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@MagicAintReal
Suppose I were to ask if morality - in your view - is like prettiness or like weight.
I don't know how much, say, Anjelina Jolie weighs but we can't disagree about it and both be right.
But we can disagree about about how pretty she is.
Which sort of thing is morality like - prettiness or weight?
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@MagicAintReal
Except there are objective standards of prettiness to be used like facial symmetry and overall proportional body size ratios.We can measure symmetry and proportion objectively.
We can indeed. But when you see a pretty girl is that what you are doing? I suggest that you (or of course I or anybody) don't actually know what objective criteria are used to evaluate prettiness. The most important thing might be eye diameter to nose length ratio!
With morality it is - if anything - even less obvious what criteria we are using to come up with a 'morality score'. It would be amaing if every human brain was identical and always agreed on how moral something is because even though any single factor might be objective (eg number of bones broken) the weight of each factor will vary from individual to individual.
In othe words no two people will agree on how moral or immoral in all cases. Obective (ie viewer independent) morality can't exist.
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@rosends
I can't find that.... but the name of moses's father in law is 'Reuel' in ch2 and 'Jethro' on ch3.
Any number of theories for that, but its not exactly the most egregious example of the way the OT strings individual tales and anecdotes from seperate sources into one continuous narrative. One presumes the writers did not expect the text to be so minutely scrtinised by outsiders! Plus tippex hadn't been invented then.
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@Stephen
You neglect it's a story, not a report of anything real. In stories people can stay well groomed for weeks. It just requires they take some narrativium with them.
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@MagicAintReal
Objective morality makes as much (and as little) sense as 'objective prettiness' - for much the same reasons.
There is considerable agreement between people about who is pretty and who isn't, just as there is good agreement about what is moral and what isn't (not withstanding there are individuals with weird views on both!).
I can imagine a computer program that could scan a photo of a person and give them a 'prettiness score' that matches up well with most people's idea of prettiness. We could call the computer's output the person's objective prettiness.
It would be much harder to write software that scans the CCTV video of a rape or of helping an old lady cross the road and correctly determines which act most people would class as 'moral' or 'immoral', but in a thought experiment we can do it!
But is the output of that program the 'objective morality' of the vidoed act it scans? I bet most people would say no. But if it's not that, what is 'objective morality'?
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@Mopac
.. what is an atheist?Someone who doesn't believe there is truth.What am I supposed to believe? It's an invalid and abominable superstition.
Shut and listen and you might find out what atheists really think. We all know what you think - it's all you ever post.
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@Stephen
Most people would say the women mistook Moses to be an Egyptian, probably because he didn't look like an enslaved Hebrew.
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@Mopac
I am not formulating a stereotype of atheists....But truthfully, atheists are consistently arbitrary.
Look up 'stereotype'.
I was rather hoping theists would want to listen to atheists tell their side of the story. Hearing what preconcptions theists have is an unwelcome bonus.
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@PGA2.0
So, if someone did something outrageously horrible and wrong you would not be angry over it? Then why are you angry with God?
Despite appearances gus is not angry with God. He is angry that people worship something that - if it existed - would be odious. He hopes that by showing you that the god you believe in is odious you will see sense and stop your superstitious nonsense altogether.
AFAIK that approach has never worked.
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@Mopac
The point of making this thread is that actual atheists do not conform to your stereotype. If atheists are - by some logic - either rapacious monsters or nice but inconsistent then it turns out we overwhemingly choose to be nice and inconsistent. There are worse things to be!
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@PGA2.0
I believe Adolph Hitler 'ceased to be' in 1945. Justice was not done and can never be done.
I don't like that's how things are, but - well - that's how it goes. What i cannot do is convince myself that there is a posthumous realm were the ills of this world are put right; where the good are rewarded and the evil punished. Wouldn't it be nice if it was like that!
Everyone makes plans for 'if they on the lottery'. It's a nice way to spend a few minutes fantasising, but in the end you stop daydreaming and go back to saving up for your holiday. imaging that things are put right when your dead is like imaging a lotery win - a nice fantasy.
But look around! unless you are very fortunate you can see the world is chaotic and random. The good die young and the bad seem to have all the fun! I don't blame people for really wanting Hitler or jimmy saville to be burning in hell. But that's not how things are. Instead we really need to concentrate on making this world better - because it's the only world.
Without an eternal reward on offer the only reason to try to do the right thing is it is the right thing. If that's not enough of a reason for you then peraps it's better you don't wakeup from your daydream.
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In 100 years we'll be dead. In what way does it matter what is going on then?
