Beginning: At 08:22 PM 8/2/2008, Rev. Stewart Marshall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Can everyone here do me a favor and quit bashing religion.
No. When religion deserves not to be bashed, people, generally speaking, I predict, will stop bashing it. But this is America, Stewart. You're perfectly free to characterize yourself, and the articles of faith in which you believe, as somehow victimized. You and they aren't victimized in the slightest. But you're free to suggest that you and they are.
Morals are set by society.
No, they aren't. Morals and society have nothing to do with each other. Morals, even assuming such a thing exists, color the way someone, individually, deals with himself, how he makes himself behave, what he knows or doesn't know about himself, if anything, and what he decides to believe or disbelieve or admit to himself that he does not know, if anything. If there exists such a thing as morality, it exists solely within the individual. Morality, if it exists, is strictly subjective, and isn't capable of being "shared," or objectively appraised, the superstitious beliefs of America's Puritan forefathers to the contrary (i.e., that how one acts shows how moral one is), notwithstanding.
Ethics, however, are very much a creature of society, to the extent (which is usually very great) that the society reflects the ethos in which it exists. My guess is that most societies have boundaries that are largely coterminous with the relevant ethos. Ethics, for the purposes of this post, is pretty much how you treat other people. The Golden Rule, for example, is ethics plenipotentiary. The convention seems to be (to me, anyway) that behaving ethically means that you treat others "fairly," "decently," "honestly," "justly," "reasonably," and "equitably." Ethics ARE objectively observable and appraisable, and, most certainly can be, and, in fact, are, shared. Unlike morals and morality.
And there is nothing that is necessarily absolute or eternal about what is or isn't ethical. It depends upon the culture, society, or ethos in question. In classical Sparta, it wasn't unethical for young boys in training to be warriors to steal food from the general Spartan agricultural community. Spartans wanted their warriors to be adept at stealth and living off the land. Once you completed your training, however, it became unethical to steal from other Spartans. [If you were in training, and you got caught stealing, you were punished not for attempting to steal, but for getting caught.]
And there is nothing that is necessarily coterminous about or between ethics and morality. They are two very distinct and different things, as anyone who read, and understood, Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" can tell you: On the two occasions when the bishop lied, where we understand that lying, in our culture, is unethical behavior, was he behaving morally, instead, by saving the life of Valjean, and the lives of Valjean's wife and children? Valjean, himself, engaged in the act of theft, which is generally understood to be unethical, but he did so in order to feed his literally starving children. I think Hugo wants you to ask whether there isn't some sense of what is "good," "proper," or "moral," inside these people that is apart from, or somehow beyond, what otherwise compels them to commit a "bad" act. And if French literature isn't up your alley, then how about the Sally Field character, in the movie "Places In The Heart," lying to protect the Danny Glover character?
In any given individual in a society, morals and ethics may overlap, like Venn diagrams, such that one person may perceive it to be a duty to himself (morals) to refrain from cheating or killing his fellow man (ethics). You and I, observing him, can see his ethical behavior (he treats his neighbor with decency and honesty), but we have no way of knowing whether or not HE, PERSONALLY, acts that way out of a sense of morals, even if we imagine (and that's all it is, most of the time, I believe) that WE would be moral if we behaved in the same ethical way. The way I see it, we spend our entire lives trying to find out who we are, and what it is most proper ("moral," some say) for us to believe and to do and to treat ourselves, and, if we are very wise and very lucky, we might, just might, by the time we die, begin to figure it all out. We simply aren't wise enough, we aren't smart enough, we aren't knowledgeable or perspicacious enough, even to discern, let alone to sit in judgment of, someone else's "morality."
Any society has a sense of morals, and taboos set by what the community standard is.
No, it doesn't, as I pointed out above. It has a sense of ETHICS, instead, since ethics, and not "morality," is what is shared by those in the society. Maybe you think that YOU have a sense of morality, and it requires you to behave this way or that, but, to the extent that you and others in the society agree upon how each of you should treat others, you aren't expressing a "sense of morals," as you used the term. You (plural) are merely behaving according to shared ethics.
Any person who claims that the community has a moral standard, and that HE knows what it is, is just using code for the idea that everybody is supposed to act in a manner consistent with HIS narrow, selfish, arbitrary, and subjective religious beliefs. Taboos, to the extent they aren't based in ethics or science, are either superstition or articles of religious faith. Either or both.
(There may be a basis in a common religious background, but even diverse religious backgrounds can agree on moral standards.)
No, they can't, and no, they don't, even if, among themselves, they say they DO so agree. Lots of people agreeing among themselves that there are unicorns doesn't make the existence of unicorns a fact. What they are actually doing is comparing, and agreeing upon what constitutes, ethical behavior. That they call it "moral" doesn't make it so, any more than calling it a ham sandwich makes it one.
Japan is decidedly not a Christian society (I think everyone can agree on this) Yet they have some strict moral standards on what is allowed of a sexual nature.
The standards, because they are objectively-appraisable, cannot be, by definition, moral, and are therefore, necessarily, ethical, instead. Or else they are taboos with a superstitious or religious basis.
Conclusion follows in the next post:
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