Catholic question
Offline In no way do I intend to offend anyone. I have been looking for a while and I just can't find an answer yet. I am just curious how one derives the "value" of human life if there is not some "higher being." That is not to say that you must believe in God to be a "good" person (as defined by me), I know PLENTY of great Atheist, Agnostics, Christians, ext. But I am just not able to figure how anyone could possibly be "right" if there is nothing higher than us?
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Offline I dont think it is hard to understand, in my opinion it appears that if there is no "higher" power there is no true right or wrong, only opinions. You say it depends ont situation and circumstance, but if that is the case right is not alway right and wrong is not always wrong so there can't really be a true right or wrong.
Then with your godly morals there is no true right or wrong. Killing for fun is wrong by your godly morals. But is killing always wrong by your godly morals? I'd hope not, because your god has killed according to his biography. Depending on circumstances, killing can be good.
You see, killing being wrong depends on circumstances no matter where morals are based. Again killing for fun is wrong. If you are killing to keep someone from setting off an atomic bomb in Manhattan, it is good, not wrong. Killing changed from wrong to good because of circumstances.
“Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have always known it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek" -- Tom Robbins
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Quote:Well, that's how the bible was written. A bunch of opinions that may or may not be truth.This is unjustified.
Quote:Except you don't even seem to know what truth is, and so your whole foundation is flawed. Truth has nothing to do with this conversation. A moral isn't true. It's a concept. If it were true, it would be universal. It is not universal, so it cannot be true.
That is terrifically patent circular logic. Truth has everything to do with this conversation. If, as your claim, survival is the reason we hold any opinion, truth itself is an illusion/non-existent. Moral truth is merely a subset of truth. However, you assert moral truth is not true, and hence not true. Terrifically circular.
Quote:Fallacy. You're depending on bullshit to further bullshit. Your own religion proves that your god is inadequate to be a standard for good and evil. Any appearance of arbitrary decisions regarding morality remove any capability of your god to claim itself as morally superior. And since god was directly or indirectly responsible for at least 2-3 million seperate and distinct crimes against his own tenets, god cannot claim moral superiority.I have no idea what you are talking about but it does not answer my question. Christians do not believe that God is arbitrary at all. I repeat my argument and await your reply. Ignoring it and calling it 'bullshit' does not change anything.
Further, I see no reason why you are saying God committed '2-3 million' crimes. First, because the number it totally arbitrary, and second because it is does not have justification at all.
Lastly, God does not 'claim moral superiority.' God, by way of eminence, is the cause of truth, being, goodness, and morality itself. It has nothing to do with being morally superior, as God is morality.
Quote:Evidence of your false god is impossible to find. Or I would not be here protesting your lies. Morals flow from evolution.Ok, then. Assert something without evidence and pretend it to be an argument.
Quote:I don't care how you define truth. Truth is truth. It has nothing to do with your god. Every time you claim truth along side god you are lying. Linguistically and materially.I still see no unique reason why you can claim that truth exists. I likewise see no justification why "every time [I] claim truth alongside god [I] am lying. Linguistically and materially." That last part doesn't even make sense.
Quote:A statement does not equal an opinion. It can be an opinion, but it can also be a fact. And if you really meant "statement" instead of opinion, then your argument is even more flawed.No it does not, but there is a different sense of the word 'opinion' I am using. It does no harm to my argument. If you want to maintain your position, only opinions (properly speaking of opinions) can exist, as no statement can be properly said to be a 'fact' as it cannot possess either truth or falsity.
Quote:"you must hold that no true or false statements can exist"I am not going to become irrational, much as you might like me to. As such, I just have to laugh at the new meaning your sentence has. Yeah, there really needs to be a god in order for: "The grass is green" to be true.*Rolls eyes*
Except that there does. If no objective and necessary cause exists, there is no reason why truth exists.
Quote:*Sigh* So I misread you. The standard of truth itself and the search of it is reality. Logic. Science. Etc.Ok, but that still does not satisfy. How can truth exist if it is identified with changeable things (like 'survival' or 'man' as being the standard of truth)?
