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I am religious and believe in free will

70 (27.6%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

113 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (24%)

Total Members Voted: 249

[Egan_BW]

I'll only join a cool-robes religion if it means I can cast fireballs. :V

[mate888]

I'll only join a cool-robes religion if it means I can cast fireballs. :V

I mean, the Spanish Inquisition has been gone for a while, but who knows.

[TD1]

I was just wondering - when Christians say "Atheists need Christianity to give them morality" is the assumption that those pre-Jesus were amoral, or simply that morality changed? If the latter, how is this reconciled with them claiming the non religious need Christian morality, if even that is subjective?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I imagine most people who make an argument like that just don't care. Christian = Good, Other = Bad. There's no need to consider "pre-Jesus". Smarter apologists do what the Catholics do and say God's moral standards are caught up in the natural law we are all aware of on some level. It's a triple threat. It explains how non-Christians can be moral, it condemns non-Christians for "knowing" Christianity is true but not accepting it, and it lets them move the goalposts of the mysterious natural law when needed.

[TempAcc]

Main argument goes that man, in believing there is no God and no real consequences for his actions other than what is imposed on him by others and/or himself, would just use his life to seek pleasures and nothing else, as without God there'd be no reason to want anything else and morality would pointless, as everything would be become nothing upon death.

Thats just the very basics of it. There's also the historical-cultural argument, since christian morality is one of the main pillars, if not THE main pillar upon which western concepts of morality were built upon.

[Frumple]

Depends on the denomination, ha. That said, a common thread with a lot of christian sects is that morality is defined as "what God wants", as described by bible, priest, and signs or communication from God or its agents. When they say atheists need God to have morality, they're saying that very, very literally. Shit's straight up definitionally impossible without it being done to follow God's will. Morality in that case, basically, is not what you do, but who you do it for.

And sure, those before the jews or whatever were amoral. Or... non-moral or something. Complete disconnect, not against or lacking. Amoral is close but tends to indicate it's in relation to moral or immoral, and that's not quite what's going on. God will forgive them _{probably maybe ahaha yeah no poor bastards gonna' burn}, according to some interpretations.

[Kot]

Smarter apologists do what the Catholics do and say God's moral standards are caught up in the natural law we are all aware of on some level. It's a triple threat. It explains how non-Christians can be moral, it condemns non-Christians for "knowing" Christianity is true but not accepting it, and it lets them move the goalposts of the mysterious natural law when needed.

But a lot of core concepts of morality do kinda come from the ingrained animal instinct - don't kill those of your pack, share the food, don't breed with women of other men because he will be pissed (continuation of his lineage and whatnot), and liking your parents is kinda ingrained because they care for you, because continuation of species. For this example, that's what's in the decalogue, of which other laws only invoke God and worship of him, which to be honest, is the thing that can lead to denouncing or even stabbing other people for not being pious enough. I mean, it's only a threat if you assume God has to be real. I mean, it explains how anyone can be moral, it explains where the Christianity even got from, and the mysterious natural law can be easily observed and measured by observing the animals.

I mean, it's not like religion is evil, but I find the claim that religion gives morality funny, for it's the other way around. Morality creates religion, as a way to explain (to less... intelligent people who don't get the concept of common good, and think that stealing is good, because it's good for that person) and enforce it (do it, or else God gets mad) and probably some other stuff.

Shit's straight up definitionally impossible without it being done to follow God's will. Morality in that case, basically, is not what you do, but who you do it for.

Humanity? As a species, and a "greater" concept?

without God there'd be no reason to want anything else and morality would pointless, as everything would be become nothing upon death.

Humanity? As a species, and a "greater" concept? Also your kids.

EDIT:
Also, as an answer to what was before Jesus - some other progressively complicated systems of beliefs tracking back to the animal instincts of proto-humans and then to whatever apes were before, and then to whatever... you get the idea.

As for what Christians religions belive was pre-Jesus - God's morality and laws which are also pretty much the same (although with more gay hate) since they're the same thing (for most part), and that all religions and people in general get the moral code from God because he kinda imprinted it in humans when he created them (although the recognition came only after the fruit of Eden thing) so the "voice of God" echoes through everyone and all religions because we deep down know what is true?
As for what was before Jews, then yeah, there was nothing, since, you know, world is apparently 6000 years old (or something around that) according to Bible, so there was always religious code of laws (in a way, although commandments came later, I suppose?).

[Frumple]

... what?

Though no, there's probably not a good answer for the chicken and egg of morality and religion, without a time machine, anyway. Speculation like that is fun, but hilariously empty and so thoroughly unconfirmable any guess might as well be false. Folks have been arguing if gods decree it because it's good or if it's good because god decrees it longer than english has existed as a language.

