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Forums - General - Where does evil come from?

The_vagabond7 on 23 May 2010
Slimebeast said:
Mise said:
Slimebeast said:
The_vagabond7 said:

Good and evil aren't real tangible objective things, they are entirely decided by the cultural zeitgeist of the day.

Really? So can think of a scenario where it's a good act to torture a baby?

Or rather, do you mean it is irrelevant to ever describe the act of torturing a child good/right or evil/wrong?

Don't know if this applies, but some cultures consider things like infant circumcision (without painkillers, of course) and ritual tattoos to be a good thing - and because both procedures tend to be quite painful, they could be considered physical torture by someone with a different point of view.

Otherwise, I pretty much agree with  The_vagabond7.

 

Please put at least a little thought into this.

Your examples were horrible and don't apply here, because in your scenarios the procedure of cirumcising the child has a purpose, some kind of gain.

Instead think of a scenario where you have one guy in the woods alone with a baby. And he's got a hammer. There is no gain except for his own temporary pleasure.

Right or wrong? Good or evil?

 

If you're asking if I think it's acceptable to torture a baby, absolutely not, obviously. But if you're asking whether there is some intrinsic built in "sense of right and wrong"  that tells me this, then no, because there are people that would think it is ok to torture a baby as in various examples already given above.

Humanity doesn't have some built in "protect all defenseless children" morality in them, at best they have a "protect the children that belong to my societal group" instinct. As with the Israelites, slaughtering children of other nationalities was perfectly acceptable, and encouraged, they were to protect their young. Alot of modern people though, don't draw the line in nationality or religious group anymore, but rather the human race, and thusly feel that torturing or executing any baby would be wrong. Sometimes people even extend it to all mammals or life that is sufficiently complex. Protect baby seals, or other wild life, but who cares about insect larva, ect ect. Where as others would just as soon hunt aa baby seal for profit. We have an instinct to a certain extent to protect our own young, and mirror neurons give a certain degree of empathy (that is to say we experience pain or pleasure that we see, even if the stimuli isn't being directly applied to us) but such things vary wildly and are hardly concrete, and certainly doesn't represent a unified morality.



You can find me on facebook as Markus Van Rijn, if you friend me just mention you're from VGchartz and who you are here.

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mrstickball on 23 May 2010
The_vagabond7 said:

No actually, I spent the first twenty two years of my life studying all religions in depth before I decided they were all bunk. I've read the bible cover to cover multiple times in multiple translation, and it was definitely slavery. As for your point here....

Yes it says not to permanently injure them. You can beat them, just don't permanently injure them. That's not really something to be proud of. I mean did you read that chapter or any of the other sections on slavery? It only partially deals with slavery (will get to the slavery aspect in a second), but it's not flattering. If you give your slave a wife, and they have kids, they are born into slavery and you retain possession of the wife and children. You can hold his wife and children hostage as your property and he has to choose between being your servant forever with his family, or being free. You can sugar coat this, but any way you look at it, humans beings are being passed around bought and sold and treated as another human beings property.

For the first section that you mention, I'd argue that the Bible is talking about disciplinary action against slaves...As opposed to beating them half to death. The Bible uses similar language when it talks about punishing your own children too, but I don't think you'd argue the Bible endorses child beating.

you can even sell your own daughter into slavery with the expectation that either the slave owner or one of his sons will marry her one day. But oh, don't worry, the daughter you just sold into slavery must continue to receive food and water if her male master decides to add more women to his harem, he can't just forget about you, and if he decides to give her to his son it's like she's family now! So I guess it's not so bad after all selling your daughter to another man.

You are wrong about this part. Its in the same section of Exodus 21 that mentioned the punishment of slaves. Please read it again. It states that if the woman is taken in by a man, and he does not marry her, she has her rights to marry anyone intact (Exodus 21:10). If he does try to add her to a harem, she is free to go (Exodus 21:11).

Also being a woman, she never gets to go free unless her master decides to free her, women don't get the six years and freed on the seventh or work til the next jubilee year that jewish men do (note there are some scholars that disagree with this point). You buy her for keeps. Also, if you are a foreign slave you do not get to go free on the seventh year, they own you until they decide they are done with you.

