Regarding the previous reblog: it reminds me of the discomfort and annoyance I always feel in church when the pastor or whoever goes on about how we should do $goodthing because God commanded us to do so, or because bad things will happen if we don’t, etc. Because… most of the times those are things we should do anyway, because they’re good, and adding in that divine obligation as the only motive to do so reduces an act of compassion to a job, or worse, to something we *have* to do out of fear of divine retribution. I don’t know what their purpose is in framing things that way, and highly dislike the unsubtle implication that Christians are somehow incapable of doing anything good unless we think God wants us to. Because that’s what they’re implying, every time, and it drives me nuts. Most of the time I hope that this is a matter of them just parroting stuff and not really thinking before speaking, because the alternative is seriously depressing, and condescending to boot. That said, I’m decreasingly able to believe in objective morality; in an atheistic universe, morality is effectively a social construct, and in a theistic universe, there’s the Euthyphro dilemma, which leaves morality as still effectively a social construct. There’s a potential chance for ‘objective’ morality in a theistic universe, to a degree, which is where the Moral Law argument comes from; and it upsets me to see theists misusing and misinterpreting that profound philosophical argument by wrongly reducing it to “if God didn’t exist, how would we know that murder is bad?” Because really? You could argue that good and evil wouldn’t be able to have objective value without God setting the definition for such by weaving moral objectivity into the very fabric of the universe, and even that is suspect; but ‘how would we know’ is completely off the mark and I wonder if those people even know what horrible things they are implying about themselves when they say that.
#religion |#atheism |#theism |#writings |
Posted on September/18/2012
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