on discussing god and religion

Okay. Sorry my words offended. By ‘mere’ I meant that if ungrounded in something objective, feelings might be arbitrary. If your feelings are based on “social mammalian empathy” they’re grounded in something objective: the objective psyche of our commonly evolved human species. They’re not just arbitrary personal feelings, preferences or ‘mere’ matters of taste.

It seems to me that a morality based on human well-being has an objective basis. Moral ideals that stem from basic human concern with what is best for us and how we are to live can be studied empirically, quantified etc.

Evolutionary psychologists are investigating how morality evolved. The first evolutionary psychologist, Charles Darwin, noted that “Any animal whatever endowed with well-marked social instincts would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well or nearly as well developed as in man a moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives of approving up some and disapproving of other and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals.”

Most abstract moral concepts are structured metaphorically. While I don’t accept them carte blanche, they are based on a long history of cultural evolution that may rest the survival of the species itself. So I don’t necessarily reject them all as hallucinatory out of hand. All abstract thinking rests on images that arise spontaneously from the unconscious. To simply reject them as irrational may be to dissociate one’s consciousness off from one’s own being. The images may be archetypal and based on our common 3.5 billion year genetic inheritance [the collective unconscious].

In the discussion of the conflict between feelings and external rules and laws, it seems we are getting into the never ending fight between autonomy [autos =self + nomos =law vs. heteronomy [heteros=strange +nomos=law]. The quest for the unity of this split in society is perhaps the greatest aspiration of the major religions.

From my frame of mind, an intellectual contraption is an assessment – basically a world of words device, contrivance – pertaining to one or another aspect of human interaction in which there is no actual description of a context in which the interactions unfold. In particular [for me] when those interactions unfold at the existential juncture of identity, value judgments and political power.

In other words, your point above. Followed by mine. Two intellectual contraptions in which the words define and defend the meaning of other words; but the words don’t make reference to any particular set of circumstances. Now, if you wish to argue that my take on it here is not “technically” correct, be my guest.

And, given my own understanding of moral nihilism, human interactions in a No God world seems to suggest [to me] a world in which conflicting moral narratives precipitating conflicting behaviors precipitating either positive or negative consequences for particular people in a particular context, there does not appear [again to me] to be a font [philosophical, scientific, natural] that mere mortals can turn to in order to establish an essential truth in regard to Good and Evil. Instead, the conflicting narratives are reflective of the manner in which I construe the meaning of identity, value judgments and political economy in my signature threads.

But, again, so far, all of this is contained in intellectual contraptions [yours and mine] predicated entirely on the meaning and the definitions given to words placed in a particular order.

That is when I insist on taking these words [mine and others] out into the world that we live in.

Again, another intellectual contraption!

”…unless you are able to provide us with an argument and a demonstration that argument which conclusively establishes how all rational people are obligated to feel about it".

Exactly. But what argument made about what set of circumstances in which different people think and feel conflicting things.

The concept of fairness?

Theoretically, given conflicting concepts of fairness, is aborting a human baby moral or immoral. But: How is this the same or different from an existential assessment of an actual abortion in an actual [and entirely unique] set of circumstances?

Conceptually, when does the unborn actually become a human being? Well, let’s define a human being as starting at the point of conception. Does that make it true for all practical purposes?

On the contrary, human morality is anything but baseless. Instead, in my view, it is constructed historically, culturally and experientially based on many, many, many often times conflicting sets of assumptions about the human condition.

But once you acknowledge there is no font that mere mortals can turn to in order to hold moral values in “absolute certainty”, then you have ask yourself how certain you can be of your own value judgments in a No God world. I simply point to components of my own here: dasein, conflicting goods, political economy.

That’s how “I” have come to explain feeling fractured and fragmented. How then do those [like KT] who do not in turn believe in objective morality not feel this way?

Over and again you express things like this in “general descriptions”. Note a context in which you acknowledge that while there is no way in which you can embody “absolute certainty” in your value judgments, you can still claim to “have ample evidence of [your] own fallibility”.

To me, there are no necessary, inherent moral failures. There is only the existential gap between what as dasein you have come to believe about right and wrong in regard to, say, citizens owning guns, and how as dasein you react to gun legislation in the world that you live in.

You and Hofstadler, stuck in your “strange loops”. I wonder if he considers himself a moral nihilist. :-k

Yes, I included quotes from him on my mundane ironist thread: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=179454&p=2724967&hilit=Douglas+Hofstadter#p2724967

Perhaps, given the “six degrees of separation” approach to human interactions, someone here knows someone who knows someone else who knows him and can invite him to explore moral nihilism with me on this thread.

Well, in regard to a particular context of course. :wink:

I wasn’t offended. It was a mere claim (lol). IOW if you are going to say feelings are ‘mere’ , iow merely feelings, then you need to explain why they are mere, as you have started to do here and also demonstrate that whatever you are contrasting as a base for preferences is not mere. I see systems of morals as arbritrary (and they certainly seem to contradict each other and find no way to reconcile their opposed axioms, and these are based on thoughts, phantoms of the mind. In Zen meditation thoughts and feelings both arise and disappear. They are either both mere or neither, it seems to me, for example.

