Even when I believed in God, it baffled me that the adults around me seemed to be convinced that we need God to tell us that murder is wrong. Imagine a society in which murder is legal: anyone who murders will, likely, in turn be murdered by a friend or relative of his victim -- which is sure to discourage others from undertaking the act. Where is God in that chain of events? As you said in your essay: morality emerges naturally from social dynamics. Nothing miraculous or even mysterious about it.
What IS mysterious to me is not the mundane quid-pro-quo morality that has always been formalized into our legal systems, but the kinds of ascetic and anti-social moralities that seem to pop up in every human civilization. Nietzsche made a decent effort to explain asceticism as an introverted expression of the will to dominate, though I wonder if his was the last word on the question. Then there is the interesting phenomena of one's personal conscience running into conflict with public decency: guilt versus shame. How do we explain that? I doubt that God is the answer, but it surprises me that the apologists for theism never seem to bring it up.
I think you're talking about the mystery of counterculture, which is the mystery of raw, existentially authentic personhood before its compromised expressions in mainstream culture.
Even when I believed in God, it baffled me that the adults around me seemed to be convinced that we need God to tell us that murder is wrong. Imagine a society in which murder is legal: anyone who murders will, likely, in turn be murdered by a friend or relative of his victim -- which is sure to discourage others from undertaking the act. Where is God in that chain of events? As you said in your essay: morality emerges naturally from social dynamics. Nothing miraculous or even mysterious about it.
ReplyDeleteWhat IS mysterious to me is not the mundane quid-pro-quo morality that has always been formalized into our legal systems, but the kinds of ascetic and anti-social moralities that seem to pop up in every human civilization. Nietzsche made a decent effort to explain asceticism as an introverted expression of the will to dominate, though I wonder if his was the last word on the question. Then there is the interesting phenomena of one's personal conscience running into conflict with public decency: guilt versus shame. How do we explain that? I doubt that God is the answer, but it surprises me that the apologists for theism never seem to bring it up.
I think you're talking about the mystery of counterculture, which is the mystery of raw, existentially authentic personhood before its compromised expressions in mainstream culture.
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