William Lane Craig's theistic base for morality

Is there even a religion that can rationally depict a moral God let alone perfect? The Christian/Jewish God certainly is no example of moral superiority. If the Christian God exist then he is the absolute undeniable pinnacle of deception, egotism, hypocrisy and sadism. But this is Craig's moral authority! Seriously? The Garden of Eden was a test equivalent to putting a candy in front of a 2 year old, and this "perfect" being couldn't fucking predict what would happen!? What a sick joke! God is the sickest, vilest, most twisted monster I could ever possibly imagine!

God was clearly operating in ignorance to give man a test without providing knowledge. Perhaps God's mother forgot to teach him this. God apparently had nipples so I can only assume he also had a mother...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7xt5LtgsxQ"]Morality 1: Good without gods - YouTube

Do you suppose God needed to dehumanize humans before permitting himself to torture them? At least most humans need to do this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSS-88ShJfo"]Morality 2: Not-so-good books - YouTube

 

Fortunately, relaxxx, we can all rest assured that those events never happened.

 

fortunately, no unknown thing, is obliged to resemble what anyone pretends to know about it. least of all the claims of any one belief, nor lineage of beliefs, to do so.

nor do we have to pretend to know what is not known, to love and be loved by it.

 

Is it possible that your moral instincts are left over from your pre-renunciation faith? Certainly, some manifestations of religion seem the very opposite of compassion, but to me compassion is the essence of what I understand to be the Christian message. So you see it as compatible with naturalistic evolution. But Dawkins says: "We are survival machines--robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior." And; ""The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference." D'accord? What ethic will we form from such an outlook?

 

There is no "Christian/Jewish God"--just God. Fundamentalism is a mind-crippling disease. So what else is new? It's sad that so many people take the Bible stories literally, just as it would be sad if they did the same to Greek and Norse mythology. On the other hand, I think it would sad to hear someone rant and rave about the depravity of Greek mythology--e.g., Saturn eating his children--without acknowledging some metaphorical value or usefulness of the passage as an allusion in learned discourse. Your propaganda video distorts reality by dwelling exclusively on the evils of scripture without so much as a word about the passages that most Christians find inspiring. Jesus told us, echoing Rabbi Hillel, that the entire Torah could be summarized in two commandments: Love of God and love of neighbor. The rest, said Hillel, is commentary. Micah told us that all God asks of us is: To act justly,to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God. So what's with your propagandist's preoccupation with the peripheral. Much of the stuff he's lathered up about is taken out of context or deliberately distorted. I'm surprised he doesn't accuse Christians, as the Romans did, of practicing cannibalism for consuming human blood at their Sunday services.

Just a couple of passages might illustrate the point: God's alleged command that people eat their young. That's from Ezekiel, who also took a prostitute for a wife on God's command, as an analog to Israel's infidelity and whorishness. "This is what the Sovereign Lord says: you stripped off your clothes like a prostitute, you gave yourself to your lovers,and to all your disgusting idols, and you killed your children as sacrifices to idols". Ezekiel was, in modern terminology, a "shock jock" trying to jolt the Israelites out of their complacency by dramatizing Yahweh's displeasure with business as usual. His recipe for bread is especially choice, considering the popularity of Ezekiel 4:9 bread. I hope the manufacturers don't follow the directions too literally, since it's to be cooked over human dung. Anybody who took this literally (as apparently your propagandist does with similar passages) missed the point.

As for Matthew 15:1-6, which has Jesus condoning the killing of children, your propagandist once again misses the point. The Pharisees were admonishing Jesus because his followers didn't wash their hands in the proper way before eating. Jesus replied, in effect, why don't you go stone a rebellious child to death? (as is called for in Leviticus). I don't think His point was that they should actually do that. Alas, atheists and fundamentalists have no sense of irony.

