ethics and faith

You state yourself that: "An individual's morality is subjective and relative to their genetic make up, and their environment." Why is it unethical to standardize any morals whether religious or not. Lets say that someone believed that rape was ok and the government standardized that as morally correct. You believe that rape is not inherently wrong so why would standardizing it's "ok'ness" be unethical?

Secondly why should ethics "be designed to benefit the individual human rights of all people in a civil society"? Who is to say that people even have rights? What makes 'your body' any more yours then mine? Where are you getting these rights from?

Ethics should a consensus of opinion by moral standards not by religious teachings. If you allow your ethics to be dictated rather than formed by logic, they should stay yours not the communities as a whole. We do progress by logic , logic will advance, religious doctrine stagnates.

You are really annoying, buddy. I hate when I have to state the same things over and over again, simply because someone refuses to comprehend my answer.

Hue-man, why are you impolite to to your fellow inquirers?

Religious doctrine does not "stagnate". Religious doctrine is in constant flux, undergoing constant change.

Further, the morality taught by religion is not somehow immune to reason or logic. Take for example the Golden Rule: both religious moral teaching and secular moral teaching.

Religious morals are not based on unverifiable claims: they are derived from the experience of human beings. If you take the time to actually read some of the material, theologians discussing morality, you will find logical arguments throughout. For example: check out Thomas Merton's Faith and Violence or the far more popular Five Sermons of Joseph Butler.

I don't mean to be, but I think that it's mainly on any subject that deals with God. I need to work on it, but I hate when people refuse to understand me because they disagree with me. I don't like stating the same thing over and over again.

because the belief in a such a God is [not]dependent on reason, logic, or verifiability, but faith.

My belief in God to a certain extent is a result of all those 4.

Oh please tell me the verifiable bit , i cant wait ..

My belief in God to a certain extent is a result of all those 4.

I think the closest thing that anyone can honestly claim to verifiability is coincedence. Sometimes coincedence seems simply too coincedental to be coincedence. This isn't to say that it isn't coincedence, only that to someone experiencing the coincedence it can seem too convenient to be dismissed as merely coincedence. Such isn't usually verifiable to someone else, but it can be darn convincing to the individual.

Religious doctrine does stagnate, because of its dogmatic nature.

Any moral argument that includes God is illogical, because the belief in such a God is not dependent on reason, logic, or verifiability, but faith. It is therefore meaningless to say that God does not want homosexuals to have equal partnership rights, or that God doesn't like murder, so you shouldn't murder. You don't need bad reasons to believe in good things.

I don't mean to be, but I think that it's mainly on any subject that deals with God. I need to work on it, but I hate when people refuse to understand me because they disagree with me. I don't like stating the same thing over and over again.

Yes I know, hue-man. But to argue the point to one who has become superstitious because of an unignorable coincedence (or multiple coincedences in some cases,) can be an impossible task. And it can seem like verifiable evidence to the individual, even if in reality it isn't. My point is simply that I can't think of any other way that someone could attempt to verify a supernatural object of their faith. (Emphasis on attempt, I know it's not success.)

You can assert such a notion all you like, but repeating the claim does not add credibility to the claim.

Go look at the history: religious doctrine is always changing. How do you think we, human beings, went from Sky God and Earth Mother cults to polytheism, to monotheism. And then, how do you think Judaism has evolved? How do you think Christianity has evolved? How do you think Buddhism came into being? How do you think Taosim has evolved over the centuries?

Simple: religious doctrine does not stagnate, but changes. To assert that religious doctrine stagnates is to turn a blind eye to the history of religion.



You can make these assertions or you can go read a book that proves you wrong: I gave you two examples, one a classic or moral philosophy, the other a modern collection of essays covering moral topics.

You may not agree with the logic, and therefore conclude that the arguments are illogical, but such a conclusion is far different from the assertion that religious moral arguments do not employ logic and reason.

Once again you assert that God is dependent on faith: and this is true. But you also assume that somehow faith is immune to logic and reason, which is false: as evidence, check the whole history of theology.

Further, you assert that belief in God is not verifiable. This is also false. You could rightly claim that God is not scientifically verifiable. However, if you take two people with experience of God, they can verify their experiences.

I think that you're misunderstanding what xris meant by saying that religious doctrine stagnates. Religious doctrine stagnates socio-political progression. That is why it was systematically removed (at least officially) from western political systems during the enlightenment and the 19th century.

The fact that religious ideas change and evolve with the environment is evidential. But what you're failing to notice is the fact that those ancient Gods you speak are no longer taken seriously when we speak of reality or existence. They are all in that trash hep that we call mythology. Specific religious doctrines do not change as much as they are replaced by a whole different religion altogether.

Not all religions are as dogmatic as others. The most dogmatic religions are those that claim to have divine revelation. Indeed, if you believe that an omniscient God has revealed absolutist truth then why would you feel the need to change the doctrine? In fact, doing so is usually considered to be blasphemy. We've made major changes to the constitution since its inception, but how many times has the bible been literally changed since the canonization of the books at the council of Nice?

The history of theology is a rhetorical tap dance around the points of discussion.

We've been through this before, Didymos. Believers only experience the idea of God, not the physical existence of such a being. To believe that a being really does physically exist merely because it is an idea is called idealism. Idealism has been discredited ten times over, and it is now widely known to be what it has always been - a crackpot proposition.

You cannot, I repeat, cannot verify the existence of such being outside of the fact that it is only an idea.