A reply worthy of a buddhist. — Bartricks

Don't mistake the sign for the referent.

(Morality is needed) For instance, to justify the need for the rule of law, its importance and value. — Olivier5

Maybe it's needed, but to no avail. America is the most Christian nation and it has the largest jail population in the known world, both in absolute numbers and in relative numbers. Obviously morality is ineffective in satisfying the need you envision its existence is justified for.

don't eat yellow snow.

1) you need a conscience to be good

2) God is your conscience

3) you need God to good

There are good people in the world. — Gregory

2) is false. Ergo, 3 is false. 1) is true, and so is the conclusion.

don't eat yellow snow — Bartricks

Thanks for the advice! :up:

Actually, do eat some.

I don't see Marx planning the final extermination of all Slavs in any of those quotes and links you posted. — Olivier5

Of course you don't. Marx was incapable of planning his own household let alone anything else. That doesn't mean that he didn't express the idea or that his idea didn't turn up in Nazi ideology.

There are many other things the Nazis borrowed from the Marxists: the idea of a mass party and ideology, the idea of revolutionary violence as a natural means for progress .... — Olivier5

That was exactly what I was saying. But you seem to have forgotten the concentration camps copied by Hitler from Marxists like Lenin and Stalin.

Gulag - Wikipedia

Actually, do eat some. — Bartricks

:smile: :ok:

So you don't agree that America -- or supposedly any other nation -- needs a core set of ethical values. The law should be enough. But by your own reconning, the rule of law is not doing so well in America...

That doesn't mean that he didn't express the idea — Apollodorus

Well then, you should be able to find a quote where he expresses the idea.

you seem to have forgotten the concentration camps copied by Hitler from Marxists like Lenin and Stalin. — Apollodorus

Concentration camps have been used by many others including the US. The real Nazi innovation was the death camps, the factories of death.

The belief that belief in god is necessary for being good is itself not good. — James Riley

Excellent point. It's a form of bigotry.

2) is false. Ergo, 3 is false. 1) is true, and so is the conclusion. — god must be atheist

If you start calling God your conscience instead of fighting a phantom you could proclaim belief in God and atheism at the same time!

And read Critique of Practical Reason

Atheists should speak that they believe in God and renew the world. The conflict between believers and atheists causes so much harm. You can still debate about Noah's ark, Mohammed sleeping with a nine year old, and all that. They need to stop defining themselves as disbelievers in God. What a relief it could be for them to say "ye I believe in God" but to know inside that they consider their conscience to be God. One thing prevents this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins#Pride

But by your own reconning, the rule of law is not doing so well in America... — Olivier5

You're right. And neither does morality.

I actually agree with the notion that ethics need to be developed for an atheistic world. And I deny that ethics ever worked very well anywhere in any society. It is a soft rule, you have a choice of accepting of its teachings for what you want to accept, and not accept and make your own those ethical values that are generally forbidden to you... the entire ethical system never worked. (When I said here "you", I meant the general you, not you personally.)

So my point is that being ethical is very noble, but useless. Nobody listens to you who does not want to. And there is no mechanism to replace it.

We are stuck being a species that has high ethical values and expectations, and hardly any specimen of our species (or speciwomen) heed to them.

Atheists should speak that they believe in God and renew the world. The conflict between believers and atheists causes so much harm. — Gregory

Absolutely not. Theists, Christians should speak that they abandoned their belief and think god is just a figment of imagination.

What audacity! You should make yourself to comply with your own wishes, not expect others to go to your crazy ideas.

The conflict between believers and atheists causes so much harm. — Gregory

Much less than you think. There was a relgion-related mass murder in Canada yesterday. A devout white Christian boy murdered four Muslims, for his own conscience called him to do that. Palestinians and Jews in the middle east are killing each other although their DNA and race and even smell is indistinguishable from the other's.

No, my friend, atheists don't harm the religious, and the religious don't harm the atheists. It is the religious that are in war with the religious and atheists that are in war with atheists.

Since this thread has already veered wildly off topic, the following is not out of place.

A very brief look at our inherited beliefs:

Many ancient poets/lawgivers claim gods rather than themselves as the authority for what they say; and appeal to revelation rather than reason.

In Judaism adherence to the Law is a matter of choice.

According to Paul, man is powerless against sin. Morality (a term he never used) necessitates not only divinity but belief, acceptance, and faith because man must be saved from sin.


One reason more highly educated people may reject this is that a liberal education is at its best a liberating education. An escape from Plato's cave. Plato replaces the stories of the gods with stories or the just, beautiful, and good. But Christianity then takes what is fundamentally a story that rejects revelation in favor of reason and turns it into a story of revealed truth.

Going further it attempts to reconcile reason and revelation, thereby making reason the handmaiden of revelation. The struggle between the claims of "Athens and Jerusalem", that is, reason and revelation, continue to this day.

And I deny that ethics ever worked very well anywhere in any society. It is a soft rule, you have a choice of accepting of its teachings for what you want to accept, and not accept and make your own those ethical values that are generally forbidden to you.. — god must be atheist

That has advantages though: it makes ethics more fluid and evolutionary.

I’ll try to reframe what I was previously saying in terms that you have used, humbly hoping to be more fully understood:

You are saying that Reason has reasons for Her reasoning which are themselves the self-contained creations of Reason alone as omnipotent arbitrator of these reasons. But then, if Reason is not Herself subject to reasons that are not of Reason’s creation, none of Reason’s reasons for reasoning will be based on non-arbitrary reasons, for all of Reason’s reasons will be arbitrated by Reason alone, thereby being fully arbitrary reasons without exception.