We will have descendants alive then, but we won't know or care about it. it won't affect us in our graves if there is no oil or tigers for our children to enjoy. Why should we stint for people of the future who don't even exist yet? They might thank us for leaving them a nice planet (if we do!), but what can a insentiate corpse do with a thank you?
We atheists are often charged by theists of being amoral monsters. We aren't - but why not?
So why aren't you and I amoral's elfish hedonists?
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@Tradesecret
the other thing which you did not seem to understand is that Jesus was actually filling out the law of the OT.
PGA and rosends have gone into this 'bigly'.
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@Goldtop
I think a major factor is simply that Christinity encouraged missionary work to actively recruit members. That was probably innovation and it remains true today that Christianity is the only religion that hasotas a core function.
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@Analgesic.Spectre
Homogeneity is the cornerstone of a flourishing society -- you care much more about those similar to you, than those whom are not.
That may have been so in the past but a wise man said "The human mind needs radical change, or else it'll fall into the same traps it historically has always fallen into."
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@Goldtop
Paul isn't clear on it.. I imagine that Jesus supposdly appeared at some kind of gathering rather than making 500 individual appearnces. But we do know it was over 500 people because it says so in the bible.
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I knew about the Sargon/Moses parallel. The story of Moses has to be taken as legend rather than history and I don't think it is possible to ever know if the scribes responsile for commiting the Hebrews foundational myths to writing in the C6 BCE borrowed from the Sargon story or if it is co-incidental.
The other babylonian story I didn't know about, but myths and legends involving shennanigans between divinities and mortal women are common enough...It's a shame the Bible writers did not see fit to include some of the legends that the hebrews told each other about the heroic giant offsprings of those couplings!
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@PGA2.0
I have to ask a dumb question - do you believe Hitler is suffering in hell?
I think you probably do, beause otherwise justice would not be served. Am I right?
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@TwoMan
I think I've learned a lot by thinking about ways that consciousness can't work!
The way I look at it is that now I know I don't know about things that I used to not know I didn't know about not knowing. That's progress!
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@TwoMan
Consciousness is the itch I can't scratch.
My intition is that consciousness somehow emerges from matter, so matter is 'more fundamental' than mind. I don't know that is true and quite often when i think about 'the hard problem' I begin to doubt it!
Sad thing is I read a lot about consciusness a few decades ago and there hasn't been any progress since to keep abreast of since. Artiicial intelligene has made a bit of progress, but artificial consciousness is nowhere on the horizon.
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@Goldtop
I am a little surprised you seem to be accepting a mention in the bible as definitive however.
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@TwoMan
I principally meant the former. I always refuse to engage with guys who have just discovered idealism and are over-excited by it - idealism is a phase we all go through, mostly in our teens. Godel's theorem and memes are other fads...
Do you refer to the role of consciousness in some interpretations of QM?
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@TwoMan
I'm tempted to say that
1) X is.
2) X is real.
3) X exists.
All express the same idea and which gets choosen is purely a matter of style and taste. I'm not sure that helps clear up what 'existence' is, but it means there is only 1 problem of meaning, not 3!
a) X is true
b) X is a fact are also equivalent as far as I can tell. That means we ony need to define fact or true, not both.
We may not even need 'is true'. I wil tell you two things:
x) 2+2=4
y) '2+2=4 is true'.
y adds no new information to x so 'is true' is redundant. It is repeatedly redundant:
'2+2=4 is true' is true
I have no idea if all this will lead any where. I beginning to doubt it!!
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@Goldtop
Fact is over 500 people saw Jesus alive after his death.You'll need to prove that alleged fact, as well. What verses?
1 Cor 15:6.
6 After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.
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@MagicAintReal
Yeah, but why do you say objective reality? How many sorts of reality are there?That which exists has objective reality.
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@3RU7AL
Ah, so you do mean "a set of arbitrary rules that a large majority of people agree to abide by".
That seems to imply that if there were no formal laws (on an isolated uncharted desert island say) I could kill you in cold blood but it wouldn't be immoral.
Re exists and real, I would say the way they are used is such that 'X exists' and 'X is real' convey exactly the same intuitive concept, but that concept cannot be defined (other than circularly).
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@3RU7AL
Dumb question, but what is 'consensus morality'?
Do you mean a set of arbitrary rules that a large marjority of people agree to abide by?
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@drafterman
As I understand it, the idea is to examine words in the context of ordinary discourse rather than imposing a definition from the outset. Of course the discourse has to be intelligible and coherent - word salad is not 'discourse'.
