Kant wrote about the greatness of diversity allows you to see what is wrong and what is right.
My biology teacher in high school said that diversity in a species is needed to help find what is successfull as well as what is a failure.

Human life is sacred for a reason, not "just because"... there comes a point in some people's lives where you can not talk to them to get them to change, you can not beat them to get them to change, and sometimes, death is the only way to fix the situation.

Its just a simple example. I would love to see a well thought out argument for human life being sacred "just because" but unless some new discovery comes out, any argument for humans being more special over animals or anything else is either religious in nature, or based off the feelings of the current society, which seems a really bad bar to measure morality by.

Explain how a newborn child - Or, even, anyone below 12 years of age - could reach that point.

Human life is sacred because the Universe would be a better place for human beings if everyone behaved as such.

You see, it's not that hard. What is best for humanity? You do that, and behave in that way. When choices are more complex, you get the collective opinion of an informed, critically thinking majority.

Except thats not true.

That wasn't a preposition that could be falsified. It's not 'true' or 'false' - It's the rudiments of a morality standard. You can't say morals are 'true' or 'false' any more than you can say that up is yellow or that taste is circular. Morals are man-made things, not inherent properties of the universe. You can definitely say that some moral systems are better than others (Inasmuch as they promote more economic and scientific growth in communities that abide by them, or by gauging the overall satisfaction of the people herein (Determining how much suffering goes on under a particular moral system), or through some particular standard such as how much personal freedom it affords) but none are more 'true' than others.

Then we will have to agree to disagree. I see intrinsic value in human life (or other life for that matter), without requiring some kind of specified social contribution or productivity, that's why I believe the 'do not kill' ethic is important everywhere, not just 'do not kill those people who are acting the right way'.

From a religious perspective, I agree with you. However from a utilitarian/secular perspective, I just don't see it.

Verithax, what's up?

The big kink in that is that the entire New Testament is Catholic oral tradition, and remains as such, with the official declaration of the New Testament's canon in writing showing up actually after Luther. No consistent standard other than conforming to the views of the early Church leaders was used in determining what should and shouldn't be read from the altar. Worse, practically all self-respecting Biblical scholars say that the Gospels were written centuries after the death of the Apostles (with the exception of Mark--that's not quite a century after Christ's death), which pokes a huge hole in anyone's claim to infallible divine inspiration as a static entity.

Then again, the Old Testament is a fun mix of Jewish and Catholic oral tradition, but Luther saw fit to revise the canon when something didn't fit his brilliant new idea. Ahem.

Well, some people say it all started with a bang, while some others still say it came from a pre-existing state and was rearranged with a bang. Other say it was created by a personal, very powerful entity or entities, although they diverge both on the nature of said entities and on whether they are still around. Others yet say we come from ant excrement, primeval chaos, or sex between two powerful, complex personal entities. And given that 'up' is defined by gravity, then nearly everything not in earth is 'up', hence what's up is the result of whatever explanation above you choose to accept, which is generally thought to consist of mostly vacuum (Which is, make no mistake, teeming with energy we can't really do anything with) dotted with bits of cool matter and bits of matter with so much gravity that they start fusing and get really hot, and bits of matter with so much gravity that, while they could be getting hot and conceivably did in the past, are now too massive to let anything escape, including heat, with the possible exception of bits of information (Stephen Hawking lost a bet on this, in fact), and all those bits of matter are orbiting around each other while either decaying constantly to a state of entropy or using lots and lots of energy to fend off entropy for a while.

But if you mean what's up in the sense of what is bugging this particular bit of matter using energy to fend off entropy for a while (Yours truly), then I'll be buggered if I know, really. Mostly just appalled at Daganev for a series of reasons I've gone over already.

All I have ever asked was which system you use to define your morals. Its really not that hard. And I think its a legitimate question. I answered it for you, and got attacked for giving an answer. You just refuse to answer.

You seem a lot more self righteous than I do.

I'm appalled at the way you justify genocide. As for how I define my morals, I can say I'm an utilitarian - I do whatever I perceive as producing the most happyness/the least suffering, for myself and others. I don't have the time or the disposition to go on a diatribe about how that is applied right now. You are free to ask specific questions.

You've always striked me more as a secular humanist, but they're similar enough anyway.

