TerminalEncounter [she/her]

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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: December 16th, 2021
  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]@hexbear.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Is the golden rule really good?English
    3·
    5 days ago

    The Golden Rule got kind of expanded into the Kantian Categorical Imperative - instead of what one should do to be moral, it tells us what we should not do. So he says, “do not treat people as purely a means to an end, because they are human and have intrinsic worth” for example, don’t lie, don’t cheat, etc. Which isn’t a bad way to live life. Of course, he said it’d be wrong to lie to an axe murderer the whereabouts of your loved ones on the grounds that it treats even the axe murderer as a means to an end rather than as a person… so not perfect anyway. Ideally, if everyone is following the Golden Rule or the Categorical Imperative then there is no harm ever done. But we don’t live in an ideal world.

    Socrates said “there is no moral evil” because he said it was impossible for anyone with sufficient knowledge to act in an evil way. Because, in his view, if they knew enough they would act in their best interests - which means limiting harm and never treating others poorly. For him that meant education and the cultivation of certain virtues meant people would act well instead of giving rules to say what is the right or wrong way to act - except his virtues were made up in Antiquity lol so didn’t really include a lot of respect for women’s rights for example.

    Sometimes Justice and Doing What Is Right demands we get some retribution or are made whole after some harm was done (for example, being abused by a person in authority) or even act punitively to prevent future harm (like removing those teachers from their jobs, maybe even banning them from ever working with anyone vulnerable, not just children). In that case, it’s wrong to keep treating someone well when they’re harming you - it’s only going to encourage further harm to someone else.

    Maybe treating them as you would have them treat you might include “hey, if I’m acting like a dick and abusing people - tell me and others and do everything you can to stop me from doing that.” Sure, that’s “badly” for narcissists who think they can never be wrong but not for people who aren’t, right? If I said something harmful carelessly, I would hope to be corrected! There’s certainly a class of people who really think treating them “well” means doing whatever they say to do and accepting all punishment, earned or not. IMO, they have a very poor understanding of what being treated well really means lol

  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]@hexbear.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What scientific discoveries greatly weakened religion and the case of God ?English
    72·
    6 days ago

    Science and religion are often compatible, I know of some Hindu thinkers (for example) who say scientific knowledge is to be taken as truth and religious truth should not contradict it - just that this scientific knowledge cannot explain the whole mysteries of the cosmos. You might be aware of “the god of the gaps” and arguments like that, or that God somehow created the universe using the laws of physics as we understand them. Historically, scientific thought and religious thought were often united and people pursued science and philosophy due to attempting to understand God (like many Islamic scholars in the 7th century or like Renee Descartes who ultimately sought to prove the existence of God by pure reasoning). Science as a complete system of belief without some religious aspect is actually a fairly recent phenomenon that likely had very little to do with any particular scientific discovery.

    Indeed, science can do very little to explain why things happen. It’s great at explaining how - e.g. science is great at explaining how fire burns or how a calculator can display an answer but it can be iffy on why. Now, “why” fire burns is probably more of a malformed question like what’s north of the north pole but we’re human, we like to ask why and seek purpose. Meaning makers.

    The decline of religiosity wasn’t really driven by science showing biblical stories weren’t real, it’s a process driven by material reality and class relations. Although many people considered themselves Christian or religious in the west, they were very Deist and didn’t think God had much influence with the world apart from answering paradoxes like what was the primum movens etc.

    Going further back, religion wasn’t a choice or something to reason to - it was just your life and your community. In medieval Europe, you didn’t really reason your way into a system of beliefs they all tied together into an economic system called the feudal mode of production. You just were a Christian and so was everyone you knew. Maybe some monks debated some esoteric aspects of theology but most people just lived their lives. This lasted for a while through to the Enlightenment and the emergence of capitalism in the 17th century. Except for some malcontents and rebels, people still didn’t reason towards being Christian, say. It was just your life - more like a hangover from that older mode of production and social cohesion than something necessary to maintaining capitalism.

    Fast forward to the actual decline of religiosity and rise of spiritual none-of-the-aboves and nothing-in-particular. This was a process started in the mid 20th century (not really in WW1 which was conceived often as a holy or religious war by the soldiers and officer class including miracles and appearances of angels and so on). In reaction to the rise of consumerism and individualism - now religion became a choice or affectation! This is where we start to see the irreligious begin their massive growth but especially by the beginning of the 00s. It’s tempting to say Quantum Mechanics, GR, a scientific basis for cosmological origins like the big bang are responsible for the loss of religion - but in my view, these just coincided due to a third cause (that of economic changes and the settling in of mature capitalism).