Good for the sake of Good

I'll respond with a quote from that smart Jesuit guy Anthony De Mello (I'm paraphrasing by the way)...

"The people I meet who are always worrying about the next life and asking me what will happen after they die tend to be precisely the people who have no idea what to do with the life they have. They've already got one life they don't know what to do with and their busy worrying about whats going to happen in their next one! That's crazy!"

Oh no! Discussion and debate! Whatever will we do . Seems to me that people share more values than your giving them credit for- ask most people if they think you should be allowed to kill or rape someone else and I have a feeling the answer is going to be the same...

 

Yes in that you will all die but no in that your life will be extremely different. The fact that both Gandhi and Hitler died does not make their lives basically the same.

 

I imagine x thousand years from now we will still have morals and as such the difference between a political pacifist and a genocidal maniac would I imagine still be appreciated. As for who the difference will be judged by I would say the folks alive then...

 

How? Folks 2,000 years ago generally seem to have had a problem with murders, 1,000 years ago same thing, today same thing except much stricter rules than 2,000 or 1,000 years ago... 1,000 years from now I imagine it will be much the same. You could say that morality has improved overall throughout human history but at heart its based around the concerns of people. As such I don't think we can exactly say its a free for all were anything goes because I doubt you could find many mainstream examples of societies were morals have been completely topsy turvy from what we expect.

 

Not gonna let you away with that. As far as I am aware in all the socities were infanticide was practiced it was generally known to be a 'bad thing' though often also a 'necessary thing' and a 'tolerated thing'. As far as I am aware there were usually rituals performed by those who performed such acts to 'abstain' them from their actions. Regardless however this is to do with the relative value of life you can bet your bottom that the rich in such societies were unlikely to be killing their offspring which leads one to ask was it really considered fine to kill your offspring? If so why was it generally only the lower classes who were engaged in such practices?

I'm not suggesting socieities morals never change... in fact they do and I have no problem with this (in fact Im glad for it!) but I don't think this makes them entirely relativistic in that we don't tend to find entirely random morals even in relatively simple societies.

How about appealing to the value of human life- as recognised by basically every human who has ever existed? Remember I never agreed to your suggestion that life with no afterlife was valueless!

Emmm... I'm quite confused why would history be meaningless? For one you can learn alot of valuable lessons from studying history especially in relation to morals, I mean when you read stuff from Victorian times you can see how casual racism was maybe in a thousand years nationalism will be regarded the same. Im not debating by the way that morals will not develop but what I am suggesting is that you are never likely to have a society were murder is considered morally acceptable... in fact the trend seems to go the opposite way as societies develop!

 

A bad one?

Agreed. And they tend to be geared towards what makes society function better.

Seems to me that every advanced society has similiar views on morals maybe then can we accept that as societies advance culturally morality improves?

Solution is: Dont worry about whats gonna happen after you die just focus on THIS life. Problem solved .

Pretty much all your examples relate to people de-humanising their victim. Also they are specific situations were the moral LAW is relaxed which we know as the individuals involved tend not to be given free reign to kill everyone around them suggesting once again that unrestrained murder is regarded as morally wrong.

Well not quite. Again I'm not as pecimistic (spelling?) as you that discussion and debate is such a bad thing. The declaration of human rights for example seems to be a much more humane form of morality than I've found in ancient religious documents and it was arrived at by debate and discussion.

Not having a divine standard does not make everything meaningless in fact as I have already explained it can actually makes events in THIS world more meaningful!

 

The same way we wouldn't recognise their higeine as inferior or the medical methods as primitive. The same way their general education would be lacking, their understanding of science seeped in superstition, their technology primitive etc.

Well, all the other comparisons I made had a kind of "standard".
The way I see it, a "standard" is what someone is used to.
Someone spoilt will have a higher standard of what it is to get their way.
Someone who's been sheltered will have a higher standard of security before they feel secure.
Someone who's been brought up with very refined food and music will have higher standards in the finéese (sp?) it takes to please them.

Recognising a high standard as a way to trying to attain the best possible results is strength but I'd say expecting things to reach a certain standard is a weakness, as it opens you up to disappointment if your expectations are inaccurate.

