Pascal's Wager is a load of balls.
Oct. 7th, 2009 12:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chaletianHaving read a series of articles about religion, I went off on a tangent with a little thought about universal morality, or, at any rate, the idea of morality requiring a God.
Unsurprisingly, I don't subscribe to this view, and I will admit to finding it strange that some people are genuinely puzzled by the concept of morality as distinct from any religion, but how does it work? When there is a world full of different religions with differing moral codes (and, indeed, differing moral codes even within the same religion), how can one blithely assume that, natch, God presented man with the rules for living? Is it just a natural by-product of the belief in one's own religion and its corollary that all other religions are wrong? But what about, say, people who work on the basis that the Christian, Jewish and Muslim "God" are all basically the same thing? Because I'm fairly sure that those religions do not have identical moral/social beliefs.
And if morality (for Christians) is based on the word of God which, by my understanding, is what is writ in yon Bible, what about all the stuff that lots of people don't pay attention to any more? All that stuff in Leviticus about stoning people and selling people and different skins? Was that not the word of God? Does God not care about certain things very much, that people can ignore them? And, fine, standards change. But then, surely, it's man deciding what morals should be, not God. Or do we look to our respective churches to tell us which of God's words we listen to and which we ignore? Do they decide our morals?
Unsurprisingly, I don't subscribe to this view, and I will admit to finding it strange that some people are genuinely puzzled by the concept of morality as distinct from any religion, but how does it work? When there is a world full of different religions with differing moral codes (and, indeed, differing moral codes even within the same religion), how can one blithely assume that, natch, God presented man with the rules for living? Is it just a natural by-product of the belief in one's own religion and its corollary that all other religions are wrong? But what about, say, people who work on the basis that the Christian, Jewish and Muslim "God" are all basically the same thing? Because I'm fairly sure that those religions do not have identical moral/social beliefs.
And if morality (for Christians) is based on the word of God which, by my understanding, is what is writ in yon Bible, what about all the stuff that lots of people don't pay attention to any more? All that stuff in Leviticus about stoning people and selling people and different skins? Was that not the word of God? Does God not care about certain things very much, that people can ignore them? And, fine, standards change. But then, surely, it's man deciding what morals should be, not God. Or do we look to our respective churches to tell us which of God's words we listen to and which we ignore? Do they decide our morals?
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Date: 2009-10-07 01:07 pm (UTC)It's really perfectly simple.
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Date: 2009-10-07 01:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-07 03:38 pm (UTC)Every time someone like Andrew Brown starts banging the drum about how atheism is so a religion, I want to snarl 'So if you honestly believe that, are you prepared to give atheism the respect you think religions deserve, then?' I bet I can tell what the answer would be.
(Sorry to rant at you. It just drives me nuts when people start telling me I don't believe in God because I'm an intellectual snob or I had a nasty childhood or I just get my kicks from stomping on other people's beliefs, when actually I don't believe in God because the world seems to me to make a lot more sense without him. I don't believe in the Easter Bunny, either, but people don't write editorials in the papers claiming that therefore I have a repressed wish to spread myxomatosis).