Criteria for evidence of a God.

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techstepgenr8tion: Morality exists with or without a belief in God. It's not a choice between eugenics and religion. The idea that without religious leaders society would spiral into anarchy is a myth propagated by those very religious leaders because they want job security.

slowmutant: Saying there will always be minor conflict doesn't justify allowing the largest causes of it. A police state would be going too far but I believe the biggest and most unnecessary causes of conflict can safely go.

AG: I'm not saying all genetic imperatives are good but the ones that benignly benefit the species should be encouraged wouldn't you say? And yes there is no imperative towards protecting the collective per say but in a society protecting your offspring and that society become generally synonymous.

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Don't be so quick to judge. Also keep in mind that if you keep going around in circles or it becomes clear they're fighting a brick wall your going to make a lot of posters leave out of frustration.

Sort of true, however, the major issue involved is that the same problems(metaphysical, epistemic, you name it) that religion has, moral values also can have. Thus, there is little apparent reason to separate them as issues within a worldview. (Yes, I know, there are some Kantians who believe that morality is a function of rationality, however, such a theory seems somewhat problematic)


No, I wouldn't say, I really don't care a lot about the "benefit of the species", only my own narrow interests, some of which really might go against the benefit of the species. Not only that, but the benefits that an individual's genes receive from protecting a collective as large as our own, seems very small compared to the benefits that an individual could receive from raping the crap out of everything.

Elaborate.

I still don't think 'play nice because it feels right' has much stability, especially when you see how social movements can make a great many people rationalize anything. Its perspective and only perspective, shifting the paradigm of facts can get a completely different result emotion will and won't endorse. You might consider this a talking point but I don't believe that in any way writes this one off.

I'm just telling you that while there are some religious types that do destabilize the world, there are a great many that you not only have no beef with but they may actually have more and even better perspective than yourself. In a nutshell if you look at evolution and say "because evolution exists I personally don't believe in a higher power", its a choice many people wouldn't make but can at least respect. If you say "because evolution exists that means all people clinging to religion are really just grown-ups who won't give up on Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny - they're wrong, I'm right, and they're destroying the earth with their almost criminal emotional weakness" its assuming both *way* more than you can call about their character or emotional strength, more than you can call about the development of their reasoning or how much they made sure to cut through their own illusions and take the evidence as it falls - you're also assuming that in your mid 20's you know more than 90% of the world out there; I'd be much more reticent to that conclusion.

My proposition is pretty simple; people can look at the same facts, mull them over with about as much rationality as the human mind can provide, and come to different conclusions - it really does happen. What I was saying before about atheists being positivists and theists being willing to accept the existence of the negative - I wasn't just pitching in throwaway lines or hoping to say something weird to obfuscate and mystify the conversation, that's really the core of this. My own problem with positivism about religion right now; we're acting like we're at the end of science, the end of evolution, the end of self-discovery as a race, and I think its a big mirage created by our own inflated egos when we fall for it.

What about morality as a function of self preservation and the pursuit of safety and happiness?



I never said people weren't inherently selfish it's others who were arguing against that point.



That sort of behavior would be selected against and be self limiting.



A lot of people say you can rationalize anything but personally I don't think that's true except among sociopaths. Morality will always trump even the best laid out rationalizations.

The biggest problems come from organizations that appeal to your faith and mandate your morality because they are both telling you it is right and that you shouldn't question it.



I'm not in my mid 20s and I don't think I know more than 90% of the world I know I do from experience. I've never met or even heard of anyone who knows more about as many subjects as I do. Is that arrogance? I think it's more of an observation. I gain nothing from believing it not even pride. Knowledge is a heavy burden and there are many things that I sometimes wish I didn't know.

I know the majority of religious people are good people but I also know that they would still be good people without religion. If there was no religion however it would take away bad peoples most effective excuse for their actions.

I really don't have to , the position writes itself. "Inhumane" is a term we use on things we disagree with.


