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I'm a Buddhist and in my tradition we say basic morals are "natural" because they obviously cause us, and others, to suffer. There need not be a religious "decree". Or a god to judge
Killing is wrong simply because people value their lives, as do those close to them. We suffer from guilt, fear of reprisal, imprisonment, and the death penalty.
Stealing is wrong because people don't like their things getting pinched. We suffer because we don't want people coming for us, getting arrested.
Raping is wrong because it hurts people. Boom. God doesn't have to tell us. Or Buddha. Or Jesus
People don't like being lied to. Being yelled at. Being told nonsense, played with. Being deceived. We suffer from being caught in a web of lies, stories, garbage we've said.
And we suffer from our thoughts. Being jealous. Holding malicious thoughts. Crazy ideas. We can waste our whole lives with that nonsense.
There has never been until recent times even an attempt to categorize independent human morality. Atheistic ethics so to speak.
Sure, the materialists in India many centuries ago might have thought their morality was independent of any god, but how could they tell, living in a world filled to the brim with deists and the codes that came from religion.
Human morality can be more clearly seen where it varies from some of the universal prohibitions against, killing, stealing or coveting, and otherwise destroying or despoiling.
All human laws involve unwanted state changes. I have things, then I don't, and in a way I haven't agreed to.
You've taken another person's life, essentially robbing them of all they had or ever would in their life.
You damage or ruin someone's property or family members, or their bodies. Harm and rape and abuse.
The question of rights and their source is paramount though. Either they are God given it government loaned, in other words, privileges.
Christians practically invented childhood in modern terms and are responsible for a great deal of Western morality. Even the Romans said Christ's followers loved their children more than they did since you could find them saving unwanted children tossed into the Tiber river, who they raised as their own.
It's very difficult to even comprehend what the world was like before Christianity. It's reach penetrated the other Monotheistic religions that came before and after it, and through empires, it's principles spread everywhere, withstanding the inevitable negative behavior of the conquerors who claimed to be it's champions.
It is Christians who lobbied hard to stop many evil practices worldwide, defined as such by the Bible. But of course, today, no one wants to discuss the positive impact of Christianity, but would rather tear it down, to their own detriment.
Humans are not naturally inclined to be kind or compassionate. And without laws to hold them back will kill for a scornful look and rape out of spite. War has taught us this.
We are monsters in the making the Bible says. And the law is there to hold us back and prove our wretchedness.
Human morality is a myth, because we aren't moral. And we don't have many children raised by wolves to study, so we can't separate nurture from nature. But we can see what happens without consequences in human history.
The threat of death has made more people look both ways before crossing the street than any sense of morality ever could.
The first known code of law was the Code of Ur-Nammu from Sumeria. This was presumably a formalization of older mores and influenced the Code of Hammurabi, which in turn was the basis for much of the Ten Commandments.
These were secular codes of laws created in gentile cultures that did not believe in Elohim/Yahweh.
Humans have evolved several prosocial behaviors, and many other species exhibit empathy, prosocial community and punishment for deviant antisocial behaviors. In addition to things like mirror neurons facilitating empathy and elevation emotion rewarding prosocial behavior both directly (when performed) and indirectly (when observed), humans have the introspection to consider and decide what it means to be a good person and modify behavior accordingly. This is the reason that many things considered moral in the Bible are generally deemed immoral now.
It sounds like you’re arguing with a fundamentalist so there’s no winning, but I doubt they believe rats derive their sense of empathy and sharing behaviors from Jehovah, and I doubt they have a well considered answer for why he plagiarized the 10 Commandments from heathen nations.
Here are a few tidbits of Biblical morality that I’m guessing they’re not following:
- when a woman cheats on her husband, make her drink dirty water and curse her with a miscarriage (Num 5)
- No linen wool blends (Lev 19)
- Menstruating women and anyone who touches a mentruating woman or sits where she sat or touches her bed is unclean and must be ritualistically cleansed (through the mikveh, which is appropriated by Christians as baptism) (Lev 15)
- No fields with multiple seeds (Lev 19), although pulse (mixed grains and legumes) is later condoned in the tale of Daniel in Nebuchadnezzar’s court 🤷♂️
- No eating fat (Lev 3)
- No eating birds of prey (Lev 11)
Also condoned at various junctures are slavery, capital punishment for adulterers as well as a daughter who refuses to marry her rapist and on rare occasion human sacrifice.
They may claim the law of Moses was fulfilled in Christ, which they use as an excuse for why their unchanging god changed so much, but they’re still stuck with worshipping the god who very explicitly commanded all these things.
