Patents are bad. Patent lawsuits that create problems for Apple are good, because they're likely to get noticed and hopefully result in improvements.
Lawsuits over say, patents related to RAM are obscure, hard to understand, and in the end only drive up the prices. The global economic impact might be huge, but the average user won't notice much, so chances are nothing will get fixed.
However when people are not able to buy the phone they want that gets their attention, and maybe will get them to see that the system could use improvements.
First of all, we are not talking about religion but morality.
Religions claim to provide a morality, so I'm discussing religious morality.
In this aspects, religions are just one more tool in order to force a more or less coherent morality in a group of people; instead of carefuling arguing about the pros and cons of killing your neighbour while he is sleeping, you say: "Thou shall not kill, because if you kill you will suffer a lot and if you do not kill you will be ok. And this is say by an almighty God so you can't evade the consequences".
It doesn't matter what flawed reasoning they use, my point is that all of them ultimately promise safety and happiness. Mostly in the afterlife, which IMO is a big part of what's wrong with it, but that's another matter.
Examples of a morality not focused at stability? Well, if you find that the Vikings were an example of a moral directed at stability... Usually these appears between young people, and in frontier / nomadic communities. The first centuries of Islam could be a good example, and the age of discoveries.
You're misunderstanding me. Vikings apparently believed in the old Norse gods, which ties again into a safe and comfortable afterlife in Valhalla, by viking standards at least.
Stablity is not the goal, stability is the indicator that a morality system is doing well. A morality system that would include mass suicide would quickly die out (unstable), while a morality system helping the civilization exist for a long time would tend to persist (stable).
Of course, I already put you an example of a different morality and you just disregarded it, because it did not follow your morality tenets... and then asked for more examples. LOL
Because you gave an entirely irrelevant example. I'm not talking about whole societies, but individual rules they implement. Individual rules, like allowing or not slavery, for instance. Allowing slavery leads to instability, as people have tried to revolt against it regularly (Spartacus, say) and eventually succeeded. The lack of slavery is stable, as there are no revolts to try to bring it back.
the essence of what I am saying is that you cannot say that any other people morality is "wrong" or "right",
Reading comprehension fail. At no point I said "right" morality. I said better morality. We can't reach perfection, nor there is a system that makes everything as good as it could possibly be, but we can definitely do better.
That said, to avoid yet more circular reasoning I am not going to follow in this thread anymore, as I have already made my point (regardless of if you have seen / accepted it).
You failed badly at understanding what I'm trying to say, then.
For values of democratic low enough. Another example of how morality changes.
That's not really relevant, see above. I am not discussing whole government systems like democracy/communism/monarchy/whatever, but the individual rules they implement. A monarchy or democracy can both have or lack slavery.
UV photos can look very cool. You should have an advantage in being able to see things that look interesting in UV without having to make a photo to check.
I have no clue if what you see is anything like on the photos, but I figure it should at least give you a clue of what kind of thing to photograph.
Morals are almost entirely subjective. Ethics are the ones that we consider to be a social standard.:)
While I agree that there's not a fixed morality, it can't be completely arbitrarily either, or we'd disagree a lot more about it.
It's my opinion that figuring out if they are "being moral" can only be done within the context of a story, as a story encapsulates the morals of the culture or person who recorded the story. I do believe that a quite lively debate about if they are "being ethical" could be had however.
I'm not sure about that.
See here and here. You can say that within the bible is is all entirely fine, but people are obviously capable of disagreeing with it, even those who supposedly subscribe to its morality.
I did not attempt to define "good" per se in my post. A good definition of what is "good" I think can be defined apart from "God".
Give it a try, then
The Euthyphro problem is a question regarding ontology. I.e. is the quality of being "good" an existing external standard to which God must conform?
It must for "good" to mean anything at all
I am suggesting that the Good has no objective existence at all apart from God, so we are not referring to any existing external standard. Goodness is an essential attribute of God. By saying this, I am arguing that goodness is not contingent and not arbitrary. My purpose is to put forth a theistic response, but I would suggest independent research elsewhere for a fuller analysis.
What I'm saying that in this case "God is good" translates to "God is godlike", which is a tautology and contains no information.
For "God is good" to be conveying something useful it must be possible to imagine a God that isn't good, just like I can imagine a black or polka dot patterned apple, whether such a thing actually exists or not in reality. But since according to you God can't possibly not be good, saying it's good isn't saying anything at all.
If you disagree please explain what an hypothetical, non-good God could be like.
