Morality and the 10 Commandments

Bearing in mind the twofold for-the-sake-of-argument assumptions, namely (a) that the christian god exists, and (b) that only the Decalogue constitutes his/her moral code, the first four commandments are immoral insofar as the christian god doesn’t reveal him-/herself to the world in such a way that eliminates all reasonable doubt.  In other words, s/he keeps us guessing but still insists on uncritical respect and adulation.  That is the conduct of a tyrant.

The next five admonishments make complete sense because they enhance the experience of communal living.  No god is required to place them before us because we would arrive at such behavioural cautions quite naturally and therefore we view them as moral in the sense of being very generally very good rules to adhere to.

But the christian god doesn’t obey with any consistency several of the rules s/he set for humanity.  In particular, the ones about not murdering, not stealing and not bearing false witness are often ignored willy-nilly at the expense of some or other people, and this observation detracts much from the christian god’s supposed morality.   Also, the fifth one is phrased a bit dodgily because it aims to encourage honouring one’s parents in exchange for longevity.  How about honouring one’s parents simply because they deserve it?

The last one goes right up against the grain of what drives people to achieve things and so asks that we deny a large part of our own nature.  It is immoral because the christian god made us so to start with and then would have us rail against the very mould we were cast from.  Moreover, it intimates that a man’s wife and servants are just so much belongings and chattel that he must keep shielded from longing eyes.

If we are permitted to bring in the remainder of the bible for examining the christian god’s morality, the picture becomes quite a lot bleaker.

'Luthon64

The discussion at this stage of the debate is primarily over the Decalogue alone, as being the all-sufficient moral code for all humankind and the specifics of its precepts. The rest of the Bible may contain moral precepts articulated in different ways, as it also contains moral precepts which were culture, demographics and age specific, some of which may now be anachronistic. The Decalogue, is a moral code and a pointer to what constitutes sin, as practised by humankind, and is valid for all humankind, from its inception, until Jesus returns to earth again, some time in the not too distant future.

The Christian God (The only true God) has revealed himself to millions of people, without any doubt, over the aeons, but as the adage goes, there are always “None so blind as those who will not see.” Winston Churchill once said: “Men [and women] occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” Even that great empiricist Galileo said: “I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.”, but I think that a saying by an unknown sage, who once said: “The atheist can't find God for the same reason that a thief can't find a policeman.” sums up the position that you and your fellow so-called sceptics find yourselves in.

God displayed His existence and power emphatically to the Jews when He led the Israelites out of Egypt by a cloud overhead during the day and a pillar of light by night. He gave them water from a rock that He instructed Moses to strike and He fed the entire nation with Manna and quail from the heavens. He then parted the Red sea. He stopped the mighty Jordan river from flowing so that the Israelites could cross etc. etc. but they ultimately rejected God. Luke 16: 19-31 tells us the story of a rich sceptic who was mugged by the reality of death, pleading to be allowed to go back to earth to warn his brothers of the hellish place he was in, waiting for the final judgement day and being told that even if he went back, or angels were to go and warn them, they would not listen.

C.S. Lewis said: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Jesus once healed a man who was blind from birth and the “teachers of the law” and theologians questioned him as to what basis he could be healed by a “sinner” like Jesus and he replied: “Whether He is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know: I was blind but now I see.” (John 9: 25).
The educated philosophers and theologians saw evidence of God’s handiwork, but refused to believe. No matter what God does to reveal Himself to you, or the world, so that there could be no reasonable doubt about His existence, you, or the world, cannot see Him without being enabled by Him. He enables those who sincerely want Him to reveal Himself to them, too see Him.

You say that the first four commandments are immoral. By which moral code do you determine that? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights? South African Common Law? Shar’ia Law?  Postmodernism’s relativism? Someone else’s normative or applied ethics?


