religion and morality

Is there a God? If so, what is She like?

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popeye1945
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Re: religion and morality

Post by popeye1945 »

[/quote]Yes, given my own particular existential trajectory in regard to God and religion, I have more or less come to think the same thing. But in regard to morality on this side of the grave and immortality and salvation on the other side, what exactly is rational or irrational? God is one possible explanation for why something exists instead of nothing. He is one possible explanation for why it is our something and not something else.
So, either through Kierkegaardian leaps of faith or Pascalian wagers, some will be able to include God and religion in their understanding of the human condition. I have met a few of them myself over the years. And they were not fools.[/quote]

Personally, I do not believe in immortality nor salvation. The individual has an impression that he is it, meaning the ultimate purpose of a long process which could not be further from the truth. The essence of what he is, creates the chain of beings, read the genes, which next to the individual are relatively immortal. So, the individual is that which cares for its own essence and then passes it along this chain of being, the being dies the essence carries on. I simply don't get it that so many people in this day and age embrace anthropomorphism, it is just silly. As regards fools, as say apposed to genius, genius allows for being a genius in a given category or at most a number of categories obviously these religious people are not geniuses in the category of life's origins. In your, they are not fools statement, I imagine you think so because they are otherwise high functioning people in the categories of making a living but context is all important here. I would be a fool if I thought I could perform neurosurgery, context is important. There is no critical thinking involved in believing something without evidence, it is the mark of a fool.

But, in my view, even to them it doesn't make this...

popeye1945 wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 7:42 pmJust as all man-made things in the physical world are his biological extensions, expressions of his human nature and its knowledge, these desert religions are the biological extensions of the ignorance of our ancestors. You seem to think in some of your protests to my reasoning that context is important, and it is, these old traditions need to be read through today's context to put things in a rational framework. If we hold onto these traditions as guides we might as well not have come down from the trees, just to tread these stagnate waters.
[/quote] Old traditions, new traditions. To each I attempt to bring them around to answering this question:
"How, in a world teeming with both conflicting goods and contingency, chance and change, ought one to live?"
Morally. Righteously. In either a God or a No God world.
But [from my frame of mind] you keep it all up in the general description intellectual/spiritual clouds:[/quote]

You have to make up your mind in making this enquirer if it is going to be emotionally based or intellectually based, a belief without evidence is emotionally based. How is one to live the good life, philosophy and/or science can do a better job at that. When morality is based on superstition and magic appealing to one's emotional state is a recipe for chaos. The only sane foundation for morality is one based upon our common biology to include all life forms, grounded in reality.


popeye1945 wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 7:42 pmReligions in the past have had the purpose of giving the population an orientation to the world as they knew it, which didn't amount to much in the way of knowledge. In the beginning these religions were oral traditions and tended to change with the times but the printed word concretized the word, and ignorance became sacred. Morality in order to be rational must serve the self -interests of our common biology embracing all life forms, for it is only when one identifies one's self with the self in others does compassion arise which is the bases of morality. It is perfectly natural to assume that life in general is part of something larger than itself but to credit that something to something supernatural, an anthropomorphic god, that is not manifest in space/time can be considered insane even if it is being politically incorrect, seems crazy isn't crazy if the crazies have the numbers.
Pertaining to what particular context?[/quote]

The context of society.
popeye1945 wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 7:42 pmAs to your concerns over the confusion of what is suffering across the board first, you must have a point of reference and that reference is our common biology. Certain generalizations can be made, it is after all are common carbon-based biology and its suffering which evokes compassion across the board. Where there is no compassion you have a psychopathic individual or a collective as found in the aggression of empires. Biology is the creator of all meaning in the world and the only possible, read rational reference point.
Okay, above you focused in on the "simple principle" of suffering.

To which I noted:
Given a particular context that most of us will be familiar with...situations in which moral and political and spiritual convictions often come into conflict...how would you imagine his "simple principle" being applicable.
It certainly is not applicable across the board on a supernatural realm but one based on our commonality it certainly would be.

You embrace the right of the unborn to live in order to prevent it suffering the fate of extinction. You embrace the right of a woman to choose abortion in order the prevent her suffering the fate of being forced to give birth...or being arrested and tried for murder.
You embrace the right of gun owners in order that they don't suffer a world in which their guns are taken. You embrace the right of gun haters in order that they don't suffer a world where guns slaughter thousands and thousands, year in and year out.
And on and on with all the rest of the "conflicting goods". What one side construes to be suffering the other side construes to be relief.[/quote]

I am assuming reason and logic applied to a morality based upon our common biology, and when one does so one needs to take into consideration the context present and future for the security and well being of that common biology. When morality is based upon a supernatural being with a bad disposition Pandora's box is left wide open.