That really isn't morality, not only that, but why should people want to pursue safety so much? We pursue it too much as is, shown by how overprotective parenting damages their offspring. In any case, a lot can be justified by the pursuit of self-interest, in fact, it is hard to think of a war that had no appeal to self-interest. In any case, there is no reason why people should care about being moral if it is just some trait of their self-interest, why not just undervalue the safety and self-preservation for other pursuits? You are just engaged in an arbitrary selection of values.


Umm.... I don't see how this relates. I simply state that I don't see why your position really matters.


Umm.... you mean eugenics? Or punishment or what? I mean, we were just talking about genetic imperatives, and there is no need to live a long life by our genetic imperatives, just have a lot of offspring.


Except morality under this conception just seems to be a fiction. What are your meta-ethics? Where does this morality come from? Why should it be followed?


Well, a big issue here is "how do you question morality?" If moral facts exist, then how can you question those? If they don't exist, then how can morality be a thing?

Define your idea of morality then? I think we are talking about different things.
I didn't say people should pursue safety only that they do.


I'm talking about the rule and you keep pointing at exceptions to the rule what are you getting at?



I'm just pointing out that the social code is separate from a 2000 year old dictated set of moral laws.



Not all rapes will produce offspring but they will all create negative social and legal consequences that will remove you from the gene pool early (where did you get eugenics from?).



Again I'm talking about social contract replace morality with law in your question and the answer becomes evident.




In general morality of social contract dictates a set of generally agreed upon rights and restrictions designed to maximize personal benefit without negatively impacting the collective. There's no reason why you can't question it or why they can't change (provided they are agreed upon nearly universally).

Morality = "oughtness" So, if you say "X is moral" then that means "People ought to do X". I don't know how you could conceive of morality in a manner that is completely dissimilar.

I dunno if we disagree on what morality means.

What is socially acceptable is different than a 2000 year old dictated set of moral laws, but the former is nearly infinitely tangible.


You said "select against" and if the purpose of rape is to create offspring(in our theoretical model) then that seems a means to select against that. In any case, people don't like to talk about being raped, so you can avoid a lot of those negative consequences.


Nothing can replace morality, either it exists or it doesn't. And the notion that a social contract *is* morality leads to some meta-ethical questions.


Here's the problem: social contracts do not exist with moral facts. Thus they can be denied as valid. The only way to maintain the value of a social contract, is to say that the current system is consonant with all moral facts, but that requires an ethical view and a meta-ethical view, and a lot of philosophical apologetics for the current workings of a system, and on some level, all you are doing is creating a state religion.

Ah your talking about what a person should do which is completely intangible and I'm talking about what people are allowed to do through acceptance of action. To elaborate you are saying morality is "people ought to do X" while I'm saying "people will accept you doing X without negative consequences (because the means justify the ends)".



Then perhaps we should elaborate on the model. I'm speaking in a purely closed box system where everyone can see what everyone else is doing (such as in the wild). In modern society you're right in that people can get away with it but modern society isn't exactly very old much less ideal.



Such as?



Then explain why the law perfectly mirrors the current human moral code without being a religion?

It seems to me that all you are doing, Fraya, is trying to swap out one kind of "oughtness" for another.

In a way I suppose. Swapping dictated oughtness for a more organic "it works and everyone's (mostly) happy" system might help us get over the roadblocks in our progress as a civilization though.

And I don't think that "acceptance of action" is really morality, but rather just a social characteristic, which Techstepgenr8tion seems to argue to be rather soft and malleable if left to itself.


Well.... um.... maybe, but the wild isn't a good model for an existing society. And frankly, rape is frequently something gotten away with in any society.


Why the social contract should be the way it is? Why those who disagree with the social contract should agree to it? I mean, laws are not just enforced by strength, but also the fact that they are considered just, but a system where laws justify themselves eliminates the entire question of justice.


