[Peace-discuss] Bellicose rhetoric???

[Jenifer Cartwright]

I guess what Carl is saying is that humankind displayed morality long before they invented God. My tho'ts precisely.
 --Jenifer

--- On Mon, 11/10/08, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:

From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Bellicose rhetoric???
To: "John W." <jbw292002 at gmail.com>
Cc: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
Date: Monday, November 10, 2008, 10:35 AM

God is not a necessary component of morality for the simple reason that God --
the answer (which we do not know) to the question, "Why is there anything
instead of nothing?" -- is not a component of anything.

God is not a thing in the universe -- we can't point to something in the
universe as the reason for the existence of the universe -- and God and the
universe don't add up to two. (Two of what would that be?  Two things?  But
God
is not thing in the universe, etc.)

Morality is a component of human nature (for the existence of which God of
course is the reason, as for everything), as grammar is a component of
language. Just as an intelligent visitor from Mars would think that all humans
were speaking one language with regional variations, so human ethics might be
regarded as the rules (or grammar) for humans' being together -- with
some interesting regional variations... (That's what makes horse racing, or
at
least philosophical argument -- and literature.)

Well over a thousand years of Christian philosophical reflection took it as a
commonplace that the Decalogue is not a set of rules imposed from outside, as
it
were, that might have been different, but rather rational conclusions from
reflection on what it is to be human.  (They did think it was a little hard to
derive the 3rd/4th Commandment -- there are different numbering systems -- this
way.)

Christian theologians thought that, although ethics could be descried
rationally, that took effort (and time) -- hence all that literature -- and so
God generously provided in the Ten Commandments as it were an operating manual
("documentation," we would say) for being human.

More on this from me (quoting others), if you want, at "The Subversive
Commandments," <http://www.counterpunch.org/estabrook03292005.html>.
 --CGE


John W. wrote:
> ... I'd be more interested in hearing one or both of you Bible
scholars explain to Jenifer why God is a necessary component of morality.  Or
conversely, how one can be moral without a belief in God.
> 
> John Wason

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