Gratitude & Happy Thanksgiving

[JVW]

4 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

And what are those timeless, moral laws? Are you suggesting, to go back to the example, that Nephi was morally wrong when he killed Laban? Are you suggesting that God was morally wrong when he caused the flood?

I don't know what the timeless moral laws are, but I believe that they exist. And I've been trying to learn about them since starting my faith journey as I believe that the more I know and live according to good moral law the happier I'll be. Based off of my experience so far I would say that some timeless ones include: believe in, and worship, God as you understand Him; live with integrity; exercise regularly; be grateful; be humble; the law of chastity matters (don't cheat, don't self-abuse, protect virtue and purity); don't do drugs. But those are based off of my subjective experience.

God can't be morally wrong because He embodies everything that is right. So no, He wasn't a bad guy for flooding the Earth and causing the deaths of countless people. If I did what God did I would be committing atrocities, but I'm not God and I'm in no place to judge Him; I'm just a wicked, worthless little person that can barely keep my head above water.

The thing with truth is that truth is evidenced by, and discovered in, patterns. If I were a historian I imagine I'd be more keen to what some objective moral laws are as I'm sure there are patterns reflected in societies who were peaceful and happy regarding how they lived their lives and what moral choices they made. You mentioned freedom as being a moral absolute, that is probably evidenced in human history.

4 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

It's not just claiming to do something on behalf of God, it's claiming what God has done and understanding that as part of this moral or ethical code. By the way, I much prefer the term moral relativism to objective and subjective in terms of morality because it is much easier to discuss in context.

I agree. I used the wrong term as any human talking about morality will be wearing a subjective lens. I don't view God as having a subjective lens because God is the truth and the light. He alone knows reality exactly as it is and is therefore objective. I am trying to discuss moral relativism, and I think that subjective morality and moral relativism are synonyms. If moral law is subjective than any person's view of morality could be the right view or the wrong view and therefore there is no right view and no way to determine which view is right. Only which moral view is the most popular and therefore adapted by society.

4 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Unpacking this would require its own thread. I am not going to condone what the Nazi's did. But at the same time, if we apply this sort of thinking to the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict we only get an absolute mess.

Agreed.

4 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I think that there are a few moral/ethical absolutes. One of those is freedom. But this is also a complex issue/

Sounding awfully American here.  Are you sure that security isn't equally as important or more important than freedom cause the world is trending towards that direction.

4 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

And I want you to realize that when you talk about careful thought and discernment, all you are saying is that the difference between believing in objective moral law and subjective moral law is nothing more than a subjective decision.

Yes, personal beliefs are a subjective decision. I have chosen to believe that there are moral laws that God instituted that, whether we are consciously aware of them or not, if we break them we face consequences to our personal peace, prosperity, and happiness. And that we can learn about those laws in the Holy Bible and the Book of Mormon, and through an examination of human history. And that current society is sick precisely because individuals and nations are breaking moral law. I believe that most, if not all, of the world's problems today are because people are wicked (with wicked meaning not living according to God's moral laws).

4 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I believe that ethics and morality have to actually work. But it is the way that we see it play out in individuals and society which tells us a great deal about people's ethics and morality. The thing about 2 Nephi 2 is that it clearly says that God gives us the Law. And if God gives us the law, it arguably cannot be subjective - God can (and does) give different laws to different groups. And this is the definition of a subjective morality (one that is dependent on the mind of God - arbitrary in the sense that what God gives you may be quite different from what God gives someone else).

I mostly agree with you here. I view this more like there is the whole pie and God gives different people different slices of the pie because our tummies can only handle so much pie at a time. Where I'm at in my life, in my world, there are a million moral laws I may be breaking, but my little brain can only focus on a couple at a time and I just have to trust that God will grow me and I'll become more capable of keeping His commandments as I become more mature.

[JVW]

3 hours ago, Calm said:

Do you believe we can reliably identify them and if so, how?

Yes. I believe that by studying the Holy Bible and the Book of Mormon that people can learn what to do in order to be happy and at peace in their heart, which is the result of following God's objective (unchanging and not relative) moral laws.

3 hours ago, Calm said:

It’s not a given, imo, anymore than believing in an objective morality would have stopped them.  It all depends on who they believe is supposed to be the source of their morality.  If a German believed in objective morality based on what was best for humanity, but their view of morality justified killing those they saw as harming the human race, they could enthusiastically participate in killing the undesirables in society.  OTOH, a German who believed in subjective morality could still be repulsed by the Nazis.

To believe one knows what is best for humanity is to act as if they were God. A German who believes in subjective (relative) morality could be repulsed by Nazis, just not likely while in the thick of living in a Nazi society. The power of culture, society, propaganda, and state law enforcement is strong and it is commonly viewed that it is morally or ethically right to "go along to get along". Punk rockers are not held up in high esteem in any society because anarchist or anti-state tendencies will cause society to destabilize if they become mainstream. 

2 hours ago, Calm said:

Do you mean in absolute number terms or percentage?  Absolute numbers, you are probably right because of the number of people on earth now is so much more that 500 years ago.

You know me, I'm not an intellectual, scientific, exact kind of guy. If you think I'm wrong go ahead and call me out on it. But the world is miserable. Society is sick and miserable. I would venture to say that percentage-wise and absolute-wise are both correct. But that's just my perspective, I don't have any statistics. It's kind of a paradox because the world is richer than its ever been, less people are starving than ever before, more live in safety, etc. Yet there is so much misery. Again, no stats to back this up, just something I feel like nobody with eyes would disagree with me on.

2 hours ago, Calm said:

But percentage wise, how would you measure this?  Corruption has been around since before civilization I am guessing, civilized countries used to justify burning women just because they were different (witch claims), built their economy on slavery, allowed rape of wives and imprisonment of the mentally ill in the worst prisons.  I don’t see how one can look at the practices of the Atlantic slave trade and somehow think that society was more moral than today’s.

I don't know enough about history to say too much one way or the other but I believe that the world is more wicked today than it was during the period of the Atlantic slave trade. If I approached history with a lens of "what is all of the bad stuff that was going on during this time period and what was the scope and impact of the bad stuff" I will never find a period that doesn't have bad stuff in it. I don't know how many people, worldwide, agreed with the Atlantic slave trade. Or how many directly participated in it. But I know that everything I wear, and every electronic device I use was created by slaves, and that applies to us all. So at least in the 19th century the rot was visible and not hidden behind international barriers, corporate speak, and myriad shell companies.

[Benjamin McGuire]

4 hours ago, Calm said:

Cannot be objective, I think you meant to say?

Yes, that is what I meant to say.