The majority of the world disagrees with this view point, there are many goverments with the death penality or such that will go against this view of "value in human life (or other life for that matter), without requiring some kind of specified social contribution or productivity" You do just have to accept that the majority of people and goverments don't see value in human life unless there is social contribution/productivity or the future potential for social contribution/productivity.

If you're trying to falsify his proposition, this is argumentum ad populum. The fact that most people don't see an inherent value in human life is lamentable, but doesn't make human life worthless.

My interest has been piqued and I feel compelled to write a long, detailed post about my personal feelings on this subject matter. If you don't like reading long, in-depth articles, feel free to gloss over it and proceed to the next post. If you are interested but have a short attention span, go all the way to the end of my post for a brief summary. Caution: This post may be hazardous to your preconceived ideas. Proceed at your own discretion.

The subject of religion has always been an interesting topic for me. For background reference, my mother is a Muslim from Palestine and my father is American from a liberal but nominally protestant Midwest family of ambiguous denomination. Currently, he is a Muslim, as he had to convert to legally marry my mother in that part of the world. We are both philosophically inclined but on slightly different pages when it comes to the subject of religion.

I do not consider myself to have a particular religion. At one time, I nominally labeled myself as an Atheist. I've refined my understanding of Atheism as meaning "The belief that there is no God." I no longer consider myself an Atheist because that would imply a direction of thinking that I do not have. I can neither label myself as an Agnostic, because that would mean "belief that one should believe in God just incase there is a God." I'm not that, either. I have what could be considered as a highly personalized religion, though I don't really think of it as a religion; more of a philosophy. What I believe about the nature of the universe on a spiritual level is a mass conglomeration of ideas, information, opinions, events, odds and ends, and other miscellanea that I've accumulated in my years. I don't hold dogmas or tenants and I have a strict (and exceedingly complex) code of ethics that I hold myself to for no other reason that I believe I should hold myself to them. This is my religion/philosophy and as much as I can try to explain it or break it down, I understand it best in my own mind and many parts I simply cannot process through the conduit of language. It would be like trying to explain the concept of the color red to a person who has been blind from birth.

I say that if there is a divine entity in any capacity, whether it be creator, maintainer, destroyer, watcher, any combination of the aforementioned, or of another quality I haven't thought of either alone or combined with the aforementioned; assuming such an entity exists, would my belief in such an entity matter. Does such an entity have a consciousness wired in such a way that it comprehends my belief in it. Consider the following. If I do believe in The Entity, for the sake of simplicity named "God" for the rest of this post; either God knows I believe or God doesn't know I believe. If God doesn't know what I know, it doesn't matter if I believe in God or not. If God exists, and I don't believe in God, it won't affect the fact that God exists. If God does not exist, and I do believe in God, I believe something that is not true. One may ask "What is the problem with believing something that is not true?" I respond by saying "It is part of the standards by which I live my life that I should try to believe what is true and not believe what is not true."

Truth. What is Truth? I will be using excerpts from my father's arguments about his view of his personal religion, which he names "The True Religion" that is to say, "The Religion of Truth." Fact: Truth exists. It cannot be possible that Truth does not exist. Fact, in order for something to be false, it has to be true that it is false. Without Truth, nothing can exist; also what does not exist cannot not exist. Truth is a tautology. Fact: Everything a person knows is true. You may argue, "No, lots of people say they know things that aren't really true." It is very easy to confuse what you believe to be true with what actually IS true. It is impossible to know something that is not true, if it is not true, you can only believe that you know it. The world can believe that the Moon is made of green cheese; that is not true. Europeans at one time believe the world was flat and if you sailed to the edge, you would fall off. That is not true, but their collective belief did not flatten the shape of the world by any amount. The problem arises in differentiating a fact from a belief. According to my father's argument about the nature of God, we take 3 premises: 1) Truth must exist. 2) No God is higher than Truth, because for any God to exist, it has to be true that God exists (quoted from Gandhi) 3) God is that which no higher thing can be conceived/exist (from St. Anselm). If God cannot be higher than Truth, and Truth cannot be higher than God, God and Truth must be the same thing.

If something exists, it is because it is Truth wills that it exists. Therefore, Truth guarantees its existence.
If something exists, it is because it is God wills that it exists. Therefore, God guarantees its existence.

The Universe exists because God made the Universe
The Universe exists because it is true that it exists.

I believe the idea of God is the personification of Truth. We, being humans, project human qualities onto Truth. A star doesn't burn because it thinks about burning. It doesn't will itself to be a star. The Universe doesn't will itself to be The Universe. Things don't exist because God wills them to exist. They exist because they exist.