Reality, if we mean 'being,' is the same standard I use for truth. However, we must refer, again, to a necessarily existent cause in order to claim that truth is founded in reality.
Quote:You can beg all you like, it doesn't make you right. You're making an assumption that you can prove even less than your god. The day you can prove your god = truth, bring it.
I can make neither heads nor tails of that second sentence ("You're making an assumption..."
. Likewise, I have been proving that truth requires God to be logically coherent.
Quote:How about the dictionary? Duh. Your continued attempts to contradict obvious reality are laughable. I'm starting to wonder if you have a mental disorder that causes some kind of neural loop in your brain.Is the dictionary the cause of truth? I cross out 'moon' in Webster's dictionary and the moon ceases to exist? That seems a silly definition.
Quote:Only because you are irrational.
I am growing to dislike unsupported assertions.
Quote:Bullshit. It's easily done with medical equipment and observation.Medical equipment is the standard? If 'survival' is the standard of truth, how can this apply to define 'pain.' What 'pain' is would merely be my opinion of pain, as my quest for survival dictates a particular view of pain. Medical equipment would only be an extension of my opinion of what 'pain' is. Is 'pain' a lighting of neurons in the top or bottom of the brain? Just because I associate some sensation with 'pain' would not ensure that there is any truth in what 'pain' is.
Quote:No measurement possible without an objective standard.Irrational argument.
Why? How can you measure without a ruler or some other instrument of measurement?
Quote:Just because you don't like democracy does not mean your god exists. Yeesh.What does democracy have to do with anything we have been speaking about? Does the state determine moral truth? I would disagree.
Quote:Have fun maintaining your lies and assumptions. Good doesn't exist. Truth is a dictionary term that you REALLY need to look up some day. And my statement is self justifying.I have no idea why you are so rampant in name-calling.
As for "truth," here is the dictionary.com defintion: "conformity with fact or reality." An atheist cannot have a conformity with reality because reality has no objective value. If survival is the standard of what constitutes reality, then everything is merely relative.
Lastly, saying your statement is 'self-justifying' does not prove anything. You need to explain something in order to argue it. You cannot merely assert that it is true.
Quote:My statement is self justifying. You simply use irrationality to attempt to poke holes in it. Which, by the way, fails by default. It seems to me that you are a very shallow person morally. Otherwise you wouldn't even be able to come up with these questions. Here, I'll give you a bone. People like you need to believe in a god or some kind of imaginary friend or risk falling apart. But that doesn't mean your god exists. And just because you need it, that does not mean that every one does.Shallow morally? What does this have to do with anything, even if I am? I do not see why we are making such weird and unjustified assertions. Second, I do not appreciate name-calling. Third, it makes you look unable to argue because all you can do is insult others.
Lastly, I do not believe in God as an 'imaginary friend.' I know God to be necessary in order to formulate meaningful propositions about reality and in order to account for the existence of the universe. I further believe Him to have become incarnate as Jesus Christ and to have founded the Church, I hope to achieve salvation in heaven, and I love Him in this life and look forward to being happy with Him in eternity.
Quote:So we can ask this question: is survival itself is good? and other questions like, what aspects of survival make it good? is the alternative to survival bad?Can these questions be answered empirically or logically? Can one provide a logical argument that survival of the human species is better than the alternative?If we can't, does that have implications for a system of morals based on this end? For example, if someone shot a fellow just for the hell of it, would we in prosecuting him have the burden of proving that survival of the human species is a good thing?
There is no room in atheism for maintaining that any view is true or good. There is no basis for it.