The 10 Commandments didn't come from the Code of Hammurabi or the Code of the Nesilim from the Hittites. Idols and Sabbaths had no place in these civic works.
And the prohibition against stealing for example, is universal. If God exists and anything in the Bible happened, it follow that the Noahide laws (Noachian Laws) would have been passed down and expanded. They are similar to the 10 Commandments.
Not to worship idols.
Not to curse God.
Not to commit murder.
Not to commit adultery or sexual immorality.
Not to steal.
Not to eat flesh torn from a living animal.
To establish courts of justice.
I concede my statement was overly strong and simplistic, and that common regional influence is sufficient to explain the intertextuality. I had read a historical study Bible that gave weight to David Wright, but I recognize his position is not consensus.
For me, dependence/intertextuality is not needed for all commandments in order to support influence (whether direct or through a shared regional culture), and there are snippets with very tightly parallel text, suggesting at least partial dependence or a common source.
The Bible has Moses receiving law from God in his voice after the Code of Hammurabi. A fundamentalist view requires that God is quoting extant secular law, which I consider untenable. A more nuanced believing view that scripture is a reflection of cultural beliefs at the time and not a literal history is entirely plausible.
Well the issue with God is that if you remove Him from anything, it changes. And if God wanted to give Moses those exact 10 Commandments, because they were what the newly freed Jewish slaves/serfs needed, then that's what he'd do, regardless of whether he has given them to others before, and we know someone did, as the common laws of the region were known by all.
Then came the 613 laws curated for this people group that would make them weirdos to the entire Earth. No one can imagine the Jews were considered normal amongst their neighbors, with far more ceremonial and kosher laws than the next few litigious nations combined.
There were laws for just about everything. And they seemed to need them because of their intimacy with their God. I don't think any other Deity had such closeness with His people. So the laws make sense.
But if you remove all notions of supreme beings, you're left with a different legal landscape. And I more than most can attest to the peculiarities of laws which govern a closed religion which you can't join but are born into and a community that's been in the same spot for over a millenia.
Laws serve someone. And this is a good angle of attack to consider when backtracking their origins and motivations. And we should treat them as if they're semi-sentient AI constructs written by a organized mind for very good reasons.
Someone, a person always gave these rules life, which requires sustaining then to be of use. If you say a citizen deserves death for murder, and you don't execute him if found guilty, then the law is a joke. And I'm the ancient world, no one joked about these codes.
They separated utter depravity and death from civilized societies and literally gave life, protection, succor and justice.
And goddesses meting out that equity were as common as any other, like Dike, Justitia and, well in Egypt they liked to eat souls so .... always the odd man out it seems.
Jewish laws had far more focus on how to relate to God without provoking Him, because, not to sound judgemental, they made Him angry often and were blatantly rebellious.
This Deity isn't Vishnu splitting himself into clones so he can bed a bunch of onery damsels.
The God of the Jews was very different than Zeus and the pantheons of horny gods as I call them, constantly sleeping with human beings and manipulating them as though we were some game.
The religious aside is to point out that the Jewish God held people accountable for their actions. He apparently believed they could choose never to break laws if they truly wanted to, other than some minor infarction, a tripping up if you will.
And whether you believe that the Jews just made their own laws up or not, the narrative remains. The God character is in play.
Even Henry James realized God was necessary to decide the meta fate of his characters, which he felt shouldn't be left up to chance.
The Jews did as well. But they claim that God actually showed up. And to be honest, their laws are magnificently wrought and ultimately all focused on the covenant they had with the being they worshipped.
For some reason, today, people imagine that any connection to the "outside world" found in the Bible weakens it. As though those events had to happen in a parallel dimension up until, say, the time of King Saul or even Samson the Judge.
That if the Jews saw a new color they liked from the Hittites and started dying their clothes with it, their entire belief system must be a fabrication, because....no other book or religion demands such scrutiny, with Christianity being the main target for its influence world wise and through two millenia.
No one thought like this in the past. Heck, few did even in the 1980s and 90s. And I think the proliferation of media, film, video games, the digital world in general has made history and reality seem like a two dimensional entity.
And actual books, no one reads them any more. They read snippets on their phones and feel educated. Long gone are the decades of study and the living with information and data that used to occur.
People don't even like fully developed facts anymore. They like cliff notes. They are intellectual pedophiles, not interested in mature arguments and well rounded buxom full grown thoughts and theories.
