Creation "science" and a Bible-based morality

[excreationist]

....Sex outside marriage was always frowned upon in Rome. But was not outlawed until Augustus in 60 BC

Really? BTW what did they call that? "Fornication"? You earlier said "Worth noting is that Roman Christians thought sex with slaves was always ok"

 

[DrZoidberg]

....Sex outside marriage was always frowned upon in Rome. But was not outlawed until Augustus in 60 BC

Really? BTW what did they call that? "Fornication"? You earlier said "Worth noting is that Roman Christians thought sex with slaves was always ok"

That's how I see it. There's a reason ancient Greek plays have survived and are still staged while ancient Roman plays aren't (even though we have so many more of them). Apart from slaves, ancient Roman plays have modern values. They feel too modern to be interesting. There's not enough novelty for theatre goers.

They thought it was shameful for a free man or woman to fall in love with a slave. But just having sex they were cool with.

There's a funny famous poem by Cutulus where he has sex with a slave while saying that he will forever be faithful to his love Lesbia. To a modern reader it's a contradiction. While in Rome sex with slaves was a common method to overcome a broken heart.

 

[excreationist]

.....They thought it was shameful for a free man or woman to fall in love with a slave. But just having sex they were cool with.

There's a funny famous poem by Cutulus where he has sex with a slave while saying that he will forever be faithful to his love Lesbia. To a modern reader it's a contradiction. While in Rome sex with slaves was a common method to overcome a broken heart.

Though today there can be some stigma with having sex with a prostitute, even in Australia....
BTW about "Roman Christians thought sex with slaves was always ok" - do you have a source that Christians would take seriously/believe?

 

[Keith&Co.]

do you have a source that Christians would take seriously/believe?

That's funny.
Christains don't even take Teh Bible seriously if it goes against what they want to be true.

 

[DrZoidberg]

.....They thought it was shameful for a free man or woman to fall in love with a slave. But just having sex they were cool with.

There's a funny famous poem by Cutulus where he has sex with a slave while saying that he will forever be faithful to his love Lesbia. To a modern reader it's a contradiction. While in Rome sex with slaves was a common method to overcome a broken heart.

Though today there can be some stigma with having sex with a prostitute, even in Australia....
BTW about "Roman Christians thought sex with slaves was always ok" - do you have a source that Christians would take seriously/believe?

There's no sources about it. And that's the interesting thing bit. We know it was normal in Roman society. Yet, the early Christian never talked about it. It was all around the early Christians and they didn't feel the urge to condemn it.

Pagan temples almost always had a brothel attached to them to pay for upkeep of the temple. When the Roman empire became Christian and these temples were converted to churches the brothels kept going. They didn't use the term brothel. It was more like a "sacred rite". But it was prostitution. "Temples to Venus" literally was just classy brothels. The temples of Vesta were famous for that you COULDN'T fuck the priestesses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_prostitution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_ancient_Rome#Prostitution_and_religion

In Judaism temple prostitutes were called "kedeshah". Jewish gay temple prostitutes were called "Kadesh". Which tells you a lot about how banned it was within Judaism (= not at all). Yes, you read that right. You could go to a Jewish temple to Jehova and have gay sexy times with a man. Not in the main temple. But in a building attached to it. And the money went straight to the Rabbi who was in charge of administering all this. Nobody back then would have seen sex with a temple prostitute as unfaithfulness.

Augustus railed against prostitutes picking up clients at the Coloseum. Which he thought was horrendously immoral. But he had no problem with contemporary temple prostitution which he thought was normal and natural.

The Christian church was always against temple prostitution. But for whatever reason they weren't against them enough to close the temple brothels until quite late. In the mid 300's the main ones were closed. Not by the church. But by emperor Constantine. I can't find it now, but I know the pope didn't officially ban them until sometimes in the 500's AD. Which the churches complained about since they needed the money to help pay for the running of the church.

It's also important to understand that in the medieval church the commandments were only ever intended to be applied to the masses. Nobles were always assumed to be above the Biblical law. It wasn't until the 1800's and the beginning of mass media that the popes decided that it was unbecoming of the clergy to have a harem of prostitutes living with him in the papal palace.