Quote:I have yet to see you explain how it would. I can't answer an objection unless you actually voice one as something other than an unsubstantiated statement.To say human morals are based in nature as a necessary component of our nature as social animals says absolutely nothing about truth. Whether what we as humans see as "good" due to our nature as social animals is good independent of our experience as humans is unimportant. If "good" does not exist as we humans know it on the dark side of the third moon of planet x-4550 makes absolutely no difference on whether or not it is truly "good" as far as we are concerned. We can only understand truth in the way that it affects us as a group. Being as that you are a human and will never experience anything as anything but a human, what difference could it possibly make whether something is true when removed from human experience? Viewing this good from a non-affected perspective is the only way the need for your desired truth could be of any consequence whatsoever.
If truth is merely a by-product of evolution, there is no reason this statement has any truth. There is no meaning to it. It is a contradiction. Truth is essential if we wish to speak about anything.
Quote:Survival is the reason for good. Our natural need to be able to survive in groups is the foundation of good. No standard is required. Even if there was a standard it would be of absolutely no importance.If there would be no standard for what is true, nothing (including that 'there is no standard for truth'
Second, survival does not determine all good. How is knowledge and contemplation good, as it does not necessarily further survival?
Third, 'good' is a term similar to 'true' in that truth indicates a good of the intellect. If good does not exist, truth does not either.
Quote:Fact 1. All morality that we humans have exist as a result of ourselves.Unsupported assertion.
Quote:Fact 2. Different groups of people have had different morality. People 100 years ago had a different morality from what we have today. People in Afghanistan under Taliban had a different morality than people in Europe or people in US. So morality obviously depends on time and geography and culture. Seems to me that the evidence we have indicate that morality comes from ourselves and not from God.
Morality might be discovered by man in different ways, but that says nothing about what moral truth is in itself. Further, the range of moral opinions you imply never existed - most morals opinions throughout time have been fairly close. Lastly, this does not necessitate that morality does not depend on an objective standard. In fact, morality must if it exists as true.
Quote:Fact 3. The morality in the old testament is immoral. They stone people for the smallest crimes, they want to force a man to have sex with his brother's widow because his brother died before he had any children. They want to force a girl to marry her rapist. Thus, the biblical moral is immoral. If that is your source of morality then you and your god are immoral beings. If you want to stone your children from speaking up against you I am sure the police wants to have a chat with you.
This is rather unfounded and also rather ignorant of what the Old Testament says. Nobody ever said that someone should marry their rapist. Nor does it dictate 'stoning' people for the 'smallest crimes.' Nor does it force a man to have sex with his brother's widow. Further, the interpretation of the moral precepts of the Old Testament is not limited purely to my interpretation of what they mean; the Church, or (for the Jews) their rabbinic interpreters.
[quote
This is where the fact that survival must be a goal of a living organism comes into play. We must think that life is good or else we cease to exist. Life could never form anywhere unless by its nature its goal was survival. Since life exists we know for a fact that it has a natural goal of survival.If the first life form had not expended the energy required to exist then no other life form would ever have existed. It necessarily, by its nature as life, had to work toward a goal of survival. This is true of any life form.
If truth is merely a side effect, does it ever have any meaning? Then your statement is merely a side-effect that evolution, according to arbitrary standards, judges to be useful.
"As far as any human is concerned" is the only way good and evil can possibly make sense or be of any importance to any human.
In so far as human beings are the agents of morality, yes. But this does not mean that morality is only our personal opinions, or by-products of evolution.
They are objective human morals based in nature. Without humans, human morals can no longer exist whether objective and based in nature or not.
They are not objective. What determines morality? You claim that survival of the individual determines truth, but what determines the truth of that statement? It goes on ad absurdum.
We should strive to make this place a happy place for all people and to live in harmony with nature and blah blah blah. This includes that we should not cause other species to go extinct or wreck havoc on earth. It also includes that we should strive to learn more about nature and the world around us. Science has been a great boon to human civilization for the last few centuries where it has been active. I think it has proven its worth and if we could put more money in science and less into military I think it would be a good thing overall.
Except that these choices for what is moral would be totally arbitrary. There is no reason why I ought to support other species at all. There is no reason I ought to save a whale from extinction rather than kill my friend. There is no basis for moral decisions.