The whole manservant thing really only applied to jewish men. There was a distinct line between debt slaves and foreign slaves. If you were a woman or a foreigner you were being sold into slavery, and you only hope was that they either do irreperable harm to you, or decide to let you go, or somebody else bought you and gave you freedom.

from leviticus 25

39“‘If one of your countrymen becomes poor among you and sells himself to you, do not make him work as a slave. 40He is to be treated as a hired worker or a temporary resident among you; he is to work for you until the Year of Jubilee. 41Then he and his children are to be released, and he will go back to his own clan and to the property of his forefathers. 42Because the Israelites are my servants, whom I brought out of Egypt, they must not be sold as slaves. 43Do not rule over them ruthlessly, but fear your God.

note if one of your "countrymen". Gods people are not to be slaves, merely hired workers for a time. It goes on.

44“‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.

 

Notice to distinction between the two groups. Jewish men had it cushy (just like in everything else in their culture), it was women and foreigners that were actually slaves. The israelites got special care as "slaves" , they were even allowed to buy themselves if they happen to have sold themself into slavery to a non jew, they could also be bought by their family, or they had to be released on the jubilee year as the passage goes on. God gave special favor to jewish men, but everybody else was a slave. And the foreigners either got sold into slavery or taken forcibly into slavery during one of their brutal conquests. But don't worry, they got to take the sabbath off too, because god is kindly and just.

And this goes along way towards how the non abolitionist christians felt justified in slavery. The bible never condemns it, merely instructs one how to do it properly (make sure god's men get the sweet end of the deal). You like to point out that abolitionists were christians, but like I said, so was everybody else in america all the slave owners included. Both of whom were pointing to the bible and drawing the exact opposite conclusions from it. Which sounds more like they had their own sense of morality and were making an appeal to the authority of the day to justify their cause.

As for the last two paragraphs, I would argue that the reason slavery was abolished was due to Christians. Christians were not the reason they were forced into slavery, however. Yes, there were some Christians that were pro-slavery, and I will not argue that, but again, I will point to the issue that the major forces in slavery were not pastors, or clergymen...But in the abolitionist movement, they were. 

Do not forget that when the Puritans came to America, they had no slaves - only servants. The idea of race-based slavery became an issue almost 100 years after the Puritans landed in the US.

I digress though, the OT laws concerning slavery are a.....Questionable. I guess it's a good thing that most Christians accept the NT as the guide for faith and practice, as opposed to the OT which is still the rule of thumb for Judiaisim.



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.

The_vagabond7 on 23 May 2010
mrstickball said:
 

As for the last two paragraphs, I would argue that the reason slavery was abolished was due to Christians. Christians were not the reason they were forced into slavery, however. Yes, there were some Christians that were pro-slavery, and I will not argue that, but again, I will point to the issue that the major forces in slavery were not pastors, or clergymen...But in the abolitionist movement, they were. 

Do not forget that when the Puritans came to America, they had no slaves - only servants. The idea of race-based slavery became an issue almost 100 years after the Puritans landed in the US.

I digress though, the OT laws concerning slavery are a.....Questionable. I guess it's a good thing that most Christians accept the NT as the guide for faith and practice, as opposed to the OT which is still the rule of thumb for Judiaisim.

I'll let it go, but your explanation makes little sense. How can you "disciplinary action" your slave to death? When it says the rod, it means the rod, unless you're doing something else to discipline your slave that is harmful enough that you have to see if they live through it or not before deciding whether or not the slave owner will be punished. And yes the bible definitely condones beating kids, hell it condones beating them to death with stones if they disobey their parents or bring shame to them. It's not like the israelites somehow found physical and capital punishment to be distasteful. I'd look up the exact verses, but I assume you know them already.

 

As for selling a woman into slavery it distinctly says that he can add more wives after he marries his slave woman as long as he continue to feed her, and sex her, and that she is not free to go unless she displeases him. Exodus 21:7-11 reads

7“If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as menservants do. 8If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself,b he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners, because he has broken faith with her. 9If he selects her for his son, he must grant her the rights of a daughter. 10If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights. 11If he does not provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without any payment of money.

The only way she gets to go free is if the man she is sold too is not pleased with her, then he can get a full refund, but he cannot sell her to foreigners (a generous acomodation by the ultimate law giver.) or if he stops feeding her after he gets a new wife. As long as he marries her or gives her to his son, they can continue to add more women for themselves as long as they continue to feed and clothe and get it on with her. She is sold into servitude permanently.