[Benjamin McGuire]

4 hours ago, bluebell said:

I would answer your specific points by suggesting that morals are external to God and those morals are neither variable nor arbitrary, but can be applied differently depending on conditions.  For example, if sexual intercourse is a sin when not married but not a sin when married, then it is not the act that is either moral or immoral but the conditions under which the act occurs.

The line between conditional and arbitrary is virtually non-existent. We get the argument, for example, that sexual intercourse is a sin when married - if the marriage isn't of an approved sort (same-sex marriage, unapproved polygamous marriage, polyandrous marriage, marriage between an adult and a child, marriage between a man and a non-human creature/object/whatever). And no, it isn't the conditions - without the act, there is arguably no immorality (under any circumstances). Part of all of this is the fact that the conditions are regularly moving goal posts. What I mean by that is that while we can delineate between types of marriage, and define which ones are sanctioned and which ones are not, the conditions themselves seem completely arbitrary. Why was polygamy okay during the Israelite time period, then not okay for the Nephites, then okay again for early Mormons, then not okay for later Mormons? What is the underlying condition that makes this non-arbitrary (if not predictable)? Some things are really clear - but they don't make good examples for us to use in a discussion about this sort of thing, because it isn't the stuff that everyone (at least for now) agrees on, but the areas where there is absolutely no clarity.

4 hours ago, bluebell said:

I would also say that other contradictions or problems can be answered by taking into account understanding and interpretation.  Though the commandment says not to kill, is that what it actually means?  If murder is against the 10 commandments but ending a life is not always murder, then Nephi does not violate moral law and the 10 commandments can still be morally absolute, if Nephi did not did not unlawfully kill Laban.  Therefore a soldier can do his or her duty in war without breaking any moral laws.

This is a very interesting question (and I have given my two cents on it years ago). But, you have to be careful about the language that you use. What is murder? Nephi does kill a man who is passed out drunk, completely unable to defend himself ... when we get to the idea of "interpretation," when we get to dealing with "understanding," we are really already engaging in the subjective morality that everyone doesn't like. The fact that we can justify something by providing a context for it isn't a very strong argument for objective morality, it is a much stronger argument for subjective morality. To give a counter example, Kant offers a very objective morality (at least from a certain perspective). Following his categorical imperative, he would say that it is completely immoral to lie - even if you had Jews in the basement and Nazis at your front door asking about them. Your first moral obligation is to tell the truth, and that you then aren't held accountable for what happens afterwards. Kant's willingness to offer an objective morality seems extreme to many who, while claiming that they want or believe in an objective morality really believe in a subjective morality.

4 hours ago, bluebell said:

The end result is a mixed bag of all sorts of stuff, some of which will look objective and some which will look subjective depending on who's doing the looking.

This is it. I think that the end result of this position is that if we believe that the Gospel is true (and perhaps even if we don't), then true morality comes only as we search for it. One of the best philosophy courses I have ever taken, had, as part of its final project, a requirement that we create our own personal ethical manifesto. To be able to do this with understanding - and then to keep it current, to change it as our understanding improves - this is how we become moral individuals. And yes, it is completely subjective, and some people may have morality completely wrong. But, if we have rules that we believe are objective but allow for an infinite number of loopholes through special circumstances - that is at least as subjective, if not more so.

[Benjamin McGuire]

2 hours ago, JVW said:

I don't know what the timeless moral laws are, but I believe that they exist. And I've been trying to learn about them since starting my faith journey as I believe that the more I know and live according to good moral law the happier I'll be. Based off of my experience so far I would say that some timeless ones include: believe in, and worship, God as you understand Him; live with integrity; exercise regularly; be grateful; be humble; the law of chastity matters (don't cheat, don't self-abuse, protect virtue and purity); don't do drugs. But those are based off of my subjective experience.

And I think that this is marvelous (even if my moral code is different in places). And this is my point about believing in a subjective morality. I think that in theory, the point of the gospel is to encourage us to develop our own personal moral compass (like this) and then to use it to mark a path that comes ever closer to divinity (even if that path is not a straight line). The message of the Tree in the Garden of Eden (and Lehi in 2 Nephi 2) is that we cannot become truly free (and truly moral) without a knowledge of good and evil - so subjective experience matters.

2 hours ago, JVW said:

God can't be morally wrong because He embodies everything that is right. So no, He wasn't a bad guy for flooding the Earth and causing the deaths of countless people. If I did what God did I would be committing atrocities, but I'm not God and I'm in no place to judge Him; I'm just a wicked, worthless little person that can barely keep my head above water.

But, and I think this is also important, if we are trying to emulate God, then God's morality matters a great deal. And, I would suggest, that perhaps when we read stories like the flood, we have stories where people have attributed bad things to God for which God was not responsible ... of course, this turns the narrative on its head, but given that there is no real evidence of the flood other than a literary tale that is based on earlier literary tales, I am not too worried about not believing in a historical flood either. At the same time, we have to be careful about our traditions of morality and their sources. Consider the cautionary tale in Mormonism of the priesthood ban.

2 hours ago, JVW said:

Sounding awfully American here.  Are you sure that security isn't equally as important or more important than freedom cause the world is trending towards that direction.

It is all a part of the same bag. The big discussion (and I could use all caps there) in the history of philosophical thought - and this includes America's found fathers, deals with the issue of the exchange of freedom for security. Just read Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. The constant debate historically has been over the question of what it means to be a natural man. Is the first man a tyrant or a peaceful individual looking for society? At least in our political philosophy, you cannot separate these two issues.

2 hours ago, JVW said:

And that current society is sick precisely because individuals and nations are breaking moral law. I believe that most, if not all, of the world's problems today are because people are wicked (with wicked meaning not living according to God's moral laws).

I would argue that we are in a time period that is not significantly worse (or better) than most of history. We tend to romanticize the past. Opiate use is way up - but it's not because of pain relief of the sort you mentioned earlier. It because, since the late 1990s, we went through a period of time where we were shoving opiates into patients. Why? Because we had bad research that suggested that opiates were not addictive when given in a hospital setting. IN the 1960s, 80 percent of people who were addicted to opiates and using heroin were addicted because they started using heroin. Today, that number is almost zero. Most opiate addicts today became addicted through the use of prescription pain medications. We tend to ignore this while focusing on the cheap sources coming from foreign countries. We hit our peak (in the US) alcohol consumption in the 1830s. The amount of pure alcohol consumed annually per capita was astonishing. Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay describing the horrific deaths caused by drinking too much rum. Actually, it wasn't the rum that caused the horrific deaths - it was the fact that it was made in lead lined stills. Death by lead poisoning is something terrible to see. Of course, rum was made from raw materials imported from the British Empire. After the war of independence, Americans abandoned rum and started drinking whiskey. In large amounts. Good old Johnny Appleseed wasn't planting apples to eat - they were almost inedible by today's standards. But they made great booze. By those standards, most drinkers in America are complete lightweights.