Again, not. You chose an utilitarian morality, and as your utilitarian point of view sees safety or comfort as paramount, you conclude that a morality that servers both is the best. And, not surprisingly, that morality is an utilitarian one.
Care to give an example of a morality that doesn't see safety and comfort as paramount?
In Christianity, the ultimate goal is getting into heaven, which is ultimate comfort and safety. In Buddism, the ultimate goal is attaining Nirvana, or at least avoiding regressing to a lower state. Again the comfort and safety of not being reborn as a chicken in a huge farm. In Norse mythology, the best outcome is a glorious death followed by the safety and comfort of the endless feasting and battle in Valhalla.
I don't think any morality system that isn't aimed at promoting safety and wellbeing is likely to survive for the very long, because ignoring those concerns is suicidal.
And saying that a moral is the best because it is "stable". First, it is another assumption you make out of nowhere, and second... well, modern democratic moralities have a couple of centuries, at best. The european feudal system lasted almost one millenia, the Indian caste system probably twice, Confucianism in China a little less...
I'm not talking about government systems, but the policies they implement. The US was democratic when it had slaves, and still is democratic afterwards. What I'm talking about is that as long as there was slavery there were revolts against it. Lo and behold once it ended there are no more revolts against it for the obvious reason, and nobody is trying to bring it back either. Therefore, we can conclude things work better without slavery.
Do not get me wrong. probably your morality or mine is not that different; after all both of us probably a common set of influences so the outcomes will be similar. But if someone sees the world in another view, I am not the owner of the "right" or "god given" or "more natural" morality. Yet, the fact that I cannot give an absolute theory for my principles does not mean a thing; they are still my principles and in no way inferior to anybody else principles.
I'm not saying that there's neither a "god given" nor a "natural" morality. There are however common goals the vast majority agrees with, though they disagree with the way of achieving them.
Also, I'm saying that there is such a thing as a "better" morality, as evidenced by that some ideas of the past have been clearly discarded. For instance, human sacrifices have been out of favor for quite a while and don't seem to be going to return.
My point was that, being a person who believes the characters to be fictional, you should be interpreting the story for yourself, or you should not care. Basically... why bother spending effort and time arguing about how ethical a fictional character is, instead of trying to find an interpretation of the story itself that makes sense to you?
Why bother spending time and effort arguing about whether Itachi is a good guy or not and writing fanfics about it?:-)
For me part of interpreting the story is figuring out whether the characters are behaving morally. It's especially important with things like the bible, because a lot of people take that as a manual of how to behave. Even if a character is fictional they may or not be setting a good example, and that may influence what real people do.
Besides that, it's ocassionally an entretaining thing to do.
Then "God is good" is an entirely meaningless thing to say.
Like I said elsewhere, for "God is good" to make sense, goodness must be something that is defined apart from "God". If I say "This apple is red", the meaning of "red" is external to the apple. This adds information, because it tells me what kind of apple we're talking about. It differentiates it from a green apple. I can also imagine a black apple, though I've never seen one and they probably don't happen in nature.
Now if I add that "red is whatever color the apple is" I made that sentence meaningless because saying that it's red doesn't add any extra information. It may reflect any wavelength of light, but it'll still be a "red apple" in any case. Since now the "red" qualifier doesn't tell me anything additional about the apple, it's redundant, I might as well remove it.
So if you're going to define "good" like that the only conclusion I can come to is that your definition of goodness doesn't really mean anything at all.
Ah yes, Buddhism is about truth and beauty like the idea of that if your life sucks, you surely must have done something in your previous one to deserve it.
I'll admit though that I don't get the point of liberal versions of religions. I figure that if you're going to decide which parts to throw out, you might as well throw out all of it and not be held back by attempting to salvage bits and pieces.
Besides, if you can cherry pick the good stuff out of the bible you surely must be using something external to the religion to figure out what that is, which means you don't really need biblical morality.
Yeah, but Einstein's Creator is unlikely to make any adherents of current religions happy.
Go read some quotes. His god: doesn't reward good or punish evil. There's no heaven or hell. It's not antropomorphic and doesn't interfere with the workings of the world. It doesn't relate to people. It has no prophets, scriptures, prophecies or anything of the sort. I'm not sure it even fits deism. He also very explicitly rejected the Church.
As far as I can gather, Einstein's god is some sort of "divine virtual machine" whose cogs drive the universe, which works through some predetermined program.
I don't really get why religious people keep bringing it up, because I can't imagine why would his belief in such a thing make them happy. IMO once you make a god like that you might as well remove it completely, because it lacks entirely the perks of any popular religion.