Potentially. Of course we differ.

I wasn’t claiming that my social mammal empathy was universal. I was saying that my preferences come out of my version of that. They are the result of a long, long process of development, I think. That does not mean they are right or good, but they do have a ground.

Unfortunately best is value laden and one could think all sorts of harsh and violent customs are useful for example. Spartans for example would treat children radically differently than most of us would. I don’t say that indicting these must be wrong, just that most people here would not like some of the customs that some other people think are for our best.

It seems to me much of this could be in support of preferences based on emotions and desires. I don’t reject morals, I just don’t think that way. IOW the while I avoid breaking quite a number of the ten commandments,but not because I think they are objective morals evil to brea, from God or from some other objectivity. I prefer not to murder or commit adultery. So, I don’t reject the preferences, I just see t hem as preferences.

I also do not see my emotions and preferences resolving conflicting goods ( re:iamg’s eternal project). I am not saying I have the solution to the various moral conflicts out there. I am just explaining that one can passionately want, for example, society to be certain ways, to have certain kinds of social interactions and not others, to be concerned about others, even plants and animals and strangers, and yet at the same time not believe in objective morals. Of course the ideal would be for each type of person to have their own world. Let those who yearn for war and strict hierarchy and control of emotions, desires and bodies at all times, have their own little planet to have their wars on. I certainly wouldn’t begrudge them that as long as they were all consenting.

The Bible never said “don’t rape people”

The Bible is a book written by men, not a hypothetical god.

Of course morality is not objective in the same way trees rocks and pencils are. But, at the very least, some feelings about what is good or what is bad may be grounded in better arguments than others and thus achieve “objectivity” in the metaphorical sense of reasonable inter sub jective consensus.

“From the book of Deuteronomy which is in the Bible:
But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then only the man that lay with her shall die. But unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death: for as when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him, even so is this matter: For he found her in the field, and the betrothed damsel cried, and there was none to save her.”

None of the books of the Bible claim for themselves that they were written by God.

This person always seems to want to ease his mind and absolve himself from past transgressions, which he involved the whole forum in by accusing all of having transgressed or suffered from such transgressions, as having acted likewise.

Fact-checking is a good skill to exercise, when facts are key, in supporting any argument.

The Bible is pretty anti-sex outside of marriage and rape being a form of sex plus violence would be especially problematic after the NT and the whole do unto others as you…etc. Now some men might come up with a self-seving way of interpreting jesus, there. Like well if I were her I would want to have sex with me. But there are some minds that can come up with anything to miss the point. This would all leave rape within marriage the only possible acceptable rape. But then, it doesn’t pass muster for Jesus’ general moral heuristic either and love is suppose to be the quality of the relation.

The Bible never said don’t put razor blades in apples on Halloween either, but I think we can come up with what Jesus would have suggested about this.

Not that I am a big fan of the bible or think it is the pure word of God, etc.

The Meaning of Life
Daniel Hill argues that without God, life would be meaningless.

Again, the important distinction here is between an overall essential meaning applicable to everyone and an existential meaning embodied in and through each and every individual. In other words, for many, the fact that different people in different sets of historical, cultural and interpersonal circumstances find meaning in different things for different reasons isn’t acceptable. There has to be someone or something they can go to in order to “officiate” when disputes break out over that which the objectivists among us insist that all reasonable and virtuous men and women are obligated to find meaningful. And for the right reasons.

Thus, historically, being either “one of us” or “one of them”.

On the other hand, it’s impractical for any atheists who choose to interact with others, not to accept that, one way or another, meaning is going to be a part of their lives. It’s inherently a manifestation of all human social, political and economic interactions. Here things come to be more or less meaningful for each of us in any particular context.

Then distinctions can be made between meaning in the either/or world and meaning in the world of conflicting value judgments. Then [from my frame of mind in a No God world] it comes down to how “fractured and fragmented” the self becomes [for all practical purposes] in interacting with others.

This, of course, is just one line of reasoning that those who embrace God and/or a No God religious narrative can take. First God and/or one or another pantheistic “entity”, then the parents/community whose job it is to pass down the ultimate meaning of life to the children. Then on and on into the furture where for most religions there is for each and everyone of us Judgment Day.

Though, clearly, the extent to which science is thrown into the mix here, will vary considerably. At least in the modern world where science is everywhere.