 

Judgements like that will always be relative, but there will always be objective factors that help determine them.

E.g. modern medicine is objectively better than 2000 year ago medicine because it is more effective at curing illness.
The method of judging morality isn't as obvious and morality isn't as straight forwardly progressive. I think we can see that morality is generally better than ever as people care more and more about things that didn't used to bother people. For instance, slave trade was seen as fine back in the day. Wars weren't so carefully avoided etc...

 

I fail to see how this is relevent to the issue I've laid out. The issue is, is divine punishment the only motivation for acting morally? You clearly stated that without ultimate justice, there's no reason to be good. I am contending that point. I don't see how that's Christian bashing. Weak argument bashing, yes - a personal hobby of mine. But I never attacked anyone for being a Christian, or even invited others to do so.

Aiki, your argument seems to be founded on a very tedious yet, fortunately for you, subtle premise - our purpose in life is to be right about everything and to never be forgotten.

You keep arguing that without God life is meaningless, and your argument just keeps circling around the notion that we could be wrong about our ideas and morals, and on the fact that if you go far enough into the future, nobody remembers what we did in this lifetime.

My question is - why is my life more meaningful if I turn out to be right about everything I think and believe? And why is my life more or less meaningless if I'm not remembered a few hundred years from now? Maybe you only glean purpose and happiness from feeling like you know everything (or rather, have an imaginary friend who knows everything) and from thinking that you will never truly die so you'll always be around to remember how great you are, but honestly, I don't know any atheists who think that way. So I find your comments at best irrelevent, and at worst completely unfounded and preposterous.

Myself, my purpose, as I think everyone's is, is to achieve and sustain happiness as best and as long as I can. I find that I can accomplish this in a number of ways - by making friends, by eating good food, by reading good books, by building and fixing computers, by working out and boxing, by spending time with my girlfriend, by thinking about things and discussing issues I find interesting, and by helping other people to achieve happiness as well. This is a small list of things that make me happy and thus give my life personal meaning.

Now, that said, you can either call me a liar and say that my real purpose in life is to be right about everything and remembered forever, or you can admit that your feeble premise does not apply to me, or any other atheist, and recognize that our lives are meaningful and purposeful to us, without God, without being right about everything, and without achieving any form of immortality.

Yes, morality is relative, everyone has their own conceptions of it. If God exists, he has his own personal views on it, same as everyone else. He may be old, and he may be powerful, but that doesn't make him right. Let's neither appeal to tradition nor to authority if we can help it. The thing is, I don't see why that makes it any less meaningful. The appreciation of art and music is completely relative - that doesn't make Bach or Shakespeare any less beautiful and powerful to me. Our taste preferences are completely relevent, but not for a second does that render Italian pasta or Asian stir fry meaningless and arbitrary to me. Our intellectual pursuits are completely relative, but that has never depreciated my interests in science, philosophy, politics, or reason.

You can argue morality is relative, and I'll give you that, but where can you really run with that? You'll find that historically, people have had a very tough time credibly arguing that pasting God into the moral argument changes anything at all. Some powerful old dude says "Blah blah blah".... so what? Good luck proving that this somehow elevates the status and objectivity of morality one iota, without appealing to emotion, or intution, or authority, or tradition, or any other number of fallacious non-points.

The simple fact is, I don't believe in God. I do not kill people or rape women, because I have no reason to believe that my desires somehow supercede their's. Not because I am afraid of divine justice.

So, how can you reconcile the above paragraph with your contention that in the absence of God I must "rationally" embrace nihilism? Would you say I'm being irrational by not arbitrarily elevating my desires above the desires of those around me? Good luck with that one. Would you say that I secretly do believe in God and ultimate justice? Fat chance. Perhaps you'll say I'm just lying, and I'm really a closet nihilist? A very productive approach, I'm sure.

I find it ironic that I would take so much heat for saying that people of faith are irrational, but nobody seems to mind when you say that all atheists are or should be amoral, valueless nihilists with no meaning or purpose.