Those aren't miracles though, they have entirely rational explanations, that being plate tectonics. Volcanoes don't suddenly pop out of nowhere.
Also, in my understanding volcanoes usually rain ash, while the lava just flows downhill. That's quite different from the biblical imagery of a moving pillar of fire coming out of nowhere.
And yet if you actually read the article you cite then you would see that there is an issue with the translation into English.
I still don't see anything there that excludes what I said, as there's no logical contradiction in it.
So a well-informed Vulcan has done a mind-meld. As I said, not proof of God, and not proof of omnipotence.
Somebody omnipotent ought to be able to keep satisfying all your objections, eventually you'd have to concede that they're omnipotent at least in every way that you can imagine. At some point you have to give up and agree that even though there might be a chance that there's really no spoon, there does seem to be one in every way you can think of to verify, and that unless you move on, you'll never get anything done.
Now check that argument on the two cases of the Golden Rule that you cited. For example, all you've shown is that the person about to be killed for their organs won't like it and is likely to resist, not that their killing for organs is immoral. You might like to look up "naturalistic fallacy" (yes, I did minor in philosophy at university. That doesn't make me right, but it means I've seen these arguments before and know the technical names for some of them).
I said "I think the golden rule can be ultimately derived from minimization of harm", and in this case killing people for organs would almost certainly fail the "minimization of harm" test.
You know that if you were the target you'd consider yourself to be harmed, so other people probably hold that opinion as well.
At a minimum, you're killing one person to save another, which is let's say a neutral exchange for the sake of argument.
However, with that comes a widespread paranoia you create for millions of people, which will amount to quite a lot when compared to the rather few that benefit from transplants.
Additionally, putting somebody in a life or death situation removes a lot of inhibitions and allows them to commit indiscrimitate and disproportionate retribution. An effective way of ensuring an unfavourable exchange would be to go blow up yourself and as many people as possible.
For less dramatic measures, it also creates an incentive to screw your own health up enough to remove yourself from the list of viable donors. Which means that for every life you save in this manner, you'll get a lot of obese chain smokers, which will then need a heart transplant, exacerbating the very problem you were trying to solve.
Thinking longer term, you never know if you're about to kill the guy who would have cured cancer in 10 years. Without omniscience it's not really possible to accurately figure out who is better off dead and who not. Which means you can be certain that a lot of harm is committed, but can never know if the good outweighs it.
People don't live in a vacuum and have friends, who'd make sure to add to the negative consequences of such a scheme.
The consequences of such ideas are very far reaching, you can't just say "let's kill Alice to save Bob" and leave it at that, as if it was going to end there.
Exactly where in the Bible does it say that God is omnipotent? Oh, and if God did reach into your head and stream all of history into it that still wouldn't prove the existence of God -- you would have nothing to test it against, and I understand LSD can give a similar experience.
Most trivial: from my knowledge of creation I would know how the planet was formed. I could go to any random place and know what would I find by digging there. Or I would know the internal details of how the house my grandfather built was made. I could pull a plank and verify that it indeed looks like what I saw. I could predict exactly what the Mars rovers are going to find. There's plenty evidence all over for verification.
I'm pretty sure LSD doesn't put accurate knowledge in your head.
If you can manage to do that, publish. Nobody else has managed yet.
I'm a programmer and not a philosopher, but something along these lines:
When people perceive they're being harmed, they attempt to resist. Enough harm eventually motivates people to take drastic measures, usually against the source of it. Also, it can be verified experimentally that other people have reactions to harm very similar to your own, that is, your own behavior is a quite reasonable predictor of the behavior of others in the same circumstances. Not identical, but close enough to be relevant.
For instance, if somebody punches me in the face, I would attempt to punch back. Based on my experience of that my reactions agree with those of other people quite often, it is very likely that if I punched some random person in the face I'd get the same sort of reaction. Therefore, I can make a pretty good guess at that punching random people in the face is probably a bad idea, without actually trying it.
Generalized, you get the golden rule: doing things you yourself wouldn't like is a bad idea because you not liking it is a good predictor of other people trying to get back at you for doing it.
If the universe came from the Big Bang, and homo sapiens evolved, and DNA research shows that there were never was an Adam and Eve, how do you reconcile that with the idea of the original sin?
Not so easy if you bother to find out what the religious actually mean by omnipotent.
Exactly where in the bible does it say YHWH couldn't reach into my head and stream all of history into it?
