Hello crios,

If you are going to be completely rational then the very bright and clever atheists on here will win you over.

Some of us are believers and we have no rational arguments. Something happens to us and it changes our perception of reality. It makes us look foolish and deluded. However, I think it has made me a better person..... well, more peaceful and hopeful. And I like talking to the thinking atheists on here because they are honest and not ‘well not often ‘ rude.

A religion debate should be a positive discussion. There are a number of denominations that criticize other denominations over their beliefs. I believe in avoiding criticism. There debate here is reasonable and civilized. Keep up the good discussion.

Welcome, Lombardoguy. I hope you find more good discussion here.

Lombardoguy wrote:I believe in avoiding criticism. The debate here is reasonable and civilized. Keep up the good discussion.

You must be talking about Penelope. Don't be having unrealistic expectations for us, just because we have one contributor who is full of warmth and kindness.

Hello Lombardo,

I’m afraid I am very critical of ‘Churches’. Not the people who attend but the edifices themselves, full of gold and silver and ornate garments. The opposite of what Jesus taught.

If we try to follow the Christian way, and have faith that the spirit of Christ will be with us and help us to feed the hungry.....That is what Jesus taught. Love one another..... nothing else. No rules and laws. Great big ornamental churches and cathedrals are where they hide Jesus in my opinion. He’s not there.

I agree that churches are more corrupt than most businesses. People hide in them to appear good when really they are pure evil. The trick is creating a personal relationship with God. No church is necessary. It is about truly filling your soul with God, not appearing to love God in a church but lying behind the scenes.

Start a new debate by reading this amazing book. Open your mind and soul to the contents and start a discussion:
https://www.amazon.com/True-Meaning-Lif ... 087914833/

https://amzn.to/3J1OFK9 Jesus: Mything in Action

Interbane wrote: ↑Tue Jul 24, 2018 12:36 pm I think all questions should start from an objective framework. To me, the objective framework is the outer circle, the framework within which everything else exists. Of course, it's a dead horse now since there's nothing much to discuss from an objective framework - the conversation must move inward. But I think probing the boundaries is never a fruitless exercise.

I think having a comprehensive personal epistemology is the same. You need to reference everything objectively first, then work your way inward to the guts of an idea, then back out again. The concepts will stitch together through this process, and the boundaries become a bit clearer(or muddier, if you uncover some personal ignorance).

I'm picking up on this old Interbane post mainly because the thread has been revived and I want to "report in." I have been reading Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and his Emissary" for a while now, and just reached the part where the author explains that moral intuition appears developmental rather than being culturally instilled. (Locke's "tabula rasa" is wrong, and Rousseau's natural innocence spoiled by society is even more mistaken.)

McGilchrist's addition to the issue is to recognize that there is a complex emergence of moral sense, and that it emerges from a much richer and more flexible process of blending ourselves with others. There is no age at which a person has a sense of self that is not shaped by their sense of how others are. As parents have experienced, children model themselves after their experience of others, mostly quite unconsciously. We don't just copy morality, we copy speech rhythms and we copy hand motions and we copy musical taste, and we copy more than we will ever be conscious of having copied. Most of us have a sense of self that is defined in terms of how we are different from others, but this is a profound misrepresentation of who we are.

Interbane wrote:There is the cultural side to morality, then our set of moral emotions. These are two sides of the same coin, and it's an extremely complex causal web.

Moral emotions are a part of us from birth, yet amplified through being raised. Left to a culture free-upbringing amongst a tribe with no language, we would still act morally within our tribe due to our moral emotions. That's not an absolute statement, since there will be slip-ups here and there, but it all depends on how sway our moral emotions have over us. Sometimes, we need to make a mistake and feel the horrible burden of embarrassment to not commit the same immoral act. Some people appear to lack certain moral emotions, so there are outliers.

The cultural side are the moral guidelines we're taught to follow. Some do not need to be taught, and empathy alone is enough. Others need to be taught and emphasized, especially in how we should treat members of our out-group. I think for everyone, being raised in a way that promotes prosocial behavior and discourages antisocial behavior also helps.

The part of this puzzle I'm currently pondering is where exactly parenting fits in. I mean this from the context of causation. There is something intersubjective to us that we have the desire to teach moral lessons. But my gut tells me it's only part of the story. Sometimes a hard lesson causes pain, and the need to teach this lesson overrides the empathy we have toward our offspring to keep them from harm. Where does this fleeting desire for "developing" others come from? Your comment on giving hard advice to a spouse is closely related to this, I think.

Interbane presented a sense of this process that is much closer to McGilchrist's organically developing intersubjectivity than my own narrative was. I am quite taken by the importance the author gives to "holistic" and relational right-brain processes, and losing a lot of my faith in logic and philosophy as a source of moral behavior or moral "reasoning". Apparently Merleau-Ponty is the "go to" thinker on this stuff, but wrote before the brain research began to unpick the relative roles of logic and intuition.

Interestingly, McGilchrist suggests that game theory is completely off base in its analysis of the role of logic in supporting morality. I would add that game theory contributes a sense of the possibilities of cooperation as well as the pitfalls and temptations that beset it, but trying to understand the appeal of cooperative behavior through this mutual sefl-interest analysis is futile at best and possibly actively harmful. We have known for more than 20 years that people who have been exposed to "Prisoner's Dilemma" analysis are less likely, not more likely, to cooperate than their "naive" colleagues.

That book has been sitting in my list. I think I'll grab it, along with his other book "The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World"

steph244 wrote: ↑Sat Mar 12, 2022 4:41 pm https://amzn.to/3J1OFK9 Jesus: Mything in Action

Thanks Steph, I recently interviewed David FitzGerald, the author of Mything in Action, focusing on the ten criticisms of Historical Jesus Theory he makes in Nailed - Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed At All.

The interview is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-5z2PfWKjY

Well done interview! I have not read Nailed, but BookTalk discussed David Fitzgerald's book The Mormons. I was shocked by that history and later read Under the Banner of Heaven, which goes into the fundamentalist plural marriage side of Mormonism in contrast to the mainstream version.

You mention the Australian Student Christian Movement which seems to investigate Christianity with a relatively open mind. That sounds interesting, but I don't think there is anything like that in the US. It would probably be denounced as Satanic.