Who are the “we” who would arrive at these commandments “quite naturally”?
There are many societies around the world where murder is acceptable. As a matter of fact, even in so-called civilized society, reason and rationalization has very often been the motivation for murder. Infanticide and cannibalism and well as revenge murders are commonplace in many societies around the world. It is acceptable behaviour in their “civil” societies. Does the murdering of unborn babies in our civilised Western society “enhance the experience of communal living”? This is what we find acceptable with the absence of God putting His moral code in place. Lying is acceptable in most societies as long as it’s well motivated and practised “in context”.

Committing adultery is acceptable in many societies. Some even argue that that enhances the experience of communal living. Stealing is acceptable in many societies, if it is done to narrow the rich-poor gap, or to alleviate hunger and poverty, or to redress the theft of previous colonisers (sound familiar). I saw a lady stealing goods in a Pick and Pay store once. She was dripping with golden jewellery and wearing a designer dress. When I went to report her, she called me a bitch and told me that I had been stealing from her people for the past 300 years.


I have told you before that God is incapable of sinning. He is not a created being. It is not possible for Him to lie because He is Truth. It is not possible for Him to steal, because He owns everything.He does not murder. He gives life and He takes life. He is the creator.

No!I am discussing the Decalogue and you are trying to disprove the existence of the Christian God.


The demonstration of God's existence and power, by restoring the sight of a person blind since birth, has nothing to do with emotional manipulation. You and your fellow sceptics need to exercise and stretch your mental acuity to its limit, just to try and establish how such a miraculous event could have taken place. Your mental acuity is spent on "well how did they do that?"
The recipient of that miracle was not a believer to start off with.The Scribes and Pharisees exhausted their mental acuity to their limit at the witnessed and verified event, but could not come up with any answers.

You are surely also not trying to tell me that only evidence-based knowledge is true knowledge, and that it is the only legitimate means of validation for unexplained phenomenological occurrences or de facto realities?
If so, where is the evidence of the Big Bang theory? There is no empirical evidence of such an event as being the genesis of all life and matter, only conjecture and much faith, but you believe it anyway, don't you? Isn't that rather an emotional belief? After all, no one living or dead on earth, other than Jesus, was there, were they?

Isn't it strange that not only religion has dogma but, notwithstanding its dichotomous conception, so does your much vaunted sphere of science too.
Medical dogma, for instance, is usually derived from unevaluated biological hypotheses and uncritical observation, or experience without recognition of the effects of chance, natural biological variation, and observer bias.Why, it even includes anecdotal evidence into its hallowed halls of empiricism.As with certain forms of philosophy, it also reasons inductively (from the specific to the general) when attempting to verify, or disprove a scientific theory.Lots of speculation, summisation and hypothesization (Often with faith).

Newton's "law of gravity" stood for 170 years as a paradigm of scientific empirical truth... that is until scientists found anomalies in the orbit of Mercury which destroyed the integrity of his theory. Then Einstein developed his theory of general relativity. What will happen to that, when God initiates another deviation from the inverse-square law of gravitation, with a spoken word, as He has done in the past?

Noam Chomsky says:"Science is the study of intelligible theories which give an explanation of some aspect of reality." and "Scientists typically don’t study the phenomenal world. That’s why they do experiments. Our phenomenal world is way too complex. If you took videotapes of what’s happening outside your window, the physicists and chemists and biologists couldn’t do anything with it. So what you try to do is try to find extremely simple cases — that’s called experiments — in which you try to get rid of a lot of things that you guess are probably not relevant to finding the main principles. And then you see how far you can go from there — the fact is, not very far." And that brings us back to the blind man who was healed. " If you can't show us empirically how your sight could have been restored, we will not believe that you can see". "All I know, once I was blind, now I can see".

God asks you, and every scientist, sceptic and so-called atheist, as He did Job: "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone- while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted with joy? Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt? ... Have you journeyed to the springa of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of the shadow of death? Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth? Tell me, if you know all this. What is the way to the abode of light? And where does darkness reside? can you take them to their places? Do you know the paths to their dwellings? Surely you know, for you were already born! You have lived so many years!"