Now references are made to our "common biology" and "compassion".
Okay, so how is my point above any less applicable to them? Common biology and compassion in regard to the unborn or the pregnant woman, to the gun lovers or the gun haters? [/quote'

Morality based upon our common biology would not permit the mass shootings that depend largely upon little in the way of gun control. As to the welfare of a fetus and/or a pregnant women that would depend first on whether a fetus is indeed to be considered a person. Also one needs to take the context of the women circumstances into account and the consequences for the biological well being of the larger community.

What I do here then is to note my own assessment of conflicting goods as the embodiment of dasein.
[/quote]

The judging and assessment of what conflicting goods are to be made available would be determined by its affecting the well-being of dasein read our common biology on an individual and/or collective level.
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iambiguous
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Re: religion and morality

Post by iambiguous »

Yes, given my own particular existential trajectory in regard to God and religion, I have more or less come to think the same thing. But in regard to morality on this side of the grave and immortality and salvation on the other side, what exactly is rational or irrational? God is one possible explanation for why something exists instead of nothing. He is one possible explanation for why it is our something and not something else.

So, either through Kierkegaardian leaps of faith or Pascalian wagers, some will be able to include God and religion in their understanding of the human condition. I have met a few of them myself over the years. And they were not fools.
popeye1945 wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 8:51 amPersonally, I do not believe in immortality nor salvation.
What you believe about them is one thing, what you can actually demonstrate is in fact true about them another thing altogether. Most people fear death because they equate it with oblivion. And, in my view, most of those who believe in God and religion were either indoctrinated as children to believe in them or come to recognize that sans God and religion it is oblivion that awaits them.

So, existentially, for each of us as individuals, those more or less blind leaps of faith and wagers.
popeye1945 wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 8:51 am The individual has an impression that he is it, meaning the ultimate purpose of a long process which could not be further from the truth. The essence of what he is, creates the chain of beings, read the genes, which next to the individual are relatively immortal. So, the individual is that which cares for its own essence and then passes it along this chain of being, the being dies the essence carries on. I simply don't get it that so many people in this day and age embrace anthropomorphism, it is just silly. As regards fools, as say apposed to genius, genius allows for being a genius in a given category or at most a number of categories obviously these religious people are not geniuses in the category of life's origins. In your, they are not fools statement, I imagine you think so because they are otherwise high functioning people in the categories of making a living but context is all important here. I would be a fool if I thought I could perform neurosurgery, context is important. There is no critical thinking involved in believing something without evidence, it is the mark of a fool.
Same thing. You note all of this. And, from my frame of mind, these assumptions are rooted existentially in dasein. Your own unique set of personal experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge brought you to this particular subjective conclusion. But what here are you able to demonstrate that all rational men and women are obligated to believe? Again, especially in regard to my own interest in God and religion...connecting the dots between morality here and now and immortality and salvation there and then.
popeye1945 wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 7:42 pmJust as all man-made things in the physical world are his biological extensions, expressions of his human nature and its knowledge, these desert religions are the biological extensions of the ignorance of our ancestors. You seem to think in some of your protests to my reasoning that context is important, and it is, these old traditions need to be read through today's context to put things in a rational framework. If we hold onto these traditions as guides we might as well not have come down from the trees, just to tread these stagnate waters.
Old traditions, new traditions. To each I attempt to bring them around to answering this question:

"How, in a world teeming with both conflicting goods and contingency, chance and change, ought one to live?"

Morally. Righteously. In either a God or a No God world.

But [from my frame of mind] you keep it all up in the general description intellectual/spiritual clouds:
popeye1945 wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 8:51 amYou have to make up your mind in making this enquirer if it is going to be emotionally based or intellectually based, a belief without evidence is emotionally based. How is one to live the good life, philosophy and/or science can do a better job at that. When morality is based on superstition and magic appealing to one's emotional state is a recipe for chaos. The only sane foundation for morality is one based upon our common biology to include all life forms, grounded in reality.
An intellectually based examination of God and religion? But the leaps of faith and the wagers themselves are predicated on the simple fact that intellectually, aside from [in my opinion] the fools here like Immanual Can and henry quirk, mere mortals here on planet Earth can never grasp rationally, logically, epistemologically, such things as God. We may as well try to grasp the existence of existence itself. What, you think that this...

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

...is not applicable to God and religion too?
popeye1945 wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 7:42 pmAs to your concerns over the confusion of what is suffering across the board first, you must have a point of reference and that reference is our common biology. Certain generalizations can be made, it is after all are common carbon-based biology and its suffering which evokes compassion across the board. Where there is no compassion you have a psychopathic individual or a collective as found in the aggression of empires. Biology is the creator of all meaning in the world and the only possible, read rational reference point.
Okay, above you focused in on the "simple principle" of suffering.