Society is much better. We have a more egalitarian relationship between the sexes. Child abuse is way down. Even with its flaws, our foster care system is much more humane than what we had in the past. We don't force children to work. We have safety rules in the work place. Life expectancy is up. Literacy is up. We could make a really long list of good things that we have. We tend to focus on all the bad things that we see - and yet, we haven't seen bad here. You should see what France was like during the French Revolution. I think that our perception of what God's laws are colors our view of what is going on today. I could argue that it isn't the drugs that are the problem. It's not the suicides (yes, our rate is currently high - 14.2 per 100,000 - but this is nowhere near the rates between 1930 and 1940 - 1932 saw suicide rates at over 22 per 100,000). Murder rates are way down from the 1970s, and the 1980s, and even the 1990s (but let's not forget the 1920s either). I will say that we are seeing a trend in thefts. But most of the thefts aren't your mugger (who carries cash anyways), its the internet guy who steals the savings from a cognitively impaired older person. There is a special place in Hell reserved for people like Jen Shah. So no, most of this bad stuff really isn't at record levels. But, the narrative that it is is really useful - it is this narrative that politicians use to convince people that all they need to be better protected is to give up a little more of their freedom.

[bluebell]

1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

The line between conditional and arbitrary is virtually non-existent. We get the argument, for example, that sexual intercourse is a sin when married - if the marriage isn't of an approved sort (same-sex marriage, unapproved polygamous marriage, polyandrous marriage, marriage between an adult and a child, marriage between a man and a non-human creature/object/whatever). And no, it isn't the conditions - without the act, there is arguably no immorality (under any circumstances). Part of all of this is the fact that the conditions are regularly moving goal posts. What I mean by that is that while we can delineate between types of marriage, and define which ones are sanctioned and which ones are not, the conditions themselves seem completely arbitrary. Why was polygamy okay during the Israelite time period, then not okay for the Nephites, then okay again for early Mormons, then not okay for later Mormons? What is the underlying condition that makes this non-arbitrary (if not predictable)? Some things are really clear - but they don't make good examples for us to use in a discussion about this sort of thing, because it isn't the stuff that everyone (at least for now) agrees on, but the areas where there is absolutely no clarity.

(we'll agree to disagree on the marriage where there is no sex ever is a moral position).

The line between the conditional and arbitrary is only "virtually non-existent" when talking about what can be perceived or known.  If the terms exist (for lack of a better way to say it), then there is a difference between them, whether we can always perceive the difference or not. 

Just because something may seem like something, doesn't mean it is that thing.  Something may seem arbitrary but not be arbitrary at all, and the difference might become perceivable once more information is acquired. Like how you can't perceive the difference between a star and a planet with the naked eye, but very much can with a telescope and other aides.

As you know there is a very interesting discussion surrounding the ideas of what "is" and what can be perceived.  To go back to my previous example, a planet 'is' whether we can perceive it or not.  If I'm understanding you correctly, you are coming at this discussion from the angle of "perception is reality" though.  So if we can't perceive planets then it is as if they don't exist.  Likewise, if we don't know the conditions that make something moral then the conditions might as well be arbitrary, subjective, etc.   Am I getting that right? 

If I am, I agree with you on that angle.  But I'm coming at this discussion from a different angle.  The angle of line upon line, precept upon precept.  It's an angle that assumes (that because of our relationship with God) we are always moving towards more information and knowledge, more light and truth.  Therefore there is nothing unperceivable in the universe, there is only what is.

Quote

This is a very interesting question (and I have given my two cents on it years ago). But, you have to be careful about the language that you use. What is murder? Nephi does kill a man who is passed out drunk, completely unable to defend himself ... when we get to the idea of "interpretation," when we get to dealing with "understanding," we are really already engaging in the subjective morality that everyone doesn't like. The fact that we can justify something by providing a context for it isn't a very strong argument for objective morality, it is a much stronger argument for subjective morality. To give a counter example, Kant offers a very objective morality (at least from a certain perspective). Following his categorical imperative, he would say that it is completely immoral to lie - even if you had Jews in the basement and Nazis at your front door asking about them. Your first moral obligation is to tell the truth, and that you then aren't held accountable for what happens afterwards. Kant's willingness to offer an objective morality seems extreme to many who, while claiming that they want or believe in an objective morality really believe in a subjective morality 

I agree it's a very interesting question, and a discussion about it would be for a different thread.  I wasn't attempting to use it to prove objective morality; I was using it to prove that an appearance of subjective morality is a perception, and a perception is by definition limited.  And limited understanding cannot be used to disprove the existence of anything, including objective morality.

To Kant's argument, I think he's right.  Corrie ten Boom grew up in a family that agreed with him and lived it.  In the book The Hiding Place, Corrie tells a story about a family member who believed in the absolute morality of honesty.  She raised her children to be honest, and this included being honest when a nazi asked her daughter if the woman pretending to be a maid in their home was actually a Jew.  Her daughter immediately answered that she was, and the Jewish woman and the girl's mother (I believe it was Corrie's sister Betsy but I can't remember for sure now as it's been a few years since I re-read it) was also arrested.  In jail I believe it was Corrie that had the opportunity to ask the family member how she could betray the Jewish woman like that and surely God would be ok with telling a lie in such a circumstance.  The woman (I wish I could remember her name) simply replied that God would never allow the Jewish woman to come to any harm because her daughter refused to lie.  Later they did learn that the Jewish woman escaped and made it to safety soon after being arrested.

I think objective morality is extreme.  Subjective morality looks on sin with a little allowance, depending on circumstances.  That's a much easier world to live in. 

Quote

 This is it. I think that the end result of this position is that if we believe that the Gospel is true (and perhaps even if we don't), then true morality comes only as we search for it. One of the best philosophy courses I have ever taken, had, as part of its final project, a requirement that we create our own personal ethical manifesto. To be able to do this with understanding - and then to keep it current, to change it as our understanding improves - this is how we become moral individuals. And yes, it is completely subjective, and some people may have morality completely wrong. But, if we have rules that we believe are objective but allow for an infinite number of loopholes through special circumstances - that is at least as subjective, if not more so.

To the bolded, I don't know if I can agree.  If we are the the standard that we use to measure what is moral, how can morality ever be more or bigger than us?  Even if we change it as we grow, it's still never more than ourselves?

Edited November 25, 2025 by bluebell

[Calm]

4 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

The line between conditional and arbitrary is virtually non-existent. 