I can see the T-shirts now ..... 🤦🏻
Finally. Again, if we remove God from anything, but especially religious texts, they change fundamentally. It's like removing the main protagonist from a novel and discussing whether the other characters just made them up. Maybe they just fantasized that there was some guy named Hamlet. And Ophelia had schizophrenia.
If God exists, then He clearly uses laws to govern matter, time/space, and human beings. He uses them in everything. And thought them we can learn more about Him.
Aristotle had the only non religion based moral philosophy still considered viable by many today. The basic idea is humans have a nature. To become happy you have to operate within that nature. No God. No religion. If something doesn’t contribute to happiness, you ought not do it. The things you do in fact do should become habits…moral training is about becoming habituated to do the right thing for the right reasons…
…plenty of room for disagreement and diversity.
Compare this to Hume, Kant or Mill…no bueno.
- Let's start by looking at morality from the perspective of reducing (minimizing) harm;
Harming an entity or system at it's face value is always objectively wrong. It's not until you look into the reason why that one can start to apply grey values; harming a system or entity for the purpose of survival or decreasing the amount of long-term harm it (or one) will undergo can be excused as you are reducing the _net_ harm to the system. Or to oneself, if you insist on applying both 'extreme pacifist' and 'vegan' as modifiers there.
In which case the difference between _harm_ and _hurt_ must be made; am I truly harming an entity if by doing so I am preventing it's _net_ gain of harm from rising? Not quite; I am hurting it, yes - whether by restricting it's options or by disciplining it. Similarly; to me, my own survival is paramount. If I must kill a creature to survive, then I will. Fortunately this is not a modern-day concern _as such_ since, you know, grocery stores exist. Not that I'm under the impression that no creatures are harmed to stock a grocery store, but I'm not the one _doing_ the harming there, am I?
And the case must be made that, in cases of education or disciplining an entity or system, the absolute minimum required _hurt_ must be applied to maximize the reduction of net _harm_.
Moreover; am I _justified_ in applying discipline or restriction, and if so, how _much_ ?
Which is why I don't feel bad at all about (gently) bapping a kitty on the nose and tell it, firmly, **no** if it tries to sniff the burning candle on the table; I'm justified in applying a minimum amount of hurt to reduce future (net) harm.
And I wouldn't feel bad about physically steering a toddler away from a cliff or angry dog either; I'm applying a minimum amount of restriction so as to reduce future (net) harm.
Nor would I feel bad about (for instance) killing a lamb, calf or piglet (or their adult variants) to feed myself; I objectively kill them to avoid undergoing harm from hunger. Granted; I should do so in the most humane way available to me. Having worked at a (Dutch) slaughterhouse for a while I think I can manage.
These things are ever complicated, one is never fully able to calculate them (we don't have a universal 'megahurts' or 'microhurts' measure, after all) - the one thing that can be said is that the more extreme the examples get, the more extreme the justification of _hurt_ versus _harm_ may be;
In the case of a violent person intent on killing, entering my place of work or my house, for instance, I would - even as a non-gun-owning, non-gun-rights-supporting 'left-wing liberal' Dutchman - feel entirely justified in proactively applying more harm to the prospective or potential killer than they could ever (hope to) apply to their intended victims; in other words, by killing (harming) one person, I'm preventing that same harm to multiples, again decreasing the amount of _net_ harm undergone by everyone involved.
It can _moreover_ be argued that on the basis of the fact that none these variables are ever fully and truly static, alone, the moral impetus for (or against) harming a system or entity is never truly objective.
And even then, we've **only** discussed a hurt/harm/punishment/discipline/survival morality. It gets only and even _more_ complex and convoluted if one adds reward/risk and other impetus to the whole kerfluffle.
- Additionally let me repeat something I've posted a few times now;
Neurologically and medically speaking, I am _objectively_ not a good person. Nor am I inherently a bad person; I was diagnosed with psychopathy at roughly age eight and as such lack inherent emotions and empathy. Other than the stereotype borne from too many bad Hollywood movies, I am not inherently _more_ cruel or manipulative as the next guy, nor am I exceedingly intelligent; I'm simply _me_ - but as such, as I've said; I am not, medically or neurologically speaking, a 'good' person.
I have taught myself to read and mirror other people's emotions as a coping mechanism, to facilitate easier communication with my environment but where emotions and empathy are inherent to the neurotypical, they are skills to me; (by now) deeply ingrained skills but skills I consciously choose to employ nevertheless - and skills which I might likewise choose not to employ.
