CelticBear’s Musings

I’m breaking my New Year’s Resolution for a couple of posts today. In a minute I’m going rail against the administration, but first, a rant against religious delusion. (I’ll get back to being positive after this; this is only a temporary resolution break. I’ve been doing pretty well all things considered so far.)

Mark at Sojourner has a post: Rational Morality. He mentions a “good conversation” he and I have had (I’m “Mechphisto,”) and I’m glad he thinks so. For me, it’s like arguing with someone who thinks they’re Napoleon. One of the ways I promised myself I’d stay more positive is if I stay away from blogs that make me bristle. I failed. I need to go back to ignoring blogs like that one and Stands to Reason and other delusionally religious blogs that are filled, teeming with cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, logical fallacies, and a lot of ignorance.

In that previously mentioned post Rational Morality, Mark uses spurious logic to try to prove objective morality. (See existing threads on this topic: Time For a Fish Fry–Attacks on Naturalism Don’t Hold Water, and Absolutely Relative (The Theme Continues).) In those articles and ensuing comments I have tended to argue to the extreme position of relativism sometimes for entertainment, sometimes to improve my own understanding, sometimes to draw out the counter argument. But the bottom line is that objective morality or not, religious morality is devoid of true ethics, morals, reason, logic, or empathy (which SHOULD be what any sense or morality be based on!)

Before I continue, I digress to repeat a couple of interesting past posts. From A Lil Squeek of Christian Relativism:

Naturalist: As there is no way for us to determine absolute morality, we must determine it as best we can with what we have.
Christian: Ah—but we have Absolute Morality!
Naturalist: Grounded in what?
Christian: God.
Naturalist: And what is God’s morality?
Christian: As there is no way for us to determine God’s morality, we must determine it as best we can with what we have.
Naturalist: And this is different from me….how?

And a little more serious and helpful when looking at such posts as Mark’s linked above: How We Know, and Relative Application of Motive. That one may be helpful in seeing through the spurious logic, sophisms, and tautological reasoning.

In analyzing objective vs. relative morality we can implore the words of any philosophers, theologians, People With Big Books we want and it all comes down to “My Calvin can beat up your Spinoza.” Whether “morality” is objective because of a “higher power” or through anthropological evolution or is totally relative, it’s all pointless to try to base it on religious dogma because even IF it’s from a “higher power,” how do you know it’s Yahveh or El, or whatever other Hebrew/Sumerian name for God you want to use, that’s provided it? These spurious exercises of erroneous logic repeated by Mark aside, his and other religious ideologue’s fundamental point is that Yahveh is the provider of the objective morality, and to that I say bulls**t. Regardless of if morality is divinely given, you cannot prove it’s Yahveh of Christianity that’s given it any more than you can prove it’s Zeus of the Iliad or Osiris or Odin or Marduk or Great Sky Spirit or Atlantians. Every attempt to try invariably takes the debate back to the Judeo-Christian Bible. A Bronze Age book of collected history from an ancient Semitic people who evolved the Sumerian pantheon they emerged from to rule over a patriarchal and even barbaric culture. Followed by a charismatic cult surrounding a supposed messiah based on this ancient culture which actually has very little in common with that ancient culture except for some terribly misapplied attempts to connect the former with the later using prophesy that only half matches up if at all.

All that babbling to say, that book is not proof of Yahveh being the source of morality and in fact, it’s evidence against it.

A previous post: Why Does God Hate Me When I Die? addresses this somewhat, and has links to other posts on the topic. Basically, religious morality is the lowest form of morality. It’s immature carrot-and-stick morality. “Do what I say and you get paradise, don’t do what I say and you suffer eternal punishment, and I’m always watching you,” is the fundamental morality from the god of love and mercy and justice. That is not morality or ethics. That’s divine fascism. To be ethical, to be moral, you don’t just follow commandments. You have to empathize with others. You have to understand what is right (what helps and promotes) and what is wrong (what harms and negates) and be able to discern the difference. Being told what to do and not to do is not morality.

And what kind of example for morality is Yahveh anyway? There’s the wonderful story of how the nomadic tribe of Dan saw a fertile and prosperous land and because the people already there were defenseless, took it as a sign of God that they should go and slaughter them all and take the land. There’s Samson’s “suicide bombing” basically. The children who were slaughtered by God’s 40 she-bears for teasing one of his prophets. There’s the countless genocides and slaughters by the Israelites at God’s behest. The stealing of virgin girls to be given to the priests. The commands to kill rape victims if it was in town. The promotion of slavery, selling daughters, “righteous” men offering daughters to raping mods to protect house-guests…. The list of atrocities and God decreed immorality is as long as the Old Testament!