Even if they are identical in the sense of subjectivity, “arbitrary” frequently (maybe even always) has negative emotional connotations that “conditional” generally does not though, such as implications of irrationality, capriciousness, childishness, tyrannical, even vindictiveness (did a search for definitions and synonyms of “arbitrary” and lacking in reason was part of the definition for google ai).  Conditional therefore is a better description, imo, when the possibilities include we are simply incapable of understanding the greater context of why God might be making his decisions on what is good and what is not. 

 For the purpose of communicating ideas, it seems like using “conditional” to describe God’s commandments as we interpret them better conveys the sense of what most try to describe…we cannot comprehend why (Nehor and others who see God’s ways if he exists as unnecessarily cruel if I am understanding him and others correctly could use arbitrary here as they intend for the negative connotations to be attached).

Edited November 25, 2025 by Calm

[The Nehor]

11 hours ago, JVW said:

Yes. I believe that by studying the Holy Bible and the Book of Mormon that people can learn what to do in order to be happy and at peace in their heart, which is the result of following God's objective (unchanging and not relative) moral laws.

And yet we’ve explained away a significant portion of the laws God gives.

11 hours ago, JVW said:

To believe one knows what is best for humanity is to act as if they were God. A German who believes in subjective (relative) morality could be repulsed by Nazis, just not likely while in the thick of living in a Nazi society. The power of culture, society, propaganda, and state law enforcement is strong and it is commonly viewed that it is morally or ethically right to "go along to get along". Punk rockers are not held up in high esteem in any society because anarchist or anti-state tendencies will cause society to destabilize if they become mainstream.

Yet Christianity in general and the LDS Church have historically “gone along to get along”. They aren’t, in general, moral pioneers going against the grain.

11 hours ago, JVW said:

You know me, I'm not an intellectual, scientific, exact kind of guy. If you think I'm wrong go ahead and call me out on it. But the world is miserable. Society is sick and miserable. I would venture to say that percentage-wise and absolute-wise are both correct. But that's just my perspective, I don't have any statistics. It's kind of a paradox because the world is richer than its ever been, less people are starving than ever before, more live in safety, etc. Yet there is so much misery. Again, no stats to back this up, just something I feel like nobody with eyes would disagree with me on.

I think you look at the past with rose-colored glasses if you believe this. We have problems but we also have freedoms that would be unthinkable to people just a few centuries back. Some of them never got to make a big life decision ever. They were plugged into their role and lived it.

11 hours ago, JVW said:

I don't know enough about history to say too much one way or the other but I believe that the world is more wicked today than it was during the period of the Atlantic slave trade.

No. Just no. 

11 hours ago, JVW said:

If I approached history with a lens of "what is all of the bad stuff that was going on during this time period and what was the scope and impact of the bad stuff" I will never find a period that doesn't have bad stuff in it. I don't know how many people, worldwide, agreed with the Atlantic slave trade. Or how many directly participated in it. But I know that everything I wear, and every electronic device I use was created by slaves, and that applies to us all. So at least in the 19th century the rot was visible and not hidden behind international barriers, corporate speak, and myriad shell companies.

While the conditions for many people are miserable chattel slavery was almost always worse.

I don’t hold humanity in general in particularly high esteem but we are largely making people more free. This isn’t happening equally everywhere and there is a long ways to go and there are a lot of horrible people that need to be brought down for cruelly exploiting people but the exploitation in the past was generally worse and more pervasive. We also have a better chance of fighting it since a lot more people actually believe that slavery and these kinds of exploitation are wrong compared to the past. The Bible supported slavery. We (mostly) decided we weren’t going to let the Bible’s endorsement count anymore. 

[Benjamin McGuire]

9 hours ago, bluebell said:

he line between the conditional and arbitrary is only "virtually non-existent" when talking about what can be perceived or known. 

I don't think so. The problem with this is that this itself is simply an arbitrary declaration. There is no way to tell the difference between something that is conditional (when the conditions are unknowable) and something that is arbitrary. This sort of definition could be used to justify just about anything - and it defeats the entire purpose of discussing something as objective. Anyone could make the claim (on this basis) that whatever they are doing is moral (for themselves) and immoral (for everyone else). So you can believe this - but it it a meaningless argument.

10 hours ago, bluebell said:

Just because something may seem like something, doesn't mean it is that thing.  Something may seem arbitrary but not be arbitrary at all, and the difference might become perceivable once more information is acquired. Like how you can't perceive the difference between a star and a planet with the naked eye, but very much can with a telescope and other aides.

This is just a bad example. There is a relatively easy way to determine the difference between planets that you can see with the naked eye and stars. Planets don't 'twinkle'. But that's neither here nor there.

10 hours ago, bluebell said:

As you know there is a very interesting discussion surrounding the ideas of what "is" and what can be perceived.  To go back to my previous example, a planet 'is' whether we can perceive it or not.  If I'm understanding you correctly, you are coming at this discussion from the angle of "perception is reality" though.  So if we can't perceive planets then it is as if they don't exist.  Likewise, if we don't know the conditions that make something moral then the conditions might as well be arbitrary, subjective, etc.   Am I getting that right? 

Not really, no. There is a much larger problem with the issue of using planets as an example. Whether an object in the night sky is a planet or a star has no real impact on our daily activities. Morality and ethics does. We can't see botulism on food. But if you had a suspicion that the food in front of you was infected with it, would you eat it?

You are re-framing the problem in a way that avoids the issue. We can have absolute (objective) moralities. Kant created a system which describes such a thing. Jeremy Bentham, with his utilitarianism created what he called a Hedonic calculus to create an absolute moral system. The problem isn't about moral or ethical systems that claim to be absolute and work within a specific set of rules that are always consistent, it isn't with a relativistic moral code which recognizes that morality and ethics is inevitably situational. The problem is with an ethical and moral code which appears to be relativistict, but is claimed to be absolute - where the argument is that the rules are preset, and unchangeable, but also unknowable. I am arguing that this particular situation is really a subjective morality that is being called objective for reasons that have nothing to do with the morality or ethics itself.

There is another issue here. If, as you suggest, "we don't know the conditions that make something moral" then we can never be certain that we are acting in a moral way. We may intend to be more, we may try to be moral, but if we succeed at acting in a moral fashion, it occurs purely by accident - because you don't know the rules you are playing by. Is there any difference between such a moral system and playing Calvinball? In Mormonism, there is an attempt to shore up that problem by making the claim that it is impossible for a prophet to lead us astray. And yet the evidence points to the contrary (priesthood ban, I'm a Mormon campaign, etc).