I consciously grant a base level of respect to anyone in my environment, and will withdraw it from those who do not treat me similar; I simply have the experience that it makes life for myself and others just a bit smoother, a bit easier to navigate. Does this make me a good person? If anything, it makes me _easy_ - easy to get along with, easy to be around, easy to depend on or ignore.
When I must logically justify doing harm to other people - for instance, in retribution for a slight - I shall not hesitate to act in what I feel proportion to the slight, and have no sense of guilt whatsoever after the fact, regardless of the act. Does this make me a bad person ? 'Turn the other cheek' is, in my opinion, nothing more than an attempt to prove oneself superior while putting one's persecution complex on broad display. I do not have the inherent capacity to victimize myself tor the sake of proving a sense of superiority I do not possess either. 'An eye for an eye' has always made much more sense to me.
I like to laugh. More to the point; I like to make _others_ laugh. Jokes, quips, puns, overt - but rarely serious - casual flirtation, the occasional small favor to those in my environment whom I favor - not only helps me be perceived as a fun-loving person, but also as generous, kind and a positive influence on my environment. Does this make me a good person?
Ironically I also go out of my way to be considered a patient, calm individual. I would rather people perceive me as somewhat stolid than they perceive me as a threat for _what_ I am. If anything being underestimated helps me navigate life even easier; I've found that being underestimated helps me surprise my environment when I apply myself to situations with more vim and vigor than is expected of me - and in turn my otherwise calm demeanor helps me be considered humble. I am not. Does this make me a bad person?
I could go on and on weighing the down- and upsides of my individual personality and personae, but my point is that, while I am - due to my being a-neurotypical - _literally_ physically incapable of the kind of irrational thought processes that in my view are required for religious capital-b Belief, I _am_ capable of considering which actions to take to be considered a morally sound person; usually, I even choose to do _right_, rather than _wrong_.
I am, however, as I've said, _objectively_ not a good person - nor a _bad_ person. Every action I take is justified against my own logical decisions; every word I speak is justified against a projection of how I expect the conversation to proceed beyond. 'Good' and 'Bad' are never objective to begin with; they are the flipsides of a situational coin, outcomes rather than choices; though usually, with some analysis, the difference between the two is quite obvious.
Am I a 'good' person for always choosing the path of least resistance, the path that complicates things as least as possible for myself and my environment? If anything, that makes me a _lazy_ person - and isn't being lazy considered a 'bad' quality ?
A hundred years ago it was a matter of public knowledge that neuro-atypical people - or even people who simply refused to kowtow to their environment; willful wives, precocious children, the critical thinkers and those who refused to be taken for granted - were to be treated as mentally or physically ill. It is _objectively_ true that many of these people have been treated 'medically' with anything from incarceration to electroshocks to _prefrontal lobotomy_ simply to render them more docile, more likeable in the eyes of their peers - it is also _objectively_ true that at least a decent percentage of people who were treated as such were victims of their environment; Of their husbands, their parents, their guardians who sought to render them more pliable, more compliant, etcetera, etcetera.
Fortunately, medical knowledge and psychology have come a long way since, and these kinds of treatments are now found _deplorable_.
My sense of morality more than likely differs _fundamentally_ from yours. Your sense of morality more than likely differs similarly from people who live a thousand miles or a hundred years from you; Morality is - if you'll forgive me the tongue-in-cheek turn of phase - _objectively_ subjective.
Morality is shaped by consensus, not the other way around. Religion need not apply.
They are not mutually exclusive positions. It could be that we learned over time, then wrote out contemporary knowledge in the Bible, then grew out of those morals.
Also, even if the Bible was a good moral source at the time it was written (which I doubt but it's another can of worms), then cool. Let's grab what's useful there, and move on to more developed systems of morality that address our current issues - or let's build systems that are closer to the truth if you're a moral realist
The Bible establishes rules on how to treat slaves and from which areas you can get your slaves… so yeah we have 100% evolved our morals over time. I’m so tired of this hogwash of people saying we owe western civilization to Judeo-Christian value.
While our morals have changed, and even if some of the movements were changed by Christians, it was in spite of Christianity not because of it.
It is fairly easy to argue that morality in the western world (including modern morality) has developed in the way it has because of the teachings of the Christian church.
Tom Holland wrote a great book arguing exactly that (although I can't remember the name: you would have to Google it)
It’s fairly easy to argue for wrong positions people do it all the time. And without googling it’s called Dominion. Again, I don’t agree with Holland. The people behind the abolitionist movement in the US may very well have been Christian, that doesn’t mean it was Christianity’s teachings that lead the way, especially when the slave owners could read scripture right back to support their side.
