see a need for that, but do you think an objective morality would improve societal and personal morality?

[Angrboda]

Bel ...That's all very noble but still based on nothing solid.

Granted, the very short version I've typed out here seems arbitrary. People have been working on it for well over 2000 years, though, so we can be pretty confident that whatever objections occur to us have been addressed. 

I really don't appreciate the appeal to tradition. It's a move to grant one's views an authority they don't possess and to shut down dialogue and dissent. This type of thinking simply leads into error.

[The Grand Nudger]

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Fun q for the theists in the thread.  Notice how many questions I've responded to without a single reference to a god?  Ask yourselves this...what would the addition of a god do for any of my answers?  What would the subtraction of a god cause to be lost?

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I like the way you play devil's advocate... see there I go again referencing imaginary beings in casual conversation...
On the serious tip though, the subtraction of God from any equation, if He doesn't exist, would simplify communication. It would do the same even if He does exist, but would miss the point. You're completely entitled to live out an entire lifespan without God and can live a perfectly moral and societally productive life positively impacting all those around you without once needing God. My point was 200 years down the road will that impact mean the same thing to people in their rearview? Maybe you support the death penalty but in 200 years society sees it as atrocious and sees you as amoral. I posit a more objective morality than personal and societal morality. It can be a flying spaghetti monster, Satan, Rosanne or Zeus or the AI running the matrix. You probably don't see a need for that, but do you think an objective morality would improve societal and personal morality?

You don't posit an objective morality, at all, by positing a god. You're simply registering your displeasure with what you view to be the mistakes of "societal morality"...but since that morality was largely informed by the very same god you are invoking (as is your displeasure at the notion of societal morality).......you should probably take that up with him?

Meanwhile.......objective moral values do not require a god and a god adds nor subtracts anything to them.

As far as objective moral values being an improvement. In some ways I'd expect them to be, sure..in other ways, maybe not. Certainly would have put the kibosh on all this god says this and that business which lead to your dissatisfaction and subsequent misconceptions. One of the more amusing things about conceptualizing morality as objective..is that is produces a similar paradox in the case of tolerance or hedonism (and even refer -to- tolerance). It may be that conceptualizing them as "other-than" produces tolerance..which is (purportedly) good. So..insomuch as an objective morality reduces tolerance it might be objectively bad to advance an objective moral schema.

Might explain some of that nastiness, god nastiness included, eh?

[Mister Agenda]

There's an interesting misconception that the faithful have, with regards to which side of that line they find themselves on, on account of their faith.  The religious often call their other-than objective moral system objective..and the irreligious mistakenly describe their objective moral system as other-than objective.

There is universal morality (possibly)- things that rational people of any time and any place find right or wrong

I think a morality that only applies to rational humans cannot be said to be universal. Universal implies that it applies across the universe, presumably to nonhumans as well. You have a hard enough time providing a foundation for the idea of an objective morality without trying to carry the water for it being universal as well. For instance, presumably there are things that it would be moral for Yahweh to do that would be immoral for a human to do. A universal morality for Christians is broken from the start.

[The Grand Nudger]

Objective morality and universal morality aren't the same things.  They couldn't be, as a matter of simple definition..since an objective morality is built from and must include relevant facts which may not be the same from species to species.

Objectivism =/= Absolutism.

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* (or even between subjects within a single species)

[Brian37]

Objective morality and universal morality aren't the same things.  They couldn't be, as a matter of simple definition..since an objective morality is built from and must include relevant facts which may not be the same from species to species.

Universal morality is........ see my avatar.

Objective morality is.........^^^^^see above.

What? Now people have a problem with arbitrary naked assertions? I can't win.

[brewer]

[edit] 
God is constrained by his nature. 
[edit]

Sorry to pull this out of context but it struck a chord (dissonant?). How is god "constrained" (restrict the scope, extent, or activity of) and how do you know it's "nature" (the basic or inherent features)? .............[parts of google definitions in ()].

