[Unthinking Majority]

Let's just say I need more data to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, or that i'm going to be tortured in hell for eternity for doing X or Y.

However, there's something to be said about a philosophy warning about the personal and societal dangers of giving in to quick and easy temptations, separating virtues and vices, the 7 deadly sins etc.

Rejecting these values, the West has turned itself into the Garden of Earthly Delights: rampant recreational drug use, stuffing our fat faces with food plus many other addictions, wealth and greed for self-interest alone, rampant sex/divorces/affairs & children out of wedlock. You can imagine how an immigrant from i.e. Asia would immigrate to the West and think we've lost our minds.

As Yoda said in Star Wars, the quick and easy things are seductive but often a path to the dark side. These things can bring short-term pleasure but not happiness.

I see friends who are good people addicted to hard drugs, lying to women to get sex, acquiring shiny things to feed their envy and ego in order to make others envious. There's a lot of nonsense superstition in religious texts like the Bible, but maybe some wise truths in some of those old stories as well.

[FiveofSwords]

Christians are often quite degenerate themselves. Superstition is not the reason people do not engage in degenerate behavior.

[Potemkin]

Christians are often quite degenerate themselves. Superstition is not the reason people do not engage in degenerate behavior.

Indeed, and to a degenerate everything is a means to degeneracy. They pervert even religion and turn it into a means for them to commit more degeneracy, like priests molesting children, or ministers having affairs with their female parishioners. They use religion as camouflage, they hide behind it. Reading a few words in a book isn’t going to change their minds about anything.

[froggo]

I believe the imperative to 'do good works' can be dangerous to the mind. An individual who has an expectation of themselves to act in a certain manner is more prone to taking a tiny moment of weakness/deviance, and turning it into a bubble-walled room of guilt bouncing around and coming back to whack them over and over again, until the sheer frustration at ones weakness results in a fuck-it attitude which momentarily permits them to enact all the sins they possibly can in a short little time until they wake up the next morning and repent repent repent, just to do it all over again next week. If you can, instead, have 'impure' thoughts, and devise 'impure' plots and be lenient on the self, acknowledging these 'impurities' but treating them in a neutral manner and not energetically feeding them, you would be better off than if you become accustomed to a cycle of self-condemnation. So essentially, no, superstition has nothing to do with it. Guilt is a mechanism of control, which is why religions find it so handy, and why religious practitioners are often so corrupted. If you called condemnation another name just because it doesn't use superstitious parables, it would still have the same effect on the followers of your condemnation. There are better ways to live your life, such as learning from your mistakes and not letting your mistakes eat away at you.

An example of what i mean is as follows; a normal person is walking down the street, and a 'disturbing' thought appears in their head; a vision of their mother nude, spreading her legs in a welcoming gesture... the person shakes it off, and tells themselves its fine, its okay, just a random harmless thought, and then they keep walking and get on with their day.
Another person who has been told to be pure and without sin on the other hand, would be walking down the street, and have the thought of their naked mother and think 'oh no! theres something wrong with me! im sick! ew! go away thought! get out of here! im such a sick disgusting person!' but the more they try to force the thought away, the more enticing their mother acts in the vision, and then the person is there with the mother doing 'horrible' things which exacerbates the self-disgust... later that night the person ends up masturbating to the thought, having futilely tried to fight it off, and afterwords is so disgusted with themself that they can barely cope with existence, they consider themselves a failure, what would their saviours think of them?... eventually this becomes a habit, and the thoughts get worse and worse involving the father, the sister, the son, the daughter, whatever... it graduates into deeper degeneracy because the person didn't realize they could have just let the thought go initially and just kept walking and continued their day without turning it into a criticism + condemnation of the self. It is situations like these which are more likely to occur in someone controlled by guilt, which lead to the worst kinds of degenerate perpetrators.

[Saeko]

Indeed, and to a degenerate everything is a means to degeneracy. They pervert even religion and turn it into a means for them to commit more degeneracy, like priests molesting children, or ministers having affairs with their female parishioners. They use religion as camouflage, they hide behind it. Reading a few words in a book isn’t going to change their minds about anything.

You are too naive, @Potemkin. The greater the moral violation, the greater the thrill. Adulterers and pedophiles don't become priests in order to provide cover for their transgressions. That's only a side benefit. They become these things so that when they do transgress, the pain and sense of betrayal inflicted on their victims will be all the sweeter.

