Morality without Religion.

@Setanta,

Quote:

if one accepts a claim that this is an ethical injunction, would mean that Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Parsis, Taoists, Buddhists--a host of billions of believers, could not be ethical because they do not believe in Jehovah.

I don't think that argument holds water. I'm sure that each religion has something within that are sins by conduct or through omission which the others do not have.

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The first commandment doesn't prescribe ethical or moral behavior, it prescribes belief.

The first proscribes behavior that to those who believe in the commandments, is unethical.

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@Setanta,

And I've pointed out more than once that the requirement was not for a universal moral truth.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

I'm not wrong as often as you are. You take positions and argue them just to be arguing, and not because you have any sound basis for defending your position.

Since I'm more familiar with my motivations than you are, this statement of yours is just silly.

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@Thomas,

Exactly. Religious rules can be doctrinal and ethical. The two categories are not mutually exclusive.

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@Setanta,

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You take positions and argue them just to be arguing, and not because you have any sound basis for defending your position.

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Having an opinion is not equivalent to being right about the matter under discussion.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

the first commandment requires belief in Jehovah, which, if one accepts a claim that this is an ethical injunction, would mean that Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Parsis, Taoists, Buddhists--a host of billions of believers, could not be ethical because they do not believe in Jehovah.

That's perfectly true. To a believer in the First Commandment, the condut of Hindus, Jains, etc., must necessarily be unethical in this point. At the same time, of course, this behavior is perfectly ethical to the heathens themselves. I wouldn't expect that this seems inconsistent to ebrown p, who is a moral relativist. In the view of moral relativists, what's unethical to Christians can be perfectly fine to others.

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JTT and Thomas: I disagree. The first commandment merely commands a belief in god. The rituals that go along with that belief are not implicit in the commandment, since the commandment itself doesn't say anything about conduct. The first commandment, in effect, says that you have to belong to the club, but the pentateuch is the club's rulebook.

Furthermore, if the first commandment subsumes all of the rituals incumbent upon the worship of god, what is the status of those rituals that predate the first commandment (e.g. male circumcision)? Do they get grandfathered in?

Indeed, since the rituals are owed only to god, it's questionable whether even those are ethical in nature. Ethics, after all, are usually viewed as a human's duties to all other humans, not just to all other co-religionists. In addition, calling religious rituals "ethical" in nature would mean that a totally isolated (but religious) individual would still have ethical obligations, which strikes me as doubtful. If someone, for instance, eats a rabbit, which is unclean according to Leviticus, he has not injured anyone else: he has only sinned against god. As such, that's more like breaking the club's rules than violating an ethical obligation.

Even if we view the rituals as ethical obligations, that still doesn't mean that the rituals are contained within the first commandment. Someone, after all, can obey the commandment but not fulfill the rituals, just as someone can fulfill the rituals but not obey the commandment. To me, that's a pretty clear indication that the commandment and the rituals cover different things. The commandment concerns belief, the rituals concern conduct.

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@Thomas,

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To a believer in the First Commandment, the condut of Hindus, Jains, etc., must necessarily be unethical in this point.

Obviously.

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At the same time, of course, this behavior is perfectly ethical to the heathens themselves.

Do heathens have the concept of ethics? Or of science in the sense of the mathematics of the will to infinity and directional energy? (see Spengler for details.) Doesn't the winner, in Darwinian terms, say what ethics are and who has the right one?

Are ethics for practical purposes rather than for pontificating about.

There might be a more fundamental relativism in having all the benefits of our ethics in one's daily life, taking them for granted even, and then getting all romantic and woosey in the pub about those who don't accept them, for the purpose of sounding humane and a nice, even-handed and concerned nice kinda guy.

Where are the nice guys in the Darwinian canon? Where were they in the heathen world.

One might almost think you were giving support to heathenish ideas Thomas.

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@joefromchicago,

joefromchicago wrote:

JTT and Thomas: I disagree. The first commandment merely commands a belief in god. The rituals that go along with that belief are not implicit in the commandment, since the commandment itself doesn't say anything about conduct. The first commandment, in effect, says that you have to belong to the club, but the pentateuch is the club's rulebook.

It's true enough that the First Commandment says nothing about conduct, but then it says nothing about belief either. It merely states: "You shall have no other gods before me". So, as Bill Clinton might put it, it all depends on your definition of "have".