I don't blame you for the fallback position of "well the OT is screwed up, that's why we christians prefer the NT." Even modern jews don't use the OT in a literal sense because it's so screwed up. You don't see them still stoning disobedient children in modern day Israel. But you can't disown it, Jesus didn't claim that the Law was screwed up, or that the things god commanded his people to do were barbaric or....questionable. He merely came to "fulfill" the law, he still considered it to be the perfect Law of god, and that a single letter of it should never be changed, but in following him you would no longer be bound to the Law. The OT still stands for christians, and is a history of how god deals with humanity. It's just not used as the Law of the land these days because that would look like Iran or other middle eastern theocracies, which is not pretty.

 

Edit: Oh forgot the last point. You can argue that it was abolished because of christianity, but you wouldn't have much evidence for it beyond some of the leaders against it were christian clergy in a country that was almost 100% christian. You really think that in the south there weren't any preachers that were pro-slavery it was only laymen? Christianity is merely incidental to the history of slavery in the US, it's like trying to point to some other common feature such as mustaches and trying to say that there was a correlation between the two. Maybe people in the south had more mustaches in the north, meaning clean shaven faces were a key catalyst in the freeing of slaves. Both sides used the bible to justify their actions, so you can't claim that the bible was only used in one side of it.



You can find me on facebook as Markus Van Rijn, if you friend me just mention you're from VGchartz and who you are here.

Kamal on 23 May 2010

Ireneanas Theodicy it tells us that evil even natural evil is used as a soul-making process allowing us to inhibit faith, courage and fortitude.

While Augstinian Theodicy says that evil is generated by our free will as everything in the world in it's very essence is good e.g. Alcohol can be used as a septic for wounds, but if we miss use it we can use it for getting wasted and destroying our liver.

This is a philosophical sense at looking at evil



"Life is but a gentle death. Fate is but a sickness that results in extinction and in the midst of all the uncertainty, lies resolve."

mrstickball on 23 May 2010
The_vagabond7 said:
mrstickball said:
 

As for the last two paragraphs, I would argue that the reason slavery was abolished was due to Christians. Christians were not the reason they were forced into slavery, however. Yes, there were some Christians that were pro-slavery, and I will not argue that, but again, I will point to the issue that the major forces in slavery were not pastors, or clergymen...But in the abolitionist movement, they were. 

Do not forget that when the Puritans came to America, they had no slaves - only servants. The idea of race-based slavery became an issue almost 100 years after the Puritans landed in the US.

I digress though, the OT laws concerning slavery are a.....Questionable. I guess it's a good thing that most Christians accept the NT as the guide for faith and practice, as opposed to the OT which is still the rule of thumb for Judiaisim.

I'll let it go, but your explanation makes little sense. How can you "disciplinary action" your slave to death? When it says the rod, it means the rod, unless you're doing something else to discipline your slave that is harmful enough that you have to see if they live through it or not before deciding whether or not the slave owner will be punished. And yes the bible definitely condones beating kids, hell it condones beating them to death with stones if they disobey their parents or bring shame to them. It's not like the israelites somehow found physical and capital punishment to be distasteful. I'd look up the exact verses, but I assume you know them already.

 

As for selling a woman into slavery it distinctly says that he can add more wives after he marries his slave woman as long as he continue to feed her, and sex her, and that she is not free to go unless she displeases him. Exodus 21:7-11 reads

7“If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as menservants do. 8If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself,b he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners, because he has broken faith with her. 9If he selects her for his son, he must grant her the rights of a daughter. 10If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights. 11If he does not provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without any payment of money.

The only way she gets to go free is if the man she is sold too is not pleased with her, then he can get a full refund, but he cannot sell her to foreigners (a generous acomodation by the ultimate law giver.) or if he stops feeding her after he gets a new wife. As long as he marries her or gives her to his son, they can continue to add more women for themselves as long as they continue to feed and clothe and get it on with her. She is sold into servitude permanently.

I don't blame you for the fallback position of "well the OT is screwed up, that's why we christians prefer the NT." Even modern jews don't use the OT in a literal sense because it's so screwed up. You don't see them still stoning disobedient children in modern day Israel. But you can't disown it, Jesus didn't claim that the Law was screwed up, or that the things god commanded his people to do were barbaric or....questionable. He merely came to "fulfill" the law, he still considered it to be the perfect Law of god, and that a single letter of it should never be changed, but in following him you would no longer be bound to the Law. The OT still stands for christians, and is a history of how god deals with humanity. It's just not used as the Law of the land these days because that would look like Iran or other middle eastern theocracies, which is not pretty.