But that's a moral/sociological argument, not a scientific one.
No, it's a logical one: the antecedent is invalid, so there's no point in bothering to think about the consequent.
So now you say that the best ethical framework minimises harm whilst staying within certain rules? What was it I said about "backing away somewhat from pure utilitarianism to some sort of mix of utilitarian and deontic ethics"?
I think the golden rule can be ultimately derived from minimization of harm, but deriving everything from first principles would make for very long arguments.
Ah, but Abraham is told that his child will suffer horribly - to live in disobedience to God (without a relationship with God) is to suffer horribly
News to me. Explain how didn't I notice?
And it isn't "I make him suffer horribly", it's "he will suffer horribly."
One and the same in this case, since God supposedly set up the entire playground.
We" did not already agree that the deity was evil - first we would have to agree on what evil is (and how you can even assert that it exists in an impartial mathematical universe)... Might makes right doesn't apply when speaking about God - we have no metaphor for an omnipotent being who exists outside of (and yet also inside of) our universe.
It makes no sense to say God is good, then. For God to be good, goodness must be something that exists independently.
For instance, when you say "This apple is red", "red" is defined externally to the apple. If you say that "red" is "whatever color the apple is", then "red" loses any meaning and you might as well remove it, because then no extra information is conferred by saying it's red.
Things seem to be moving towards my kind of morality, and I figure there has to be a reason for that.
The slavers' morality leads to widespread unhappiness, which leads to revolts. Those result eventually in the removal of the rule that caused the revolt. People revolt when they preceive they've been greatly harmed and that the revolt is worth the risk. They succeed when a large amount of people shares the feeling.
So I think it can be said that the minimization of harm morality is the best one because it's the most stable. Any moral system that creates great harm eventually gets overthrown.
I also note that your example doesn't parallel the Abraham story. He isn't told "your child will suffer horribly if you don't kill him", so the decision works differently.
Also, anybody proposing a bargain like "kill him or I make him suffer horribly" is evil, and there's likely no guaranteed right answer. Since we're talking about a deity here, and we already agreed it's evil, there's nothing stopping it from stopping you from killing your child, then torturing him.
I disagree with the attempts to stablish an "objective" basis for morality, were them theists or rationalists.
I don't think perfection is possible in the matter. We can do better, though.
First of all, you just take better or worse as granted. In fact, it is you who decides (for your morality) what is better or worse. Remember, slave owners theorised that slavery benefited the slaves "because they can not manage themselves". Many of the cruelest acts of mankind have been justified by many moralists... how can it be?
Minimization of harm + golden rule. The slavery example wouldn't pass that because people wouldn't agree to enslave themselves.
So, in the end, it is just each of us who makes those decisions (of course, with lots of social/cultural influences). The idea frightens a lot of people, because then "the others" maybe do not follow the same rules than us, and complexity and risk increases, but there is nothing more to it.
I don't think there's a definitive answer to it. There are always going to be problems, but improvements can be made.
Christians assert that God has already done that, but in fact it wouldn't be proof of the existence of God, for any useful definition of God (something Jesus is reported as noting: Luke 16:31). Ok, they might be able to do impressive stuff, but that shows that they have access to better technology, not that they're omnipotent. What they say might check out, but that shows that they're well-informed, not omniscient. How could they show that they created the universe? If you apply Occam's razor, any finite explanation of the observations is preferable to the explanation of an infinite being. That's why it's a mistake to draw any conclusions either way about the existence of God from any absence of scientific proof of his/her existence.
That's an easy one. It might be indeed an impossible condition to satisfy, but if it's a god, and it's indeed omnipotent, then it can. An omnipotent being could make me see all of mankind's history starting from the creation of the universe up to today, and manage to make all of that fit in my head.
True, but you are now into a moral argument (does it serve them right?) and a theological argument (why would a good God allow the innocent to suffer?), not a scientific argument.
I'm not making an argument, I'm saying it's a pointless line of argumentation. It's like "If the moon was made of cheese...", but it isn't, so any further thoughts down that line are pointless.
Your ethical framework minimizes harm, and you believe that to be the best, which is why you hold it. In fact, few people would tolerate all-out utilitarianism as an ethical framework in practice, partly because of the definition of harm (apartheid in South Africa was often justified on utilitarian grounds, through a particular definition of "harm"), partly because of arguments over who comes within the protection from harm (the holocaust was justified on utilitarian grounds by declaring some groups subhuman and so outside that protection;
All moral frameworks are imperfect. I don't think there's such a thing as a perfect one because it'd need to change in real time. Taking the right decision every time would require awareness of everything that is and all the consequences of every action.
