Does morality require a god?

[Anddenex]

43 minutes ago, bytebear said:

I am thinking of situations like where a Lion will kill the cubs of a competitor.  Or hierarchical systems where you literally have to kill off all the other alphas to become king.   Those are hardly moral choices.  But they are beneficial if you want to preserve your genetic lineage.

Or this morality from our distant cousins, so to speak from a evolutionary perspective (another primate), the younger male killed the leader. Like the lion, right after killing leader, he then kills the offspring of all the leaders seed. Why? So he can mate with the females. 

 

 

[LeSellers]

2 hours ago, EricE said:

Since secular morality has existed since long before Christianity, I don't think you can just claim it as judeo-christian.

We can, since "Judeo-Christian" predates either Jesus' birth or Judah's — it goes back to Adam.

2 hours ago, EricE said:

Just because we are constantly improving as a society,

And you have evidence that what we're doing is "improving"? How? What? Who decides it's "improving" and not "regressing"?

You seem to be suffering from a severe case of chronocentrism and, specifically, presentism.

Lehi

[unixknight]

4 hours ago, EricE said:

This is my first time on these forums, so I don't know how to do that nifty trick of breaking up the other person's response into chunks to reply to. So hopefully you can just tell which I'm replying to here.

When you reply with quote, you can copy/paste the quoted box by clicking the upper left corner and doing a Ctrl+C.  I just paste it over and over, deleting out everything but the text I'm responding to.

4 hours ago, EricE said:

Because carrot & stick morality isn't morality, it's doing what you're told under threat of punishment or reward. Morality implies understand, empathy, judgement. Surrendering your humanity to follow instructions isn't moral.

Well, that's how you see it, which is fine, but I'd advise you not to assume that's how everybody sees it.  Morality is the code by which we determine right vs. wrong.  You're insisting that somehow for a person to be moral they have to have enough wisdom to understand the meanings behind the rules.  It's nice to have that understanding, but it isn't necessary to practice morality.

4 hours ago, EricE said:

I do have kids, yes. And I think the metaphor is a good one. When a child learns how to empathize, how to think through the consequences of their actions (and I'm not equating consequences in this instance to punishment), their morality improves. I would be willing to bet these are things you are trying to teach your own kids. There are of course times when we just say "don't do that," but that isn't the end of the discussion. We don't just hand our kids written commands saying "stealing is bad" and consider our job as parents over. That's not morality, that's robotic.

Sure, as the child matures they gain a deeper understanding of the wherefores behind the rules but it doesn't mean they aren't expected to obey them in the meantime.  It's still morality.  Some people never achieve that level of understanding but we don't excuse them from acting morally.

4 hours ago, EricE said:

Since secular morality has existed since long before Christianity, I don't think you can just claim it as judeo-christian.

Either way, Western civilization is based on Judeo-Christian mores.  Spoiler alert: Those also tend to be the parts of the world where human rights are valued the most.  By your logic, that's pure coincidence.

4 hours ago, EricE said:

As for the idea that it is debunked because there are immoral people in the world, that argument seems a little on the absurd side. Just because we are constantly improving as a society, doesn't mean that everyone will always follow the day's morality, one can't just jump to the extreme of the example and call that reflective of the whole.

Except that wasn't the point I made.  The point is that your insistence that civilization evolves a higher morality on its own is demonstrably untrue.  This isn't a matter of corner cases.  After thousands of years of development we're still fighting wars, beheading each other and justifying torture.  That's everywhere.

4 hours ago, EricE said:

I could mention that more people have been killed over a god than any other, but that wouldn't exactly be reflective of all religious people.

You could mention that, but you'd be wrong.  That's one of the big falsehoods I often hear from people who have an axe to grind against religion.  Add up all the casualties from holy wars in history and compare that to the casualties from the two World Wars, the deaths from Stalin's and Mao's policies and the Holocaust.  None of that had anything whatsoever to do with religion.

4 hours ago, EricE said:

I don't see how you can say things in our secular society haven't improved. We have abolished slavery, we have established universal education, we try not to let people die in poverty, etc. There is (and will always be) huge room for improvement, but the institution that typically seems to be holding us back from the next moral advancement is religion, not secularism.

• Slavery still exists in some parts of the world.
• Education is not universal worldwide at all, and in some places certain groups are outright forbidden to be educated.
• People die in poverty every single day, even in the United States

And dude, seriously... Religion is holding us back from morality?  In the same paragraph where you wrote that you bragged about how we ended slavery.  Spoiler alert:  Slavery was ended in Western culture because of Christian values.  If you disagree with that then I challenge you to go study your pre-Civil War history.  That universal education you bragged about doesn't actually exist but the closest we can come to it is in... you guessed it... the West, which is influenced by Judeo-Christian values.  Churches donate massive amounts of money, time and other resources to helping the poor... far more than secular based organizations.

