"You'd be surprised," Miss Smythe said. "People are longing for a message of hope." “Hope?” “Yes, hope,” [Mr.] Smythe said. “Can’t you see what hope there’d be, if everybody in the world knew that there was nothing else than what we have here? No future compensation, rewards, punishments.” His face had a crazy nobility…. “Then we’d begin to make this world like heaven.”The point being that focussing on some other world which exists only in the imagination -- heaven, Valhalla, Paradise, Jannah, Elysium -- the abode only of gods and angels and the souls of those who have "gained salvation" -- necessarily sells life on this world pretty short, and pushes the locus of morality and the object of 'salvation' out into the realm of the imaginary.
This world is all we have. Don't sell it short with such fictions.
14 comments:
You are wrong P.C, without belief in divine judgment there is no morality, only subjective desire.
'The amateurs' in '300' deserted the front as they saw no glory in dying for mystical principles!
As I have argued elsewhere those cowards were objectivists who put their own life before truth, before everything else!
Also if heaven really does exist then you wishing it away to suit your notion of atheism as a prerequisite of morality is to deny a fact of reality.
end of story.
Pascal said failure to consider the immortality of the soul was a great error that renders the ethics of such short sighted philosophers as worthless.
And I wonder why you have not decried Dawkins claim that while there is no scientific basis for morality, that you can "simply go straight for the good stuff" ???
In a previous article you actually endorse it!
I don’t see how you can do this and still be an Objectivist?
That modus opperandi is definitively subjective!
Your failure to critise Dawkins exposes the bankruptcy of Objectivism and the fact that deep down you know it!
Rand would have torn strips off him! That she ultimately failed to draw a moral foundation from atheism does not detract the fact that she knew an objective foundation of morality was critical and was the primary reason she called her philosophy "Objectivism"!
She failed because her dream is impossible!
Thus you fail also!
If there is no heaven or God then the survival of the fittest becomes the standard, and mere carnality and satisfaction of mans animal desires becomes the goal!
No real planning for the future is possible as living for the moment is the first principle.
Love is no longer love but some sort of 'instinct' that overrides rational self interest!
No P.C! You can only sell this rubbish to lost souls who already practice godlessness and live for vain pleasure and ego.
Suicide is a disbelief in God and the afterlife.
Mass murder of the Jews was a rejection of the bible!
It is laughable that you think atheism tends to morality in the face of gangsterism, the night starker, nihilism, and soulless materialism!
No body who commits a crime believes they will be judged for it esp in hell!
“Its only a crime if you get caught” becomes the morality of the godless!
You can cheat on your wife if you are diabolically deceptive enough because “What she doesn’t know cant hurt her”, meaning “I can get away with it!”, and “marriage is just a silly religious myth” etc.
Your position is absurd.
If you were arguing there is no god or morality, then at least you would be consistent, but you are arguing there is no absolute judgment of evil, no holy God, that mankind is just an accident of materialism, yet you persist in saying you think morality is true!
You are Mad!
Actually P.C
the belief that there is no god, no heaven, no hell is a jolly good reason to invent your own religion and get the plebs to worship you and finance your God-like life!
Atheism is the font of all evil!
Atheism has probably spawned more fake religions than misguided theism!
Your dream is it's own nightmare!
Tim.....if its true that God is God and you are well in with him why are you so scared and hostile? Surely with the big guy in your corner you have no worries about atheists being of any concern or threat do you...? Why all the hand wringing and fear?
;-)
Oh! Tim!
I certainly hope your article(s?) in Free Radical contain less exclamation points and question marks. Honestly, reading this post from you makes me question the value of reading anything in FR. I certainly hope your article is stronger on basic logic:
...without belief in divine judgment there is no morality, only subjective desire.
This cannot possibly be true, because plainly at least some atheists are moral people.
Furthermore, it cannot be true that the source of morality for believers in Christianity is the Bible, because nearly all Christians reject the rougher ideals contained in it (e.g. children who curse their parents should die). Christians themselves plainly apply a filter to what they take from the Bible and it is this filter, not the Bible, that is the ultimate arbiter of a person's morality. That is Dawkin's point.
Also if heaven really does exist then you wishing it away to suit your notion of atheism as a prerequisite of morality is to deny a fact of reality. end of story.
