Plato's Playground
First of all, I love the "Atheists for Jesus" tee shirts.
Second, I would never say that God is the only source of morality nor that non-religious people or wicked.
It's true that the Old Testament is more rule-based than the Gospels. St. Paul, in the New Testament, is somewhat more rule-oriented.
Where I would disagree is that the Gospels are radically inconsistent with the Old Testament. Jesus was a good Jew, and his teachings were rooted in the Old Testament. He said in Matthew 5:17, "Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them." Jewish Christians considered themselves good Jews until they were expelled from the synagogues in approximately 80-90 CE.
Of course Jesus did not affirm that he was breaking with the law and the prophets. Nevertheless he did. Paul was not a Christian, but he was the founder of the religion we today call Christianity. It should be called Paulism.
I have a strong mystical understanding of Jesus as the living tree. If, as described in the wonderful book of Nehemiah, the God of the Patriarch's was the Plumb Line, delineating good from evil, then this vision of Jesus as the living tree takes that plumb line and turns it 90 degrees, to the medieval living tree, the axle tree in the center of the turning world.
What moves me is the image of Jesus not as delineating good from evil, but of taking what is most foul and wretched, all our striving after wind, he takes it all and redeems it.
I don't worry too much about lines. The lines are ultimately not for us to draw, never were. And by my faith (and I know not everyone gets it this way at all, which I know by faith is fine) by my faith I know that through Christ, all that we behold may be made pure and holy, made whole, redeemed.
i like that graph in the middle about principles and selective advantage. i will muse upon it.
i am way out of my depth here on biblical stuff. i like the view of jesus as being radical for insisting that no one needs a priest (rabbi?) to communicate with god. that's what ya get from a congregational sunday school.
To rephrase what I said above, I don't think of Jesus as offering a new ethical principle, instead he's demonstrated in the flesh the loving presence of God, making all things new, redeeming what we, with our linear understanding of history, believe to be unredeemable.
I don't pretend to be able to see beyond the linear version of history, so I'm not sure why the patriarchal God of judgement moved on to become again a loving and creative God. I think there's a whole aspect of Protestant Christianity that has wanted to clean God up and make him only the creative generative good guy and ignored the necessarily destructive aspect of the Holy. I truly believe that with our fallen mortal vision, we can't see that destructive power as not being evil, but that's because of our perspective being off.
So rather than work too hard to rectify that issue, I just take as a clear directive the charge to love God and love my neighbor.
maybe the protestants are subconsciously harkening back to a matriarchal milieu. a fusion of gender for a more balanced deity. god and goddess. life and death. yin and yang. maybe the second coming will be jesusina. the sister.
if there be such a reality as the collective unconscious, as i suspect there to be (not the same IMHO as a personal god), surely it must encompass male and female aspects. and maybe animals other than human as well.
dpr- I have a strong deep feeling that God is male and female, not just some bland neutral version, but really both. And when I pray, I am as likely to call on and image God my Mother as God my Father.
It's an unfortunate hand down from our patriarchal culture that God is so masculine.
I'm not sure though that the sanitizing of God is akin to the feminine spirituality past or present. I think most feminine based Godess worship includes all the terrifying and destructive elements as well as the creative fecund life giving aspects. I'm fairly convinced that the loss of a sense of the destructive element of the holy has brought about some of the craziness in our society.
I'm sort of in that "Atheist for Jesus"
camp. The best statement of how I feel
showed up in the sadly underseen film "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" where a character asks the main character "Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour?" "Noo, but I love his work."
I'm with Jefferson with thinking Yeshua bin Yoseph a sublime philosopher, with the rest of the theologcial stuff made up by other men.
The selectivity of the Bible Quoters is stunning; an incoherance that masks a will to power.
uhh, should be 'theological'; carry on.
Of course we don't really know much for sure, if anything, about historical Jesus. The gospels weren't written until a century or so after his death, and they all take somewhat different perspectives. Likely the real J of Nazareth was much more of a political revolutionary than the philosopher we see in the gospels. Also, his claims in the gospels to divinity may well be additions by his followers. What exactly he claimed to be is unknown. Whatever one thinks of him is in fact a reconstruction.
Mr. Bill, in a previous part of my career I spent a lot of time in the houses of evangelical Christians. They were lovely people, but invariably they'd ask the have you been saved question and the do you know Jesus as your Lord & savior question. That would always trip me up because while I have my own Christian experiences, they don't go toward the "being saved" approach. I used to try to parse it out, but finally a friend who'd grown up in the Black Baptist church explained to me that all I needed to do when I was asked the Jesus question, was answer "Yes M'am." or "Yes Sir, " and that would end the conversation.See if they know they don't need to try to convert you, you don't need to discuss it. What a time saver!
Much as I feel that I am deeply loved and have had the experience of feeling Christ's presence intimately, I would never ever ask anybody else if they "Knew Jesus." That wpi;d seems so rude and pushy-- though most of the black folks I knew didn't s
black folks didn't seem to be pushy, just gently asking. Actually, it seems to me that it's usually been the whilte evangelicals who turn Jesus into a stick to beat you with. Something about their smug, self-congratulatory tone that gets under your skin...