...You can discipline your kids to death too? Its called child abuse, and usually isn't tolerated :-p

I'd say that the law is trying to make a distinction between punishment and abuse - correlate the statement in Exodus 21 with the other statements regarding that even if so much as a tooth is broken on the slave, that he is to go free. Both together should give you a pretty clear picture that if you do serious injury to the slave, that they should be let go. That would lend a stronger argument to it being punishment rather than an attack.

For the other part - concerning adding wives - the NT does argue against that scenario when setting out rules for deacons and elders in the church...Which should mean that the argumen your using is either mis-interpreted (your argument), or that the law indeed changed. Also, do not forget that multiple wives were frowed upon in the book of Samuel, when dealing with the amount of power that kings were to wield if appointed to lead Israel.

The whole point of Christianity is to be 'like Christ'. Did Christ have multiple wives? Did he own slaves? Jesus Christ is our rule for right living, and last I checked...He didn't have any gross moral failures by today's standards. Better yet, did any of the NT apostles have multiple wives, slaves? I can't think of any there, either.

 



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.

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Slimebeast on 23 May 2010
The_vagabond7 said:
Slimebeast said:
Mise said:
Slimebeast said:
The_vagabond7 said:

Good and evil aren't real tangible objective things, they are entirely decided by the cultural zeitgeist of the day.

Really? So can think of a scenario where it's a good act to torture a baby?

Or rather, do you mean it is irrelevant to ever describe the act of torturing a child good/right or evil/wrong?

Don't know if this applies, but some cultures consider things like infant circumcision (without painkillers, of course) and ritual tattoos to be a good thing - and because both procedures tend to be quite painful, they could be considered physical torture by someone with a different point of view.

Otherwise, I pretty much agree with  The_vagabond7.

 

Please put at least a little thought into this.

Your examples were horrible and don't apply here, because in your scenarios the procedure of cirumcising the child has a purpose, some kind of gain.

Instead think of a scenario where you have one guy in the woods alone with a baby. And he's got a hammer. There is no gain except for his own temporary pleasure.

Right or wrong? Good or evil?

 

If you're asking if I think it's acceptable to torture a baby, absolutely not, obviously. But if you're asking whether there is some intrinsic built in "sense of right and wrong"  that tells me this, then no, because there are people that would think it is ok to torture a baby as in various examples already given above.

Humanity doesn't have some built in "protect all defenseless children" morality in them, at best they have a "protect the children that belong to my societal group" instinct. As with the Israelites, slaughtering children of other nationalities was perfectly acceptable, and encouraged, they were to protect their young. Alot of modern people though, don't draw the line in nationality or religious group anymore, but rather the human race, and thusly feel that torturing or executing any baby would be wrong. Sometimes people even extend it to all mammals or life that is sufficiently complex. Protect baby seals, or other wild life, but who cares about insect larva, ect ect. Where as others would just as soon hunt aa baby seal for profit. We have an instinct to a certain extent to protect our own young, and mirror neurons give a certain degree of empathy (that is to say we experience pain or pleasure that we see, even if the stimuli isn't being directly applied to us) but such things vary wildly and are hardly concrete, and certainly doesn't represent a unified morality.

So why is it not acceptable to torture a baby? Just because you happen to have genes that tell you so?

So what if I don't have those genes and I am not a product of your particular culture? Then your argument ends there. I would not listen to you and you would have no influence over my decisions.

 



The_vagabond7 on 23 May 2010
mrstickball said:
The_vagabond7 said:
mrstickball said:
 

As for the last two paragraphs, I would argue that the reason slavery was abolished was due to Christians. Christians were not the reason they were forced into slavery, however. Yes, there were some Christians that were pro-slavery, and I will not argue that, but again, I will point to the issue that the major forces in slavery were not pastors, or clergymen...But in the abolitionist movement, they were. 

Do not forget that when the Puritans came to America, they had no slaves - only servants. The idea of race-based slavery became an issue almost 100 years after the Puritans landed in the US.