Ok. And if heaven does not exist then wishing it into existence to suit your notion of religion as a prerequisite of morality is to deny a fact of reality (or at least the starting point of your circular argument). You see what that was Tim - your circular argument is also symmetric and therefore meaningless.
What is your criticism of Dawkins?
Tim, in case you hadn't noticed, a pre-requisite for great evil is a belief in absolute morality. Anyone humble enough to believe that their world view is not absolute and that others may reasonably disagree isn't in a position to pick up a sword and fight to the death for their view. A pre-requisite for that sort of behaviour is appeal to the divine, either a god, sometimes a deified human, precisely of the sort you seem to be making here, useless exclamation marks and all.
MyTradesman,
I can thank the editor of the Free Radical for tidying up my very rude piece that I presented him.
He also insisted it contain relevant quotes from Bainimarama, which I gave him some from the media and he inserted.
My original piece was longer and I could not decide for myself which pieces to sacrifice to squeeze in the quotes and virtually gave up on whole thing.
P.C chopped out what he thought could go without detracting too much of what I wanted to say and inserted the quotes and the final result was in my opinion far superior in clarity that my original. It is not perfect yet it does state most of the essentials and I am truly grateful to P.C for his patience and editorial skills and I must share any credit with him.
P.C may distance himself from my article completely. I don’t honestly know his final judgement.
I am not 'a writer'.
I am a truth seeker who struggles to put my ideas into clear forms in few words.
Grammar is almost incomprehensible to me.
Yet I battle on and must accept the criticisms of people like you rather than keep silent for the sake of avoiding ridicule.
I apologize that this means people like you must either ignore my thoughts completely or suffer the pain my inadequacies cause.
Thus while I give PC as much grief as I can about his Objectivism, I will also praise him for his patience and help.
As for your statement that rejects absolute morality you have made a grave error in that to avoid conflict you ascribe the necessity to deny it completely.
It is not so that belief in absolute right and wrong automatically leads to religious persecution of infidels whereas Dawkins idea of morality is automatically subjective and arbitrary, as is all atheist morality and therefore not binding.
This being so Atheism has no foundation for rights and ethics but whim!
Belief in God and absolute morality is so often bad and oppressive when false ideals are mistaken as absolute truth. E.g. That it is ok to murder infidels.
This perversion does not destroy the fact that a true and good absolute morality does exist that is founded upon the nature of the true God and that to live by it is to respect the life and liberty of your fellow man, and to have all your values in the correct order starting with God Almighty as supreme. (the whole problem with the world is not recognizing the true God and the true system of values)
From these righteous absolutes our inalienable rights are derived, the limits of state power defined, and the Christian code of conduct is laid out.
It is from this that we may absolutely and with justice put criminals in jail etc for violation of these political ethics / moral laws.
That these are valid moral laws even criminals will admit when they stop deluding themselves and they confess their punishments were just, and will seek to reform. (I’m not talking about crap laws that destroy liberty but the just ones consistent with the rights of the individual)
Now that theology has formulated these principles It may well be that atheists while hating God might see the glory of these principles, and choose to embrace them without recognition of their foundation in theology ( “simply go strait for the good stuff”) and even like Rand set up a false foundation to hide their true origin, this is an act of self delusion and to cut them off from the source of their strength.
Criminals will never submit to laws they believe are unfounded fabrications which is all the atheist has to offer.
You cannot know much about criminal reform or the civilization of savages if you don’t comprehend the amazing power of Christian morality to change evil and lost souls into loving civilized people.
Your atheism is virtually powerless to do that!
These are my criticisms.
Atheists are deluded.
Atheists wrongly think all religion is false and evil.
In so doing they destroy the truth and are in danger of God’s absolute judgment which is impervious to atheist doubt.
Dawkins is a complete freak and his theory of evolution a monstrous joke!
Aliens with god like powers! Imaginary genetic cranes! Belief that life can self generate from matter! The denial of freewill!
Talk about unscientific blind superstition!
P.S I went through this post and removed at least a dozen exclamation points. The rest stand.
Cheers!
Jesus is commonly credited as being the source of the golden rule "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" yet in fact that was said by at least six other philosophers hundreds of years before him so the idea that morality began with Christianity is bogus.Human beings have had moral codes since the dawn of time, the rules of their community's.
