Question for Theists About Morality

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Nooo, that cannot be. That doesn't fit *any* of the proclamations by conservative Christians, at all & they make up nearly half of America! Surely they know best what Jesus taught?

I like some of the stuff that Christians have come up with.

It doesn't mean I believe in Jesus.

Muslims have come up with pretty good stuff themselves.

It doesn't mean I believe in Allah/Mohammed.

How can you claim to follow something you haven't properly read? I suspect you are like the majority of believers, you like the "idea" of believing and being apart of a group of believers. There is a kind of comfort and romanticism to it, so long as you don't have to be bogged down in the detail, which would spoil that idea.

Fnord if I'm not mistaken went to a seminary, so if anybody knows about this he does.

Lastly, do you really need commandments to tell you murder is wrong?

Correct. Believe it or not, I am also an ordained Elder in the Presbyterian Church.

I don't know who nominated me or why I got voted in; but once they ordained me, I started teaching Sunday School from the Bible, and not from the official lesson plan. For some strange reason, my career as a Sunday School teacher didn't last long ...

Do you have scots / ulster ancestry?

Presbyterians are probably why scots get the dour stereotype. They are really not dour in general. Just some conservative parts like the island of Harris, deeply Presbyterian/Calvinists conservative.

I've started to view the god of Judeo-Christian scripture mostly as a parent.

Humans have free will, so God's rules are not really binding, but actually just guidelines on living a long and healthy life. When your parents tell you not to eat too much sugar, they may be depriving you of short term gratification, but they know it's for your long term benefit.

The thing about guidelines, they are not immutable. They are not "zero tolerance" decrees on behavior. While there is a commandment against murder, God realized there were times, such as self-defense, when it is morally acceptable to kill another human being.

The morality itself is not arbitrary. However, morality can never be applied as black and white, it is always situational. You cannot say it is always wrong to kill somebody. So, if you are expecting absolute decrees when it comes to morality, you will be disappointed. Morality is in the details.

You seem to suggest that non-Hebrews were not treated as "neighbors." That is either extremely misleading or deliberately provocative.

The original meaning of neighbor was "associate" (Hebrew, rea). In Leviticus 19:18, the term clearly referred to a fellow Hebrew: "Do not take revenge or bear a grudge against members of your community, but love your neighbor as yourself; I am Yahweh." Here the parallel for "your neighbor" is "members of your community." The Israelites were to treat such persons fairly and kindly and were not to cheat or rob them. Further, they were to extend the same kindness to the foreigner dwelling among them: "when a foreigner lives with you in your land, you must not oppress him. You must regard the foreigner who lives with you as the native-born among you. You are to love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt; I am Yahweh your God" (Lev. 19:33).

I feel like you may have mixed up your former and later.

Nonetheless I think I get what you're saying.


I tend to think of this place as a myriad construct of dualities. It's how we get our parameters of space, heat vs cold, light vs. dark, gender, positive vs. negative, etc. etc. etc..

The only morality I really see in the universe goes something like this - do you like the results of your actions and where they put you? There are certain things you'd never want to do based on both external and internal ramifications. I don't see a sky-daddy meting any of this out, something more like humanity being in a complex web of interactions where we don't always necessarily see the results of our actions until significantly later in life and often enough far enough out that we don't always see the causal connections (perhaps the easiest way to see it is in what certain actions do to our character and proclivities?)

I think this goes back to seeing it like this - for God to be all-powerful it means that there could be no substances here foreign to God, that God created the entire thing and it works exactly as desired. Some would see that as proof that deity would be evil, others would have to stop and think - there's a bit too much of both good and evil here for that to necessarily be the whole picture. If a God created it then the rules are that God's creation, and if a God didn't create it and finds itself indeed being then it's more properly a god or goddess - ie. perhaps a very powerful form of consciousness but something with plenty of its own questions about it's existence and place in the universe.

I don't really side with traditional/mainstream Christianity, Judaism, or Islam on their narratives, rather my read of this is along the Hermetic flavor or panentheism and particularly in a way where the higher the being the more general, the more their degree of conscious to us looks like non-sentience by it's distance of operating framework, and the more the supreme deity, from our perspective would appear to be very much like the great No-Thing. It's a place where theism, deism, and metaphysical atheism start looking extremely similar.

What I don't get is it was written by humans and said to be 'the word of god' how does anyone know a lot of it wasn't largely made up? Or does it mean god took took a pen and wrote the whole thing himself and bestowed it upon the earth.

All "holy" books were written by humans, most of whom had no concept of how nature actually works.

Amen! That and much more. I'll be visiting a friend in prison pretty soon, actually.