Re: I feel like college is changing my friend
@Daigonite, I am not religious myself either, or at least not other than in the personal sense.
I was bought up a Christian, but with an emphasis on openmindedness etc.
"morals" or "morality" if you study it as a subject stands apart from Christianity or religion since it simply reflects on human conduct and can cover everything from the practice of science, the foundations of laws the rightness of corporal punishment.
One problem with going too far down the "no universal morals, everything relative" path is then you ultimately end up in a situation where there is no overbearing force upon moral action other than force itself.
jack the ripper wants to murder people because he enjoys it, so he does because he can.
Other people don't like jack the ripper doing murders so they get together and linch him and there are more of them than there are of him murder is wrong and bye bye jack.
this is actually the rather unpleasant situation posited by Fredrich Nietche, that morality essentially comes from the weak collectively exerting force ove r the strong.
this also leads to the disturbing social Darwinist implications, since if the majority of people decide cannibalism is good for society, well it doesn't matter if the minority object since the majority, and therefore those with might on their side have spoken, end of story!
I would also be very careful with throwing around scientific principles such as "evidence"
If you study the problem of induction or experimental regress will learn that science itself is essentially a set of assumptions based on other assumptions. Yes, probably the best assumptions we can make at the time, but unofortunately just that.
this is one reason why science will never negate personal religious experience since there are people who have experienced the presence of god, but nobody has experienced the presence of an electron, and it is only faith in the previously occurring scientific theory and that the effects of the experiment show that electrons exist after all, where as for those people who ahave a true connection to God that connection is something personally felt.
This is equally not to say we should all go around doubting the existence of the electrons running through our computers who's negative and positive charges make up this forum, just a note that the likes of Richard Dorkins who admire the almighty scientists for dispensing truth and hate the nasty silly religious people for dispensing lies are waaaay off the mark.
Indeed philosophers I know tend to be agnostics for this reason.
Myself I am not convinced the existence of god is something that one can prove logically, it's something that one experiences directly.
Joseph, I am afraid this is probably where we disagree. Since rather like Bishop spong did, while I do that the writers of the bib
le did! have a sense of divinity, I tend to believe that it is a set of historical documents written with the understanding and morality of the time that said divine revelation was interpreted by the writers of the bible with the views they had.
The idea of punitive justice and sacrifice was very much around at that point in history, it is part of Jewish ethics.
Likewise there is at least some evidence that some of the gospel writers had rather audiences, for example Spong that John was writing primarily for Jews who had been directly condemned by the jewish authorities of the time, were being denounced in sinagogs as unclean, were thus looking for comfort and the knolidge that God wasn't going to reject them.
Of course this sort of interpretation and understanding of the bible is not compatible with the idea that literally every word is absolutely true, indeed that was the theme of spong's book.
I was never myself bought u p with that sort of dogmatic belief, indeed most Christians in Britain don't tend to hold as much, so it isn't particularly important for me, I can quite accept the idea of the Bible as divinely enspired (indeed perhaps not the only divine revelation in the worlds' history), but don't need it to be literally word for word true.
Btw this isn't again intended as an attack, just a sharing of beliefs, though given where this conversation is headed we might be coming to hume's statement "I can reason no longer with him", ie, it's gone beyond a point where moral dialogue is possible since the underlying assumptions are no longer compatible enough for furtile discourse.
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