In summation, either Reason is subject to uncreated reasons that Reason Herself aspires to (in which case Reason/God does not create the Good/right/correct as reason for Her own actions) or all of Reasons’ omnipotently created reasons, including that of the Good/right/correct, are themselves created without reason by Reason and, hence, are irrationally created (in which case Reason/God creates the Good/right/correct in manners not subject to anything good, anything right, or anything correct – but instead, as you say, in manners that are fully without reason).

In short, you’re arguing for Reason Herself being fully irrational in all that She creates.

Well then, you should be able to find a quote where he expresses the idea. — Olivier5

You should be able to read the quotes I have already provided.

Marx wrote:

"The revolution, which finds here not its end, but its organizational beginning, is no short-lived revolution. The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It not only has a new world to conquer, it must go under in order to make room for the men who are able to cope with a new world"

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch03.htm

Engels wrote:

“… these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation, just as their whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution” (234) […] “the Germans and Magyars have assumed the historical initiative. They represent the revolution … The Southern Slavs represent the counter-revolution (236) […] “The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too. Is a step forward” (238).

- “The Magyar Struggle”, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 13 Jan. 1849

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels - Collected Works, Vol. 8, pp. 227 – 238.

Engels was Marx's close friend and collaborator and was writing in Marx's paper Neue Rheinische Zeitung. As publisher of his own paper, Marx obviously agreed with what he was publishing.

Marx and Engels' idea of Germans making a united front with the Hungarians and others against the Slavs and exterminating the Slavs, appears virtually word-by-word in Nazi ideology.

Concentration camps have been used by many others including the US. The real Nazi innovation was the death camps, the factories of death. — Olivier5

Sure. However, you forget that concentration camps for political prisoners were used by Marxists like Lenin and Stalin long before the Nazis. You also forget the Red Terror launched by Lenin to exterminate "counterrevolutionaries". And you forget the millions that died under Lenin and Stalin before Hitler even came to power. You condemn one form of mass murder and genocide and condone another.

Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin - Wikipedia

That has advantages though: it makes ethics more fluid and evolutionary. — Olivier5

True, that is an advantage. At the same time that it's a disadvantage, inasmuch as you can't rely on anyone else to follow the same ethics as you do.

You come across as a control freak, whereas you probably are a kind, old, deeply religious man. But you expect others to do what you are not willing to do: to give up their convictions, for nothing but to satisfy your own personal comfort of thinking there is god being accepted.

I am sorry, but you really make cake. Your control comes across as that of a man who has no insight, foresight and has no ability to empathize.

How can Reason's attitudes possibly be arbitrary when arbitrary means 'for no reason'? Her attitudes 'are' reasons and thus they can never be arbitrary. To think they could be is to refuse to acknowledge that Reason's attitudes are reasons.

You might be in need of defining "reason" for me to better answer your questions. Assuming that I could.

BTW: To be clear, my own stance is that the Good, which encapsulates the right and the correct, is an uncreated metaphysical facet of the world: not created by a monotheistic deity (be this God renamed Reason or otherwise), not by a plurality of gods, and certainly not by corporeal beings such as ourselves.

Any reason held is held with the Good in mind; this, minimally, with one's appraisals of what is good for one's own self.

... kind of thing.

I've gone back and forth my whole life on how to understand God but saying you believe in God is good because this has been confirmed by lesser depression among religious people. Everybody has community, religious people speak something different

The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. — Apollodorus quoting Marx

If you remember your Bible, the Hebrews in question were not exterminated. Simply they couldn't reach the promised land for some absurd unworthiness reason. The next generation did, according to the myth. What Marx is saying here is that, although he and many others had placed high hopes in the 1848 revolutions across Europe, these revolutions all failed; hence his generation won't see the promised land, but the next generation will, as it will be better prepared and educated and thus more "worthy".

The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too. Is a step forward” (238). — Apollodorus quoting Engels

As I said, this is from a very polemic text written right after the brutal suppression of popular revolutions in Vienna, Budapest and Paris. It is an unfortunate polemical statement. It's very different from Hitler's "scientific racism".

At the same time that it's a disadvantage, inasmuch as you can't rely on anyone else to follow the same ethics as you do. — god must be atheist

Indeed. The best you can do is ally yourself politically, maritally or otherwise with some who do share enough of your values, in the hope of promoting them.

My point remains that it is harder to imagine, plan and implement the murder of millions of people on an industrial scale -- e.g. the Holocaust -- within a traditional Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim) context than it is to do so within a secular context. — Olivier5

But the murder of millions of e.g. non-JCI Africans, Indigenous Americans & Austrialians, Indians, and Chinese by "traditional JCI" conquistadors, slavers or colonizing settlers at the behest and with the backing of "traditional JCI" empires and nations for the last millennium (since the Crusades) is, of course, "too hard to imagine" as well. :shade:

Last time I checked, secular also includes "traditional JCI contexts". I'll concede Mao's Cultural Revolution was a mass atrocity on an unpresidented scale prosecuted by "godless communists" that mass-produced corpses in near-industrial fashion. Soviets were in bed with the Russian Orthodox Church just as the Nazis (& other fascist regimes) were in bed with the Roman Catholic Church. And let's not forget Roman Catholic King Leopold's 19th century "holocaust" of millions in the Congo which was surely "planned and implemented" in a traditional JCI context.

History shows that true words have rarely, if ever, been spoken:

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion. — Steven Weinberg

:up: