The Official God FAQ

[BeBMan]

This is an interesting threadi, I learned lots of new things about god and stuff

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
I wouldn't want to screw every woman I've met either

I did up until your mom.

[Nikolai]

Originally posted by Cort Haus


Yes, I had this explained to me at school, and it always seemed to be the sort of thing that is easier to accept than to understand.

However, by the time we throw in the iconic Mary (who must get far more prayers in her mailbag than the Holy Ghost) and a bazillion saints, I can't help but wonder that the Polytheistic impulse is still going.

Do Jews and Muslims have the Holy Spirit thing?

Mary and the saints are a Catholic thing. I think that is unbiblical. The Jews and the Muslims do not have the Holy Spirit, it's a Christian concept.

[Zanarkand]

Besides, what about all that that god inspired before the bible ?

Well, if you mean inspired as in that God has guided the writers, than I'll say that there are no scriptures or other books than the Bible where the writers have been guided.

[Elok]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker

No, I'm temporarily working, purely for the sake of argument, under no assumptions other than basic self-interest, which is the only undeniable, self-evident imperative: "you should generally not do something that screws you over, and generally should do stuff that helps you." That's the one should that pretty much everyone can agree on, since none of us deliberately poke ourselves in the eyes with sharp sticks or decline an offer of a delicious dinner. It can be assumed from the get-go as pretty much nothing else can.

The problem is that it isn't really true. The human nature doesn't exist in isolation; it developed as how we relate to other humans. Because of that, by nature we don't act out of pure "self-interest".

You're describing how we do act. Not how we reasonably should or could given our circumstances, which is what's under discussion. We're also xenophobic by nature, but that doesn't make throwing rocks at ugly strangers the most sensible course of action.

Aggie, either you missed the point or you're being a twerp. Or both.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Elok

You're describing how we do act. Not how we reasonably should or could given our circumstances, which is what's under discussion. We're also xenophobic by nature, but that doesn't make throwing rocks at ugly strangers the most sensible course of action.

Aggie, either you missed the point or you're being a twerp. Or both.

Not really. You said:

From that assumption, I maintain it follows that there is no especial reason to do things that are of no advantage of any kind to you. You particularly should not do things to your detriment, as choosing to be moral often is.

But you provided no reason to think that what is to my advantage is what I value. You are illicitly conflating two kinds of interests: (1) self interest, and (2) the interests I have.

The interests I have are what give me reasons to do things. It so happens that most human beings have interests that go beyond their own self interest. Objecting that they should not do these things because it isn't in their self interest begs the question against them.

As for the question of whether or not people should abandon their altruistic values in favour of self interested values, that is something that you can answer only by appealing to values that people already have, and since they already have altruistic values, you won't get very far.

You could try the naturalistic route (with its attendant logical problems) and say that it is somehow in our nature to be selfish (like Ayn Rand seems to want to do, or the bull**** Will to Power crap), but then you face a whole heap of evidence that altruistic behaviour is extremely natural and that Aristotle was right in deeming us social animals.

You face a problem: either you appeal to the values people already have, in which case you face the problem of altruism, or you attempt a naturalistic account, in which case you face the problem of natural altruism.

As for the point about Xenophobia, there are two easy responses. The first is that people can often be reasoned out of their xenophobia by appeal to altruistic values they already have in combination with facts (most xenophobic beliefs depend on falsehoods about strangers). The second is that it is quite easy to get people to be less xenopobic. In fact, people are much less xenophobic and racist now than they were 100 years ago. That demonstrates that xenophobia, if natural, is not particularly deep. On the other hand it isn't clear that we can "cure" people of their altruism at all, and if we can it would have to be by some pretty awful and extreme form of psychological torture.

We don't need God to be altruists. In fact, organized religions and scriptural commandments are the detrimental to morality, because if we surrender ourselves completely to written moral precepts, then we bypass our own moral imagination (the faculty we have to creatively interpret situations in order to determine the ethical thing to do) and make ourselves the dogmatic moral slaves of a book or of a religious authority.

Look, if God exists and morality is in fact a matter of "ultimate concern", then he absolutely does not want you to know that, or to believe in him. Knowing that a God exists would immediately compromise your authenticity by "giving the game away". Making an act of faith to surrender your ethical judgement to that of some proffered religion just compromises your authenticity as a reasoning person, so the result is the same. If God were an ethical being, he she or it would not intervene in the physical universe in a way that compromised our authenticity. To do so would be an appalling act of paternalism (as if your own parents told you what to do your whole life).

Personally, I rather prefer that God doesn't exist and that there is no final judgement, because every single religious person would be in for a horrible shock.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Agathon


Personally, I rather prefer that God doesn't exist

I'll pray for you.

[Dry]

Originally posted by Lonestar
289 Ways To Piss Off An Atheist

290)

121) Claim that Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed.

196) Tell them that Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by MrFun

I'll pray for you.

You're goin to burn in hell, ya great big puff.

[Zanarkand]

And that you know because .... ?

