Can Christians Do Good For Goodness Sake?

[Moonbeam]

Our earliest experiences with guilt and shame come from a time where morality isn't something we understand. They are part of us separating from our early attachment figures, and as a mental function, literally understanding the difference between self and others and cause and effect.

Culture, religion, logic, morality, etc. are all ideas which we attach later on.

Avoidance of guilt and shame is one mechanism of promoting humans to do good. It acts in this way for the theist and atheist both.

I do think that some cultures and religions take very concrete approaches to behavior and back it up by emphasizing the risk of those feelings, and attaching them to a fear of an undesirable outcome (e.g. going to hell).

As you have observed, though, this mechanism (and others) of providing a sense of morality does not equate to any objective morality. It can be subject to radical change throughout time and radical difference between communities.

But knowing that is no endorsement for logic as a replacement. I actually find that more susceptible to distortion because the alternative must be withheld through a community rather than simply an individual.

This is why I emphasize empathy as the deficit tool in approaching the greater good. If we are able to appreciate the experience of those affected by our choices on a level of feeling, it provides cognitive dissonance when either our logic or our community rules are subject to unconscious biases.

Apparently the profundity of this post went by without comment Hehe, it's almost as if God entered the thread and posted and the Christians and Atheists, preoccupied by arguing among themselves, failed to notice.

But that failure is conditional, I would also suspect, because the wisdom you have can't be transmitted to people who lack a foundation onto which it can be visibly placed. The secret protects itself by being invisible to those not prepared to see it and if you tell them of their lack of preparation they take it as a personal offense. You didn't do that, of course. I did.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

If you're looking at it from a Christian definition, then you have to look at it in context: if you, as God, set the ground rules, which everyone but a small group ignores & refuses to change, then how do you deal out punishment?

Why must there be punishment at all? Nobody has ever answered that question beyond "because god says so," which isn't a rational answer. It isn't a reason. It's saying "might makes right."

The fact is that humans experience feelings of vengeance and desires of retribution, so they project those feelings onto a god, and then don't even think to ask the question. They want to suppose that their god is all-powerful but then don't even stop to wonder why he is unable to accomplish his goals without incredible human death and suffering. Why not simply wiggle His nose and reprogram the entire human race? OMG NOT THEIR PRECIOUS FREE WILL, NO! BETTER DROWN THEM ALL INSTEAD!

 

[ch33zw1z]

And there is the answer to the question. As ch33zw1z said there can be genuinely good people, but do we really care if others must be coerced as long as they fall in line? To remove the harm they'd do to others and replace it with kindness is worth something at least. The basis of Christianity is Jesus, and the only message that matters there is his sacrifice. It is one of pacifism, of boundless love, and to live without hate. To suffer evil as he did.

To rise above our base animal instincts, it's the definition of enlightenment, is it not? That'd be the pinnacle, the highest meaning, of Christianity.

Beyond that I think they have some details wrong. I'm not a religious person, never attended Church, and I have a fondness for Buddhists even though I've grown up in a classically Californian way. The only temple of worship needed is ones own body. That means through your actions be kind. Eat, drink, and !@#$ as you'd like, but be kind.

Great post!

Love, peace, and spread it around.

 

[Doc Savage Fan]

I don't believe in ANY god. Is it then your confession that, for any putative god, you agree that it doesn't exist? I'm guessing not, so perhaps you want to put a bit more thought into your statement instead of just trying to come up with a catchy "gotcha".

I was in no way attempting to play "gotcha". If you want to be pedantic go for it...but don't expect me to play that game. I believe that you don't believe in ANY god...I get it.

But you don't know that because it's completely false. Here's an example: 1 million digits of pi at the beginning of the original manuscript of genesis and a 256-bit checksum of that string at the end of the original manuscript of Revelations would be a powerfully persuasive bit of evidence that the Bible is true.

Is that too hard for your god?

Back to shooting fish in a barrel I see. Apparently you didn't understand my previous post regarding the fallibility of religions. I'm in no way trying to prove to you that the Bible is true. I'm saying to you that Christianity is a fallible religious construct.

No, the curiosity is why you're all too fucking pussy to really challenge your beliefs.