On the holocaust, that very clearly fails the golden rule
on the other side Peter Singer has argued that limiting the protection to humans is speciesist, so the protection should be extended to all animals -- thus making veganism a moral obligation)
Actually I can agree with that though I don't comply currently. I like a lot the idea of growing meat in a vat.
and partly because it leads to conclusions that many find odious (for instance, that unwilling, healthy people should be killed for organ harvesting, because killing one can save the life of many
That also fails the golden rule. Also I don't think every life is worth exactly the same. You can't know you'd be killing the guy who would have come up with a cure for cancer 10 years later. Also people don't live in a vacuum.
Overall, the right decision can't be taken without being omniscient, and implementing such a policy would ultimately cause more harm than it'd prevent.
I'd be a lot more impressed with the idea of an universal handed down from God morality if it actually held up, instead of everybody having their own reading of every verse.
Depends. If God or the gods don't exist, no reason. If they do, every reason.
Why would I need religion if God exists? I will believe in one when it's proven, by say, showing up, saying Hi, and performing something sufficiently godly. But then I won't need a religion, as there will be proof.
Given the number of times I've had condoms split on me I have to grant that the Vatican's solution of sexual abstinence outside lifelong monogamous relationships would be more effective if applied.
Yes, but that's a pipe dream. People have proven they don't abstain even if they swear to every deity they will.
Right. But how does one decide between competing ethical frameworks? Nobody has come up with an agreed way to do that even without religion in the picture.
The best ethical framework minimizes harm, so we compare them on that basis. The religious frameworks result in lots of unnecessary harm, so they lose.
So for instance, the Mayan ethical framework involves lots of sacrifices. That harms a lot of people, so it's not good. The Abrahamic ethical framework doesn't include that, so it's somewhat better. However, it still involves plenty suffering caused by rules that are entirely unrelated to preventing harm to people, and so impose suffering for no gain. The secular humanist framework is better because it does away with that.
The idea that science and religion are incompatible is poisonous and civilization-threatening.
Funny, you demonstrate why they're incompatible right above that sentence.
You show how science demands evidence and changes course when it's presented, while religion demands adherence to the doctrines and rejects anything that doesn't arrive to the predefined conclusion. Hence once people figured that the Big Bang might conflict with Genesis, it no longer became acceptable.
That's your incompatiblity right there.
Getting back to the example, the idea that religious folks, of all people, should be opposed to the Big Bang theory is completely baffling. If I live to be a thousand years old, I'll never understand it. There's no shortage of beauty in modern science or ancient teachings; the conflicts (such as they are) are largely manufactured. And as you mention, the rising fundamentalist movement is a major player in this enterprise.
Why, it's clear enough.
Religion isn't about truth or beauty, it's about unfounded belief in scriptures. Things are right if they agree with the scripture, and wrong if they do not, no matter how beautiful.
The Big Bang creates problems: a drastically different timeline, and an universe that developed by itself. Add evolution and there's no creation of Man, and no Adam and Eve. With that, there's no original sin, and without that what did Jesus show up for? Really you might as well throw the whole thing out at that point.
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Indeed, we can see an example of this unconditional love in Mark 7:9, for instance.
Patents are bad. Patent lawsuits that create problems for Apple are good, because they're likely to get noticed and hopefully result in improvements.
Lawsuits over say, patents related to RAM are obscure, hard to understand, and in the end only drive up the prices. The global economic impact might be huge, but the average user won't notice much, so chances are nothing will get fixed.
However when people are not able to buy the phone they want that gets their attention, and maybe will get them to see that the system could use improvements.
Religions claim to provide a morality, so I'm discussing religious morality.
It doesn't matter what flawed reasoning they use, my point is that all of them ultimately promise safety and happiness. Mostly in the afterlife, which IMO is a big part of what's wrong with it, but that's another matter.
You're misunderstanding me. Vikings apparently believed in the old Norse gods, which ties again into a safe and comfortable afterlife in Valhalla, by viking standards at least.
Stablity is not the goal, stability is the indicator that a morality system is doing well. A morality system that would include mass suicide would quickly die out (unstable), while a morality system helping the civilization exist for a long time would tend to persist (stable).
Because you gave an entirely irrelevant example. I'm not talking about whole societies, but individual rules they implement. Individual rules, like allowing or not slavery, for instance. Allowing slavery leads to instability, as people have tried to revolt against it regularly (Spartacus, say) and eventually succeeded. The lack of slavery is stable, as there are no revolts to try to bring it back.