Its only since the 20th century with Rands Objectivism have we arrived at a non contradictory stage in morality based on reality and man's nature as man.You don't see Rand advocating murder,rape,theft,etc but you do see that in the Christian bible in various places...
MyTradesman,
I ought to have said also that it is impossible to make sound moral judgments without holding moral absolutes. The result of Dawkins ethical subjectivism and evolutionary bankrupt denial of god will result in the following
The Swiss theologian, Emil Brunner, put it like this:
“The feeling for the personal and the human which is the fruit of faith may outlive for a time the death of the roots from which it has grown. But this cannot last very long. As a rule the decay of religion works out in the second generation as moral rigidity and in the third generation as the breakdown of all morality. Humanity without religion has never been a historical force capable of resistance.”
Thus evil such as socialism grows with the decline in theistic absolutes! Your atheism leads to the destruction of freedom! It’s merely a matter of time!
James,
Read C S Lewis "The Abolition of man" that book covers this ethic of 'Natural theology'.
St Paul acknowledged those Gentiles whose conscious convictions led them to be good people and in fact used that notion to take a swat at the vain ritualistic Jews who were inwardly wicked.
he called your theologians (as that is what those philosophers were) "circumcised of heart"
Jesus sent Paul with gospel of grace to save these good Gentiles.
And also it is arguable that there existed a link from the Hebrews to the Greeks that stimulated their theological endeavors. It is widely held that the Greeks had copies of Moses writings.
I believe Josephus state this among other sources such as Plutarch, or Turtullian (if my memory is correct)
The Golden rule is a theological principle, not an atheist/ scientific fact.
Most of the great philosophers of ancient times were theists not atheists and derived their moral convictions from belief in god and his holiness. Many of them like Socrates were murdered by their polytheistic neighbors.
Thus you have said nothing that undermines my indictments against atheism!
You your self may believe that precept without acknowledging its foundation in theology yet you do nothing to make it a binding atheist conscept.
P.S I have removed my '!!!'
Tim,
Is God's morality right because God believes it, or does God believe it because it is right? Fellow non-Objectivist libertarian Elliot Temple argues that either way we answer religious morality loses out. I agree with him.
Brian s.
My first comment is while I love Socrates for so many reasons, yet he did say a lot of silly things and make a lot of false arguments.
Eg. His theory of learning as being recollection which he attributed to being proof the immortality of the soul and reincarnation.
I don’t think it is necessary for me to go though this argument for you to immediately perceive it to be a “ bullshit story” based upon false premise.
Likewise with your argument against morality as being outside the providence of God.
You ought to have immediately smelled a rat! It is based upon false premises.
Sophistry could produce convincing logic that ‘a monkey could talk’, yet by intuition you ought to realize that no matter how convincing an argument may appear, It should never override what you know to be absolutely false!
At first you may struggle to answer such sophistry. Yet have faith! (the courage of your convictions) and do not give way! (yet neither close your mind to arguments contrary to your beliefs)
What you must do is search out for the error. You must search out both side of the argument. If the argument is false, you ought to be able to find the solution some where some how some time.
This act of faith is not to abdicate your reason but to utilize it!
It is to understand that lies can be very convincing and that you don’t know every thing and that the truth is out there! That is that a solution will be found, or your quest will prove the proposition to be true and then you can with honesty change your position and embrace it.
I was an absolute atheist until convincing proof of it’s bankruptcy changed my mind.
My atheism was founded upon the theory of evolution and the delusion that it was a proven science. When that was destroyed I then began to question my other atheist assumptions and found they were all either false or unfounded assertions.
In the end it took more faith to remain an atheist than to embrace Christianity!
Since then my pilgrimage has vindicated my decision to change my position.
The subject you have raised is massive and yet it is bad manners to may epic length arguments in a ‘comments’ zone.
Let me just state the Bible claims God is Holy and that he made the world and gave man free will. These are the very foundations of Human morality and Love.
God is infinite in wisdom whereas man is finite, thus no matter how good God was to Adam the relationship had to be founded upon Adams loving faith in the absolute goodness of God (which his finite brain could never prove) and which was the case until Satan cast doubt into Adams mind and conned him into disbelieving Gods absolute goodness and Adam broke this essential relationship of faith.