Wittgenstein argued that we do not learn the meaning of words as definitions; we pick up on the rules for using a word in discourse. Therefore philosphy is - or it should be? - concerned with a word's usage, not its dictionary definition. But there are any number of interpretations of W's ideas out there and I don't claim to have presented the only or best one. Indeed I'm not doing much more than flying kites to see what flies and what crashes.
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@drafterman
It is not a "word game" to clearly define your terms and/or define the context they are to be used.
But suppose we want to discover the nature of truth, or of morality. One cannot 'clearly define' what is unknown. Or perhaps we dispute the nature of morality - whose definition do we use then? And if we use two definitions of morality, are we talking about the same thing each time?
'Morality' is a word in the English language, so dictionary compilers are obliged to put something in their books but working out what morality truly is the job of philosophers, not dictionary writers.
An alternative approach is provided by Wittgenstein who summed it up as "Meaning is use". By attending to the ordinary language contexts that give words their meaning, we can avoid misusing them and trying to make them mean things that they aren’t made to mean. That's the theory, anyway!
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@drafterman
I think that philosophical chats can easily degenerate into word games. I don't think you can do philosophy with a dictionary. A hammer yes, but not a dictionary.
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@secularmerlin
'psychy' is 'psyche', btw.
The only way to procede is for you to present a non subjective standard so that we can explore the idea further.
I hope that isn't the only way!
I think we can agree that feeling something is moral or immoral is not something we decide consciously. We don't have to think about rape or gencide to feel it is wrong -its a semi-hardwired response (semi because it can be reprogrammed albeit with considerable effort). As making moral judgements is an unconscious process we 9(or fallaneze)don't know what criteria are used - but we can guess with good confidence it is related to an estimate of its impact on Darwinian fitness.
But we can't expect that estimate to be spot on in every instance - evolution will mean it is better than random but we can expect cases where it goes very wrong and flags the best dawinian option as immoral or (more often) something finess-neutral as very immoral.
As a social species any fitness estimate has to take account of the society concerned. What is fitness-engancing in one human society may not being another due to historical accidents.
So what we sense as the morality of something is a rough estimate of its contribution to fitness. The contribution to fitness is objective (but difficult to quantify), the feeling of that things (im)morality is its subjective manifestation, parallel to the way subjective colours are used to encode
objective wavelengths.
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@Analgesic.Spectre
If not 'nations', then humans will find another trivial facets to discriminate between in and out-groups. The concept of 'nation' isn't the root of the problem. If you look at experiments like the Robbers Cave experiment, it takes virtually nothing for humans to engage in tribalistic nonsense.Humans would require massive redesigning, in order for appeals to "humanity" to be more effective than tribalism.
Something we are close to agreement on for once.
Perhaps it is only your apparent pessimism regarding postive change I don't fully concur with.
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@Tradesecret
You're very fond of calling what is written in the bible a fact.
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@PGA2.0
So your worldview does not deal with justice for all. Some get away with the worst atrocities in the history of humanity without receiving any judgment for their crimes. There is nothing fair about that, yet you criticize God for being just and fair in that we are judged for our life lived and what we do with it?
I don't think anyone is critiizing God for being fair! I am saying the fairness and justice you think god provides is illusory. Hitler didn't suffer enough for his crimes and many good people die young or poor. The world sucks like that because there is no god to make things better.
Atheists have a problem answering 'Why bother? you just die anyway.' I've never found a good reason to care about others. But I - and 99% of atheists care anyway. I can explain why humans have evolved empathy, but that expains why we are not all rabid egoists not why we shouldn't be rabid egoists! i'm not sure 'should' can ever be explained totally logically. At least theists can evoke 'enlightened self-interest' -atheists don't even have that option.
Sure some people seem born with defective empathy cells in their heads but that is inevitable as every brain is unique. But most humans have a healthy mix of selishness and altruism built in to their brains. Atheists tend to explain human nature using genes, theists prefer to think a god is responsible. The thing is we know that genes exist and how altruism can evolve against naive expectation. The existence of the gods,on the other hand, is infintely debatable.
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@Mopac
I'm thinking that 'real' and 'exists' (+their opposites)mean essentially the same thing and apply to objects while 'true/false' applies to propostions.
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@secularmerlin
Indeed even if the universe is illusory (not unnecessarily simulated but that is included under this umbrella term) we can still learn "facts" about how our "universe" works and interact with it reliably. The question is ultimately less important than we make it out to be. It is important however to accept human epistemology and it is impossible to prove a negative. There can never be any evidence for something that does not exist. I tend to accept reality provisionally and provided we accept reality we can also provisionally accept the findings of modern science until such time as we know more (and of course the human experience continues to evolve and as we come to understand our "universe" better).
