Where does right and wrong come from?

[Doug]

Matt: Why did you want to expose the Bible, to a believer, as false and contradictory?

Suppose you had attracted a believer to this thread, someone whose personal morals were good.

A kind, considerate person, who believed that the good things that they did in life, had supernatural support.

Someone, let's say, whose only child had died of cancer, but who found solace in believing that this child was now in the bosom of Abraham, and would be reunited with them some day.

Why would you want to undermine their belief?

 

[midcan5]

Morality is a tough subject, while no one brought it up, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The Golden Rule. Pretty simple in terms of commandments to live by. Do people follow it? Hell, no. People basically do what works for them, I am in agreement with Parfit that when examined closely moral behavior is often contradictory if viewed from the perspective of a consistent moral philosophy. It wouldn't take one long to find a contradiction even in the golden rule. I discussed this issue in a debate that questioned whether 'Happiness' was the chief goal of life. If it were, all actions would be easier to fathom. I disagree with that view.

http://www.fullpolitics.com/viewthread.php?tid=27223

 

[Diuretic]

Morality is a tough subject, while no one brought it up, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The Golden Rule. Pretty simple in terms of commandments to live by. Do people follow it? Hell, no. People basically do what works for them, I am in agreement with Parfit that when examined closely moral behavior is often contradictory if viewed from the perspective of a consistent moral philosophy. It wouldn't take one long to find a contradiction even in the golden rule. I discussed this issue in a debate that questioned whether 'Happiness' was the chief goal of life. If it were, all actions would be easier to fathom. I disagree with that view.

http://www.fullpolitics.com/viewthread.php?tid=27223

At the moment I'm looking at the question of eudaimonia as put by Aristotle. I'm examining it in the context of virtue and virtue ethics. It's very interesting.

 

[mattskramer]

Matt: Why did you want to expose the Bible, to a believer, as false and contradictory?

Suppose you had attracted a believer to this thread, someone whose personal morals were good.

A kind, considerate person, who believed that the good things that they did in life, had supernatural support.

Someone, let's say, whose only child had died of cancer, but who found solace in believing that this child was now in the bosom of Abraham, and would be reunited with them some day.

Why would you want to undermine their belief?

I don’t know. Perhaps I’m just mean. Perhaps I had a childhood in which too self-righteous people snubbed their noses at me and pushed the Bible in my face. I don’t know.

 

[Chips Rafferty]

Matt: Why did you want to expose the Bible, to a believer, as false and contradictory?

Suppose you had attracted a believer to this thread, someone whose personal morals were good.

A kind, considerate person, who believed that the good things that they did in life, had supernatural support.

Someone, let's say, whose only child had died of cancer, but who found solace in believing that this child was now in the bosom of Abraham, and would be reunited with them some day.

Why would you want to undermine their belief?

Doug: Why do you want to espouse the Bible, to a non-believer, as true and non-contradictory?

Suppose you had attracted a non-believer to this thread, someone whose personal morals were good.

A kind, considerate person, who believed that the good things that they did in life, had supernatural support.

Someone, let's say, whose only child had died of cancer, who found solace in believing that this child was now in the bosom of Allah, Krishna, or a host of other “Gods” other than Chewsarse, and would be reunited with them some day.

Why do “Christians” want to undermine their belief?

 

[Doug]

Chips: I don't espouse the Bible. I'm an atheist.

If I were a Christian, I could offer the believers in other forms of the supernatural, equal or better consolation. So it would not bother me to proselytize them, since I wouldn't be destroying their happiness. True, if the child had died in a state of Sin, old-fashioned Christians would have to say it is burning in the Lake of Fire, but there are few such about -- and if there are such, then fie to them too.

Surely our real contempt should be reserved for those nauseatingly self-righteous folk who make a big play of their own deprived Dickensian background (poor little me! boo hoo hoo!) (and generate tiresome stage-Irishman rants about the wickedness and selfishness of the 'respectable' people who actually made something of thmselves), while in practice showing callous indifference for real people?

