Sure if you disagree agree against the precepts of humility, compassion, kindness and the discouragement of vanity and revenge. If your values as an atheist are superior to these then by all means keep them to yourself. — invicta

This seems naive. Firstly, it goes to my point that most, if not all theists, would class themsleves as the good guys - with a series of similar motherhood statements you've provided - compassion, humility etc. I heard a similar list recently from a Muslim taxi driver.

As I said, believers of any stripe ususally think they have the right interpretation, not realising the bedrock of subjectivity that underpins their faith.

Secondly, atheism is the answer to a single question - whether you are convinced a god exists. Atheism isn't a system. There are atheists who are libertarians or Marxists, some even believe in reincarnation and astrology. What you may be thinking of, perhaps, is secular humanism which also includes the sorts of homilies you have described above.

The point with morality is not what people say they value and do, it is what they actually value and do.

Thanks. My intuition sides with Rouse on this matter. I have held a version of this notion since I was quite young.

There’s nothing naive about those values, calling them naive with expanding on why strikes me as unjustifed judgment. As such it’s just an opinion, and I’m happy to have a difference of opinion with you, but how could you advocate vanity or revenge when they are negative attributes or actions ? Can you offer an explanation?

Humility enables us avoid the trap of arrogance at the same time allowing us to take instruction and advice. I accept most of those Christian values that I mentioned as they’re good for my soul.

Take the opposite of say humility which is hubris, and the the opposite of compassion is apathy.

On what grounds do you disagree with these moral teachings irrespective of a creator God?

@Wayfarer do you think I’m making sense in the above things regardless of god, certain values are non-negotiable?

The enforcement of sound judgment comes from experience which is first hand account of morality, and education as prescriptive and second hand.

Though one of the 10 commandments says Thou Shalt not Steal, but you do steal. It’s only when you’re stolen from that you understand morality first hand otherwise the precepts of such morality are only prescriptive and serve as a warning against doing so.

You can't kill a religion. — Benj96

But religions can and have died, the religions of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, etc., etc.

There’s nothing naive about those values, calling them naive with expanding on why strikes me as unjustifed judgment. — invicta

I didn't say the values were naïve, I said they are motherhood statements that almost all believers, no matter how intolerant and dreadful, profess to share.

It seems naïve to assume that you putting them here in any way clarifies things since these values are interpreted differently by all and sundry.

On what grounds do you disagree with these moral teachings irrespective of a creator God? — invicta

I'm not talking about morality - that's a separate matter. I'm talking about the difference between what people say and how they are.

Perhaps this example will assist. Some years back I spent time with some South Africans who were supporters of apartheid. Turns out they were also devout Christians. Over the course of a meal it was clear they professed compassion, forgiveness, humility, tolerance and love yet simultaneously they denigrated black people and spoke of their contempt for homosexuals and women who are not homemakers. They supported capital punishment for dug users and revered 'white blood'. Their faith and the Bible 'told' them these where core moral values from God. Needless to say we can easily find Christians who are in opposition to these positions.

"There are those" seems to be covertly pointing at yours truly. — Gnomon

Indeed.

Nowhere have I accused you of new ageism, nor of "science bashing"

The most I have "accused" (your word) you of is not being able to either follow or present a clear argument.

Despite the faux footnotes.

The most I have "accused" (your word) you of is not being able to either follow or present a clear argument.

Despite the faux footnotes. — Banno

Speaking of "faux footnotes", can you "present a clear argument" to show why any of my footnotes is "faux". That would be instructive, and help me to communicate in your language. :smile:

:lol:

No.

No. — Banno

OK. I was just trying to be accommodating to your & my limitations.

Perhaps my complex arguments have too many elements for your open/shut bear-trap mind*1. "Hard" problems are indeed difficult to follow, with all the twist & turns, and varying perspectives. Perhaps an "argument map" would help*2. But I'll save that for someone who is really interested in the OP question. :smile:


*1. Compared to my more excursive mind.

*2. Argument Map :
A complex argument is a set of arguments with either overlapping premises or conclusions (or both). Complex arguments are very common because many issues and debates are complicated and involve extended reasoning. To understand complex arguments, we need to analyze the logical structure of the reasoning involved.
https://philosophy.hku.hk/think/arg/complex.php

I’m curious about your reasoning that humanity wouldn’t be better off without religion. Can you explain why? — praxis

As long as the need for religion is felt, humanity will not be better off without it. I doubt that need is going to disappear.

do you think I’m making sense in the above things regardless of god, certain values are non-negotiable? — invicta

I think you are, but it's an unwinnable argument, as there will always be counter-examples, such as those @Tom Storm has given.