[Kot]

It is though. Archeological evidence and, you know, common sense indicate that the pack instincts and whatnot came a lot before first ritual burials and other stuff that could be considered religion.
Unless bacteria also belive in bacteria Jesus, or something.

[RAM]

I mean, it's not like religion is evil

I would argue that religions which have moral imperitives are evil. They inherently deny the indifvidual the authority to make their own morality judgements and impose morality judgements that the individual is not permitted to question(Lacking a committment to god's authority is usually an official failure condition) and doesn't understand(They may have an understanding of it of their own, and agree with it independantly, but they are doing it for religious reasons and are not permitted to question those reasons sufficiently to understand them.). Externally-imposed morality imposes responsibility which is fundamentally incompatible with personal responsibility which is required to maintain personal morality.
...
A morality that isn't challenged isn't justified...
...
It isn't even enough to personally verify religous morality. One needs(In order to justify it) to generate their own morality independantly. It is the old arguing trick of going on the offensive. You can say "The president committed election fraud.". One reply is "There is no way that it is possible. They would have revised the security after those problems with the virus busters going wrong!". Another reply is "You keep crying about healthcare, but when you had your chance, nobody wanted it!". The latter is going to be far more effective because people will be too busy yelling about how wrong you are to remember their original issue. If ou start by verifying that you agree with the morality that you have been given, then you have already lost the chance to find out if there is a better one...

explain (to less... intelligent people who don't get the concept of common good, and think that stealing is good, because it's good for that person)

I would say that it is not so much that less intelligent people don't understand that good for them is the limit of morality. I beileve that far more common is people compatmentalising morality "It is good that I make money. people's lives may or may not get ruined as a result, but that is an unrelated issue.". Another is mindlessness(Which is the default function of the human mind) "Wha? Hurting people? Naaa, we were just having some fun! I mean, sure, there was screaming and crying and bleeding and dying and stuff, but that is just how these things go, y'Know?". Then there is familiarity "Huh? Arbitrarily dictating life or death of entire populations without justification? Brutal regime that inhibits freedom too much for a mentally stable society? Stop being silly! That's just Hitler! Everyone know he is a good guy. Finally someone willing to stand up and stop those scheming jews from stealing our nation out from under us! It is about time we had someone honest and decent to end this ridiculous apathy and fix things for the better..."... It is not so much that people are not intelligent, but that they do not apply their intelligence to their objectives or justifications.

Morality creates religion, as a way to explain and enforce it and probably some other stuff.

Shit's straight up definitionally impossible without it being done to follow God's will. Morality in that case, basically, is not what you do, but who you do it for.

Humanity? As a species, and a "greater" concept?

I have difficulty parsing this, but I believe that you are saying that you can do things for humanity in place of doing things for god. Which sort of seems to be missing the point of the original statement of religion defining good as being god, and thus what humanity believes is irrelevant. I would argue that humanity as a species is a terrible god. They are clearly insane. They think that they are bette than animals because thye can build cities and guns and art... Animals can build settlements and weapons and art. Humans are largely incapable of building complex weapons, sophiticated art, and large settlements. These things are built by humans, but only by relying upon unfathomable generations of human civilisation. Humans have a high talent for language and manipulation of sturdy objects. Baiscally, humans are gifted at making records. I very much doubt that you would see a single generation of humans come up with something as sophisticated as a rock combined with a stick outside of an extreme instance of inspiration. Humans are naturally inclined to think the most of themselves for no reason. It is basically the same as religion, it ends up being all about obediance and lacks justification.

without God there'd be no reason to want anything else and morality would pointless, as everything would be become nothing upon death.

Also your kids.

You kids become pointless unless they also have kids, and those are only as valid as their kids, which are only valid because they have kids, which they might not, and the concept of all possibilities occuring if provided with sufficient time indicates that eventually there will be no kids. Also entropy/gravity-death of the universe, or armageddon... But really, justifying kids with more kids is dependant upon valuing kids, and provides no inherent value for kids itself. You may as well just say that kids are self-evidently reason-for-being and thus everyone is self-evidently meaningful because everyone was kids at some point... Unfortunately some people don't feel that humans, even children, are self-evidently meaningful. Otherwise, would people be asking why their own existence is meaningful?

For myself, I feel that the best available meaning of life is to seek out a good meaning of life. Which has various quite promising implications. I feel that the inherent meaning of life is to "be yourself" in an evolutionary sense. Which is abysmally bad for a whole host of reasons, not least of which is that there is nobody at the helm and that the whole system is composed of lotteries, but the imminent doom is perhaps the most off-putting. Perhaps the most plausible of the vaguely defensible options is to express the self that you can be proud of. This largely involves throwing away human impulse and adopting understanding and prediction, as otherwise you won't have a clear understanding of what you can be proud of and won't be in a position to control what you express.

