Re: Religion Thread: We Could Say a Prayer
Without God, there is no "ultimate judge" other than your conscience.
There are plenty.
There's your laws. (Hint: I do not recommend this.)
There's your culture.
There's humanity.
There's any of a thousand different purely secular moral-ethical determinisms from evo-bio to utilitarianism.
There's the I Ching or a magic 8 ball.
They're all arbitrary, just like every god ever invented by man, which is to say, every god. The wonderful part of each god, once you strip away the creepy social control part, is that it was our earliest way to come to grips with humans' unique place in the universe as the source of good and bad in a way that every person could handle mentally and emotionally.
The "grounding" of a god is itself just another arbitrary human creation. It is only deterministic if we declare it is. If that grounding on something outside yourself is what you need, you could accomplish the same thing by examining bird entrails.
The grounding of a god as authoritative has the same problem as the idea of god as First Cause. It merely pushes the question back one step further. The solution to an infinite regress is you have made an error. There's no First Cause, and there's no ultimate authority. God as a parable is a brilliant human creation. God as a literal existant is Zeno declaring motion is impossible.
Bad ethics, like bad epistemology, comes from bad metaphysics. The problem comes down to the desperate attempt to escape human responsibility for mores. But they are born with us. They are what we bring to the table. They are our nature. The very heart of human Being is we
literally bring morality to life. Nature doesn't care. But humanity is born and we start throwing laws around because with us is born right and wrong.
Don't run away from that. Face it.
The tragedy: The universe does not care.
The miracle: But we
do. <-- And there's your reason to be good, right there. Because without you
there is no good. That's the point of the metaphors of ****ation and hell. If you shirk your responsibility to create and Be good you missed your chance to be human, you are ****ed, and you live in hell. How long? Forever, for with your death time ends for you. For every instant t you will ever know, you live. You
already have eternal life, by definition. You don't have to worry about the second after you die because after you die
there are no more seconds.
The price of our self-awareness is that human Being includes right and wrong.
The good news
is that there is no ultimate authority. Not because it's party time but because we are not born into a torture chamber with a grinning, seething, petty tyrant glowering at us. Good is arbitrary and always in negotiation, and good is always complete with us -- once the last human winks out there will be no good or bad in the universe, just rocks and cats. So this is it: your endless lifespan is the full breadth of the right and wrong in the universe.
That is of course also the bad news. You are the single arbitrator of good and bad in all the universe in all of time. SO DON'T F-CK IT UP!
Sleep tight.
(@yashar) <a href="https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1159534722655096832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 8, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
