Then there are none. Whatever "is," is 'good,' or 'not evil,' at least. It's all amoral.Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Nov 05, 2022 2:59 pmYes, it seems to be true: there is no *objective* basis for morals and moral systems. That is, if the natural world is taken as the model or the example. The world is amoral. Or, if there are morals and ethics they are of the sort that rule and dominate in the natural world.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Nov 05, 2022 3:45 am In a Godless world, there is no objective basis for morals. Ask Dostoevsky...or if you don't like him, read Nietzsche. The two couldn't have been more diametrically opposed in ideology, but both said it is true.
And it is. You can realize it is, if you think carefully. It might be put like this.
The cosmos is an accident (meaning a "happening" without intention or telos). Accidents have no opinions -- about morals or anything else. Therefore, the cosmos has no moral opinions.
But here's the interesting question: what then is "morality"? By logic, it ought not to exist at all, even as a local social delusion. People ought not to imagine a thing like "morality" precisely because reality does not invite them to do so. Rather, the reality, and hence the evolutionarily-promotable and evolutionarily functional belief is belief in reality itself...and hence, the belief that morality does not even exist.
So why do we think it does?
Like it or not, accept it or not, it seems clear to me that these rules very much function in our human world. It is also true that these rules, these realities, are "appalling" to people when they realize what sort of a system they actually live in.
The exist. But do they "function"? How? How does it help human beings to imagine falsehoods? How would it help them to lose touch with reality, fail to behave as evolution requires them to believe in order to evolve (survival of the fittest), and come to believe instead in something completely imaginary, like "love for one's neighbour"?
The traditional answer to this is that morality is "evolutionarily adaptive" because it facilitates group solidarity in some way. But that just raises an additional problem: why would the impersonal, indifferent universe of material things create an illusory belief that turns out to be adaptive to the very reality it denies? That looks very, very odd as an explanation indeed. It would need a lot of explanation...explanation that we cannot offer.
If a 'model of god' or a 'picture of god' were to be created as a reflection of the natural world, and the cosmos, it would not be the sort of god-image that grips your imagination.
You mean something like the Gaia hypothesis? The idea that "god" is another word for "world," "universe" or "nature"?
So...people believe in a delusion (morality) because it gives them "psychological consequences" that are actually being visited on them by an indifferent universe that they've failed to understand?So it seems to me that people hold to them out of habit but also out of *desperation*.
But then, the sooner they reject all of that morality, all of that delusion, the better for them: they'll be more aware and more fit for survival, just as Nietzsche said. Or if it's a delusion and they like it, there's no harm in them believing the delusion. Why should we deny people their happy delusions, since the universe has no opinion about the matter.
The Romans called the Christians "Atheists," because the Romans thought they believed in TOO FEW 'gods'.I think that what happens as a result of that inner conflict is that people seem to go in one of two directions: one, toward the strengthening or bolstering of a belief-system that is actually fading away; and two to a position that is defined as 'atheism'.
One wasn't enough, apparently.You should. It's an irrational position.In my own case I do not judge a person who takes the atheistic stance.
If the Atheist holds it "on evidence," then he owes us that evidence. But not only does he not have it, he can't even get it, since the task exceeds human powers by far. So for him to claim he has the necessary evidence simply means he's lying or deluded: he cannot. But if he believes it "without evidence," then he's irrational.
Arbitrarily, of course.It is quite possible to live very well as an atheist.
Inconsistently, of course.It is similarly possible to live wretchedly as a *believer*.
That never actually happens. It's sometimes threatened briefly, but the threat is always avoided....an entire culture has lost its metaphysical grounding...
They always seize a new, and often even more ideologically wild, alternative, and proceed with business as usual. For example, Postitivism is being lost in the West...and now the West is madly chasing "climate change," socialism, transhumanism and world governance as if these are metaphysical absolutes. Human beings cannot live without metaphysical assumptions: and if they don't have realistic ones, they immediately embrace delusions.
But that, too, needs us to step back and explain. How should that be? How come a creature that was generated purely by chance and time "needs" any metaphysical suppositions? Shouldn't hard-nosed reality be enough?
Apparently not.
Similarly, I observe a person like yourself -- a religious fanatic
One it seems you can't stop talking to.
Not at all. I have neither threatened you nor cursed you. I've just told you what is going to come. And an eternity without God is what you are rushing toward, gladly. That's a "Hell" alright. But it's all been your choice, from the get-go. And I have claimed no authority whatsoever to make any of that happen....your argument follows an established pattern that does not vary, is *the curse*. "You'll see" "Just wait" "one of will be right and one of us will be wrong" and of course behind this threat is the imago that you wield of a torturous hell-realm.
But what will come will come. That's just a statement of fact so obvious one can't possibly miss it.
If you have bothered to read anything I have written
I did. But it's so windy.
Why do you take three paragraphs to make a point that ususally ends up being so simple?
I can. But I don't find many of the ideas worth "assimilating." They are often either wrong or partly so. Sometimes they're just so wide of the mark they require no reaction at all....you cannot read. You can't assimilate any idea that does not conform to your idees-fixes.
You have a few interesting ideas here, which is why I'm responding now. But I've still had to simply dismiss paragraphs of pure blah.
Here's an example: all you're saying here is, "Believing in reality is better than deluding oneself."Simply put, the world that we create by our actions and attitudes is the world that we will (eventually) have to live in. And we will continue to live in the result of our choices until we opt to change how we act and what we create. That seems to me to be a far more realistic view because we all verify this in our own lives. We see that our actions result in undesirable outcomes and we resolve, if we are able, to change our behavior.
Why didn't you just say that?
Not always. Sometimes the abandon it. But they always abandon it for another. They never go Nihilist completely, because Nihilism is unliveable.I recognize that some people really need the *container* of a belief-system and, as I say, will do all they can as a strategy to protect it, to strengthen as it were the shell.
"Honourable." "Upstanding." You throw these words out there like everybody agrees on what they mean. But they don't. And you throw them out as if they indicate the "right" or "moral" thing to do, which they cannot if, as you say earlier, we live in an amoral universe. So neither people nor the universe accepts your terms as givens.The only right way is the training of the soul, the training of the person, in those ways that lead to leading an honorable and upstanding life.
How come you don't realize this?
You aren't sufficiently interrogating your own assumptions, I fear. You're letting yourself get away with bluffs all the time. And that won't help you make a good theory of life. And reasonably smart people will detect it instantly.
You seem capable: but you seem to have decided to turn off your brain in favour of your civilizational theory. Likewise, you're so against "Hebrew imperialism" you're indifferent to the antisemitism people have repeatedly pointed out to you. You're a strange exhibition of wasted capacity, at the moment...but one hopes the potential for self-evaluation somehow remains.
You could do better if you advanced your theory more tentatively, and if you decided to understand interrogation and inspection rightly, as a cooperative effort to make the theory better. Because you insist on interpreting it as mere hostility, your theory isn't improving at the moment.
