Atheism and the seven deadly sins.

[Brian Peacock]

What is the difference? Surely action is just action, and if that action is good then it is good, if it is bad then it is bad? But if one simply follows a code because some authority advises or insists one should or must, and that whatever the outcomes to action may be one can guarantee they are always good if and when the code is adhered to, then one may in fact be doing a great bad (by just following orders) believing it to be just the opposite.

The example of the Amalekites is pertinent and informative because the brutal and violent ethnic cleansing of an entire tribe, including the non-combative women and children, is deemed to be the of the highest good because it is God will, and because conforming to God's code is always good. But how can the putting of children to the sword ever be deemed 'a good' in any rational sense?

But in this Biblical story about the situation between the Israelites and the Amalekites, the believer has to understand that even though God code demanded the death of innocents the Israelites had to recognises that to not act as God's willing agent would be a great sin. But how can the not putting of children to the sword ever be deemed 'a bad' in any rational sense either? It is rational to do such a thing if and only if God exists as some perfect authority and morally supreme entity - if God does not exist in this manner then the Israelites put a whole tribe to the sword on the basis of either a misunderstanding, a misapprehension, a misconception, a falsehood, a fantasy or the delusional raving of a blood-thirsty, power-crazed human. One might very well understand how the Israelites are then very heavily invested in the whole notion of a good and righteous God, what other reason could they possibly have had for dashing babies heads against the wall or slitting the throats of screaming 8 year olds? For them the horror of God's non-existence must have been something far too hideous to contemplate, for to do so would be to acknowledge the vileness and horror of their own actions - and to also acknowledge the responsibility for, and culpability in a very great bad.

As the poet said, and as Christopher Hitchens is fond of reminding us; good people will do good things and bad people will do bad, but to get a good person to do a bad thing you generally need religion.

[Brian Peacock]

....continuing....

The implications for Sin of accepting the fact of God's non-existence is that it simply disappears. But because this notion of Sin (capital S) is a religious construction and is defined as all that which a nominated deity does not approve of and/or authorise, abandoning religious principles does not mean that sin (in the general sense as a synonymic to wicked, objectionable and wrong) also goes away. It just means the idea that a non-compliance with religious beliefs and practices can only ever be a bad thing becomes morallly irrelevant.

The sins of the atheist are therefore now examined and decided on on a case-by-case basis, as is their responsibility for action. The atheist does good for goodness' sake, not for God's sake by following some decree like a slavish robot. Likewise, when an atheist does bad they are responsible for it, they cannot play the, "...but God told me to do it!" moral joker.

In fact, when one considers the plethora of religions with their different and competing moral codes and strictures it seems eminently sensible to consider all so-called sins on a case-by-case basis, putting aside any religious component as irrelevant. To do otherwise would be declare any action motivated and justified on religious grounds permissible, and more than that automatically good. The Islamic suicide-bomber, the Mormon who takes his 13 year old granddaughter as a wife, the pious Christian leader who pursues the occupation of another land by force of arms, would all be seen to be acting for the highest good if allowed to justify their action on religious grounds, and each could (and probably would) act with total impunity because they would simply be doing the bidding of their nominated deity.

In this sense judging morality of action on a case-by-case basis free from the partisan impingements of religious viewpoints is in fact a secular approach to morality, a morality which judges all action by the same standard and does not afford any particular rights, privileges or exemptions to the members of some self-regulated club or other.

This is why people like the Pope or The Supreme Leader of Iran seek to denigrate secularism so publicly to both their followers and to all others, because in asserting the fairness and good sense of judging all equally and by the same standards secularism takes religion's moral joker out of play and asserts a right to declare the religious sinners themselves, on the basis of their action, their motivation and the outcomes thereof, and with a totally neutral disregard for the rules of this or that club.

Secularism is growing obstacle for Mormon Church

An attorney for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints predicts secularism will be one of the most significant obstacles facing the LDS Church over the coming decade.

William F. Atkin, associate general counsel for the LDS Church, made the prognostication Saturday during an address at the 2010 J. Reuben Clark Law Society Conference on the University of Utah campus.

"When governments become neutral towards religion, we see less and less protection of religion and religious activities," he said. "Secularism in the world is neutral at best towards religions and hostile at worst. We're seeing more and more that it is hostile, not just neutral, towards religion."