It actually doesn't, and certainly doesn't do so always. In fact, there are a lot of disagreements about the nature of the law, and these are found in the various political movements, and these political movements are themselves expression of a transcendent feeling, sort of a secular religion, as people don't vote Democrat or Republican based upon something minor, but rather they think such parties represent aspects of goodness itself(which is why some people are really hardcore into politics). I don't think that the spirituality of people is something that will go away, I just think that secular cults will emerge, and that these will have the same traits of religion, but narrowly escape classification as such.

Soft and malleable like society itself perhaps but that's still a far cry from the holocaust part 2.



Again though simply because it can be gotten away with doesn't make it acceptable with or without religion.



It is the way it is because the masses deem it so and those we place in positions of authority to ensure that there is no "oppression by the masses" find it to be a reasonable balance of the individuals rights versus the welfare of the collective. For those who disagree with it that's their right but that doesn't mean the collective will or should allow them to disregard it. As for laws justifying themselves I don't understand how that could be the case. It's a circular system. The collective dictate the laws and then inspect them to ensure they are an acceptable part of the social contract.



That's what makes the system great. There are disagreements about the nature of the law and if the oppositions arguments bear weight the law can be altered. Religion is static and cannot keep up with the changing human race. As we progress farther from our roots this chasm between what was once right and wrong and the things those who founded those moral laws could never imagine grow it becomes increasingly more of a burden and less relevant.

As for secular cults they may spring up and probably will but they would be held more strictly to the social contract than religions which are allowed to skirt it whenever they feel like it.

Why wopuld the secular cults adhere more firmly to the social contract than would the religions? Why wouldn't the social cults skirt it whenever they felt like it?

I don't listen to the mandates and don't really care about them as such - my concern about them in my own life and how I follow them is how well they work. What I have learned, through the same conduits you claim - careful and rational observation - is that with or without a God, there are uncanny truths about society and how the human psyche work, both strengths and weakness - that the mechanisms of religion cover and deal with. The reasons behind that are unfortunately too complex to explain to most people - they won't put up with it or even listen (and I think your on the page of understanding where you see that quite well about society yourself). That's why dogma and allegories came into being, they go through easier circuits of the brain for people to process.

The unfortunate danger of such allegories though, as you cited, that people can take the convenient cover story too seriously or not see the rhyme and reason behind it. The one perk that Judaism and Christianity already have, one which I believe Islam will in the coming centuries or eventually on its own, is the understanding of what they have in their hands, what it is, and how to deal with it (like AG was mentioning with apologists, at least with the moral framework they've done house-cleaning and are throwing away what doesn't work - as if they do understand that we know little of God and that its up to us to clarify truth by reason, by science, and by looking at the human condition even more closely than the Bible or Torah). Polytheism I don't know, Buddhism teaches good interpersonal values but kills central coherency - makes people something more like opt-outs when another society rolls in with the tanks and machine guns to tell them how things will be; it survives but not in as free of a state as it could if it had more unitarian aspects.

I think clarifying that is the future of faith and one where you'll have far fewer Rev. Jone's, Westboro Bungles, or Muslim Brotherhoods. It'll be something where atheists and theists both converge more on common analysis of what does and doesn't work in society as well as what does and doesn't work for faith - both go hand in hand.




What your missing in your thesis is that bad people will find an excuse anytime anywhere and hide behind whatever ideology is most available - that includes atheism. Also, with no belief in final retribution, they have far more incentive to do what they will just like society at large will have far less incentive to lie cheat and steel - you'd almost have to have the Hammurabi code reenacted or put dead criminals on pikes along the highway to deal with that one. That's not naivity or religious talking-points, its because 'bad' people are too bad-ass for their own good, they're violent and patent narcissists and society has potential to produce them in greater and greater numbers once the governance comes off. In the end we'd like to say that neither of us can prove or disprove whether or not a God exists or the reality of salvation but - it takes an intelligent and self-aware individual to have that debate and continue to function in an upright manner; more basic elements can't go this route without some rather caustic consequences.