John Knox famously went to Rome and visited the pope, and was shocked about that the pope wasn't hiding the fact that S:t Peters palace had an entire wing populated with his courtesans. He had no problem with the pope screwing hookers. What he didn't like was that the pope couldn't be bothered to hide it.

The churches critique against Marquis de Sade wasn't the fact that he was having all that debauched sex. Only that he was acting above his station. If he'd been a prince, his behaviour would have been fine.

The Christian church's attitudes about sex is quite fascinating and often quite contradictory.

 

[Bomb#20]

Ken Ham is saying that without the foundation of Biblical literalism and with a foundation of evolution it is up to you to decide though a belief in evolution could make things like abortion seem ok since it could be argued that it is just some tissue or an animal rather than a human life. Though I guess it is possible an atheistic "evolutionist" could be completely against abortion.

Not just possible -- it used to be quite common, back in the era before abortion was normalized. What people are completely against usually has more to do with what their cultures taboo than with what they can construct a coherent argument for or with what their scriptures say. We don't find a lot of Christians who are completely against cotton/polyester fabrics.

Morality based on "God's word" theoretically has an absolute foundation while "anything goes" if you base it on man's opinions.

That's a bald claim, unsupportable.

What if I said that morality based on logic is objective, but moralities based on the opinions of various gods are inherently subjective? Wouldn't that argument be at least as strong as yours?

And if morality really were based on the words of gods, that's when we'd have a case of anything goes. "Regardless of logic or consequences, anything that god says goes."

From post #11:

If you believe in creation what does that mean? Doesn't it mean there's a creator?​

What's immoral is violating other people's rights. Well, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. Well, why would morality need gods, then? We were created by natural selection. And since it was natural selection that endowed us with certain unalienable rights and not some insane alien from beyond spacetime, so much the better -- to identify those rights we won't have to take the word of some self-appointed creator-spokesman who's probably lying for his own nefarious purposes, and can instead expect the rights to have some logic to them and to be accessible to investigation.

The creator owns you, he sets the rules. It means we are to be in total submission to him. He is the absolute authority. He sets what's right and what's wrong. He has a right to do that because he owns us, because he created us. On the other hand if you believe you're a product of chance random processes who owns you? You do. Who sets the rules? You do. Who decides what's right and what's wrong? You do.​

This is a completely self-contradictory argument. It relies on the unsupported premise "If you create it you own it and you have the right to do what you like with it", which is just a rule somebody made up. If relying on rules somebody just made up means you have a subjective "anything goes" morality, then Divine Command Theory is every bit as subjective and "anything goes" as "Who decides what's right and what's wrong? You do.".

And of course we know "If you create it you own it and you have the right to do what you like with it" isn't really true. People are created by their parents. Doesn't make child-abuse okay.

 

[Bomb#20]

.....If a Sim thinks the computer code is all there is to physics, and then when he discovers there's a player with a mouse he can interact with he concludes players are supernatural, that isn't a Sim discovering physics can't account for everything. That's a Sim giving up.

I'd assume that the mouse pointer can only be seen by the player and the sims also can't see or hear the player. The only activity of the player that the sims would be able to detect is the player creating, removing, moving, and modifying objects

If a scientifically minded Sim has gotten as far as figuring out some computer code that could account for most object behavior, and he goes on to notice there are occasional events that that hypothetical code doesn't explain, the null hypothesis would be that occasionally things happen at random, just as we hypothesize that occasionally uranium atoms decay at random. The next step is to collect statistics on the unexplained events and look for patterns and correlations. We assume uranium decays randomly because we've already done all that -- we've collected lots of statistics and we can't find anything that uranium decays correlate with -- but since the human operator isn't really random, eventually a Sim may detect a pattern in the unexplained events, and form a hypothesis, and test his theory that if he does this the probability of an object anomalously acting that way goes up, and confirm or falsify his theory. In principle this process could eventually lead to evidence that there's an intelligent player making choices about modifying objects, followed by constructing a language for communication, followed by the Sims becoming aware of gravity and quantum entanglement and so forth. This would be sort of analogous to what humans experienced in the 1920s when we realized the Milky Way wasn't the entire cosmos -- the Sims would find out what they'd known of reality up until then was only a tiny piece of it. Alternately, the Sims might not be smart enough to detect the patterns in the player's actions, and they'd just retain the theory that sometimes objects change randomly.