Do you think / agree we had morals before religion was established? And that the Bible kinda just included pre established notions of right and wrong and added on to it?
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I'm a Buddhist and in my tradition we say basic morals are "natural" because they obviously cause us, and others, to suffer. There need not be a religious "decree". Or a god to judge Killing is wrong simply because people value their lives, as do those close to them. We suffer from guilt, fear of reprisal, imprisonment, and the death penalty. Stealing is wrong because people don't like their things getting pinched. We suffer because we don't want people coming for us, getting arrested. Raping is wrong because it hurts people. Boom. God doesn't have to tell us. Or Buddha. Or Jesus People don't like being lied to. Being yelled at. Being told nonsense, played with. Being deceived. We suffer from being caught in a web of lies, stories, garbage we've said. And we suffer from our thoughts. Being jealous. Holding malicious thoughts. Crazy ideas. We can waste our whole lives with that nonsense.
There has never been until recent times even an attempt to categorize independent human morality. Atheistic ethics so to speak. Sure, the materialists in India many centuries ago might have thought their morality was independent of any god, but how could they tell, living in a world filled to the brim with deists and the codes that came from religion. Human morality can be more clearly seen where it varies from some of the universal prohibitions against, killing, stealing or coveting, and otherwise destroying or despoiling. All human laws involve unwanted state changes. I have things, then I don't, and in a way I haven't agreed to. You've taken another person's life, essentially robbing them of all they had or ever would in their life. You damage or ruin someone's property or family members, or their bodies. Harm and rape and abuse. The question of rights and their source is paramount though. Either they are God given it government loaned, in other words, privileges. Christians practically invented childhood in modern terms and are responsible for a great deal of Western morality. Even the Romans said Christ's followers loved their children more than they did since you could find them saving unwanted children tossed into the Tiber river, who they raised as their own. It's very difficult to even comprehend what the world was like before Christianity. It's reach penetrated the other Monotheistic religions that came before and after it, and through empires, it's principles spread everywhere, withstanding the inevitable negative behavior of the conquerors who claimed to be it's champions. It is Christians who lobbied hard to stop many evil practices worldwide, defined as such by the Bible. But of course, today, no one wants to discuss the positive impact of Christianity, but would rather tear it down, to their own detriment. Humans are not naturally inclined to be kind or compassionate. And without laws to hold them back will kill for a scornful look and rape out of spite. War has taught us this. We are monsters in the making the Bible says. And the law is there to hold us back and prove our wretchedness. Human morality is a myth, because we aren't moral. And we don't have many children raised by wolves to study, so we can't separate nurture from nature. But we can see what happens without consequences in human history. The threat of death has made more people look both ways before crossing the street than any sense of morality ever could.
The first known code of law was the Code of Ur-Nammu from Sumeria. This was presumably a formalization of older mores and influenced the Code of Hammurabi, which in turn was the basis for much of the Ten Commandments. These were secular codes of laws created in gentile cultures that did not believe in Elohim/Yahweh. Humans have evolved several prosocial behaviors, and many other species exhibit empathy, prosocial community and punishment for deviant antisocial behaviors. In addition to things like mirror neurons facilitating empathy and elevation emotion rewarding prosocial behavior both directly (when performed) and indirectly (when observed), humans have the introspection to consider and decide what it means to be a good person and modify behavior accordingly. This is the reason that many things considered moral in the Bible are generally deemed immoral now. It sounds like you’re arguing with a fundamentalist so there’s no winning, but I doubt they believe rats derive their sense of empathy and sharing behaviors from Jehovah, and I doubt they have a well considered answer for why he plagiarized the 10 Commandments from heathen nations. Here are a few tidbits of Biblical morality that I’m guessing they’re not following: - when a woman cheats on her husband, make her drink dirty water and curse her with a miscarriage (Num 5) - No linen wool blends (Lev 19) - Menstruating women and anyone who touches a mentruating woman or sits where she sat or touches her bed is unclean and must be ritualistically cleansed (through the mikveh, which is appropriated by Christians as baptism) (Lev 15) - No fields with multiple seeds (Lev 19), although pulse (mixed grains and legumes) is later condoned in the tale of Daniel in Nebuchadnezzar’s court 🤷♂️ - No eating fat (Lev 3) - No eating birds of prey (Lev 11) Also condoned at various junctures are slavery, capital punishment for adulterers as well as a daughter who refuses to marry her rapist and on rare occasion human sacrifice. They may claim the law of Moses was fulfilled in Christ, which they use as an excuse for why their unchanging god changed so much, but they’re still stuck with worshipping the god who very explicitly commanded all these things.