And there you go again. Why so angry? You seem to know my beliefs better than I do...so what exactly do you want me to challenge about my beliefs?

Bullshit equivocation. I can feel awe and wonder at the universe, and I do all the time. Einstein was a brilliant man surrounded by religious people, so it's no surprise he would try to express strictly endogenous feelings in religious terms. That has fuck-all to do with any gods actually existing.

"Religious" experiences that are not uncommon and most who experience them, rightly or wrongly, typically associate them with God.

It is no folly to challenge others to experience their feelings individually and directly instead of dressing them up in the language of somebody else's dogma because they lack the courage to stand apart, nor is it folly to call out the systematic and oppressive manner in which the religious compel others to surrender the integrity of their individual experiences to the tyranny of religious dogma.

Make fun of religions all you want...knock yourself out. But it's folly to condescend to those who believe in God when you clearly don't understand what they've experienced or how those experiences have fundamentally affected them.

 

[Kaido]

.... and a few rules are:

95% of the 500+ rules in the Old Testament Christians completely ignore. The parts they tend to like are those that bash gays. When was the last time a Christian took an unfaithful wife to prove that they.

Oh, no doubt. There was an excellent segment on West Wing about exactly that:

Couple that with countless biblical translations & the errors going from language to language along the way and you get a pretty confusing & conflicting set of guidelines.

 

[Aikouka]

And none of that is a secret anymore. The origins of the myths are clear, the history of the beginnings of the religions are clear and prove that the stories are just that, old stories invented by men. So yeah, the desire to believe in an all-powerful god is understandable, a person has to be monumentally and willfully stupid to actually do it in this day and age. The Abrahamic gods are no more real than the feathered snake or the green panda. That's why we atheists look down on the wannabelievers. It's not that they were hoodwinked by being indoctrinated into religion, that could happen to anyone. It's that they choose, they demand, they insist upon remaining stupid. They've got all the information about gravity at their fingertips and they purposefully ignore it so they can go on believing in the green panda instead.

Hm... it is an interesting thing to question why people still believe regardless of how much science has progressed in the past 50-100 years to show that some things just don't make sense. Although, almost in ways that Christianity assimilated holidays (the Pagan Winter Solstice becoming Christmas), there has been a push toward "theisticizing" aspects of science. For example, Theistic Evolution is pretty much just saying that evolution is real and it did occur, but that's because God made it happen. Ultimately, it's a pretty big cop out, because it's literally impossible to prove any which way.

I've had some good discussions with religious folk over the past few years, and I think it still comes back to that psychological desire that I mentioned combined with the indoctrination that you talked about. Essentially, these religious ideals become a part of these people's core identity, and that can be a hard thing to change. I used to be religious, but I'd say that I was never as deeply religious as some of the people that I know. So, what happened to me? I've always considered myself to be a person that follows logic, and when I saw logical reasoning as to why the evidence for God is superficial and self-referential, I can't help but go with that.

Although, I'm going to be clear in that I don't look down on anyone. Personally, I don't care what someone believes as long as it doesn't hurt anyone, and I don't like to be crass toward others.

 

[Paratus]

But you don't know that because it's completely false. Here's an example: 1 million digits of pi at the beginning of the original manuscript of genesis and a 256-bit checksum of that string at the end of the original manuscript of Revelations would be a powerfully persuasive bit of evidence that the Bible is true.

Interestingly the reverse of your proof is likely true. The first million digits of PI, the entire bible (in ASCII) and the 256bit checksum are likely contained in the values of PI.

In the end of the book Contact by Carl Sagan the protagonist finds a series of ones and zeros in PI that create a perfect circle on her computer. The inference is the creator of the universe left a message in a fundamental constant.

I thought this was a really interesting idea. One that could be considered proof of a greater being if true. However after thinking about it some more I realized that the "message" almost had to certainly be there.

As an irrational transcendental number the odds of a string of numbers of length N appearing at some position K approach 100% after enough digits are calculated.

So basically every bit of non-infinitely repeating information in the universe is likely contained in every irrational number.