God sets the rules, not man. We are free to live by them or not yet no matter what the rules remain unaltered and God will judge the matter.
God so set up the world and man so that spiritually there is cause and effect with the emotions of sorrow and the sensation of pain as indicators that connect spiritual reality of morality/ immorality to our actions and the physical world. Thus by pain and sorrow and the joy of compassion can Natural theology ( a type of morality) be arrived at via our conscience. These senses are God given indicators to the reality of Absolute moral truth and ought to stimulate a quest of the soul to find the Holy God who is the author of absolute morality and is attempting to make himself known to us by our senses.
The opposite rebellious spirit is to right off theses senses and the existence of God and throw absolute morality out with the trash… Having done this atheists must invent their own false subjective morality just to get by in life, and to a certain degree this fake morality will is get them by and salve their conscience from resisting their atheism…until
they face death! Then they will face the judge and bare the consequences of their rejection of God.
The whole purpose of the creation of Man was to play out and prove this Divine morality and prove what happens when finite beings loose faith in the character of God and put their own idols in his place.
When this tragedy has run it’s course, God will be vindicated and he will have created an amazing race of beings who understand Good and evil and will never loose faith in Gods goodness or right to be supreme.
Dawkins is a fool! His one eye fails to see that God has always shown grace and mercy and love towards man and worked to restore us to him.
Dawkins is a fool as he only chooses to see the times of judgment when God exercises his Divine rights in acts that kill people.
Dawkins cries when God stomps on false religion with one breath and then cries that God does not stomp on false religion with the next!
Dawkins is a fool in denying God his rights to judge.
Dawkins is a fool to think he can better judge men than God Almighty.
Dawkins is a fool who equate man and his mind and his senses as accidental properties of matter!
Atheists must put their faith in the delusions of such fools.
I choose to put my trust in God and his absolute morality.
Today God has grace awaiting the soul who will but ask for it!
Thus I say it is an absurdity to deny God is the font of morality.
You do well to consider the biblical proverb.
“The fool has said in his heart there is no God”
Tim said...
Atheists wrongly think all religion is false and evil.
That is true Tim. Your God is false. It only exists in your deluded mind. How often do you meet up with your God perhaps for a beer? Once a week? Once a month?
What does he/she/it look like? Does he/she/it have hair? Ears, eyes, legs or any form of geometry meaning does he/she/it have a shape? Does he/she/it eat? Or have sex? Or perhaps wank once and a while, since there is no God opposite sex?
If you can't describe these to me in a clear physical description, then should admit that you're deluded.
Tim
I accidentally posted under my business account 'MyTradesman' earlier.
I appreciate your efforts on grammar and will try to be a bit less critical.
What you are saying is that Christians morals have a claim to being absolute whereas an atheist simply makes up his own rules to suit himself.
But to anyone that does not accept both the existence of the Christian god and that the scriptures were divinely inspired (and not all Christians do), the scriptures are simply a collection of rules for living written by a collection of people. Without your priors, the Christian morality is no more or less arbitrary in its foundations than an atheist's.
A second source of arbitrariness is that Christians pick and choose what they take from the bible, and each chooses differently. Christians couldn't possibly obey everything in the bible, in any case, and thankfully so because there is what I think of as awful morality in some parts of the bible.
A third source of arbitrariness is the different way in which different Christians interpret the same parts of the bible.
Your entire argument rests on divine inspiration being the source of the bible's absolute morality, and so it is completely unconvincing to any who does not accept your priors. The argument falls flat the minute somebody doesn't go along with your starting assumption. Not a good argument.
Now, some responses:
It is not so that belief in absolute right and wrong automatically leads to religious persecution
I didn't say that. I said it's a pre-requisite.
Belief in God and absolute morality is so often bad and oppressive when false ideals are mistaken as absolute truth. E.g. That it is ok to murder infidels.
Excuse me for saying this, Tim, but it is extraordinarily obvious that you could not possibly know that your reading of the bible reveals absolute truth whereas the interpretation of the members of the first crusade, for example, is false. Could it not be your reading that reveals false ideals? Other than simply believing you are right - which by the way is no comfort to anyone but you - how can you demonstrate this?