When I studied Comparative Religion, the very first class was devoted to ‘defining religion’. Convinced this would be a simple task, we all sat around in small groups and canvassed ideas and came up with a list of what we thought would amount to a definition. To our surprise, the lecturer was able to demonstrate that every definition was incomplete or inaccurate. We couldn't, in the end, come up with a definition.

I was (and am) a theosophical type (small t), who believes that the different wisdom traditions portray profound truths, but they are very hard to grasp. They can't be explained in direct terms - that is why so much of their lore is couched in terms of myth, metaphor, and allegory. Ultimately they all demand that you become a different kind of being. Herewith a quote from a Catholic philosopher (I will add, I'm not Catholic)

Our minds do not—contrary to many views currently popular—create truth. Rather, they must be conformed to the truth of things given in creation. And such conformity is possible only as the moral virtues become deeply embedded in our character, a slow and halting process. We have lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity. That is, in order to know the truth we must become persons of a certain sort. The full transformation of character that we need will, in fact, finally require the virtues of faith, hope, and love. And this transformation will not necessarily—perhaps not often—be experienced by us as easy or painless. Hence the transformation of self that we must—by God’s grace—undergo “perhaps resembles passing through something akin to dying.”

You could find exact parallels to that text in Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist sources, were you to look. But it's not the property of any of them, in that it's not confined or limited to them. Let the world get rid of all of them - the requirement would remain.

Let the world get rid of all of them - the requirement would remain. — Wayfarer

No loss then. :up:

As long as the need for religion is felt, humanity will not be better off without it. I doubt that need is going to disappear. — Janus

That’s like saying that if the need for a drug is felt humanity will not be better off without it. If the drug was never know it would not be missed.

If you mean something else I think you may need to elaborate on the nature of the need that you mention, and why only a religion can fulfill it.

I will add, science itself has a parallel discipline - the point of the scientific method being to eliminate the personal, the idiosyncratic, the subjective, so as to arrive at a conclusion which does not depend on the observer. It is an austere discipline and its roots are very much entwined with the development of the Western intellectual tradition. But it also assumes at the outset, as one of the 'boundary conditons', as it were, that the domain of enquiry is objective, that it exists totally separately from us. That, I think, is the crucial step that occured with the 'scientific revolution'. Prior to that, in scholastic metaphysics, there remained a sense of the 'unity of knower and known' that is one of the fundamental motifs of the various wisdom traditions. You find it in Aquinas. But with Galileo and the ascendancy of the dualistic model which assigns primary reality to the measurable quantities of objects, then not only do you have a new scientific method, but also a fundamentally different way of being, which we're now so embedded in, that it is very difficult to be aware of it. It's the water in which we all swim.

That’s like saying that if the need for a drug is felt humanity will not be better off without it. If the drug was never know it would not be missed.

If you mean something else I think you may need to elaborate on the nature of the need that you mention, and why only a religion can fulfill it. — praxis

I think the drug analogy is weak. Religion is not an addiction, but a way of life, the need for religion is not like the need for a drug, and a religious life is not intrinsically unhealthy or inherently unhappier than a secular life; in fact, some studies have shown the opposite. Some people are simply attracted to that way of life, and others not. And the numbers of those who are is significant, so it's not a peripheral social phenomenon. Religion is also socially engaging, not isolating like the use of hard drugs of addiction.

Some people are simply attracted to that way of life, and others not. — Janus

I used drug as an analogy but it could have been anything. If we’ve never known something then we can’t miss it.

The point being that religion is not the only way to fulfill human needs of any kind. We seem to agree about that.

I think the need to believe in something transcendant can only be satisfied by religion, and I think that need is inexplicably there in some people and absent in others. I think if you could somehow wipe out all existing religions and knowledge of them, religion would be reinvented.

