Do you WANT there to be a God?

Closing Topic temporarily. One person is currently submitting a comment so I will let that one in.

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Then you have just refuted your claim that morality can only based on God’s nature. Do you need me to explain why?

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I do not think that holding to the arbitrary, personal preference argument (while demanding that people acknowledge this law of God in their hearts caveat) is great.

It is clear that you have not dealt with secular morality. You can even make cases based on sound logic and quantifiable positions.

All it takes is for someone then to point out the cultural influence or flaws in biblical morality (you might claim that they do not exist).

Slavery always immoral (even from a secular perspective) yet was divinely sanctioned. Please do not take the whole biblical slavery != chattel. It is still terrible.

Having a specific test for female unfaithfulness and a resulting abortion is immoral.

Murdering populations in constant tribal warfare and taking sex slaves (or I mean wives that you married in a bit based on horrific and inaccurate virginity tests) is immoral. Is continuation of bullshit, the best that could be done in that time?

Eternal torture for finite sin, tolerance of prejudice/racism in “feeding widows”, second class dressed up status of women, the romanization of biblical standards in Paul’s writing over time, even the use of textual communication in an ancient language is pretty suspect.

While a common apologetics position, the whole “my morality is objective/better/true” is tired, ineffective, and not well supported.

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That’s only true if the “explanation” actually makes sense. If I, for example, told you that square circles must exist because horses are purple, that would not prevent a square circle from being a logical contradiction. All you have here is an imaginary purple horse.

Tell that to the people who face but do not overcome adversity. I guess they’re all just unavoidable collateral damage from your heroic story.

But it isn’t possible.

Why would that be? Are you familiar with the Euthyphro dilemma?

While there is no ultimate or entirely objective basis for morality, there is a basis in human attitudes and social goods. Thus we consider genocide to be a bad thing, and it’s a bad thing whether perpetrated by Nazis or YHWH. You disagree?

I wouldn’t. I’d say that the divine attributes defined and derived from the bible all arise from his actions. But that’s a digression irrelevant to this discussion.

You don’t? You’re OK with killing off all life not on the Ark, killing all the firstborn of Egypt, condemning a substantial majority of the human population to eternal torture, and so on?

It may be made up, but it’s not baseless or arbitrary. What, though, is the basis of your morality? How do you know it isn’t arbitrary?

I’m afraid none of your comment reveals a great deal of thought.

Then why did you mention it?

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That’s perfectly fine. I, along with many (but not all) other atheists, don’t believe that “absolute morality”/“objective morality” exists in any case. So I have no objection to be told that I lack something that I don’t believe exists.

My evaluation of morality tends to be more practical than epistemological. I see no evidence (from, for example, demographic data) that Christians live objectively better lives than atheists do, so I discount the claim that Christian morality is superior – with or without an “absolute” basis.

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[My emphasis]

I think the fact that you came into this conversation with this strong preconception has prevented you from understanding what we have been saying.

Speaking for myself, to the extent that I see my beliefs as a “choice” at all, my beliefs are NOT based on what I “want” to believe, but on what, to me, makes more sense of the world. I do in fact believe in a very large number of things that I wouldn’t want to have to believe in, given a choice, simply because believing them makes the world make more sense. Thirty years ago, I found that the world made more sense without belief in God than with, so I stopped believing – what I “wanted” didn’t come into it.

I think a large reason that you got fairly ambivalent answers may be (i) because atheists may simply not normally think in terms of ‘wanting to believe’ or not (so find it a stretch to think in such terms) and (ii) most atheists view God as a purely hypothetical concept, so one needing proper defining before any opinion can be forthcoming (and see the opinion as heavily dependent on that definition).

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Come on now. I think you understand the context in which that statement was made. Read the next sentence.

A distinction without a difference.

Indeed, which is why neither I nor Christianity hold that doctrine. Strawman. Incomplete ≠ insufficient.

I think that is false. I’ve known people who want to believe, even to desperation. But they cannot get past what they perceive as reasons and evidence to the contrary.