Matt: You say maybe your motivation is that you are a mean person. But I doubt that very much. I suspect it is just that fundamentalist idiots irritate you. I share in this feeling. But then you should target your responses. The little old lady who finds solace in going to Mass is not your enemy, and your general invitation to debate about the Bible here is as likely to get that type, as it is to get a minion of Pat Robertson.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

A person that had read the bible would not believe a sinner was burning in hell nor that a righteous person were walking the halls of heaven.

The Bible is clear when you die your dead. Until the End times when everyone living and dead will be summoned and judged. AT the point you will either be given everlasting life or you will be completely destroyed. Most of those given a new life will live NOT in heaven but on Earth.

 

[Chips Rafferty]

Chips: I don't espouse the Bible. I'm an atheist.

If I were a Christian, I could offer the believers in other forms of the supernatural, equal or better consolation. So it would not bother me to proselytize them, since I wouldn't be destroying their happiness. True, if the child had died in a state of Sin, old-fashioned Christians would have to say it is burning in the Lake of Fire, but there are few such about -- and if there are such, then fie to them too.

Surely our real contempt should be reserved for those nauseatingly self-righteous folk who make a big play of their own deprived Dickensian background (poor little me! boo hoo hoo!) (and generate tiresome stage-Irishman rants about the wickedness and selfishness of the 'respectable' people who actually made something of thmselves), while in practice showing callous indifference for real people?

Doug, going by your mercenary standards, I did “make something of myself.”

In fact, I’ll stack my successes alongside your groundlessly esteemed Presibent’s life of serial silver spoon fed failures for inspection any day.

Contrary to the cosseted, pantywaisted, Jubilation T Cornponish, laughing stock of a leader that most Americans deify, I'm the classic example of the “from rags to riches,” “drag-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps” "self-made man" that Uncle Sham keeps urging his dimwitted drones to be.

I'll give you a very brief precis of my accomplishments then leave it to your infallible native American good judgement, the kind that put the aforementioned gibbering pig-ignorant goon in power, as to who is the bigger success; me, or that self-ordained demigod that is the epitome, the creme de la creme, the Acme, of American society.

Check out The company I started, turned into a multimillion dollar enterprise in 5 years, and sold in 1998.

From a float of $5000.00, Quantum owned - lock-stock-and-barrel - its own 10, 000 sq ft premises, all its vehicles, plant, and equipment, employed a staff of twenty, and contracted to the biggest names in the communications industry - within three years - and still returned an almost obscene annual profit.

Before Quantum I ran C.A.A’s (Civil Aviation) Victoria/Tasmania Region's Radio Lines Section (around 40 men) for many years. From which I was regularly seconded to our Foreign Affairs Department for ADAB (Australian Development Assistance Bureau) projects in second and third world countries.

I can provide you with commendations (up to Prime Ministerial level) from several of these countries. I was even made an honorary citizen of one of them for my services.

Coming from someone who was expelled from school in the seventh grade and, apart from in-house technical courses with CAA and two semesters of “Community Development,” had no further formal education, I think this is quite "successful."

Put it this way, it certainly puts the abject failures of your silvertailed Little Lord Flauntleroy in the Offal Office in the shade!

So here I am, just turned 65 and retired for going on ten years.

I’m a “self-funded retiree,” so I can’t even get a health care card, after paying taxes for 42 years and providing sterling service to the Calvinazi Establishment. Our far right-wing regime that, like yours, insinuates economic success is a sign of "salvation,” all of a sudden conveniently turns communist and classes me as a petty-bourgeoisie capitalist when it comes to giving me a paltry return on my lifetime investment!

Not only have I worked all my life, I put my life on the line for these shinny-arsed carpet bagging bastards, and now I can’t even get subsidised Lexapro for the problems THEY caused!

Yet these "respectable" bastards subsidise their capitalist buddies with untold billions to kill innocent people on behalf of a beetle-browed professional failure like GW Bush!