4 hours ago, EricE said:

No, my points about god's morality have not been debunked. Just because someone else claims that the god is moral, doesn't make it so. I have never condoned slavery, I have never watched a child being raped and ignored it even though I have the power to stop it. I don't allow thousands of people to die from starvation every single day. Yes, both you and I are far morally superior than the god of the bible and the Book of Mormon (and that's not even being arrogant, it's not hard to do).

It's been debunked as far as I'm concerned.  You can hold onto that if you want to but dude, it's shockingly arrogant to claim superior morality than the Creator of the universe and it's fairly rude to write a sentence like that last one among a bunch of Mormons.  You don't believe it, fine but we do and that was pretty insensitive.  If you're going to say things like that then fine, but don't ever complain about people being rude to you on here.

I mean, do you honestly think anyone's going to take you seriously when you claim a superior morality to God?

3 hours ago, EricE said:

As I understand my LDS theology, the results of the two plans were the same: returning to heaven, no? But in one plan, everyone just does the right thing, and in the other they choose. So I imagine you meant the process of god's plan is preferable, not the result, right?

You honestly think the result would be the same?  That speaks volumes of your understanding of the point of all of this, bro.

The results would NOT be the same.  Returning to Heaven is pointless if we learned nothing while on the Earth, which is what we're here for. 

Edited August 13, 2016 by unixknight

[estradling75]

Careful @unixknight  @NeedleinA  has show us that if the OP can't beat you with his arguments then he will cut and paste your post to his echo chamber on Facebook where he and his friends will mock what you wrote and you will not be able to defend yourself...

In fact everyone in this thread should take notice his actions in that matter, and decide if you want to take the risk of that happening to you.

 

 

Edited August 13, 2016 by estradling75

[Guest]

38 minutes ago, estradling75 said:

Careful @unixknight  @NeedleinA  has show us that if the OP can't beat you with his arguments then he will cut and paste your post to his echo chamber on Facebook where he and his friends will mock what you wrote and you will not be able to defend yourself...

If fact everyone in this thread should take notice his actions in that matter, and decide if you want to take the risk of that happening to you.

 

 

Do they teach this tactic in Exmo School? I had the same happen to me by an ex-boyfriend who has made himself an enemy to the church after leaving. Coward move, if you ask me.

[Guest MormonGator]

3 minutes ago, Eowyn said:

Do they teach this tactic in Exmo School? I had the same happen to me by an ex-boyfriend who has made himself an enemy to the church after leaving. Coward move, if you ask me.

More sad than anything else. 

[Guest MormonGator]

I guess the big thing is that I'm disappointed. I don't know of a single believer who walks into atheist forms, acts like they know everything and everyone else is so stupid than posts about it on Facebook. I don't know, maybe he "protests too much" and he probably doesn't even know why. Freud was right, the subconscious controls a lot of what we do. Since he's so good at critiquing others, maybe he should critique himself. After all, Socrates said "the unexamined life is not worth living."  

Must be sad when you've become a walking cliche. 

Edited August 13, 2016 by MormonGator

[zil]

4 minutes ago, MormonGator said:

I guess the big thing is that I'm disappointed. I don't know of a single believer who walks into atheist forms, acts like they know everything and everyone else is so stupid than posts about it on Facebook.

You left out the part where it was initiated under false pretenses (OP = help me understand; later post = just honing my anti debate skills (explicit = "I knew that from the start", fact = "I didn't mention my intent", implicit = "I deceived you because I believed¹ it was the only way you'd cooperate with my intent")).  Yes, very disappointing.

¹Oops, except he claims he doesn't believe anything "until the truth of the proposition has been demonstrated". (So he must have foreseen the future... no, that doesn't work either.  Huh, I'm stumped.  He must have found some other way to determine the conclusion before the initiation, you know, in order to avoid believing initiation would lead to conclusion. </snark>)

I'm gonna go do another logic puzzle now.

[Guest MormonGator]

5 minutes ago, zil said:

 

I'm gonna go do another logic puzzle now.

What? LDS don't do logic puzzles. We just so stupid we can't even read. 

Edited August 13, 2016 by MormonGator

[zil]

5 minutes ago, MormonGator said:

What? LDS don't do logic puzzles. We just so stupid. 

Yeah, I just like making little patterns with dots and Xs - the puzzles themselves are beyond me. </snark>

Meanwhile, if you want to warm up, they have nice easy ones here.

[zil]

And apparently the "duplicate" post problem isn't solved.

