Faith Philosophy & Religion
there are no such things as right and wrong?
This was part of a discussion about morality/morals. I was just sounding off my thoughts.
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i understand that agnostics and atheists and some other religions say they have morals independent of any God or moral authority.
my problem with that is there is no such thing as morals without a moral authority. you can believe we are evolved accidents resulting from a large BOOM billions of years ago, and our ‘morals’ are merely learned chemical reactions and psychological developments that mean absolutely nothing….but your moral codes still come from somewhere.
sure it’s real easy and self-aggrandizing to say “i believe in doing good for people because i simply believe in doing good for people. i don’t do it because a book or deity told me so.” oh please, as if you came up with the idea for “being good”.
sentiments/statements like that are just simple, subtle attacks on people who do indeed follow a book or deity for moral codes, ethics, laws. these feelings are meant to make the atheist, humanist and/or agnostic look like a ‘better person’ than someone who follows a set of beliefs and/or book.
when people say they don’t need a god or book to tell them to do what’s right, i cringe just a little. because your ‘morals’ came from your parents, friends, society, government, media, etc. you do or don’t do simply because you were influenced into agreeing or disagreeing with certain beliefs and then absorbing them as your own moral code.
regardless of your beliefs or lack therof, morals don’t exist without a cause. you learned your morals and you chose to live your life by them.
and even if you pretend that that isn’t true, you still have to admit that your opinions on morality aren’t something “you just came up with”. you aren’t good just for the sake of being good. your view isn’t unique.
that’s a pretty simple concept to swallow. so now you gotta remember that the current american moral code, laws, and ethics are all influenced by a judaeo-christian worldview.
without a moral authority or God to appeal to, then you are left with nothing but made-up concepts in your own mind. these concepts are then spread throughout a society and accepted as a good generic morality.
in other words, there is no such thing as good or bad, right or wrong, or ‘morality’ if there is no standard by which we can measure all this. all of this morality is simply concocted behaviour with patterned reactions.
this makes the concept of ‘wrong’ meaningless. as an acquaintance once said, you can rationalize murder if only you believe we’re evolved life-forms without a god or creator.
here’s a bad example….(sorry it’s what’s off the top of my head right now)
if i decided to get a kitten and proceed to beat a 4 year old child to death with it, why would it be wrong? why is that immoral?
1) because it’s wrong to kill.
says who? says you? why, because you believe in the sanctity of life? because some people think that all of nature declares an unspoken, natural right to life or sanctity thereof. who cares? If it’s being declared, then how come I don’t hear them? Maybe because that hogwash is your unfounded belief and i happen not to believe in that. i believe that life and death are arbitary. because several billion years ago, some speck got infected and mutated, evolved and spread into what humans are today, i cannot accept the idea of ‘right’ ‘wrong’ or ‘morality’. these are all the result of conscious thought projecting wishful thinking. so really, there’s no reason why i shouldn’t beat this 4 year old to death with a kitten.
you’re taking that kitten and child’s right to life away.
what right to life? who says they have a right to life? i’ve just said that you don’t have any reason to tell me to stop
the law says not to kill or be cruel to animals.
why does the law say that? by what authority are they claiming this? why must i listen to the law. because they’ll put me into jail? so what? i’m still not ‘wrong’ in killing the child with the kitten. neither am i ‘right’. it is all meaningless because your morals are
empty terms for learned conduct.
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okay that was weird….but you get my point…
without appealing to a higher moral authority, your morals have no basis. you simply ‘believe just because’. if you just think it’s good to be good for goodness sake, then you’re deluding yourself.
without a moral authority, then it is okay to do anything you want. i can kill anyone i want to simply because i feel like it. oh sure, governments will prosecute me, but they only do it because they say it’s wrong. not because it’s ACTUALLY wrong. some say well, because we’re a civilized society, with concscious awareness of our existence, we must abide by certain sets of societal rules. we set forth these rules/laws so that we can continue in a civilized fashion, thus promoting and furthering the species. we are not savage creatures, we are free-thinking creatures who are atop of the food chain and will be the dominant race so long as we continue in our civilized, rational societal mindset.
whatever. even with that mentality, which is apparent today, you can’t prove the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of anything. a morality-as-a-necessity-for-furthering-of-humankind mentality still leaves the question to be answered: why is anything ‘right’ or ‘wrong’? what constitutes as either one? does right and wrong even exist? does it exist independent of human nature? which came first? — RIGHT and WRONG….or human consciousness? if we came first and then invented the concepts of right and wrong, then really, they don’t have to be taken seriously. we can brush them off and do whatever we want.
we can indeed do anything that tickles our fancy, regardless of others’ feelings or our environments. because even if we are infringing on somenone’s ‘rights’ or life, it doesn’t matter. there is no right and wrong.
unless of course, RIGHT and WRONG (morality) exists independent of human thought. that is, humans did not create right and wrong. if we didn’t, then that is kinda scary. because we now have to wonder where this right and wrong came from. who determines the standard of right and wrong? then there must be some sort of moral authority, right? who?
to make a long story longer….there really is no such thing as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ if there isn’t an absolute moral authority to appeal to.
i’m sure there are holes in my rant, but that’s it for now…
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