To which I noted:
Given a particular context that most of us will be familiar with...situations in which moral and political and spiritual convictions often come into conflict...how would you imagine his "simple principle" being applicable.

You embrace the right of the unborn to live in order to prevent it suffering the fate of extinction. You embrace the right of a woman to choose abortion in order the prevent her suffering the fate of being forced to give birth...or being arrested and tried for murder.

You embrace the right of gun owners in order that they don't suffer a world in which their guns are taken. You embrace the right of gun haters in order that they don't suffer a world where guns slaughter thousands and thousands, year in and year out.

And on and on with all the rest of the "conflicting goods". What one side construes to be suffering the other side construes to be relief.
popeye1945 wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 7:42 pmI am assuming reason and logic applied to a morality based upon our common biology, and when one does so one needs to take into consideration the context present and future for the security and well being of that common biology. When morality is based upon a supernatural being with a bad disposition Pandora's box is left wide open.
And that is relevant to the point I raised above...how? "Reason and logic applied to a morality based upon our common biology" from the perspective of those in favor of abortion or those opposed to it? To those in favor of gun ownership or those opposed to it?

And, again, while I do not believe in God and religion myself "here and now", that's not the same thing as me demonstrating that they are just supernatural delusions the faithful adhere to. Instead, from my own frame of mind, I'm willing to concede for the sake of argument in a philosophy forum that a God, the God [or No God spiritual path] does exist.

Then these parts:
1] a demonstrable proof of the existence of your God or religious/spiritual path
2] addressing the fact that down through the ages hundreds of Gods and religious/spiritual paths to immortality and salvation were/are championed...but only one of which [if any] can be the true path. So why yours?
3] addressing the profoundly problematic role that dasein plays in any particular individual's belief in Gods and religious/spiritual faiths
4] the questions that revolve around theodicy and your own particular God or religious/spiritual path
popeye1945
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Re: religion and morality

Post by popeye1945 »

The suffering of those deprived of automatic military style weapons --come on, a little honest commonsense is in order. With this proposition, one only need look at the context of other societies where the public is not armed to the teeth and the security and wellbeing of its citizens is still secured. Of course one claim is going to be played against its opposite, with abortion I think the rights of the living trump the yet unborn, a biological being is in essence that which experiences, we avoid pain, deprivation, and violence in all its many forms. Religion is for those who cannot think critically, or who just can't be bother. That we are all part of something greater than ourselves is an obvious given, but fantasy isn't the answer, the question is how to raise the intellect of the populous so that humanity at large will ultimately survive, as things stand humanity will not survive. One needs to see reality in it is horrific form life lives upon life and its sublimely beautiful evolutionary creations, escaping reality is not the answer.

Schopenhauer stated once, " Life is something that should never have been", but it is, and we must affirm it. It seems to me moronic knowing that all meaning is biologically dependent and that morality is not based upon our common biology, its the elephant in the room. This new morality needs to be base upon the common biology of all life forms and the living nature that supports its well-being. This is then making the physical world sacred the only way humanity will survive. The essence of all life is one and the same, differing only in structure and form fitting into the niches structure and form allows for. I ask you if this were realized, would this not be a spiritual life living in sacredness?
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iambiguous
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Re: religion and morality

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Does Morality Depend on Religion?
From the purdue.edu website
1. The Presumed Connection between Morality and Religion

In 1987 Governor Mario Cuomo of New York announced that he would appoint a special panel to advise him on ethical issues. The governor pointed out that “Like it or not, we are increasingly involved in life-and-death matters.” As examples, he mentioned abortion, the problem of handicapped babies, the right to die, and assisted reproduction. The purpose of the panel would be to provide the governor with “expert assistance” in thinking about the moral dimensions of these and other matters.
In other words, our politically correct experts or their politically correct experts?

But it's always important to call them experts. That way we can be assured that the advice they give really does reflect the most rational assessment. On the other hand, of course, the rest is history.

Right?

And if there is one thing we can be reasonably sure of here it's that we have our fair share of experts. Or, as I call them, objectivists.

Only in America, more so than in any other modern industrial nation around the globe, the role that religion plays in all this is particularly...appalling?

In America, it is simply not possible for a government official of note to not profess a belief in God. And, in almost all cases, the Christian God.