To our surprise, the lecturer was able to demonstrate that every definition was incomplete or inaccurate. We couldn't, in the end, come up with a definition. — Wayfarer

Indeed. Karen Armstrong has written compellingly about this. Religion is one of those things that we struggle to define, but we know it when we see it. Like anything human, it may be awful and great. For years I felt slightly ashamed for my bias against religion until I met a couple of Catholic priests, one of them is now friend. He used to say - 'Religion is all too frequently deficient - people use relgion as a place to hide.'

Most of my criticism of religion I found in Krishnamurti, Fr Richard Rohr and Bishop Shelby Spong - all robust critics of the more popular expressions of faith. I think it was Christian thinker David Bentley Hart who said that Evangelicalism is not really Christianity, it is type of capitalist cult.

I don't think there is a 'spiritual' or theistic urge specifically which people share that explains the persistence of religions, I think it's just the urge to have metanarratives which are transcendence as foundational story. Which is why in some moods I would put Communism and Scientism down as expressions of religion. I don't think they are sublimated or distorted transcendence; they are the real deal, the 'urge' incarnate.

@Tom Storm I think you’re equating indoctrination to ideology in your summary of what it means to be religious . And whilst that may be true of any religion it could also be true of atheists in their every day beliefs about the world.

But yes even as a Christian I’m not dogmatic. But there is a sense of zeal when it comes to knocking down someone’s beliefs. It’s called intolerance.

In this sense prosecuting someone for their beliefs highlights immaturity.

By all means question or be sceptical of idea such as god, but to knock it down altogether is to remain ever in infancy.

By all means question or be sceptical of idea such as god, but to knock it down altogether is to remain ever in infancy. — invicta

Hmm, look above I also wrote this:

Like anything human, it may be awful and great. — Tom Storm

And whilst that may be true of any religion it could also be true of atheists in their every day beliefs about the world. — invicta

I have no special fondness for atheists. Especially those who are libertarians or scientistic thinkers. Or worse, occultists...

But when I look at what is happening in America with Trump and evangelical white nationalists, and in India with Modi and Hindu nationalists and Saudi Arabia with Wahhabi nationalists and Myanmar and its extreme Buddhist nationalists and... etc, etc. This is no small thing. And sure, the religion of Communism as instantiated in China sucks too. You're right, I'm intolerant about these things.

And sects of major religions either die or radically transform. The Vatican of 2023 is not the Vatican of 1123; the faith has undergone a dramatic transformation.

Likewise, the Gnostic sects died out in late antiquity, although some of their ideas were reborn with the Cathars/Albagensians.

I think this is generally taken as evidence against the veracity of religious or spiritual systems.

However, I've found it interesting that some religious thinkers see this as a necessary process. I've seen this view more often in the Christian tradition, but I assume it applies elsewhere. The idea is that God reveals God's plan for humanity through history, in stages of progression, hence the Bible being over 50% histories.

The Bible starts with God having a 1 on 1, personal, handholding, relationship with Abraham and the other Patriarchs. This relationship only required faith, like a toddler who must learn to do what their parents says, but who also willfully misinterprets commands and ends up being corrected.

With Moses the relationship moves to a cultural group and the members are now expected to follow arbitrary rules. Christianity then represents a move to following the more nuanced, flexible reason behind the rules. A lot of Jesus' discussion of the law focuses on following the spirit of the law, love for God and others, over the letter of the law.

The idea is that this progression continues today. Societies weren't ready for modern governance in antiquity. Before you get to socialism, the social question, you first need to progress to constitutional rule of law and the end of noble status, the political question.

So the faith will change over time, growing towards an ultimate realization. This change will sometimes be painful; as Saint Paul says in Romans 8, the world is in labor pains as it gives birth to the future world where freedom is achieved.

Just an aside, because I've always found both religious and non-religious theories of progress interesting. It is relevant though in that science itself also believes in progress. Even people who assiduously deny the concept of historical progress often allow that science is a human institutions in which theories progressively get better at representing the world over time.

Indeed, I think this belief in progress is necessary for science. If we don't think our theories today are necessarily any better than the theories of 1900, then we can't trust any text books and learn about a wide number of fields. All our efforts will have to be focused on deciding if the text book of 2023 is actually better than the one of 1883 if we have no reason to assume science "progresses."

I think the need to believe in something transcendant can only be satisfied by religion, and I think that need is inexplicably there in some people and absent in others. I think if you could somehow wipe out all existing religions and knowledge of them, religion would be reinvented. — Janus

You need to explain why religion is needed to believe in something transcendent.