[froggo]

In some circumstances it may have nothing to do with having power over the victim; rather they feel a sense of thrill and power in their transgression because it gives them a temporary release from their guilt-induced prison of self-hate. The more atrocious they can be in their abandon, the freer they feel for a brief moment. Eventually, when they realize there are no repercussions thus far for their actions , ie. 'maybe there is no god' they could turn from being self-hating and guilt-ridden, to just plain outright relentlessly evil.

[Drlee]

I agree with @Unthinking Majority unthinking majority. In the posts following his we see the very common practice of holding people who hold themselves to a higher standard, to a higher standard. This, delicious as it is, does not make sense

Our world does not suffer from a surfeit of moral compass. Indeed it is the opposite. The very examples that Froggo uses can be questioned on the face of them. Why is it wrong to have sexual thoughts about anything? The very notion that they are harmful is driven by religious beliefs from time immemorial. Thoughts are not actions. Only in the context of some imposed moral compass would that become real. Nor do random thoughts compel action. If they did we would all be under surveillance.

UM's correct in recognizing the usefulness of religious thought in identifying laudable behavior and condemning harmful behavior. One does not have to be a theist to believe this. I concede that is is much easier for those of us who are theists.

I would not remove religion from the discussion of moral compass. It serves our purpose with a great many people. IF "Thou shall not steal" works in place of "that would not be nice" or "that would be illegal" and, as a result my car is not stolen, I am just fine with that. Call it, defense in depth.

[froggo]

It is not so much that I am holding them to a higher standard, rather its the environment and influences they have in their life which makes them hold themselves to a higher standard.
Nor do i believe it is wrong to have sexual thoughts, but a person who may be repeatedly told that having such thoughts are inappropriate could succumb to a situation where a benign thought can evolve into an obsession; my example juxtaposes a Buddhistic non-attachment of thought with a Christian guilt-complexy way of thinking... and that's where i believe a thought certainly can lead to action; when it becomes obsessive, when it takes power over the weakened mind, and leads to compulsive behaviours. A person who hunts down Jodie Foster, or goes into a school to shoot their peers, or habitually kidnaps innocent children compulsively does so by having obsessed over the fantasy of doing so. and the obsessive nature of a thought is often formed within the confines of a strict rigidity of dogma.
now, do i think it's wrong to tell your child to be nice to their sister, don't steal her m&ms, ask her nicely if you can have some? Certainly not. But i think teaching a child to intuit a general expectation of good conduct is a bit less severe than how i perceive what the teaching of 'sin', and what happens when one sins, how sinning is to make one feel, where one stands as a sinner in the world, what the punishment for sin is, etc. would be.

[Drlee]

There is a case to be made that the discouraging of such thoughts in a religious context reduces not increases the instances of them. You argue repression I suppose. To assume that learning that one ought not shoot one's neighbor in a religious upbringing is less effective or more repressive than learning that one ought not to do so in a secular upbringing is imagining facts not in evidence.

You assert that teaching outside of a religious context is "less severe" but that would assume two things... First that you choose the most fervent religious context to support your assertions and then that milder admonitions are as effective in eliminating "bad" behavior. As I said, neither is supported by any evidence of which I am aware.

[froggo]

the assertions i am speaking of do exist in the most severe of religious context. the types of abhorrent degenerates i'm speaking of, thankfully, are not as common as they could be. A mildly religious person who does not use the religion to outright-control the progeny is unlikely to have their child grow into a degenerate via the examples i've provided; unfortunately where a dogmatic schematic is concerned, there will be those who interpret it mildly and those who interpret it severely.
There are several reasons why evidence will not be able to support my arguments, which i take it will lead you to dismiss me, so be it, and they are as follows; 1. i am primarily speaking anecdotally and experientially. and secondly, people have a multitude of ways they interpret guilt. studies in psychopathology themselves have had conflicting results, some of which state that guilt is good and leads to good behaviour, and some of which state that guilt is bad and leads to bad behaviour. There is no consensus, because this subject matter deals with individuals and situational analyses, there can never be a one-size-fits-all approach. When i say i am speaking anecdotally i am basing my conclusions on how i have observed certain characters i have come across in life. i mentioned in the longest thread ever that i spent over a year living amongst pedophiles and rapists while incarcerated and, having not much else to do, i was rather fond of interrogating them to try to get to the root of who they were and why they did some of the things they did. Another situation occurred where i was in a recovery house, supporting my boyfriend's recovery, and this was a christian-based organization with unorthodox methods of group-therapy, and the way i observed how attempts of using guilt to 'remedy' the lost was rather appalling, and lead certain characters in the group to act out in worse ways than if a softer approach had been applied. Now; i will not attempt to convince you that my experiences and observations trump your intuitive nature of how rules of conduct have been applied and helpful in your own life. I simply share my perspective so that you can see why some people might find the application of sin in their lives as being more of a destructive force than anything conducive to good works.