Thus...
But who, exactly, would sit on such a panel? The answer tells us a lot about who, in this country, is thought to speak for morality. The answer is: representatives of organized religion. According to the New York Times, “Mr. Cuomo, in an appearance at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, said he had invited Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jewish leaders to join the group."
Join the group? Or, for all practical purposes, become the group?
Few people, at least in the United States, would find this remarkable. Among western democracies, the U.S. is an unusually religious country. Nine out of ten Americans say they believe in a personal God; in Denmark and Sweden, the figure is only one in five. It is not unusual for priests and ministers to be treated as moral experts. Most hospitals, for example, have ethics committees, and these committees usually include three types of members: healthcare professionals to advise about technical matters, lawyers to handle legal issues, and religious representatives to address the moral questions. When newspapers want comments about the ethical dimensions of a story, they call upon the clergy, and the clergy are happy to oblige. Priests and ministers are assumed to be wise counselors who will give sound moral advice when it is needed.
Only in America!

Or, perhaps, as Seneca suggested, "religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful."

Tell me that the ruling class in America has not used religion to their advantage in prompting "the masses" to toe the line. Just explore Trump, MAGA and their own evangelical flocks of sheep.

Workers of the world unite? In church maybe.

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=186929
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iambiguous
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Re: religion and morality

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Does Morality Depend on Religion?
From the purdue.edu website
Why are [priests and ministers assumed to be wise counselors who will give sound moral advice when it is needed]? The reason is not that they have proven to be better or wiser than other people—as a group, they seem to be neither better nor worse than the rest of us. There is a deeper reason why they are regarded as having special moral insight. In popular thinking, morality and religion are inseparable: People commonly believe that morality can be understood only in the context of religion. So because the clergymen are the spokesmen for religion, it is assumed that they must be spokesmen for morality as well.
And why is this of particular importance? Because God and religion [and only God and religion] then connect the dots between morality on this side of the grave and immortality and salvation on the other side of it. Sure, there are secular ideologies and philosophies [from Marxism to Objectivism] that provide us with "scientific" and "metaphysical" value judgments. But that's only for here and now. Seventy to eighty odd years down here compared to "all of eternity" up there. There's simply no comparison. And the only reason many settle for the here and now secular "isms" is because it is in the here and the now that they are living. They are simply unable to make themselves believe in all the Gods and all the religious paths "out there" to choose from.

To wit...
It is not hard to see why people think this. When viewed from a nonreligious perspective, the universe seems to be a cold, meaningless place, devoid of value and purpose.
That's me, right? And I suspect that many here respond to me as harshly as they do because they possess just enough intelligence to recognize that given enough time I might manage to yank them down into "the hole" with me. And all I have to offer on this side of the grave is the possibility that if they abandon their own rendition of "What would Jesus do?", they at least have access to so many more options in their interactions with others. And they don't necessarily have to take that all the way to becoming a sociopath.
In his essay “A Free Man’s Worship,” written in 1902, Bertrand Russell expressed what he called the “scientific” view of the world:

"That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built."
That Woman too, I suspect.

On the other hand, like most things, this too is open existentially to who knows how many individual interpretations.

Cue dasein.

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popeye1945
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Re: religion and morality

Post by popeye1945 »

Religion depends upon semi-conscious human beings to egocentric to have an imagination. Ancient imaginations are served up as fast food for a starving humanity in need of spiritual nourishment.
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Re: religion and morality

Post by DPMartin »

FYI
Here is an excerpt of napoleon’s opinions on religion and gov who at the least didn’t seem to follow any religious beliefs:
"I do not want a dominant religion, nor the establishment of new ones. The Catholic, Reformed, and Lutheran systems, established by the Concordat, are sufficient."
Their direction and force are intelligible, and their irruptions can be guarded against. Moreover, the present inclinations and configurations of the human soil favor them; the child follows the road marked out by the parent, and the man follows the road marked out when a child.
"Listen, last Sunday, here at Malmaison, while strolling alone in the solitude enjoying the repose of nature, my ear suddenly caught the sound of the church-bell at Rueil. I was moved, so strong is the force of early habits and education! I said to myself, What an impression this must make on simple, credulous people!"
Let us gratify them; let us give back these bells and the rest to the Catholics. After all, the general effect of Christianity is beneficial.
"As far as I am concerned, I do not see in it the mystery of the incarnation, but the mystery of social order, the association of religion with paradise, an idea of equality which keeps the rich from being massacred by the poor."
"Society could not exist without an inequality of fortunes, and an inequality of fortunes without religion. A man dying of starvation alongside of one who has abundance would not yield to this difference unless he had some authority which assured him that God so orders it that there must be both poor and rich in the world, but that in the future, and throughout eternity, the portion of each will be changed."
Alongside of the repressive police exercised by the State there is a preventive police exercised by the Church. The clergy, in its cassock, is an additional spiritual gendarmerie, much more efficient than the temporal gendarmerie in its stout boots, while the essential thing is to make both keep step together in concert.
Between the two domains, between that which belongs to civil authority and that which belongs to religious authority, is there any line of separation?
"I look in vain where to place it; its existence is purely chimerical. I see only clouds, obscurities, difficulties. The civil government condemns a criminal to death; the priest gives him absolution and offers him paradise."