I think that is a sensible attitude. What we learn about 'our reality' would retain its practical utility even in the unlikely event we discover we are all living in Sim City. At least that is how I justify not spending more than 1% of mental effort on worrying about it! :)
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@Tradesecret
it's not an argument for atheism. It is an argument that the element of virgin birth was added to the stories about jesus by matthew and Luke seperately at a relatively late date.
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@secularmerlin
I was looking at it from the angle that it is uncertain if our world is real or a simulation. Given that uncertainty we can ask what are philosphers and scientists think they are doing, Shouldn't they stop and estabish what reality is before building on such a weak foundation?
Clearly not, I say. Even if it turns out there is a supra-reality above this reality what we learn about our reality has value - it might be'what matters' and how 'supra-reality' is doesn't matter at all. So its worthwhile doing science and philosophy, and the discoveries of scince and philosophy won't lose value if this is a simulation.
And of course, it probably isn't.
ifyou want to wor on the 'simulation' problem then thats fine - its a legitmate area of philosophy. But we don;t have to wait for certainty - we can 'keep calm and carry on.' confident we aren't wasting our time,
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@secularmerlin
i think you're asking if/how we can tell if this world is real?
I'd be tempted to sidestep the issue by defining 'reality' (etc) as applying to our world even if it does turn out to be a simulation.
If it is a simulation then we could talk about the 'supra-reality' in which our world is embedded, and if neccessary a supra-supra-reality above that, and so on. That way most references to what is 'real' (and related words such as 'true' and exists) in the text books would still be valid. The same applies to say, morality. The 'supra morality' of a world in which we are embedded might be different from our morality but what has been said and written about morality would still apply more or less unmodified - with any luck!
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@TwoMan
Surely if you are looking at a tiger on a tv screen everthing is real/exists ... except the tiger.
but
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@PGA2.0
Also, consider those sins of Hitler. Do you think he paid for his wrongful actions, or is there no justice there for his wrongdoing? If there is no justice there then your system of justice sucks.
I'm surprised you even bother to ask. But its not atheist justice that sucks. What sucks is the universe doesn't put things right. If we want a just and fair world - and we do - then we have to make it fair and just ourselves. its not fair that Africans starve while Amercans are too fat... but it won't change unless we do something about it - and i don't mean praying.
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@Paul
This line doesn’t hold up.
it does hold up and it is correct!
It's true by virtue of the way 'maximally great' was defined - it implicity gave the 'maximal being' neccessary existence from the outset.
That is to say
"If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world."
reduces to
"A necessarily existing being exists in every possible world"
The desired conclusion was smuggled into the initial definitions - that's a logic fail!
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@Fallaneze
Hmm... I was thinking purely in terms of language... I don't know how to answer your question!
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@3RU7AL
What keeps a human from being "maximally great"?
The ontological argument normally defines 'maximally great' in terms of what can be conceived or imagined rather than what exists. Because it is possble to imagine an entity greater than a human, a human is not a candidate for being 'maximally great'.
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Are 'X exists' and 'X is real' only different ways of saying the same thing or are they different?
I'm leaning towards the former.
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@3RU7AL
You are wrong about 3. It's not a non-sequitur - it is totally valid!
you have to bear in mind that a 'maximally great being' necessarily exists - mere existence would mean it wasn't 'maximally great'.
That is the root of the trick. by defining god as 'maximally great' you smuggle in that god necssarilty exists at the outset. In effect the argument is that 'something that necessarily exists, exists', which is not a great discovery.
The fallacy is 'beggaring the question' - ie assuming what you purport to be proving.
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@TwoMan
I might say "Truth is a property of the real; falsehood(/untruth?) is a property of the unreal". That applies independently of humans.I would say truth is a human concept that defines or clarifies reality.
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@Swagnarok
We will probably reduce consumption by running out of resources.
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@Greyparrot
I was repsonding to
Multi race is fine. Multi cultural is the death of any nation as there is no one culture worth defending together.
As I understand you, you say no-one would fight to defend britain (ie a nation) unless there was a unifying 'british culture'. I better make sure I understand you before we argue anything!
I suppose there are two images of 'multi-culturalism'. One image resembles a mosaic of hermeticaly sealed, independent ghettos; another image is much more fluid where colour and religion are of no more significance than county of birth, ie having a workmate or neighbour who is a pakistani moslem is no more or less of significance than if he was from Kent or Lancashire.
The latter is my utopian ideal - I think I might prefer monoculture to the former. Self evidently what we have today more closely resembles a mosaic than utopia. Neither right nor left like the mosaic model - they differ on what should replace it.
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