It’s true that without God everything is permitted, but it’s also true that God permits everything. Can you think of anything God has not permitted? Like ISIS, you can even rape and kill in God’s name, and God stays silent. He permits it. Until the day God starts reaching down His hand to enforce His will, nobody can really know what that will is, and everything is permitted.
Long ago, and on another site, we had a god-botherer who thought he had the ultimate argument against atheism. “You can’t say that eating babies is wrong”, he shrieked.
To which the answer was given, “No, we can’t say that the statement, ‘eating babies is wrong’ is true. The best we can do is point to intersubjective, and possibly universal, agreement that eating babies is wrong. So, you show us that the statement is necessarily and objectively true, and how you know this”.
Naturally enough, he was unable to demonstrate that there are such things as “objective (moral) values” or provide a solution to Euthyphro dilemma.
It was also pointed out to him that if there are objective moral values, then there should be a single, correct answer to trolley problems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). Again, he wasn’t able to show which answer was correct for any of the problems, and why.
He departed the site shortly after, and we never heard from him again.
As often happens, the dilemmas look like weak joke material to me. The god-botherer take on eating babies has to come from his god’s mouth; same with Euthyphro’s piety and solutions for the trolley problem. If no direct word on it from god, then it has to be constructed from god advice on other matters. If morality has divine origins. The question would then be what’s god’s story on eating babies.
I was curious myself, and it turns out there’s a lot more pedophagy in the bible than I expected. Picking one, I found some woman bothering the king with her story, that during a siege where every had gotten real hungry, another woman had made this deal where they’d eat each other’s sons, but “you go first”, and after their delicious meal the other woman’s son was not to be found. Wise kid. The king was sorry to hear about that. End of story. I conclude that the bible doesn’t really make a big deal of prohibiting this practice, it’s just regarded as an unfortunate occurrence that indicates things aren’t tip top around the neighborhood.
If so, it isn’t the only moral principle we’ve made up in the intervening couple of millennia, and attribute to divine guidance even though Yahweh doesn’t seem to be on record on the subject.
Another angle on it might be that whatever you got out of the bible, it’s just a dusty relic without godly help that you get directly from your personal relationship with god and his little helpers the priests. This wholesome influence innoculates you against the amoral influences of the secular world. In this case, I think I would expect to see a high degree of consistency between moral principles independent of various cultures, as long as the church is the same, but I believe that isn’t what happens at all. Corruption, for example, is far worse in some thoroughly Catholic countries than others. So it appears that acceptance of and adherence to moral principles is not really driven by the Christian religion.
Just spitballing here; don’t have any credentials 😉
Could it be that Yhwh’s ire towards “pedophagy” (new word to me; honestly!) has some connection with the (alleged) customs in ancient Babylonia around Be’elsebub, Magog or whatever deity of the Crest demanding burnt baby offerings? As a failed protector of the captured tribe, He might have been reasonably biased against any dogma from that dictator (to use a modern word).
Disclaimer: I have never purported to be, nor even played one on TV, a Divine Dictator. Anyone who has should speak up now, or else stay forever silent. (As they all have, so far.)
And then we have A Modest Proposal by Swift, of course. But that came later, and never picked up much.
Yahweh opposed burnt babies? Possibly because charring meat creates heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that aren’t good for you, just to offer an alternative explanation.
As creator of the universe, I don’t need any objective basis, am objective basis. It’s my game. Just be glad I’m willing to stop by and give you some hints on how to avoid my wrath. Because I’ve got a lot of that wrath. Maybe more than is good for me … doc said to try to get a handle on it, and to be honest it’s true that I’m not the deity I used to be, so he could have something.
When I was quite young I asked my mother — a good Catholic — whether God told us to do things because those things were good, or whether things were good because God said they were good. My mother told me the meaning of “good” was “in accordance with the will of God”, and that anything God told us to do was good because God said it was good. So yes, even though he would never do such a thing!, if God told you to just go and kill someone then killing that person would be good.
I’m not sure if this is the official position of the Catholic Church, but it’s certainly a clear and consistent definition of the word “good”. Not a very satisfying definition for someone like present day me, but one that goes a long way towards explaining the actions of groups like ISIS, as well as those of certain individuals who have the rare privilege of hearing the voice of God in their heads.
I’m not sure this distinction makes sense. I mean, there can be other definitions of “good”, like even a person who entirely believes in a god could notice that not every “god good” is “me good.”
But assuming we’re interested only in “god good” here … it’s god’s game. She knows what’s good, because she invented it. “Because she said” vs. “she said. because” — not a real distinction. If you have a god that created the universe and then spoke to you about morality, and part of your faith in this crap is that she won’t lie to you or anything like that.
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March 23, 2006
It’s true that without God everything is permitted, but it’s also true that God permits everything. Can you think of anything God has not permitted? Like ISIS, you can even rape and kill in God’s name, and God stays silent. He permits it. Until the day God starts reaching down His hand to enforce His will, nobody can really know what that will is, and everything is permitted.