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lol I don’t think you missed my point, but are pretending you did. That’s a nice little rhetorical trick.
Nevertheless, I will clarify. What is meant by “sufficient reasons and evidence” is such reasons and evidence that, when considered objectively, demonstrate the belief is epistemologically fully warranted. Obviously, whatever reasons and evidence a flat-earther might conjure, it would not be sufficient to warrant belief. Again, I’m not making the case here, expecting to convince you of all the sufficient reasoning and evidence. That would be folly. All that is already out there, and you reject it for all the reasons I don’t expect you to enumerate here.

Strawman much? All of your claims to the contrary, I believe my thesis is still live. My little informal survey here is interesting, but far from conclusive :wink:

Yes, exactly my point. And, yet, if one is so inclined against holding a particular belief, they may just, for some reason, find a way to raise the epistemological bar high enough that their personal threshold for belief just so happens to never actually be met. Nor could it ever be.

[emphasis mine]

Interesting choice of words.

Another interesting choice of words.

I don’t demand anybody acknowledge anything, and I don’t expect anyone here will. I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind here. Like I explained, people believe things for all sorts of reasons, and the probability of “reasoning” them out of their belief is about zero, at least over any short to intermediate term time horizon. I didn’t come here to do that. I simply wanted to hear people’s reactions to the Nagel quotation, and I explained why - out of curiosity mostly. If you go back and read my prior posts, I’m not laying out methodical arguments, defining all my terms, listing and defending premises, and what not. No, what I essentially did was state my beliefs and opinions with minimal argument or support. But, not because I don’t have such argument and support.

Arguing about this or that Biblical passage’s morality is a waste of time. I’ve heard all your complaints, and investigated them. Like I said, it’s very easy for the skeptic (much less 15 such skeptics) to sit back and nit pick someone else’s views, or even worse, their word choice. For me to sit here and try to respond to 15 skeptics’ nitpicks, arguments, and misunderstandings on every conceivable moral question in the Old Testament (slavery, tribal warfare, etc.) would take writing books, which have already been written by others. And, I wouldn’t convince any of them anyway!

I understand I am not talking to someone I just met randomly at a party, who, in casual conversation, it happened to turn out was an atheist. No, the people in this message board, many of them anyway, have made it part of their very identity arguing with and debating people who hold religious views, not just on this message board, but elsewhere as well. I am under no delusion of convincing such a person of anything, regardless of the soundness of my arguments or the breadth of my evidence. Such a person is dyed in the wool, die-hard, fully invested in their views for all sorts of reasons that don’t necessarily have anything to do with reason and evidence.

So, then we agree. Atheists have no objective, absolute morality. I believe you need to ponder more what that means.

I think all of our beliefs are based much more on desires and emotional needs than virtually anyone is willing to admit. Most of our “reasoning” and “making sense of the world” is backing up a deep-seated, often even denied to ourself, want or felt need. Again, I don’t expect to convince you of this here. But, perhaps you might ponder it more with my having mentioned it than had I not.

I don’t know that I wholly dismiss the idea of anything that could be described as “objective morality,” but what is fairly obvious is that the opinions of a god could not establish such a morality. Morality arises from human experience, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

I think that part of the problem here is that many of us at one point or another in our lives have recognized that we’ve made the mistake of engaging in motivated reasoning on some subject or other. People who cultivate positive mental habits note the error and resolve to do better. People who do not wish to cultivate positive mental habits double down, insist that motivated reasoning has led them to the right conclusion, and accuse everyone else of motivated reasoning. So when I hear “we all choose what to believe,” I hear “I am a sloppy, sloppy thinker who does not care whether the things I think make any sense.”

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As a matter of fact, theists actually are more deficient in this regard.

Consider this for Christians (although a similar line of reasoning holds for most theists):

By definition, God is all-encompassing. All knowing, all powerful, infinite in being, knowledge, power, everything. This is God.

Mankind, OTOH, is finite, mortal, limited in being, knowledge, power, everything.

