RE: Where do we go when we die and are you afraid?
August 6, 2020 at 8:38 am
(This post was last modified: August 6, 2020 at 9:05 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(August 2, 2020 at 4:24 pm)Shazzalovesnovels Wrote: I have thought about that. My God has certain values that I believe are correct to follow. I don't know what else to say.
Presumably, those values derive their correctness™ from something other than the alleged factual details of the myths. We could even note that those details are only important to the mythical claim, not the moral claim.
If the god-man never existed to say "love your neighbor" then the mythological content of christianity is DOA - but that won't and can't touch whether or not the values are correct to follow.
Similarly, if the character of god is a moral mess - and it is, as expected, transposed from the centuries of it's origin to the modern day, that still won't touch whether or not it's correct to love your neighbor.
Whatever unspoken standard you've used to determine the correctness of a value, and then applied to the god you believe in, in judgement, is probably the same standard that others apply directly to life, eschewing the mythical deontology-as-middleman. The belief that a given value is correct is no reason to believe in a god, nor is the belief that a value isn't a reason not to. The fact of a persons religion is almost entirely an accident of birth, but this isn't the case with moral intuitions and value assessments. As noted, other religions have used the theme of loving our neighbors, and doing unto others. It's clear that this belief is not rooted in any particular religion or constrained to any specific geology. It's bound up in what sociologists and anthropologists call reciprocity and kinship. TBT, they're more survival strategies than moral maxims. We believe that they're true because we've been using them to great effect for tens of thousands of years - but we haven't always been able to competently express the underlying justification, maybe not even today. They're true things in search of concurrent truth, and insomuch as a person believes in a myth they will find reason to draw other true things into the fold of that myth.
We're incredibly self-interested. We believe, as human beings, that the best sorts of relationships are familial ones. We believe, as human beings, that there is a credible expectation of treatment in-kind. This is a belief that we appear to share with other primates, as a point of interest. We believe in these things regardless of whether we believe in gods, and in fact, regardless of whether any god exists. The divine stands in as a crutch, the ultimate right-maker, a lazy argument from authority given life and license. We can sit here as adults, today, and say "Well, yeah" - but we have to acknowledge the purpose of deontology to understand why the authors of the myths chose to include those values - but did not choose to include adequate semantics to establish their own veracity, let alone the free riding addendum that gods exist, jesus is god, and that his death will have some positive effect on the moral state of your soul.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
because the other 4 billion pilgrims devote their lives to false Gods. And die for him. And kill others for him.