How fucking hypocritical can you conservatives get?!!

In summary, I’ve done what every work ethic brainwashed WASP aspires to.

I paid protection money (taxes) to the God-ordained Mafia (government) and its hit men (police, military, and associated services) all my life, paid for my own retirement, and I am not a burden on the corporate socialist system.

Surely that makes me as worshipfully decent in your Hamilinian eyes as your Pie-eyed Piper in WASPington!!

As for me crying about my Dickensian background, - au contraire, my class-conscious conservative friend. I’m as fiercely proud of it as any redneck Reb is of Dixie.

By showing me just how hollow and hypocritical “respectable people” and their institutions are, it taught me self-sufficiency and the kind of survival skills that saw me thrive in situations that Father-Know-Best fascists like you would see as insurmountable adversity.

In conclusion I warrant I’ve done far more with far less than any of the “rugged individualism” spruiking Dupes of Hazard that haunt this board has.

 

[Doug]

Chips: I applaud your energy and your success.

Here is what I don't like about the Chips Rafferty whose very articulate and entertaining, if painful to conservatives, posts I read: he sounds like a cynic, not like a Leftist activist.

Although I am a political enemy of the Left, I admire them for one thing: they have the capacity for indignation, and act on it. They see what appears to them an unjust world, where the pack is stacked before the cards are dealt, and they want to change it.

And the world is unjust. The world of human beings is what you get when some miracle zaps a gang of chimpanzees and starts them on the road to language and self-awareness. Really nasty animals. And their intelliegence and ingenuity and tools just made them able to be nastier to each other. And so it went, generation after generation. Slaughter, cut, burn alive, hang in chains, seal up in animal skins, nail to a cross, cut strips of skin and flay alive ... what a horrible species.

And then it began to change.

What is amazing to me is how much better we have made the world, in the last few hundred years, for ordinary people.

This mainly came as we got better at understanding and controlling the physical world, and also as our social and political institutions grew and evolved to embrace ever-larger layers of the population. We curbed the power of the masters; we tamed the Lords of Everything.

I'll give the Left, and its political predecessors, credit for a lot of this, although without the economic and social environment to work in, it would just have been more Peasants' Revolts. (Which, contrary to Leftist mythology, were never pretty things, either in victory or defeat.)

That's the part of the Left that I admire -- trying to change a world and make it better. That's why I like to argue with sincere liberals and Leftists, as opposed to exchange insults. I want to convince them that their aims cannot be realized by the nationalization of the means of production, or by racial quotas, or by Western disarmament, etc

And what gets my goat about your posts is that, while you are obviously an intelligent and articulate man, you appear to be just a flippant cynic, out to entertain his co-thinkers, which you no doubt do very well, but not someone who can be engaged in a serious discussion about how to make the world a better place for its inhabitants.

If I have mis-judged you, I apologize.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

Give it up Doug, they are never going to like you nor accept your version of events. You can apologize for them, praise them and defend them all you want, at the end of the day you won't vote their way so your the "enemy". And for them the ends ALWAYS justify the means. The far left are a disease. And irregardless of the denials, the far left pulls the Democratic parties levers.

What I find telling is the fact the right can and does condemn the extreme right, that they booted them out of power in the party of the right, BUT the dems embrace the far left and allow them to pull the strings.

 

[Shogun]

Give it up Doug, they are never going to like you nor accept your version of events. You can apologize for them, praise them and defend them all you want, at the end of the day you won't vote their way so your the "enemy". And for them the ends ALWAYS justify the means. The far left are a disease. And irregardless of the denials, the far left pulls the Democratic parties levers.

What I find telling is the fact the right can and does condemn the extreme right, that they booted them out of power in the party of the right, BUT the dems embrace the far left and allow them to pull the strings.

are you fucking kidding me? Your capacity for blacking out the last two presidential election cycles and making such laughable statements is rediculous.


good grief... pushing out the far right... Buddy, 00 and 04 were both SOAKED in far right dementia.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

are you fucking kidding me? Your capacity for blacking out the last two presidential election cycles and making such laughable statements is rediculous.


good grief... pushing out the far right... Buddy, 00 and 04 were both SOAKED in far right dementia.

