Religion is good because it gives the believer an objective and absolute standard of morality

[Vivacia]

(This idea was introduced in another thread, but it felt like an unfair tangent for that thread to be taking in my humble opinion, but one I'd be interested in discussing).

Firstly, I absolutely disagree with the statement.

Secondly, I feel as an atheist I have an objective morality, if not an absolute one.

Sounds like you're.dehumanising them to me though. And your good and loving god couldn't think of a better way of stopping them other than getting other humans to stab them all. babies included?

What do you mean by still be very damaging?

Not sure I can articulate this very well but....

I think it all makes sense in my head now in terms of empathy/morality/goodness and selfishness/lack of morality/"evil", it's like opposing forces interplaying all the time in a complex dynamic, in different contexts within individual humans and the human race, with different outcomes depending on context.

I can totally see empathy vs selfishness being the two sides of the same coin in that they both stem from a more advanced/evolved and complex form of "the survival instinct". Humans can be altruistic for selfish reasons ( which also embraces empathy), this tends to be more towards people "like them". And when humans dehumanise others, you basically see them as the "others" and have little empathy and no conscience about the killing of them.

In the fight for scarce resources, conflicts between difference groups or races will arise as if it is a fight for the survival for the race /(national) identity. I believe humans instinctively tend to very more altruistic to people " like them", as part of the survival instinct as head said and as I tried to allude to.

I could almost see the golden rule/ empathy as another evolutionary step which separates humans from animals that are driven by pure survival instinct, but are (I believe) not capable of intentional evil or altruism in the same way as humans.

I also see the different degrees of empathy shown towards different beings as embracing altruism AND intentional evil, when you dehumanise someone as an Other and you really don't care whether you kill or torture the being senselessly or you destroy the Others to protect you own kind....OMG I've now decided that it's' all evolution and survival.

Hope I'm making sense.

I am not dehumanising them, head. If I lived in those times, with my particular genetic heritage, I (+ my family) could easily be 'for it' if I decided to come against Israel. What I am saying is that people, behaving wrongly can cause an awful lot of damage. Sometimes the decision is made to stop this damage, if there is no hope of them seeing the error of their ways, stopping their destructive actions. Because flaws were (and still are) passed down genetically, with no sure hope of rectifying them in the OT, the flaws could potentially spread like wildfire. Christ gives hope, according to Christian belief, through the possibility of redemption through believing on Him.

queen regarding separating animals from humans in terms of altruistic behaviour, these crow stories are fascinating.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31795681

Wait a minute caps i thought you baulked at the idea of genetics being a big factor in 'evil' because of the risks of trying to play god for huge wont of a better expression. Why did god not think of another way of dealing with it instead of making other humans stab babies? what sort of good god would choose to sort it out that way? You keep referring to how bad they were, what were they like. if god told you all eskimos hated him and he wanted you to stab them all to death you'd think that moral?

with no hope of rectified them

why not?

which takes us again to the limiting nature of genes and some seeing a need by governments and.health services to manage risks of the genetic kind...again scary

I do baulk at the idea of genetics being judged a big factor in evil, head. Primarily because I believe we can overcome our genetic flaws, if indeed they are flaws per se and not an out of context epigenetic gene expression (we have had conversations re epigenetics before, head) I believe in redemption and, following on from this, believe seeking hidden flaws out,in order to condemn, is a very worrying course of action for human kind to take.

No hope of rectifying them
Because redemption I believe redemption came with Christ. If people do not acknowledge, cannot acknowledge wrong behaviour, cannot recognise good (as shown in Christ), are intent on creating continuing on their destructive path and will not change. I believe God knows the beginning from the end so have to trust He made right decisions. As for choosing me to destroy? I hate violence and war. I might just fail in that. But defending the weak and innocent, who knows? I am most likely descended from Vikings and have been warrior like at times, though only on paper!

And the better 'way of dealing with it' was provided by God through Christ, according to my beliefs head.

Why do you hate violence?

Am now listening to Thinking Allowed with Laurie Taylor on R4 and its about.genetics in family narratives would you believe!

Always have hated violence, for as long as I can remember, head. As a small child I used to cry when the news came on TV. Toy guns appalled me. The waxwork dungeons displays traumatised me when I was a bit older and I had difficulty sleeping for a time after seeing them.

^ so I don't think it was a conscious decision.