Reading comprehension fail. At no point I said "right" morality. I said better morality. We can't reach perfection, nor there is a system that makes everything as good as it could possibly be, but we can definitely do better.
You failed badly at understanding what I'm trying to say, then.
That's not really relevant, see above. I am not discussing whole government systems like democracy/communism/monarchy/whatever, but the individual rules they implement. A monarchy or democracy can both have or lack slavery.
UV photos can look very cool. You should have an advantage in being able to see things that look interesting in UV without having to make a photo to check.
I have no clue if what you see is anything like on the photos, but I figure it should at least give you a clue of what kind of thing to photograph.
While I agree that there's not a fixed morality, it can't be completely arbitrarily either, or we'd disagree a lot more about it.
I'm not sure about that.
See here and here. You can say that within the bible is is all entirely fine, but people are obviously capable of disagreeing with it, even those who supposedly subscribe to its morality.
Give it a try, then
It must for "good" to mean anything at all
What I'm saying that in this case "God is good" translates to "God is godlike", which is a tautology and contains no information.
For "God is good" to be conveying something useful it must be possible to imagine a God that isn't good, just like I can imagine a black or polka dot patterned apple, whether such a thing actually exists or not in reality. But since according to you God can't possibly not be good, saying it's good isn't saying anything at all.
If you disagree please explain what an hypothetical, non-good God could be like.
Care to give an example of a morality that doesn't see safety and comfort as paramount?
In Christianity, the ultimate goal is getting into heaven, which is ultimate comfort and safety.
In Buddism, the ultimate goal is attaining Nirvana, or at least avoiding regressing to a lower state. Again the comfort and safety of not being reborn as a chicken in a huge farm.
In Norse mythology, the best outcome is a glorious death followed by the safety and comfort of the endless feasting and battle in Valhalla.
I don't think any morality system that isn't aimed at promoting safety and wellbeing is likely to survive for the very long, because ignoring those concerns is suicidal.
I'm not talking about government systems, but the policies they implement. The US was democratic when it had slaves, and still is democratic afterwards. What I'm talking about is that as long as there was slavery there were revolts against it. Lo and behold once it ended there are no more revolts against it for the obvious reason, and nobody is trying to bring it back either. Therefore, we can conclude things work better without slavery.
I'm not saying that there's neither a "god given" nor a "natural" morality. There are however common goals the vast majority agrees with, though they disagree with the way of achieving them.
Also, I'm saying that there is such a thing as a "better" morality, as evidenced by that some ideas of the past have been clearly discarded. For instance, human sacrifices have been out of favor for quite a while and don't seem to be going to return.
Why bother spending time and effort arguing about whether Itachi is a good guy or not and writing fanfics about it? :-)
For me part of interpreting the story is figuring out whether the characters are behaving morally. It's especially important with things like the bible, because a lot of people take that as a manual of how to behave. Even if a character is fictional they may or not be setting a good example, and that may influence what real people do.
Besides that, it's ocassionally an entretaining thing to do.
Then "God is good" is an entirely meaningless thing to say.
Like I said elsewhere, for "God is good" to make sense, goodness must be something that is defined apart from "God". If I say "This apple is red", the meaning of "red" is external to the apple. This adds information, because it tells me what kind of apple we're talking about. It differentiates it from a green apple. I can also imagine a black apple, though I've never seen one and they probably don't happen in nature.
Now if I add that "red is whatever color the apple is" I made that sentence meaningless because saying that it's red doesn't add any extra information. It may reflect any wavelength of light, but it'll still be a "red apple" in any case. Since now the "red" qualifier doesn't tell me anything additional about the apple, it's redundant, I might as well remove it.
So if you're going to define "good" like that the only conclusion I can come to is that your definition of goodness doesn't really mean anything at all.
Ah yes, Buddhism is about truth and beauty like the idea of that if your life sucks, you surely must have done something in your previous one to deserve it.
I'll admit though that I don't get the point of liberal versions of religions. I figure that if you're going to decide which parts to throw out, you might as well throw out all of it and not be held back by attempting to salvage bits and pieces.
Besides, if you can cherry pick the good stuff out of the bible you surely must be using something external to the religion to figure out what that is, which means you don't really need biblical morality.
Perhaps you should have made yourself clearer, then. I'm not really sure what your point is, in that case.
On the site: tried getting cheaper hosting? It's possible to get perfectly good hosting for $20/month, $10/month if you want it really cheap.