Your an idiot, Bush is hardly right at all. And the vast majority of republicans are not far right either. Your so far left someone in the middle seems far right to you, THAT should wake you the fuck up.

 

[Shogun]

thats not what your side was clinging to in the past two presidiential cycles.

He was your poster boy of REAGAN! It's fucking hilarious to watch you dance around this morning... keep dancing, monkey boy.

 

[Chips Rafferty]

Chips: I applaud your energy and your success.

Here is what I don't like about the Chips Rafferty whose very articulate and entertaining, if painful to conservatives, posts I read: he sounds like a cynic, not like a Leftist activist.

Although I am a political enemy of the Left, I admire them for one thing: they have the capacity for indignation, and act on it. They see what appears to them an unjust world, where the pack is stacked before the cards are dealt, and they want to change it.

And the world is unjust. The world of human beings is what you get when some miracle zaps a gang of chimpanzees and starts them on the road to language and self-awareness. Really nasty animals. And their intelliegence and ingenuity and tools just made them able to be nastier to each other. And so it went, generation after generation. Slaughter, cut, burn alive, hang in chains, seal up in animal skins, nail to a cross, cut strips of skin and flay alive ... what a horrible species.

And then it began to change.

What is amazing to me is how much better we have made the world, in the last few hundred years, for ordinary people.

This mainly came as we got better at understanding and controlling the physical world, and also as our social and political institutions grew and evolved to embrace ever-larger layers of the population. We curbed the power of the masters; we tamed the Lords of Everything.

I'll give the Left, and its political predecessors, credit for a lot of this, although without the economic and social environment to work in, it would just have been more Peasants' Revolts. (Which, contrary to Leftist mythology, were never pretty things, either in victory or defeat.)

That's the part of the Left that I admire -- trying to change a world and make it better. That's why I like to argue with sincere liberals and Leftists, as opposed to exchange insults. I want to convince them that their aims cannot be realized by the nationalization of the means of production, or by racial quotas, or by Western disarmament, etc

And what gets my goat about your posts is that, while you are obviously an intelligent and articulate man, you appear to be just a flippant cynic, out to entertain his co-thinkers, which you no doubt do very well, but not someone who can be engaged in a serious discussion about how to make the world a better place for its inhabitants.

If I have mis-judged you, I apologize.

Doug, like those fairy floss idealists on the Left, you would change the world by appealing to your political opponent’s logic. I must say I genuinely admire your optimism.

Whereas I feel more is achieved by turning the point of your opponent’s political Epee in on himself.

I find satire succeeds more often in getting through to religio-reactionary (pardon the redundancy!) retards, whose patently illogical outlook clearly rules out the use of reason.

For instance, no amount of reasoning will work with a spoilt brat intent on getting its own way by putting on a tantrum in a crowded store.

Instead of bashing the shit outta the caterwauling little \!/, it is far better for someone, an uncle, an aunt, or even a complete stranger, to get down on the floor with it and mimic its epileptic-like purple-faced antics.

Generally, after almost busting a boiler at the temerity of a mere adult imitating it, His Mimi Majesty is reduced to gut-wrenching, resentful, sympathy seeking sobs.

After a few sessions of such treatment, Mummy’s Little Tin God usually realises it needs to negotiate its narcissistic needs, not imperiously demand them as its god-given right.

Sure it might not publicly admit to its self-centred petulant pissy-pants peers that it has learnt a lasting lesson, but you can be sure it won’t try its temper tantrum tactic on Uncle Danny again.

Unfortunately, some spoilt brats only respond to a thorough trashing. And the more I look at the world’s biggest brat, the more I am convinced that this is what it will take before it understands it isn’t the epicentre of it’s God's creation.