I believe that the writers of the Bible were guided by God because The Bible is a book that God gave men as an invitation to get to know Him. And so if there is something in the Bible that is wrong, that would make God fallible, and He's not.

Personally, I rather prefer that God doesn't exist

I really, really believe you wouldn't like a world without God..

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Zanarkand
I really, really believe you wouldn't like a world without God..

I like the world plenty and there are no gods.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Zanarkand
I really, really believe you wouldn't like a world without God..

Free people don't need a god to tell them what to think and do.

[Elok]

Originally posted by Agathon
But you provided no reason to think that what is to my advantage is what I value. You are illicitly conflating two kinds of interests: (1) self interest, and (2) the interests I have.

The interests I have are what give me reasons to do things. It so happens that most human beings have interests that go beyond their own self interest. Objecting that they should not do these things because it isn't in their self interest begs the question against them.

Get real. I have interests in reading but I don't sit down and read a book on the railroad tracks while a train's coming down to hit me. You have interests in things that are pleasurable to you: interest in friends because their company brings you pleasure (I assume you have 'em, and they do), interest in debate apparently because it lets you show off some big words, which gives you pleasure. You certainly don't seem to have any interest in encountering new ideas. But whatever.

It all boils down, as a matter of necessity, to self-interest under one guise or another. Things that are interesting to you are by definition a form of self-interest. Likewise you are interested in avoiding things that are painful and detrimental to you. If you refuse to see how it all coheres, that's your bad faith, not mine. Not that, in a vacuum, bad faith is necessarily bad...

As for the question of whether or not people should abandon their altruistic values in favour of self interested values, that is something that you can answer only by appealing to values that people already have, and since they already have altruistic values, you won't get very far.

So people are completely immune to reasonable discussion? Quite possibly, but I'll try anyway, thanks.

You could try the naturalistic route (with its attendant logical problems) and say that it is somehow in our nature to be selfish (like Ayn Rand seems to want to do, or the bull**** Will to Power crap), but then you face a whole heap of evidence that altruistic behaviour is extremely natural and that Aristotle was right in deeming us social animals.

You face a problem: either you appeal to the values people already have, in which case you face the problem of altruism, or you attempt a naturalistic account, in which case you face the problem of natural altruism.

You're the one who's talking about nature here. Humans are not bound entirely by a preset nature; that's one of the distinctive things that makes us human. We're not meerkats, or ants, or wolves (though if you're going to talk about nature, our nearest relatives are chimps and they're not "naturally" very nice, social animals or not). We can choose our own way, and many of us do, and to assume that they're all wrong or secretly feeling terrible inside or in some other way missing out is just a bald assumption to make your worldview work.

You don't have to be a total thug all the time. As I told CH, it's not a matter of Angels and Devils. You can just keep the wallet some dude left on the train. Ignore the guy being mugged--it takes time to call the police, and it's not your problem. Be Wally from Dilbert, getting money for nothing. There are no limitations but your own, so the trick is to know them.

Of course, if you're lucky, you can be George W. Bush. You can go to Yale and have everything given to you your whole life. When you make a mess, there's a whole system to clean it up for you or protect you from the consequences of your actions. You can run a superpower into the ground and go home to Crawford and clear out the brush some more, calmly putting your fingers in your ears when anyone but Laura and the girls talks. For the sake of argument we'll ignore that W is a Methodist. In a moral vacuum, what do you tell GWB to convince him he should act differently? It's not like he ever had to worry about consequences, or probably ever will.

As for the point about Xenophobia, there are two easy responses. The first is that people can often be reasoned out of their xenophobia by appeal to altruistic values they already have in combination with facts (most xenophobic beliefs depend on falsehoods about strangers). The second is that it is quite easy to get people to be less xenopobic. In fact, people are much less xenophobic and racist now than they were 100 years ago. That demonstrates that xenophobia, if natural, is not particularly deep. On the other hand it isn't clear that we can "cure" people of their altruism at all, and if we can it would have to be by some pretty awful and extreme form of psychological torture.

Look at the deep political divide in America today, or at the Dubai Ports nonsense a couple of years back, or in your own fear and hate of the bourgeois and its fear and hate of folks like you. Xenophobia reduced? Nuh-uh, we've just switched targets. THEY are still out there, only now they're swarthy Arabs out to kill you, or bible-thumping lunatics out to take your rights away, or crazy ivy-league liberals conspiring to destroy the church and establish a police state (that last one's not really paranoia in your case, but it's usually unwarranted). We have a modern capitalist economy of fear, where you can choose for yourself who's out to get you and send e-mails to your friends about how this corporation or that nonprofit has just made another clear move towards its goal.

We don't need God to be altruists. In fact, organized religions and scriptural commandments are the detrimental to morality, because if we surrender ourselves completely to written moral precepts, then we bypass our own moral imagination (the faculty we have to creatively interpret situations in order to determine the ethical thing to do) and make ourselves the dogmatic moral slaves of a book or of a religious authority.