- and when the player is giving orders to the sims they would think they (or part of their personality) thought up the decision themselves.

True; but from the point of view of a Sim, another Sim is just an object. If they have a theory of what computer code could account for typical object behavior, it presumably would account for most of Sims' own decisions as well. Then when a Sim behaves anomalously because the player gave it orders, the other Sims could notice, conclude that sometimes Sims make random decisions too, look for patterns and correlations in the apparently random decisions, and the rest follows...

 

[Wiploc]

... The creator owns you, he sets the rules.

Who made that rule? You? Why should we believe it's true.

Are you saying that's true in all possible created worlds?

What if I said that in all countries with fuhrers, the fuhrer is in charge. He owns you. He sets the rules. You are morally obligated to follow those rules.

Is your argument that creators rule any stronger than my argument that fuhrers rule?

I don't think so. I think they are both bald claims, undefended and indefensible.

It means we are to be in total submission to him. He is the absolute authority. He sets what's right and what's wrong.

Did you just make that up, or can you give us some reason to agree with you?

He has a right to do that because he owns us, because he created us.

Who made that rule? Certainly not a benevolent god.

And if the person who made the rule isn't benevolent, why should we care about his rules?

Can you offer us any justification at all for your outrageous claim?

...

Though in this case Ken's opponent wasn't very good at justifying their morality....

Pot, meet kettle. You haven't even made a stab at justifying your morality.

 

[Elixir]

… do you have a source that Christians would take seriously/believe?

That’s epic. You mean “is it in the Bible?”

No, and neither is the Pythagorean theorem, the value of pi or the wavelength of UV light. But that doesn’t mean that those things cannot be determined to a degree of precision.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

… do you have a source that Christians would take seriously/believe?

That’s epic. You mean “is it in the Bible?”

No, and neither is the Pythagorean theorem, the value of pi or the wavelength of UV light. But that doesn’t mean that those things cannot be determined to a degree of precision.

Seeing as how bible eaters think their magic book is the source of everything it's hard to have a meaningful discussion on "sources." My source for knowledge is the universe, and from knowledge derives morality. What is the source for someone learning to brush their teeth or pick up their keys? On record the bible is a pretty immoral book. Anyone sourcing their morality therefrom cannot be moral unless they are projecting.

 

[excreationist]

Who made that rule? You? Why should we believe it's true....

That quote is from Ken Ham, not me. I said "I'm not a supporter of Ken Ham".

What if I said that in all countries with fuhrers, the fuhrer is in charge. He owns you. He sets the rules. You are morally obligated to follow those rules.


Is your argument that creators rule any stronger than my argument that fuhrers rule?

Well God can apparently also give extreme rewards and punishments - eternal paradise and eternal torment.

Who made that rule? Certainly not a benevolent god.

Well Christians including Ken Ham believe God is perfectly benevolent...

And if the person who made the rule isn't benevolent, why should we care about his rules?

Consequences in the afterlife...

Though in this case Ken's opponent wasn't very good at justifying their morality....

Pot, meet kettle. You haven't even made a stab at justifying your morality.

I haven't even mentioned my morality. I believe most of the Bible isn't true and a lot of it isn't moral.

 

[excreationist]

… do you have a source that Christians would take seriously/believe?

That’s epic. You mean “is it in the Bible?”

No, and neither is the Pythagorean theorem, the value of pi or the wavelength of UV light. But that doesn’t mean that those things cannot be determined to a degree of precision.

DrZoidberg wrote "Roman Christians thought sex with slaves was always ok" - and there could be other sources besides the Bible.

 

[excreationist]

.....This is a completely self-contradictory argument. It relies on the unsupported premise "If you create it you own it and you have the right to do what you like with it", which is just a rule somebody made up. If relying on rules somebody just made up means you have a subjective "anything goes" morality, then Divine Command Theory is every bit as subjective and "anything goes" as "Who decides what's right and what's wrong? You do.".