In the United States, secularism could result in changing how the tax code treats nonprofit religious organizations.

"We think there's going to be a tightening now of what kind of entities get tax-exempt status," Atkin said. "Maybe churches are no longer going to be viewed as such a positive influence in society — therefore (maybe) they're not going to be granted tax-exempt status."

Abroad, secularism is manifesting itself in a wave of anti-discrimination measures in Europe that could, for example, prevent the LDS Church from requiring its employees to adhere to a basic level of personal worthiness and moral conduct.

"We're seeing more and more, particularly in Western Europe, the countries who are very secular are pushing anti-discrimination and not permitting any religious exclusions," he said.

According to Atkin, additional "trends that are here and coming in the next 5-10 years that have the possibility of impacting the church adversely" include an increase in audits of church financial records as governments searching for more revenue during a global economic downturn and immigration restrictions that stand to severely limit the number of visas available to the church for full-time missionaries.

He also provided some context for the wide range of issues the LDS Church's Office of General Counsel routinely confronts. "The Office of General Counsel takes care of the legal affairs of the church. We want the church to be legal wherever we are so that the enemies of the kingdom cannot attack us because we've done something incorrectly."

http://www.mormontimes.com/article/819/ ... mon-Church

[hiyymer]

....continuing....

The sins of the atheist are therefore now examined and decided on on a case-by-case basis, as is their responsibility for action. The atheist does good for goodness' sake, not for God's sake by following some decree like a slavish robot. Likewise, when an atheist does bad they are responsible for it, they cannot play the, "...but God told me to do it!" moral joker.

I don't know where you get this idea that theists slavishly follow some moral rules. Maybe what you are thinking of is the tendency of religion to try to apply set rules to everyone. But that's not about morality. That's just about agreements. It's not why people do what they do. (If theists actually followed their own rules, the world would be a far different place.) People do what they do because their brain does it. Then they rationalize it in language. You have two choices. You can make up reasons. Or you can say God told me to do it. Personally I think the latter one has a stronger ring of truth under the circumstances.

[JimC]

hiyymer wrote:

You have two choices. You can make up reasons. Or you can say God told me to do it. Personally I think the latter one has a stronger ring of truth under the circumstances.

I rather think I actually have more than 2 choices, particularly given the absurdity of these two.

"made-up" reasons has a strong implication of falsity, of creating reasons as excuses, of a casual disregard for one's personal responsibility. It may well be the choice of people in certain circumstances for certain reasons, but it is scarcely a useful summary of the complex factors, both learned and innate, that contribute to the decision making process of a real person, in the real world.

The only ring that "God told me to do it" has is the ring of some form of mental impairment. "The voices in my head told me to do it" has never been an appealing basis for moral decision making...

[hiyymer]

hiyymer wrote:

You have two choices. You can make up reasons. Or you can say God told me to do it. Personally I think the latter one has a stronger ring of truth under the circumstances.

I rather think I actually have more than 2 choices, particularly given the absurdity of these two.

"made-up" reasons has a strong implication of falsity, of creating reasons as excuses, of a casual disregard for one's personal responsibility. It may well be the choice of people in certain circumstances for certain reasons, but it is scarcely a useful summary of the complex factors, both learned and innate, that contribute to the decision making process of a real person, in the real world.

The only ring that "God told me to do it" has is the ring of some form of mental impairment. "The voices in my head told me to do it" has never been an appealing basis for moral decision making...

"the real world" is just the world of our experience; what is occurring as our experience as part of the physical process of the organism. It's not what really exists. Neuroscience tells us that "we" aren't responsible for our decisions (the "we" that we experience in our "mind"), but the physical brain/body is. (Although we can certainly be responsible after the fact). The conscious representation of the decision and it's alternatives in our conscious mind is part of the mechanism by which the body responds to its environment, but it is not where the response is formulated. (See Damasio, "Descartes Error"). The reasons which we postulate after the fact are always rationalizations since the whole experience of having conscious reasons isn't what is really happening. The true reasons; the billions of molecules in your body acting in such a complex causal dance that it would take a practically infinite amount of time to calculate and predict the result from instant to instant even if it could be modeled; is not available to us. It can be demonstrated that our actions are being initiated in the unconscious physical brain before we are aware that we "made the decision". That "decision" is a conscious experience that occurs after the fact of the brain's response. Life inside the mechanism is not rational.