10 hours ago, bluebell said:

To Kant's argument, I think he's right.  Corrie ten Boom grew up in a family that agreed with him and lived it.  In the book The Hiding Place, Corrie tells a story about a family member who believed in the absolute morality of honesty.  She raised her children to be honest, and this included being honest when a nazi asked her daughter if the woman pretending to be a maid in their home was actually a Jew.  Her daughter immediately answered that she was, and the Jewish woman and the girl's mother (I believe it was Corrie's sister Betsy but I can't remember for sure now as it's been a few years since I re-read it) was also arrested.  In jail I believe it was Corrie that had the opportunity to ask the family member how she could betray the Jewish woman like that and surely God would be ok with telling a lie in such a circumstance.  The woman (I wish I could remember her name) simply replied that God would never allow the Jewish woman to come to any harm because her daughter refused to lie.  Later they did learn that the Jewish woman escaped and made it to safety soon after being arrested.

I believe that Kant is wrong. I think that we have a moral obligation to protect others from harm that supercedes our moral obligation to always tell the truth. And anecdotes like this one (assuming that it's true) are the exception and not the rule. Clearly God did not protect the Jews from harm. Six million of them were killed. It is a more fascinating question to ask people what they would do if the person that was being hunted was their child (after all, we don't have the same sort of built in self-sacrifice mechanism for strangers as we do for our own children). In any case, these kinds of anecdotes are harmful to the argument not helpful.

10 hours ago, bluebell said:

I think objective morality is extreme.  Subjective morality looks on sin with a little allowance, depending on circumstances.  That's a much easier world to live in. 

This is a separate issue. What is sin seems subjective (relativistic). A six year old who lies - it is not a sin (Moroni 8).

I think the platitude is generally wrong. There is an old saying - 'if you eat a live frog every morning for breakfast, nothing worse will happen to you all day'. To which the response is: 'to you or the frog'? We have to first decide what morality is before we can decide which is easier - and even then, there are always exceptions. Bentham's utilitarianism argues that what is most ethical is that which brings the most happiness to the most people. But if you are one of the few that is left out, your happiness isn't considered. This conundrum has been explored in a lot of different media. But the two that I like most are the movie Minority Report, and the story by Ursula Le Guin: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. The reality is that the easiness of our life has nothing to do with either the reality of morality as subject or objective, or the perception of it.

11 hours ago, bluebell said:

To the bolded, I don't know if I can agree.  If we are the the standard that we use to measure what is moral, how can morality ever be more or bigger than us?  Even if we change it as we grow, it's still never more than ourselves?

As compared with a morality which you can't ever understand and will never know the rules for it? It seems to me that in a way, the idea of a perceived absolute morality is easy because the only real requirement is to keep the rules of the day (and wait to see if they change tomorrow).

[JVW]

14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

And I think that this is marvelous (even if my moral code is different in places). And this is my point about believing in a subjective morality. I think that in theory, the point of the gospel is to encourage us to develop our own personal moral compass (like this) and then to use it to mark a path that comes ever closer to divinity (even if that path is not a straight line). The message of the Tree in the Garden of Eden (and Lehi in 2 Nephi 2) is that we cannot become truly free (and truly moral) without a knowledge of good and evil - so subjective experience matters.

I agree except I want to add a distinction.

Just like in AA it's key to believe in something stronger than me that can lift me out of my addiction. With morality I believe it's important to believe in an objective moral law that exists outside of my subjective perception. Part of the reason this is important is because if a person doesn't believe that sin exists, and that there are negative consequences to sinning, then it will be difficult to make adjustments that align with good morality. As humans, we can make ourselves believe anything is right, we can justify anything, "the pathway to hell is paved with good intentions". I think that not believing in sin shifts the moral journey from an introspective one into one where other people are the reason I'm not happy, nothing is ever my fault and I don't have any personal responsibility for how I feel. I'm open to be persuaded to adjust my views here, but this is where I currently stand.

14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

But, and I think this is also important, if we are trying to emulate God, then God's morality matters a great deal. And, I would suggest, that perhaps when we read stories like the flood, we have stories where people have attributed bad things to God for which God was not responsible ... of course, this turns the narrative on its head, but given that there is no real evidence of the flood other than a literary tale that is based on earlier literary tales, I am not too worried about not believing in a historical flood either. At the same time, we have to be careful about our traditions of morality and their sources. Consider the cautionary tale in Mormonism of the priesthood ban.

I am trying to emulate Jesus Christ who showed us what God would do if He were walking among us. When it comes to what God does outside of the time in which He was on the Earth, I am not God and I cannot judge Him. I do not have His perspective, His love, His responsibility, or His stewardship. I would never let someone die. I would let everyone live forever. I would never let someone get kidnapped or tortured, or let someone invent weapons, or cheat on their spouse. Yet God allows all of these things to happen. It's not my realm of responsibility or my concern. My responsibility is to relieve suffering everywhere that I see it to the best of my ability. To "love God and love my neighbor as myself". I know that God is love, therefore everything that He does I have to believe that His choices are the most loving choices He can make, even if they cause me intense pain and brokenness. For the record I believe in a literal Great Flood. I've stated on this forum before that God is mean. In the society I live in today "niceness" is the highest virtue, but I have never read anywhere in the scriptures a command to be nice, and God certainly isn't.

14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

It is all a part of the same bag. The big discussion (and I could use all caps there) in the history of philosophical thought - and this includes America's found fathers, deals with the issue of the exchange of freedom for security. Just read Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. The constant debate historically has been over the question of what it means to be a natural man. Is the first man a tyrant or a peaceful individual looking for society? At least in our political philosophy, you cannot separate these two issues.

Thanks for the book recommendation.

14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I would argue that we are in a time period that is not significantly worse (or better) than most of history. We tend to romanticize the past. Opiate use is way up - but it's not because of pain relief of the sort you mentioned earlier. It because, since the late 1990s, we went through a period of time where we were shoving opiates into patients. Why? Because we had bad research that suggested that opiates were not addictive when given in a hospital setting. IN the 1960s, 80 percent of people who were addicted to opiates and using heroin were addicted because they started using heroin. Today, that number is almost zero. Most opiate addicts today became addicted through the use of prescription pain medications. We tend to ignore this while focusing on the cheap sources coming from foreign countries. We hit our peak (in the US) alcohol consumption in the 1830s. The amount of pure alcohol consumed annually per capita was astonishing. Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay describing the horrific deaths caused by drinking too much rum. Actually, it wasn't the rum that caused the horrific deaths - it was the fact that it was made in lead lined stills. Death by lead poisoning is something terrible to see. Of course, rum was made from raw materials imported from the British Empire. After the war of independence, Americans abandoned rum and started drinking whiskey. In large amounts. Good old Johnny Appleseed wasn't planting apples to eat - they were almost inedible by today's standards. But they made great booze. By those standards, most drinkers in America are complete lightweights.