So you can say that I do believe in a force that created, maintains, and which will possibly bring about the end of existence and all things contained therein. I do not, however, personify such a force. I don't even label such a force as "Truth." That is an attempt to bring a concept too fundamental for the comprehension of human minds closer to the realm of understanding.

Religion has long been used as a means to enforce social order. Life forms have a built-in survival instinct. It comes from eons of evolution. When something is going to try to eat you, you work to prevent yourself from being eaten. If you are going to eat something, you work to ensure that you get something to eat. However, for some reason, mankind evolved in such a way that there are members of our species that feel the need to kill not to eat or to keep from being eaten, but simply for the act of killing. In what is now a time of abundant resources and the technology to effectively guarantee everyone's survivability, people still hoard to themselves more than they could possibly use. I firmly hold that given the resources in the world, and even given 6.5 billion human beings in the world, if the resources were managed efficiently, those 6.5 billion people could be supported. Through personal discipline, 6.5 billion people (a largely unnecessary number for the ensured survival of the species), could decide of their own free will to limit their reproduction until the world population is reduced to a far more manageable level, and that level would then need only be sustained. If you have enough to survive, you don't need more. If everyone were to, of their own free will, work towards what needs to be done, without thought of rewards as all people will already be provided with what they need, the whole social mechanism would run like a perfect machine, one that uses bio-friendly energy and produces no harmful waste products. But long ago, people didn't understand the way the universe operates. They didn't understand the principals of chemistry, biology, physics, etc. People wanted to save themselves the effort of having to fend off every intruder for fear that they were dangerous. So, gradually, systems of spiritual belief came into practice 1) to explain natural occurrences that people didn't understand, and 2) to level the playing field of social structure to ease the flow of life. However, the system was corrupted. After science progressed to the point that it could explain phenomena in the world, people still clung to long-held religious beliefs. The level playing field of life was tilted until religion enforced a condition in which certain people were entitled to a higher, more dominant position. The whole system, which should be used as a tool for a specific set of circumstances, was misappropriated and misused until it caused the very problems it was supposed to prevent.

I say this is why some people came to see the institution of religion as a menace. They fight against it with that same survival instinct that prompted its conception in the first place. They over generalize. They mix what the institution has become with what it was supposed to do. Granted, some people still need the institution of religion to explain things that they don't understand. Some people are more advanced than others. In terms of human growth, some people are still in the childhood of humanity while others have progressed to adolescence. A very small percentage has proceeded to the young adulthood of humanity, but almost no one has reached middle adulthood. Some people are religious or atheistic in a good way. Others are one or the other in a bad way. Many people have difficulty figuring out that what they have believed for so long isn't really true. The basis of science is to test a hypothesis, rigorously test it to try to disprove it. If you cannot disprove a hypothesis after rigorous testing, it becomes a Theory. But Theories can still be disproved. It is exceedingly difficult to prove a theory because it has to be tested in every possible instance, everywhere in the universe under every condition. You can't test to infinity. Something can be mathematically proven, because we always know anywhere in the universe that 2 + 2 = 4 and pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter and other mathematical facts. But few things are quantitative to the point that math can apply to them in such a matter. Math cannot prove qualitative theories because they don't involve fixed numbers.

If God is conscious, is God good, bad, or neutral.
Lets us suppose for the moment, that God IS a conscious entity. Is he Good? One can argue that with all the bad things happening in the world, even by our subjective, human definition of "good", how a good God can allow such things to happen, if he has the will to drive the flow of the universe, even from the time he created it. Why wouldn't he have created the world in such a way that bad things didn't happen. Opponents of this view would say "Sometimes God has to give us something bad in order to gain a good conclusion." Why? Couldn't God give us something good that leads to a good conclusion? "If there weren't any bad, there wouldn't be any good” True, if there wasn't any bad, everything would be what we know as good. It wouldn't be worse or better than it is. If it isn't enough to satisfy our physical and emotional needs, is it really what we call now "good"? If it is enough, we don't need more, and there wouldn't be less. So if God made what is now called "good" the norm, the only condition, it would be just fine. "God is testing us to see if we can handle the bad to deserve the good." Doesn't God know already who can handle the bad and who deserves the good? Why does God have to keep working out the problem 2 + 2 to make sure it still equals 4? Is God Bad? If God were "bad" meaning having a morality so fundamentally different from ours that God wants to throw our natural survival instincts into turmoil, why would there be good in the world. God could have simply created the world in such a way that "bad" was the norm and we would never know "good." "But if God were bad, he would want us to suffer, so he created "good" because he wants us to know about what he is going to deny us to make us suffer." There are so many, far easier ways to make people suffer. God could, for example, make the air out of acid (quoted from Red Mage of 8-Bit Theater). Is God neutral? This is the big one. Is God on the middle path? Did God create existence merely for the purpose of making it exist? Are good and bad merely natural opposites like forward and backward? Is Good necessarily "good" and is Bad necessarily "bad". Does everything exist simply because it exists, simply because it is true that it exists? If this were the case, it seems it doesn't matter whether you believe such a God exists because God isn't concerned with the results or effects of creation, good or bad, belief or non-belief.