A totally unchastised kid that keeps putting his hands on a red hot stove either learns not to do so or he losses the use of its hands. Only a irredeemably psychologically disturbed child keeps doing it and blames the stove for his pain.

When the pain becomes too intense even a donkey will have sense enough to lift its arse off of the thorn it is sitting on. I haven’t the slightest sympathy for American "asses:" bleating about their self-induced pain.

BTW, I class myself as a cynical iconoclast with Nihilist tendencies.

You may have noticed I don't offer alternatives, I just oppose dogma, be it from the mouths of chaos fearing conservatives or from idealistic Chardonnay sipping socialists.

Despite this, I DO read you and quite often find myself agreeing with your right-wing reflections. I have real respect for your well reasoned and eloquently expressed opinions.

And thanks for the apology, although there was really no need to do so. No one here has ever truly offended me. You have to still have tickets on yourself to be offended.

Let me assure you that anyone who has stood before a select crowd of vicariously curious “respectable” folk from his hometown*, that included the Lord Mayor, the State Premier, and other notables, and candidly discussed his sexual inadequacies, admitted beating his wife, and far worse, isn’t easily insulted anymore.

*AA Public Awareness weekend

 

[Doug]

To Chips and RetiredGySgt and others, all I can do is to respond with a quote from Alexander Herzen: We must open men's eyes, not tear them out of their heads.

 

[midcan5]

And the answer to the original question is....biology, self interest, cynicism (no higher auth), or some higher authority? and the real answer is none of the above but rather society progressing slowly from the cave to nuclear holocaust. We are somewhere before that last event.

The most brilliant contemporary book on these questions is "Reasons and Persons" by Derek Parfit. Wade in slowly it is a complicated argument.

"It is not enough to ask, ‘Will my act harm other people?’ Even if the answer is No, my act may still be wrong, because of its effects on other people. I should ask, ‘Will my act be one of a set of acts that will together harm other people?’ The answer may be Yes. And the harm to others may be great. If this is so, I may be acting very wrongly, like the Harmless Torturers."

Derek Parfit (b. 1943), British philosopher. Reasons and Persons

 

[Chips Rafferty]

To Chips and RetiredGySgt and others, all I can do is to respond with a quote from Alexander Herzen: We must open men's eyes, not tear them out of their heads.

To Chips and RetiredGySgt and others

So now its Gunny and Danny, eh?

Don’t tell me you are finally connecting the collective guilt dots between the arguments of Gunny and his Jesus freak friends and my own, Doug!

You do believe in the unassailable logic of the universally accepted Biblical concept of a people’s collective guilt for their leaders crimes, don’t you?

I mean you’re not going to imprudently try to deny the collective guilt of the Germans, (Hitlerian and Kaiserian) Japanese, Chinese, Cubans, Cambodians, Koreans, Laotians, Filipinos, Afghans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Syrians, Austrians, Australians, Iranians, Russians, South Americans, Pacific Islanders, and scores of other “evil” peoples, that America has altruistically crusaded against – solely to save an ungrateful globe from itself, of course! – ever since its foundation, are you?

To do so would contradict the casus belli used by every Gratingest American Generation since the exclusively “Elect” Puritans holocausted the heathen Injuns. Why it would make every war since Satan and his "evil Angel" supporters were cast out of Heaven a mockery!

Not to mention leaving your present evil regime without its fig-leaf excuse for its Orson Wellsian War of the World!

Worse still, it would question the legitimacy of the open cheque Congress - i.e. the infallibly insightful American people - gave a patently incompetent, known alcohol and drug-addicted doofus, with a reverse Midas Touch, to collectively condemn to national death ANY PEOPLE ON EARTH his fevered Christian rent-a-mind hallucinates as “evil”!

Do you realise what rejecting collective guilt would do to your credibility among your incredibly credulous, unbelievably self-biased Calvinazi brethren, dont you, Doug? Those who think the killing of millions of coloured kids was "worth it" - to quote that ugly Toadess, Maddeningly Notbright - to rid the world of the non-threatening likes of Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, and Saddam.