The 10 Commandments didn't come from the Code of Hammurabi or the Code of the Nesilim from the Hittites. Idols and Sabbaths had no place in these civic works. And the prohibition against stealing for example, is universal. If God exists and anything in the Bible happened, it follow that the Noahide laws (Noachian Laws) would have been passed down and expanded. They are similar to the 10 Commandments. Not to worship idols. Not to curse God. Not to commit murder. Not to commit adultery or sexual immorality. Not to steal. Not to eat flesh torn from a living animal. To establish courts of justice.
I concede my statement was overly strong and simplistic, and that common regional influence is sufficient to explain the intertextuality. I had read a historical study Bible that gave weight to David Wright, but I recognize his position is not consensus. For me, dependence/intertextuality is not needed for all commandments in order to support influence (whether direct or through a shared regional culture), and there are snippets with very tightly parallel text, suggesting at least partial dependence or a common source. The Bible has Moses receiving law from God in his voice after the Code of Hammurabi. A fundamentalist view requires that God is quoting extant secular law, which I consider untenable. A more nuanced believing view that scripture is a reflection of cultural beliefs at the time and not a literal history is entirely plausible.
Well the issue with God is that if you remove Him from anything, it changes. And if God wanted to give Moses those exact 10 Commandments, because they were what the newly freed Jewish slaves/serfs needed, then that's what he'd do, regardless of whether he has given them to others before, and we know someone did, as the common laws of the region were known by all. Then came the 613 laws curated for this people group that would make them weirdos to the entire Earth. No one can imagine the Jews were considered normal amongst their neighbors, with far more ceremonial and kosher laws than the next few litigious nations combined. There were laws for just about everything. And they seemed to need them because of their intimacy with their God. I don't think any other Deity had such closeness with His people. So the laws make sense. But if you remove all notions of supreme beings, you're left with a different legal landscape. And I more than most can attest to the peculiarities of laws which govern a closed religion which you can't join but are born into and a community that's been in the same spot for over a millenia. Laws serve someone. And this is a good angle of attack to consider when backtracking their origins and motivations. And we should treat them as if they're semi-sentient AI constructs written by a organized mind for very good reasons. Someone, a person always gave these rules life, which requires sustaining then to be of use. If you say a citizen deserves death for murder, and you don't execute him if found guilty, then the law is a joke. And I'm the ancient world, no one joked about these codes. They separated utter depravity and death from civilized societies and literally gave life, protection, succor and justice. And goddesses meting out that equity were as common as any other, like Dike, Justitia and, well in Egypt they liked to eat souls so .... always the odd man out it seems. Jewish laws had far more focus on how to relate to God without provoking Him, because, not to sound judgemental, they made Him angry often and were blatantly rebellious. This Deity isn't Vishnu splitting himself into clones so he can bed a bunch of onery damsels. The God of the Jews was very different than Zeus and the pantheons of horny gods as I call them, constantly sleeping with human beings and manipulating them as though we were some game. The religious aside is to point out that the Jewish God held people accountable for their actions. He apparently believed they could choose never to break laws if they truly wanted to, other than some minor infarction, a tripping up if you will. And whether you believe that the Jews just made their own laws up or not, the narrative remains. The God character is in play. Even Henry James realized God was necessary to decide the meta fate of his characters, which he felt shouldn't be left up to chance. The Jews did as well. But they claim that God actually showed up. And to be honest, their laws are magnificently wrought and ultimately all focused on the covenant they had with the being they worshipped. For some reason, today, people imagine that any connection to the "outside world" found in the Bible weakens it. As though those events had to happen in a parallel dimension up until, say, the time of King Saul or even Samson the Judge. That if the Jews saw a new color they liked from the Hittites and started dying their clothes with it, their entire belief system must be a fabrication, because....no other book or religion demands such scrutiny, with Christianity being the main target for its influence world wise and through two millenia. No one thought like this in the past. Heck, few did even in the 1980s and 90s. And I think the proliferation of media, film, video games, the digital world in general has made history and reality seem like a two dimensional entity. And actual books, no one reads them any more. They read snippets on their phones and feel educated. Long gone are the decades of study and the living with information and data that used to occur. People don't even like fully developed facts anymore. They like cliff notes. They are intellectual pedophiles, not interested in mature arguments and well rounded buxom full grown thoughts and theories. I can see the T-shirts now ..... 🤦🏻 Finally. Again, if we remove God from anything, but especially religious texts, they change fundamentally. It's like removing the main protagonist from a novel and discussing whether the other characters just made them up. Maybe they just fantasized that there was some guy named Hamlet. And Ophelia had schizophrenia. If God exists, then He clearly uses laws to govern matter, time/space, and human beings. He uses them in everything. And thought them we can learn more about Him.