[Rich]

What is the fundamental (intellectual) problem here?

The problem is that the moral society that most modern westerners assume as a foundation was utterly impossible until quite recently and is still missing in significant ways for a large part of humanity. The moral system that presupposes independence, freedom and a certain level of economic comfort just didn't exist for men and was much worse for women and children. We have an idea the children's childhood should be protected. Everyone get's very upset by child sexaul abuse, but childhood as we moderns understand it didn't exist. The idea that children's rights could be protected outside of our modern context is utterly absurd. There's a reason that child sexual abuse only really started to become an issue in the 1980s. It only made sense to try and protect children's rights, once the idea that women should be treated as full adults could be established.

Our moral system only works within the context of our modern liberal societies. In Britain we had the phenomenon of Jimmy Saville. Seemingly a prolific sexual abuser over decades. He was front page news for day after day after day. It makes sense in our society to demonise him. But single attacks by an Israeli war plane in Gaza have caused more harm, more suffering than Jimmy Saville caused in his entire life. No one in Gaza cares about the Jimmey Savilles. When you try and apply normal moral standards to these situations you end up in farce. The Liberal cretins keep trying to solve these situation as if its a case of criminality. A case of individual criminals breaking the codes that the overwhelming majority accept. It isn't. I remember the Liberal morons on this forum during the Syrian conflict saying all this terrible war and conflict and suffering was the fault of one man Bashar Assad. No its not morons. This was a problem of religious, ethnic, political , class conflict, it was not a problem of individual criminals or individual sinners.

[Drlee]

When you are mature enough not to call names and generally offer naive opinions I will engage with you. As it stands, your post is as rude as it is absurd.

[Bill_Nye]

This is why I like Stoicism, but removed from a Logos. I was Vulgar for a time and people like Epictetus make me regret it.

[Verv]

Let's just say I need more data to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, or that i'm going to be tortured in hell for eternity for doing X or Y.

However, there's something to be said about a philosophy warning about the personal and societal dangers of giving in to quick and easy temptations, separating virtues and vices, the 7 deadly sins etc.

Rejecting these values, the West has turned itself into the Garden of Earthly Delights: rampant recreational drug use, stuffing our fat faces with food plus many other addictions, wealth and greed for self-interest alone, rampant sex/divorces/affairs & children out of wedlock. You can imagine how an immigrant from i.e. Asia would immigrate to the West and think we've lost our minds.

As Yoda said in Star Wars, the quick and easy things are seductive but often a path to the dark side. These things can bring short-term pleasure but not happiness.

I see friends who are good people addicted to hard drugs, lying to women to get sex, acquiring shiny things to feed their envy and ego in order to make others envious. There's a lot of nonsense superstition in religious texts like the Bible, but maybe some wise truths in some of those old stories as well.

No, there can't be a concept of sin without the metaphysics of a religion. It is potential for something to be somehow godless, but there needs to be a sense of rebirth. The reason that Buddhism can sometimes be godless (it definitely isn't always) is because of the concept of samsara and the necessity of escaping it.

In a godless world, "without superstitions" about the eternity of your soul, punishments to be faced in the afterlife or rewards to be gained, sin makes no sense.

Why should I not enjoy drugs? The only negative about drugs is that I could become so addicted that it would ruin my ability to maximize pleasure.

Why should I not occasionally cheat on my wife? Why wouldn't a man in his 50s who has millions divorce his wife in her 50s and get a woman who is 22-32? If he fulfills his obligation of throwing some money at her and the children he had by her, what's wrong?

You can talk about the obligations that we have to others... But what obligation?

Obviously it is always bad to be cruel without reason, and it's ideal to avoid using people in such a way that inflicts harm... Probably we should be more transparent overall, but what's so wrong about telling lies to a naive girl so she'll sleep with you? It's the game. Both parties use deception to get what they want and trap each other. Why can't men do it?