I could write a library and a half about all this, but I'll summarize here. I understand that the universe exists in a manner that I can conceive. My belief on the nature of the universe is inconsequential compared to the fact of the universe. I consider myself evolved and advanced to such a point in the growth of humanity as a species; that I can, by my own free will, act in what I consider a conscientious and moral manner. Part of this morality is based on external social influences; another part is based on internal influences for which I have little or no capacity to transcribe into words. I believe that everyone is entitled to believe what they in their hearts, minds, souls, spirits, any similar metaphysical concepts, or any combination thereof; because I believe that, baring severe psychological disorders that throw the whole brain chemistry into a blender and hit puree, everyone has a natural inclination to want to survive and co-exist among fellow life forms. I accept the possibility that there are things that exist and concepts that are true that I am unaware of and I am always ready to explore such possibilities, I consider it fun to think about the possibilities of this complicated thing called "reality," and whatever I learn is mine to keep; either until my brain functions cease and the information is lost to the chemical degradation of my synapses, or for a longer period of time if any or all of it is stored in a metaphysical way. If there is a personified God, it is most likely our own mind providing for the personification. In a way, each and every one of us is a God in our own right, we are the Gods of our inner universes, the way we understand the universe in our own minds.

Contemplate, Discuss, Respond, Disagree, Assimilate. Do what you want with this opinion.

Very nice post.

There was one point in there that I generally disagree with though.

Any rule about "survival instincts" generally doesn't apply to a good percentage of humans. Humans as a whole seem to break every rule we ever come up with. Every urge that a human has ever felt, there is some group of people who control that urge and sometimes do away with it completely.

I also don't agree with "religion being used for social order"... I think there are other much more basic mechanisms which have been used throughout time for social order. Government being the main one. But there is also economics, nationalism and just general philosophy as well.

Acording to anthropologists "religion" has been a staple of homosapiens since they existed. No homosapien has every been found outside of a culture that had some sort of signs of a belief in the afterlife.

I find those facts interesting, not saying they point to any argument. Also, Religion has often been a force of going -against- social order, not conforming to it. (take the supposed cult in china for example)

Oh no I'd probally agree with his statement, I was just pointing out that the majority of people/goverments place no value at all on life unless that life is profitable to them so don't be to surprised when people say they don't place any value on human life in this case daganev.

I was just sort of saying don't be so surprised.

Although to comment on the religion comment the basis of religion is that it wants you to conform to its ideals over any other so saying that religions are not conformist is just simply wrong.

@kurohyou: It seems to me you subscribe to a form of pantheism.

Any "group" is conformist by definition. I didn't say they are not conformist, I said that their goal is not necessarily social order, and in fact is rarely focused on social order.

Social order is something we attribute to religions from the outside in. "Hey look, all those people are basically acting a similar way" That must mean social order. But the truth is, that religions, or belief systems, tend to pull people away from the social order. Because the social order is here and now, and religion is often about "something more".. something more important than the "social order" ... The human nature is such that people start to behave with a social order with the people around them, whether thats based on their economic philosophy, their nationalism, their race, or even their clothing styles. Whatever it is, its not unique to religions or religious systems.




Doesn't everybody?

I don't think I've ever read a book about the deeper aspects of "god" from any religion that didn't get down to pantheism/panatheism.

Umm, no? The anthropology I study believes humans had no need for religion until some decided to undertake the quest to understand reality, and even then the result was magic, not religion. Religion was only formed after magic didn't work out.

As for the belief in the afterlife, I can think of one culture that rejects the afterlife off the top of my head: Judaism.