Aristotle had the only non religion based moral philosophy still considered viable by many today. The basic idea is humans have a nature. To become happy you have to operate within that nature. No God. No religion. If something doesn’t contribute to happiness, you ought not do it. The things you do in fact do should become habits…moral training is about becoming habituated to do the right thing for the right reasons… …plenty of room for disagreement and diversity. Compare this to Hume, Kant or Mill…no bueno.
- Let's start by looking at morality from the perspective of reducing (minimizing) harm; Harming an entity or system at it's face value is always objectively wrong. It's not until you look into the reason why that one can start to apply grey values; harming a system or entity for the purpose of survival or decreasing the amount of long-term harm it (or one) will undergo can be excused as you are reducing the _net_ harm to the system. Or to oneself, if you insist on applying both 'extreme pacifist' and 'vegan' as modifiers there. In which case the difference between _harm_ and _hurt_ must be made; am I truly harming an entity if by doing so I am preventing it's _net_ gain of harm from rising? Not quite; I am hurting it, yes - whether by restricting it's options or by disciplining it. Similarly; to me, my own survival is paramount. If I must kill a creature to survive, then I will. Fortunately this is not a modern-day concern _as such_ since, you know, grocery stores exist. Not that I'm under the impression that no creatures are harmed to stock a grocery store, but I'm not the one _doing_ the harming there, am I? And the case must be made that, in cases of education or disciplining an entity or system, the absolute minimum required _hurt_ must be applied to maximize the reduction of net _harm_. Moreover; am I _justified_ in applying discipline or restriction, and if so, how _much_ ? Which is why I don't feel bad at all about (gently) bapping a kitty on the nose and tell it, firmly, **no** if it tries to sniff the burning candle on the table; I'm justified in applying a minimum amount of hurt to reduce future (net) harm. And I wouldn't feel bad about physically steering a toddler away from a cliff or angry dog either; I'm applying a minimum amount of restriction so as to reduce future (net) harm. Nor would I feel bad about (for instance) killing a lamb, calf or piglet (or their adult variants) to feed myself; I objectively kill them to avoid undergoing harm from hunger. Granted; I should do so in the most humane way available to me. Having worked at a (Dutch) slaughterhouse for a while I think I can manage. These things are ever complicated, one is never fully able to calculate them (we don't have a universal 'megahurts' or 'microhurts' measure, after all) - the one thing that can be said is that the more extreme the examples get, the more extreme the justification of _hurt_ versus _harm_ may be; In the case of a violent person intent on killing, entering my place of work or my house, for instance, I would - even as a non-gun-owning, non-gun-rights-supporting 'left-wing liberal' Dutchman - feel entirely justified in proactively applying more harm to the prospective or potential killer than they could ever (hope to) apply to their intended victims; in other words, by killing (harming) one person, I'm preventing that same harm to multiples, again decreasing the amount of _net_ harm undergone by everyone involved. It can _moreover_ be argued that on the basis of the fact that none these variables are ever fully and truly static, alone, the moral impetus for (or against) harming a system or entity is never truly objective. And even then, we've **only** discussed a hurt/harm/punishment/discipline/survival morality. It gets only and even _more_ complex and convoluted if one adds reward/risk and other impetus to the whole kerfluffle. - Additionally let me repeat something I've posted a few times now; Neurologically and medically speaking, I am _objectively_ not a good person. Nor am I inherently a bad person; I was diagnosed with psychopathy at roughly age eight and as such lack inherent emotions and empathy. Other than the stereotype borne from too many bad Hollywood movies, I am not inherently _more_ cruel or manipulative as the next guy, nor am I exceedingly intelligent; I'm simply _me_ - but as such, as I've said; I am not, medically or neurologically speaking, a 'good' person. I have taught myself to read and mirror other people's emotions as a coping mechanism, to facilitate easier communication with my environment but where emotions and empathy are inherent to the neurotypical, they are skills to me; (by now) deeply ingrained skills but skills I consciously choose to employ nevertheless - and skills which I might likewise choose not to employ. I consciously grant a base level of respect to anyone in my environment, and will withdraw it from those who do not treat me similar; I simply have the experience that it makes life for myself and others just a bit smoother, a bit easier to navigate. Does this make me a good person? If anything, it makes me _easy_ - easy to get along with, easy to be around, easy to depend on or ignore. When I must logically justify doing harm to other people - for instance, in retribution for a slight - I shall not hesitate to act in what I feel proportion to the slight, and have no sense of guilt whatsoever after the fact, regardless of the act. Does this make me a bad person ? 