In relation to this act, both powers operate publicly in an inverse sense on the same individual, one with the guillotine and the other with a pardon. As these authorities may clash with each other, let us prevent conflicts and leave no undefined frontier; let us trace this out beforehand; let us indicate what our part is and not allow the Church to encroach on the State.—The Church rally wants all; it is the accessory which she concedes to us, while she appropriates the principal to herself.
"Mark the insolence of the priests who, in sharing authority with what they call the temporal power, reserve to themselves all action on the mind, the noblest part of man, and take it on themselves to reduce my part merely to physical action. They retain the soul and fling me the corpse!"
__________


this is after an attempt to make a religion of reason stick as a state religion, a result of the French revolution. Religion can always work hand in hand with civil gov. to manage a people. Constantinople didn’t convert until his death bed, but at the time he agreed to be vicar of what is now the catholic church, it was obviously easier to manage a people of one religion then many religions.

Also, religion isn’t necessarily morality though it assumed to be so, agreement is the morals, of which there is no need for religion. but religion can teach what a proper agreement should be such as what a marriage agreement should be as understood by the society the religion serves.


But to be clear even though Israel in its day as in King David had the same administration structure so as to manage a people as people are to be managed. The claim of and in the name of Jesus Christ is about Life, the Life that was lost with Adam, and restored in Jesus.
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iambiguous
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Re: religion and morality

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The Ontological Argument Revisited
Peter Mullen explores the argument that by definition, God exists.
From the latest PN issue.
In one form the Ontological Argument for God is basically the argument: 1) God is by definition the perfect being; 2) It is more perfect for a perfect thing to exist than not exist; 3) Therefore God exists.
Defining something into existence? Something that, in fact, to the best of my knowledge, has never once been demonstrated to in fact exist? As, for example, we exist, the pyramids in Egypt exist, oak trees exist, colonies of ants exist, the covid virus exists.

I've never clearly understood how someone can "think up" something like this and then actually consider that proof enough that God exists. Let alone a God, the God, their God.

Instead, I assume that, given all that would be the case if their God did in fact exist -- moral Commandments on this side of the grave, the reason terrible things happen to good people, immortality and salvation on the other side of the grave -- they "think up" what they want to believe is true because, psychologically, in believing that it is true it comforts and consoles them.

How hard can it be to grasp why, "for all practical purposes" this explains the allure of religion? This and the fact that many are indoctrinated as children to believe in one or another religious or spiritual path. And that, historically, many a government has learned the value of using Religion as a tool to sustain its power over the years.
This argument for the existence of God was given the name ‘ontological’ by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), but it was the invention of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1078, in his book Proslogion (how we miss philosopher-bishops these days!). The word derives from ‘ ontos’, which is the Greek word for ‘being’. Anselm’s own form of the Ontological Argument begins with the words: id quo maius cogitari nequit – “there must be that [thing] the greater than which cannot be conceived.” Anselm concluded that a being who has all the qualities of greatness and who exists must be greater than the conjectural amalgamation of these qualities but who does not exist; therefore, God exists. Anselm stressed the point in his prayer: “So truly thou dost exist, O Lord. My God, that thou canst not be conceived not to exist.”
Ontological.

By definition? It has to be, right? After all, if ontology is defined as "the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality", how on Earth could we possibly go beyond a "world of words" and link it empirically, materially, phenomenologically to a definitive understanding of existence itself.

Did God start existence or is He a part of an existence that has ever and always been? How does one even begin to wrap his or her mind around that? Other than in a "world of words" that are defined into existence in order to define the meaning yet more words still.

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iambiguous
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Re: religion and morality

Post by iambiguous »

The Ontological Argument Revisited
Peter Mullen explores the argument that by definition, God exists.
From the latest PN issue.
Some of the most renowned logicians of modern times have accepted one or other variety of the Ontological Argument, including Kurt Gödel, the inventor of the Incompleteness Theorem (who, incidentally, deliberately starved himself to death). Even the professional atheist Bertrand Russell accepted it for a time. As he writes in his Autobiography:

“I remember the precise moment, one day in 1894, as I was walking along Trinity Lane, when I saw in a flash (or thought I saw) that the Ontological Argument is valid. I had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco; on my way back, I suddenly threw it up in the air and exclaimed as I caught it, ‘Great Scott, the Ontological Argument is sound’.”
Of course, what I come back to here time and again is this: that it is one thing to accept an ontological argument...if the argument itself consists largely of words defining and defending the meaning of other words...and another thing altogether to connect the dots between the argument and the existence of an actual God.