Speaking specifically to opioids - the problem was similar to the same problem as the South during slave times in America. A small conglomerate of wealthy businessmen doing whatever they could to maximize profits and influencing public opinion to agree with them. To date there has been nearly $58 Billion in settlements related to opioids [https://www.opioidsettlementtracker.com/globalsettlementtracker] and, since 1999, there have been around 800k deaths in the U.S. alone [https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/about/understanding-the-opioid-overdose-epidemic.html]. That is a lot of harm done by wicked men, and many are complicit in it. It wasn't due to bad science, they knew what they were doing. They still obfuscate data in big pharma funded studies today. See https://blog.maryannedemasi.com/p/study-329-the-big-fraud-is-finally as an example, but there are many, many more.

14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Child abuse is way down.

If child abuse is way down I shudder to think about what it used to be: [https://victimsofcrime.org/child-sexual-abuse-statistics/]

Quote

- 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse;
- Self-report studies show that 20% of adult females and 5-10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual abuse incident;
- During a one-year period in the U.S., 16% of youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;
- Over the course of their lifetime, 28% of U.S. youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;
- Children are most vulnerable to CSA between the ages of 7 and 13.

14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Even with its flaws, our foster care system is much more humane than what we had in the past. We don't force children to work. We have safety rules in the work place. Life expectancy is up. Literacy is up. We could make a really long list of good things that we have. We tend to focus on all the bad things that we see - and yet, we haven't seen bad here. You should see what France was like during the French Revolution. I think that our perception of what God's laws are colors our view of what is going on today. I could argue that it isn't the drugs that are the problem. It's not the suicides (yes, our rate is currently high - 14.2 per 100,000 - but this is nowhere near the rates between 1930 and 1940 - 1932 saw suicide rates at over 22 per 100,000). Murder rates are way down from the 1970s, and the 1980s, and even the 1990s (but let's not forget the 1920s either). I will say that we are seeing a trend in thefts. But most of the thefts aren't your mugger (who carries cash anyways), its the internet guy who steals the savings from a cognitively impaired older person. There is a special place in Hell reserved for people like Jen Shah. So no, most of this bad stuff really isn't at record levels. But, the narrative that it is is really useful - it is this narrative that politicians use to convince people that all they need to be better protected is to give up a little more of their freedom.

In America, I agree, in many ways life is better than it was 100-200 years ago. Living conditions globally are improved, but that's not related to morality, that's related to scientific advancement. However, we do force children to work, just not American children. We have labor laws and safety rules in the American workplace, but how much of what we buy is produced here? I think most of the evil in the world is obfuscated now, I wish it was clear and plain to see, but it isn't anymore.

I know I'm going on a tangent, but it's been really fun chatting with you. Thanks for conversing with me, brother. 

[JVW]

6 hours ago, The Nehor said:

And yet we’ve explained away a significant portion of the laws God gives.

Have we? I feel like we haven't been following the same thread. I haven't seen anything explained away, just a conversation around the nuances of morality.

6 hours ago, The Nehor said:

Yet Christianity in general and the LDS Church have historically “gone along to get along”. They aren’t, in general, moral pioneers going against the grain.

I mostly agree, and I personally don't like it. I have a punk soul and the culture we find ourselves in today where everyone loves "the man" is really unsettling for me. Makes me wish it was the 60s when I could be part of a society that wanted to stick it to "the man". WHO. IPCC. Big Pharma. Government. All loved and defended. What a shame. And many churches are in lockstep with the same sentiments.

However, as time has gone on I do feel like being a Christian has started to have a rebellious connotation, and I believe that one day the words "Jesus Christ" will be the ultimate form of hate speech. Christianity is not in vogue. Christians are dismissed, mocked, and belittled. Standing up for Biblical values is becoming more "against the grain" as each year passes, which makes me happy in a weird way.

I'll also note here that during the 19th century the LDS church was very much against the grain. They literally left the United States and started their own shadow government of Deseret and went to war against the U.S. very cool.

6 hours ago, The Nehor said:

I think you look at the past with rose-colored glasses if you believe this. We have problems but we also have freedoms that would be unthinkable to people just a few centuries back. Some of them never got to make a big life decision ever. They were plugged into their role and lived it.

It's possible that I have rose colored glasses, but I don't think so. I just think the scope of the evil that was done was naturally much smaller before electricity, cars, phones, planes, internet, etc. I also believe that we overemphasize the "big bads" of history and give little attention to how many people quietly lived their lives piously, seeking to do God's will and doing their best to live morally upright. During the 19th century in America, there were a bunch of wealthy nasties doing slave stuff, but there were so many more, even in the South, who were quietly living Godly lives. If we look at America now, how many are living Godly lives? Pretty much nobody is anymore. People have become nasty, uncivilized, selfish, arrogant, selfish little creatures now.

Morality is not measured by how much suffering or how much freedom is in the world. It's measured by how many people are trying to keep God's commandments. Because without a definition of a commandment and a sin, there is no morality, only ethics. And this thread we are talking about morality. Morality is an inherently religious term.

6 hours ago, The Nehor said:

No. Just no. 

I'll defer to you because you are very well read and intelligent. Right now I'll take your word on blind faith but I'm open to be persuaded to personally believe more in line with your position. I'm not being facetious here.

6 hours ago, The Nehor said:

While the conditions for many people are miserable chattel slavery was almost always worse.

I'll have to take your word for it. People are literally dying from working too much in Japan. Apple had to but nets on their Chinese factories to stop people from dying when jumping off the roof, it was that common. That sounds at least "equally bad" to me as the results to a slave during chattel slavery. [https://www.news.com.au/travel/destinations/asia/japans-deadly-hustle-culture-is-making-a-grim-return/news-story/c401e0a0648931ca82bad688234f1cea]

6 hours ago, The Nehor said:

I don’t hold humanity in general in particularly high esteem but we are largely making people more free. This isn’t happening equally everywhere and there is a long ways to go and there are a lot of horrible people that need to be brought down for cruelly exploiting people but the exploitation in the past was generally worse and more pervasive. We also have a better chance of fighting it since a lot more people actually believe that slavery and these kinds of exploitation are wrong compared to the past. The Bible supported slavery. We (mostly) decided we weren’t going to let the Bible’s endorsement count anymore. 

I don't think in the past that exploitation was more pervasive, I think it was just easier to see it. I think stuff is obfuscated now. Whether we use the Bible or not, people will justify their evil acts in whatever manner they want to. In America we exploit in a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" kind of way, but we all do it.