I find nihilism to be a detestable term - please, hoist a flag that says I'm an ignorant irrational fool before you say I am or should be a nihilist.

 

If the issue is solely about divine punishment as motivation, then your answer can be quite simply summed up as "no".

I find it almost laughable that none of the atheists contributing to this thread are willing to acknowledge that the notion of morality that they follow without 'religious guidance' is based entirely on being the product of a Western Judeo-Christian society. The idea that you can seperate your ideas of morality from the religious context from which they came is ridiculous. A Westerner's cultural morality is a byproduct of the Judeo-Christian heritage of the the West, plain and simple. The athiests in this thread who keep pointing out that they don't believe in God, yet they don't lie, cheat, steal, etc hold that lying, cheating, stealing, etc are wrong because they grew up in a culture that holds those things as wrong. The culture holds them as wrong because the religion that underpins the culture holds them as wrong.

 

And it's quite laughable that you would think that the Church is the origin of this morality. Do you think before the Christian church there were no morals? Do you also think that movements like humanism had no impact on our present systems of morality? If I write down "people should not swear on MAP" I did not just make the rule up, I just wrote it down, the rule already existed prior to my saying it. Morality I would argue functions in much the same way. Look at non-Christian societies they seem to have a good grasp of morals as well without being hugely influenced by Christianity. I don't think anyone could deny Christianitys influence over society and moral values throughout history however to attribute ALL morality of ALL Westerners especially in the modern era I think is remarkably silly.

EDIT: and aiki before you jump in when I say 'already existed' I mean was already a part of society. Not that it already existed in some non-material world of ideals.

Your repeating the same point and its wrong again. Morality wasn't invented by religion and even if we were to accept that it was, its hardly restrained to within that context today so your point is well... pointless.

Your attributing alot of cultural influence to religion here. I learnt most of my values from my parents and my close friends and they rarely invoked religion as the reason for it being right and wrong. Don't steal from other people because it's not your thing and you wouldn't like it if it happened to you, don't hit people smaller than you because you wouldn't like it if someone did it to you etc. etc. Seems to me morality has more to do with empathy and the smooth functioning of society than any religious motivation perhaps I should argue that Christianity is actually the leech which stole common societal values (and religious values from older traditions) then tried to pass them off as its property alone? Unfair, I think so but its no less unfair than your silly characterisation.

 

Value is a function of a subject's feelings and desires towards an object. Value is subjective in that it cannot be a function of an object's properties alone, there must be the relation between a subject and an object. There is no veracity to the statement "This watch is valued" without either an explicit or an implied subject to which it refers. "This watch is valued by my mother" or "This watch is valued by the local pawn shop owner" has a truth value, it is either objectively true or false. It is nonsense to speak of value independent of a subject. Obviously, by definition, value is subjective.

Now, to tie this into the discussion at hand, when referring to moral values a lot of people tend to forget the inherent subjectivity of value itself. Moral values are simply values which are related to sociology, human choices, and lifestyles, or are shared collectively by a large social group. Moral values are really synonomous with cultural values, and a moral code is really synonomous with culture.

You simply cannot make a coherent moral proposition without referencing the subjective values of a person or persons. "X is bad" has no truth value, because without a subjective referent it is meaningless. "Y thinks X is bad" actually has veracity, and is coherent because it references value in terms of a subjects desires/opinions.

The point of all this is, DCombatives, that morality is nothing more than value statements. Religion did not create value, that is an absurd notion. People valued things long before people worshipped dieties. Human beings, as empathetic social animals, tend to universally value things like their own safety, the cohesion of their society, their property, etc. Thus, there have always been, and will always be, consequent moral propositions based on these subjective values - such as "Murder is bad", "Law-abiding is good", "Stealing is bad", etc., all of course with subjective reference to the desires of the society and its people.

Essentially DCombatives, you're saying before Christianity, or any religion, nobody valued or desired anything whatsoever. You're also saying, that the only reason I value the things I value is because the dominant religion in the culture I grew up traditionally enforces these values. That's rather silly. People will hold the basic moral values they hold completely regardless of any religion. Religions do nothing more than structuralize commonly held subjective values that are already there into moral codes.