And if a woman wants a high value man to stick around and raise the kids with her, she better let him sleep with other women, or she better be there ready to give him what he wants on demand... High status males have places to be & things to do. The old hot chick will have to be with some beta who is settling on a single mother of 3-4 and providing her his money for what amounts to the same deal: give me your flesh; let me have your beauty increase my status.

What does any of it matter?

"It's bad for society if some of my friends are drug addicts & adulterers,"
"Society doesn't thrive."

That is somebody else's problem. You are living in a peaceful decline. You live at the end of the world's greatest value extraction chain that sends natural resources from shit-holes in Africa to sweatshops in Asia, and you can have it all with minimal qualifications. When you are in your fifties or sixties, you can go and be a s*x tourist in Asia and live in the luxury of a King... You won the lottery.

If you feel bad about being rich, tip handsomely. Leave your wealth to an orphanage. Or, even better: divorce your odl woman wife, hire a 25 year old single mom (or soon-to-be-divorced mom) from some dung-heap nation to come, take care of you, cook and clean and do anything you ask, and she is rewarded by citizenship and she can get all the wealth. You can continue your hedonism for the last 5-10 years of your life, plump, massaged, and drinking Rum Cokes, never setting foot in a nursing home, and a woman who would now be 30-35 (40 at worse) can leave her corrugated iron shack and bring her two babies to skip to the top of the Consumer Line & enjoy the same life you did. And you get a happy ending with a 'happy ending,' if you know what I mean.

"Sin" is a useless concept without God - it would just be something that you use to manipulate people to do what yo want to ease your mind that there might be less suffering in the world.

[Verv]

Another person who has been told to be pure and without sin on the other hand, would be walking down the street, and have the thought of their naked mother and think 'oh no! theres something wrong with me! im sick! ew! go away thought! get out of here! im such a sick disgusting person!' but the more they try to force the thought away, the more enticing their mother acts in the vision, and then the person is there with the mother doing 'horrible' things which exacerbates the self-disgust... later that night the person ends up masturbating to the thought, having futilely tried to fight it off, and afterwords is so disgusted with themself that they can barely cope with existence, they consider themselves a failure, what would their saviours think of them?... eventually this becomes a habit, and the thoughts get worse and worse involving the father, the sister, the son, the daughter, whatever... it graduates into deeper degeneracy because the person didn't realize they could have just let the thought go initially and just kept walking and continued their day without turning it into a criticism + condemnation of the self. It is situations like these which are more likely to occur in someone controlled by guilt, which lead to the worst kinds of degenerate perpetrators.

But you have to distinguish between the ABSURD and the tempting. Everyone gets really funny, absurd, insane thoughts in their brain, but they push them out fairly quickly - one of the ways they do that is by replacing the person. I have zero interest in my mother in that way... I can see how my brain snaps to some image of this, but if I think about s*x and want to continue to do so, I swap her out with someone I am interested in...

And this is actually how both Buddhist meditation and Christian purity is supposed to work...

Swap out your thoughts about lust with thoughts about something else.

Obviously, it doesn't always work, but your mind is a muscle. You can get good at avoiding these impure thoughts.

Of course there are maniacs that never quite are able to beat it and then let it back into their mind sporadically, and break themselves with guilt, and they end up doing crazy things... But I think it's far more common for a drug addict to murder someone, or for someone who senselessly pursues their lust over and over and over again to grow their appetite until they become absolutely violent and disagreeable when they can't get what they want.

The trope of the violent, repressed religionist who explodes is just a useful mechanism for the justification of pursuing one's own desires to their very end.

What is far more common is the indulgent wastrel who explodes and kills someone.

One of the funny things you get here in Korea is all the stories that end with "... he was apprehended at an anma..."

It was reported that Choi Mo (30), a retired Coast Guard constable who was arrested on suspicion of murdering his girlfriend in a bathroom, was caught naked in a massage parlor. There were many testimonies from those around him that he was overly obsessed with his sexual desires and became violent when things didn't go his way.

Naver

You want to see somebody become violent?

Take away their drug.

[Unthinking Majority]

@Verv Sin isn't useless if certain sins, like the 7 deadly sins, are corrupting and harmful to yourself. Sometimes feeling good etc has short-term gains but longterm negative consequences and thus should be avoided. Sometimes certain actions may be good for yourself but harm innocent people. There's good reason to honour your word in marriage. There are many temptations that are better to be avoided. E.g. Being a lazy obese glutton doesn't help anyone.

