I agree 100% cofty, it's insane to say that we are worse off now morally than we were a hundred years ago. Isn't it terrible how blacks and women have rights now, or how it's frowned upon to tar and feather homosexuals, that racism is taboo rather than racial tolerance, so on and so forth. The world was only a better place for straight white men. Everyone else I'm pretty sure would rather live today than a hundred years ago.
JonathanH
JoinedPosts by JonathanH
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161
There is No Morality Without God
by whereami inaddressing the argument, made by many christians, that with no god there can be no morality.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnu-qbgxmn0.
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161
There is No Morality Without God
by whereami inaddressing the argument, made by many christians, that with no god there can be no morality.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnu-qbgxmn0.
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JonathanH
That's a fantastic example NewChapter! What the hell did things like that have to do with prosperity of mankind? Now if you asked a religious moral philosopher whether it would've been immoral for them NOT to wear blue, they would probably say "no, that wouldn't be immoral" because that act wasn't immoral, but they would probably chime in "But disobeying god's mandate was immoral", and that introduces a third and very important element to morality. Control. Obedience to those of the higher caste was almost always a moral mandate in countless religious cultures. The preist said it, you have to do it, it's wrong not to. The JWs operate with this mentality to an extreme. Their greatest moral imperitive is to obey the society.
I think those are the three aspects of "morality", control, identification, and the well being of concious things. But only the last one is of any importance in a post enlightenment society. We don't need blind obedience to authority figures, and identification is more harmful than anything (seeing as how that is what creates prejudice and bigotry). The last one however doesn't come from some innate understanding. It's complex, multifaceted, and there are no easy answers. Attempting to pigeon hole it with something as simple as "the golden rule" doesn't work, because cultures want different things out of life. We don't just "get it" in our "heart of hearts" or something lame like that, but with diligent study, meditation, and contemplation we've managed to work towards it for thousands of years. It's not because we have progressively stopped ignoring the unicorn in our heart telling us right from wrong, it's because great men and women dedicate their lives to civil rights movements, ethical philosophy, conciousness raising and other means of working towards the benefit of everyone rather than the benefit of their singular group. That's what we need more of, we don't need more people consulting bronze age barbarians and mystics and demanding we follow their tribal council.
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Good to study JW past .... New "Writing Archives" under direction of the Writing Committee
by wannabefree inyes friends, it is important to understand your rich spiritual heritage as jehovah's witnesses, and so you don't have to look at old publications on your own or refer to worldly sources, the organization is pleased to select for you the history as we want you to have it and you can get it in your current watchtower.. from january 15, 2012 watchtower pg 31-32. the governing body is keenly interested in.
our theocratic history.
in commenting on the.
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JonathanH
You're right teary, you reiterated what I said. It wouldn't be free (though given their resources it would be a drop in the bucket), it's just a matter of they don't want to. Letting anyone from academics, to witnesses, to apostates freely peruse their library doesn't benefit them one iota. And that is exactly what it's about. Will this benefit them, hurt them, or be a benign benefit to those that seek more information? Unless it's the first one, they won't do it. What will benefit them, however, is to give brief snippets of historical documents that they can put into whatever context they want (kind of like the bible.) It wouldn't benefit them at all to just put up all the information for all to see without them providing spin, context or explanation. And they aren't going to do something that doesn't directly benefit them. I mean what do we think they are, some kind of religious charity? It's a corporation after all.
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161
There is No Morality Without God
by whereami inaddressing the argument, made by many christians, that with no god there can be no morality.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnu-qbgxmn0.
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JonathanH
@Cofty
Because morality is relic from a bygone era of tribal thinking. It's a way of seperating the actions of one group from the actions of another group, as well as defining who belongs to which group. Look around at what people use morality for. It's not so much to ensure the well being of people, so much as it is used to define who belongs to which group, or more importantly "is this person in my group?" Views on war, homosexuality, poverty, ect are convenient ways to see if this person is part of your group or not. Like you said, "morality" is a bottom up thing, and as newchapter pointed out, it often had more to do with finding obtuse methods and reasons for dealing with undesired outcomes when real knowledge was absent, than with innate goalposts for human well being. But once it becomes imprinted on a culture, it's a convenient way to identify "us" from "them". In theory, your definition of morality is what most people mean, but in practice morality is cult of tradition being ever formed by the cultural influences around it. It's a complex thing, certainly not so simple as "we all just understand it."
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Beware the educated, they are mentally diseased.
by JonathanH insaw this poster on a website and i had to post it here.
i think it really shows the twisted way of thinking that witnesses have cultured into them.
they turn virtues into vices, and vices into virtues.
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JonathanH
I haven't decided 100% on which engineering degree, but I think I'm going to go for electrical. MAYBE mechanical, but I don't really have any interest in civil. In the university I am going to, the electrical engineering degree comes with a minor degree in mathematics, just by virtue of the classes required. If I want to get my degree in Mathematics as well, that would just put me a hop, skip and jump away from a major since I will have the minor already.
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161
There is No Morality Without God
by whereami inaddressing the argument, made by many christians, that with no god there can be no morality.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnu-qbgxmn0.
