Subjective Morality

[dave_littler]

I’ve had a thought rumbling around in my head in recent months - a product of one of my occasional and innumerable hypothetical debates with theists - which a post this morning on the atheist community prompted me to begin to formulate more textually.

It runs along similar lines to a lot of my thoughts on this topic (which you can view as pedantry,

Comments

[thecaffeinecat]

That is a gift of a topic to present to people who actually know about their religion. Imagine discussing this with a group of rabbis! I would love to be there and I suspect that they would enjoy the experience too. Maybe it would be really worthwhile trying to organise this sometime. An intelligent discussion like that would be of so much benefit :D

[dave_littler]

In broad terms, I find that a lot of people who claim to know about their religion actually just know a lot about making excuses about the shortcomings of their religion. The entire field of apologetics basically boils down to a giant system of excuses for why the religion doesn't say the things it says, and doesn't mean the things it means.

This having been said, I wouldn't mind locking horns with one. My main target has always been christianity, since they're the ones that locally are the most aggressive, but most of my arguments which deal with christianity also apply to judaism.

[skittish_derby]

I have had similar thoughts-- especially considering their bad guy character and all the not-bad he has actually done to humanity compared to the actual-bad the god himself has done. (you know, if I am to take any of it seriously)

I mean, satan is responsible for giving man the ability to think for himself. god is responsible for killing millions of millions of people. So, I sometimes wonder if the people got it backwards, and are just delusional by god's great ability to warp minds.

[dave_littler]

Hah! Well, as far as that goes, have you ever heard of "Asherah"?

In case you haven't (or anyone else happens upon this comment and hasn't), it's important to know that the idea of the snake in the Genesis story being "Satan" is a huge ret-con, introduced much later. In the text, there's no suggestion of this whatsoever. It's just a magical talking snake, with no explanation at all.

However! If you go back to an older version of the mythology, before the dawn of Judaism, the myth went a little bit differently. Back then, the religion was a polytheism. The father-god, then known as El, and later by other names, had a wife named Asherah. Asherah was among other things a goddess of wisdom and knowledge, and her symbol was a snake wrapped about a tree. Originally, the snake wasn't some diabolical boogieman, it was just a mother passing on her knowledge to her daughter, Eve.

[skittish_derby]

I had never heard that alternate mythology it seems very fascinating (is it in any books you know of?), but i did know that the idea of satan being the snake came later. it just seems a lot easier to debate what the xtians in general think they believe, rather than what is actually in the text. you know?

[dave_littler]

No, I know, I know. And I debate that internally all the time. I mean, you can look at my "atheism" or "religion" tag, and see me arguing on about eight different levels, right? Debating the logic within their mythology, discussing the history of their mythology, discussing the social implication of literalistic or liberal interpretations of the mythology. They're all worthwhile areas of discussion, but sometimes there's something like this, and I just say to myself "do I even want to dignify this idea that the serpent is supposed to be the devil? Seriously?" On a certain level, it's almost like by doing so, I'm giving them a win. I'm letting them get away with their stupidity and ignorance, you know? And I feel like I can do better than that

[echan314]

Ugh. I hate the fact that there are so many christians who claim that purely by being christian they are better and more moral than anyone else out there. (Again, ugh)

I suppose the issue is that God is considered omnipotent, omnipresent, and completely infallible. God doesn't make mistakes, or do bad things because, as you said, due to the do-er, they are good things. God as a vengeful being has never, ever made sense to me.

Of course, I fall into the rather large category of "lapsed catholic" so I have a strange view of the world to begin with. (And I was always more attached to the forgiving God of my imagination who absolves if you admit you fucked up and attempt penance).

The worst part about all this is that there are plenty of athiests and/or agnostics out there who are far more moral than most christians I know. It has nothing to do with your god(s) and everything to do with you as a person, how conscientious you are of those around you, and whether or not you are more of a selfish douche than the other people around you.

[dave_littler]

It seems that the whole omniscient/omnipotent/omnibenevolent thing is another ret-con, or at least a very liberal re-inerpretation of certain cherry-picked words and phrases in the original text. I mean, if you read the older books of the bible, it paints a picture of a god who is fallible, can be surprised, who is capable of acts of pettiness and spite which he can be talked out of or later regret. This isn't the modern "force of nature" god we think of today; this is more in line with the Greek or Babylonian gods who were his contemporaries at the time

[echan314]

My brain hurts from all this.

I mean, basically the bible was written by dudes about their God and then reinterpreted and reinterpreted and translated and reinterpreted and then translated from the translation until what we have is something very much like what you'd get if you threw this through google translate's translations of four or five languages back to back.

[dave_littler]

You're mostly right.

Like I was saying to skittish_dirby elsewhere in this ppost, the mythology which the earliest Hebrews came up with is actually a simplified, bastardized version of an older religion which had been practiced in the region we now know as Israel; basically, there was a huge cultural crash and burn, and the people there were set back a couple of centuries. In the process, their religion went through a big revamp, and what had once been a polytheism became a monotheism; the other gods were pruned away, and the father-god, El, became Yahweh, the god of the Jews and later the Christians.

El was a much simpler creature than the later version, more like a tribal hero-god, of the sort that was common of the time.

I would LOVE to know the history of El; I suspect he started off as some flesh-and-blood guy. Probably a king or something. Sadly, that culture was so completely over-written by the later Jews that we're lucky we even know what we do about them. We're unlikely to ever know very much more.

ivano agostini

[anonymous]

Hello

euroconf agugliano

[anonymous]

Hello