Religion and Ethics Forum

I once tried using "chicken" as a password, but was told it must contain a capital so I tried "chickenkiev"
On another occasion, I tried "beefstew", but was told it wasn't stroganoff.

Well, for me it was talk of wanting religion out of the public forum and behind closed doors and religion being the root of all evil and even religious moderates pose a danger.

You don't think then that the CofE already operates 'behind closed doors', given the current problem they are facing, by failing to act and keeping quiet about child abuse they were well aware of.?

Nice to see, at this time of year, that you've managed to hang on to some straw.

Like what?

Well, for me it was talk of wanting religion out of the public forum and behind closed doors and religion being the root of all evil and even religious moderates pose a danger.

VG,

I think I am getting it since I agreed with your point that claims about what gods want / will reward/ if they exist - can't be tested and are different from verifiable claims i.e. ones that can be measured.

Where we disagree is your notion that the non-religious in society e.g. non-religious voters and politicians aren't influenced by abstract concepts that impact society as much as abstract concepts influence religious people and impact society. Both groups interpret ideas that they have come across about culture, history, ethics etc to come up with abstract concepts of values that are right or wrong for society.

Inserting "God thinks" before "we should" in the sentence "I think we should... bomb the Arabs/ Russians/ Ukrainians/ Israelis" for example... doesn't change the impact of the action on society. Clearly there are wars going on and people predicting dire consequences if these wars aren't continued that have nothing to do with claims about an after-life.

You think politicians sometimes say this is morally better. Whereas I see them spend a lot of time talking about the different values voters want to see upheld in society especially in relation to state intervention and social issues - abstract concepts about human rights, authoritarianism, liberalism, free markets, free speech, patriotism, racism, privilege, bias, tolerance, inclusion, privacy, freedom, preservation of way of life, rule of law, fairness, equality, social inequality, exploitation, self-interest.

Both religious and non-religious might spin metrics as evidence of the values the government is seeking or should be seeking to uphold but the values themselves are based on abstract concepts rather than metrics. Hence as I pointed out, there can be a metric about thousands of civilians killed by bombing residential areas and a society's values might view this as the right thing to do.

No. Try two examples:

1. The God of the OT says, “slaughter the Canaanite men, women and children because their behaviour is sinful”. The Jews accept that as an article of faith and slay the Canaanites.

2. Netanyahu says, “kill the Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza because that way we may also exterminate Hezbollah and in any case our retribution for the October 7 killings will be so terrible that they’ll never attempt the same thing again”.

In both cases, as you note, lots of innocent people end up dead. In the former case though, the faith claim is the beginning and the end of the matter – there’s no way to know if the God of the OT is real and nor, even if "He" is, whether his instructions are faithfully written in a text. There's no particular, real world outcome other than delivering on the article of faith.     

In the second case though, either it works or it doesn’t – ie, either Hezbollah regroups and attacks again, or they never again try it. 

Note too that in the second case there’s no overt reference to a moral or philosophical imperative (which is all there is in the first case). Instead there’s a claim to a pragmatic, real world solution that demonstrably after the slaughter can be shown to have worked or not (regardless of how morally contemptible you or I think it to be whether or not it achieves its objective).

This difference clearly is a difference no matter how much you try to obfuscate that, and I happen to think it’s quite an important one too.     

Does the searching for God thread on this forum count as a circle of hell since it keeps going round and round and I have abandoned hope of many getting off it?