If there was one creator for the history of the world then there is apparently one set of rules (I suppose the two covenants are somehow consistent). If evolution is true there can be millions of sets of rules.

And of course we know "If you create it you own it and you have the right to do what you like with it" isn't really true. People are created by their parents. Doesn't make child-abuse okay.

Well parents are fellow humans while God is a superior being compared to humans.... he commands people to love him with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength.

 

[Elixir]

If evolution is true there can be millions of sets of rules.

Show your work. Did you get this from an authority figure?
And there is absolutely no question of "IF evolution is true", as it is tested and observed as well as, or better than, any other scientific findings. Including all those that enable scientists to fly helicopters on Mars.

Actually, evolutionary mechanics are well replicated in genetic algorithms, and yield effects that are almost as surprising as those of biological evolution.

The dynamics are simple, even for organisms: brute force trial and error and maximum number of trials through imperfect replications, converging on replication success. Physical conditions dictate the contours of the fitness landscape for biological organisms, and that is complicated. But it doesn't have to be for evolution to be shown to be operative.

 

[excreationist]

If a scientifically minded Sim has gotten as far as figuring out some computer code that could account for most object behavior,

I don't think it is generally possible for characters in a game to detect what the computer code is (unless the game was designed for that, or the player was showing the characters the code). The computer code runs in a fraction of a second rather than just hanging around. They could notice consistencies in the behaviour of the world though.

....and he goes on to notice there are occasional events that that hypothetical code doesn't explain, the null hypothesis would be that occasionally things happen at random...

Generally when a player interacts with objects they improve things like change it for better furniture... and in the game the Sims sometimes call out to the player which suggests they believe in an intelligent force.

 

[excreationist]

If evolution is true there can be millions of sets of rules.

Show your work. Did you get this from an authority figure?

I mean if you don't believe in a creator there could be a large number of different systems of morality.... with Ken Ham's creation foundation there is theoretically one system of morality though Christians would disagree on some of the specifics....
Ken Ham didn't say that evolutionists could have millions of sets of morality, just that it is up to the individual (and a evolutionist world view)

 

[Elixir]

If evolution is true there can be millions of sets of rules.

Show your work. Did you get this from an authority figure?

I mean if you don't believe in a creator there could be a large number of different systems of morality.... with Ken Ham's creation foundation there is theoretically one system of morality though Christians would disagree on some of the specifics....
Ken Ham didn't say that evolutionists could have millions of sets of morality, just that it is up to the individual (and a evolutionist world view)

Every existing "set of morality" has evolutionary imperatives at its core, because we are products of evolution.
Without the primacy of those evolutionary imperatives, we wouldn't be here to mentally masturbate over "moral systems".

IF there is a creator, its greatest creation is the process of evolution.
THERE IS evolution. It is a PROCESS that is repeatedly OBSERVED, and controls outcomes in any arena where imperfect self replicators inhabit a dynamic fitness landscape.

 

[ideologyhunter]

I mean if you don't believe in a creator there could be a large number of different systems of morality.... with Ken Ham's creation foundation there is theoretically one system of morality though Christians would disagree on some of the specifics....
Ken Ham didn't say that evolutionists could have millions of sets of morality, just that it is up to the individual (and a evolutionist world view)

If you open Professor Ham's Bible, you can get it to say damn near anything you want, on numerous moral issues -- right down to what standard of morality one uses, i.e., Torah law or salvation by grace. Try to find one consistent, unchanging Bible teaching on faith vs. acts, pacifism vs. taking up arms, returning good for evil or slaughtering one's enemy and committing rape and rapine on his cities, polygamy vs. monogamy, predestination vs. free choice, murder the unbeliever vs. love your enemy.

 

[Keith&Co.]

If evolution is true there can be millions of sets of rules..

You continue to approach evolutionary theory as the atheist position, and only the atheist position.

This is fucking wrong.

You should be saying that 'if atheism is true,' as people do not look to evolutionary theory as a source of morality.
And still, 'if evolution were true' is something many Christains find compatible with their worship of Jehovah.

 

[rousseau]

It seems like you're missing my point, or just ignoring it. My understanding of what you're saying is there is no physical embodiment of God, therefore Santa is perceived as more real. Yes, I'm with you on the point that to children Santa is real because there is a physical embodiment. But the analogy between child / adult isn't even really apt, because children will believe anything you tell them. You could feed a four year old literally any story and they would believe it.

But my argument is that you're understating how much of a physical embodiment of the Adult God there is. No you can't actually see God, but you can spend your entire life surrounded by other people who literally believe in it's existence, and will do anything in their power to convince you that it's real. In some regions of the world people can spend their entire life coming across no contrary social inputs.

You can live in cities where there might be 20 - 30 churches, some very grandiose, and in Catholic versions very striking imagery. In these same cities there might be biblical quotes on a number of street corners.

The bible is the world's best selling book and at least half of the world's population believe that it's a holy text.

On Facebook you can follow religious pages that will promote religion day after day.

So for the adult it's not just a matter of intellect, and interacting with the world like a child, it's a matter of religion being a normalized part of our culture. Religion is even more pernicious than Santa because to most of the world it is real. I get that you consider yourself an activist of sorts with regards to religion, but the constant insinuation that the religious are just dumb feels off the mark to me.

I think it's more the case that those who can see beyond culture are very smart. Where those who fall for culture are just normal people.

I get what you are saying and I don't disagree with the gist of it. I can certainly see myself being the same way given the same inputs. It's why I don't try to change the way people think anymore than I try to change how tall they are. Would I be happier if I woke up tomorrow and observed that everyone had acquired sufficient knowledge to conclude that there aren't invisible people living in the sky? Certainly.

One of my favorite sayings is "You can't use knowledge you don't have." That is the explanation for why kids pretty much believe anything they're told, because they don't know any better. They simply lack enough knowledge to come to the informed conclusion that santa is a dog and pony show. Not until they muster sufficient knowledge does santa belief change.

How are adults that worship invisible creatures living in the sky any different? What exactly would allow them to "see beyond culture" if not knowledge? In short, they lack the intellect - lack the intellect for whatever reason. Those reasons are many and varied but in the end it's an intellectual shortcoming. And aren't very smart people normal people too?

That kid who believes in santa is living in his santa culture. Then it changes. The kid was just as normal before he stopped believing as he was after, but he's smarter because he has knowledge that allowed him to make an important change.

That same kid has no doubt heard about gods and religion too. Think for a second how many kids' lives would be different if told that some people believe gods are real and some don't. And that it's fine to be either way. Pretty important bit of acquired knowledge wouldn't you say? But how many kids have that experience? Pretty close to zero?

And that's why kids continue to believe in invisible people living in the sky. It's okay to stop believing in santa but it isn't okay to stop believing in invisible people living in the sky. That understanding, that knowledge, is denied in that culture.

What you don't seem to be seeing is that you're denigrating those who believe in religion by explaining their religiosity as a lack of something, in your view - intellect. What I'm trying to convey is that a mental configuration that readily accepts immediate, and popular culture is a feature of our species, not a bug. It's how we're built.

Look to other cultural elements like child-rearing, marriage, the importance of a well-paying job - who has the most children: those who readily buy into these things and do them with joy, or counter-culturists who reject these popular elements? Of course it's those who buy-in, which suggests that a central, and enduring feature of our species is that people ultimately identify with their immediate environment and social inputs. We're not supposed to see through popular culture, which includes religion.

So it's fine, as a part of any given culture, to input whatever kind of information you want into that culture, this is how change works. But it's also worthwhile to recognize that, as a species, we're not progressing towards some type of higher intellect in any meaningful sense. The reality is that intellect isn't the primary feature of our cognitive make-up, it's just a tool in a set of tools that we use to navigate our environment. To put it more plainly, and in reference to your point - it's worthwhile to view people who hold deluded beliefs as essentially average and regular people, not lacking anything. Because almost every human being on the planet holds deluded beliefs.