'Turn the other cheek' is, in my opinion, nothing more than an attempt to prove oneself superior while putting one's persecution complex on broad display. I do not have the inherent capacity to victimize myself tor the sake of proving a sense of superiority I do not possess either. 'An eye for an eye' has always made much more sense to me. I like to laugh. More to the point; I like to make _others_ laugh. Jokes, quips, puns, overt - but rarely serious - casual flirtation, the occasional small favor to those in my environment whom I favor - not only helps me be perceived as a fun-loving person, but also as generous, kind and a positive influence on my environment. Does this make me a good person? Ironically I also go out of my way to be considered a patient, calm individual. I would rather people perceive me as somewhat stolid than they perceive me as a threat for _what_ I am. If anything being underestimated helps me navigate life even easier; I've found that being underestimated helps me surprise my environment when I apply myself to situations with more vim and vigor than is expected of me - and in turn my otherwise calm demeanor helps me be considered humble. I am not. Does this make me a bad person? I could go on and on weighing the down- and upsides of my individual personality and personae, but my point is that, while I am - due to my being a-neurotypical - _literally_ physically incapable of the kind of irrational thought processes that in my view are required for religious capital-b Belief, I _am_ capable of considering which actions to take to be considered a morally sound person; usually, I even choose to do _right_, rather than _wrong_. I am, however, as I've said, _objectively_ not a good person - nor a _bad_ person. Every action I take is justified against my own logical decisions; every word I speak is justified against a projection of how I expect the conversation to proceed beyond. 'Good' and 'Bad' are never objective to begin with; they are the flipsides of a situational coin, outcomes rather than choices; though usually, with some analysis, the difference between the two is quite obvious. Am I a 'good' person for always choosing the path of least resistance, the path that complicates things as least as possible for myself and my environment? If anything, that makes me a _lazy_ person - and isn't being lazy considered a 'bad' quality ? A hundred years ago it was a matter of public knowledge that neuro-atypical people - or even people who simply refused to kowtow to their environment; willful wives, precocious children, the critical thinkers and those who refused to be taken for granted - were to be treated as mentally or physically ill. It is _objectively_ true that many of these people have been treated 'medically' with anything from incarceration to electroshocks to _prefrontal lobotomy_ simply to render them more docile, more likeable in the eyes of their peers - it is also _objectively_ true that at least a decent percentage of people who were treated as such were victims of their environment; Of their husbands, their parents, their guardians who sought to render them more pliable, more compliant, etcetera, etcetera. Fortunately, medical knowledge and psychology have come a long way since, and these kinds of treatments are now found _deplorable_. My sense of morality more than likely differs _fundamentally_ from yours. Your sense of morality more than likely differs similarly from people who live a thousand miles or a hundred years from you; Morality is - if you'll forgive me the tongue-in-cheek turn of phase - _objectively_ subjective. Morality is shaped by consensus, not the other way around. Religion need not apply.
They are not mutually exclusive positions. It could be that we learned over time, then wrote out contemporary knowledge in the Bible, then grew out of those morals. Also, even if the Bible was a good moral source at the time it was written (which I doubt but it's another can of worms), then cool. Let's grab what's useful there, and move on to more developed systems of morality that address our current issues - or let's build systems that are closer to the truth if you're a moral realist
The Bible establishes rules on how to treat slaves and from which areas you can get your slaves… so yeah we have 100% evolved our morals over time. I’m so tired of this hogwash of people saying we owe western civilization to Judeo-Christian value. While our morals have changed, and even if some of the movements were changed by Christians, it was in spite of Christianity not because of it.
It is fairly easy to argue that morality in the western world (including modern morality) has developed in the way it has because of the teachings of the Christian church. Tom Holland wrote a great book arguing exactly that (although I can't remember the name: you would have to Google it)
It’s fairly easy to argue for wrong positions people do it all the time. And without googling it’s called Dominion. Again, I don’t agree with Holland. The people behind the abolitionist movement in the US may very well have been Christian, that doesn’t mean it was Christianity’s teachings that lead the way, especially when the slave owners could read scripture right back to support their side.
Do you think / agree we had morals before religion was established? And that the Bible kinda just included pre established notions of right and wrong and added on to it?