Saying all this I still got into fights...so I'm not entirely a pacifist.

trust he made right decisions

so getting other humans to stab babies was the right decision for an all powerful god? it sounds like you have a conflict 'i think god is good but when he does things that are disgusting i will ignore my moral objection' could not anyone use that defense for horrific behavior? there is such a gulf between how god dealt with humans before and after Jesus. he had the same morality as the humans he killed in their millions. lets talk about the flood was noah just a genetic freak because he wasnt as evil as everyone else at the time?

A lot of the OT deals with tracing bloodlines, head, so I think there was a genetic significance. However with the NT, after Christ, this was no longer important.

I agree with you, that the violence in the OT is hard to stomach. I feel like that about all wars. Although maybe some are necessary? In peacetime (relative) I think war is difficult to comprehend.

However, for me, my belief on Christ overrides any difficulty I might have with the OT. And Christ refers to the OT and doesn't contradict it. I don't comprehend it all, or expect to, in this lifetime. I expect being eternal, knowing the beginning from the end and the heart of everyone and everything would affect a being's perspective on things, somewhat.

I personally think that you have to separate God from violence if you are to maintain his existence. Every single person perpetrating human rights in the Middle East (and I suppose elsewhere for that matter) does so because of a skewed interpretation of a holy text and also because of a deeply flawed character, e.g. the propensity to bully because you are 'one of the gang'.

Yes, I do believe skewed interpretations can cause many problems, Fenny. People may cite the violence in the OT as a justification for their own violent actions but the NT talks about not taking vengeance, turning the other cheek, forgiveness and not condemning.

so getting other humans to stab babies was the right decision for an all powerful god?

what puzzles me is this. how does god, even if you grant he exists, solve the problem of objective morality? Why should we listen to him?

It seems to me either he is good by definition, in which case he does provide an objective basis for morality but genocide and killing babies is sometimes good, or there is some external criteria by which he is judged and he is not an objective basis for morality.

Head, it is fairly mainstream to say that the further you back in time, the less reliable it becomes. Noah's flood for example is probably half myth. I would classify the Exodus and Caananite 'genocide' as exaggerated accounts of historical events. Anyway, it is pretty clear from the OT that the Caananites were assimilated rather than wiped out.

Anyway, my main point ... Maybe this WAS the best way for God to deal with all. To deny this, you would need to investigate all other alternatives which is of course ridiculous. Maybe God had to do certain things in a certain way to eradicate things like infanticide. I am not saying I can prove this, merely pointing out that none of us really know.

Keep

If you think of good being defined by God, as the ultimate authority, this could look different across different contexts but His nature remain the same.

The right action, in the right context, at the right point in history. As human beings we cannot know this. We can only examine actions retrospectively in terms of their success and then only from the point of time we are at.

If you think of good being defined by God, as the ultimate authority, this could look different across different contexts but His nature remain the same.

but this does then means sometimes killing babies is the right thing to do, which obviously shouldn't be the case. Also, then, you get the problem that god the creator may be different than god the good (why are they the same entity?).

As human beings we cannot know this.

we can ask. And if no satisfactory answer is given, we can question his authority. isn't that the right thing to do when faced with seeming injustice?

eradicate things like infanticide

so getting humans to stab babies is the best he could come up with? Surely a nation with a penchant for killing their babies would suffer a lack of numbers. How come they were a large nation if they were busy seeing off their offspring? How did they ever get off the ground as a tribe which makes you think it wasn't some race wide genetic mutation that could only be dealt with by being stabbed. Why was god so keen on Abraham being willing to kill his own son if he is so disgusted by people killing their kids? It's very reasonable.to wonder if he couldn't have used a better method, he is supposed to be all powerful, even i can think of better methods that wouldn't leave men with PTSD, can you imagine having to stab babies and what that would do to you?

we can not know this

so the moral thing to do is say 'this god seems morally flawed to me so I am unable to accept it is real'. Are you able to reject other religions? How are you able to know they are false when you are keen to stress our inability to discern god etc?

Unfortunately it was a common feature of war across all sorts of different nations head. Along with cultures that would leave newborns, with anything wrong with them, to die. The practice happened not even so long ago. My own grandmother's twin (very small) was thrown on the fire and the same nearly happened to her but a relative saved her (kept animals and could look after rejected newborns). Horrible but true.

keep of course we should question and ask. I've never been put in anywhere like the position we are talking about though.

head I do not reject God largely because I understand Jesus to be the embodiment of Him and I cannot reject Jesus.