For information on what the Bible means by "having" other gods before Jahwe, I think the most instructive case is when Moses returns from Mount Sinai and catches his people in flagrant violation of the First and Second Commandments: They dance around the Golden Calf. The dancing, and Moses's wrath about it that ensues, are definitely about conduct, not belief. There is no sense in which Aaron and the Israelites believed in the Golden Calf.

joefromchicago wrote:

Furthermore, if the first commandment subsumes all of the rituals incumbent upon the worship of god, what is the status of those rituals that predate the first commandment (e.g. male circumcision)? Do they get grandfathered in?

Is circumcision incumbent upon the worship of god? I don't know that it is. Independent of that, circumcision is regulated by later rules in Leviticus.

Not if you ask the dictionaries. When I look up the term ethics on dictionary.com, their definitions seem 1) mostly circular (ethics is all about morals, where morals are all about ethics), and 2) dwell on human obligations and rules of human conduct. So it's the obliged and the conducting parties that are human. But the owners of the obligations and the targets of the conduct are left unspecified. Hence, it is consistent with the term ethics to say that humans have ethical obligations to god. Just as it is consistent to say that humans have ethical obligations to animals, which is Peter Singer's big theme.

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@spendius,

I had a "nice" too many in my last post. I'm sorry.

It must be being in the presence of all this niceness on here.

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

For information on what the Bible means to "have" other gods before Jahwe, I think the most instructive case is when Moses returns from Mount Sinai and catches his people in flagrant violation of the First Commandment: They dance around the Golden Calf. The dancing, And Moses's wrath that ensues, are definitely about conduct, not belief.

That's a very good illustration of why you're wrong. Moses wasn't mad at the dancing -- he wasn't a Southern Baptist, after all -- and god doesn't really seem to have a problem with it either:

God, in 1 Samuel 18:6, wrote:

And it came to pass as they came, when David was returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, that the women came out of all cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet king Saul, with tabrets, with joy, and with instruments of musick.

Instead, Moses was mad at the worship of a graven idol. Moses didn't go around smiting people just for dancing.

Thomas wrote:

Is circumcision incumbent upon the worship of god? I don't think it is.

It's a ritual prescribed for all observant Jews. Whether it is subsumed under the general head of "worship of god" is, I think, the question being debated.

Thomas wrote:

Not if you ask the dictionaries. When I look up the term ethics on dictionary.com, they seem 1) mostly circular (ethics are about morals, whereas morals are about ethics), and 2) dwell on human obligations and rules of human conduct.

You should know better than to consult a dictionary for validating your argument. That's an argumentum ad verecundium.

Thomas wrote:

The owners of the obligations and the targets of the conduct are left unspecified. Hence, it is consistent with the term ethics to say that humans have ethical obligations to god. Just as it is consistent to say that humans have ethical obligation to animals, which is Peter Singer's big theme.

If a gentile does not circumcise his infant son, is he acting unethically?

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@joefromchicago,

joefromchicago wrote:

Instead, Moses was mad at the worship of a graven idol. Moses didn't go around smiting people just for dancing.

Fair enough, but that's a distinction without a difference to our disagreement. Worship is still conduct.

joefromchicago wrote:

You should know better than to consult a dictionary for validating your argument. That's an argumentum ad verecundium.

... which, according to your source, is "the fallacy of appealing to the testimony of an authority outside his special field." I responded to your claim that "Ethics, after all, are usually viewed as ... " My authorities are dictionaries, who are authorities on how words are commonly used. The usage of a word reflects very closely how people commonly view the content of the word. Hence, I was using the authority in question within its special field, and hence didn't commit the fallacy you accused me of.

joefromchicago wrote:

If a gentile does not circumcise his infant son, is he acting unethically?

Not in my opinion. After all, I don't see any obligation to the infant son to circumcise him, and I don't believe there exists a god to whom we might have ethical obligations. But hypothetically, if I believed in the god of the Old Testament, I may* well believe he's entitled to us circumcising our infant sons. In this case, I would consider the gentile in this case to be acting unethically.

-------
* I say "may", because Christians are maddeningly inconsistent about which Old Testament rules still apply to them and which don't. But that's a separate topic.

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@joefromchicago,

Quote:

Moses didn't go around smiting people just for dancing.

He might have had that as one reason. "Dancing isn't going to get us anywhere", he might have thought.

There have been two "dancing crazes" that have swept Christendom that I have heard of. Big ones. No doubt many smaller ones. Whether they were smited I don't know but they were stamped out.

You can't dance around an infinite power.

