Is morality objective or subjective?

[Walker]

If an idea is in fifty words or less, at least I have the option of knowing whether or not I object to a specific idea, or agree with the idea, if I'm not too stupid to understand the idea. (40 words)

[Alexis Jacobi]

Strike two. You have one more chance though. Pretend that your life depended on it!

[Walker]

That idea is indeed less than fifty words, but it's also a fantasy. I should have specified before you made the effort. My bad.

Your fantasies are your own. (29 words)

[Alexis Jacobi]

According to Wilbur Bouwman, other than lining up with Parmenides and Descartes, it is all fantasy.

So, I am on solid philosophical ground.

And with that said I will not self-refute.

[Immanuel Can]

So carry on as you see fit, I guess. But if you want dialogue, I think you will find it useful to be more brief and precise, and to pause more frequently for feedback from your interlocutors, if any remain. Just my advice. You don't have to take it. But I'm out, if this is the style to which you're committed.

You just wasted an entire post with a vain but empty critique that addressed none of what I spoke about.

It addressed your basic problem...what you needed to hear, rather than what you wanted to hear. So I'm good with that.

[Immanuel Can]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that in God's eyes, between child abuse and atheism, the greater crime is atheism.

I wouldn't say that, at all. Of course, I'm not the Judge: but it seems to me that to threaten those who cause harm to children to have a fate less desirable than to be chained and thrown into the bottom of the sea, as Christ did, implies a very serious condemnation to abusers of children. But Atheism, by comparison, is a quickly curable condition.

I think his question was more along the lines of: if he is unable to sincerely accept Christ and has committed relatively minor transgressions in life against others himself compared to greater transgressions originally done to him but he doesn't accept Christ, will he be condemned for not accepting Christ? And if the one who committed those much greater offenses to him accepts Christ through honestly repenting and declaring Christ his/her savior, will his abuser, in return go to heaven for accepting Christ while he goes to hell for not accepting Christ?

What are your thoughts on that IC? As someone who has been closer to God than many of us, what do you think will happen in the end?

I think you should ask the Judge. He talked about such things a great deal. (John 3:36, for example. Or Mark 1:15, Mark 9:42, Matthew 13:41-43, John 3:16...) You can make up your own mind what you think He said.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Please, Immanuel, leave the high-handed didacticism to me — since I obviously have real content to impart.

[Immanuel Can]

Please, Immanuel, leave the high-handed didacticism to me — since I obviously have real content to impart.

Hey, I note you've taken the advice, at least in the last few messages. Good for you. I think it will serve your own turn better in the end, anyway.

[iambiguous]

Well, if life is just "tragic," as you suppose, then there's actually no use in teaching them anything at all. Human life has no nobility, and death ends all: who's to care what they believed between the womb and the tomb? In that worldview, there's no rewards for harsh "realism" of that type. One may as well embrace any consolation one can grab...true or not.

Yep, that pretty much sums it all up in a No God world.

So, given this, the only thing that really actually matters then is the extent to which what IC believes is true about a God, the God, his God is in fact something that he is able to demonstrate as true.

In other words, given in turn that most of these folks...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions

...will embrace the same assumption that he does about God and religion but will include IC himself among the souls to be saved.

[Alexis Jacobi]

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea.“

This ain’t gonna help Willy since he was not a believer (I assume).

In traditional Catholic belief the one who sinned (against a child in this case), and repented, will likely still have to face the fires of purgatorial purification. Whether it is true or not is one thing, but the intuitive logic is impressive: they say that the soul itself, realizing how contaminated it is, would itself choose purgatorial purification rather than to drag contaminants with him to the supernal realm.

[Immanuel Can]

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea.“

This ain’t gonna help Willy since he was not a believer (I assume).

Everything changes. When a person who's been mistreated realizes that the only justice he's ever going to have comes from God, he may decide he's better to work with that than against it.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Yep, that pretty much sums it all up in a No God world.

