Yes they are :)

My morality is Biblically based, but I agree with a lot of what you have said about how do we know which interpretation? That is (one of the reasons) why I am Catholic.

@KingCyrus Can you expand on that, how would you being catholic make a difference?

Simple. I believe that we weren't left alone to figure out the Bible on our own like a lot of Christians.

I like this verse from Acts, and I think it describes this situation very well:

Philip ran up and heard him [an Ethiopian dude] reading Isaiah the prophet and said, “Do you understand what you are reading?” He [Ethiopian man again] replied, “How can I, unless someone instructs me?” So he invited Philip to get in and sit with him. (Acts 8:30-31)

God didn't leave us to figure everything out on our own. He left us a Church. Not just in the sense that there are a bunch of Christians around and we are all spiritually united. But a literal entity. We see it in the Bible, where all the Apostles and their disciples gather for a council. It has continued to this day. That is how being Catholic matters. Because I have "the pillar of truth" as my guiding force on Earth.

So you believe what the catholic church says?
If you believe everything, even when they change their mind?
If not then how do you decide which is true and which is not?

I do. Unfortunately, there seems to be a huge amount of misinformation regarding how and what the Catholic Church teaches. There is big stuff and little stuff. Big stuff being like Jesus being born of a virgin (which most Christians would agree with) little stuff being priests not marrying. Big stuff doesn't change. Never has, never will. Little stuff can, because it isn't written in stone anywhere. To take the issue of married priests, the Catholic Church has flip-flopped on this in the past. At first, they were against married priests. Then they decided to try it, and then realized that was mistake. So if that is what you mean by changing their minds, that isn't a matter of faith, but practicality.

How about evolution? The world orbiting the Sun?

Not theological or moral, and therefore, in its own rules, the Church has no binding authority.

How about limbo? Magdalene laundries, handling of the child sex abuse, money laundering in the vatican bank, no apology for the churches role in the rwandan genocide, stance on condoms in areas with large amounts of HIV

I'm just looking for someone you disagree with the church on morally, there has to be something right?

Not sure about current or former stances on limbo, I have never read it.

Magdalene laundries? Not sure what that is. Also not informed about the Church's role in the Rwandan genocide.

Sex abuse? Money laundering? Absolutely. That stuff is bad.

Not going to apologize for stance on condoms. The Church's recommended treatment is much more effective :)

You are differentiating things that the Church *teaches* and things that its people *do*. It is also important to note that just about all of that stuff was not done ex cathedra so doesn't even fall under what the Church can do with authority.

*sorry, you *aren't* differentiating

@KC, yes Eva is differentiating; but the question is, do you believe the church is capable of doing wrong. In which case, how can you judge that wrong?

If it does wrong, then it's teachings could be wrong; any thing the church does **could** be wrong. Then you have to take each teaching in turn and determine if it is moral.

Thus how do you do this?

According to Catholic teaching, the Church is only preserved from error under EXTREMELY rare circumstances, and those all relate to teaching. The two things that he highlighted have nothing to do with teaching. Sort of a "do what I say, not what I do." Catholics don't believe that people in the Church (for that is what it is) can't do wrong, but that the Church as a whole unit, ie. the pope and all the bishops, can be preserved from error.

Orathaic, Baptists and other evangelicals believe that we need to live our lives pretty much as Martin Luther laid it out in the three solas: Sola Scriptura, Sola Gratia, Sola Fide, which means that the Bible is our guide rather than the church (sola scriptura), we only get to heaven by God's undeserved gift (sola gratia), and we access that gift only through trusting in Him (sola fide). So yes, we believe that our church, or any church, can commit errors or even be taken over by ungodly people.

The three signposts to knowing God's will are his objective word, our subjective agreement that something is right, and the unfolding of circumstances, in that order.

@ Eva

From your responses, I think you may not have understood what I said. Don't get me wrong do not expect you to accept my premise as right necessarily. I just don't think that your counter-claims are on track.

Are you suggesting that Luke 16 supports the idea that Hell is a torture chamber? If so please provide some commentary so that I can understand your point. I never said that Hell was a nice place, I attacked the idea that it is a torture chamber that people are thrown into. It’s a much different conversation than the one in the OP though.


My claim is that Christianity does encourage self-assessment but does not encourage self-loathing. I pointed out that if I truly loathed myself I would reject Christ’s offer of salvation because I would not consider myself worth saving. Thus self-loathing is not only discouraged, but is the sin of despair.