Ahh, Speechless -- you see, you violated the deontological ethic against lying, by saying you were saved; but you probably justified your action by utilitarian, or less likely, principled reasoning.
Just goes to show that rule-based ethics are less sophisticated, and less successful as a basis for living. In other words, let's dump the ridiculous Ten Commandments.
let's just dump the ten commandments
Cervantes, just who is this "us" that should dump the ten commandments? No one is stopping you from doing just that. Are you speaking ex cathedra, so that we must all obey your decree? Sometimes you pontificate like - well- the Pope. You really don't seem to leave much room for discussion. You end the discussion by decree.
To me, what Speechless said was not a lie. It's akin to saying, "I have other plans," when invited to do something you don't want to do, even though you don't have other plans. It's more polite than saying, "I don't want to do that."
Hey Cervantes, touche! But of course I still have more to say on this...Perhaps like you, cause I read a lot of gleeful irony in your comment, I couldn't help but enjoy the irony of short circuiting the grilling regarding the state of my soul with the simple "Yes M'am." And at the same time, I can't say it was an outright lie because in fact even back then I had my own intimate sense of connection to Christ, though I don't know that the Bible thumping Christians would see their Jesus in my Christ. I knew that, but they didn't need to-- the joy of words used as markers for experiences not so easy to name...
Now as a Quaker, I'd probably be in trouble, because Quakers have it as one of their chief imperatives to "make their yes a yes and their no a no." The testimony of integrity is one of the Primary strongholds among Friends. However (I say with equal glee, I hope you can see my dancing eyes) the happy fact is that I'm a convert to Catholicism. I can go to confess
I can go to confession and confess such a sin and receive assurance that forgiveness is available. And that, my deaqr Cervantes, is part of the wonderful irony of the Catholic point of view...it's one of the things gave James Joyce a good kick up the arse and got him writing as he did...
Ah, Speechless, now you're going to get our dear Cervantes started on the sin and confess, sin and confess business and where on earth will that take us?
Hang onto your hats, we're off into the wonderful undefendable incongruous realm of the absurd! It's rather like a ride on a rocket ship, we'll soon be up aming the stars!
Hey MG, I'm just expressing my own opinion. There's nothing in my expression that says you have to agree with me -- I'm just saying what I think.
And what I meant in my comment to Speechless is that she used what's often called a "white lie." A rule like "thou shalt not lie" is an unsatisfactory way of thinking about ethics because, for example, it requires us to hurt people by telling them they look fat, or whatever. So adults know that sometimes, it's best not to tell the truth.
In general I think that rules provide a useful means of providing the guidelines on how members of a society are to behave in that society. As long as they are not excessive in number or excessive in rigidity they are probably a good thing. I like the view of the “Matrix”: There are rules, some can be bent, some can be broken.
Ethics, in my opinion, is a word like the words right and wrong for which there is no exact definition. Like that tired old saying, they tend to be subject to change without notice and void where prohibited by law. I don’t mean to demean ethics but I do feel that pursuing them too far is about as useful as calculating the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
With all sincere respect to the fine people posting on this blog, it strikes me as odd that so many Christians having so many diverse views concerning Christianity all claim the very same Jesus. If Jesus had a message how is it that it is used to justify so many different views?
I consider
If Jesus had a message how is it that it is used to justify so many different views?
I consider religion to be a good thing and people with like beliefs coming together in churches also to be good. Where I begin to see problems is when a religion grows large and bureaucratic. This then seems to require some dogma and those in the bureaucracy have to justify their position with what usually amounts to the claim that they are holier than others. Most of the problems with regard to religion seem to stem from this bureaucracy.
As a point for discussion I would like to offer the idea that man created god. Does this lead to answers to some perplexing religious problems?
It is not my intention to offend, demean, or flame anyone or any view, but if this is an open discussion then I offer these thoughts in that vein.
Gary, I appreciate your thoughts. There's some interesting insight on these matters from the Quaker Unversalist Fellowship. The web address is: http://www.universalistfriends.o.../
rickerman.html
Sorry I haven't yet managed to get a link embedded properly in a comment or posting, despite Cervanted very helpful directions on his blog. I suppose I'm rather like a first year student at Hogwarts, can't quite get the spells to work right yet. Maybe my wand is bent...
Speechless:
Thanks for the link. It works just fine above and I copied it to a list of links I frequent. Looks like lots of good interesting reading.
A question of interest to me, regarding this stuff, is what is the source of morality? And much more important, how can morality be logically justified?
My opinion is that morality is metaphysical by definition...it's a leap of faith which makes metaphysicians of all of us. The stopgap that some materialist friends of mine have attempted, which is that there may be a scientifically coherent morality somewhere down the line, isn't meaningful to me, because people have to make moral decisions now, and they do so based on things other than science or logic.
The question of whether atheists can be moral is absurd. Of course they can. (Hell, Simone Weil thought an atheist could be a saint.) But like theories of the origin of life on earth based on panspermia, this simply pushes back the real question. Where does morality come from? While I'm not wedded to a theological answer, the scientific answers proferred so far have been inadequate, to say the least.