The ontological/essential God defined into existence and the ontic/existential God who actually sends you up or down on Judgment Day. The gap between them.

After all, it's easy enough for the true believers from any denomination to "think up" a God, the God, my God. Or to fall back on a Scripture that others have "thought up". But to demonstrate down here on Earth that their God is in fact the real deal? With so much at stake on both sides of the grave?
Kant, however, rejected Anselm’s reasoning, famously arguing that existence ‘is not a predicate’. He meant by this that existence is not a contingent property of a thing, like its roundness or blueness can be. The implication of Kant’s position is that we cannot as it were simply conjure things into existence by mere words, as the Ontological Argument might seem to do. In Kant’s own words: “A hundred real thalers do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers. My financial position is, however, affected very differently by a hundred real thalers than it is by the mere concept of them.”
How ironic is this? Well, that depends on how you interpret Kant's own philosophy...technically? In regard to, say, deontology? Mere mortals having an imperative and categorical obligation to, for example, never lie? Morality itself linked to all that is rational. But, in the end, it requiring a "transcending font" to...enforce it?

How was he not "simply conjuring things into existence by mere words" here?

Sure, I may still be misconstruing the a priori/a posteriori...thing for itself/thing in itself...deduction/induction components of arguments like this.

So, let's bring them down to, say, Mary aborting Jane and connect the dots between morality and mere mortals and God as Kant and others would construe it.

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Re: religion and morality

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Does God Exist?
William Lane Craig says there are good reasons for thinking that He does.
So could this fine-tuning be due to chance? The problem with this explanation is that the odds of all the constants and quantities’ randomly falling into the incomprehensibly narrow life-permitting range are just so infinitesimal that they cannot be reasonably accepted.
Again, back to how each of us reacts to this. To what extent do we have the education and the actual on-the-job training as an astrophysicist [among others in the scientific community] to respond to that in a truly sophisticated manner? And then the gap still between what the scientific community thinks it knows about these things and all that there is still to be learned. What does "randomly falling into place" mean given the staggering gaps here? Are the odds really "infinitesimally" small?

Also, if that is the case, how small in turn are the odds that an existing God is your God...given just how many of them are claimed to exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions

And that's just on this planet.

That's basically IC's quandary here. He was the one who recommended I read this article. But arguing for the existence of a God, the God is a far cry from demonstrable proof that it is, in fact, your God that set into motion the Goldilocks Factor.
Therefore the proponents of the chance explanation have been forced to postulate the existence of a ‘World Ensemble’ of other universes, preferably infinite in number and randomly ordered, so that life-permitting universes like ours would appear by chance somewhere in the Ensemble.
Right. That and only that among the atheists is postulated. The irony here being that just as he needs to imagine the most "out there" set of circumstances to explain the Goldilocks effect, the faithful need to imagine that only their own God set it all into motion. And that one way or another theodicy also fits into it all Divinely.
Not only is this hypothesis, to borrow Richard Dawkins’ phrase, “an unparsimonious extravagance,” it faces an insuperable objection. By far, the most probable observable universes in a World Ensemble would be worlds in which a single brain fluctuated into existence out of the vacuum and observed its otherwise empty world. So, if our world were just a random member of the World Ensemble, by all probability we ought to be having observations like that. Since we don’t, that strongly disconfirms the World Ensemble hypothesis. So chance is also not a good explanation.
Look, once we go this far out onto the metaphysical limb, sure, we are allowed to imagine all kinds of fantastic explanations for the existence of existence itself. God and No God. But to suggest that the "insuperable objection" is more applicable to the atheists than the theists?

Well, that's ridiculous in my view. And more to the point, the scientists employ the "scientific method" in the attempt to grapple with it. And the theists among us? One or another Scripture? A more or less blind leap of faith?

A wager?
Thus...

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. The fine-tuning of the universe is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, the fine-tuning of the universe is due to design.

Thus, the fine-tuning of the universe constitutes evidence for a cosmic Designer.
Admittedly, more power to those here who are actually able to convince themselves that this set of assumptions is all but...axiomatic?

Bottom line [mine]: with God, you have your "transcending font" to judge your morality on this side of the grave. You have your immortality and salvation on the other side of it.

So, if the author here is able to tie it altogether into a "philosophical" argument for you as well then, okay, why not, it is your God and only your God that does in fact exist.
promethean75
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Re: religion and morality

Post by promethean75 »

"So could this fine-tuning be due to chance?"