You can't kill a religion.
— Benj96
But religions can and have died, the religions of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, etc., etc. — Art48

Ah yes but I said you can't kill "religion". As a general concept or category. Sure religions die. But new ones are invariably born.

The simple matter is that religion offers other interpretations to science. And so acts as a healthy stand in for contrast, variety etc. And deals in part with fields not within the scope of science, at least not currently.

Many religions like taoism, buddhism etc actually have quite consistently relevant and useful concepts for philosophy, life ethos, outlook on death etc. Science doesn't deal with such things in quite the same way.

You need to explain why religion is needed to believe in something transcendent. — praxis

Because transcendence is about traversing boundaries. Unifying. Taking the separate and combining them. Science and religions are typically apart, segregated and often directly in opposition to one another.
Science alone cannot transcendent spirituality. Spirituality alone cannot transcendent science.

But perhaps there is a fusion available/possible that doesn't erode the unique advantages and disadvantages of both tools as approaches to understanding reality and the human condition.

I was (and am) a theosophical type (small t), who believes that the different wisdom traditions portray profound truths, but they are very hard to grasp. — Wayfarer

In Architecture school, I was once assigned the task of inventing a new religion, then designing a church or temple for its peculiar worship needs. Since I had been recently reading about Theosophy, instead of mars-worship, or buglike-alien-worship, or chocolate-chip-cookie worship, I chose the actual doctrines & practices of Theosophy (god wisdom) as the functional requirements for my building. It was so foreign to my upbringing that it seemed pure fantasy. FWIW, I was not then, nor am I now, a believer or practitioner of mystical Theosophy. "Not that there is anything wrong with that" :smile:


Theosophy : teaching about God and the world based on mystical insight.

any of a number of philosophies maintaining that a knowledge of God may be achieved through spiritual ecstasy, direct intuition, or special individual relations, especially the movement founded in 1875 as the Theosophical Society by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907).

Theosophy is a term used in general to designate the knowledge of God supposed to be obtained by the direct intuition of the Divine essence. In method it differs from theology, which is the knowledge of God obtained by revelation, and from philosophy, which is the knowledge of Divine things acquire by human reasoning. . . . India is the home of all theosophic speculation.

Note --- Theosophy seems to be a sort of American amalgamation of Hinduism. So it may be a local source of much of what we now call New Age religion/philosophy

PS__The OP seems to be wondering if stark objective Science and warm & fuzzy subjective Mysticism could mate (cross-species) to produce something resembling a traditional fat furry Religion with abstract rational skeleton.

I’m angry at stupidity because it leads to ignorance and ignorance leads to evil. — invicta

To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton: Of course, not all believers are stupid but almost all the stupid people I've ever met are believers.

There are those" seems to be covertly pointing at yours truly.
— Gnomon

Indeed.

Nowhere have I accused you of new ageism, nor of "science bashing"

The most I have "accused" (your word) you of is not being able to either follow or present a clear argument.

Despite the faux footnotes. — Banno

:up:

You need to explain why religion is needed to believe in something transcendent. — praxis

The belief in something transcendent is the essence of religion as I would define it. (Note, I draw a distinction between thinking the transcendental and believing in some form of transcendence). Religious thinking is always hierarchical thinking.

I came into contact with the Theosophical Society through the Adyar Bookshop, which was an institution in Sydney until early in this millennium when it fell victim to Amazon. It was always staffed by kindly older ladies, as was the associated Adyar Library. I noted in my visits there that the membership was on the whole very aged, as the Society’s heyday was in the 1920’s. And it’s been on a downward trajectory ever since. The Victorian Theosophists were an eccentric lot and Madame Blavatsky often depicted as an outrageous charlatan. Nevertheless they were a fascinating milieu, at one stage there was a very well-appointed Theosophy House in the business district of Sydney, and their lectures were well attended. Then there was the discovery and promotion of Krishnamurti, so-called ‘World Teacher’, for whom an amphitheatre was constructed at Balmoral beach in Sydney (which in the end stood vacant, as he famously resigned from the organisation before appearing at it.) I will always retain some affection for them, they are a 'third way' outside of either religion or science as cultural institutions.

Interesting. I think I agree. Can you say some more?

Religious thinking is always hierarchical thinking. — Janus

Huston Smith's depiction of the Great Chain of Being