1. The idea that there's a universal morality comes from the Abrahamic worldview. A dualistic, pluralistic, or relativistic worldview rejects the concept of an objective morality. So your worldview and religion is HIGHLY relevant to claims about morality or immorality. It would be so for an alligator too!
1. The idea that there's a universal morality comes from the Abrahamic worldview. A dualistic, pluralistic, or relativistic worldview rejects the concept of an objective morality. So your worldview and religion is HIGHLY relevant to claims about morality or immorality. It would be so for an alligator too!
2. There is a fascinating amount of science regarding religion, actually. "Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts makes life worth living" by Dimitris Xygalatas is an excellent place to start. No religious claims, just scientific analysis of the physiological effects of ritual, as measured in real time by wearable monitoring gear.
3. The definition of religion comes from
"Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World" by Tara Isabella Burton. Another useful book is "Cultish, the language of fanaticism", by Amanda Montell.
“ The idea that there's a universal morality comes from the Abrahamic worldview. ”
No it doesn’t. “Universal moralities” existed prior to Judaism and aside from
Judaism. Most major ancient civilizations had universal moralities. Egyptians, Greeks, Indians, Chinese, Mesopotamians. Small societies also show them.
“ A dualistic, pluralistic, or relativistic worldview rejects the concept of an objective morality. So your worldview and religion is HIGHLY relevant to claims about morality or immorality. ”
Metaethical theory is not needed to make moral claims. I’d have no problem discussing this with you, but it’s not necessary for what we are talking about.
"Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts makes life worth living"
Looks like it could be a neat book. But I don’t think it includes your *specific* claim about health and religion. If it does I suspect the “science” is garbage. But you are welcome to actually cite the study it provides. Unfortunately people present bad interpretations of unreplicated, sloppy research as “the science” when it’s not. My hypothesis is that is what you did.
After all, the definition you provided seems like it comes from a different book? Did the ritual book’s research that it cites all use that same definition? Which doesn’t seem actually like a particularly good one to me.
Have you actually read any original “religious” literature yourself? Like the Old and New Testaments, thoroughly? Homer? Hesiod? The Epic of Gilgamesh? The Hammurabi Code? The Gita? The Upanishad’s? The Book of the Dead? The Quran?
It seems like you are simply regurgitating commentary. For example the notion that universal morality comes from Abrahamic religions is a very ignorant statement and sounds like it came from someone like Jordan Peterson or a televangelist.
Jesus was a bad man. Threatening other people with supernatural torture if they don’t absolutely obey a god who commands his followers to massacre suckling infants is bad. My metaethics are irrelevant. Just as my metaethics are irrelevant were I to say Hitler was a bad man. I suspect you understand my sentiments well enough. If you want a ritual — put “Jesus is bad man” on your Alexa to repeat once a day at noon and echo it yourself.
You claim that Jesus threatened other people with supernatural torture if they don't massacre suckling infants. You seem to imply that he not only made this claim, but originated it.
Please cite chapter and verse from the new testament to back up this claim. The new testament is quite short, it should be an easy read to find...if it's there.
“ You claim that Jesus threatened other people with supernatural torture if they don't massacre suckling infants.”
I didn’t claim that. Please reread my comment. Read carefully.
This is what I wrote:
“Threatening other people with supernatural torture if they don’t absolutely obey a god who commands his followers to massacre suckling infants is bad.”
If you need help breaking down that sentence, let me know. Your last try would get you an F. The fact that you did so horribly gives me the impression that your reading skills are not sufficient for reading the Bible. I suggest you take some remedial reading classes.
So your objection is to the Abrahamic concept of God. A concept of the divine that is held by roughly 56% of the population, nearly 3.5 BILLION people. They're all wrong and stupid.
That seems a bit like hubris to me. But it's your life. Believe whatever works for you.
It’s stupid to establish morality and truth on popularity. It’s not hubris to use our own reason and experience and emotion to assess what is true and good regardless of what is more or less popularly held to be true and good. It is courageous. It is proper self-respect. It should be honored. The fact that you have such contempt for independent thinking goes a long way to explain your reverence for Yahweh. You have slavish morals, which the Bible preaches.