[bluebell]

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I don't think so. The problem with this is that this itself is simply an arbitrary declaration. There is no way to tell the difference between something that is conditional (when the conditions are unknowable) and something that is arbitrary. This sort of definition could be used to justify just about anything - and it defeats the entire purpose of discussing something as objective. Anyone could make the claim (on this basis) that whatever they are doing is moral (for themselves) and immoral (for everyone else). So you can believe this - but it it a meaningless argument.

It's not meaningless.  It's philosophy.   

There is no sense or type of morality that we come up with that can't be wrong and no sense or type of morality where someone can't justify just about anything.  If that's the bar we are using then we might as well go home cause no one's getting over it.  Unprovable doesn't mean unknowable.  I had Feynman's famous quote as my signature for a while because it's just so relevant to everything:

"A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven." 

In this case, conditions can be knowable with the use of an outside source, such as God.  That doesn't mean we will know all conditions perfectly.  That doesn't mean they can be proven.  It doesn't mean that we can't sometimes still get the conditions wrong.  But the existence of fallibility does not null the argument.

Quote

This is just a bad example. There is a relatively easy way to determine the difference between planets that you can see with the naked eye and stars. Planets don't 'twinkle'. But that's neither here nor there.

Planets do twinkle though, when they are low on the horizon and the thicker atmosphere distorts their light.  But still, someone would have to first know that planets don't often twinkle and stars do, to tell the difference between the two. 

Once you know something, then using that knowledge can be relatively easy, sure.  But without the knowledge, not so much. My point is that what can be perceived (or observed) does not determine what is. You've got to know what you are looking at, and how to interpret the information.

Quote

The problem is with an ethical and moral code which appears to be relativistict, but is claimed to be absolute - where the argument is that the rules are preset, and unchangeable, but also unknowable. I am arguing that this particular situation is really a subjective morality that is being called objective for reasons that have nothing to do with the morality or ethics itself.  

If something is actually unknowable, then I would agree.  But I don't think anything is unknowable when you have access to an omniscient source (such as God).  I do think many things are unprovable though.

Quote

I believe that Kant is wrong. I think that we have a moral obligation to protect others from harm that supercedes our moral obligation to always tell the truth. And anecdotes like this one (assuming that it's true) are the exception and not the rule. Clearly God did not protect the Jews from harm. Six million of them were killed. It is a more fascinating question to ask people what they would do if the person that was being hunted was their child (after all, we don't have the same sort of built in self-sacrifice mechanism for strangers as we do for our own children). In any case, these kinds of anecdotes are harmful to the argument not helpful.

Lots of people think Kant is wrong.  Lots of people think you are wrong.  Lots of people think I am wrong.  There are all sorts of arguments in support of and against it all.  

But I do think the anecdotes are helpful, because they ask us to consider things we may never have considered before, and they introduce information that we may have had no knowledge of.  That's why all the philosophy classes make you argue about whether or not you'd save the train full of strangers or your child.  Or ponder Sophie's Choice.  You'll never come up with an actual correct answer everyone agrees with but you learn to think and see the world differently, which I think is always helpful.  

Quote

 

This is a separate issue. What is sin seems subjective (relativistic). A six year old who lies - it is not a sin (Moroni 8).

I think the platitude is generally wrong. There is an old saying - 'if you eat a live frog every morning for breakfast, nothing worse will happen to you all day'. To which the response is: 'to you or the frog'? We have to first decide what morality is before we can decide which is easier - and even then, there are always exceptions. Bentham's utilitarianism argues that what is most ethical is that which brings the most happiness to the most people. But if you are one of the few that is left out, your happiness isn't considered. This conundrum has been explored in a lot of different media. But the two that I like most are the movie Minority Report, and the story by Ursula Le Guin: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. The reality is that the easiness of our life has nothing to do with either the reality of morality as subject or objective, or the perception of it.

 

Children and lying is a good example of something that looks subjective until more information is added, and then becomes conditional.  A lie told by a six year old breaks the law of justice just as much as one told by a 30 year old.  That is why children need the Atonement as much adults and why the Atonement automatically covers their sins.  But children are not accountable for their sins and adults are, and that is the difference.  The condition under which the sin is committed.

I agree that there are a myriad of different arguments for what is ethical and what isn't.   Lots of different arguments and schools of thought.  Thousands of years worth.

Quote

As compared with a morality which you can't ever understand and will never know the rules for it? It seems to me that in a way, the idea of a perceived absolute morality is easy because the only real requirement is to keep the rules of the day (and wait to see if they change tomorrow).

With those parameters, sure.  But I don't think those parameters actually exist.  I'll say again what I said at the beginning. Unprovable doesn't mean unknowable.  

"A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven."   

[The Nehor]

1 hour ago, JVW said:

Have we? I feel like we haven't been following the same thread. I haven't seen anything explained away, just a conversation around the nuances of morality.

Yes. Virtually no one is following Paul’s counsel on apparel in church. No one is practicing the exact forms of chattel and debt slavery the Bible prescribes. Very few people take Paul seriously when he prescribes chastity as the best form of living. We make up divisions in the Torah to decide which laws or concepts there still have value. We decided usury isn’t a horrible sin.

1 hour ago, JVW said:

I mostly agree, and I personally don't like it. I have a punk soul and the culture we find ourselves in today where everyone loves "the man" is really unsettling for me. Makes me wish it was the 60s when I could be part of a society that wanted to stick it to "the man". WHO. IPCC. Big Pharma. Government. All loved and defended. What a shame. And many churches are in lockstep with the same sentiments.

Everyone love “the man”? What planet are you living on? The chanting of “free Luigi” are somehow servile? What?

1 hour ago, JVW said:

However, as time has gone on I do feel like being a Christian has started to have a rebellious connotation, and I believe that one day the words "Jesus Christ" will be the ultimate form of hate speech. Christianity is not in vogue. Christians are dismissed, mocked, and belittled. Standing up for Biblical values is becoming more "against the grain" as each year passes, which makes me happy in a weird way.

Yeah, no. “Biblical values” is a nebulous phrase that can mean almost anything. Also most of the people who don’t like Christianity much don’t care about it as much as many people seem to wish they did. They just don’t think about it that often in general.

1 hour ago, JVW said:

I'll also note here that during the 19th century the LDS church was very much against the grain. They literally left the United States and started their own shadow government of Deseret and went to war against the U.S. very cool.

Most of that over plural marriage which was abandoned in order to “get along”. The Church had its rebellious teenager phase and then moved on in favor of conformity to the larger culture.