If you want my unscientific two-bits on the roots of things like morality it is this: The roots go far back down the evolutionary chain as traits required for organisms living in a social group. In ants these traits are hard wired. As more sophisticated organisms evolved they became less hard wired but remained necessary. Then a creature arose cursed with the insanity we call intelligence and attempted to define these traits, but never completely succeeded in giving them an exact definition.
Except, Gary, that some of those traits aren't required for organisms in a social group...at least, not in any really demonstrable way. EvPsych and allied disciplines have generally thought them as disguised selfishness, which is about as inane as calling selfishness perverted altruism.
The larger question I'm asking is along the lines suggested by Wittgenstein (I've got him on the brain, thanks to Jeffers): why do we make a distinction between a rock falling, and murder when we have no reliable logical grounds for doing so?
The evolutionary arguments for it are, as yet, pretty much inane. It doesn't mean that such reasons couldn't be discovered...but what does one do in the meantime? We're nonetheless in the position of basing morality on something other than fact.
Sorry that's so garbled...I'm in a hurry, and kind of sick. I hope you'll be able to figure out what I'm saying despite the typos and clumisiness.
Hi Phila, I just blogwhored this posting on your site . . .
Humans are a very different kind of social being than ants or herds of ungulates or flocking birds, because we have (drumroll please) culture. That means that we can invent, learn and disseminate all sorts of new ways of doing things, and new norms of behavior, from generation to generation and place to place. This only works, however, because we do have, somewhere deep down inside the hardware, some "heuristics" -- ways of making ethical decisions. If evolution hadn't given us those, we'd have no chance. But they are broad, flexible, fuzzy logic kinds of rules. Hence they leave us plenty of room to debate subjects like ethics, while stll having some ground to stand on. That's how I see it.
But they are broad, flexible, fuzzy logic kinds of rules. Hence they leave us plenty of room to debate subjects like ethics, while stll having some ground to stand on. That's how I see it.
cervantes
I can live with that. Although were I to refuse my assent in the absence of proof...
Seriously, this is a good stab at the riddle, though still a bit too close to question-begging sociobiological claptrap for my taste. But still, in my opinion, reference to hardwired heuristics - or even to some vague concept of evolved culture - really doesn't address the highest forms of moral activity. Throwing oneself in front of a hail of bullets to save a near stranger's life, for instance. And to the extent that certain explanations devalue these actions, I'm not eager to embrace them unless forced to by rock-solid evidence.
What I'm getting at is that if we applied the same evidenciary standards to moral conceptions that we do to the idea of "God," we'd run into some
Ooops. Didn't know you had that character limit.
Oh well...I talk about this a bit more in my PZ Myers' thread (whom I mean no disrespect to, by the way; I like him!).
Evolution can explain human altruism, that's the point. I can't think of any way to go back in time and directly observe the evolution of human society, through both the biological and cultural mechanisms, beyond what little we can glean through paleontological, archaeological and historical research. But we do know that evolution is what got us here, and it is not difficult at all to reconcile that with the observation that there are ethical principles which transcend cultures.
Well...yeah...but...
I don't know. This reminds me a bit of (I think) Dawkins' answer to some question about whether abiogenesis was possible: "Evidently so, for here we are." It makes sense, and yet...
I feel like we're talking at cross-purposes, a bit. It seems to me that this argument boils down to what is and isn't an allowable inference from the facts of existence. Without arguing for certain types of theism, I do see it as an allowable inference, and am thus intellectually comfortable with people making it. Mainly because to deny that it's an allowable inference seems like zealotry.
(to be con't.)
Anyway, as I said, it seems as though the only "benefit" I'd get from adopting your worldview is the ability to look down my nose at Jeffers, which I have neither the desire nor the right to do.
My unwillingness to pretend that I've grasped not merely the present, but any potential future state of existence, hasn't hampered my ability to do science or anything else. Thus, I simply can't share your agitation about this stuff.
Further, as I said, the veganism thing seems to me to be an argument against your position. Science can't back up my feelings about that issue. And yet, I'm "right." That's where a lot of my tolerant attitude comes from, actually. And I'm perfect willing to call my impulses religious. Indeed, I can't imagine what else one would call them. Except deluded, of course.
Excuse me, I don't "look down my nose" at RMJ or just about anybody else. Just because I have a different opinion about somebody doesn't mean I don't respect them.
I believe you have misconstrued what I am saying about ethics. Science is not the source of ethics, although it can explain why we have them. Ethics are a property of human beings, that vary from person to person. "Science" doesn't make you male or female, tall or short, but it can explain how you ended up as you happen to be. There is no need to resort to religion to explain or discuss ethics. If you want to say that your ethics=religion, that's just a semantic choice. God didn't cause you to be vegan -- or if he did, why did he skip most other people?
"Different opinion than somebody," not "about somebody." Argghh.
Cervantes,
I can just hear one of the learned fathers from the early Christian church say, as you dispute with him, "My son, you are not far from conversion."
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