I ought to have said also that it is impossible to make sound moral judgments without holding moral absolutes.
This is a very strong statement, and is falsified by a single example of sound moral judgment by a person who does not believe in moral absolutes. Presumably any atheist who at any time behaved in a way, if only by coincidence, that was consistent with how a Christian would.
More generally, it should be obvious that people of all religions and who are non-religious very frequently, if not almost always, act in a way consistent with the words of Jesus - love thy neighbour, do unto others, etc. Planly, religion is not a pre-requisite for behaving in ways Jesus suggested. Nor were his ideas original. Religion may well inspire people to behave morally, but people draw their inspiration from other sources as well. There is no doubt at all religion inspires some very ugly behaviour as well, and I do not believe the same can be said for those other sources of inspiration.
Thus evil such as socialism grows with the decline in theistic absolutes!
No. I agree socialism, and in particular communism, is evil, but its the source of its authority over people, like religion, is the creation and worship of a deity. In the case of communism, that deity was a man (Lenin in Russia, Mao in China, Kim Il Sung in Korea), but this is incidental. Those systems are fundamentally inseparable from religion, in the sense that they demand blind faith, and exist in spite of reason.
Matt B,
Your error is to confuse personal (arbitrary) interpretation as a negation of absolute truth when it is nothing of the sort.
If I misinterpret the scripture it is my fault not the fault of the scripture.
The scripture is still true.
You also must be careful not to take relative parts of the scriptures and make them absolute or visa versa. The Bible is very complex and you need to 'grow as a Christian' from 'a child' into 'a father ''correctly handling' and "rightly dividing the scriptures".
This takes time, study and guidance.
It comes from a seeking heart building doctrine upon doctrine, and leaning from your errors etc.
ie it involves intellectual and spiritual growth and is as much a matter of the soul as of the mind because an evil heart will blind the mind. If you had read the bible esp the books of st Paul you would find that what I have said above is of chief importance and there is nothing more foolish than to open the bible at random and accept what is written on that page as a message from God that you ought to follow!
That is superstition!
False doctrine is false and a disaster!
So my points on this are.
Firstly the bible must be handled with great care.
Secondly that poor handling can and does result in false doctrine.
Thirdly that wrong interpretation does not detract from the absolute truth of the bible but simply is an error of the reader "like bad math" which like bad math can kill!
So The absolute morality of the bible remains intact and so does Gods absolute moral judgment stand.
Your next point that…
Some Christian have swallowed the BS of 'Doctors of philosophy'
and 'doctors of history etc' that the bible is not absolutely true nor 'really God's word' likewise does nothing to undermine the reality that it is exactly God's word and absolutely true. It again reflects on their failure not the bible.
Even if I myself rejected the bible it would not undermine it’s truth one bit but would expose my folly!
Your third point to the effect
"some people who don’t believe in absolute morality still make good judgments"...
I say certainly does not prove me wrong that when I said ...
"that it is impossible to make sound moral judgments without holding moral absolutes."
Two points.
Firstly what it proves is they appeal to moral absolutes without even understanding that that is what they are doing!
They actually believe in some sort of absolute morality even though they have not clearly defined it in their own minds so as to realize it!
The moment they do realize it is the moment they will start seeking for the origin of that absolute morality, and if they don’t have a heart that is anti- Christ but a heart that desires the truth no matter where it leads them, they will find the truth in the bible and become Christians!
Should they be snared by the devil with such anti-Christ systems as Objectivism and stop seeking the truth and embrace Rand, they will have failed and will be lost in that delusion until they see the fraud of it and again set out on the quest for truth.
Secondly another group are simply a-moral and draw their ideas 'out of a hat' and get it right sometimes and wrong sometimes!
When they get it right this does not equate to moral judgment in it's true sense but simply living by the skin of your teeth in moral blindness.
They act under such motives as ‘popularity’ ‘saving face’ etc.
These sort of folk can be nice to you and friendly when things are easy and they can appear Good and moral but watch out when the heat is on! They will trample you down in a heart beat to save themselves the slightest inconvenience, and would give you to Hitler in a second if they felt the slightest risk!
They are like wolves in sheep’s cloth!
Thus my arguments still holds good.
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