Of course it’s not the same! But it would not be my subjective feeling that I KNOW God exists that makes God exist. He exists whether I believe He exists or not. My feelings of knowing have absolutely nothing to do with His existence.
But it’s not my private judgment. It’s truth, whether it is attributed to God or to a universal law. It’s true in all societies. There are certain moral absolutes that exist everywhere on earth. I know this isn’t what I’ve been arguing. I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot and my understanding is developing.
Note how you worded your Muslims’ belief. You had to put the term “woman who **allows **herself to be raped.” There is a moral absolute that rape is wrong. So your Muslims have to rationalize so that they can be allowed to rape without having to admit they are wrong to do so. But they know. Deep down inside, they know. And so do Christians who believe that abortion is just fine. They know it’s wrong so they say “it’s not a person” but deep down most people really know.
(I like that you included “inborn temperament.” A lot of people wouldn’t.) I think maybe we’re talking past each other here. I agree with you. I know God exists and I know that our morality comes from Him but if one does not believe in God yet has those same moral values but has reached his conclusions through reason and the other factors you listed, I just don’t see a problem. The morality exists. I didn’t always know that God exists. But when I was agnostic I still had morality and I think an awful lot of it came from my innate temperament, my parents, and all those other factors.
Again, I agree. Fully. I hadn’t read this part of your post before I wrote my other responses above but it meshes very well.
The Law should not be identified with every legal rule in the OT but with the Decalogue. Jesus repeatedly said:
“But I say to you…” And the case of the woman taken in adultery highlights the stark contrast between His teaching and that of the Jews…
You are assuming he was morally responsible.
The fact remains that your moral indignation has no rational basis in an amoral universe…
You have overlooked the Decalogue, the Prophets and the books of Wisdom…
Revelation does not imply infallible literalism…
You are stuck with your own negativity…
What are you left with in a purposeless universe which exists for no reason, a life which has no purpose and a destiny which has no value?
Oh why did you have to go off and write something like this? The Church does not force us to be members. We aren’t “stuck” with anything except perhaps death and taxes. We WANT to be Catholics!! We LOVE the Church! And the Church encourages us to question, to discuss, to debate. Why do you think CAF is here and is so popular? I’m aware of some Protestant churches who do not allow their faithful members to question any of their teachings. Catholics are not bound like that. We have the freedom to try to learn more about our faith and about the faith of others.
If he exists whether you believe he exists or not, the same is true if he does not exist; if he does not exist, he still does not exist no matter how much you are convinced that he does. So how can you be dogmatic about his existence based on a feeling that has as much chance of being wrong as right? In fact, more, since you desperately want him to exist, so you are more likely to give credence to the feeling that he does than the feeling that he doesn’t (if you ever have such feelings).
If so, that would be great! Good for us.But it’s not my private judgment. It’s truth, whether it is attributed to God or to a universal law. It’s true in all societies. There are certain moral absolutes that exist everywhere on earth. I know this isn’t what I’ve been arguing. I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot and my understanding is developing.Note how you worded your Muslims’ belief. You had to put the term “woman who **allows **herself to be raped.” There is a moral absolute that rape is wrong. So your Muslims have to rationalize so that they can be allowed to rape without having to admit they are wrong to do so. But they know. Deep down inside, they know. And so do Christians who believe that abortion is just fine. They know it’s wrong so they say “it’s not a person” but deep down most people really know.
Muslims believe there is one God. Christians believe there is one God. We agree on this. It’s the name we don’t agree upon and I really don’t see a problem there. When I’ve debated with Muslims the issue of “God” and “Allah” has never come up. It’s been a non-issue.(I like that you included “inborn temperament.” A lot of people wouldn’t.) I think maybe we’re talking past each other here. I agree with you. I know God exists and I know that our morality comes from Him but if one does not believe in God yet has those same moral values but has reached his conclusions through reason and the other factors you listed, I just don’t see a problem. The morality exists. I didn’t always know that God exists. But when I was agnostic I still had morality and I think an awful lot of it came from my innate temperament, my parents, and all those other factors.Again, I agree. Fully. I hadn’t read this part of your post before I wrote my other responses above but it meshes very well.
Is this some sort of breakthrough?
Thank you for pointing out yet another contradiction in the NT
. Since Matthew has Jesus saying “not a dot or iota (the smallest letters) of the law,” you can’t interpret him as meaning “only the ten commandments.” He said “not so much as a comma or period,” which obviously means the whole ball of wax. The fact that he later abridges, alters, and gets rid of parts of it is your problem, not mine. I don’t have to reconcile all those contradictions.That’s not a fact, because you have no basis for the claim that there are no other alternatives than A) God provides all the moral rules, or B) there are no moral rules. If God never gave any commandments, people would still have to live together, so there would be moral laws and they would be enforced, just as in countries which have other religions than the Abrahamic ones.
Tonyrey’s nightmare. But since I don’t live in that universe, I don’t worry about it.
