Hi Cody,
Please feel free to jump in, I have to apologize in advance though that the close we get to Sunday, the less time I have to respond.
Originally posted by -CodyC
Seagoon time most certainly did not begin and end with the death of christ, so moral guidance must be derived from some point in time. Before christ mankind had a sense of right and wrong, where did it come from? Granted there were other religions with other gods but moral guidance, or the idea of right and wrong, has to have a birthplace. Do you think man had to create god to create morality? And im not referring to your god, just a god. Apart from the creation of god and the idea of right and wrong, where would society go if it suddenly decided that there is no god? Would the death of god also be the death of "moral guidance" or could we continue on as we are with the realization that our ultimate goal should be to better ourselves through one another rather than through god?
The problem from my point of view with your questions is that the presuppositions are essentially flawed. Your questions presume that nothing created everything, and then that undirected inert matter plus time, and chance created life, and that instead of following the general trend from more complex to less complex and order to disorder, that life was molded without direction or a designer into greater and greater complexity with new information constantly being generated and added to the DNA helix, and that eventually man was the result, and that man then created religions of increasing complexity (following the history of religions hypothesis).
I on the other hand believe the biblical record that a personal and knowable God always existed, that He created man in his own image with a reasonable soul and that he wrote his moral laws on the hearts of men but that man broke those laws and rebelled against His creator and since that time has been inclined towards rebellion, making up his own substitute gods and rules as he goes along. Properly understood, Christianity did not start with the birth of Christ, it started with the Creation of the World and Christ came into the world to save people from their rebellious and fallen condition. What Christ taught was not brand-new, and although He freed it from the unwarranted additions and subtractions of the Pharisees, you find the same system of ethics and method of salvation in both the Old and the New Testaments (you'll even find prophecies of His coming and vicarious death for the sins of others in places like
Isaiah 53) Therefore I believe that there are
objective ethics found in the Law of God and that evil is the transgression of or want of conformity to those immutable laws, while good is conformity to them. I also believe that it was our inability to keep this law that made it necessary for Christ to pay the penalty for the violation of it.
So in summary answer to your questions, the laws always existed, they are objective and transcendent, they were originally known because they were written on the "heart" of man, since the fall of man, the knowledge of them is obscured but we still feel the weight of them in our conscience and they can be known through revelation. The fact that we still have that vestige of the image of God and a muted but still present conscience explains why most societies even when they come up with replacement theologies still have great similarities in their ethical systems. The death of God movement however, and the rejection of revelation has brought us into a state of increasing moral relativism. "Everyone does what it right in his own eyes" and iincreasingly everyone is a law unto themselves, hence the the tendency toward increasing balkanization, isolation, rebellion and lawlessness in our own society. We are in danger of ceasing to be the ethical and moral people the Constitution was written for, and when that happens our freedoms will disappear to be replaced by rule by the bayonet.
I'm assuming then that you believe that there was no consciousness prior to the self-awareness of human beings and that values are not therefore "brute facts" but constructs created by humans. That prior to us there was no right and wrong in the universe, no
natural law in the Cosmos. Therefore in a real sense they are not "true" or "false" and have no ontological implications. Would that be correct?
Therefore, I would ask you, when it comes to the morals themselves are they:
A) A subjective expression of emotions? (i.e. Theft is wrong, really means "Ugh, Theft" as opposed to "Hurrah for theft!")
B) A subjective expression of the psychological state of the speaker? (i.e. Theft is wrong really means "I dislike theft")
C) Cultural Relativism (i.e. Morals are actually sociological statements about the current state of likes and dislikes in our society "We in our culture mostly dislike theft")
Also, I'm confused about "bettering ourselves through one another" what does this mean in application, and why does it convey the ethical force of "ought"? As in
"we ought to better ourselves through one another"?
I know you weren't asking me but it seems like an open ended question that i'll tackle. Why was mocking Mrs. Ross and what we believe to be her delusion wrong? Simply because the only thing as people we have to rely on is the comfort we find in our own mind and imagination. [/B]
Again, "is" does not imply "ought." Let us say that Mrs. Ross does rely on the comfort she finds in her "delusion" how does this affect me or compel me to do anything? At the time I mocked her beliefs I found great comfort in mocking theists, why should her comfort be more important than mine?
Additionally, at the time, my mocking of her made many of my friends exceedingly happy, and her beliefs made me and my friends angry, surely if comfort and happiness are our goals the greater comfort and happiness was achieved - we all had a good laugh then and later at the pub and for days afterwards. Surely therefore the greatest comfort of the greatest number of people was achieved by mocking and therefore in that situation it was "good"?
