____no5
Free Man
Not really, above icons are canonical, the mermaid Madonna even has her own dedicated, fully operational church where common priests chant and everyday people worship.
The Catholicism thread (Popes, Clothes, Buildings, Theology, Media...)
- Thread starter JudasMyGuide
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Not really, above icons are canonical, the mermaid Madonna even has her own dedicated, fully operational church where common priests chant and everyday people worship.
Magnus
Pica Serdica
You're missing the point, Per.
Am I? Or am I the only one who gets the point?
Magnus
Pica Serdica
Apologies, @JudasMyGuide , out now.
JudasMyGuide
The incorrigible papist
None necessary, anyway, you're always welcome here if you want to see what's on my mind, friend.
@MrKnickerbocker I appreciate you taking my polemics in stride and not as a hostility. Also, to anyone to whom I would seem arrogant, just put "in my opinion" before every sentence. Well, for those who read it, anyway. Sorry. I know it's long, but I don't think it's just nonsensical rambling.
You are conflating some of my points together, I'll throw your sentences around a bit, because there is a logical progression.
No, all people have morals or ethics, however non-theists (or in general people denying metaphysics) have a much harder time finding a reasoning for it, because they mostly inherited the core virtues and concepts from the time people were all religious (in which the latest secular age is an anomaly, I mean, we were still half-apes when we were already performing burials, rituals and some kind of spiritual re-action and cognisance. Human beings are Homo Religiosus, just by abandoning the structural religion people will find different beliefs, more dangerous ones, but I digress) and the core virtues and concepts are still of that sort, still evolving from the same (theistic) preconceptions. Secular morality would look very different.
Take the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Put aside the fact it's been so much influenced by Catholicism (primarily via Jacques Maritain) that Islamic countries still have problems with it, calling it too much drenched in Judeo-Christian worldview, but how would you reconstruct it from scratch?
How would you for example come to a dignity and importance of every human being (including those that you don't like, those that are somewhat wicked, those that are very wicked and those that are not very "useful", like disabled people and so on) purely on materialistic (meaning pure matter, nothing metaphysical) worldview alone?
And that goes for every belief, not just morality, but with morality it's much easier to demonstrate - simply after every point you believe or argue that is good, fair or just, say "Why?" Be honest and admit to yourself at least, when you start to get a bit lost for arguments backing up what you feel or think is true.
This is not just mere sophistry - morality is about being good, you must therefore know what is good. A lot of things (most) can be just as good as bad (whether lying to your government is good or bad kinda depends on whether the government asks about your income or whether you have Jews hidden at your home, for example), so you do need a system and a reasoning. But where do those originate?
Studying law (still as an anti-theist, btw) was somewhat eye-opening, although I didn't realise it at the time. With the first year being all about the theory of law and its origins and philosophy and with ethics which is supposed to be universal and eo-ipso evident and it just... appeared, just manifested out of nowhere (wait, you don't know that human rights always existed?) is kinda ... weird, to be honest.
It is exactly this, the very unconvincing arguments for secular morality that were one of the (many) factors for my conversion, after all.
If you don't mind high-brow literature, an example of a brilliant deconstruction of secular morality is Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue - he wrote it still as an atheist and sometimes it's hilarious how he desperately wants to cling to that line of argument, but then again, it makes it really thorough. It's also a fascinating work as it - during its writing - it kinda converted its author (like John Henry Newman became Catholic during writing another work and doing another research).
For more info on how and why Christianity in particular influenced nearly everything we know today (including Marxism, feminism and others), see Tom Holland's Dominion.
(It's true that Haidt attempts to come to a universal human morality from a secular point of view based on evolutionary psychology in Righteous Mind and while I agree with him up to about 90 % of what he says, some of that still works with religion as an anthropological constant and some of the final secularisation on his side is a bit of stretch, so take it with a grain of salt - however if you read it, I'm more than willing to discuss it in this regard and I'm presenting it as a contrasting opinion of sorts to mine, so to be fair)
This is a leading question and I won't be flippant and say "yes", paraphrasing Dostoevsky, but my answer would be "if religion/spirituality somehow never existed, then yes". But we're speaking of a different species by then; animals have physical capabilities and even may possess a certain degree of intelligence, but they don't understand "rape" or "murder". Recognising good and evil is not a matter of intelligence, it is literally what makes us human.
You may say I am implying that without religion, people have much less reason not to do so, especially if no-one sees them. Not because we are "guarded by a celestial policeman", but because we lack the reasoning for good and bad that would be different from our personal benefit.
To borrow from Lewis again, say you want to do a good thing, even if it really inconveniences you. Why would you, say, give money to a poor person when there is absolutely no guarantee that they (or someone else) would do so for you if the roles were reversed? Mere commiseration? But that is an emotion, not a moral, and an emotion that can be actually rather immoral, say if a teacher commiserates and won't let the student who cheated fail, invalidating others' education in the process. And so on, I'm not going down this rabbit hole, since this is already extremely long, it's a mere demonstration.
Besides, we rape and murder (and steal and swindle and whatever else) each other anyway, so this point is kinda moot.
My primary point was that people already do put their beliefs into law, people want to enforce what they perceive as Good and Christians are no less legitimised or even obligated to do so than atheists. Furthermore, since so many of "secular morality" has roots in Christian morality already, I find it very dubious to try to enforce one and abhor the other, or to even make some kind of meaningful difference between the two; all this was because you expressed your distaste at people putting their theology into law, which is what was happening at the very moment, on your side.
The part about Adams was more about the secular founding fathers not being as secular as they are sometimes presented and even if they were or at least thought so (Jefferson, who is the main architect of the "secularism"), that they were working with a bit of a blind spot, so to speak, not realising how much of what they perceive as universally right is in fact dependent on many preconceptions, including religious/theological/spiritual ones.
Besides, from what I gather (and I have this from a secular historian), modern-type democracy with equality and "democratic values" only appeared there where was already a long-standing Christian tradition. Almost as if there was some prerequisite ... Sure, correlation does not equal causation, but it does imply it.
Yes, I think that without people's vices in check, democracy can't survive for long, the short remark would be "democracy is good, but where do you get the democrats? Is democracy even able to raise them?". I'm not saying Christianity is the only answer, but the other answers (like how people thrive in their morality and get the most democratic often under oppression, sort of Herbert's argument for the Golden Path in the Dune universe) kinda scare me. But that's a different question.
The problem is, science tells you that something exists or how something exists, religion tells you why something exists. The former is much more changeable than the latter. The why, doesn't change, only our understanding of it, which is covered in the development of the doctrine.
God doesn't change. Man doesn't really change. You may think we are so different because of our advanced state or better understanding of psychology, whatever, but reading spiritual writings of people from 2000 years ago, it convinces me we are still the same. Man is still a mystery even to himself. And his virtues and vices remain the same.