Re: I feel like college is changing my friend
@Daigonite, I have studdied ethics for years now as an adult. While I do agree belief in god is not a necessity for ethics, I would be very careful with "good of society" as a standard or reason for morality.
As Joseph said, there are plenty of people who would use "social good" to justify all sorts of things, racism, slavery, economic slavery, sexism, especially people who conceive "the good of society" as only referringto that part of humanity they perceive as mattering, ---- consider some of the loopy sexists who think everyone would be better off if women just stayed at home and had children (read the Handmaid's tale for a good portrait of this).
Ultimately focusing on "society" seems to me scarily close to social Darwinism, and ultimately fascism and eugenics.
Myself I'd simply base morality on the fact that everyone suffers, wehther physically, spiritually or through lack of freedom, suffering is bad, and ac tions that tend diminishing suffering are good.
Of course there are more macro questions about social management and the best political or logical structures how to diminish suffering, but for the basic moral principle you really don't need to go any further, either postulating some great "society" to sacrifice your moral efforts to, or requiring that God be there to guarantee reward or punishment.
As for God nocturnus, I'm afraid when you start postulating questions like "unclean" or god being too holy to look on evil you have simply lost me.
My conception of what god is primarily based on meditation and experience, as well as a little scholarship.
If you asked me to describe! my experience of god I'd say two things.
1: universal love.
2: universal presence.
The best way I can explain this is to say that even were I to get a spaceship and travel light years away into space, I could conceive of a ny part of the universe that would not! be a part of that presence.
the idea that something so grubby, so petty so profoundly and disgustingly pointless as our capacity to be nasty to each other would change that is something I find directly inconceivable a very fundamental level.
it would be like the idea that the sun shining down on an ant colony could be affected by where the ants walk.
yet as a contrast to this, was the universal love, the connectedness, the fact that this was not! just the impersonal vastness of creation but something uniquely and profoundly ---- personal.
Okay, we're getting to the point where words don't work anymore.
of course, these are experiences and the conclusions I have drawn from those experiences.
I would claim any authority for these experiences or impressions of god that would really have force to change anothers' beliefs, I put them into words to try and explain why the conception of god and
punitive justice is one which is so profoundly alien to me.
Btw, I'm enjoying this topic as well, and also very glad that people are so able to share views without too much by way of shenanigans.
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