It would mean certain excommunication from the lost in the Fifties, Leave it to Beaver Clan, disfellowship from the Annette Funicello Fan Club, and facing the American Auto-Da-Fe for defaming fascist family vales!

This is what you have to do to confute my irrefutably respectable call for unconditional warfare, including nooks, against the American people. Until they either surrender their indictable leaders to a world court, or assassinate them, for their serial crimes against humanity.

To say otherwise is to confirm your leader’s ultra arrogant assertion that global laws and conventions don’t apply to Americans.

FUCK! That feels s-o-o R-I-G-H-TEOUS!

I'm turning Sepponese, I think I'm turning Sepponese, I really think
so,
Turning Sepponese, I think I'm turning Sepponese, I really think so....

 

[Gunny]

So now its Gunny and Danny, eh?

Don’t tell me you are finally connecting the collective guilt dots between the arguments of Gunny and his Jesus freak friends and my own, Doug!

You do believe in the unassailable logic of the universally accepted Biblical concept of a people’s collective guilt for their leaders crimes, don’t you?

I mean you’re not going to imprudently try to deny the collective guilt of the Germans, (Hitlerian and Kaiserian) Japanese, Chinese, Cubans, Cambodians, Koreans, Laotians, Filipinos, Afghans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Syrians, Austrians, Australians, Iranians, Russians, South Americans, Pacific Islanders, and scores of other “evil” peoples, that America has altruistically crusaded against – solely to save an ungrateful globe from itself, of course! – ever since its foundation, are you?

To do so would contradict the casus belli used by every Gratingest American Generation since the exclusively “Elect” Puritans holocausted the heathen Injuns. Why it would make every war since Satan and his "evil Angel" supporters were cast out of Heaven a mockery!

Not to mention leaving your present evil regime without its fig-leaf excuse for its Orson Wellsian War of the World!

Worse still, it would question the legitimacy of the open cheque Congress - i.e. the infallibly insightful American people - gave a patently incompetent, known alcohol and drug-addicted doofus, with a reverse Midas Touch, to collectively condemn to national death ANY PEOPLE ON EARTH his fevered Christian rent-a-mind hallucinates as “evil”!

Do you realise what rejecting collective guilt would do to your credibility among your incredibly credulous, unbelievably self-biased Calvinazi brethren, dont you, Doug? Those who think the killing of millions of coloured kids was "worth it" - to quote that ugly Toadess, Maddeningly Notbright - to rid the world of the non-threatening likes of Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, and Saddam.

It would mean certain excommunication from the lost in the Fifties, Leave it to Beaver Clan, disfellowship from the Annette Funicello Fan Club, and facing the American Auto-Da-Fe for defaming fascist family vales!

This is what you have to do to confute my irrefutably respectable call for unconditional warfare, including nooks, against the American people. Until they either surrender their indictable leaders to a world court, or assassinate them, for their serial crimes against humanity.

To say otherwise is to confirm your leader’s ultra arrogant assertion that global laws and conventions don’t apply to Americans.

FUCK! That feels s-o-o R-I-G-H-TEOUS!

I'm turning Sepponese, I think I'm turning Sepponese, I really think
so,
Turning Sepponese, I think I'm turning Sepponese, I really think so....

I'm just trying to imagine them actually making a tinfoil hat big enough for your head ....

 

[Doug]

Chips: I think if I read carefully through your post I could boil it down to some simple ideas. Then we could argue those ideas. But I don't have the mental energy to do so. If you could do the work yourself, and post a summary of what you are saying, we could debate it.

Everyone: The best book I have found for giving a conservative take on "where does morality come from" is James Q Wilson's [ame=http://www.amazon.com/MORAL-SENSE-James-Q-Wilson/dp/0684833328/ref=sr_1_15/103-9655811-7155832?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193051238&sr=1-15] The Moral Sense[/ame]. I urge everyone to read this book. Perhaps if enough people did so, we could have a discussion about it.