I digress though, the OT laws concerning slavery are a.....Questionable. I guess it's a good thing that most Christians accept the NT as the guide for faith and practice, as opposed to the OT which is still the rule of thumb for Judiaisim.

I'll let it go, but your explanation makes little sense. How can you "disciplinary action" your slave to death? When it says the rod, it means the rod, unless you're doing something else to discipline your slave that is harmful enough that you have to see if they live through it or not before deciding whether or not the slave owner will be punished. And yes the bible definitely condones beating kids, hell it condones beating them to death with stones if they disobey their parents or bring shame to them. It's not like the israelites somehow found physical and capital punishment to be distasteful. I'd look up the exact verses, but I assume you know them already.

 

As for selling a woman into slavery it distinctly says that he can add more wives after he marries his slave woman as long as he continue to feed her, and sex her, and that she is not free to go unless she displeases him. Exodus 21:7-11 reads

7“If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as menservants do. 8If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself,b he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners, because he has broken faith with her. 9If he selects her for his son, he must grant her the rights of a daughter. 10If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights. 11If he does not provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without any payment of money.

The only way she gets to go free is if the man she is sold too is not pleased with her, then he can get a full refund, but he cannot sell her to foreigners (a generous acomodation by the ultimate law giver.) or if he stops feeding her after he gets a new wife. As long as he marries her or gives her to his son, they can continue to add more women for themselves as long as they continue to feed and clothe and get it on with her. She is sold into servitude permanently.

I don't blame you for the fallback position of "well the OT is screwed up, that's why we christians prefer the NT." Even modern jews don't use the OT in a literal sense because it's so screwed up. You don't see them still stoning disobedient children in modern day Israel. But you can't disown it, Jesus didn't claim that the Law was screwed up, or that the things god commanded his people to do were barbaric or....questionable. He merely came to "fulfill" the law, he still considered it to be the perfect Law of god, and that a single letter of it should never be changed, but in following him you would no longer be bound to the Law. The OT still stands for christians, and is a history of how god deals with humanity. It's just not used as the Law of the land these days because that would look like Iran or other middle eastern theocracies, which is not pretty.

...You can discipline your kids to death too? Its called child abuse, and usually isn't tolerated :-p

I'd say that the law is trying to make a distinction between punishment and abuse - correlate the statement in Exodus 21 with the other statements regarding that even if so much as a tooth is broken on the slave, that he is to go free. Both together should give you a pretty clear picture that if you do serious injury to the slave, that they should be let go. That would lend a stronger argument to it being punishment rather than an attack.

For the other part - concerning adding wives - the NT does argue against that scenario when setting out rules for deacons and elders in the church...Which should mean that the argumen your using is either mis-interpreted (your argument), or that the law indeed changed. Also, do not forget that multiple wives were frowed upon in the book of Samuel, when dealing with the amount of power that kings were to wield if appointed to lead Israel.

The whole point of Christianity is to be 'like Christ'. Did Christ have multiple wives? Did he own slaves? Jesus Christ is our rule for right living, and last I checked...He didn't have any gross moral failures by today's standards. Better yet, did any of the NT apostles have multiple wives, slaves? I can't think of any there, either.

 

 

You're kind of arguing my point, I think you are conflating what I'm saying as an argument against christianity. Rather I am arguing that our morality is not divinely inspired, and that our culture has to do with what we deem good and evil. You can discipline your child to death, and today that isn't tolerated. But in the israelites time, it was very much tolerated, and in fact commanded. The point is that the OT shows that our morality has evolved, it isn't intrinsic, we don't just have a sense of automatic right and wrong. The fact that you find the OT's views on slavery questionable, try to find some room so that permanent servitude and violence towards slaves isn't so bad, and that you resort to using the NT to show that the OT is wrong about polygamy shows that we have come a long way from the genocidal, mysogynistic, barbarians of the OT. It's great that Jesus was nothing like the patriarchs that employed the death penalty for the smallest of offenses, even for children. It's great that he wasn't a polygamist, and it's great that he wasn't demanding the genocide of the romans, and it's great he wasn't telling his disciples to go collect some slaves from neighboring countries. But that's exactly what God commanded his people to do and that's the Law he gave them in the OT. It's great that you think that those are bad things, that's because today's moral zeitgeist frowns upon throwing rocks at a child until he dies as a punishment for his disobedience, or bringing shame to his parents.

