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| ▲ | godelski 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > It means you can bring your priors into the classroom but I can’t.
I've heard about this from Fox News but I've never experienced it myself, even having grown up in a very blue state. I'm sure this happens somewhere, but I'm unconvinced it is the norm. > Ethics is and always has been applied theology
This is trivial to prove false. You even do it! "What do we do?" You've implicitly added "if god exists". You're so strong in that conviction you claim there's a former question and yet never wrote one down. I'd even argue it is important for theologists to ask "What do we do if god doesn't exist?"You seem to be under the belief that without god there are no moral convictions. Well I'll quote a very famous conman, as I feel the same as him. The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you.
- Penn Jillette
You can even find in the Bible plenty of passages to support his point. If the only thing stopping you from doing evil is the belief of punishment, then you are not a good person. Conversely, if the only reason you are doing good is because you are seeking eternal reward, neither are you good. One does not need god to have morals, one only needs have society and a theory of mind.Hey look, we did Secular Ethics, and discussed religion! I disagreed with you, but you'll notice I never made claims about if I believe in god or not. You'll notice I make no judgement on you for believing in god. You'll notice, my entire argument is based on the origin of morals and really we've discussed is what is in a man's heart matters. This is no different than "Is an act of kindness good if one films themselves doing it?" There's a lot of gray in that question, obviously. No ethics class is going to exclude you for being religious, as that would be unethical. | | |
| ▲ | snaking0776 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Agreed. I find that people who argue that religion is necessary for ethics tend to ignore the history of their religion and the fact that the original text largely serves as a jumping off point for religious philosophers to connect older “secular” texts to this new religion. Modern Christianity is a complex combination of Platonic, Aristotelian, Syrian, and Roman ideals which are taken out of their original context to align with the Bible even though the original writers would say they knew nothing about Jesus. The base texts which many of these ideas are based on make almost no appeals to God and focus more on what it means to live a “good life”. To be fair a lot of great ethical arguments are made by Christian writers but I think that’s more just a consequence of their cultural upbringing and the fact that the thing the New Testament really added to the discussion was that your ethical responsibilities generalize beyond yourself and your friends/family. Religious ethics are just as fluid and complex as secular ethics, it’s just that the concept of God makes people think they can claim that their way of thinking is the only one that’s real. I would guess if you self-reflect though you’d see that even within one lifetime the definition of what’s moral in a religious context changes as well. | |
| ▲ | srean 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes exactly. Golden rule does not need the existence of any god. There are godless religions too that have strong ethical traditions. They are not religions in the Abrahamic sense. |
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| ▲ | 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | tovej 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I have to strongly disagree. I've met people who have never been in touch with organized religion. They generally have excellent ethical frameworks. I've also read the bible, it does not have a consistent moral or ethical framework. How can it be that areligious people have ethics if they need god for ethics? Ethics is all about being human, it does not require a god, and it does not require anyone to understand even what a human is, or what process led to us living life together. The subjective experience of life and the subjective experience of life in a society is all you need to develop ethics. | | |
| ▲ | Tarq0n 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | At this point theists often try to smuggle God back in as the source of morality through culture. But I agree, empirically religion and moral behavior seem at best uncorrelated. | |
| ▲ | srean 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Bible is quite permissive of killing if it's in the name of god. Genocide is quite a recurring theme. | | |
| ▲ | Alan_Writer 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Even God told Abraham to kill his own son. Like, really? | | |
| ▲ | godelski 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Don't worry, it was just a test of Abraham's loyalty. God was never going to let him kill Isaac. It's the perfect example of a completely ethical thing to do to another person... | | |
| ▲ | srean 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Some religious people would be nodding along in agreement not realising this is satire. | | |
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| ▲ | srean 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not unlike a cartel head that rules by a mix of fear and gaslighting. Many religious texts, not just the Bible start making a lot of sense when looked at like psyops. |
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| ▲ | intended 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | sorry, perhaps I misunderstand, but dont you /wouldn’t you take the best from others as well? Is that outside of consideration for some reason? |
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