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

joefromchicago wrote:
If a gentile does not circumcise his infant son, is he acting unethically?

Not in my opinion. After all, I don't see any obligation to the infant son to circumcise him, and I don't believe there exists a god to whom we might have ethical obligations.

But you just got finished saying that religious rituals constitute ethical obligations. If circumcision is a religious ritual, then isn't that an ethical obligation?

Thomas wrote:

But hypothetically, if I believed in the god of the Old Testament, I may* well believe he's entitled to us circumcising our infant sons. In this case, I would consider the gentile in this case to be acting unethically.

Why? The gentile, after all, isn't a Jew, so why should he be judged by standards that are established only for Jews? Remember, god didn't create the covenant of circumcision for all mankind, just for his chosen people (Gen 17:11). So why aren't gentiles exempt?

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@DrewDad,

So what if you pointed that out? It's simply not relevant to the discussion. Hitchens stated that there is no ethical statement or action which would exclude a non-believer. Brown offered the first commandment as an example in refutation. No "universal moral truth" is relevant to that argument. I have responded to Brown by pointing out that the first commandment is prescriptive of doctrine, of what one must believe, and more specifically, that one must believe in Jehovah, to the exclusion of all other gods (inferentially recognizing that other gods exist). I have never mentioned a concept of "universal moral truth," i've merely denied that there is anything inherently ethical in believing in Jehovah, nor anything inherently unethical in not believing in Jehovah.

Attempting to change the terms of the argument i had with Brown is a pointless exercise, which does not relate to the substance of the argument.

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@Thomas,

Quote:

There is no sense in which Aaron and the Israelites believed in the Golden Calf.

This statement shows a profound ignorance of the significance of the golden calf. The calf was a symbol of the worship of Baal-Moloch. Baal-Moloch was the chief competitor to the Jawists in the pre-Captivity Jewish community. Indeed, dancing around the golden calf would have been seen by all Jews in the pre-captivity era, and most Jews thereafter, as evidence that the Jews of the Exodus believed in Baal-Moloch. This is why the passages in Exodus and Deuteronomy which i quoted were particular about the making of graven images, an aspect of the Baal-Moloch cult.

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@Setanta,

Nah- it was the dancing around totems that was tabooed. Any totems.

Set can't see the wood for the trees.

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@joefromchicago,

joefromchicago wrote:

But you just got finished saying that religious rituals constitute ethical obligations. If circumcision is a religious ritual, then isn't that an ethical obligation?

Only for the believers in the religion. For non-believers in the religion, it isn't an ethical obligation.

joefromchicago wrote:

Why? The gentile, after all, isn't a Jew, so why should he be judged by standards that are established only for Jews?

[Playing advocatus moral relativisti]

By stating your question in the passive voice and saying should be judged, you are implying that ethical standards are absolute. But they aren't. They are relative to who does the judging. Jews should condemn gentiles for not circumcising their sons because Jews think circumcision is a duty to god, and Jews, unlike ebrown p, aren't moral relativists. Non-believers in the Old Testament shouldn't condemn gentiles because they don't believe there is such an obligation to god.

[/Playing advocatus moral relativisti]

Setanta wrote:

This statement shows a profound ignorance of the significance of the golden calf. The calf was a symbol of the worship of Baal-Moloch. Baal-Moloch was the chief competitor to the Jawists in the pre-Captivity Jewish community. Indeed, dancing around the golden calf would have been seen by all Jews in the pre-captivity era, and most Jews thereafter, as evidence that the Jews of the Exodus believed in Baal-Moloch.

I take your point, and take back my statement about believing. Nevertheless, I maintain that the praying also constitutes a conduct.

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Well, i'm not arguing whether or not prayer is a conduct, so you'll have to take that up with Joe.

Since posting that, i've perused some online sources, sources maintained by Jewish organizations, and concerned with Talmudic scholarship. Some of these point out that there is also an opinion that the calf might have represented the Egyptian bull-headed god Apis. However, they are all in agreement that the "sin" of the golden calf was that the people were worshiping a false god as their deliverer from Egypt. I think it is implicit in worship that one believes in the deity which is represented by the object of veneration.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

Hitchens stated that there is no ethical statement or action which would exclude a non-believer. Brown offered the first commandment as an example in refutation.

I believe ebrown was responding to this in the original post:

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Here is my challenge. Let Gerson name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever.

It says nothing about ethical statements that exclude anyone.

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Morality without Religion.

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