ShieldWife
Marchioness
I am creating this thread to avoid a tangent on another thread. I will quote some relevant posts below:
We can continue the above conversation here and soon I will reply with my thoughts on the topic.
It is an error to read that passage as saying that hate is the opposite of love, or to apply the command to love your enemies outside the brotherhoood of Christ. Love the Body of Christ, hate the enemies of Christ. It is also an error to read 'Judge not' as an instruction never to judge anyone for anything.
19Did Moses not give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth the law? 20Why seek you to kill me? The multitude answered, and said: Thou hast a devil; who seeketh to kill thee? 21Jesus answered, and said to them: One work I have done; and you all wonder: 22Therefore, Moses gave you circumcision (not because it is of Moses, but of the fathers) and on the sabbath day you circumcise a man. 23If a man receive circumcision on the sabbath day, that the law of Moses may not be broken; are you angry at me because I have healed the whole man on the sabbath day? 24Judge not according to the appearance, but judge just judgment.
Problem with that play is that removing said foundation ... leaves the whole idea of natural rights hanging in the air unsupported. If man is just another animal, you can do whatsoever you please to him. Literally nothing is forbidden.
Except that isn't true, it only a conceit assumed by many religions to give them a means exercise control on people's thoughts and try to pretend the natural world is separate from the human world.
The fact pack animals exist completely blows the conceit out of the water, because they don't need a religion to keep packs together or survive long term. We are just another pack animal, if a very fucking clever and resourceful one that harnessed fire, something no other animal can really claim.
We've also been very lucky.
I'm not an atheist, more an agnostic who looks for the divine in nature, not in scripture.
I am convinced there is a divine, but I'm not anywhere near feeling any religion represents the totality of it.
Which is why if feel secular laws are safer for societies as a whole, particularly ones where multiple faiths live together.
I think Christianity is great, but has too little focus on humanities place in the larger natural world. I also think Shintoism and Buddhism have great qualities for their more...naturalistic views on humanities' relationship with our world. I like the Sikh self/community defense ethics, and their kickass turbans/beards.
See, why don't we just go the old Roman way that led to them having such a period of well...a golden age?
We need our own Augutus, and may Amrs choose him wisely
ah, yes we should seek to emulate pack hunters like orcas, dolphins and chimps, elephants and crows.
You know baby eating, corpse raping, genocidal maniacs?
Highly intelligent pack animals have some of the most violently dysfunctional societies on the planet.
Without religion and even then only certain religions we'd be walking around thinking necrophilia and cannibalism is totally A okay.
That...that's the most unique way I've ever heard anyone describe the fall of the Roman Empire.
But it ain't wrong.
One should note how, in comparison to more primitive cultures, Islam is downright civilised. Providing a wide moral framework for a society is a good thing,
RE: bolded part, that is largely how humans have come to be a dominant species on the planet... in fact, when you look at dolphin behaviour and the "natural state" human behaviour, there is basically no difference. Where difference does lie is that we are simply too powerful and also have the capacity of being afraid of ourselves. Hence the culture, civilization, laws, borders... all of that exists in order to allow humans to coexist without wiping themselves out.
That would only be the nihilistic viewpoint. You are not going to win anyone over to your religion by making this argument, so you may as well not make it.
It's nihilistic to point out that secularists are morons who are too old to be mad at dad and that without certain world religions we'd be a disaster?
Maybe now would be an inconvenient time to note that Troons working for Nick Jr put out blatant pedophilic content and went full Groomer and even included satanic imagery in a recent cartoon because y'all drove the religious right out of power and have no one to gate keep the animals any more?
That's certainly an interesting PoV. What I'm referring to is the idea that without religion, man is just an animal and you can just do whatever. A lot of people, both religious and antitheist, seem to have it in their had that not believing in religion and having an afterlife somehow cheapens human life. My view is that it actually makes it that much more precious, because once someone is dead, that's it, there's no afterlife for them and they're gone. To me that makes it all the more tragic when people die.