So I'm still not sure what I would consider proof.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Hm... it is an interesting thing to question why people still believe regardless of how much science has progressed in the past 50-100 years to show that some things just don't make sense. Although, almost in ways that Christianity assimilated holidays (the Pagan Winter Solstice becoming Christmas), there has been a push toward "theisticizing" aspects of science. For example, Theistic Evolution is pretty much just saying that evolution is real and it did occur, but that's because God made it happen. Ultimately, it's a pretty big cop out, because it's literally impossible to prove any which way.

I've had some good discussions with religious folk over the past few years, and I think it still comes back to that psychological desire that I mentioned combined with the indoctrination that you talked about. Essentially, these religious ideals become a part of these people's core identity, and that can be a hard thing to change. I used to be religious, but I'd say that I was never as deeply religious as some of the people that I know. So, what happened to me? I've always considered myself to be a person that follows logic, and when I saw logical reasoning as to why the evidence for God is superficial and self-referential, I can't help but go with that.

Although, I'm going to be clear in that I don't look down on anyone. Personally, I don't care what someone believes as long as it doesn't hurt anyone, and I don't like to be crass toward others.

Hey, I agree completely. It's hard to change. It's comforting and feels good to wrap yourself in the lie of a god looking out for you. That's why so many people who have access to the truth, the origin of their fairy tales, the atrocities committed by their god and their church leaders, still insist upon looking the other way and cling desperately to the warm, feel-good delusions.

Of course, the same could be said about dependence on heroin. It feels good and it's hard to quit once you get into it.

 

[Moonbeam]

I'd really like to talk about a good reason to believe that a god exists, but nobody seems to have any.

People can suggest all kinds of reasons for believing in God but they aren't acceptable to you. We could maybe explore why that is so. None of the gods of religion make any logical sense or can be proved so you reject believing in them. Your idea of a good reason is one that passes the logical proof test, God must be a physically demonstrable fact that can be tested and proved. But we know that is totally impossible and every evidence that Christians offer to the contrary always fall on their face, over and over again to the point that you basically see it as true as the law of gravity.

Perhaps, however, we can do a thought experiment. Suppose that the proof that would satisfy you would be to actually see Him, but in order to see Him you would need to have a special kind of eye, an eye that can be created by a science that is kept very secret and nobody knows about. It will require that you sit in a dark room for hours and hours a day imagining a burning candle and that the exercise will create new and different neural pathways in your brain and that these, when drinking a certain kind of tea will allow you to see God. He will then tell you all of the secrets of the universe and infuse you with infinite love of the kind that He has and you will return to the world with the window of that wide open so that His love is your love to shine on the world.

Now when somebody asks you to prove that love real, what could you do but laugh. Are you going to tell them to sit in a dark room and drink Earl Gray. They will just say you're nuts. It is only the lover who knows who his Beloved is. Nobody can tell the blind a damn thing. There are fingers all over the world that point to the moon, but they are not the moon. We live in Plato's cave and see though a glass darkly.

 

[Moonbeam]

So I'm still not sure what I would consider proof.

You might try sitting in a Zen monastery and being occasionally lashed by a cane.

 

[Moonbeam]

Hey, I agree completely. It's hard to change. It's comforting and feels good to wrap yourself in the lie of a god looking out for you. That's why so many people who have access to the truth, the origin of their fairy tales, the atrocities committed by their god and their church leaders, still insist upon looking the other way and cling desperately to the warm, feel-good delusions.

Of course, the same could be said about dependence on heroin. It feels good and it's hard to quit once you get into it.

That's nothing. You should try being smugly self assured about everything. You'll want to cling to that like stink on shit.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

People can suggest all kinds of reasons for believing in God but they aren't acceptable to you. We could maybe explore why that is so.

Could we also explore the flip-side of why for so many people it's not so?

Most of us grow up believing in a lot of lies and fairy tales. Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, fairies and pixies and unicorns, oh my! And we outgrow them. They're happy little thoughts and they make us feel good, but when we finally learn the truth we're capable of letting them go. We can put logic, reason and evidence ahead of delusion, superstition and blind faith. Why not god? What is it that allows a person to discard Santa Claus when overwhelming evidence says he's not real, but makes that same person cling to the belief in god even more zealously when the evidence says he's not real?