[JimC]

hiyymer wrote:

You have two choices. You can make up reasons. Or you can say God told me to do it. Personally I think the latter one has a stronger ring of truth under the circumstances.

I rather think I actually have more than 2 choices, particularly given the absurdity of these two.

"made-up" reasons has a strong implication of falsity, of creating reasons as excuses, of a casual disregard for one's personal responsibility. It may well be the choice of people in certain circumstances for certain reasons, but it is scarcely a useful summary of the complex factors, both learned and innate, that contribute to the decision making process of a real person, in the real world.

The only ring that "God told me to do it" has is the ring of some form of mental impairment. "The voices in my head told me to do it" has never been an appealing basis for moral decision making...

"the real world" is just the world of our experience; what is occurring as our experience as part of the physical process of the organism. It's not what really exists. Neuroscience tells us that "we" aren't responsible for our decisions (the "we" that we experience in our "mind"), but the physical brain/body is. (Although we can certainly be responsible after the fact). The conscious representation of the decision and it's alternatives in our conscious mind is part of the mechanism by which the body responds to its environment, but it is not where the response is formulated. (See Damasio, "Descartes Error"). The reasons which we postulate after the fact are always rationalizations since the whole experience of having conscious reasons isn't what is really happening. The true reasons; the billions of molecules in your body acting in such a complex causal dance that it would take a practically infinite amount of time to calculate and predict the result from instant to instant even if it could be modeled; is not available to us. It can be demonstrated that our actions are being initiated in the unconscious physical brain before we are aware that we "made the decision". That "decision" is a conscious experience that occurs after the fact of the brain's response. Life inside the mechanism is not rational.

In a way, that is what I was trying to explicate by "complex reasons". By saying "made-up" reasons, you are emphasising what is trivial about the process, the after the fact rationalising.

Mind you, to someone with a degree of wisdom, experience and humility, those "made-up" reasons may be a valid "after the action" commentary...

But the bit about "God told me to do it" is not only arrant nonsense, but has all the pernicious effect of a false appeal to a non-existant authority...

[hiyymer]

In a way, that is what I was trying to explicate by "complex reasons". By saying "made-up" reasons, you are emphasising what is trivial about the process, the after the fact rationalising.

Mind you, to someone with a degree of wisdom, experience and humility, those "made-up" reasons may be a valid "after the action" commentary...

But the bit about "God told me to do it" is not only arrant nonsense, but has all the pernicious effect of a false appeal to a non-existant authority...

But the whole process by which the response is generated has a "felt" aspect and is very very far from purely cognitive and logical. In fact that association between the representations of the alternatives and bodily emotional states is how the decision gets made in the first place (Damasio). This is the experience of feeling (not logically determining) what is right and wrong. It's how the life intention inherent in the human form gets expressed in the response; our biological regulation in action; our evolutionary agenda. The consciously experienced rational relationships in the situation are only an input to the response. As C.S. "Jack" Lewis opined, there must be a God because we know right from wrong. Put another way, "something" is telling me what to do, because it is not coming from my experience of me. The "authority" exists. It just doesn't have all the qualities of the external God agent. That's only in our experience, the agent invention of the brain. Just like "I deciding" is an agent invention of the brain.

A simple bacteria has many complex "behaviors" in response to its environment, so that it can maintain homeostatis, the condition of aliveness. The bacteria has a goal, the goal of all life whether the particular form has a brain or not. We immediately think of those behaviors of the bacteria as intentional in the sense of an agent causing the response because that's the convention that our brain uses. But the intention is only the intention that is inherent in the mechanism of the evolved organism, genetically replicated to survive in its environment. There is no brain and no self-caused agent. We also respond the way we do because of what we are, not because the invented agent in our experience is deciding as an uncaused cause with reasons.

The issue of how that experience of our biological felt "right" and "wrong" gets translated into agreements of the group is a whole other issue. That is a different kind of authority and one which is also inescapable. Agreements are a fact of life for humans.

[Brian Peacock]

I do not think we can reduce morality to absolutes, to something that just is, not even if that fixed-given is deemed to be the particular arrangement of molecules and compounds contributing to an individual's state of being in response to a unique set of personal circumstances at any given time.