Is "God" needed to punish me for these behaviours? They seem harmful on their own merit.

[froggo]

Being a lazy obese glutton doesn't help anyone.

This comes across to me as being somewhat fatphobic. Let us take a person who is depressed for chemical reasons, and has found solace and comfort in a bag of potato chips and marijuana every evening while they lie in bed watching television shows that make them laugh. Why should this person be made to feel bad about themselves? What is the benefit in condemning them and forcing them to get motivated, go to the gym, be physically fit? If a person is living their life to the best of their ability and that life is not to your personal standards of how a life ought to be lived, why should your standards (which have little understanding of their life-struggles) reign supreme over their relatively harmless mode of existence? I just don't comprehend why it should matter to anyone else how that person chooses to spend their free-time. Of course we can say that ideally every member of society, in the best of societies, would be the supreme version of themselves that they can be, but why does that seem a bit disturbing in an 'ubermensch' sort of way, when thinking about how it would practically be applied?

[Verv]

@Verv Sin isn't useless if certain sins, like the 7 deadly sins, are corrupting and harmful to yourself. Sometimes feeling good etc has short-term gains but longterm negative consequences and thus should be avoided. Sometimes certain actions may be good for yourself but harm innocent people. There's good reason to honour your word in marriage. There are many temptations that are better to be avoided. E.g. Being a lazy obese glutton doesn't help anyone.

Is "God" needed to punish me for these behaviours? They seem harmful on their own merit.

... But what is the point without God?

"Hey guys, Unthinking Majority wants to live in a society that he finds morally pleasing - knock it off."

Of course, what you are saying is true: some sins do provide an obvious backlash to the sinner. Gluttony can make you fat. Addiction can kill you. Addiction can make you impotent. But if you've spoken with an addict, you'll also understand how these things can be acceptable sacrifices or you'll hear how they actually are managing the problem reasonably well (a lie much of the time).

There's also just the situation of a person like Hugh Hefner - addicted to booze and fornication with a limitless supply of cash. What reason does he have to stop? Because it sets a bad precedent? There are many people who can be functioning alcoholics, functioning addicts of narcotics or s6x, etc.

And it's not our business, right?

People who choose to not have families and choose a path through life that is self-centered have no reason to give up any vices. Their vices are their escapes.

There's also no real basis for moral growth but "philosophy."

How many people do you know in real life who are big into philosophy? Not that many in comparison tot he number of people you know overall, and you likely know more people into philosophy than most because I imagine you tend to be friends with people like yourself.

St. Just Martyr would point out that philosophy cannot save - rather, Christianity does, and thus is the greatest philosophy.

[Verv]

Let me also say this, though... I do not think that you have to be so dogmatic and to fall down and accept every miracle, every Saint, everything you think is superstitious... But a good starting point for you might be thinking about God and the structure of morality within our society.

"Oh, that's easy, Verv: morality grew out of us being primates who have to be cooperative with one another to survive, and it grew gradually more complex until..."

But this is not the philosophy that saves or motivates. It is viewing morality as purely a utility - it invites the creation of a moral system that is purely performative and meant to apply to people who are being observed, not those who have some sense of privacy... It also presents morality as something that is good if it is good for me.

The drug addict will agree that indiscriminate violence and cruelty are bad because they are also bad for him. He'll also agree in "Be Kind, Rewind..!"

But when you tell people that their party is over beacuse it's bad for them, it falls flat. After all, we have now told them that the purpose of morality is to make their life better. It's very hard to tell people that you know what's better for them.

[Rich]

In a godless world, "without superstitions" about the eternity of your soul, punishments to be faced in the afterlife or rewards to be gained, sin makes no sense.

Sin existed in Judaism long before the concept of after life judgement. The big lie of Christianity is that we somehow owe our moral framework to the Jews / Israelites. The Christian moral frame work is inherited from Platonism and Zoroastrianism, although these philosophies may themselves have inherited ideas about post life karma from proto Hinduism.

The irony is that it was actually the Nazis who in the West came closest to replicating ancient Judaic / Israelite morality. If you were a guard in a slave labour / death camp and you felt affection towards a prisoner and spared them you were commiting a sin. This is the same as the Israelite genociders, where it could be a sin to spare the life even of an animal of a people targeted for genocide.