I don’t simply believe everything based on what works; that’s not how rationality works.
And simply believing in Yahweh doesn’t make a person stupid. Many otherwise intelligent people can believe irrational things.
I don't think it's particularly rational or scientific to prioritize what feels good or seems reasonable over what matches the evidence.
The quantum theory of atomic structure makes no sense to me. But it matches the data better than any other model. So for now, I'll cheerfully accept it as true, even though neither my personal logic or feelings confirm it.
Your worldview is different and prioritizes different things when making decisions about truth. That's okay...in my worldview anyway.
“The quantum theory of atomic structure makes no sense to me. But it matches the data better than any other model. So for now, I'll cheerfully accept it as true, even though neither my personal logic or feelings confirm it.”
Quantum theory is not going to help with what we are talking about. We are talking about the character Yahweh. And all the evidence we have of him is in the mythological literature of humans. Just like all the evidence we have of Voldemort is in the books of Harry Potter. There is nothing that should be incongruent about the evidence and what should “seems reasonable”. Yahweh does not exhibit quantum indeterminacy. Simply hypocrisy and gaslighting.
My empirical world view prioritizes empirical evidence, which I reason upon. And the evidence points to Yahweh commanding genocide and Jesus threatening people with torture if they don’t obey Yahweh.
Your feelings don’t seem to like that, but you should accept it as true nonetheless.
My feelings though do have something to say about characters commanding genocide and threatening people with supernatural torture for disobedience: it’s detestable. My moral world view, as does everyone’s, is affected by emotions and sentiments and desires. A combination of my empirical world view and my moral world view leads to the conclusion that Yahweh is an evil character. Perhaps your moral world view is different that mine because you have different desires and sentiments. You might have, for example, a slave morality due to your desires and sentiments. And that is why you don’t feel there is anything wrong with Yahweh, rather than actually having any problem with accepting the empirical truth of his actions.
I think you are confusing my statement about using my emotion to understand what is true rather than what is good. What is *good* cannot be understood without our emotions, which includes our moral sense. There are things that can be ascertained without meaningful emotional input, such as the sum of 2 + 2 or whether Yahweh commanded genocide according to the definitions of international law. But without our emotions we cannot come to any conclusions about whether it is good or bad, honorable or dishonorable. Morality straddles reason and sentiment.
I hope that most of humanity shares a potentially near universal moral sense because of similar desires, emotions, and passions and that with persuasion and reason people can find common moral ground on the most contentious issues. But sometimes I question that, especially when I have conversations like this with people who defend characters that are genocidal slavers. Ultimately much of our sentiments are culturally bound, so some might be very difficult to change — at least without being exposed to powerful social emotional influences.
In my moral world view, it is not okay that you revere a genocidal slaver. That’s immoral.
YOU are talking about YOUR understanding of Yahweh. I am talking about something entirely different.
I am talking about respecting the basic human worth of more than half the global human population. But as established in another message, you don't believe in the concept of basic human worth at all, therefore the idea of respecting it is completely unthinkable.
That's why we're talking past each other. We are fundamentally not talking about the same thing.
Ancient Egyptian morality was DIFFERENT than the morality of, say, early Chinese dynasties. Deities were also generally local, although they could be moved or stolen. To the best of my knowledge, the idea of making a universal moral claim for all of humanity originated with the Abrahamic religions. Love it or hate it, that's also the origin of proselytizing.
I've read a great many sacred texts, yes.
The definition of religion I used came from Strange Rites.
All those ancient civilizations I listed had religion that promoted universal morals no less than Judaism. And Abrahamic religions were not the only or original proselytizers.
I suggest you read about Zoroastrianism. That should be sufficient to dispel your ignorance.
Zoroastrianism has the House of Lies as punishment in the afterlife. Not eternal, it's most equivalent to the Catholic concept of purgatory. It's a temporary hell.
It appears that Zoroastrianism was primarily located in Persia, and few attempts were made to spread it outside the Persian empire. Many of the most useful and functional ideas of Zoroastrianism were incorporated into Christianity and later Islam, however.