As for what Christians religions belive was pre-Jesus - God's morality and laws which are also pretty much the same (although with more gay hate) since they're the same thing (for most part), and that all religions and people in general get the moral code from God because he kinda imprinted it in humans when he created them (although the recognition came only after the fruit of Eden thing) so the "voice of God" echoes through everyone and all religions because we deep down know what is true?
As for what was before Jews, then yeah, there was nothing, since, you know, world is apparently 6000 years old (or something around that) according to Bible, so there was always religious code of laws (in a way, although commandments came later, I suppose?).

If a god's morality is inherent, then everyone should know to obey that god without needing to be converted. Devosion to that specific religion should be as common as not murdering. The existence of wide-spread adoption of incompatible religions is good evidence that such is not the case, or that the god in question doesn't actually regard worship as being as important as murder.

As for the 6000 years old thing? There is loads of evidence that such is not true. Enough that I would say that it goes beyond "the gods just like the idea of things being in progress when they started" and well into "the gods are deliberately lying to us". There are just too many details to it, they could have just had everything break down over that span of time and we would have just accepted it, but no, they needed to splat down whole evolutionary trees and weird extinction events... Now, if the gods in question say that lying is okay, then fine, religion of unreliable texts and shameless P.R. campaigns is willing to live up to its own standards. And why not? Everyone loves trickster gods! But a lot of these religions make quite a big deal about their texts not being written as a shameless divine P.R. piece and suggest that lying is bad...

It is though. Archeological evidence and, you know, common sense indicate that the pack instincts and whatnot came a lot before first ritual burials and other stuff that could be considered religion.
Unless bacteria also belive in bacteria Jesus, or something.

I would say that bacteria jesus is unlikely. But bacteria commonality is quite likely. there really isn't that much special about humans. I suspect that the human internal monologue is the highlight, and I doubt that it is completely unique. On the other hand, internal monologue is not necessary. I am pretty sure that I didn't have an internal monologue until after I learned to read. I remember being asked to "read silently" and just had a complete "huh!?!?" moment. And we certainly formulate ideas without spelling them out, so that really isn't a thing. I could easily see bacteria having decision-making functions that focused on the self and decision-making functions that focused upon the group and that the latter could be equated to religion. I can see how people could question if such a thing is a mind, but to me it is just a whole great tower of different methods of determining outcomes, with rocks almost certrainly near the bottom with their "roll down until stable" operation and humans near the top with their "if problems arising from acquiring food is less than value of food + hunger+expecation of food in the future then acquire food" operation.

 Really, free will is a false concept. It is not as though it does or doesn't exist, but there is no point to it either way. There is no potential for variation. All decisions are a product of mind and circumstance. mind and circumstance are entirely derived from mind and circumstance all the way back to the start of mind, and the forces that led up to that are a product of immutable processes from origin or infinity. The outcome of random chance is inevitable, regardless of whether it is predictable. The ridiculous cience-fiction notion of a parallel world being created every time a person makes a decision is ludicrous. the closest that could happen is infinite worlds with slight variations that resulted is varying decisions, possibly even commencing at the point of variation. The outcome is the same, but the process is completely different. The important point of all this is that the human mind possesses zero potential for variation from its inevitable course. The rock rolls downhill with the same certainty that the hippy feels that a war for the purposes of increasing the support for the ruling political party is bad. People think themselves far too special. The only power we have is to be party to invoking a specific result, or we can be amongst the rocks who abandon that and go with their impulses. I like to think that people would be party to making a better world if they saw it as a possibility.

[Egan_BW]

Jeez, get that religion discussion out of the railgun thread.

[Frumple]

It is though. Archeological evidence and, you know, common sense indicate that the pack instincts and whatnot came a lot before first ritual burials and other stuff that could be considered religion.
Unless bacteria also belive in bacteria Jesus, or something.

Man, when you bring common sense into parsing archeological evidence you dun screwed up. Common sense ain't -- stuff's a set of cultural norms highly informed by bias, common to that particular society only sorta' and actually common even among specific ones only occasionally. For all it works out often enough what likes to happen when you start applying assumptions ultimately based on your current environment and whatnot to incomplete reconstructions of previous environments is those assumptions end up wrong. If you're going to make analysis that isn't just a nice go at a just-so story (i.e. it might as well be fiction, to the extent it isn't outright) you kneecap "common sense" and bury it in the nearest mushroom patch.