My point is that a person can't look at the laws god gave his people and find them questionable, and at the same time say god inspired our morality. If a person can't look at god talking about how he's going to gather the medes together so that they can gang rape mens wives and murder their children while they watch and say "Yeah, that's totally a righteous an appropriate thing to do. It's perfectly loving and just well tempered punishment for the babylonians." then a person can't claim that their morality is divinely inspired by that same god. If a person can't look at the OT's god's views on slavery, capturing foreign women and forcing them to be your wife, executing children by the thousands, and using the most brutal forms of capital punishment for minor crimes,  then they can't in honesty say that such a god is the source of their morality. Like the Buddha , the Christ was a great humanist philosopher, but his views on ethics are in almost direct opposition to the god he claims to be (or be the son of depending on your sect). Which is a very very good thing.



You can find me on facebook as Markus Van Rijn, if you friend me just mention you're from VGchartz and who you are here.

The_vagabond7 on 23 May 2010
Slimebeast said:
The_vagabond7 said:
Slimebeast said:
Mise said:
Slimebeast said:
The_vagabond7 said:

Good and evil aren't real tangible objective things, they are entirely decided by the cultural zeitgeist of the day.

Really? So can think of a scenario where it's a good act to torture a baby?

Or rather, do you mean it is irrelevant to ever describe the act of torturing a child good/right or evil/wrong?

Don't know if this applies, but some cultures consider things like infant circumcision (without painkillers, of course) and ritual tattoos to be a good thing - and because both procedures tend to be quite painful, they could be considered physical torture by someone with a different point of view.

Otherwise, I pretty much agree with  The_vagabond7.

 

Please put at least a little thought into this.

Your examples were horrible and don't apply here, because in your scenarios the procedure of cirumcising the child has a purpose, some kind of gain.

Instead think of a scenario where you have one guy in the woods alone with a baby. And he's got a hammer. There is no gain except for his own temporary pleasure.

Right or wrong? Good or evil?

 

If you're asking if I think it's acceptable to torture a baby, absolutely not, obviously. But if you're asking whether there is some intrinsic built in "sense of right and wrong"  that tells me this, then no, because there are people that would think it is ok to torture a baby as in various examples already given above.

Humanity doesn't have some built in "protect all defenseless children" morality in them, at best they have a "protect the children that belong to my societal group" instinct. As with the Israelites, slaughtering children of other nationalities was perfectly acceptable, and encouraged, they were to protect their young. Alot of modern people though, don't draw the line in nationality or religious group anymore, but rather the human race, and thusly feel that torturing or executing any baby would be wrong. Sometimes people even extend it to all mammals or life that is sufficiently complex. Protect baby seals, or other wild life, but who cares about insect larva, ect ect. Where as others would just as soon hunt aa baby seal for profit. We have an instinct to a certain extent to protect our own young, and mirror neurons give a certain degree of empathy (that is to say we experience pain or pleasure that we see, even if the stimuli isn't being directly applied to us) but such things vary wildly and are hardly concrete, and certainly doesn't represent a unified morality.

So why is it not acceptable to torture a baby? Just because you happen to have genes that tell you so?

So what if I don't have those genes and I am not a product of your particular culture? Then your argument ends there. I would not listen to you and you would have no influence over my decisions.

 

Point being? Have you looked at the middle east? They don't listen to me, and my views on ethics don't influence their decisions, and my arguments would have no affect on them. That's kind of the point.



You can find me on facebook as Markus Van Rijn, if you friend me just mention you're from VGchartz and who you are here.

Slimebeast on 23 May 2010
The_vagabond7 said:
Slimebeast said:
The_vagabond7 said:
Slimebeast said:
Mise said:
Slimebeast said:
The_vagabond7 said:

Good and evil aren't real tangible objective things, they are entirely decided by the cultural zeitgeist of the day.

Really? So can think of a scenario where it's a good act to torture a baby?

Or rather, do you mean it is irrelevant to ever describe the act of torturing a child good/right or evil/wrong?

Don't know if this applies, but some cultures consider things like infant circumcision (without painkillers, of course) and ritual tattoos to be a good thing - and because both procedures tend to be quite painful, they could be considered physical torture by someone with a different point of view.

Otherwise, I pretty much agree with  The_vagabond7.

 

Please put at least a little thought into this.