Are you a Zoroastrian believer? Tell me about your faith. What benefits does it bring to your life?
What does anything you said have to do with what what I said?
No I’m not a Zoroastrian believer.
How about you tell me about your “faith” instead? For all your defense of genocidal gods, and your demands I tell you about my “religion”, you haven’t shared your own.
Okay, then we have a fundamentally different worldview. Concepts deeply important to me simply don't exist in your worldview. I do not believe that human worth is either subjective or on a spectrum.
Yes, this puts us in separate communities. I have no problem with that.
Adulthood is a complex concept related to competence and responsibility. It MIGHT fit in your worldview. Or maybe not. 🤷♀️
I find it fascinating and befuddling that you can glibly describe some people as having negative human worth and yet find the idea of earned adulthood offensive.
Human beings are born as infants. We grow up. Most of us pass into the responsibility, independence, competence, and deliberate interdependence of adulthood. Some do not and remain socially eternally children, regardless of their physical development.
This seems perfectly clear to me, but that's because adulthood as a concept exists in my worldview. It may not exist in your worldview.
There are clearly plenty of things that exist in your worldview that simply don't in mine. But that's how worldviews work. A worldview is like water to a fish. It's really hard to see something without any form of contrast.
Which is WHY I enjoy conversations with strangers on the internet (or anywhere else). Learning to understand the worldview of others helps me learn to see my own more clearly.
Meaning: Pain that is the price we pay for joy. An elimination of pain is also the elimination of change or hope. A world without pain or suffering is not utopia, but an endless unchanging grey. That's sounds like hell to me. It WAS the ancient Greek concept of hell.
Purpose: to leave the world a better place for human beings than it would have been without me.
Sense of community: All those who honor inherent human worth are my community. As are my family.
Ritual: I have a few annual rituals, such as major holidays. My more regular rituals are a bit inadequate. Arguing with strangers on the internet appears to be one of them. 🤣
I base my current working model of Truth on a combination of pragmatism and sustainability. Basically, what works for an extended period of time. I think the scientific method is incredibly useful as a counterweight to normal human biases. I don't believe any human being can ever truly grasp Truth, so I hold onto my working model of Truth as lightly as possible. I call this humility. I maintain the awareness that I could be wrong.
I am absolutely opposed to anti-human efforts to exterminate the human species. Polar bears are worth protecting and so are people. I don't think the efforts to exterminate humanity will be successful, but I believe a great deal of harm will be done by the effort. I am strongly Team Pro-human.
I also revere adulthood, which I think is earned through personal effort. The respect due to adults is above and beyond the inherent human worth each of us is born with. Inherent human worth isn't earned and can't be lost. Adulthood is earned and can be revoked. In my worldview, it's not simply a matter of age.
There's more, obviously, but those are some major points.
Thanks for asking! I have spent a great deal of time pondering the question recently.
It would be way too long writing out all my thoughts on what you wrote. But I’ll remark on a few things.
I am skeptical of “inherent worth” of humans. It’s not clear to me what is meant by that. Worth is something subjective. Like beauty. The beauty of any flower isn’t inherent. It is dependent on the creature observing it and its relationship to the flower. If there were no conscious beings capable of experiencing beauty, there wouldn’t be beautiful flowers — or ugly ones for that matter. “Worth” of humans is the same. And worth, as you even suggested, is a spectrum. Someone can be felt more or less worthy. Someone can even have negative worth… in the sense they are felt to be deserving of destruction or even torture(Like Jesus felt about people who didnt follow him). How much worth must people think other people have before they are part of your community…before they are… worthy of your approval? And how is that perception of worth manifest in their behavior?
I don’t think people have inherent worth. I don’t believe such a thing exists. I guess I’m not part of your community? 🤷🏽♂️ What does that even mean to you?
And your “adulthood” thing sounds very condescending. Maybe that is what you intended, but you have come across to me through our discussion as being opposed to the notion of moral superiority.
Interesting that you think some people have negative human worth but can also have a problem with the idea that adulthood is earned. I suspect there is BOTH a massive worldview difference and a language gap.
I believe that we define "moral superiority" in ways that have very little overlap.