Edited August 13, 2016 by zil

[unixknight]

1 hour ago, estradling75 said:

Careful @unixknight  @NeedleinA  has show us that if the OP can't beat you with his arguments then he will cut and paste your post to his echo chamber on Facebook where he and his friends will mock what you wrote and you will not be able to defend yourself...

In fact everyone in this thread should take notice his actions in that matter, and decide if you want to take the risk of that happening to you.

I couldn't possibly care less.  Let them mock.  I don't need to defend myself to those people.

[Guest MormonGator]

3 minutes ago, unixknight said:

I couldn't possibly care less.  Let them mock.  I don't need to defend myself to those people.

No, you don't. Very true. 

I've noticed that Christians are in a catch-22. Atheists can bully people who say whatever they want and if a Christian dares to say anything in defense, the person doing the bullying will yell "Hey, you are supposed to turn the other cheek!"

[Guest MormonGator]

3 minutes ago, unixknight said:

I couldn't possibly care less.  Let them mock.  I don't need to defend myself to those people.

No, you don't. Very true. 

I've noticed that Christians are in a catch-22. Atheists can bully people who say whatever they want and if a Christian dares to say anything in defense, the person doing the bullying will yell "Hey, you are supposed to turn the other cheek!"

[unixknight]

3 minutes ago, MormonGator said:

No, you don't. Very true. 

I've noticed that Christians are in a catch-22. Atheists can bully people who say whatever they want and if a Christian dares to say anything in defense, the person doing the bullying will yell "Hey, you are supposed to turn the other cheek!"

I don't think the philosophy of turning the other cheek was meant to ignore lies, historical revisionism and distorted truths. 

[Guest MormonGator]

3 minutes ago, unixknight said:

I don't think the philosophy of turning the other cheek was meant to ignore lies, historical revisionism and distorted truths. 

I agree 100%, but atheists and christian bashers do not, sadly. 

[Guest MormonGator]

3 minutes ago, unixknight said:

I don't think the philosophy of turning the other cheek was meant to ignore lies, historical revisionism and distorted truths. 

I agree 100%, but atheists and christian bashers do not, sadly. 

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, MormonGator said:

No, you don't. Very true. 

I've noticed that Christians are in a catch-22. Atheists can bully people who say whatever they want and if a Christian dares to say anything in defense, the person doing the bullying will yell "Hey, you are supposed to turn the other cheek!"

To say nothing of being devious from the outset while pursuing a conversation about morality.

[unixknight]

3 minutes ago, MormonGator said:

I agree 100%, but atheists and christian bashers do not, sadly. 

You are absolutely right.

But then, that's what bullies do.  They try to exploit what they perceive to be weakness.

[Anddenex]

37 minutes ago, unixknight said:

I don't think the philosophy of turning the other cheek was meant to ignore lies, historical revisionism and distorted truths. 

I don't remember now where I had read this, but the concept of turning the cheek comes from a tradition during Roman times. As Jews were seen as slaves, when the initial slap was received it was a slap of superiority specifying "I am master you are slave." The notion of turning the cheek required the master to slap the cheek that would be considered the slap of an equal. If the cheek was turned, then the master would have to slap the side of the cheek and in a manner that meant the master saw the slave as an equal, which meant that the individual would not get slapped again, as the master wouldn't slap him on that side. It was an interesting read.

[theSQUIDSTER]

So... I'm wondering if EricE is still around or if he's abandoned this thread and forum...

EricE,
I don't think it matters what any of us say about God or morality because it seems to me like you've already made your choice of what you want to believe and what you don't want to.  That saddens me, but it is your choice... God-given, I might add... though you would probably claim otherwise. You are free to choose what you believe, what you think is moral and what is immoral.. as are the rest of us.  So we really have nowhere to go but to agree to disagree on many or most of the fundamentals of where morality even comes from.

As for so-called "evidence" of things true or not true ... well... you still have to choose what constitutes enough evidence and what is insufficient.  As do we all.  So what's the difference?  In the end you make choices on what you believe and what you don't.  As do we all.  Do you feel like you need to justify those choices with any of us?  If not then why are you asking?  What are you hoping to accomplish?  If you need affirmation on what you've chosen to believe, wouldn't you get better results on an atheist forum or in a discussion amongst secular humanists or a similar group?  Or would that be too easy?  Is it the challenge of who you can sway to your viewpoint?  If so, why is that important?  Why should we choose to believe what you say?  Are you looking for atheist "converts" ?  If so, why?  Does atheism make the world a better place?  

