Seasons

Are YOU objective?

::in english accent:: I'm anything you want me to be, baby yeah!

"But when the Pharisees heard that He had put the Saducees to silence, they gathered themselves together. And one of them, a scribe, asked Him a question, testing Him, 'Teacher, which is the great commandment of the Law?' And He said to him, '"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." This is the great and foremost commandment. And the second is like it, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.' -- Matthew 22:34-40

Maybe the bible was really written by a couple of stoners who had partied a little too hard the night before...
"Dude, I swear, there was this voice, he was like talking to me, man, and you wouldn't believe the crazy-ass shit this dude was spewing, yo!"

Just a theory...

I was asking about you, not the Bible. If we're talking about objectivity, well....don't get me started about Mosaic law.

I was answering Mr. Crab's question.

I already answered your question, Butterfly. I was just bringing up a new subject.

I believe there is a universal morality too, but I also believe that a lot of people are too blind to see it. Because then they'd have to analyze their actions and realize that hey maybe some of their actions were wrong in a moral sense. And most people tend to hate being wrong, especially in a situation where someone else knows they're wrong. Also, I think a lot of people consider their values to be more important than morals. For instance, Joe values his independence, which can cause him to do immoral things to various women to keep them from having enough control over him to impede his independence. Although Joe will probably also be inconsistent enough to control others to an extent he wouldn't approve of if it was being done to him. He'd think it was pretty much an either-or situation...*someone* usually has to be controlled and he doesn't want it to be him. This is why acting morally generally requires a certain amount of empathy. If you don't care about others to some extent, you won't bother to figure out how your actions affect them, and the "do unto others" thing won't work too well even if you try. We all have blind spots, and none of us is perfect. I don't think it's even possible to live a 100% moral life, but that shouldn't keep us from at least trying to see the big picture and realizing when just maybe we've been wrong.

Right OnyxFlame -- I think values do trump morality. In fact, just about anything trumps morality, including morality sometimes. So that's why we have the study of ethics, I think, which is how to recognize what the moral claims on you are in a given situation and what you're going to do about it.

Eugene, that raises two questions immediately for me: I can understand why loving your neighbor should be the crux of your moral theory, but how can loving God (who after all can derive no benefit from it) be a moral issue? And the second question is, obviously, how do you define neighbor?

Is who objective, Butterfly Dream? Me? I try, when it's important...

Not that any of us are going to devote our lives to being the posterboys and girls of morality.

Isn't it amazing how most priests & other religious officials aren't even moral all the time? There's a big difference between knowing what the most moral action in a situation is, and actually choosing to DO the most moral action. If we were all 100% moral it'd be a bit like 2 ppl trying to get through a door & both of them would spend the rest of their lives telling the other person to go first. This is why I say that even if we knew how to be moral 100% of the time, none of us would be that way.

As for loving God, what's to say he can't derive benefit from it, providing he exists? You derive benefit from someone loving you, in the sense that it makes you feel better about yourself if nothing else. I maintain it's impossible to tell whether God gets anything out of it or not, since we can't really put ourselves in his shoes since we don't know what size his feet are.

Fair enough, but I'll limit my moral considerations to things I think exist.

In the case of God though, I see that as especially suspect since if there was something God needed or wanted, he could get it for himself. So I don't have to worry about how my actions affect him.