EricPH wrote: ↑January 21st, 2023, 10:16 am
Sy Borg wrote: ↑January 19th, 2023, 3:41 pm
You have to love people who hate science - writing their jaundiced views on advanced technology that was made possible by science.
Science is not a moral guide. Ask the people in Ukraine, I am sure they are thankful for anaesthetics after being bombed.
Science helps us to be moral, which is why people don't cut dogs up in public to demonstrate that they don't feel anything, claiming that the dogs' agonised yelps were just reflex actions that mimicked pain. That was the famous theist, Descartes, who thought that only humans contained an immortal soul, and those were the only being to truly feel their lives.
While science is not a moral guide, I don't treat it as such. Also note that religion is not a scientific guide. Yet I note you are a creationist, completely ignoring scientific learning to follow the primitive ideas of ancient people who believed that the Sun, Moon and stars existed in a dome.
Besides, theists have failed worse morally than anyone. Consider the network rings of theist paedophiles, molesting thousands and thousands of young children. This was not just a failure of individual but the entire edifice of religion. The outrageous betrayal, with theists pretending to be morally sound and better than the rest of us ... and they turned out to be not just less moral than secular people, but far less moral!
There's were very few, and ineffectual, no whistleblowers, despite the molestation being so common that dark humour jokes about priests and young boys were common in secular society. Now consider the late George Pell. He received multiple direct complaints about molesting and he either dismissed it as ridiculous or assumed it was consensual. In ANY of my secular workplaces, if there was a report that someone was fiddling with children, it would have been a serious deal. It would not have been Pell's hush hush approach, simply moving paedophiles to new parishes where potential victims won't know of the misdeeds.
This was not one person or a few people, this was institutional and global. Christianity's moral teaching had proved to be less effective than standard ethics training. Christianity as an institution had failed at the very most basic and obvious moral, with many of its most influential practitioners betraying people's trust and preying on the weak and vulnerable for sexual gratification, and few others with the courage to speak up.
So, let's see why most regular secular people are usually pretty moral without need of a moral system that allows abusers to molest children.
For many, morality is hammered into us from the get-go, because that's what humans must do to live in a society. My earliest memory was sitting in a pram scribbling circles on a wall with a pen. It felt good. Then I vaguely remember Mum coming through the door and seeing me. After that, there's only a sense of tumult before the memory ends. In other words, I got into trouble and my baby brain shut down a little. Don't mess up the wall. The lessons extrapolate from there.
So, re: the thread, I understand God (or something roughly akin to it) as a universal potential, but otherwise its a phase of human thought, extrapolated from humans' ancient risk management strategy of assuming that all things have agency. Prehistoric people would make a sacrifice to the volcano god for mercy, because if no volcano god exists, then that darn thing could blow up at any time and there'd be nothing anyone could do about it! Monotheism simply extrapolates that process, but still applies to all known things. People now know more about what's "out there" so God's realm expanded, but the same risk management principles apply, laid bare by Pascal's naive wager.
My feeling is that the main benefit of theism is social. People find themselves a supportive tribe. As long as they conform, they have a vast extended family.
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