Dawkins noted in one of his books that an optic nerve of a giraffe runs from the eyes, down the neck, around the pelvic bone, back up the neck and into the brain.

the fine tuner musta been drunk when he designed the giraffe, eh?
popeye1945
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Re: religion and morality

Post by popeye1945 »

promethean75 wrote: Tue Jan 03, 2023 10:10 pm "So could this fine-tuning be due to chance?"

Dawkins noted in one of his books that an optic nerve of a giraffe runs from the eyes, down the neck, around the pelvic bone, back up the neck and into the brain.

the fine tuner musta been drunk when he designed the giraffe, eh?
That and the fact that 99.99 percent of mutations spell death for an organism, but then, the religious were never fond of facts, really quite bad taste really!! lol!!
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iambiguous
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Re: religion and morality

Post by iambiguous »

Here is an interesting column from Ross Douthat at the New York Times. It explores many of the ways "in our own day and age" in which men and women explore the spiritual realm "experimentally". What he deems to be "rational" about it...but what he also suspected can be "dangerous" about it as well.

Then as a Christian himself he reacts to all as a Christian himself.

My own reaction to speculation of this sort is always the same: It's not what you believe "in your head" so much as what you can demonstrate [even to yourself] is in fact true. The part where many take that more or less blind leap of faith. Then the part where you seriously confront the fact that with so much at stake on both sides of the grave, why your God and not one of the others. Then the role that dasein plays in your own profoundly existential sense of self. And then [for me] the most important part of all: theodicy.


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/opin ... ality.html

In this column I want to defend the rationality of this kind of spiritual experimentation and then to warn about its dangers. (The argument will get weirder as it goes.) But first let me give you three‌ examples of the experimental style I have in mind, from the general to the specific.

Start with the broad youthful impulse toward what you might call magical thinking, ranging from the vogue for astrology to the TikTok craze for “manifesting” desired outcomes in your life. In certain ways this is an extension of the self-help spiritualities that have been attached to American religion since forever, but right now the magical dimension is more explicit, the connection to old-time religion weak to nonexistent.

At the same time, it’s unclear to what extent any of this can be called belief. Instead there is a playacting dimension throughout, a range of attitudes from “This isn’t real but it’s fun” to “Maybe this isn’t real but it’s cool to play around with” to “This is actually real but who knows what it means.” Even some people who explicitly identify with witchcraft seem to have this ambiguity in their identification; they are participants in a culture of ritual and exploration, not believers in a specific set of claims.

A second example is the increasing fascination with psychedelics and hallucinogenic drugs, which takes secular and scientific forms but also has a strong spiritual dimension, with many participants who believe the drugs don’t just cause an experience within the mind but open the “doors of perception,” in Aldous Huxley’s phrase, to realities that are exist above and around us all the while.

This is clearly true of the emergent spiritual culture around DMT, an ingredient in the psychedelic brew known as ayahuasca that’s become a trip of choice for so-called psychonauts — explorers of the spiritual territory that its ingestion seems to open up. For many users DMT seems to offer an eerily shared experience: They report encountering similar landscapes and similar beings, as if they’re all either ‌‌connecting to the shared archetypes of some Jungian subconscious (which would be strange enough) or actually entering the same supernatural plane. And the latter belief yields spiritual experimentation in its purest form: People taking DMT this way aren’t practicing a religion so much as trying to discover religion’s supernatural grounding, and fashion a personal theology out of what they find and see.

Now a third example, very specific: Recently a statue appeared on a New York courthouse, occupying a plinth near famous lawgivers like Moses and Confucius. It’s a golden woman, or at least a female figure, with braided hair shaped like horns, roots or tendrils for arms and feet, rising upward from a lotus flower.

The figure’s sculptor, the Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander, has emphasized her work’s political significance. The golden woman wears a version of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s lace collar, and she’s meant to symbolize female power in a historically male-dominated legal world and to protest Roe v. Wade’s reversal.

But the work is clearly an attempt at a religious icon as well, one forged in a blurring of spiritual traditions. It matches a similar statue by the same artist that bears the word “Havah,” evoking the Arabic and Hebrew name for Eve, and thereby making a feminist claim on the monotheistic tradition. But the imagery of the courthouse statue is also pantheistic, the roots and flower evoking nature-spirituality, “a magical hybrid plant-animal,” as one art critic puts it. And then finally its very hard not to see the braids-as-horns, the tendrils that look a bit tentacle-like, as an appropriation of Christian images of the demonic in a statue that stands against the politics of conservative Christianity.

But none of these interpretations are stable; much like people playing with magic or experimenting on the frontiers of consciousness, Sikander has devised a religious icon that lacks a settled religious meaning, that’s deliberately open to infusions from the viewer, that summons spiritual energy in a nonspecific way.