Now, the common Christian rebuttal here is that that is all Old Law and Jesus came to fulfill the Law (so says Paul, who really said a lot of stuff that has little basis in the Gospels. I mean, Jesus supposedly said the Old Law must still be observed. And Psalms says God says the Law will stand always. Did he change his mind? He could have said “The Law stands until the Messiah comes” which would make more consistent sense.)

But here’s the thing… even if Paul’s letters to Romans and I think Timothy stands and Jesus makes the Old Law irrelevant, you still have 4,000 years beforehand of God inspired, God provoked, God decreed atrocities and barbarism. 4,000 years of a God that slaughters innocents and advocates such death and destruction and hatred and intolerance and prejudice that he puts Allah and Baal and Vishnu to shame! 4,000 years of religiously dictated horror before Jesus comes and God evidently decides OK, slavery is wrong now and so is war and killing your family members if they break commandments…. Even if Yahveh exists, that is not a capricious, feckless, psychopathic thug that I would want to worship!!

The Christian can’t dismiss the Old Testament. There is no Messiah without Judaic myth religion. There is no Son of God, no fulfillment of covenants, no salvation from original sin, no fulfillment of prophesy without the Old Testament and the God of Abraham. Without the Old Testament, the New Testament is about a meaningless cult. (Which, is what I believe is the case, but for people who call themselves “Christian” it is disingenuous to worship Christ and act like the Old Testament doesn’t matter.) Whether you take the OT literally or symbolically, the underlying message is the same: The God of the Hebrews is and represents a horrible, cruel idea of “morality” that we today would put down as being “evil”.

How can any sense of absolute, objective morality be said to come from a deity that one epoch tells his small group of chosen people to slaughter and hate in his name, who commands people to be killed for farming or dressing incorrectly, and then suddenly change everything the next? How can you even say anything we consider moral and ethical today come from a supposedly all-loving being who creates people for no reason other than his own personal glory, tells them they have “free will” but if they exercise that free will incorrectly during their life (they didn’t have a choice in having in the first place) when they die they will have eternity of punishment? Morality that comes from a “perfect being” that creates conditions on a planet for the people he “so loves” that results in endless, countless pain and suffering that ends for supposedly most people in eternal pain and suffering so that he can ultimately be glorified?!

My god, how can people not see how much this all screams of ancient, primitive mythology?! It’s so blatant, so obvious, so clear! Even so, even I didn’t see it until reason let the scales fall from my eyes, so to speak. For believers, no amount of reason will ever pierce their armor of rationalizing and delusion. The delusion rules the psyche, and arguing with even an otherwise intelligent and sane person, like Mark above, is like arguing with a paranoid schizophrenic that no the aliens are not listening to his thoughts. Whether it’s psychological, or even some remnant of evolutionary biology, some people HAVE to believe, whether it’s in Yahveh, or Allah, or Sylvia Browne, or Oprah, or astrology. Belief is a powerful force that twists logic, perverts reason, makes one immune to facts and reality.

I know, because I used to be there. For years I was clouded by religious delusion, and every argument, every debate I went toe-to-toe using as much twisted logic and sophisms at my disposal and when they would ultimately fail, my final refuge was “God is mysterious,” “who are we to question God,” “God’s will is more powerful than my mind,” “we’re only seeing the back of the tapestry,” etc etc. No amount of arguing will make any difference. They have to learn it, if ever, on their own. And people like Mark who, like me, started life out with the deck stacked against them by being raised in a family/culture that indoctrinated then during the formation of their basic psyche in the myth, the psyche (which is basically your center of reality) fights tooth-and-nail against anything that would weaken a belief system that one has invested everything about themselves into. Family, career, way of viewing the world. How much pain and torment the psyche is protecting the person against, protecting one’s beliefs from reality, when they have so much to lose. So much built around the fantasy and myth. It’s sad, really. It took me years to finally see the truth, so I have sympathy for people who still suffer under the delusion…but not much. There comes a time when a person has to honestly question their beliefs and for the sake of living in reality, for the sake of everyone around them, give up myth.