Look, if God exists and morality is in fact a matter of "ultimate concern", then he absolutely does not want you to know that, or to believe in him. Knowing that a God exists would immediately compromise your authenticity by "giving the game away". Making an act of faith to surrender your ethical judgement to that of some proffered religion just compromises your authenticity as a reasoning person, so the result is the same. If God were an ethical being, he she or it would not intervene in the physical universe in a way that compromised our authenticity. To do so would be an appalling act of paternalism (as if your own parents told you what to do your whole life).

Personally, I rather prefer that God doesn't exist and that there is no final judgement, because every single religious person would be in for a horrible shock.

Yes, I know what you prefer. Actually, I'd rather not know too much. I disagree with you, obviously, but I want to more or less stay on the threadjack I've already started. I will rest on the retort that you are by your own logic the dogmatic slave of whatever brand of communism you have, and of the methods of philosophical inquiry your professors taught you. You thought that absurd line about circularity made sense, and that sounds like fettered thinking to me. So it seems slavery is in the eye of the beholder.

[Arrian]

Look at the deep political divide in America today, or at the Dubai Ports nonsense a couple of years back, or in your own fear and hate of the bourgeois and its fear and hate of folks like you. Xenophobia reduced? Nuh-uh, we've just switched targets. THEY are still out there, only now they're swarthy Arabs out to kill you, or bible-thumping lunatics out to take your rights away, or crazy ivy-league liberals conspiring to destroy the church and establish a police state (that last one's not really paranoia in your case, but it's usually unwarranted). We have a modern capitalist economy of fear, where you can choose for yourself who's out to get you and send e-mails to your friends about how this corporation or that nonprofit has just made another clear move towards its goal.

That's well said. I just wanted to note that.

As for the rest... I disagree with you Elok, but I don't have the heart to really argue it. My morality is a basic "golden rule" type of system and it's not based on God (at least not directly - one could argue that it's the product of an upbringing that is itself the product of a society that was and is religious). I'm big on [what I perceive to be] fairness. And that simply doesn't require a God or gods.

Further, it seems rather obvious to me that the various religious morality systems in the world are are, in fact, the creation of humans (as I find the arguments in support of God's/gods' existence uncompelling). They change over time, when humans decide to change them.

And I simply don't find that scary. I know many do (maybe you don't, but many do).

-Arrian

[Whaleboy]

If morality is in fact an artificial construct, then there are limited reasons to follow it: you feel bad if you don't (which isn't very satisfying as a reason), or it is to your personal advantage to go along (which it often isn't). Those are the only two I can think of.

But this assumes a rational process that is consented to by the would-be moral person, hence it begs the question. The best example which illustrates my point is that of love. Few would claim that this emanates from God, and no-one claims that it is a wholly rational process. Humans are perfectly capable of irrational constructs without the presence of God.

Our fundamental conflict is that you see the question of morality as either God-given (by which I mean stems from the idea of God; whether you believe this to have any normative truth I don't know) or cognitivist. As a logical positivist I would be more inclined to look at non-cognitivist ideas of morality such as emotivism. I doubt you'd find the idea particularly satisfactory but then we're coming at the question of morality from very different angles. I'm interested in describing it whereas others are interested in prescribing it, perhaps in order to give principle to a legal system (where morality moves from governing your own behaviour to that of others).

I you must tie me down to a general humanistic moral principle it might look something like this...

1) A person who wishes to participate in society / communicate with others depends upon the theory of mind where an individual projects the perspective of another onto himself.
2) This relies (with not a small dollop of perversity) on the view that to at least some degree all people are equal
3) Stable society depends upon communication
4) 2+3 = Stable society depends on the view that people are equal
5) Fair approach to governance, i.e., one set of rules for all requires a balance of power between individuals
6) Unnecessary harm to another person violates 4. Taking into account 5, it also violates 2.
7) Much ponderous cogitation
8) Do to others what you would have done to yourself

You may find this familiar as R. Hillel's "Golden Rule". Ironically my view reaches the same conclusion using similar reasoning, but sans god. An interesting consequence is that cognitive morality only becomes relevant in the context of society, on your own it doesn't matter. This links back to my earlier point about cognitive morality being necessarily prescriptive, but I don't see morality as being necessarily cognitive.

Mmm-hmm. Example?

Oh I don't know - let's say the albatross spending all of its life hitched with one partner even when thousands of miles apart and enduring the horrors that whatever ocean they live in is throwing at them. What of the human survival story such as the bottleneck in our population ~70K years ago and how we survived and prospered and made a royal mess of everything.

As I'm sure you can tell by my tone I don't take much stock in the idea of inspiring people by abstract examples; scriptural or otherwise. Emotion and reason are more powerful tools.

If the process is not in some sense rational I have very little faith in it.

Love the turn of phrase! You've summed up in an ill-advised use of the word "faith" pretty much my whole argument!

I'm glad you're back, BTW. You can be great fun to argue with.

Gotta keep those cerebral juices flowing somehow.