Your examples were horrible and don't apply here, because in your scenarios the procedure of cirumcising the child has a purpose, some kind of gain.

Instead think of a scenario where you have one guy in the woods alone with a baby. And he's got a hammer. There is no gain except for his own temporary pleasure.

Right or wrong? Good or evil?

 

If you're asking if I think it's acceptable to torture a baby, absolutely not, obviously. But if you're asking whether there is some intrinsic built in "sense of right and wrong"  that tells me this, then no, because there are people that would think it is ok to torture a baby as in various examples already given above.

Humanity doesn't have some built in "protect all defenseless children" morality in them, at best they have a "protect the children that belong to my societal group" instinct. As with the Israelites, slaughtering children of other nationalities was perfectly acceptable, and encouraged, they were to protect their young. Alot of modern people though, don't draw the line in nationality or religious group anymore, but rather the human race, and thusly feel that torturing or executing any baby would be wrong. Sometimes people even extend it to all mammals or life that is sufficiently complex. Protect baby seals, or other wild life, but who cares about insect larva, ect ect. Where as others would just as soon hunt aa baby seal for profit. We have an instinct to a certain extent to protect our own young, and mirror neurons give a certain degree of empathy (that is to say we experience pain or pleasure that we see, even if the stimuli isn't being directly applied to us) but such things vary wildly and are hardly concrete, and certainly doesn't represent a unified morality.

So why is it not acceptable to torture a baby? Just because you happen to have genes that tell you so?

So what if I don't have those genes and I am not a product of your particular culture? Then your argument ends there. I would not listen to you and you would have no influence over my decisions.

 

Point being? Have you looked at the middle east? They don't listen to me, and my views on ethics don't influence their decisions, and my arguments would have no affect on them. That's kind of the point.

Exactly. Point being that atheist morals as you, highwaystar and others in this thread have presented them are practically worthless.

Why would I ever listen to you when we debate immigrant policies, racism or whatever?

And thus I've reached full circle in this thread: 

Slimebeast said:
highwaystar101 said:

My real answer, events happen naturally , we are the ones that label them good and evil.

We also label these events in a spectrum. There is no such thing as good and evil per se, but good on one side of the spectrum and evil on the other, and everything exists as points in between.

The atheist view. Because everything that happens is predetermined (minus some randomness on the quantum level or whatever) there is no free will. And therefore no one is accountable for his actions. Thus there is no such thing as right or wrong, no good or evil.

 



highwaystar101 on 23 May 2010
Slimebeast said:
highwaystar101 said:
Slimebeast said:

I wish you had been sober when you wrote your reply.

These kinds of debates are exhausting for me cos I'm not very good with words, especially as there's a language barrier. So I'll give you a chance to edit before I reply.

Oh, ok. Usually when I'm drunk I suffer from 'perfectionism', where I will try very hard to try and be coherent. It annoys a lot of people lol. But I can see that I did ramble on a bit. Perhaps I can list my arguments and you can draw from the other post...

Green:

1. Instinctive morals work. We have evolved to feel repulsed by committing certain acts, but it unfortunately has a certain degree of error where people will commit hideous acts. I challenge you to prove that this degree of error doesn't also exist within unified sets of morals.

2. Yes, I don't think aliens have a unified set of morals. If aliens came, unless they felt compassionate due to some social or biological evolution, I think we would be wiped out.

 

Blue:

1. If God is all knowing and omnipotent, then why did he feel the need to change his morals from the old testament to the new testament? Shouldn't God be able to determine everlasting Universal rules in the first instance.

2. Why are his old morals now defunct? What was the catalyst causing God to condone murdering blasphemers but then change his stance?

3. Christians, Jews and Muslims have all adapted/evolved their morals past Gods decree. I see this as reason to believe there is no divine backing to morals.

 

Orange:

1. There is no evidence for a divine origin of morals, however there is a lot of evidence for the evolution of morals.

2. There are plenty of morals in the bible that have no bearing on the modern world.

3. All people have instinctive morals, it's just that some mask their instinctive morals with religion.

 

Extra question:

Why is one unified set of morals the one true representation? There are many unified sets of morals that claim to be divine and infallible. Many of these conflict, why are the unified set of morals of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, Judaism, etc... incorrect, when many of them claim to have a divine and infallible backing the same as Christianity's?