[Angrboda]

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It is asserted by theologians that it is not arbitrary, but by the definition of arbitrary it is.  You can't just define a fact into existence.  If God's morals do not depend upon anything but himself, that, by very definition, makes them arbitrary.  Theologians are simply wrong.  If Gods morals are not arbitrary then they would necessarily have to be based on something which would establish that they have an orientation, instead of being random.  But since God's morals aren't based upon anything but himself, they are random, and that is the definition of arbitrary.  I've had theists repeatedly tell me that God is by definition good, but describing anything as good solely because it has that character is arbitrary, and therefore 'good' in the theist system is a free floating and unconstrained fact.  It is simply incoherent to assert that God is good because he is arbitrary, so the theist assertion is simply meaningless posturing.

And no, I'm not headed into POE territory.  As an example above, let's suppose that according to God's nature, rape is moral.  All the typical arguments you hear then follow.  God is still good, by definition.  God's morals depend upon his nature, so there is an objective foundation for his morals.  And so on.  There is no difference whatsoever between a world in which rape is moral because it is consistent with God's nature, and a world in which rape is not moral because of God's nature.  There is essentially no way to determine which of those two hypothetical world's we inhabited if in fact we inhabited them, and in both worlds the theists would assert that God is good by definition and so on.  If there is an inconsistency between those worlds it has to be accounted for, or else the inconsistency points out that the theist logic doesn't yield a definite conclusion and any and all morals one might imagine would be consistent with the theist's assertions if we inhabited that world.  But only one of those world's can be moral or else we have a logical explosion because of the inconsistency, yielding the assertion that all things are true.  Such an absurdity, and the inability of the theist logic of asserting that God is good by definition to pick out the actual moral world demonstrates conclusively that defining morals that way is arbitrary.  That's something of an our-world-centrism in that, whatever world you happen to be in, that world is the right world, and the morals in that world are the right ones.  The existence of two mutually inconsistent worlds, embracing opposite conclusions, using the same logical forms, is an absurdity, and points to an error in the logical forms.  I think the error is in assuming that you can make God's nature be good by simply defining that as an axiom of your system.  Doing so simply yields a contradiction, so something is amiss in your axioms.  (Unless you want to embrace dialetheism, or engage in a similar maneuver.  I have no idea off the top of my head what happens then.)

So, in a nutshell, I understand you are sincere when you assert that God is good by definition, but that simply leads to absurdities, so that assertion, or something in its orbit, must necessarily be abandoned.  To do otherwise is simply to embrace unreason.  Theologians have asserted it since time immemorial and I'm sure its been a part of your standard worldview as a theist but it simply doesn't pass muster.

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The goodness of God is definitely another thread. First could we tackle definitions. I think I see where people misinterpret arbitrary:
Do you define it as subject  to  individual   will  or  judgment   without   restriction;   contingent   solely   upon   one's   discretion? The point is that it is with description. Look at all the other definitions for arbitrary

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2. decided  by a  judge  or  arbiter   rather   than  by a  law  or  statute.
3. having   unlimited   power;   uncontrolled  or  unrestricted  by  law;   despotic;   tyrannical:
: existing or coming about seemingly at random or by chance or as a capricious and unreasonable act of will
: based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something

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God is constrained by his nature. Your definition stated above "depend upon anything but himself" to atheists reads as subjective, but to theists reads as random. Thought exercise: Are your decisions arbitrary? No of course not, they're based on who you are and what you believe, by your nature. Do you have arbitrary thoughts? Probably, but thoughts without will or action do not equal anything demonstrable.

I'm not a trivialist or using God as a self referencing answer to my moral code to create some nonsensical loop in logic. I also don't believe God's morals reflect my personal morality so I'm up for a thought experiment if you can dumb it down for me. I wouldn't want to have any cognitive dissonance  left to resolve. Please assist me in knocking some stragglers out of orbit and convincing me otherwise.