1. The idea that there's a universal morality comes from the Abrahamic worldview. A dualistic, pluralistic, or relativistic worldview rejects the concept of an objective morality. So your worldview and religion is HIGHLY relevant to claims about morality or immorality. It would be so for an alligator too!
2. There is a fascinating amount of science regarding religion, actually. "Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts makes life worth living" by Dimitris Xygalatas is an excellent place to start. No religious claims, just scientific analysis of the physiological effects of ritual, as measured in real time by wearable monitoring gear.
3. The definition of religion comes from
"Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World" by Tara Isabella Burton. Another useful book is "Cultish, the language of fanaticism", by Amanda Montell.
To be continued...
“ The idea that there's a universal morality comes from the Abrahamic worldview. ”
No it doesn’t. “Universal moralities” existed prior to Judaism and aside from
Judaism. Most major ancient civilizations had universal moralities. Egyptians, Greeks, Indians, Chinese, Mesopotamians. Small societies also show them.
“ A dualistic, pluralistic, or relativistic worldview rejects the concept of an objective morality. So your worldview and religion is HIGHLY relevant to claims about morality or immorality. ”
Metaethical theory is not needed to make moral claims. I’d have no problem discussing this with you, but it’s not necessary for what we are talking about.
"Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts makes life worth living"
Looks like it could be a neat book. But I don’t think it includes your *specific* claim about health and religion. If it does I suspect the “science” is garbage. But you are welcome to actually cite the study it provides. Unfortunately people present bad interpretations of unreplicated, sloppy research as “the science” when it’s not. My hypothesis is that is what you did.
After all, the definition you provided seems like it comes from a different book? Did the ritual book’s research that it cites all use that same definition? Which doesn’t seem actually like a particularly good one to me.
Have you actually read any original “religious” literature yourself? Like the Old and New Testaments, thoroughly? Homer? Hesiod? The Epic of Gilgamesh? The Hammurabi Code? The Gita? The Upanishad’s? The Book of the Dead? The Quran?
It seems like you are simply regurgitating commentary. For example the notion that universal morality comes from Abrahamic religions is a very ignorant statement and sounds like it came from someone like Jordan Peterson or a televangelist.
Jesus was a bad man. Threatening other people with supernatural torture if they don’t absolutely obey a god who commands his followers to massacre suckling infants is bad. My metaethics are irrelevant. Just as my metaethics are irrelevant were I to say Hitler was a bad man. I suspect you understand my sentiments well enough. If you want a ritual — put “Jesus is bad man” on your Alexa to repeat once a day at noon and echo it yourself.
You claim that Jesus threatened other people with supernatural torture if they don't massacre suckling infants. You seem to imply that he not only made this claim, but originated it.
Please cite chapter and verse from the new testament to back up this claim. The new testament is quite short, it should be an easy read to find...if it's there.
“ You claim that Jesus threatened other people with supernatural torture if they don't massacre suckling infants.”
I didn’t claim that. Please reread my comment. Read carefully.
This is what I wrote:
“Threatening other people with supernatural torture if they don’t absolutely obey a god who commands his followers to massacre suckling infants is bad.”
If you need help breaking down that sentence, let me know. Your last try would get you an F. The fact that you did so horribly gives me the impression that your reading skills are not sufficient for reading the Bible. I suggest you take some remedial reading classes.
So your objection is to the Abrahamic concept of God. A concept of the divine that is held by roughly 56% of the population, nearly 3.5 BILLION people. They're all wrong and stupid.
That seems a bit like hubris to me. But it's your life. Believe whatever works for you.
It’s stupid to establish morality and truth on popularity. It’s not hubris to use our own reason and experience and emotion to assess what is true and good regardless of what is more or less popularly held to be true and good. It is courageous. It is proper self-respect. It should be honored. The fact that you have such contempt for independent thinking goes a long way to explain your reverence for Yahweh. You have slavish morals, which the Bible preaches.
I don’t simply believe everything based on what works; that’s not how rationality works.
And simply believing in Yahweh doesn’t make a person stupid. Many otherwise intelligent people can believe irrational things.
I don't think it's particularly rational or scientific to prioritize what feels good or seems reasonable over what matches the evidence.
The quantum theory of atomic structure makes no sense to me. But it matches the data better than any other model. So for now, I'll cheerfully accept it as true, even though neither my personal logic or feelings confirm it.
Your worldview is different and prioritizes different things when making decisions about truth. That's okay...in my worldview anyway.
“The quantum theory of atomic structure makes no sense to me. But it matches the data better than any other model. So for now, I'll cheerfully accept it as true, even though neither my personal logic or feelings confirm it.”
Quantum theory is not going to help with what we are talking about. We are talking about the character Yahweh. And all the evidence we have of him is in the mythological literature of humans. Just like all the evidence we have of Voldemort is in the books of Harry Potter. There is nothing that should be incongruent about the evidence and what should “seems reasonable”. Yahweh does not exhibit quantum indeterminacy. Simply hypocrisy and gaslighting.
My empirical world view prioritizes empirical evidence, which I reason upon. And the evidence points to Yahweh commanding genocide and Jesus threatening people with torture if they don’t obey Yahweh.
Your feelings don’t seem to like that, but you should accept it as true nonetheless.
My feelings though do have something to say about characters commanding genocide and threatening people with supernatural torture for disobedience: it’s detestable. My moral world view, as does everyone’s, is affected by emotions and sentiments and desires. A combination of my empirical world view and my moral world view leads to the conclusion that Yahweh is an evil character. Perhaps your moral world view is different that mine because you have different desires and sentiments. You might have, for example, a slave morality due to your desires and sentiments. And that is why you don’t feel there is anything wrong with Yahweh, rather than actually having any problem with accepting the empirical truth of his actions.
I think you are confusing my statement about using my emotion to understand what is true rather than what is good. What is *good* cannot be understood without our emotions, which includes our moral sense. There are things that can be ascertained without meaningful emotional input, such as the sum of 2 + 2 or whether Yahweh commanded genocide according to the definitions of international law. But without our emotions we cannot come to any conclusions about whether it is good or bad, honorable or dishonorable. Morality straddles reason and sentiment.
I hope that most of humanity shares a potentially near universal moral sense because of similar desires, emotions, and passions and that with persuasion and reason people can find common moral ground on the most contentious issues. But sometimes I question that, especially when I have conversations like this with people who defend characters that are genocidal slavers. Ultimately much of our sentiments are culturally bound, so some might be very difficult to change — at least without being exposed to powerful social emotional influences.
In my moral world view, it is not okay that you revere a genocidal slaver. That’s immoral.
YOU are talking about YOUR understanding of Yahweh. I am talking about something entirely different.
I am talking about respecting the basic human worth of more than half the global human population. But as established in another message, you don't believe in the concept of basic human worth at all, therefore the idea of respecting it is completely unthinkable.
That's why we're talking past each other. We are fundamentally not talking about the same thing.
Moved to a single thread.
Ancient Egyptian morality was DIFFERENT than the morality of, say, early Chinese dynasties. Deities were also generally local, although they could be moved or stolen. To the best of my knowledge, the idea of making a universal moral claim for all of humanity originated with the Abrahamic religions. Love it or hate it, that's also the origin of proselytizing.
I've read a great many sacred texts, yes.
The definition of religion I used came from Strange Rites.
All those ancient civilizations I listed had religion that promoted universal morals no less than Judaism. And Abrahamic religions were not the only or original proselytizers.
I suggest you read about Zoroastrianism. That should be sufficient to dispel your ignorance.
Zoroastrianism has the House of Lies as punishment in the afterlife. Not eternal, it's most equivalent to the Catholic concept of purgatory. It's a temporary hell.
It appears that Zoroastrianism was primarily located in Persia, and few attempts were made to spread it outside the Persian empire. Many of the most useful and functional ideas of Zoroastrianism were incorporated into Christianity and later Islam, however.
Are you a Zoroastrian believer? Tell me about your faith. What benefits does it bring to your life?
What does anything you said have to do with what what I said?
No I’m not a Zoroastrian believer.
How about you tell me about your “faith” instead? For all your defense of genocidal gods, and your demands I tell you about my “religion”, you haven’t shared your own.
Okay, then we have a fundamentally different worldview. Concepts deeply important to me simply don't exist in your worldview. I do not believe that human worth is either subjective or on a spectrum.
Yes, this puts us in separate communities. I have no problem with that.
Adulthood is a complex concept related to competence and responsibility. It MIGHT fit in your worldview. Or maybe not. 🤷♀️
I find it fascinating and befuddling that you can glibly describe some people as having negative human worth and yet find the idea of earned adulthood offensive.
Human beings are born as infants. We grow up. Most of us pass into the responsibility, independence, competence, and deliberate interdependence of adulthood. Some do not and remain socially eternally children, regardless of their physical development.
This seems perfectly clear to me, but that's because adulthood as a concept exists in my worldview. It may not exist in your worldview.
There are clearly plenty of things that exist in your worldview that simply don't in mine. But that's how worldviews work. A worldview is like water to a fish. It's really hard to see something without any form of contrast.
Which is WHY I enjoy conversations with strangers on the internet (or anywhere else). Learning to understand the worldview of others helps me learn to see my own more clearly.
Will continue on a single thread.
My religion is as follows:
Meaning: Pain that is the price we pay for joy. An elimination of pain is also the elimination of change or hope. A world without pain or suffering is not utopia, but an endless unchanging grey. That's sounds like hell to me. It WAS the ancient Greek concept of hell.
Purpose: to leave the world a better place for human beings than it would have been without me.
Sense of community: All those who honor inherent human worth are my community. As are my family.
Ritual: I have a few annual rituals, such as major holidays. My more regular rituals are a bit inadequate. Arguing with strangers on the internet appears to be one of them. 🤣
I base my current working model of Truth on a combination of pragmatism and sustainability. Basically, what works for an extended period of time. I think the scientific method is incredibly useful as a counterweight to normal human biases. I don't believe any human being can ever truly grasp Truth, so I hold onto my working model of Truth as lightly as possible. I call this humility. I maintain the awareness that I could be wrong.
I am absolutely opposed to anti-human efforts to exterminate the human species. Polar bears are worth protecting and so are people. I don't think the efforts to exterminate humanity will be successful, but I believe a great deal of harm will be done by the effort. I am strongly Team Pro-human.
I also revere adulthood, which I think is earned through personal effort. The respect due to adults is above and beyond the inherent human worth each of us is born with. Inherent human worth isn't earned and can't be lost. Adulthood is earned and can be revoked. In my worldview, it's not simply a matter of age.
There's more, obviously, but those are some major points.
Thanks for asking! I have spent a great deal of time pondering the question recently.
I see you have. Thanks for sharing.
It would be way too long writing out all my thoughts on what you wrote. But I’ll remark on a few things.
I am skeptical of “inherent worth” of humans. It’s not clear to me what is meant by that. Worth is something subjective. Like beauty. The beauty of any flower isn’t inherent. It is dependent on the creature observing it and its relationship to the flower. If there were no conscious beings capable of experiencing beauty, there wouldn’t be beautiful flowers — or ugly ones for that matter. “Worth” of humans is the same. And worth, as you even suggested, is a spectrum. Someone can be felt more or less worthy. Someone can even have negative worth… in the sense they are felt to be deserving of destruction or even torture(Like Jesus felt about people who didnt follow him). How much worth must people think other people have before they are part of your community…before they are… worthy of your approval? And how is that perception of worth manifest in their behavior?
I don’t think people have inherent worth. I don’t believe such a thing exists. I guess I’m not part of your community? 🤷🏽♂️ What does that even mean to you?
And your “adulthood” thing sounds very condescending. Maybe that is what you intended, but you have come across to me through our discussion as being opposed to the notion of moral superiority.
Interesting that you think some people have negative human worth but can also have a problem with the idea that adulthood is earned. I suspect there is BOTH a massive worldview difference and a language gap.
I believe that we define "moral superiority" in ways that have very little overlap.
I don’t want to respond to you on multiple threads so I’m just going to answer everything going forward on a single thread.