As I see it your counter-claim is that acceptance of the doctrine of Hell requires self-loathing. Yet only one image of Hell works for you in this regard (I gave you several, lake of fire, outer darkness, etc.), and that the one that you seem to be latching on to isn’t biblical. Who chooses to walk into a torture chamber and sit down? Nobody, right? Yet, the man in the passage of Luke realizes that his choices got him there, and asks for a ghostly warning to keep his brothers from choosing the same fate. Hell is choosing to be cut off away from God. It isn’t a room where bad boys are imprisoned to get their comeuppance.

As a result, Self-loathing is contrary to Christianity. God loves me. God is no fool. There must be something lovable about me.

@Eva

Thank you for your response to my question, and I applaud your helping of others.

I am curious about one thing though. You said:



“I do not have free will”

and

“My personal experience of what I think is the underlying basis for morality is that I form my morality on the basis that suffering is bad and I should reduce it by my actions.

So I do volunteer counselling, and my brain rewards me with happy feelings”



These statements seem contradictory to me. How can you volunteer to do anything if you do not have free-will? If your actions reduce suffering isn’t that largely an accident of whatever forces cased you to make them? Can you elaborate on what you meant by these statements?

@CA, re free will.

Thrre are two ways to think about this, one is that free will is an illusion, in this you have the illusion of 'volunteering'. So your mind has evolved to give you executive function (which exists in the prefrontal cortex, and we understand can be taken away by damage to the brain, or surgery) this is the part of your brain which evolved to assess situations and decide the best course of action to take. You are conscious of the fact that you have the ability to assess and decide and this leads to the illusion you are in control.

Another way to look at it, which ignores the personal experience as described by humams, is that we are robots following a set of instructions. Ok, it is a complex set of instructions, and allows for a dynamic solution to problems; you can come to a set of circumstances twice and do something different the second time, because you remember the first. But there is no way this robot can convince anyone that it has free will. It merelymfollows a set of prescribed instructions.

That said if you read all the instructions you couldn't necessarily predict what the robot will do - without first simulating it's actions/decisions - amd that simulation is in effect the same identical process as 'thinking'.

In this setting, the robot's code has been evolved to behave in ways which are likely to increase the chance of survival, 'rewarding' the robot for things which have proven to be benificial in the past (previous evolved versions of the program) including the seeking of sex, food, and comfort (ie shelter and social support)

Volunteering is a economic term for unpaid work. In that context all people do labour in exchange for money and we need a special term for 'voluntary' contributions. In some areas where monetary exchange hasn't become the predominant method of interaction we use volunteerig.

You will note, we don't say volunteering for activities which are usually unpaid, like say sex, raising a child, socializing with a friend, buying/cooking your own food - all things necessary to survival and thus have not been invented in recent times so have older norms.

In that sense volunteering didn't exist before paid labour but it is not any special example of free will, it is a behvaiour in the context of paid labour. But all these behaviour can be understood in the context of an evolved brain which has goals directed at survival - via the pleasure mechanisms associated with sex, food and comfort.

The illusion of free will goes along with the sensation of consciousness; by having 'awareness' of your surroundings you can respond to dangers and keep yourself safe. And any animal who behaves in this way can be presumed to have consciousness in the same sense. Though like the robot above they can't prove this.

I don't find this to be a contradiction at all.

This is where I think "humanism" is de-humanising. How can you call someone without a soul, someone without freedom of action, "human"?

@ orathaic

"You are conscious of the fact that you have the ability to assess and decide and this leads to the illusion you are in control."

Am I misunderstanding you here? I do not necessarily think that free will is the "being in control" but I do view it as "the ability to assess and decide".

In terms of the illusion, what exactly is illusionary? My assessments and decisions?

@dipplayer, i don't know that this is a tenant of humanism, this is probably more materialism.

What the word soul means, in a metaphysical sense, would determine whether or not i think you have one. You might think my philosophy is de-humanising, but my life philosophy has developed to extend my empathy to animals, and become a vegetarian (to minimize suffering, as i believe factory farming is cruel) - that is, it has lead me to being more considerate of others, even others which most people ignore - though i'm not going to claim that most people would directly torture an animal, but they allow it to happen which i think is morally lazy.

Anyway, i think this empathy is a very human thing, and don't find it de-humanizing at all. The logic and rationality which i base my philosophy doesn't discount the actual human experience. The experience of suffering is a key assumption/basis of my philosophy; and the cold rational logic is merely a tool to suggest the best way to behave in this world...