"Live.for the moment because there's no point in anything else"
Long term thinking vanishes when you walk down that road. As evidence by the total collapse and degeneration of our society.
We are dying as a people because of that.
Just because atheists and secularists don't like being reminded of the logical consequences of their ideology, does not mean that what they are being told is not true.
Atheism has no foundation for morality. It has personal preferences, but in the end it teaches that we're nothing more or less than biological machines, and there is no inherent worth or value to that, nothing transcendant, just what a given atheist prefers to personally impute.
The effects of atheism in the 20th and 21st century are a testament to the horrors that this brings. Among other world ideologies, only Islam can come close to causing as much sheer human misery and suffering as has come about through atheism.
I was going to make a comment, but I believe we've gone off topic.
Oh shut up. You are literally casting stones when you live in a glass house. For instance we just found piles of corpses of children next to a residential school- you know one run by the Catholic and Anglican schools. And apparently there are more. Also we cannot forget that mass grave found in Ireland. Or how King Leopold II who turned the Congo red... was a Christian, I mean if you toss blame at us for what you are blaming us for, we can do the same. Remember, in all the examples that I have provided say Leopold they have done these atrocities in service of their religion. And speaking of atrocities in service of religion, "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.".
See, there's a difference. When you point to those things, I can say that they were morally wrong, as they violate God's Law, and anyone who claims to have done so in God's name is clearly a liar.
An Atheist?
All you can really say is 'I don't like it.' Because you have no higher moral law. You can say that your preferences are moral law, but in the end, they're still only your personal preferences.
Murder is wrong. Theft is wrong. Rape is wrong. Genocide is wrong. I can make these as moral statements, and that is logically consistent with my worldview. That some people violate these demonstrates that the heart of man is prone to sin and wickedness, which is also logically consistent with my worldview. It's ugly, and it should be resisted at all turns, but it's observably true.
To an atheistic worldview, what is it but one biological machine interacting with other biological machines in a way that results in the machine being damaged or broken?
Note that in nations with dominant, or even strong remnants of Christian culture, these offenses needed to be hidden. Because they are known to be unacceptable.
In aggressively atheistic regimes? These things are done openly, as warnings, or just because someone in power is on an ego trip. Even publicly claimed to be right and moral by those who do them. See, USSR, Khmer Rouge, Maoist China, etc.
Evil happened in both cases. But the scale of the offense and how it was treated were drastically different.
I'll be happy to continue this argument if you want, but yes, it should move to a new thread if it's to keep going on.
(As an addendum, yes atheistic people are capable of being moral. I'm not claiming otherwise. It's just not logically consistent with their worldview to believe in morality.)
And there is a problem there, because that means that whatever God says is law is law. Whatever he says is Good is Good. Which is all well and good if you believe in Intellectualism, because God has rules, and sticks to them. Voluntarism...not so much. I honestly don't think divine command is a valid system of morality, because it very much allows people to substitute their own will for their god, or presuming the existence of god means morality is entirely contingent (well at least in Voluntarism)
And that assumes that we don't subscribe to the fact that there isn't a higher moral law. I actually lean to the belief that there is, a transcendent law to the universe, 'Divine' Reason- the Logos or the Tao. Or I'd rather believe it to be the case. The very law of the cosmos. Or I want to believe in it, that there is some transcendent law, independent of man, or of any supposed god or gods.
And I don't think the Communists are Atheistic, even Religious Atheistic like certain Asiatic religions and sects. They have a god, which is Communism itself or the State, and varying prophets and even their own theology. Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live. History is on their side, and will end in universal communism. And so on.
You probably should on both counts. Even if I don't want to continue this scrap much longer, it should be continued.
It is perfectly consistent with my worldview. I believe in listening to Reason, Reason tells me what is moral, what is just, what is truth, what is not-truth and so on. And what Reason cannot provide me I listen to my fellow man and heed what he or she has to say and look to the words of the teachers both ancient and moderate.
We can continue the above conversation here and soon I will reply with my thoughts on the topic.