A view of right and wrong, good and evil, in a universe without gods.
I am away from my blog for a couple of weeks. This is an experiment in posting some conversation topics while I am gone.
The two questions to answer relevant to the statement below is are:
• Is it true?
• Is it important?
(10) People do not get their morality from God. If anything, they assign their moral beliefs to God. In doing so, they find an amazing amount of coincidence between what they value and what God commands.
Posted by
Alonzo Fyfe
at
5:00 AM
By request, I have written some of the basic principles of the desire utilitarian moral theory that sits as the foundation for these blog postings into a book called, A Better Place: Selected Essays in Desire Utilitarianism.
In a previous post, I wrote a detailed account of the contents of the book.
3 comments:
I'd say yes to both. The Bible's a big enough book to allow for any interpretation of correct and so-called moral behaviour. Verses that condone slavery were used to justify slavery. Verses that insist rape and beatings are required help justify abuse of women and children.
Not to say there aren't useful and necessary verses in there that suggest humans should be treated decently whether friend or foe, but the continued quotations of the other stuff, the anti-gay, anti-progress stuff illustrates how far humanity still has to go before we're truly free.
Obviously, people do not get their morality from God, because God does not exist. They do often get their morality from scriptures, though. As a former God-believer, I can attest that many believers will transform themselves and their conception of ethics to meet their interpretation of the ethics of their scriptures. Not everyone just projects their existing ethical code onto their interpretation of scripture.
True to both.
While people are influenced by others and by what they read (scripture), ultimately, all faith-holding people assign their own personal, subjective moral beliefs to whatever particular diety they happen to ascribe to, which incidentally, has a significant deal to do with the region they grew up in, which variety of diety the authority figure(s) (generally parents) in their formative years had blind faith in, or even the direct and indirect influence their community had on them. If some omnitient and omnipotent supernatural diety with the general self-centered, worship-craving characteristics of the Abrahamic deity of the Christians for example were actual and existed in truth objectively, none of those factors of influence would be relevant. To me, from the perspective of reasonability, this is one of many profound acknowledgements that such a concept as the Judeo-Christian god is anything but real or actual and simply a faith-based delusion.
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