 

You know what. You are arguing that morals are completely subjective. I want you to be aware of that.

So I want to ask you, why do you even start to argue with me if I say "Go BNP!" or whatever?

1. So instinct is good. I can partly agree with that. But what if somebody doesnt have that same insticnt? There are a lot of people who instinctively get pleasure from torturing animals. You wouldnt even try to argue with them. It's like you deny the whole world or moral argument that is out there in 1000's of philosofy books??

I'd say instinctive morals work only to a degree.

2. Of course you can assume the aliens would be compassionate. They could be or they could not. Morals still play a part in their decision. The question is, would they kill us or spare us and on what grounds? Morals arent the same as feelings of sympathy. They're tied to feelings, but not the same. You are dodging the question by avoiding the aliens part. By calling it a strawman or whatever. You wouldnt even argue with the aliens. But I know our leaders would.

Blue

Im skipping this part, for many reasons.

Orange.

1. Your replies are all over the place, you're changing the topic. So I repeat:

But the three guys with a hammer, their genes maybe don't produce such a feeling. So how could I (or you) then condemn them?

Nearly every atheist will in fact, just like you, argue that it's wrong to torment the baby no matter if it was in pre-historic times, today or by an alien on an alien planet and yet in these discussions he will drop comments like we already seen in this thread "it's all relative" - that is, the atheist will attribute himself to absolute morals (damn, I dont think attribute is the proper word) and contradicts himself without knowing it.

Extra question:
Of course everyone claims to have the truth. What is your point?

Green:

"So what if somebody doesn't have that same instinct?", seriously?

We all have the instinct, it's just that some people get pleasure out of torturing animals and that's sad. As I said, there is a "nut case factor" to it, you will get those few people who torture animals, and I've never hidden this fact. It's a sad flaw in evolution, which by definition can never be perfect.

What gets me is that you make this point whilst conveniently skipping what I said about the "nut case factor" of people who have unified sets of morals, as though you think Christians and other people who accept unified sets of religious morals are incapable of such acts. Are you seriously going to say that no Christian in the history of mankind has ever tortured an animals and got pleasure from it, regardless of their "unified morals" they accept?

Oh, and I would argue the people torturing the animal. You seem to think that atheists have no morals that we would try and form a consensus on. 99% of us would agree that torturing an animal is wrong and we would determine that no individual should do this. Don't believe it happens? Then take that up with every secular society on the planet. Social morals do exist without the influence of religion.

 

Blue:

Why are you skipping it? I have a perfectly valid point. Why do your Unified set of morals that you believe have been given from an omnipotent, infallible, divine creator change? What was the catalyst for this change? Why does an infallible all knowing eternal God change so rapidly?

 

Orange:

My points are not all over the place, I'm not changing the topic, you just don't want to take up the way I'm going with this.

To your question about the three guys and a hammer, are you seriously saying that because it is not part of their instinct we can't condemn them? It's really not down to what the individual feels, it's down to how the society instinctively feels about certain actions as a group. A secular court of law would judge them and punish them with no influence from a divine set of morals.

And are we using absolute morals? Yes, we are not arguing that we aren't. We just get our absolute morals come from instinct. Morals don't particularly exist within the individual, they exist on a wider basis. We are social creatures and our morals come from us, not what we believe to be the correct God.

Now back to my orange arguments...

1. Are you going to reject the evidence for the evolution of morals, and claim that your divine morals are the primary source of moral behaviour?

2. Do all of the morals in the bible have bearing on the modern world, and all morals that exist outside the Bible in the modern world are false? Because if you don't accept this, then you accept that morals have evolved past your unified set of morals.

3. I assert that all morals are instinctive and that religious morals are just the instinctive morals masked with religion. It's just that I think you've labelled them and claimed they are from a divine source, when really they are made by man.

 

Extra question:

What I'm getting at is that how can you be certain that your unified set of morals is the correct one. Why are you right and everyone else is wrong? For example, why is the Hindu set of morals wrong? Can you prove that they're wrong and that yours is right?

If you can't, then how can you be so certain that your set of morals is right?

... 

Also, if your morals are unified from an infallible divine source then they are inflexible. Instinctive morals are adaptable to a changing environment. Given this point, whose morals are going to be more effective in the modern world?

And if your morals are open to interpretation, then they are only as good as the weakest link (man) and brought instantly to the level of instinctive morals.