 

[Paratus]

You might try sitting in a Zen monastery and being occasionally lashed by a cane.

MB are you saying I need some religion beaten into me?!

 

[Moonbeam]

MB are you saying I need some religion beaten into me?!

Of course not. I'm saying you might benefit from having the pi beaten out of you. You can't pour tea in a full cup. Well, you can, but, well, you know.

 

[Victorian Gray]

okay dude.

Incidentally, you didn't respond - where right now are Christians raping, pillaging, murdering, etc?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...1adbb2-9032-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html

http://heavy.com/news/2015/12/anti-...urder-mass-grave-genocide-uncensored-youtube/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...ic-burnt-witches-at-stake-says-UN-report.html

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/afric...ethnically-cleansed-car-2015196546788288.html

 

[ch33zw1z]

Our earliest experiences with guilt and shame come from a time where morality isn't something we understand. They are part of us separating from our early attachment figures, and as a mental function, literally understanding the difference between self and others and cause and effect.

Culture, religion, logic, morality, etc. are all ideas which we attach later on.

Avoidance of guilt and shame is one mechanism of promoting humans to do good. It acts in this way for the theist and atheist both.

I do think that some cultures and religions take very concrete approaches to behavior and back it up by emphasizing the risk of those feelings, and attaching them to a fear of an undesirable outcome (e.g. going to hell).

As you have observed, though, this mechanism (and others) of providing a sense of morality does not equate to any objective morality. It can be subject to radical change throughout time and radical difference between communities.

But knowing that is no endorsement for logic as a replacement. I actually find that more susceptible to distortion because the alternative must be withheld through a community rather than simply an individual.

This is why I emphasize empathy as the deficit tool in approaching the greater good. If we are able to appreciate the experience of those affected by our choices on a level of feeling, it provides cognitive dissonance when either our logic or our community rules are subject to unconscious biases.

Just gonna touch on the earliest experiences, as there's nothing else in your post that stands out. All good stuff.

Leave all the labels behind (morals, logic, ethics, etc..), and it's apparent that guilt and shame are still based on a perceived version of right and wrong.

Earliest experiences is a subjective to what belief system is being referenced.

Theist (Christian): Adam eats from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (been a while, not sure if that's exactly what it's called), this is essentially the turning point where man gains self-awareness, ashamed of his nakedness, creates clothing to cover himself. Guilt and shame is born.

Atheist: Guilt and shame are based on accepted social norms.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

MB are you saying I need some religion beaten into me?!

Well it could be a thing I guess.

I tend to hang out on reddit these days and one of the subs they have is r/philosophy. It would be fun to see how long this thread would last there. What, two minutes?

 

[Puffnstuff]

95% of the 500+ rules in the Old Testament Christians completely ignore. The parts they tend to like are those that bash gays.

The truth is that the majority of people who claim to be Christians are not and only have religion and the rituals of men vs a genuine conversion. You don't wake up one day and decide hey I want to be a Christian and just label yourself as such. You don't join a church and magically become a Christian by showing up every time the doors are open. You don't decide to start doing good works one day in hopes that you will be accepted by God and allowed into heaven.

You don't obtain forgiveness of sins by sitting in a wooden box telling another man about them. Only Jesus has the power to forgive you of your sins which you must confess directly to him (1 John 1:7-9). There are no appointed middle men that can absolve them for you. Also organized religion has been promoting hate and judgmental thinking since its inception all in the name of God (whichever one they are serving).

 

[Meghan54]

I'm still wondering how polytheism came about. If the Biblical account is accurate, early man only knew God. God routinely interacted with man, thereby reinforcing that God is God.

Then, some time later, polytheism came into being. How? If man only knew God, how did prayer to/worship of golden calves, money, whatever, ever get substituted for God?

 

[MajinCry]

I'm still wondering how polytheism came about. If the Biblical account is accurate, early man only knew God. God routinely interacted with man, thereby reinforcing that God is God.

Then, some time later, polytheism came into being. How? If man only knew God, how did prayer to/worship of golden calves, money, whatever, ever get substituted for God?