What we do not need more of in this world is superstitious religious nuts who want to introduce ID in school and fly airplanes into buildings and blow themselves and innocent people around them to pieces because they believe they can get to heaven that way.
This is libelous and unnecessary.
No need for god in any form of moral. Gods just makes morality more muddy and unclear.
God makes things much clearer than 'let's all just get along.' Further, without a foundation, you are not just living with muddy morality, but no morality.
What else is there really?Moral is easy:
- Don't take or inflict damage to anything that is not yours
- Don't harm other humans or animals.
Religion adds a whole lot of other crap that is not needed.
Except that your standards of what is or is not moral is totally arbitrary.
God creates a standard in which I can make moral decisions (not in His will, but in the fact that He exists independent of myself and hence is a stable foundation on which to place truth).
Well, I can't speak for atheists, but as for myself, this is what I've been explaining in my posts. There is no such thing as my morals and Hitler's morals, or Mother Theresa's morals and Papa Doc's morals. Hitler had the same morals I do, he merely made justifications to commit the acts he commited.
That is gonna go over real well in the Borscht Belt.
I would agree with your seeming statement that morals are non-relative, but you have no way in which you can claim that.
Lastly, if you assume a set moral code for all people, you cannot prove how it exists independent of a subjective perspective.
Morals are not opinion. Do you know what's right and wrong? I would bet that it is very similar to what anyone else you ask thinks is right or wrong. No two people will have the exact same idea of what is right and wrong unless they have been indoctrinated to follow a certain rigid code. This is because people have intelligence which allows them to consider morals and justify actions. But, because people are all humans, they all have similar morals.
This, essentially, is what the Church believes. Human beings naturally have a moral sense of right and wrong that can be discovered naturally. However, as an atheist, it becomes unclear how you could say that what is 'true for me' is 'true for all men.'
Of course there is nothing, no god with a promise of heaven and threat of hell to make people adhere to natural morals, or to keep them from finding ways to justify mass murder or genocide within morals, but for most people this is not the way they choose to live, or are genetically predisposed to live (depending on whether one goes with nature or nuture).
The Christian does not claim that the threat of hell is what creates moral code. The Christian claims that God's existence as the Eternal Law ensures the existence and objectivity of the Natural Law.
Because we are in many ways, and we all have just as much right as any other to existence. Whether that is no right or every right is unimportant. We have equal right and that says that each should be respected as equal.
If there are no rights, there can be no way you can say that every thing must be respected equally. You have no place from which to claim that rights of any sort exist.
Isn't a god existing just your opinion? See you can ask this question of anything and since all you have to answer with is the thoughts from your own mind, how do you answer such a question? You can't answer from anything other than a human perspective using your human senses and what you have learned through personal human experience. It is impossible for a human to do anything else whether a god were to exist or not.
What I know is not the same as opinion. I know God exists because I see that things exist dependent upon a first cause - God.
As to whether or not we let the most intelligent make the rules, well, that depends. It seems to be a sound idea as long as the intelligent person has a level of altruism we find acceptable, We also want to have our own say in the matter so that our interests are seen to, etc.. There is much more than intelligence that is required to make a good leader. I think that aside from the anomally of the current U.S. president, humans normally do try to put people of above average intelligence into positions of power.
Intelligence is irrelevant if there is no reason why some thing ought to be true or moral rather than another.
Yours In Christ, Eternal Wisdom,
StMichael
I ignore your post because i can't read a thing with that font. Please stop copy pasting. Thank you.
God had no time to create time.
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I'm just not sure what evil you are talking about?
Why is this hard to understand? It is no different than with your godly morality. It will either be good or bad or some combination of the two. It must have some effect one way or the other and that effect will be either good or bad or in between depending on the act, situation, circumstances. Being non-omniscient you will not always know all the possible outcomes of any event, but you don't with godly morals either.And as with godly morals whether an action is good or bad it is still you who must decide, in your human mind, whether or not to commit the act.
“Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have always known it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek" -- Tom Robbins
A lion killing a deer wouldn't be a moral issue but a survival issue - just like a man killing a cow is not a moral issue. A lion will not generally kill another of it's own kind for the mere sake of it, and neither will a human. It will only be 'wrong' or 'right' depending on what angle you view it from. As a victim it's wrong, as the killer it's right.
God had no time to create time.
Because of this unique social cohesion, the dominant entity, the leader, has to do more than impose his rule and domination by his strength - he has to demonstrate wisdom and judgement.
God had no time to create time.
I dont think it is hard to understand, in my opinion it appears that if there is no "higher" power there is no true right or wrong, only opinions. You say it depends ont situation and circumstance, but if that is the case right is not alway right and wrong is not always wrong so there can't really be a true right or wrong
So you would agree that all we have are opinions, and noones opinion is better/more valuable than anothers?
This is unjustified.
That is terrifically patent circular logic. Truth has everything to do with this conversation. If, as your claim, survival is the reason we hold any opinion, truth itself is an illusion/non-existent. Moral truth is merely a subset of truth. However, you assert moral truth is not true, and hence not true. Terrifically circular.
I have no idea what you are talking about but it does not answer my question. Christians do not believe that God is arbitrary at all. I repeat my argument and await your reply. Ignoring it and calling it 'bullshit' does not change anything.
Further, I see no reason why you are saying God committed '2-3 million' crimes. First, because the number it totally arbitrary, and second because it is does not have justification at all.
Lastly, God does not 'claim moral superiority.' God, by way of eminence, is the cause of truth, being, goodness, and morality itself. It has nothing to do with being morally superior, as God is morality.
Ok, then. Assert something without evidence and pretend it to be an argument.
I still see no unique reason why you can claim that truth exists. I likewise see no justification why "every time [I] claim truth alongside god [I] am lying. Linguistically and materially." That last part doesn't even make sense.
No it does not, but there is a different sense of the word 'opinion' I am using. It does no harm to my argument. If you want to maintain your position, only opinions (properly speaking of opinions) can exist, as no statement can be properly said to be a 'fact' as it cannot possess either truth or falsity.
Except that there does. If no objective and necessary cause exists, there is no reason why truth exists.
Ok, but that still does not satisfy. How can truth exist if it is identified with changeable things (like 'survival' or 'man' as being the standard of truth)?
Reality, if we mean 'being,' is the same standard I use for truth. However, we must refer, again, to a necessarily existent cause in order to claim that truth is founded in reality.
I can make neither heads nor tails of that second sentence ("You're making an assumption..."
. Likewise, I have been proving that truth requires God to be logically coherent.
Is the dictionary the cause of truth? I cross out 'moon' in Webster's dictionary and the moon ceases to exist? That seems a silly definition.
I am growing to dislike unsupported assertions.
Medical equipment is the standard? If 'survival' is the standard of truth, how can this apply to define 'pain.' What 'pain' is would merely be my opinion of pain, as my quest for survival dictates a particular view of pain. Medical equipment would only be an extension of my opinion of what 'pain' is. Is 'pain' a lighting of neurons in the top or bottom of the brain? Just because I associate some sensation with 'pain' would not ensure that there is any truth in what 'pain' is.
Why? How can you measure without a ruler or some other instrument of measurement?
What does democracy have to do with anything we have been speaking about? Does the state determine moral truth? I would disagree.
I have no idea why you are so rampant in name-calling.
As for "truth," here is the dictionary.com defintion: "conformity with fact or reality." An atheist cannot have a conformity with reality because reality has no objective value. If survival is the standard of what constitutes reality, then everything is merely relative.
Lastly, saying your statement is 'self-justifying' does not prove anything. You need to explain something in order to argue it. You cannot merely assert that it is true.
Shallow morally? What does this have to do with anything, even if I am? I do not see why we are making such weird and unjustified assertions. Second, I do not appreciate name-calling. Third, it makes you look unable to argue because all you can do is insult others.