Using either of the other definitions of arbitrary leads to moral vacuity, so appealing to them simply obfuscates things. Arbiters and judges appeal to justified standards and authorities, they are not standards in and of themselves. And the second definition really does nothing for us as its unrelated to the sense in which arbitrary is being used in our discussion. I am not simply saying that might makes right and that alone is arbitrary, although it is, because I am focusing on a different meaning of arbitrary. If you were just confused by my usage, fine, but it seems uncharitable to blur my argument by referring to alternate ways of understanding what I said if you did in fact understand what I said in the sense that I intended. My definition was not that his goodness depended solely upon himself, but that it was arbitrary, and that the fact that it did not depend upon anybody but himself was one way of illustrating why it is arbitrary. It is not an independent bar in itself and so addressing that, wrongly as you have, is not helpful. His good being dependent only upon himself is not a problem because it is subjective but because it is arbitrary. It implying that his good is subjective, which I was not, was not the substance of my argument. He could have a subjective view of the good and so long as that good was real and not arbitrary, that would be somewhat okay. We object to morals that are subjective not because we have anything against subjectivity but because such things, generally, are arbitrary, or can be arbitrary. It is the arbitrariness which is the issue, not the subjectiveness. And this is reflected in complaints about moral relativism in that, if morals are just something we each decide, then there is no way to determine whose morals are correct and indeed the question becomes inapplicable because all morals then become correct because any arbitrary moral opinion is granted validity. Again, it is the arbitrariness that is at issue, not the dependency upon mind.

You want me to dumb it down, yet you didn't address the rather simple example I gave of two worlds with mutually inconsistent moral beliefs, in which both assert all the same things you do. If asserting the things you are asserting leads to such an absurdity, then something is very wrong in Denmark. You need to engage in some self evaluation and figure out exactly what it is in your arguments that led to such an absurdity and somehow explain it without inavlidating your entire concept or else you are simply not taking the question seriously and are simply papering over a very real problem with your ideas.

You want me to dumb it down? I don't know that the example of multiple independent and mutually inconsistent worlds needs an Einstein to grasp it, but I will offer another hypothetical that may be more to your liking. Let's say that we live in a universe in which there are six Gods, all of whom exist necessarily in the same way that Yahweh has, and all of them who appeal to their natures as the good, yet each of them advances inconsistent and incompatible morals. Before I ask how we would decide which of them has the correct moral values, I want to point out that this is more than just an epistemological question which, we may decline because our inability to form a correct conclusion isn't a bar to there actually being a correct conclusion. My suggestion here is that we cannot justify any of their morals and indeed none of them are moral because each of them is simply an arbitrary definition of the good. Suppose instead of six of them, you had an infinite number of such Gods and all morals were, according to some God's nature, true. Would any of these infinite gods have a possible claim on morality? Not just can we figure it out, but is there even a truth to be figured out here. If we were to say that one of them were the good, it seems to me, the only way we could do so would be by referencing something outside of that particular god. But that we can't do, both because we have nothing outside themselves that we can reference which would substantiate their claims to the good, and because Yahweh explicitly does not appeal to anything outside himself for his morals. So if vindicating Yahweh's morals would require referencing something outside himself, and there is nothing outside him that we can reference, and we explicitly are forbidden from doing so anyway, then Yahweh's morals can't be vindicated, not just in practice, but in principle. If you cannot justify Yahweh's morals as good and not arbitrary, then calling them good is just applying an arbitrary and meaningless name. You might as well refer to them as Schwarzenneggerean instead of good, as that would be just as meaningless.

[Mister Agenda]

No matter how hard we try, we can't escape responsibility for our own moral decisions. Even if abdicate all of our morality to some ideology or religion or deity, that is due to a moral decision on our part: that the ideology or religion or deity; in our judgment, should be obeyed. It might be the last time we use our own moral judgment, but we are responsible for the results, for any good or harm that ensues. 'I'm only doing what the deity says' is not a defense, when we chose to always do what we think the deity wants of us.