Yeah, but Einstein's Creator is unlikely to make any adherents of current religions happy.
Go read some quotes. His god: doesn't reward good or punish evil. There's no heaven or hell. It's not antropomorphic and doesn't interfere with the workings of the world. It doesn't relate to people. It has no prophets, scriptures, prophecies or anything of the sort. I'm not sure it even fits deism. He also very explicitly rejected the Church.
As far as I can gather, Einstein's god is some sort of "divine virtual machine" whose cogs drive the universe, which works through some predetermined program.
I don't really get why religious people keep bringing it up, because I can't imagine why would his belief in such a thing make them happy. IMO once you make a god like that you might as well remove it completely, because it lacks entirely the perks of any popular religion.
Those aren't miracles though, they have entirely rational explanations, that being plate tectonics. Volcanoes don't suddenly pop out of nowhere.
Also, in my understanding volcanoes usually rain ash, while the lava just flows downhill. That's quite different from the biblical imagery of a moving pillar of fire coming out of nowhere.
I still don't see anything there that excludes what I said, as there's no logical contradiction in it.
Somebody omnipotent ought to be able to keep satisfying all your objections, eventually you'd have to concede that they're omnipotent at least in every way that you can imagine. At some point you have to give up and agree that even though there might be a chance that there's really no spoon, there does seem to be one in every way you can think of to verify, and that unless you move on, you'll never get anything done.
I said "I think the golden rule can be ultimately derived from minimization of harm", and in this case killing people for organs would almost certainly fail the "minimization of harm" test.
You know that if you were the target you'd consider yourself to be harmed, so other people probably hold that opinion as well.
At a minimum, you're killing one person to save another, which is let's say a neutral exchange for the sake of argument.
However, with that comes a widespread paranoia you create for millions of people, which will amount to quite a lot when compared to the rather few that benefit from transplants.
Additionally, putting somebody in a life or death situation removes a lot of inhibitions and allows them to commit indiscrimitate and disproportionate retribution. An effective way of ensuring an unfavourable exchange would be to go blow up yourself and as many people as possible.
For less dramatic measures, it also creates an incentive to screw your own health up enough to remove yourself from the list of viable donors. Which means that for every life you save in this manner, you'll get a lot of obese chain smokers, which will then need a heart transplant, exacerbating the very problem you were trying to solve.
Thinking longer term, you never know if you're about to kill the guy who would have cured cancer in 10 years. Without omniscience it's not really possible to accurately figure out who is better off dead and who not. Which means you can be certain that a lot of harm is committed, but can never know if the good outweighs it.
People don't live in a vacuum and have friends, who'd make sure to add to the negative consequences of such a scheme.
The consequences of such ideas are very far reaching, you can't just say "let's kill Alice to save Bob" and leave it at that, as if it was going to end there.
Here, and there would be plenty.
Most trivial: from my knowledge of creation I would know how the planet was formed. I could go to any random place and know what would I find by digging there. Or I would know the internal details of how the house my grandfather built was made. I could pull a plank and verify that it indeed looks like what I saw. I could predict exactly what the Mars rovers are going to find. There's plenty evidence all over for verification.
I'm pretty sure LSD doesn't put accurate knowledge in your head.
I'm a programmer and not a philosopher, but something along these lines:
When people perceive they're being harmed, they attempt to resist. Enough harm eventually motivates people to take drastic measures, usually against the source of it. Also, it can be verified experimentally that other people have reactions to harm very similar to your own, that is, your own behavior is a quite reasonable predictor of the behavior of others in the same circumstances. Not identical, but close enough to be relevant.
For instance, if somebody punches me in the face, I would attempt to punch back. Based on my experience of that my reactions agree with those of other people quite often, it is very likely that if I punched some random person in the face I'd get the same sort of reaction. Therefore, I can make a pretty good guess at that punching random people in the face is probably a bad idea, without actually trying it.
Generalized, you get the golden rule: doing things you yourself wouldn't like is a bad idea because you not liking it is a good predictor of other people trying to get back at you for doing it.
Ok, explain me this then, because I'm curious.
If the universe came from the Big Bang, and homo sapiens evolved, and DNA research shows that there were never was an Adam and Eve, how do you reconcile that with the idea of the original sin?
Exactly where in the bible does it say YHWH couldn't reach into my head and stream all of history into it?
No, it's a logical one: the antecedent is invalid, so there's no point in bothering to think about the consequent.
I think the golden rule can be ultimately derived from minimization of harm, but deriving everything from first principles would make for very long arguments.