 

Okie I recently attended a non-denominational mass and that passage from Mathew was actually one of the topics of the sermon. The minister in this case had a slightly different explanation though. He claimed that Jesus was criticizing the practice of declaring one's possessions a gift to god so that one would not have to use the profits that could be derived from those possessions to honor one's parents. When I read it it seems to me that Jesus is saying to the Pharisees "You accuse me of transgressing against this law and yet you make up loopholes (declaring something corban) to get out of more important laws."
Thoughts? I haven't heard this passage discussed often, even in 6 years of Catholic school.

And back to the topic. I do not think that my moral instincts are left over from my faith days, for many reasons. First, my moral sense differs greatly from the moral sense of my former classmates, former religion teachers, and former preachers. Second, I don't remember really having discussions about morality in my religion classes. Even when we read scripture we mostly stuck to matters of belief, not morality. Also, at the time that I was a believer I was not terribly concerned with moral behavior. I was selfish, I lacked compassion, I was not charitable. Morality was no concern of mine until I became an atheist.

Also a word on Dawkins and selfish genes. Firstly of course Dawkins does not believe in genetical elements capable of being literally selfish. Secondly Dawkins devotes a large portion of the book The Selfish Gene to discussing how non-selfish behaviors can arise from figuratively selfish genetical elements. Thirdly, as Dawkins points out, the title is not very apt: It would have been accurate to call it the cooperative gene because genes can only succeed in the long run by cooperating within a genome. That being said the existence of genetical elements that will compete within a genome to the deteriment and even death of the organism have been found. In the literature these are referred to as 'selfish genetical elements.' Fourthly, Dawkins is essentially an existentialist in that he believes that each person must derive their own meaning from the world. He basically says 'don't look for meaning in evolutionary science, and don't use it as lesson in how to behave.'

That being said, even if my body is built by figuratively selfish elements, then so what? My intellect told my genes to jump off a bridge long ago if they don't like charity and service to others.

 

First of all, can we agree that the presentation in the video is a distortion of what Jesus was trying to say. He was not going around saying that "children who curse their parents must be put to death" , even if they have Tourets, as a central part of His teaching. The lack of exception for Touret's victims is purely gratuitous on the part of the propagandist. Jesus was reaffirming the Old Testament's norm of respect for parents, and was attacking the Pharisees' preoccuption with their own rules developed in their "oral Torah". That was the important part of the exchange. The video is obviously reaching for anything that can be used to discredit Christianity. As you say, you didn't hear the passage discussed often during six years of Catholic schooling, and I haven't heard it discussed at all, except by atheists. It was not an important part of Jesus' teaching, and was used to illustrate how the Pharisees spun their own rules to qualify the Torah when it suited them.

I consider myself to be something of an existentialist myself in taking a chance on the moral principles of Jesus. But I also believe that these are objectively grounded in human needs. Harris and I aren't far apart in that regard.

 

You misunderstood me. I didn't even watch the video you are talking about, and I agree 100% that Jesus was not telling people to kill children. I was referring to Matthew 15:5 through the end of 15:6. As it was explained to me this was some sort of a tradition whereby people could escape obligations to their parents by declaring their possessions to be gifts to God, and Jesus was criticizing them for creating that loophole. But I've only heard that in one place so I wanted to know if you knew anything about that.

 

Ruthless selfishness might work for animals that lay eggs in sand and leave their young to fend for themselves. But we CARE for our young and live in social groups that require us to develop NATURAL EMPATHY for each other. This is all pretty obvious.

Normally I skip your posts but unfortunately read this one so felt compelled to respond. Seriously it must be exhausting for you to continuously defend such convictions of ignorance and rejections of reason.

 

You read the post but missed the point--an occupational hazard for the closed-minded. I wasn't suggesting that we are ruthlessly selfish, but was responding to a serious atheist who seems to be trying to understand the foundation of his ethical beliefs. Obviously, natural empathy doesn't seem to cut it for a lot of people, and science, as we've just seen, has nothing to say on the matter either, unless Harris can get his act together better.

 

OH NO! Harris is our only hope! LOL!

Does it help you make it through the day? Fixating like that?

For millions of free thinking atheists, it cuts it just fine.