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JonathanH
The view that we all have an innate morality built into us I think can be surmised as thus. We all know something, but nobody can agree on exactly what it is that we know, merely that we all know it, and furthermore it can be agreed that some people are ignoring what it is that they know (but we can't say exactly what it is that they know that they are ignoring...knowingly), but it's obvious some people are ignoring it, but it's less obvious who is ignoring it and exactly when they are ignoring whatever obvious thing they are ignoring, but we all know it...whatever it is. Objective morality is just as clear as that.
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Good to study JW past .... New "Writing Archives" under direction of the Writing Committee
by wannabefree inyes friends, it is important to understand your rich spiritual heritage as jehovah's witnesses, and so you don't have to look at old publications on your own or refer to worldly sources, the organization is pleased to select for you the history as we want you to have it and you can get it in your current watchtower.. from january 15, 2012 watchtower pg 31-32. the governing body is keenly interested in.
our theocratic history.
in commenting on the.
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JonathanH
Work load is never an excuse for an organization of millions of volunteers, especially a billion dollar corporation that lives on volunteer work. Even if it took five years for a group of bethelites to go through the library book by book, it would still be an immensely cheap project. And even if they had to host a WHOLE gigabyte of material on the internet, that would be chump change to a billion dollar corporation. It's not a matter of ability or practicality, it's a matter of willingness. It's the information age. Getting information out is ridiculously easy. Keeping information in, however, is a difficult task. They are attempting the latter, while doing a poor job at appearing to do the former.
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161
There is No Morality Without God
by whereami inaddressing the argument, made by many christians, that with no god there can be no morality.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnu-qbgxmn0.
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JonathanH
You're just making up the rules of morality now to find something good in the situation. Which shows how flexible morality is. The norse viewed it as an honorable death, but the reality is they were trying to kill people and got killed. There isn't much "honor" (from our moral perspective) in what they were doing or wanted. We aren't talking about a burglar in their home and they died defending their family. We are talking about being the burglar and getting killed. If somebody broke into your house with the intent to kill you, steal your goods, and rape your family, and you shot them, would you be immoral for doing so? and would you say that burglar died an honorable death? And also which innate objective moral systems that we all share make the answer for the first two answers correct?
Which leads to the question, what is this objective moral code that we all agree on, but refuse to obey? It can't even be something as simple as "do to others as you want done to yourself" because as has been shown, even that will lead to problems depending on the culture.
As for the rape aspect, that is for one moving the goal posts. Now that we've shown that murder can be thrown into the golden rule and still work, we'll just say having one's daughters raped crosses that moral line. Except again, the bible gives us examples of that not being such a big deal either. Exodus 21:7 deals with the proper way to sell your daughter to men that are allowed to use her as a sex slave. Of course this in in the era of extreme mysogeny where arranged marriage and all sorts of disgusting things were the norm. But that kind of goes to the point doesn't it, in their culture selling your daughter to men who may force them to marry their sons was perfectly ok, and moral. They didn't ignore some moral sense that told them how horrible it would be for their daughter, they just bought and sold women.
When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again. But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. And if the slave girl's owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter. If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife. If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment
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161
There is No Morality Without God
by whereami inaddressing the argument, made by many christians, that with no god there can be no morality.
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnu-qbgxmn0.
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JonathanH
@ PSacramento
That's an incredibly simple and black and white view of how people percieve morality. Things that are only right under every given circumstance? The ones throwing the acid think it's right to do so because a woman shouldn't get an education, not because throwing acid is a generally acceptable thing to do. Are they a woman getting an education? No, then why would it be ok to throw acid in their face? Jesus overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the temple, would jesus want his table overturned if he was selling things in the temple? You see why that doesn't work? Even a simple view of morality is situational. That in a given situation it may be ok to do something to some one that you don't want done to yourself, much of morality and ethics is dedicated to sussing out what these sitations are, and how to handle them. Your view simply conflates morality with self preservation, or a survival instinct.
It's impossible to create a clear working evident view of objective morality in the world without using tautologies or weak platitudes. Even at the end of your post you resort to the old "We all know what's right, we just don't all obey it." Which is a cop out that can be applied to any and every moral system.
Also as a side note, the vikings did think it was ok to kill them in battle, that was in fact their greatest goal. To kill others, and then be killed so that they could go to valhalla. So were they moral because they obeyed the golden rule? Or did they march to the beat of a different moral drum?
Edit: Newchapter beat me to it, and added to it with pirates. There are probably countless more examples of cultures where they wanted things done to them that we would consider immoral or unpleasant.
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161
There is No Morality Without God
by whereami inaddressing the argument, made by many christians, that with no god there can be no morality.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnu-qbgxmn0.
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JonathanH
I think you guys are barking up the wrong tree, not that I will try to stop you. Bioflex doesn't seem worth argueing with. I don't agree with sacramento, but I at least know he is rational, and well spoken enough to discuss matters with. And while I may be at times vociferous in my writing style, I make sure to at least be respectful of the people I am discussing things with (though, never respectful of ideas, just the person espousing them.) Bioflex seems to be rude, poorly spoken, with questionable reading comprehension. If you guys want to argue with him or her, go for it, but we all know what path that's going to lead down. An inflammatory, unfocused, and barely comprehensible discussion.