So, the majority of people have an innate moral code embedded in them. The knowledge of good and evil? That is a biblical principle, that by God's so-called common Grace, all people have have sufficient knowledge to know what is right and wrong, in broad strokes. It's called a conscience.That is by what all people who lived on earth before Christ, and those presently living on earth, who have not heard of Christ, will be judged on.

This comes about in humankind probably by genetic and memetic means?
But you're an empericist. You are not allowed to embrace possible or probable origins.You need to demonbstrate, by your own chosen touchstone, by empirical evidence, that such a hypothesis is indeed the truth and not a thumbsuck philpsophocal flight of fancy,borne from an over fertile imagination.The last time I checked, Meme theory was very much still just that.

If, as the Neo-Darwinist Meme theory suggests, just as we are the pawns by which our genes compete for dominance, so we are creatures of our memes, and, if Dawkins' fanciful postulation was true, we would all have evolved to a reasonably high level of moral and ethical integrity.But this is not so. We need look no further than the images within our own country of a man being incinerated in the streets because he happened to originate from north of our borders, or the children who are being raped, or the men and women who are being blown away because of their wallets or purses.

Just as we cannot find living intermediate stages of so-called Human Evolution, there should, for meme theory to be consistant, also be no living intermediate stages of meme or gene developement that would articulate anomalies to its progressive advancement.No, it is the same sin and the same free will that have been engaged with each other aeons before Dawkins and Darwin were born.

Isn't it really weird that Dawkins, recently in Muizenberg, Cape Town, ascribed the creation of the universe to God ? Maybe he was just mocking the God whom he believes isn't there. Talk about a "God Delusion". Weird!

Why would free will fail to address your dilemma as to why everyone on earth would not subscribe to a moral code given by an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omni-beneficient God? It most certainly does.

God says:"Choose this day whom you will serve"(Joshua 24: 15) and the majority of the world replies: "Not You." If God made humankind like robots, whereas everyone could only do His bidding, then you might have some basis for attacking His omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence and omni-beneficience; but He has not, and you cannot, justifiably, challenge any of those attributes.As I mention elsewhere, those who have not been exposed to the knowledge of God or His Christ, will be judged as to how they lived according to their God-given consciences.(Romans 2: 12-16).

… continued

And what are some of these things “that were previously impossible for them to do?”  How does that constitute “proof?”



I’m afraid that’s a false premise.  In many dynamical systems, patterns and order arise spontaneously from simple governing principles without any conscious effort.  Snowflakes are but one example.



Not so because the validity of a notion is ultimately gauged against the background of reality.  A scientifically or philosophically bankrupt notion does not enjoy a long lifespan.



Again, not so because the default position is one of doubt, pending compelling evidence, reason and/or logic in support of a proposition, otherwise we’d be doing gullible things like accepting any and every old fable someone concocted, or taking away the presumption of innocence from alleged criminals by demanding that they must prove their innocence.  Doubt is, in short, the antivirus software of the mind.



Please point out where, exactly, I have ever posited such a thing.  Chapter and verse, please, because I think you’re bearing particularly egregious false witness here.



It may appear in the bible as you say but that doesn’t prove the christian god ordained it, just as a novel’s factual background doesn’t prove that the author brought those facts about.  Here is a very brief overview of germane knowledge and plausible explanations.



This suggestion is childishly absurd.  Since when does empiricism forbid hypothesising?  How else would science progress except by testing hypotheses against reality? 



I’m afraid that doesn’t follow at all.  The only thing that needs to happen in this context is that a sufficient number of individuals benefit adequately from a given code of conduct for it to be perpetuated.  In fact, the ubiquitous presence of a minority of bad people persisting among a largely obedient majority supports this contention when morality is evaluated from a Games Theory point of view.



But these are torments the christian god allows to happen, despite knowing in advance that they will and being more than powerful enough to intervene, yet chooses not to.  How does that make the christian god “moral” by any common yardstick of morality?  Many countries, in fact, attach culpability to individuals who do not prevent the commission of crime when they are able to do so.