It is impossible to poke enough holes in the nonsense believers hold to affect them in any way. But it is sure fun to see it done with such wit.
Long ago, and on another site, we had a god-botherer who thought he had the ultimate argument against atheism. “You can’t say that eating babies is wrong”, he shrieked.
To which the answer was given, “No, we can’t say that the statement, ‘eating babies is wrong’ is true. The best we can do is point to intersubjective, and possibly universal, agreement that eating babies is wrong. So, you show us that the statement is necessarily and objectively true, and how you know this”.
Naturally enough, he was unable to demonstrate that there are such things as “objective (moral) values” or provide a solution to Euthyphro dilemma.
It was also pointed out to him that if there are objective moral values, then there should be a single, correct answer to trolley problems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). Again, he wasn’t able to show which answer was correct for any of the problems, and why.
He departed the site shortly after, and we never heard from him again.
As often happens, the dilemmas look like weak joke material to me. The god-botherer take on eating babies has to come from his god’s mouth; same with Euthyphro’s piety and solutions for the trolley problem. If no direct word on it from god, then it has to be constructed from god advice on other matters. If morality has divine origins. The question would then be what’s god’s story on eating babies.
I was curious myself, and it turns out there’s a lot more pedophagy in the bible than I expected. Picking one, I found some woman bothering the king with her story, that during a siege where every had gotten real hungry, another woman had made this deal where they’d eat each other’s sons, but “you go first”, and after their delicious meal the other woman’s son was not to be found. Wise kid. The king was sorry to hear about that. End of story. I conclude that the bible doesn’t really make a big deal of prohibiting this practice, it’s just regarded as an unfortunate occurrence that indicates things aren’t tip top around the neighborhood.
If so, it isn’t the only moral principle we’ve made up in the intervening couple of millennia, and attribute to divine guidance even though Yahweh doesn’t seem to be on record on the subject.
Another angle on it might be that whatever you got out of the bible, it’s just a dusty relic without godly help that you get directly from your personal relationship with god and his little helpers the priests. This wholesome influence innoculates you against the amoral influences of the secular world. In this case, I think I would expect to see a high degree of consistency between moral principles independent of various cultures, as long as the church is the same, but I believe that isn’t what happens at all. Corruption, for example, is far worse in some thoroughly Catholic countries than others. So it appears that acceptance of and adherence to moral principles is not really driven by the Christian religion.
Just spitballing here; don’t have any credentials 😉
Could it be that Yhwh’s ire towards “pedophagy” (new word to me; honestly!) has some connection with the (alleged) customs in ancient Babylonia around Be’elsebub, Magog or whatever deity of the Crest demanding burnt baby offerings? As a failed protector of the captured tribe, He might have been reasonably biased against any dogma from that dictator (to use a modern word).
Disclaimer: I have never purported to be, nor even played one on TV, a Divine Dictator. Anyone who has should speak up now, or else stay forever silent. (As they all have, so far.)
And then we have A Modest Proposal by Swift, of course. But that came later, and never picked up much.
Yahweh opposed burnt babies? Possibly because charring meat creates heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that aren’t good for you, just to offer an alternative explanation.
This Jay-Way character that is supposedly the source of morality, where did he get his objective basis for morality? Just wondering.
As creator of the universe, I don’t need any objective basis, am objective basis. It’s my game. Just be glad I’m willing to stop by and give you some hints on how to avoid my wrath. Because I’ve got a lot of that wrath. Maybe more than is good for me … doc said to try to get a handle on it, and to be honest it’s true that I’m not the deity I used to be, so he could have something.
When I was quite young I asked my mother — a good Catholic — whether God told us to do things because those things were good, or whether things were good because God said they were good. My mother told me the meaning of “good” was “in accordance with the will of God”, and that anything God told us to do was good because God said it was good. So yes, even though he would never do such a thing!, if God told you to just go and kill someone then killing that person would be good.
I’m not sure if this is the official position of the Catholic Church, but it’s certainly a clear and consistent definition of the word “good”. Not a very satisfying definition for someone like present day me, but one that goes a long way towards explaining the actions of groups like ISIS, as well as those of certain individuals who have the rare privilege of hearing the voice of God in their heads.
I’m not sure this distinction makes sense. I mean, there can be other definitions of “good”, like even a person who entirely believes in a god could notice that not every “god good” is “me good.”
But assuming we’re interested only in “god good” here … it’s god’s game. She knows what’s good, because she invented it. “Because she said” vs. “she said. because” — not a real distinction. If you have a god that created the universe and then spoke to you about morality, and part of your faith in this crap is that she won’t lie to you or anything like that.
God just this minute told me that all posts on this site are bullshit.
Except this one, of course . . .