Please share at how you arrive at that interpretation of the the text, especially since racism is a concept that’s only centuries old.
Humans can turn wrong into right and that’s morally ok?
I don’t know what the age of the term “racism” is. Why would that matter? This isn’t a point about whether particular words would have been used at the time. Nor am I basing this upon any unusual “interpretation” of the text. “Murder these children solely because their parents are Midianites” is the substance of the command, so if you have a term for murdering children on the basis of their parentage alone other than “racism,” we can use that term instead. I call that racism. I don’t think renaming it will help you.
I have no idea why you’re asking that. It has no bearing upon anything. But if what you are asking is whether morality is a human concept, yes, it is.
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I thought a few days ago about asking those who replied here if it would be morally right to incentivize genetic testing before birth and then if any genetic defects were found, to incentivize abortion through government tax credits since reducing population would help climate change and it would help our species evolve, being able to reduce undesirable genetic traits.
Well, non sequiturs ‘r’ us, I guess. I think you might do well to ask better questions.
My preference would be to leave this up to the parents (or parents-to-be). I do not favor government incentives on this.
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It’s a preference though? If it’s not a moral problem, then it would be OK for the government to do so? The reason I’m asking is because it seems human morality would allow for it, to evolve the species. But I don’t find it to be a particularly different philosophical question than Hitler euthanizing the disabled or mentally insane. If we don’t have a soul, then the only difference really is the age of the human, one is an embryo or fetus and one is a juvenile or adult.
It’s a preference for me. But if I attempt to force my preference on you, then that becomes a moral problem.
Preferences are what we believe and how we live our lives. Moral problems are how we affect other people and how we affect the way that they live their lives.
If the government were to act on this proposal, that would be a moral problem.
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OK. I can see that I’m thinking too much like a Christian. 
As Jesus said lusting was a sin, and I think it’s Paul that said we wouldn’t know the law except it said we should not covet.
By your explanation racism isn’t a moral problem until someone acts on their preferences. I just find it impossible to think that way. I sometimes feel like I’m ready to murder my children in my head, because I’m frustrated with them and this usually results in me yelling at them when I shouldn’t. To me, this is a moral issue where the action is related to the thought.
No, that’s not a moral problem. That’s just being a parent.
Children can be very frustrating at times. And when you are a parent and one of those situations comes up, you should be learning to find better ways of dealing with the frustration and ways of better understanding why they children act as they do.
As long as you are learning from it, you should think of it as a learning experience rather than as a moral problem.
I think of it as both. God made us image bearers - part of that is knowledge. And learning righteousness makes us more like Him.
I am unaware of any notion of “human morality” which involves, as any sort of primary consideration, “evolving the species.” I have the sense that you have not actually discussed morality with non-Christians as your sense of what morality is seems quite twisted. As for “human morality,” too, I don’t know what you can mean; I suspect you are not referring to a contrast with other ethical systems within the animal kingdom, but if so, there are no other moralities than “human” and so I don’t know what the qualifier would be. Some systems of human morality claim an external origin, but that certainly doesn’t make them anything other than “human” morality.
And I’m still trying to figure out what you find confusing about the Midianite scenario. The question’s pretty straightforward: if God orders you to murder all of the people, including the little children, of another race (or, if you don’t like “race,” we could use some other term for the tribe of the Midianites), is it a sin to disobey? If so, that would seem to dispose of the question whether racism – even murderous racism – is a sin.
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I’m trying to figure out what atheists or agnostics believe the origin or purpose of morality is if it’s not from God. If not to improve the species by evolving it, then what?
As I was explaining above, Christians distinguish between intentions that drive actions. Sometimes one action can look the same as another action but one is a sin and another isn’t because of the intention. Doesn’t the law do the same thing when deciding whether a killing is murder or self-defense? In the case of the Midianites, God determined it to be self-defense because of their gross immorality. So yes it would be a sin to disobey then because God had good in mind. But in another situation, killing of another tribe may just be murder because the intention was to disobey justice rather than obey it. Once Jesus fulfilled the law of the Old Testament and declared that his kingdom is not of this world - racism or ethnocentrism and any actions that result from those prejudices are always a sin.
