How do agnostics live? (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, June 09, 2008, 22:34 (6009 days ago) @ Mark

Mark says that the agreement of atheists with "the social, moral and legal code...is a personal decision. A choice. It is not because there is anything out there which objectively says it is good and right." - Two things seem to have got confused here: the decision and the code. An atheist's agreement to abide by the moral code is indeed a personal decision. So is a Christian's. You chose to be a Christian and obey what you believe to be God's code. I chose to be an agnostic and obey a humanist code. - You think, however, that your code is objective and mine is not. With the more obvious moral laws that we all agree on (see your own list posted on 9 June at 00.06), society provides guidance that is independent of the individual. But that is the nearest any of us can get to objectivity. One of the points that you have not responded to in my own and in David Turell's posts is the fact that we do not have direct access to God. We have texts that you believe to be God's word. These can only come into operation through subjective interpretation (my point), and were written by humans, assembled by the decisions of committees, translated and, in the case of the Koran, transcribed at the dictation of an illiterate who could not check the transcription (David's point). Not only are the texts and their interpretation the product of subjective human processes but, as George has pointed out (8 June at 22.53), there are also masses of moral issues on which theists themselves cannot agree, or keep changing their minds, which again shows there is no objectivity. - For instance, as a theist you may have to decide whether to celebrate your son's homosexual wedding, to instruct millions of people not to use condoms, to kill someone for insulting your God, to blow yourself up and take a few other theists and non-theists with you. God won't tell you what to do. Only the little voice inside you will tell you, and your little voice may tell you something quite different from the little voice of your theist neighbour. - To sum up: each of us takes a personal decision as to what moral code to obey. Some areas of the code are generally accepted by society ... independently of religion. In all other areas, individuals must make their own subjective interpretation of the code they have chosen to obey. Nobody has direct access to any objective authority that can tell us what is good and right. - On a totally different matter, I sympathize when you say it is sometimes difficult to keep track of the various arguments, and that is why it is important for all of us to quote or summarize (accurately, please) the points we are responding to. As regards evasion, I was complaining that you had not responded to David T.'s point mentioned above about the non-objectivity of the Bible and the Koran, or to the equally important point about humanism. Your only response was to ask what he meant by human dignity. But we have a lot of ground to cover and time to cover it!