The case is made above that our choices are expressive behaviours which result from a particular complex of physical states and are, to a great extent, predictable, and that this predictability impacts and impinges on what we might otherwise think of as our freedom to choose and to act.

This may indeed be the case at the choice-making moment, to some extent, but the relevance of this to the topic seems somewhat slight. What we are considering is not 'the process' of choosing for the good but 'the what' of our choices. We might say that all healthy-brained individuals have a similar or comparable set of neurological conditions which are at play when presented with certain choices, but we obviously do not make the same choices in similar or comparable circumstances.

It is 'the what' of our choices which comprises the body of "morality" in both the descriptive sense and the normative sense, that is, in the sense of morality as a term for that which is deemed broadly 'for the good' by society, groups, or individuals, and as a term for a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.* But more specifically, we are considering how eschewing 'the what' which various religious institutions put forward as necessary for all persons is considered a 'sin,' or moral failing, by those religions - and on what basis the religious consider this valid and the non-religious consider it non-valid.

So while I accept that moral choices, like any cognitive, conscious function, proceed from a complex of internal and external circumstances, the choices we make 'in the moment' are nonetheless informed by previous experiences, understandings and choices, the ideas we have been exposed to, personal or cultural values, practices and traditions, the circumstances of our existence and our relationship with world and the things in it.

My point in relation to this is that if we are to say that in response to this-or-that moral dilemma our favourite deity has authorised that-or-this action as correct and good in all cases, as religious codes and laws invariably do, then those who commit to abide by the terms and condition of such codes are actually forsaking their moral choices for action and abrogating their moral responsibility for the consequences.

I am not seeking to replace the moral codes of religion with an alternative code (though I do have views on this too!), only to suggest that the 'if X then always and only ever Y' approach to morality does not always and only ever produce good, morally acceptable outcomes by default, just outcomes which conform to the code. Likewise, applying this formula to those who do not conform to religious codes does not justify the claim that non-believers are always and only ever sinful moral failures. If no particular response to any particular circumstance is always and only ever for the good then we must simply acknowledge the rather obvious conclusion that 'if X then ?' - which seem to invoke a moral responsibility to at least think seriously (and hopefully critically) about the nature of X and the merits or otherwise of ?1, ?2, ?3, etc.


* SEoP: Definition of Morality - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/

[hiyymer]

My point in relation to this is that if we are to say that in response to this-or-that moral dilemma our favourite deity has authorised that-or-this action as correct and good in all cases, as religious codes and laws invariably do, then those who commit to abide by the terms and condition of such codes are actually forsaking their moral choices for action and abrogating their moral responsibility for the consequences.

I don't think that's what is going on. If someone is a member of a group then their behavior is going to be affected by what the group would want. But it's never a simplistic rational decision. Again it's a matter of how the subconscious emotional center of the brain reacts. And those reactions will be conflicted if both the motivation/instinct for self survival and the motivation/instinct for group survival are in conflict. It's not the "code" one reacts to, but the "code" as a carrier of the group's interests and solidarity.

[JimC]

My point in relation to this is that if we are to say that in response to this-or-that moral dilemma our favourite deity has authorised that-or-this action as correct and good in all cases, as religious codes and laws invariably do, then those who commit to abide by the terms and condition of such codes are actually forsaking their moral choices for action and abrogating their moral responsibility for the consequences.

I don't think that's what is going on. If someone is a member of a group then their behavior is going to be affected by what the group would want. But it's never a simplistic rational decision. Again it's a matter of how the subconscious emotional center of the brain reacts. And those reactions will be conflicted if both the motivation/instinct for self survival and the motivation/instinct for group survival are in conflict. It's not the "code" one reacts to, but the "code" as a carrier of the group's interests and solidarity.

It's strange. You are saying many things (some, but not all of which I may agree with) which come from a very materialist and biological analysis about the way our species may react in given circumstances.

Then, out of the blue, come woo from C.S. Lewis, and strange communications from the purported creator of the Universe to the brains of certain Earth hominids...

Does not compute...

[Brian Peacock]

[JimC]

I am disgusted!

Why has there not been a parody thread about Atheism and the 7 dwarves height challenged individuals?

[Svartalf]

because you're not happy, so that already excludes one