 

From the vantage point of history and the daily news, it looks like there are millions of people for whom it doesn't cut just fine, whether or not they know it. I think Harris does a good job of discussing what he and I consider to be real problems with fashionable moral relativism. I agree Harris isn't much to pin our hopes on, because he's hopelessly confused about determinism and free will, and offers nothing much beyond warmed over Benthamism.

 

Well I don't expect zombies to be hungry for soup.

And we all know the media panders to the masses regardless of their values.

 

This whole concept of objective morality is pretty pointless. So, in a world without God and hence no objective morality, we can all agree that torturing children is wrong. Now, lets say God does exist and therefore objective morality exists, how does this change anything?

Being told something is objectively wrong, and subjectively feeling something wrong has no real world consequences or differences. It's arbitrary to ask for an objective morality, it's superficial.

Also I don't want an objective morality, because if there is one, then our thoughts and feeling on the matter are irrelevant. We may as well be robots following orders 'I SAY THIS IS WRONG SO OBEY". What is the point in that? So, if the bible is the word of god and is correct, then homosexuals are objectively wicked sinners and should go to hell. Now most civilised, cutlured, well educated people wouldn't for a second agree with that, but it's irrelevant, if God exists then his morals are objective and homosexuals are immoral people, we have no say in the matter.

Is this really what we want? I want a morality that is reasoned, thought out, discussed, based upon studies, history, culture and philosophy, social experimentation, a morality that can adapt to the times and learn from itself, build upon itself. That's what the human race needs (and has).

So instead of letting Craig get the upper hand here by claiming that Christianity is superior because it has objective foundations for its morality, we should flip it around and say why an objective morality is actually a bad thing, and why we don't want it.

 

Also if you want to see pretty much all of Dr. Craig's arguments debunked, watch this debate. Skip to 49:00 where the his point on objective values specifically is dismantled:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhfkhq-CM84"]Is Faith in God Reasonable? FULL DEBATE with William Lane Craig and Alex Rosenberg - YouTube

 

So Craig says the purpose of this life is the knowledge of God.

Where is this knowledge exactly?
Old brutal anecdotes of God breaking his own moral code?
Egocentric personal anecdotes of salvation from people dealing with their own moral conflicts, issues and mortality?
God refuses to show himself and for some reason puts great value in dangerous ignorant non-reason behaviors, faiths.

Who really needs blind unquestioning sheeple, Gods or human rulers?

 

I think there's a semantic problem here. If there is no objective morality, why can we all agree that torturing children is wrong?

Au contraire. It's arbitrary to ask for subjective feelings. All that gives us is each individual's gut reactions, which may be perverse or sadistic.

We can't always get what wewant, but if you try real hard we get what we need.

Not robots. We have a choice. We can torture kids if we want to, but if we do we'll be immoral.

The operative word is "if". I think the Bible is the words of people trying to understand God's will. I don't think the Abrahamic religions necessarily have a monopoly on objective moral truth. The taboo against homosexuality is rooted in certain passages of the Bible that meant something different to people of the time they were written than they do today.

Me,too--i.e., a morality that is "objective".

I disagree. I think that we should explain why Craig's understanding of objective morality and the Bible are wrong.

 

There is no knowledge "exactly". Even science is mostly approximations. The best we can do is to make educated bets, relying on our logic, judgment, experience, intuitions, scholarship, and the evidence at hand. I tend to agree more with Harris on this than with Craig. Craig has the proverbial "mind like a steel trap"--quick to close, hard to open. His arguments strike me as circular, pretentious and intellectually dishonest--mostly bravado, smoke and mirrors. Harris is misguided and often annoying, but he impresses me as at least attempting to grapple with reality instead of just trying to come up with another ingenious argument in defense of his preconceptions about it.

 

you want a basis for morality?

when everyone is considerate instead of aggressive, that makes a heaven.
when everyone is aggressive instead of considerate, that makes a hell.

that's it. totally. we individually experience what all of us together create by how we live. so morality is how we create the kind of world we'd rather experience instead of the kind we'd rather not.

there may be gods and all these other neat fun invisible things, but morality is just how we all of us together, create what we each individually experience.