JWeinCom said:
o_O.Q said:
"If our laws were objectively right, then why would they ever need to be changed?"
i didn't say that our laws are objectively right... we'd have to be living in a utopia for that to be the case... i was simply using that as an example that we do have laws in place in society that are predicated under the understanding that one way of being is better than other ways of being ( a notion that you have denied several times now )... and if we didn't have them then we wouldn't have a society since there needs to be some kind of understanding between all people of a society that ties them together
"if police and laws can serve the foundation in place of religion, why does it matter if god exists?"
i didn't say that they do, i was using them as an example that we do have laws in place in society that are predicated under the understanding that one way of being is better than other ways of being ( a notion that you have denied several times now )
beyond that the foundation that we use to operate in the world has to be something that transcends the limited scope of man that everyone can partake in and observe for themselves...
otherwise you quite clearly can't have a society, because to have a society you have to provide a basis that everyone can be involved in or at least those who want to aid in the construction of the society and not just a small subsection of the society ( which is all you can appeal to with a subjective viewpoint )
for example, i wouldn't use the life experiences of one man to determine moral values for a population but i would use something we can all attest to that seems to transcend us such as love, rage, togetherness etc etc etc because these are states we all experience and understand to some extent and they appear to be constant with regards to their relationship to the human experience
that is why the civilisations from earlier times assigned gods to these states of being and built stories around them based on observations of the best ways people can live in the world
i think where you are misunderstaning me is that you think i'm reffering to god as the personal god of the christian religion and that's not the case... my conception of god is those aspects of reality that appear to defy our limitations such as the emotions i mentioned before... beyond that they appear to be at the heart of a lot of the old stories that made up the foundation for moral values in all of the civilisations we've known about
for example... i'm coming around to the idea that the story of adam and eve was really a metaphor for man gaining intelligence possibly through the evolutionary process signified as satan and the consequences that came about as a result such as not living in harmony with nature as the other animals do etc etc etc
i think the old stories actually have a lot of wisdom contained in them metaphorically but for whatever reason we've lost some of the ability to decipher them properly
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I see no reason to call those emotions god. We have a word for love. It's love. We have a word for rage. It's rage. Calling these things god needlessly complicates things. If we're not talking about god as an actual being, whether or not that's the god of Christianity, we're talking about entirely different things.
Other than that I agree with most of what you said. People obviously created these stories to express moral values. But that doesn't make them objective or good, and it doesn't make god necessary.
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people find it easier to relate to stories when they can more easily form a bond with the subject of the story, that's why personification was used in this context
to make stories about certain fundamental qualities of man more relatable and digestible through stories... and if people were more aware in our current era, they'd realise that the same thing happens frequently in our various entettainment genres like the movie genre
" whether or not that's the god of Christianity, we're talking about entirely different things."
the god of christianity is also a metaphor for concepts that extend beyond our subjective view as individuals and again in that case personification was used to tie the concept down and make it more relatable to people
but i suppose that over time people lost the original understanding and took personification literally
but you have to ask yourself what is more relatable - a story about all the things you don't understand or simply calling those things a father like entity with close connections to man?
"But that doesn't make them objective or good"
well i'd argue that if the concepts are concepts that are always present in civilisation then there is objectivity
for example conflict is something that is always going to occur between individuals in a society so if observations are made on the best ways to deal with conflict over a long period of time, they can then be put into story form to better communicate the conclusions reached
i suppose you could argue that this would still be corrupted by the subjectivity of man but all of our observations are, but we regardless still have to reach conclusions about things to operate properly
" it doesn't make god necessary."
well i suppose you could argue that the mode of delivery isn't the best but i don't know about that since even today its still the most common way we try to communicate values