If this is an argument that is seriously meant, then I’m afraid to say that your grasp of evolutionary principles and facts is sorely defective.  We have mostly the same genes as our ancestors, just expressed differently.



I think you may be referring to Stephen Hawking, rather than Richard Dawkins; if so, Hawking spelled out quite clearly in A Brief History of Time that he uses the term “god” in a purely figurative way as a convenient label for whatever kicked off the universe.  There’s no implicit or explicit reference to an almighty conscious creator.  And I doubt that it was indeed Dawkins who spoke thus.



Truth is not decided by our desires or beliefs.  Any useful notion of what “truth” is must include some principle relating to objectivity.


'Luthon64

 

To Johonno777:
Read this and maybe you will understand why I can not believe in your god.

This morning there was a knock at my door.
When I answered the door I found a wellgroomed,
nicely dressed couple. The man spoke
first:
John: “Hi! I’m John, and this is Mary.”
Mary: Hi! We’re here to invite you to come kiss
Hank’s ass with us.”
Me: “Pardon me?! What are you talking
about? Who’s Hank, and why would I
want to kiss His ass?”
John: “If you kiss Hank’s ass, He’ll give you a
million dollars; and if you don’t, He’ll kick
the shit out of you.”
Me: “What? Is this some sort of bizarre mob
shake-down?”
John: “Hank is a billionaire philanthropists.
Hank built this town. Hank owns this
town. He can do whatever He wants, and
what He wants is to give you a million
dollars, but He can’t until you kiss His
ass.”
Me: “That doesn’t make any sense. Why...”
Mary: “Who are you to question Hank’s gift?
Don’t you want a million dollars? Isn’t it
worth a little kiss on the ass?”
Me: “Well maybe, if it’s legit, but...”
John: “Then come kiss Hank’s ass with us.”
Me: “Do you kiss Hank’s ass often?”
Mary: “Oh yes, all the time...”
Me: “And has He given you a million dollars?”
John: “Well no. You don’t actually get the
money until you leave town.”
Me: “So why don’t you just leave town now?”
Mary: “You can’t leave until Hank tells you to, or
you don’t get the money, and He kicks
the shit out of you.”
Me: “Do you know anyone who kissed Hank’s
ass, left town, and got the million
dollars?”
John: “My mother kissed Hank’s ass for years.
She left town last year, and I’m sure she
got the money.”
Me: “Haven’t you talked to her since
then?”
John: “Of course not, Hank doesn’t allow it.”
Me: “So what makes you think He’ll
actually give you the money if you’ve
never talked to anyone who got the
money?”
Mary: “Well, He gives you a little bit before
you leave. Maybe you’ll get a raise,
maybe you’ll win a small lotto, maybe
you’ll just find a twenty-dollar bill on
the street.”
Me: “What’s that got to do with Hank?”
John: “Hank has certain ‘connections.’“
Me: “I’m sorry, but this sounds like some
sort of bizarre con game.”
John: “But it’s a million dollars, can you
really take the chance? And
remember, if you don’t kiss Hank’s
ass He’ll kick the shit of you.”
Me: “Maybe if I could see Hank, talk to
Him, get the details straight from
him...”
Mary: “No one sees Hank, no one talks to
Hank.”
Me: “Then how do you kiss His ass?”
John: “Sometimes we just blow Him a kiss,
and think of His ass. Other times we
kiss Karl’s ass, and he passes it on.”
Me: “Who’s Karl?”
Mary: “A friend of ours. He’s the one who
taught us all about kissing Hank’s ass.
All we had to do was take him out to
dinner a few times.”
Me: “And you just took his word for it
when he said there was a Hank, that
Hank wanted you to kiss His ass, and
that Hank would reward you?”
John: “Oh no! Karl has a letter he got from
Hank years ago explaining the whole
thing. Here’s a copy; see for
yourself.”
Kissing
Hank’s Ass