1 hour ago, JVW said:

It's possible that I have rose colored glasses, but I don't think so. I just think the scope of the evil that was done was naturally much smaller before electricity, cars, phones, planes, internet, etc. I also believe that we overemphasize the "big bads" of history and give little attention to how many people quietly lived their lives piously, seeking to do God's will and doing their best to live morally upright. During the 19th century in America, there were a bunch of wealthy nasties doing slave stuff, but there were so many more, even in the South, who were quietly living Godly lives. If we look at America now, how many are living Godly lives? Pretty much nobody is anymore. People have become nasty, uncivilized, selfish, arrogant, selfish little creatures now.

I think you and I have vastly different ideas of what living a “Godly life” means if you think it was pervasive in the past. It really wasn’t. The Christian world wasn’t some utopian bastion of peace, good will, and wisdom compared to the rest of the world.

1 hour ago, JVW said:

Morality is not measured by how much suffering or how much freedom is in the world. It's measured by how many people are trying to keep God's commandments. Because without a definition of a commandment and a sin, there is no morality, only ethics. And this thread we are talking about morality. Morality is an inherently religious term.

No, it isn’t. Religious people just like to pretend that you cannot be moral without a belief in a divine judgement. We are far enough along with the cognitive sciences to have a pretty good idea of how morality works and where it comes from.

1 hour ago, JVW said:

I'll defer to you because you are very well read and intelligent. Right now I'll take your word on blind faith but I'm open to be persuaded to personally believe more in line with your position. I'm not being facetious here.

The Atlantic Slave Trade was designed to be as dehumanizing, degrading, and soul-crushing as possible. This wasn’t a bug, it was a feature.

1 hour ago, JVW said:

I'll have to take your word for it. People are literally dying from working too much in Japan. Apple had to but nets on their Chinese factories to stop people from dying when jumping off the roof, it was that common. That sounds at least "equally bad" to me as the results to a slave during chattel slavery. [https://www.news.com.au/travel/destinations/asia/japans-deadly-hustle-culture-is-making-a-grim-return/news-story/c401e0a0648931ca82bad688234f1cea]

Suicide amongst enslaved people was high. Also infanticide. 

1 hour ago, JVW said:

I don't think in the past that exploitation was more pervasive, I think it was just easier to see it. I think stuff is obfuscated now. Whether we use the Bible or not, people will justify their evil acts in whatever manner they want to. In America we exploit in a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" kind of way, but we all do it.

It was much more pervasive. Through most of human history 80%+ of people were working as subsistence farmers with a tough extraction rate. You’re romanticizing the past. The Enlightenment, classical liberalism, medicine, and industrialization were big improvements to human society. There are some ugly dark sides to industrialization but I drive around in a car with enough metal in it to bankrupt all but the richest nobles in the ancient world.

We should try to improve society but pretending things aren’t better now is just silly.

[JVW]

1 hour ago, The Nehor said:

Yes. Virtually no one is following Paul’s counsel on apparel in church. No one is practicing the exact forms of chattel and debt slavery the Bible prescribes. Very few people take Paul seriously when he prescribes chastity as the best form of living. We make up divisions in the Torah to decide which laws or concepts there still have value. We decided usury isn’t a horrible sin.

Everyone love “the man”? What planet are you living on? The chanting of “free Luigi” are somehow servile? What?

Yeah, no. “Biblical values” is a nebulous phrase that can mean almost anything. Also most of the people who don’t like Christianity much don’t care about it as much as many people seem to wish they did. They just don’t think about it that often in general.

Most of that over plural marriage which was abandoned in order to “get along”. The Church had its rebellious teenager phase and then moved on in favor of conformity to the larger culture.

I think you and I have vastly different ideas of what living a “Godly life” means if you think it was pervasive in the past. It really wasn’t. The Christian world wasn’t some utopian bastion of peace, good will, and wisdom compared to the rest of the world.

No, it isn’t. Religious people just like to pretend that you cannot be moral without a belief in a divine judgement. We are far enough along with the cognitive sciences to have a pretty good idea of how morality works and where it comes from.

The Atlantic Slave Trade was designed to be as dehumanizing, degrading, and soul-crushing as possible. This wasn’t a bug, it was a feature.

Suicide amongst enslaved people was high. Also infanticide. 

It was much more pervasive. Through most of human history 80%+ of people were working as subsistence farmers with a tough extraction rate. You’re romanticizing the past. The Enlightenment, classical liberalism, medicine, and industrialization were big improvements to human society. There are some ugly dark sides to industrialization but I drive around in a car with enough metal in it to bankrupt all but the richest nobles in the ancient world.

We should try to improve society but pretending things aren’t better now is just silly.

You make good arguments, thanks for responding, I'm considering them as I continue to think about this topic.

[Kenngo1969]

At least one thing becomes clearer to me as I continue to ponder the subject(s) of this thread: There's more good even in many of the so-called "worst" of us and more bad even in many of the so-called "best" of us than any of the rest of us might suspect.  [1]

_____________________

END NOTE

1. Thats just a general, slightly tongue-in-cheek, off-the-cuff observation that may or may not hold up well when considered vis-a-vis specific cases.  I'm neither prepared nor inclined to defend it when considering specific cases.  Was Hitler "good" or "bad"?  I don't think any reasonable debate could be had that he wasn't, thoroughly, the latter.  Was Edison "good" or "bad"?  Well, whatever his flaws, he gave us the lightbulb.  Was Carnegie "good" or "bad"?  Well, whatever his flaws, he gave us the library system as we know it today.  And so on.

[JVW]

On 12/7/2025 at 7:08 AM, Kenngo1969 said:

At least one thing becomes clearer to me as I continue to ponder the subject(s) of this thread: There's more good even in many of the so-called "worst" of us and more bad even in many of the so-called "best" of us than any of the rest of us might suspect.  [1]

_____________________

END NOTE

1. Thats just a general, slightly tongue-in-cheek, off-the-cuff observation that may or may not hold up well when considered vis-a-vis specific cases.  I'm neither prepared nor inclined to defend it when considering specific cases.  Was Hitler "good" or "bad"?  I don't think any reasonable debate could be had that he wasn't, thoroughly, the latter.  Was Edison "good" or "bad"?  Well, whatever his flaws, he gave us the lightbulb.  Was Carnegie "good" or "bad"?  Well, whatever his flaws, he gave us the library system as we know it today.  And so on.

I take a more cynical view, probably because hope is one of my weakest attributes. This is evidenced by my favorite verse in the New Testament Mark 10:18 "And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God." However, in some sort of a paradox my personal happiness and humility is to be achieved by focusing on what I have that is good by way of gratitude.