Up to a point, of course. Then you have to swallow your doubts and believe anyway. But I will give you this: the Catholic CHurch is more open than most other churches I’ve been in. Not as open as the Episcopal Church, though that church is so open that there’s not much left in it
. Also, some Catholics are more open than others, but that isn’t the Church’s fault.My feeling has no chance of being wrong. I don’t desperately want Him to exist. In the past that was indeed true because I was afraid of dying and would cling to anything that I thought would ease my fears. I used to think that the concept of “God” was the result of the fear that human beings have had, ever since they became aware that they will die.
Definitely good for us!!
And yet, when you assert this, you are attributing even more authority to the Church. She proclaimed the doctrine of Original Sin many centuries ago, based only on Scripture and the teachings of the Apostles and the Church Fathers. Now, you suggest that modern science *seems *to show (and I emphasize the “seems” because a scientific theory is by definition never settled) that morality came to homo sapiens as individuals gained conscience that their ancestors had done very bad things in the past. The Original Sin dogma is peculiarly compatible with that. As it happens, the doctrine of the Original Sin is one of the most important pillars of the basically sound Christian morality, with the extra bonus that it applies to all human beings (safe Jesus and Our Lady). In other words, you have an elegant, ancient and unexpected doctrine that accounts for our obvious broken nature, but also for the fundamental equality of all people. Now compare this with the much more modern doctrines of social Darwinism, Marxism, Eugenism, the Superman, utilitarian consequentialism, etc., all bound to failure as they violate the two simple truths that we are born with the burden of sin (or evil, if you prefer a less “theistic” word) and that such condition has no exceptions. Even saints like Thérèse of Lisieux or Anthony of Padua and great political leaders like Gandhi or Mandela must have their hidden darker facets. This is all the more strange as the Church asserted a true thing when no one expected that, a truth that we are slowly discovering so many centuries later.
Not at all silly. Enviable, rather. I’m glad you feel this way, and appreciate your sharing it. I would not take it from you, even if I could, for all the world. In the face of an experience so powerful, reason must bow her head in silence.
You make it sound as though nobody was aware of any human tendency toward evil until St. Augustine came up with the Original Sin idea, but if you read the writings of pagans and other religions hundreds of years before the church, you find that the knowledge of our evil inclinations is commonplace, and recipes for curing it plentiful. What the church added – which is the part I disagree with – is the story of the mechanism by which we supposedly inherited it, namely, our first parents disobeying God and consequently corrupting the nature of all their descendants. This is too much like the Lamarckian idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics to be credible. Just as the children of one-armed parents are born with two arms, the children of sinful parents are born innocent. Why do they always commit sins? That’s where our true inheritance comes in. We inherit certain tendencies from our simian ancestry, others from our unique genetic makeup, and our parents raise us according to the patterns they were raised in. These, I believe, account for our behaving contrary to the rules we were taught, without anybody in the beginning of our history eating a fruit.
Who said that the Original Sin is exclusively Christian? If it is a truly important idea, it might not have gone unnoticed previously. Christianity offers an important twist: there are no exceptions (safe Jesus and Our Lady). Pagans possibly believed some people were essentially perfect. Roman emperors were quasi-gods. Most modern doctrines have an element of human perfection: Nietzsche’s obvious Superman; utilitarianism (the person herself is her perfect judge and the measure of all things); Marxism (people are essentially good and will eventually construct a society without injustice); Eugenics (people can be made more intelligent and physically robust through directed selection); etc. The Christian doctrine states this is all nonsense. Humans are bad, will remain bad, and any system based in a different assumption will fail. We need help.
Thank you.
I feel very blessed and your happiness for me makes it even better.You seemed to imply that Original Sin was an exclusively Christian teaching by expressing it in exclusively Christian terms, like when you said the Church “proclaimed the doctrine of Original Sin many centuries ago, based only on Scripture and the teachings of the Apostles and the Church Fathers.”( BTW, the exception regarding Our Lady does not apply to all Christians).
A Brick wall will never comprehend or accept your arguments tonyrey, no matter how reasonable you are. Thats not to say however that your efforts have gone unnoticed by worthier minds. Between us, nihilism has been explained several times, and each one of those explanations have been ignored by the atheists on this forum. Anything that is not consistent with their human fantasy gets brushed aside without any evidence of serious contemplation or understanding. Nobody likes the idea of losing their value. In this case the atheists want to be the root of their own true value and significance. Its not surprising really. I suppose we all at some point have gone through the immature phase of wanting to be our own Gods. Be satisfied that you can see through the hypocrisy. Many of the atheists on this site clearly think its okay to indulge in fantasy, even though they like to disguise it in pretty language. They are okay with that, so long as you don’t bother them with God.
It’s highly significant there has been no attempt to explain how purposeful activity has been produced by purposeless activity. Evolution doesn’t come into it at all for the simple reason that the notion of “semi-purposeful” is absurd - unless an example of semi-purposeful activity can be given… It would be far more logical to assert that purpose is an illusion and that everything happens for no purpose in spite of what we think!