The devil.

 

[bshole]

The devil.

LoL. It isn't good enough that God made us broken, he also had to unleash a supernatural deceiver among us to maximize the number of people in hell. There is no morally acceptable reason for him to do this to us.

 

[ch33zw1z]

LoL. It isn't good enough that God made us broken, he also had to unleash a supernatural deceiver among us to maximize the number of people in hell. There is no morally acceptable reason for him to do this to us.

That really is the rub right there. Christians will submit that a mere mortal such as ourselves could never fathom the "mind of God", thus our puny little minds could never understand his motives.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

That really is the rub right there. Christians will submit that a mere mortal such as ourselves could never fathom the "mind of God", thus our puny little minds could never understand his motives.

All the while telling us what we're doing wrong because they know what the invisible man in the sky really wants.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

I was in no way attempting to play "gotcha".

Well, let's see about that. You said:

The God you don't believe in clearly doesn't exist.

I took this to imply that I suppose Christians believe in a certain idea of god, and while you agree that idea is not instantiated in reality, nonetheless a different idea of god is the real one in which Christians believe, and that one *is* instantiated in reality. I really don't see any other way to take it. You are agreeing that at least one particular idea of god does not exist, but being that you are a theist, you nonetheless believe a god does exist.

But the reality is that each and every god is "the god that I don't believe in." If you "get it" that I don't believe in any gods, then what you said is equivalent to saying that all gods do not exist. Is that what you believe? I hardly think so. So either you don't get it, you didn't think your statement through before writing it, or you're trying to play some kind of game.

Which is it?

If you want to be pedantic go for it...but don't expect me to play that game. I believe that you don't believe in ANY god...I get it.

It isn't simple pedantry. The devil is in the details, Doc.

Back to shooting fish in a barrel I see. Apparently you didn't understand my previous post regarding the fallibility of religions. I'm in no way trying to prove to you that the Bible is true. I'm saying to you that Christianity is a fallible religious construct.

I don't quite understand your characterization of this as "shooting fish in a barrel." You said, "there is no "proof" that anyone could give you that would meet your standards. You know that, I know that." I refuted that idea by presenting a fairly simple counterexample to your claim. I don't see where that connects to this distinct point of "Christianity is a fallible religious construct." Was the idea that Christianity is a fallible human creation a point of contention in your mind? What does that have to do with your claim that no proof could ever "meet my standards"?

And there you go again. Why so angry? You seem to know my beliefs better than I do...so what exactly do you want me to challenge about my beliefs?

I want everyone to apply consistent standards for testing their beliefs' correspondence to reality. Every line of evidence I've been presented in defense of any particular god's existence by any believer or apologist in my considerable experience debating theism and religion could equally justify the existence of one if not several gods in which that theist does not believe. Some loon says he hears the voice of god, but he's in dirty rags smelling of urine on the street and Christians will laugh at him. You put Jimmy Swaggart on the television saying the same things and they'll send him the last two pennies they had to rub together, and then go beat a homosexual within an inch of his life.

"Religious" experiences that are not uncommon and most who experience them, rightly or wrongly, typically associate them with God.

Of course they do! Because they lack the courage to accept their experiences on their own terms, and instead feel compelled to dress them up in the dogma of somebody else's religion!

Make fun of religions all you want...knock yourself out. But it's folly to condescend to those who believe in God when you clearly don't understand what they've experienced or how those experiences have fundamentally affected them.

That's exactly why I'm here taunting everyone to explain to me why they are justified claiming that their experiences have anything to do with their pet diety, and nobody will!

 

[interchange]

Apparently the profundity of this post went by without comment Hehe, it's almost as if God entered the thread and posted and the Christians and Atheists, preoccupied by arguing among themselves, failed to notice.

But that failure is conditional, I would also suspect, because the wisdom you have can't be transmitted to people who lack a foundation onto which it can be visibly placed. The secret protects itself by being invisible to those not prepared to see it and if you tell them of their lack of preparation they take it as a personal offense. You didn't do that, of course. I did.

I believe you are talking about the Dunning-Kruber effect.