271–280 of 338 posts
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That's like saying you don't believe in monsters, yet refusing to open the closet. Your morals match exactly what you would do. What you say about your morals doesn't. What you are is what you do , after all, not what you imagine yourself to be.
Your morals and your instincts are two different things.
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The article is missing the forest for the trees. It assumes morality is relative. Morality is the product of the intersection of narrative and mythology on a group. Morality is the story a particular group (or civilization) is enacting: the program they're executing. All groups hold myths. Even atheist groups hold myths. They just think their myths are just "the world" or "reality" or "how we got here". Civilizations…
>article ... assumes morality is relative I didn't get that from the article. The author seems to have looked at how people justify violence and found they gave moral explanations. Whether their morality is relative or absolute doesn't seem that important to the argument.
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Where "sin" means essentially not being Christian enough, I am skeptical that the correct diagnosis for violence is "sin" when people who identify as Christian do not seem especially less likely to commit violence than people who identify as adhering to some other worldview with moral entailments. Frankly, if you want everyone else to believe that Christians are less violent than people of other religions, you have t…
It seems, based on your comment, that you have experienced Christian practice not meeting Christian teaching, which saddens me. Sin, in Christian theology based around total depravity, is not 'essentially not being Christian enough', but is rather a failure to obey God. As I said before, this is an area where different religious backgrounds or experiences make discussing this issue difficult. I certainly don't mean t…
Except that when you say "failure to obey God" you mean "failure to behave as christians have defined a supposed god wants you to behave", or in short "not being christian enough". Simply attributing your rules to an entity whose existence you haven't even demonstrated is simply a rhetorical device to obfuscate the easy to understand statement "sin is when you don't follow my/our rules".
Just consider whether you would be willing to substitute any definition of god out there in your statement instead of the christian one. How about Allah? Then your claim would be that in christian theology, it's sin to not obey Allah (that is, behave as Muslims define that god wants you to behave). If you aren't willing to accept that, your argument doesn't hold, and if you are, you have to deal with a huge pile of self-contradictory doctrine from all the world's religions.
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Please stop posting inflammatory ideological rants to Hacker News. Please also stop posting personal attacks, which this comment crosses into and which you've done before. Those are not allowed here.
I have often appreciated your quick interventions to stop snark and abuse on this message board. But this doesn't seem right. This thread by its definition is controversial and lends itself to subjective option and heated discussion, more than others. At what point does opinion become 'ideology' as every single comment can be described as such, who decides the thin line between ideology and opinion and worse cross it…
The problem here isn't just one comment, though, but a history of making HN threads more toxic with incivility and inflammatory rhetoric. Doing that doesn't improve discussion; in the long run it destroys it. The whole of HN is organized to try to stave that off. If we have an existential concern, this is it.
I don't think bit-flipping arguments are valid here, i.e. arguments that acting to dampen one thing (incivility) will flip the system to its binary opposite (sterility). That's not how complex systems work. There's plenty of room for thoughtful discussion to flourish. On HN this happens when people take up the challenge of remaining civil and respectful, even when others are wrong or provocative. One can do that while still feeling strongly about a topic. Yes, it's hard, but not because of any contradiction in the spec.
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I'd go bit further. Let's assume everybody agreed with the "Really try hard to not be a jerk!" and everybody would have 100% similar general picture of what is moral. Two people still interpret a situation from two points of view. Both making the judgement that the other guy is out of bounds. Which justifies some apprehension. But they both experience wrongful apprehension, which justifies pretty big apprehension. Wh…
My favorite example: 1) Randomly divide people into two groups. 2) Ask everyone in the first group this question: "If someone sues you and loses, is it fair that they should pay your legal costs?" Most people will say yes. 3) Ask everyone in the second group this question: "If you sue someone and lose, is it fair that you should pay their legal costs?" Most people will say no. Even though it's the same fucking questi…
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The principle of relativity is for velocities not morality.
The principle of relativity arises from observer dependence in measured quantities. Human experience is observer dependent. Morality is a logical system based on human observations. Therefore morality has a logic of relativity. Relativity comes up in mathematics all the time. Relativity isn't the idea that there is no one truth, it is the idea that there is one truth but it cannot be described from a single point of…
I think the biggest cause of immorality is that we assume morality cannot be treated logically and scientifically, and instead call it the province of faith. Faith has proven itself wholly unsuited as arbitrator of morality. Maybe it's time to give science and logic a go at it.
I liked this article, it went straight to the heart of the issue. Many take a cheap shot at religion (in most cases Muslims) when they talk about this sort of stuff. But this article talks about morality as the factor. While moral codes are often a huge part of religions they are also a huge part of other groups of society, such as animal rights groups, labour unions and even criminal organisations. To me this seems…
> While moral codes are often a huge part of religions they are also a huge part of other groups of society, such as animal rights groups, labour unions and even criminal organisations. Very true indeed, but I think that religion still deserves particular attention because it's the most prominent institution that promotes believing claims without evidence as a virtue, in particular in the area of morality, which pave…
I'd argue that this not the case, that morality is a philosophical question. In some cases one must draw on scientific knowledge to make moral judgments, but that's as far as it goes.
We often overestimate the roll of science and underestimate the roll of philosophy. Most religious philosophies are obvious, while secular ones are over looked and just assumed correct by those who embrace them.
One of the most perennially popular courses at my alma mater was entitled "Murder". It was an exploration of the moral justification behind state-sponsored violence, from capital punishment to war to genocide. The realization that most violence is morally motivated comes with interesting quandaries when you consider what the response to such violence should be. Say that society successfully develops the norm that vio…
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It seems, based on your comment, that you have experienced Christian practice not meeting Christian teaching, which saddens me. Sin, in Christian theology based around total depravity, is not 'essentially not being Christian enough', but is rather a failure to obey God. As I said before, this is an area where different religious backgrounds or experiences make discussing this issue difficult. I certainly don't mean t…
> Sin, in Christian theology based around total depravity, is not 'essentially not being Christian enough', but is rather a failure to obey God. Except that when you say "failure to obey God" you mean "failure to behave as christians have defined a supposed god wants you to behave", or in short "not being christian enough". Simply attributing your rules to an entity whose existence you haven't even demonstrated is si…
Its a not-uncommon bit of Christian theology that sin is not acting how God has specifically and personally directed you, individually, to behave.
Now, Christians holding to that model have (varying, even among Christians) beliefs, to which they ascribe varying degrees of certainty, about things which they thing God commands of all people generally, which are therefore incorporated into that. But those beliefs are conceptually separate from the definition of sin.
That strikes me as a non-sequitur. Aren't morality and mental health orthogonal?
For example, if someone believed that his refrigerator is God and it speaks to him via the expiration dates on the milk, that would be barking mad. If he based a system of morality on those messages and it told him that bald people are evil and need to die, then he's got moral justification and motivation in his own mind. But he's still barking mad, and a mental health check would show that, right?