Indicate isn't prove, basically. What a thing looks like doesn't necessitate it is what that thing is. We make good attempts at a guess, and do our best to make things cohesive based on what information we have, and it's not like that isn't important to one extent or another... but we did that for dinosaurs, too, and they seem to be picking up the oddest profusion of feathers nowadays :V

We have a lot of things, but the ability to say with justified confidence that religion and ritual were caused by morality or that morality was caused by religion and ritual innit one of 'em. That's the kind of thing you can build evidence for and make a good argument, but at the end of the day we have no means of observing when it happened and end up with the grounds to say which is right, or if either are.

Which, hell. Is fine. For all it's fun to talk about the actual answer doesn't really make a difference.

[TD1]

Heavily suggesting a morality, provided the reasons for doing so are not corrupt or destructive, is not evil in my opinion. Most of evil is in intent, not action.

[TempAcc]

Ye, plus morality is a fluid concept that can evolve with the group that stablished it. What was moral 100 years ago isn't considered moral nowadays. What was once evil may be viewed as not evil as morality gets perfected, and what was once considered good may be considered evil by the new morality.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the old morality was evil in comparison to the new morality, it was just born out of a different historical and cultural context.
Hell, this happened within the timeline of the bible itself, as when jesus questioned a lot of the old practices and rituals carried over from the period of Moses' laws. He didn't want to bring about new morals, but he did seem to want to get rid of empty ritualism (something which was important in Moses' time, in order to keep the widely diverse group he was leading together, as rituals create a sense of identity and union) and maybe the more severe punishments (murdering a herd animal is a very serious offense if you're travelling in the desert and your group's existence depends mostly on livestock, but not so much if you're already settled somewhere and have actual crops, for example).

One of the biggest mistakes of both theists and atheists is to take a certain concept of morality born thousands of years ago within a different historical and cultural context at face value. The atheist that views christianity based only on literal interpretation of what he reads in the bible is commiting the same mistake of the hardcore fundamentalist who wants to live by Moses law and stone people for trying to steal cattle.

Of course, there is always an almost unchanging core to all systems of morality, which is inseparable to the whole system and the basis for all of it. In christianity thats the 10 commandments.

[RAM]

I feel that separation degrades morality. A general can order a city to be captured, quickly, at all costs. They may well know that this could result in soldiers dying because they were forced into situations with less preparation, civilians dying because there is insufficient time to verify their identity, prisoners beign executed because detainment is impractical... A general upswing in events that would generally be considered bad. The general, however, is not personally performing such actions, and can only speculate as to how likely they with the new orders and how likely they would be without. It is much easier for the general to dismiss these thingsas uncertain, or to avoid the issue entirely by lacking exposure to it. The private, on the other hand, has to confront these things personally, but has faith that following orders is very important. They have surrendered some of their morality to orders, trusting that orders will be moral, or at least that obeying orders as a practice is overall more moral on the larger scale. But the orders come from a general who may well have considered these things and decided that it would be worth it in the long run, but may or may not be correct, or the general might have ignored all this and is just looking for a quick victory to gain notoriety. And the private is likely not fighting for the general, they are likely fighting for patriotism. Which is all well an good if they actually know the relative identities of their own and the opposing nations, but in all likelihood they would fight for almost anywhere so long as it is their nation of origin, regardless of whether it is stable, civil, corrupt, competent... and they probably never looked closely enough to know one way or another. Of course, there is also fighting for their family, but in all likelihood they don't actually know what would happen to their family if the war is lost. So the private isn't even taking orders from the entitiy that they serve, they are taking orders from a general who is just acting as a representative and it is almost certain that the private doesn't know the general's personality, convictions, morals, nor most anything else about them.

The private can still make their own moral decisions, but if they oppose orders and it is deemed that the orders failed to be actively opposed to morality, then the private is damned, and may even be so regardless. If they support orders and are deemed immoral for doing so then they will likely retain some respect for having obeyed orders. Religion is basically the same, religious morality is entirely capable of opposing personal morality, and religious morality is less sensitive to context. It is also true that religious morality benefits from experience, but in my own experience, anything that isn't stringently verified is likely to pick up as many errors as accuracies, and religion often actively opposes verification. Then again, people can claim that their religion would never compel them to oppose their own morality, but at that point they are refusing to follow a religion that disagrees with them, which probably meant that they fail to bear sufficient committment to their religion to meet its minimum standards.

So all this comes down the the question of whether gods are trustworthy. Most people seem to commit to gods because doing so "feels right". Unfortunately, conmen around the world have conclusively proven that what "feels right" is the polar opposite of what can be trusted. The most reasonable assumption is that any given god doesn't exist, there is just too much opposition and exclusivity amongst religions, not to mention Occam's Razor... The second most reasonable assumption is that all gods are untrustworthy. Gods are generally agreed to be mentally different from humans, so they reasonably have different ambitions, and with no means of being caught in a lie, they are free to engineer us to their own ambitions rather than ours.