To have lived nobly, to have chosen noble actions when it would have been easier perhaps not to; it seems to me that that man had done more and better than the typical Christian whose reward was promised.

Anyway, it’s not that it is a no-god world, it is that the former picture (of god, of ourselves, of this situation) became inadequate.

You guys are not understanding things: god is right here among ye, and ye perceive him not.

Did you ever read No Exit (Sartre):

The play begins with a bellman ushering three recently deceased people into a room. They are Garcin, a revolutionary who betrayed his own cause and wants to be reassured that he is not a coward; Estelle, a nymphomaniac who has killed her illegitimate child; and Inez, a predatory lesbian. All the characters require another person for self-definition, yet each is most attracted to the person most likely to discomfit. Their inability to escape from each other guarantees their eternal torture.

In one sense what we face here, on this forum, in these threads is similar. And God, ever-devilish, is intimating what he has in store.

So Immanuel, Age and Gary might be one ménage in the terrifying anti-heavenly future where they will spend Eternity hashing it all out.

Or me and Lacewing and Dubious …

Just think of the combinations. And then consider the room, the decorations and the food.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Good for you. I think it will serve your own turn better in the end, anyway.

[Redacted]

[iambiguous]

Sure, we have alternatives. What you mean here is only, "I don't agree with you." Fine. This is a philosophy forum, so we don't have to; but we can still treat each other respectfully, of course.

Can you believe this coming from him?!

We leave the philosophy forum where we are free to think for ourselves. But when it comes to the life that we live and the behaviors that we choose, we may be free to choose then as well... but if that does not include accepting Jesus Christ as our personal savior, the Christian God treats us respectfully by...sending us to Hell?

[Lacewing]

I mean that moral responsibility starts with you and me. We can worry about many ethical speculations about other people and entities.../... where are all the babies who never reached the age of decision...all very engaging to think about, but maybe not with answers you and I are due to be given.

So you don't think it's important to challenge and assess that which you choose to believe and follow... and you are content to believe that there are 'answers you are not due' and for anything else, you 'must wait to discover'?

Is that not a perfect mental framework for believers who want to accept and follow anything?

We aren't in charge of /...anybody else.

So we shouldn't care or question what God does with babies... but we must definitely assert control over what women do in regard to their pregnancies?

I don't imagine the secular world, which aborts babies at a rate of millions per year, can much concern themselves with the welfare of babies, though.

You think that secularists don't care about the welfare of babies?

That depends: are these secularists aborting them? Then I don't any longer they have any sincerity of concern for babies, for children, or for anybody but themselves. That much must surely be evident from their actions.

Surely you can conceive that women of all belief systems have aborted babies throughout human history. And all of those women OF COURSE care about others -- it is so ridiculous for you to suggest otherwise. Why do you do that?

All females (of age) must deal with a biological function of their bodies that produces unintended results of a serious and lasting nature. If males had to deal with this happening within their own bodies, do you imagine they would be carrying through with the delivery and significant responsibility that would result? They would most surely rewrite and/or reinterpret everything to suit themselves... and deny that there are any reasons to think otherwise... just as you do in these discussions.

Do you think Christians don't have abortions?

I can't say I have any way of knowing conclusively, of course; I don't have any reason to think so.

The only reason NOT to think so is to preserve your belief system which ignores and excludes all that doesn't serve it. Can't you see that it is ridiculous and self-serving to think that Christians don't have abortions? Is that an example of your sincerity for speaking the truth?

But I can say that abortion is an anti-Christian action.
Something immoral does not become moral when somebody who makes a claim to being moral does it. It remains immoral.

Making a claim that something is immoral is not the proof that it is immoral. The Bible is full of conflicting statements of God's will.

If (as you say) we are not in charge of anybody else, then Christianity has way overstepped... wouldn't you agree? Shouldn't God and each individual have their own relationship and understandings about what is appropriate for each person and circumstance, all things considered? Who are men to intrude into that? Who are men to impose their limited ideas of God onto others?