| ▲ | godelski 19 hours ago | |
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.
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.
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 14 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 18 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. | ||