News to me. Explain how didn't I notice?
One and the same in this case, since God supposedly set up the entire playground.
It makes no sense to say God is good, then. For God to be good, goodness must be something that exists independently.
For instance, when you say "This apple is red", "red" is defined externally to the apple. If you say that "red" is "whatever color the apple is", then "red" loses any meaning and you might as well remove it, because then no extra information is conferred by saying it's red.
Things seem to be moving towards my kind of morality, and I figure there has to be a reason for that.
The slavers' morality leads to widespread unhappiness, which leads to revolts. Those result eventually in the removal of the rule that caused the revolt. People revolt when they preceive they've been greatly harmed and that the revolt is worth the risk. They succeed when a large amount of people shares the feeling.
So I think it can be said that the minimization of harm morality is the best one because it's the most stable. Any moral system that creates great harm eventually gets overthrown.
Might makes right, in other words?
I also note that your example doesn't parallel the Abraham story. He isn't told "your child will suffer horribly if you don't kill him", so the decision works differently.
Also, anybody proposing a bargain like "kill him or I make him suffer horribly" is evil, and there's likely no guaranteed right answer. Since we're talking about a deity here, and we already agreed it's evil, there's nothing stopping it from stopping you from killing your child, then torturing him.
I don't think perfection is possible in the matter. We can do better, though.
Minimization of harm + golden rule. The slavery example wouldn't pass that because people wouldn't agree to enslave themselves.
I don't think there's a definitive answer to it. There are always going to be problems, but improvements can be made.
That's an easy one. It might be indeed an impossible condition to satisfy, but if it's a god, and it's indeed omnipotent, then it can. An omnipotent being could make me see all of mankind's history starting from the creation of the universe up to today, and manage to make all of that fit in my head.
I'm not making an argument, I'm saying it's a pointless line of argumentation. It's like "If the moon was made of cheese...", but it isn't, so any further thoughts down that line are pointless.
All moral frameworks are imperfect. I don't think there's such a thing as a perfect one because it'd need to change in real time. Taking the right decision every time would require awareness of everything that is and all the consequences of every action.
On the holocaust, that very clearly fails the golden rule
Actually I can agree with that though I don't comply currently. I like a lot the idea of growing meat in a vat.
That also fails the golden rule. Also I don't think every life is worth exactly the same. You can't know you'd be killing the guy who would have come up with a cure for cancer 10 years later. Also people don't live in a vacuum.
Overall, the right decision can't be taken without being omniscient, and implementing such a policy would ultimately cause more harm than it'd prevent.
But that's precisely how it is. Your morality, whatever it is, doesn't agree with the Mayans, or the ancient Greeks, or even modern buddhists.
People agree on a few basic things, like "murder is bad", and that's about it.
Heck, even in the Abrahamic religions they still haven't figured out whether it's you shall not kill or you shall not murder.
I'd be a lot more impressed with the idea of an universal handed down from God morality if it actually held up, instead of everybody having their own reading of every verse.
Why would I need religion if God exists? I will believe in one when it's proven, by say, showing up, saying Hi, and performing something sufficiently godly. But then I won't need a religion, as there will be proof.
Yes, but that's a pipe dream. People have proven they don't abstain even if they swear to every deity they will.
The best ethical framework minimizes harm, so we compare them on that basis. The religious frameworks result in lots of unnecessary harm, so they lose.
So for instance, the Mayan ethical framework involves lots of sacrifices. That harms a lot of people, so it's not good.
The Abrahamic ethical framework doesn't include that, so it's somewhat better. However, it still involves plenty suffering caused by rules that are entirely unrelated to preventing harm to people, and so impose suffering for no gain.
The secular humanist framework is better because it does away with that.
Funny, you demonstrate why they're incompatible right above that sentence.
You show how science demands evidence and changes course when it's presented, while religion demands adherence to the doctrines and rejects anything that doesn't arrive to the predefined conclusion. Hence once people figured that the Big Bang might conflict with Genesis, it no longer became acceptable.
That's your incompatiblity right there.
Why, it's clear enough.
Religion isn't about truth or beauty, it's about unfounded belief in scriptures. Things are right if they agree with the scripture, and wrong if they do not, no matter how beautiful.
The Big Bang creates problems: a drastically different timeline, and an universe that developed by itself. Add evolution and there's no creation of Man, and no Adam and Eve. With that, there's no original sin, and without that what did Jesus show up for? Really you might as well throw the whole thing out at that point.