| cardboard adolescent |
12-02-2008 04:47 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unfan
(Post 556609)
But why is that a bad thing? Being limitless on moral freedom doesn't mean inclination to do what others or perhaps yourself would see as morally unjust. In fact, I feel the opposite to some degree. If God is the best thing we have and I am to live by it's morality and rules than life ultimately means nothing, especially since I highly disagree with the morality of all the deities I've read about. However, if I am my own standard than life gains great meaning, and among those things to give it meaning is knowing that I am a moral being seeking to do honest good. (Perceptive good might be a better wording.) By taking all deities out of the equasion I gain reason to be a moral being.
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If you are your own standard, if man is the measure of everything, then true is only true because you want it to be, and could just as easily be false if you felt like it. Morality becomes an empty justification for whatever you choose to do. Good and evil are just afterthoughts. If meaning is constructed, than it could just as easily not be, and thus negates itself.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Janszoon
(Post 556687)
The problem with deriving morality from authority like that is that it essentially means that you have to think of yourself as an amoral blank slate that is simply subject to the capricious whim of the higher authority. If God decided tomorrow that rape was morally good then you would have to go along with that viewpoint. IMHO, this renders morality meaningless.
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And in my viewpoint that is the only way morality can be meaningful at all. God could lay down laws which are absurd, he could ask me to sacrifice my first-born son, but it is only in recognizing my own limits and subjugation that morality can actually "tell" me to do something.
Quote:
Originally Posted by streetwaves
(Post 556727)
I totally agree with this post. Morality, in that case, would simply be obedience to the higher power.
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Yes! It is either this, or it is nothing.
Furthermore, it is this digging to the bottom of things, which leads inevitably to nihilism, that paradoxically leads one to the idea of God. How this idea is expressed is steeped in historicity, not because of how one arrives at it, but because of how one is forced to express it to get others to embrace it. |