It seems to me that “meaning of life” is a metaphor which implies that there is something outside of or beyond life that life refers to like a word refers to an object. So the trope "meaning of life " implies transcendence. Of course, to me transcendence isn’t necessarily theistic in the narrow sense that you describe it. Anyway, the metaphor seems to depend on a cognitive frame implying transcendence. So if you remove transcendence as a possibility, the expression “meaning of life” has no meaning.

i’ve got this excellent essay in a book somewhere but i ain’t about to type the thing out and i can’t find it online… but there is this:

reasonandmeaning.com/2015/11/23 … he-absurd/

philosopher’s have been wrestling with ‘meaninglessness’ for thousands of years… and yet it didn’t take nagel three pages to

Read and appreciated Nagel’s “Vew from Nowhere”. Still, the unconscious psyche speaks to us in images including those of transcendence. The insights of Newton, Darwin and Einstein came in images not hypotheses or conclusions drawn from logical deduction. There is more to reality than the divided self of the western modern mindset which dismisses it or tries to explain it away.

Again, another intellectual contraption.

From the perspective of God and religion, coupled with the manner in which I choose to approach them here, the “meaning of life” revolves around one or another denominational narrative, such that meaning becomes the embodiment of the “will of God”. That becomes the overarching teleological component of one’s life – either from the perspective of Western faiths or Eastern faiths.

Religious agendas, in other words, that revolve around this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotheism

But my aim is to go beyond general descriptions of one’s faith and focus instead on how one intertwines one’s beliefs and value judgments in the behaviors that one chooses on this side of the grave. As that pertains to one’s belief about the fate of “I” on the other side of it.

Thus, in any particular context, what is meaningful to you? Why is it meaningful to you? How, in the course of living your life, did that meaning come about? How is that meaning related to your religious beliefs? How did those beliefs in turn come about given the agglomeration of a particular set of experiences?

And then the part where the religious folks here go beyond merely stating what they believe and attempt in turn to demonstrate through descriptions of actual experiences and an accumulation of substantive evidence why and how what they believe goes beyond just what is all “in their heads”.

Yet 67 pages into this thread, and how often has that sort of exchange unfolded?

What you did right there I dismiss as an intellectual contraption. That was easy. It didn’t require a reasonable argument or even that I comprehended what you meant. That’s how you dismiss people’s thought on virtually every one of your posts. Why would anyone bother to play your game according to your “heads I win tails you lose” rules?

In my view, you point this out only in order to avoid [over and over again] discussing in detail your own chosen behaviors on this side of the grave, as that pertains to your religious beliefs, as that pertains to what you believe about the fate of your own particular “I” on the other side of the grave.

Let alone in supplying us with actual evidence able to demonstrate that what you believe here is in fact true.

So, again:

Or, once again, wiggle out of going there by making me the issue instead.

Oh, and how on earth do I win anything here? I don’t believe in the “real me” able to be in sync with “the right thing to do” on this side of the grave. I don’t have that to comfort and console me. On the contrary, to me it seems reasonable to assess the human condition as encompassing what appears to be, in a No God universe, an essentially meaningless existence. And one that ends in the obliteration of “I” for all of eternity after I tumble over into the abyss that is death.

Now, of course, I am no more able to demonstrate that this is true than you can your own beliefs. Instead, I can only point to the accumulattion of personal experiences that I have had that predispose me existentially to believe what I do “here and now”.

It’s just when I suggest this appears to be applicable to everyone that the objectivists will often become rather apoplectic.

I think your POV and your conditions of discourse require objective dogmas for you to shoot down. The way I think doesn’t fit into that kind of frame.

Apparently you used to hold an religion dogmatically like that yourself. So that’s religion as you understand it and it failed you. When someone departs from that model, you “don’t know what on earth [they] are talking about.”

In addition to that, I have observed that in your dialogue with others you play a zero-sum game. You seem to learn nothing from the interaction. That can be seen by your repetitive use of the same old tropes, post after post.

There are smart people here who come at life from a variety of perspectives that one can learn from. I don’t see evidence that your doing that. I do see you displaying scads of confirmation bias.

But, openness may be to some extent a personality trait that is relatively stable across time. If so, what you suppose to be a point of view you arrived at by way of reason, may actually be a fixed feature of your personality. Sad but maybe true.

To top it off, when people become frustrated with your modus operandi , you think they are the ones with a problem. I’ve watched you do this over and over.

It’s possible that you persist here because on some level [probably unconscious] you are actually seeking a way to transcendence that you can’t shoot down. The Tao Te Ching talks about the principle in which everything becomes its opposite. Based on what you have shared of your bio, that apparently has happened to you more than once in your life. Maybe you hope it will happen again.

Shortly followed by…

iow what is good for the goose is verboten for the gander…

Both posts with a footer that says…

Thus making his entire output in the context of what he is doing to others - shooting them in a barrel, metaphorically - and the reasons why they do what they do to him, his psychic conclusions, in advance of any possible discussion.

and where every post is asking people to describe their own personal experiences, how they affected them, their own epistemology, so that he can tell them it is only in their head, since they have not convinced every rational person.

IOW there is an extreme irony in the ‘making me the issue’. It should read…the terms here are only you are the issue, I transcend.

Note to others:

What on earth does that have to do with this:

It’s just another wiggle to me.

He will focus in on the whole point this thread was created or he won’t. Though, sure, if he needs to make this all about me, instead, why doesn’t he just start a new thread: on discussing iambiguous.

In Rant if he prefers.