For the stringent materialist, everything I’ve just described is reasonable so long as its understood to be playacting, experience-hunting, artistic experimentation. Only when it becomes serious does it offend against rationality.

However, stringent materialism is itself a weird late-modern superstition, and the kind of experimentation I’m describing is actually far more rational than a life lived as though the universe is random and indifferent and human beings are gene-transmission machines with an illusion of self-consciousness.

Yes, plenty of New Age and “woo-woo” practices don’t make any sense or lead only unto pyramid schemes; there are traps for the credulous all over. But the basic pattern of human existence and experience, an ordered and mathematically beautiful cosmos that yields extraordinary secrets to human inquiry and supplies all kinds of wild spiritual experiences even in our allegedly disenchanted age (and even sometimes to professional skeptics), makes a general openness to metaphysical possibilities a fundamentally reasonable default. And this is especially true if you have no theological tradition, no religious upbringing to structure your encounter with the universe’s mysteries — if you’re starting fresh, as many people nowadays are.

But precisely because an attitude of spiritual experimentation is reasonable, it’s also important to emphasize something taught by almost every horror movie but nonetheless skated over in a lot of American spirituality: the importance of being really careful in your openness, and not just taking the beneficence of the metaphysical realm for granted.

If the material universe as we find it is beautiful but also naturally perilous, and shot through with sin and evil wherever human agency is at work, there is no reason to expect that any spiritual dimension would be different — no reason to think that being a “psychonaut” is any less perilous than being an astronaut, even if the danger takes a different form.

There is plenty of raw data to indicate the perils: Not every near-death experience is heavenly; some share of DMT users come back traumatized; the American Catholic Church reportedly fields an increasing number of exorcism inquiries even as its cultural influence otherwise declines. And there should also be a fundamental uncertainty around even initially positive experiences: Not all that glitters is gold, and the idea that certain forces are out to trick you or use you recurs across religious cultures (and in the semireligious culture around U.F.O. experience today).

I’m writing as a Christian; my religion explicitly warns against magic, divination, summoning spirits and the like. (Atheist polemicists like to say that religious people are atheists about every god except their own, but this is not really the case; Christianity certainly takes for granted that there are powers in the world besides its triune God.) And it makes sense that in a culture where people are reacting against the Christian past there might be an instinct to ignore such prohibitions, to regard them as just another form of patriarchal chaunivism, white-male control.

But the presumption of danger in the supernatural realm is hardly confined to Christian tradition, and the presumption that pantheism or polytheism or any other alternative to Western monotheism automatically generates humane and kindly societies finds no confirmation in history whatsoever.

So from any religious perspective there’s reason to worry about a society where structures have broken down and a mass of people are going searching without maps, or playing around in half-belief, or deploying, against what remains of Christianity, symbols that invoke multiple spiritualities at once.

Some element of danger is unavoidable. The future of humanity depends on people opening doors to the transcendent, rather than sealing themselves into materialism and despair.

But when the door is open, be very, very careful about what you invite in.
popeye1945
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Re: religion and morality

Post by popeye1945 »

Religion and morality, now let's see which is the precursor, how about religion being a biological extension of humanity, expressing the fears, desires, and knowledge of its times? That would make Christianity along with the other desert religions wonderful sources of knowledge of the needs and desires of the peoples of its times. Forward ahead two thousand five hundred years; Its wisdom and its knowledge concretized; it is still speaking to those same people, but it is you listening. Morality concerns the well-being and security of the biology that religion should be addressing, but according to it your body/biology is a bit of a nasty thing, unholy it is, and even more so naked.

It really is about time to give these archaic religions the disrespect they earned by persisting beyond reason and beyond the well-being of all humanity. Mythology is something humanity has always needed it seems from a historical perspective, for they were meant at one time to be methods of orientation, to align us with the realities of the world and our own reality as creatures for a day. Perhaps we are just too cowardly to allow ourselves to grow up and this is why we cling to these ancient absurdities but I for one would like to believe humanity is made of better stuff. Perhaps we cannot do without our stories but let us make them intelligent stories, let us make them stories that show us the light to a promising future. Let intelligence and reason light the way, but again, through our stories.
Iwannaplato
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Re: religion and morality

Post by Iwannaplato »

promethean75 wrote: Tue Jan 03, 2023 10:10 pm "So could this fine-tuning be due to chance?"

Dawkins noted in one of his books that an optic nerve of a giraffe runs from the eyes, down the neck, around the pelvic bone, back up the neck and into the brain.

the fine tuner musta been drunk when he designed the giraffe, eh?
That's not what the fine tuning argument focuses on. It's not biology, it's physics that makes them wonder.
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