In an infinite universe governed by an infinite, all-knowing God, it is a necessary and inescapable fact (FACT, I say) that there necessarily exists something - a confounding fact, a contrary being, an new understanding, etc. - that contradicts whatever a human thinks they know about God. This goes for anything they think they know about God’s morality, INCLUDING any understanding one thinks the Bible gives them. (If you are going to argue this point, we are done, since you are claiming to be the infinite, all-knowing God you purport to worship. That’s enough hubris for this forum, I think.)

What does this mean? @jmk00001, even if there is an absolute, objective morality that flows from an infinite God, you have no chance - zero - of comprehending this morality. None of us do. This is a necessary result of the mortal dealing with the infinite.

Thus, I would argue that, even if there was an absolute, objective morality, the fact that no person can comprehend it makes as real and useful as if there was no such morality.

In other words, Christians are no more guided by some absolute morality than are atheists.

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I know, you don’t mean to be insulting, right? It just comes out that way. But I think you’re fooling yourself here regarding your motives. You didn’t come here just to ask questions. If you had, you would have paid attention to the answers rather than substituting your own.

You really don’t understand this. Atheists have no objective, absolute morality. But neither do you. You only imagine you do, and you can’t defend that claim.

So reason is useless? Some would call that projection.

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My point makes sense in that “context”, and your “next sentence” mischaracterises the issue.

It is easier to simply ignore the contradictions in your beliefs than to address them. It is easier to ‘go along to get along’ than to articulate your doubts and risk alienating friends and family. It is easier for an atheist to simply shut up and take it than to stand up for their First Amendment rights and risk harassment and death threats. It is easier to pretend to still be a good observant Muslim than to announce your apostasy and risk death.

There is nothing easier than accepting the religion that you were spoon-fed from birth, especially when it is the majority religion in your locality.

Yes, but as I don’t believe that objective, absolute morality doesn’t exist, I also believe that you “have no objective, absolute morality” either.

I actually explicitly pondered the shortcomings of both purely-absolute and purely-relativist moralities a couple of decades ago – and came to the conclusion that the only viable option was a middle ground between the two – and that this is in fact what everybody adheres to (if perhaps with different balances between the two), no matter how they characterise their moralities.

And here again we return to your preconceptions.

If you are going to return to your preconceptions whatever we say, then why did you bother to ask us the question in the first place?

I would also point out that your statement is more than a little egocentric (in assuming that we all form our beliefs the same way you do) and patronising (in telling us how we form our beliefs). It is also more than a little self-serving, in that it allows you to dismiss atheists’ rejection of theism as merely based on “desires and emotional needs” rather than reason. You probably find this “easier” than addressing the reasons for our rejection.

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Utter codswallop. There are plenty of other belief systems (including not just atheist and non-Christian theist systems but also different versions of the Christian universe than the one you believe we live in) all of which have their own moral and ethical codes.

If you truly believe that only your personal belief system includes morals, you are so deluded there’s no point discussing anything with you.

So I’ll just point out your other howlers:

No, you said that “if you look at all the tremendous good belief in God has done throughout history, it becomes obvious that the consequences of that belief not being there throughout history … would have been tremendously negative”.

But that assessment requires comparing the good outcomes of belief in God with the bad outcomes of said belief - which you didn’t even attempt to do.

Poppycock.

If I deem all these things harmful (not ‘evil’, that’s a loaded term) its in spite of the widespread belief in the Christian God held by the people who perpetrated these acts. If widespread belief in the Christian God didn’t make these perpetrators consider their own acts evil, it’s not going to have much effect on me.

Also poppycock.

Christianity does not include human rights, equality or tolerance. Those are largely the result of the Renaissance, philosophy and English common law.

Also poppycock.

Much of the roots of science lie within ancient Greece and Egypt, Byzantium and Arabia, including those such as Ptolemy and Aristotle.

I didn’t say there was. Again, you seem to be arguing against your expectations of responses, and not the actual responses you have received.

I didn’t say anything about Europeans in the New World either.

You can’t just chalk it up to later Christian culture either, but that is clearly what you are trying to do.

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That is offensive.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: About Thomas Nagel