@CA:

I guess it is the 'free' part of free will, you are constrained to act based on your personality, your environment, the incentives you perceive, etc.... basically all the things that make you up. I guess you could sum them up as a set of rules, then the illusion is that you can't see the rules.

Of course you can come to understand your rules and by doing so expand your options... but then you're changed your rules by adding them to your experience, and forming new rules which you can't see. I think it is a fundamental physical limit of any processing system. (something analogous to Gödel's incompleteness theorem, or the stopping problem)

I guess to avoid the brain checking if it's decisions are the best ones by looking at the rules, it just hides the rules from us, and lets us feel like we're making the decisions. That's like a formal mathematical system where you can do whatever calculations within the system you want, but none of the processes all the system to change the rules (where the rules define what processes are)

In that sense, the things the brain is intentionally hiding is the illusion.

"my life philosophy has developed to extend my empathy to animals, and become a vegetarian"

You celery murder. You make me sick. If you really cared about suffering in all forms, you would eat only manufactured food that has not harmed innocent cabbages.

@ orathaic

I am not sure that we are using the same definition of free will. A working definition may be helpful. Here is a definition from Webster's:

The capacity to make decisions independent of causality, fate, or divine will.


What you seem to be describing is a set of parameters that the decider may not be aware of (and certainly isn't entirely aware of) within which he must operate. For me those parameters are implicit in free will. I don't worry about my inability to turn marigolds into tofu with my X-ray vision, & I fully realize that I am making choices based on the many factors that make up me. I also realize that my choices now affect the parameters for my future choices. When I say "free" will, I am not speaking of completely unconstrained will, but the freedom to choose among possible options. Are we speaking the same language in this sense?

@ orathaic

I appreciate you taking the time to elaborate on the basis for your philosophy. I am still finding it hard to see where it is not self-contradictory with regard to the issue of free-will. For instance:

"Of course you can come to understand your rules and by doing so expand your options... but then you're changed your rules by adding them to your experience, and forming new rules which you can't see."

seems to be a direct contradiction of,

"I guess to avoid the brain checking if it's decisions are the best ones by looking at the rules, it just hides the rules from us, and lets us feel like we're making the decisions. That's like a formal mathematical system where you can do whatever calculations within the system you want, but none of the processes all the system to change the rules (where the rules define what processes are)"


It might be that what you term to be "the rules" in both quotes are actually different things, but it seems to me that you just said "You can give yourself more options by understanding the rules (which changes them), and then turning around and comparing it to a mathematical system in which none of the calculations allow (I assume that was the word you intended) you to change the rules."

One would think that you can either change the rules (albeit indirectly), or not change them. How can it be both? I understand if its an imperfect analogy, those happen.

Damn, i know i wrote a responce to this, maybe it is on my phone.

@Crazy A, an analogy, but heres something:
"What you seem to be describing is a set of parameters that the decider may not be aware of (and certainly isn't entirely aware of) within which he must operate. For me those parameters are implicit in free will. I don't worry about my inability to turn marigolds into tofu with my X-ray vision"

I think i agree with your definition, but your example highlights what i'm not talking about. I am talking about your inability to do things which a human might be physically capable of doing.

It's like i'm saying you are austria and you could in theory invade italy in 1901, but you're not able to because you limit your choices knowing that an early invasion will most likely kill you.

Except for social situations being more complicated than the type of tactical ones you make in diplomacy, and the options harder to distinguish.

@Crazy A: yes that is inconsistant. The example of a mathematical formal system may be a less than perfect analogy. But i also seem to be unsure about whether you can change your parameters.

It makes sense to me that a brain would have limits, and that limiting self-reflexive thinking would be necessary - or that any brains which happen to get lost being overly self-reflexive go crazy and fail to reproduce...

Ps: found my original reply...

Analogies with pure mathematical systems may be lacking, approximations at best. Illustrative of the ideas. To actually understanding the functioning of the brain it is helpful to look at conditions where it is malfunctioning.

Take depression, a lot of depressed people have difficulty remembering positive things and focus more on the negative. This is a 'limitation' affects decision making, if you can't see the pleasure in life you are less likely to choose to engage in activities which you found pleasurable when healthy. (see recent studies: www.psypost.org/2015/02/shake-it-off-not-so-easy-for-people-with-depression-new-brain-research-suggests-32078 )

You might look at addiction in similar ways, if one substance/activity can give you the 'normal' pleasure responce and everything else in life just pales in comparison the it will be little surprise that your behaviour becomes limited in ways to seek out that thing.

These amount to 'unhealthy' limitations added to the 'normal' human behaviour. But normal behaviour is limited already.