Bandit72 wrote:Adurentibus Spina wrote:Well, the moral metaphors of Jesus are sometimes pretty good. I wouldn't mind if the vast majority of Christians just tried to live good lives according to Jesus's demand that you love your neighbour... which has got nothing to do with miracles or knowledge, scientific or otherwise. You don't have to know much, if anything, to try to be a good person, and that's pretty much the only useful content of the Bible, when it's there, which isn't very often.
It's just a bit sad that they have to look up to another (maybe imaginary, may be not) human being (?) to give them moralistic values on how to live their lives. I always thought common sense would prevail.
We teach a course called "Life, Death, and Meaning" where the kids get to read a lot of philosophical views about these kinds of questions. It's really interesting to read what 70 kids think about about the claim that life really is ultimately absurd and has no externally generated meaning, but even if there were an external source of meaning (i.e., a God, or real moral values) that source would be absurd too unless you could internalize it.
I think there are good arguments that can show that one of the biggest mistakes you can make in life, including a religious life, is failing to internalize real value. That is, it's not that things are good or bad, and so you should do the good things and not do the bad ones, whether or not you want to. It's that you should want to do the good things (because that's precisely what makes things worth doing), and want to avoid the bad things. And if you don't want to do good, or don't want to avoid bad, your life isn't going to go as well as it otherwise might.
But as I was saying, it's really interesting that in an arbitrary group of 70 high achieving young kids going to a top university, nearly all of them have difficulty seeing things like this clearly. Maybe it's sociocultural, or maybe it's evolutionary, but people seem to be conditioned to feel like meaning has to come from obedience to, and approval from, authority figures.