In your worldview, aren't your wife and children merely non-designed chemical accidents, like motor oil? Isn't love just a chemical reaction in your brain, no different in principle than hate? If someone else decided to hate his wife and children and brutally torture them, do you think that would be morally wrong? And if so, how can you justify your belief
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They are non-designed accidental bundles of reactions, but they are sentient non-designed accidental bundles of reactions. I would empathise with a very human-like robot too.
And your deity murders and tortures all the time.
Let's see now...
Now, you might say that my motivations are selfish. To that I say Yes! Yes, my motivations are selfish at their heart, because my self lies close to my heart and preserving the self is one of the few things that I care about.
Oh, and Lemonaidemon? Well put.
The fact that you think human life and morality is fundamentally worthless without Christianity shows the wretched depravity hiding behind your self-righteousness.
Murder and torture are objectively WRONG, Ten Commandments or not, and they are still wrong even if some bloodthirsty deity sanctions it; which in this case, God did all the time in the Bible.
You are the type of person who would take full advantage of that sanction... if you didn't lack guts like you lack intelligence and moral fibre!
Jason, in your "worldview" the wife and children must sit back and take it and the father, as the undisputed head, can do as he wishes. Do not presume to lecture us on how brutal our "worldviews" are.
Why the "just"? Doesn't love feel as great, regardless of the process that causes it? Isn't your wife as beautiful and charming, regardless of the process that "caused" her?
Love is very different in principle to hatred. They cause very different sets of chemical reactions and they have very different reasons.
As I don't want to be hated and tortured, others probably don't want to either, so that would be very morally wrong. This is not a belief, but evolved empathy. Species that take care of each other and protect each other from harm, have a greater chance at survival and productive offspring.
If someone else decided to hate his wife and children and brutally torture them, do you think that would be morally wrong? And if so, how can you justify your belief
You believe that it is morally RIGHT... or are you saying your own god is immoral?
I say it's wrong because I dont want anyone to hurt me and I don;t think I can get laws passed to protect oly myself, so we agree to protect everyone as best we can. Its part of being a social animal and getting alog with others.
You are only good from FEAR of your God. pity for you.
You have the right to hate your spouse and children. You'd be a sad and pathetic excuse for a human being, but you have the right to your emotions.
You do not have the right to torture them, because that is not an emotion but an act that harms another.
Got it?
"Isn't love just a chemical reaction in your brain, no different in principle than hate?"
Yeah, so what?
That doesn't change the meaning of love or the value we as individuals place on it.
non-designed chemical accidents, like motor oil?
They just don't get it. They can't . They never will.
> In your worldview, aren't your wife and children merely non-designed chemical accidents, like motor oil?
Yes. Not sure what the merely is for, though. After all, what else would they be? Black holes, elementary particles, abstract ideas, heat?
I guess. There's an obvious difference between them, just like there's a difference between a word processor and a virus. But they're both chemical reactions.
Yes.
Because it would suck for them.
In your worldview, aren't your daughters just property to be sold into sex slavery? How can you think it is moral to sell your own daughters as sex slaves? How can you justify that?
Here's what your "book of morality" says:
So these are the biblical family values! A man can buy as many sex slaves as he wants as long as he feeds them, clothes them, and screws them! I guess that "biblical marriage, one man, one woman" is just a bunch of crap, too.
If someone else decided to hate his wife and children and brutally torture them, do you think that would be morally wrong?
Luke 14:26 If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
That said, in all fairness Jesus didn't advocate actually torturing your family. I give Mr Lisle credit for coming up with that idea himself.
If you can't understand that brutally torturing people is morally wrong because they are people with feelings who can feel pain, distress and terror, then you just don't deserve to live.
I swear that these people who can't justify not being total monsters to other people without God really scare the shit out of me.
As a utilitarian, torture reduces others happiness and pleasure and does not create enough tangible rewards to justify it, so... yeah. Morally wrong.
Since all Sapient individual are worthy of value because their complex assortment of chemical and bio-electrical reactions cause them to have extremely complex thoughts, complexity even if it is through a weird mutation that brainpower proved advantageous, so it kept growing and growing, because the smarter you are, the more successful they were.
Until one day, there were 8 Billion large mammals of a SINGLE SPECIES, and even more of their farm animals.
But yeah, humans, sapient aliens, sapient robots are all worthy of respect due to the complexity of their understanding and intelligence. Not that you should torture animals either, cause creating pain for the sake of it is not a... positive sign in anyone.
"Isn't love just a chemical reaction in your brain"
No.
Here's why.
If we say it's the chemical reaction then we'd have to say anyone lacking that reaction isn't really in love even if they do the same behaviors, and say they are in love and have no ulterior motives for doing so.
Which is absurd. "Love" had a definition, a somewhat fuzzy one but it had one before brain chemistry was ever observed. Certain neurological reactions tend to correlate with love, however it is not itself love. If someone is in love but the brain chemistry doesn't look typical for someone in love then it means there's more to be researched not that the person isn't in love.
We should be open to the fact that there will be exceptions to these correlations. In fact most neurological studies don't find 100% correlations but even then people even scientists will say things that make it sound like it is. There are also problems with neurological studies even when they are lauded and trumpeted as authoritative. Sometimes when fully analyzed a study which is quoted in the media as meaning a single thing could really have many valid interpretations.
We should also be open to studying mental correlations with other parts of the body and people's environments. Even if the mind is the brain (which is questionable, I think the mind is a complex process of interaction that the brain plays a central role in but which includes the whole body and a person's environment as well) these things aren't vaccumed off from the brain and not everything in the brain is directly observable, so differences in the environment or body could mean differences in the brain even when they can't be detected.
Still regardless of what the mind is and whether or not it is the brain that's not proof of God's existence or nonexistence.
No, not like motor oil. Like dolphins, like doves, like you, etc.
And while both love and hate do represent emotional states that originate as emergent properties of neural archtiecture and chemistry, they are diamterically opposed states--not identical in principle.
You're presuming it's posible to decide to form a particular emotional response--i.e., that one can decide to ahte someone else. I've seen no evidence this is true--could you, for example, decide to feel romantic love for a same sex partner? Could you decide to hate someone you nw love instead?
But while they aren't responsible for what they feel they are certainly responsible for if and how they choose to express that feeling, so if the man in the example did elected to express hatred through torture yes: he would be morally culpable.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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