Lastly, I do not believe in God as an 'imaginary friend.' I know God to be necessary in order to formulate meaningful propositions about reality and in order to account for the existence of the universe. I further believe Him to have become incarnate as Jesus Christ and to have founded the Church, I hope to achieve salvation in heaven, and I love Him in this life and look forward to being happy with Him in eternity.
There is no room in atheism for maintaining that any view is true or good. There is no basis for it.
If truth is merely a by-product of evolution, there is no reason this statement has any truth. There is no meaning to it. It is a contradiction. Truth is essential if we wish to speak about anything.
If there would be no standard for what is true, nothing (including that 'there is no standard for truth'
would be false.
Second, survival does not determine all good. How is knowledge and contemplation good, as it does not necessarily further survival?
Third, 'good' is a term similar to 'true' in that truth indicates a good of the intellect. If good does not exist, truth does not either.
Unsupported assertion.
Morality might be discovered by man in different ways, but that says nothing about what moral truth is in itself. Further, the range of moral opinions you imply never existed - most morals opinions throughout time have been fairly close. Lastly, this does not necessitate that morality does not depend on an objective standard. In fact, morality must if it exists as true.
This is rather unfounded and also rather ignorant of what the Old Testament says. Nobody ever said that someone should marry their rapist. Nor does it dictate 'stoning' people for the 'smallest crimes.' Nor does it force a man to have sex with his brother's widow. Further, the interpretation of the moral precepts of the Old Testament is not limited purely to my interpretation of what they mean; the Church, or (for the Jews) their rabbinic interpreters.
[quote
This is where the fact that survival must be a goal of a living organism comes into play. We must think that life is good or else we cease to exist. Life could never form anywhere unless by its nature its goal was survival. Since life exists we know for a fact that it has a natural goal of survival.If the first life form had not expended the energy required to exist then no other life form would ever have existed. It necessarily, by its nature as life, had to work toward a goal of survival. This is true of any life form.
If truth is merely a side effect, does it ever have any meaning? Then your statement is merely a side-effect that evolution, according to arbitrary standards, judges to be useful.
In so far as human beings are the agents of morality, yes. But this does not mean that morality is only our personal opinions, or by-products of evolution.
They are not objective. What determines morality? You claim that survival of the individual determines truth, but what determines the truth of that statement? It goes on ad absurdum.
Except that these choices for what is moral would be totally arbitrary. There is no reason why I ought to support other species at all. There is no reason I ought to save a whale from extinction rather than kill my friend. There is no basis for moral decisions.
This is libelous and unnecessary.
God makes things much clearer than 'let's all just get along.' Further, without a foundation, you are not just living with muddy morality, but no morality.
Except that your standards of what is or is not moral is totally arbitrary.
God creates a standard in which I can make moral decisions (not in His will, but in the fact that He exists independent of myself and hence is a stable foundation on which to place truth).
That is gonna go over real well in the Borscht Belt.
I would agree with your seeming statement that morals are non-relative, but you have no way in which you can claim that.
Lastly, if you assume a set moral code for all people, you cannot prove how it exists independent of a subjective perspective.
This, essentially, is what the Church believes. Human beings naturally have a moral sense of right and wrong that can be discovered naturally. However, as an atheist, it becomes unclear how you could say that what is 'true for me' is 'true for all men.'
The Christian does not claim that the threat of hell is what creates moral code. The Christian claims that God's existence as the Eternal Law ensures the existence and objectivity of the Natural Law.
If there are no rights, there can be no way you can say that every thing must be respected equally. You have no place from which to claim that rights of any sort exist.
What I know is not the same as opinion. I know God exists because I see that things exist dependent upon a first cause - God.
Intelligence is irrelevant if there is no reason why some thing ought to be true or moral rather than another.
Yours In Christ, Eternal Wisdom,
StMichael
Psalm 50(1):8. For behold thou hast loved truth: the uncertain and hidden things of thy wisdom thou hast made manifest to me.