And so the debate with my email/blogging buddy continues...
Buddy's Comment 5: People need universal absolutes, (morals), that provide a timeless standard of right and wrong, good and bad. Without that standard, and by extension, the rewards and consequences for good or bad behavior, a feeling of hopelessness is unavoidable, if not for everyone, then for the majority.
My Response to Comment 5:
This statement has two parts. a) The first is the people need absolute standards. b) The second part is that without absolute standards, hopelessness is inevitable.
My Response 5a).
I'm not in agreement with this because I believe that there are good, moral people who have never heard of the Bible. And if this is true, then people don't NEED absolute standards. If you insist that people still NEED absolute standards, then all those people would be immoral, or at least "accidentally" moral. This seems unlikely to me. If they can be moral, then what do you mean by the term "Need"?
My Response 5b)
This implies that all non-christians will inherently experience hopelessness. I strongly suspect you are wrong about this. While I understand that rates of depression are a smidgen higher in the atheist population than in the deist population, that is a far cry from the blanket statement you have made here. I think you are stating an opinion that you cannot support with any objectivity.
Even atheists have morals, boundaries. Regardless where you believe they came from, they have roots in, not the Bible, not even the Torah, but in how man was created, in the earliest contact mankind had with its Creator. I know you don't believe this. But you haven't given a plausible, a believable, alternative to that. From what you've said, from all the responses in all the discussions till now, nothing reconciles how man derived the codes he lives under, if not 'god-given'.
ReplyDeleteYes, a family can have three, four, even five children who are 'compliant', and need very little discipline. But to treat the one who isn't compliant, who is more than a handful to manage the same as the others, wreaks havoc in the family. Those who are 'good' see that 'bad' one get away with 'murder' and it erodes their behavior. The 'bad' one, seeing he can get away with murder, further tries to see how much more he can do in opposition to the family's code. Cultures are very similar to this illustration. If there were no god-given code, none at all, that is common to the species, this family's anarchy would be experienced by mankind on a grand scale. So yes, the species NEEDS the boundaries a common moral code gives.
As for non-christians, other cultures, other belief systems have a code that mimics, at least in part, the biblical code.
Fair enough. And although I think I previously referenced at least one book on the subject of studies in the origin of human morality, I certainly will admit that at this time the jury is out.
ReplyDeleteAs for extrapolating naughty child behaviors to society-wide behaviors, I can't say I know either way whether this is reasonable or practical. I do tend to think that people are inherently good with smatterings of bad bits, rather than being inherently bad with smatterings of goodness. In this way, I feel that people will tend toward goodness, thus needing absolute moral codes seems like disciplining a good child.
As for other religions mimicing biblical code, I think there is good reason to consider that codes that predate biblical code may qualify as original work, or at least not mimics.