(Not sure I did complete justice with that explanation, but hopefully it better explains my POV.)
Are you familiar with the Euthyphro dilemma, taken from Plato’s dialog of the same title? If not, you should read up on it.
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I don’t know what you mean. There is the natural biological origin of morality – that’s one thing entirely – and there are various philosophical and experiential grounds people give as their explanations of morality – something else entirely – and there are the proximate neural causes of morality, which very likely are somewhat independent of the philosophical/experiential grounds people give when asked to explain moral feeling. But whichever of these sorts of things you mean, I have literally never, in my entire life, met anyone who explained his moral feelings in terms of “improving the species by evolving it” or anything remotely like that. I doubt you have ever met such a person, either.
What I hear here are two threads: might makes right, and the end justifies the means even when “the means” involves the brutal slaughter of innocent children (and, by the way, I think that very few people would regard the notion of self-defense, when slaughtering a child with a bladed implement across the throat, as having much applicability to the situation). I think most people would say that these notions, while they have historically had some expression in human moral philosophy, are without a doubt representative of a low and brutish morality, the sort of thing above which our ethical impulses call us to rise.
Well, you know, the notion that God “got religion,” as Twain put it, in the NT is not one I see voiced very often. But if you’re saying that when God’s opinions about morality changed, then morality itself changed, that seems to me to be a dangerously unstable notion upon which to try to base ethical behavior. Surely the mere shiftable opinions of one who doesn’t even suffer the consequences of human immorality cannot be a part of the moral conversation – that’s the sort of thing which people need to decide, and I would affirm the high moral status of someone who refused to slaughter innocent children above that of someone who assented, whether the party giving the command was God or Hitler.
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Of course, the problem is how you act on your thoughts, not the thought itself. But ask yourself, are you in control of the fact that you some times experience the emotion called anger? Is it not obvious to you that this state of mind occurs to you, and that the challenge is not so much to never even experience anger, but to not let that emotion control you?
You seem to be arguing for thought-crime. Not just the actions you perform in response to certain thoughts, but even your thoughts themselves. That you can be guilty merely for having thoughts occur to you that you couldn’t possibly prevent. How can you be responsible for something you are not in control of? What justice or fairness is there in that?
Yeah, I cannot see how morality can in any way apply to mere internal processing of ideas, without more. Since morality principally concerns the impact we have upon others, isolated thoughts are just irrelevant. Obviously when we ACT upon thoughts (and even when we act implicitly upon them rather than explicitly, e.g., in behaving differently to people of different races but without any conscious purpose to do so) then morality comes right into it. But thoughts, by themselves, harm nobody unless they harm the thinker himself.
The purpose, from the standpoint of religious institutions, of “thought-crime” notions, however, is an interesting one. It certainly is another example of the darkness which theology so often brings to human existence, and the way in which that darkness is driven by the need of religious professionals for employment security.
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I don’t think emotions themselves are moral or immoral as even anger can be used for good purposes.
The government has no interest in policing thoughts nor can it.
But I do believe God judges us for our thoughts. Matthews 5:27 You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Matthew 22
35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and prophets."
I can prevent the thoughts as I think about them more and realize they are harmful, especially as they always bring me further away from God.
If you are referring to the first time a thought occurs, I suppose that would be the idea of original sin or depravity.
yes, I believe they are harmful to me. Sin always has consequences.
As I explained above, Jesus taught this. He gained no security by doing so. It isn’t darkness. The more I bring my mind and heart into His will, the less I harm anyone morally.
Well, he was said to have taught that. Whether those who retold it in this fashion gained security from it is a question which the anonymity of the authors of the gospels precludes our having a good answer to. It is darkness.
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The church has always maintained that the gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. No anonymous claims. I recently watched a great YouTube discussion on when and why they were written if you want. Their historicity is fascinating. 