If I may make one observation on your searching for truth... I believe there are many truths which can be discovered through scientific means and methods as well as through empirical reasoning and such.. But if you ever really WANT to know if God really exists... you will never find Him through these means... not in any meaningful way.  The only way you will find Him, or find Him AGAIN... if you want to, is by searching with real intent and with the intent of exercising faith.  You will most probably not be able to find Him if you go in with an agenda of your own.  He has spoken to us through prophets and given us the means to experiment upon His words through them.  If you've grown up LDS then you probably have not completely forgotten these things you learned or even knew at one time.  They can be lost however.  God won't force Himself upon you.  If you choose to walk away from Him or choose to no longer believe... If exercising faith in Him just seems like trying to believe in Santa Claus, then maybe you feel like you've outgrown Him... like He was just a delusion and a crutch.  If that's your conclusions, if that's what you CHOOSE to believe, even He won't stop you.  That's free agency.  You're allowed to go that route if you so choose.  Is it immoral for Him to allow you to do that?

[Guest]

On 8/12/2016 at 6:07 PM, zil said:

When I lived in Moscow, I had a Mormon friend who (with her husband) had gone very, very inactive.  They had both been life-long members and had been sealed in the temple, and then something (I don't know what) happened and they drifted away and then some.  (They were never "anti", just not living their covenants.)  Anywho, one day she and I were having a conversation about church stuff, and in the middle of the conversation I came to realize that she had forgotten a great deal - more, I think, that would be accounted for by normal memory loss.  I didn't say anything to her, but this concept was what came to mind:

Doctrine and Covenants 1:33 And he that repents not, from him shall be taken even the light which he has received; for my Spirit shall not always strive with man, saith the Lord of Hosts.

For some people, not being able to (correctly) recall the truth may simply be loss of the Spirit; for others, it seems to clearly to be something else.  Meanwhile, I'm happy to report my friend and her husband came back with a bang and before I left, she was the RS President of our branch.

That is very interesting.  I hadn't considered that.

I had a bout with another "recovering Mormon" (his words).  He pointed to the passage about the Zoramites and the Rameumptum.  He pointed to that and mocked how Mormons thought we were supposed to pray.  I had to point out to him that this was a BoM example of what NOT to do and that the Zoramites were the bad guys in that episode.

He had no idea what I was talking about.

[zil]

17 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

That is very interesting.  I hadn't considered that.

I had a bout with another "recovering Mormon" (his words).  He pointed to the passage about the Zoramites and the Rameumptum.  He pointed to that and mocked how Mormons thought we were supposed to pray.  I had to point out to him that this was a BoM example of what NOT to do and that the Zoramites were the bad guys in that episode.

He had no idea what I was talking about.

And I suspect this (taking light away from those who reject it) is yet another form of mercy.

[Traveler]

On ‎8‎/‎12‎/‎2016 at 3:59 PM, EricE said:

I was not implying there's no evidence of evolving intelligence, however there is no evidence of intelligence that has evolved beyond man. Is it possible that somewhere out in the universe? I don't know, I can't say that it's impossible. But just because something is impossible, that does not make it possible. It would be a logical fallacy to argue that something is probable, if you have no examples of that thing ever happening. We predict when an earthquake is probable, because we have evidence of earthquakes happening previously. We know when it's likely to rain (unless you're the local tv weatherman!!), because we have evidence of it raining period. We have no examples of a god happening previously, nor do we have examples of intelligence beyond man, so we cannot with any reliability demonstrate the probability of such a thing.

 

Part of the problem, it would seem, is that you are not clear concerning the difference between what constitutes evidence and what constitutes proof.  Also your response has obvious contradiction as well as flaws in deductive logic.   

I have been deliberately vague in our discussion because to be entirely precise would constitute more time and discussion that is probable and assumed necessary.   Also to employ all the rudiments of logic is often interpreted as demeaning and accusations of being stupid.

I have some ideas as to where we could continue from here if you deem it valuable to continue – but I do not mean to create an environment that could cause feelings to be hurt.  If you find my responses condescending or hurtful perhaps I should not continue if considered such a threat.  Regardless I thank you for your opinion and input.

 

The Traveler

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Traveler said:

Part of the problem, it would seem, is that you are not clear concerning the difference between what constitutes evidence and what constitutes proof.  Also your response has obvious contradiction as well as flaws in deductive logic.

I tend to believe that the problem is that Eric already determined his position regardless of any answers.  And when he was confronted with real answers with real understanding, he just cited a logical fallacy even when it didn't apply.

I saw his accusations of logical fallacies thusly:  Because it rained last night, the sidewalk is wet.

NOPE.  That's an ad hoc fallacy because you said A caused B just because they were sequential.

Uhm.  But A did cause B.

HAH!  That just shows you how illogical all you Mormons are.