Religionists: Is Murder Wrong? If So, Explain Why

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29 Dec 2008, 4:43 pm

Many of the world's religions are replete with examples of religiously inspired or condoned murder, war, and even genocide. The Roman Catholics had the Inquisition, the Albigensian Crusade; Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians had the Crusades in the Near East; between the Roman Catholics and Protestants (roughly) was the Thirty Years War. Muslims had their jihads. India and Pakistan have had conflicts that were in part religiously motivated. I could go on, but we all know the story.

Anyway it seems that most religions condone murder under various conditions—for example, if the murdered is a heretic or a member of a rival sect. So to you religionists, why is murder not wrong? Bonus points if you can answer without falling back on tautologies or quotes from the Bible.

anna-banana
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29 Dec 2008, 5:11 pm

NH, are you trying to match Ragtime with idiotic questions? :wink:

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z0rp
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29 Dec 2008, 6:16 pm

It's only wrong if it's not in the name of your God or if you're not getting 72 virgins after you die, right?

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29 Dec 2008, 6:21 pm

It's an idiotic question.

z0rp
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29 Dec 2008, 6:38 pm

slowmutant wrote:

It's an idiotic question.

Yes.. Judging how the title is formatted you can tell it's purely mocking Ragtime's thread which was an idiotic thread, which was the main point here.

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29 Dec 2008, 6:41 pm

slowmutant wrote:

It's an idiotic question.

Not really. I mean, again this goes back to the Judeo Christian dichotomy between murder and killing in general, and the question could more reasonably be posed as "Is killing wrong?" or "under what circumstances is killing wrong?" or something of that sort.

I'm sure it was meant as parody, but there's still an interesting question to be had here. "Parody is always serious", as a wise man once said

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29 Dec 2008, 6:56 pm

If people could not die, murder would not be wrong. But since people can die, murder is wrong.

Murder is wrong because morality says so!

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29 Dec 2008, 7:01 pm

slowmutant wrote:

Murder is wrong because morality says so!

I'm not taking his calls anymore.

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29 Dec 2008, 7:19 pm

Imagine a world in which a human being could not be killed by another human being ... :chin:

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29 Dec 2008, 7:36 pm

slowmutant wrote:

Imagine a world in which a human being could not be killed by another human being ... :chin:

you mean "human being" as defined by the Vatican?

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z0rp
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29 Dec 2008, 7:52 pm

slowmutant wrote:

Imagine a world in which a human being could not be killed by another human being ... :chin:

Imagine a world in which another organism could not be killed by another organism, oh wait, then we'd all starve to death.

history_of_psychiatry
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29 Dec 2008, 8:08 pm

Hey, if god tells you it's ok to kill in his name isn't it ok to kill in his name as long as god says so???

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29 Dec 2008, 8:18 pm

slowmutant wrote:

It's an idiotic question.

To be precise, it's not an idiotic question. It's just formulated on the model of Ragtime's question, which had an overtly confrontational tone.

slowmutant wrote:

If people could not die, murder would not be wrong. But since people can die, murder is wrong.

Murder is wrong because morality says so!

See, you fell back on a tautology immediately. If people could not die, they could also not be murdered, so you're merely begging the question. When you appeal to the authority of morality, you leave morality undefined; I presume you are referring to your own sense of morality or perhaps even a generally shared sense of morality, but you don't define what this sense is in a way that substantially answers the question.

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29 Dec 2008, 8:25 pm

twoshots wrote:

I mean, again this goes back to the Judeo Christian dichotomy between murder and killing in general, and the question could more reasonably be posed as "Is killing wrong?" or "under what circumstances is killing wrong?" or something of that sort.

Well, the dichotomy would be between justifiable killing (e.g., in self-defense) and unjustifiable killing (i.e., murder and manslaughter). Really there is a third category as well: amoral killing. For example, if a man is walking in the woods and a tree should fall and crush him, the tree has killed him, but unless someone was there chopping the tree down, no morally relevant act took place in the man's death. It's the category of justifiable killing that is most debatable, but even then murder must also be defined to contrast it with.

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29 Dec 2008, 8:31 pm

history_of_psychiatry wrote:

Hey, if god tells you it's ok to kill in his name isn't it ok to kill in his name as long as god says so???

Maybe.

Is this god a moral agent, also bound to the same concept of morality that human beings are? Does this god define morality? Is it even theoretically possible for this god to act immorally? Do gods and humans have different standards of morality? Can gods make exceptions to morality ad hoc? Is it possible for this god to be unjust and evil such that it is better for people to ignore its precepts?

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29 Dec 2008, 8:36 pm

z0rp wrote:

Imagine a world in which another organism could not be killed by another organism, oh wait, then we'd all starve to death.

So should human beings follow a different set of moral principles in their actions towards other human beings than towards other animals and indeed all other organisms? What makes certain acts animal cruelty? Why do we raise many species of animal for the express purpose of later harvesting their carcass to eat? What should the standard be for an organism to be the benefactor of moral consideration: sapience (thought), sentience (feeling), some other standard? Is it all just based on mere custom?

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