It seems that Wittgenstein was a believer in the Correspondence theory of truth. So am I. You must have misunderstood something you read about him or what I've ready is completely off.

Can you quote something by him offering your definition of truth.

That was his!!!!

Those comments were about beliefs, not people. There is a difference. You are more than your beliefs. And even though your beliefs are fallacious and cowardly, in that they excuse evil so that you don't have to be judgmental, you are probably still a good person all around.

And I'm supposed to accept you at your word? A URL or something would be appreciated. His book is available online, so if you can tell me the exact quote, I'll find it myself.

jrbogie,

I'm really confused now. You aren't being clear on this.

Are morals relative or absolute?

If you believe that morals are relative, then what are your grounds for judging the human rights violations of other nations?

You understand that if you are a moral relativist, you are saying that their beliefs make what they are doing right for them and thus you lose any intellectual legitimacy when you question or judge their beliefs, right?

The moral relativist is really only able to question morals on the level which they believe "right and wrong" are developed. If you believe it is societal, then you can only criticize the morals of your own country while remaining intellectually consistent. If you believe that you can impose your views of "right and wrong" on another society or judge them by your views of "right and wrong", then you aren't a moral relativist and must believe in some moral absolutes.

ah, another act relevant to perception. your creating a statement and attributing it to me by prefacing "you are saying that........" when i said nothing of the sort would seem insulting to many. especially when you then go on to suggest that your morals hold the high ground over mine by attributing "my thinking" to YOUR words. but i'm not in the least insulted. indeed i'm amused. i come accross this often when discussing religion with christians and i wonder with them as i do with you. is it your church from which you derive the moral and ethecal standard that allows you to treat people so unfairly?

I am not Jbogie but I have to say here that your premise is incorrect to make a proper deduction.

To personally believe anything absolutely still does not make there be absolute right and wrongs for everyone. Your personal beliefs are just that your personal moral compass. Societal moral compass is often different from your personal moral compass and should be for the most part because individual morals will not stand for the whole world, there are two many different kinds of people with different ideals.

So you are still not proving there are absolute morals or right and wrong for the world of humans at large.

as i keep saying, my morals are relative to me and my grounds for MY judgments are grounded by MY morals. i didn't say i stood on solid legal ground for my judging human rights violations in other countries. i said that i, like you judge them immoral. i for my morals and you for yours. in this case those morals happen to mesh.



you're doing it again honey. oops sorry. visions of my ex. i'm saying nothing of the sort. again, read MY words not YOURS. this is becoming pathetic. you argue your point and allow me the FAIR courtesy of arguing mine.



and now you're even telling me what i believe. do you find these debate tactics effective? if your performance here is any measure you sure don't seem to be getting your point accross to many if anybody here are you? perhaps assuming that others here are at least as intelligent as you are might help you come up with well thought out and concise arguments to make your points instead of attempting to demean my position or REWORDING my statements to facilitate your arguement you just might have some success. but your screwing around with my position hardly makes your position credible. indeed it violates one of my long held morals. it's being dishonest.

Spider believes he has the right answers always because he is in touch with the man upstairs. That is what it comes down to.

Spider, I keep telling you, you have the right to believe whatever you want but it will not be right and just for all no matter how hard you try.

Subjectivity is paramount when dealing with humans, there is no way around it, under it, beside it, etc....

Wow!

I don’t see any way around the fact that both of those are essentially opinions based on mutually exclusive premises. Like atheism and theism. In order to prove the existence of either one, you have to start with a premise that is contradictory to the other.

Truly, “never the twain shall meet”.

Now what I find interesting is that my personal view on morality doesn’t exactly fit into either one of those definitions.

Although I do hold the view that there is no universal standard of right and wrong, I do not hold the view that right and wrong are dependent on beliefs.

In my view, right and wrong are beliefs.

So what label should we use to refer to my view?

precisely. as is the case with every god fearing faithful of whatever religion. and of course they usually conclude with, "believe precisely as i believe or else."

It always comes down to an attempt to prove right and wrong..lol Which cannot be done in an absolute way in order to confirm the religious belief so there you have the frustration.

If they would learn to say to themselves, "I am right for me and only for me, all others are right for themselves", it would end the whole thing.

yep

Absolutely!

jrbogie,

I'm sorry if I'm not being clear. I wasn't stating what you believe, I was stating what a moral relativist must believe to be intellectually coherent. Now if you aren't a moral relativist (it seems that you have defended that position) then are your a moral absolutist? It certainly doesn't sound like it. You believe in morality, so you aren't a nihilist.

It's becoming more difficult to determine what you actually believe or what your position is. What I continually hear from you is that I'm wrong and mischaracterizing your positions. Well, I have to be honest, I don't know what any of your positions really are. You imply that you are a moral relativist, but insist you can judge others by your morals. It sounds like you are a moral absolutists. The moral relativist has no grounds for questioning the actions of another culture. Unless you are comfortable having intellectually incoherent beliefs, in which case, I can no longer debate with you. It is impossible for the coherent and incoherent to come to an understanding.

Your morals include the right to judge others by your own personal morals? Am I understanding this correctly?

And I said nothing about "legal ground", I was specifically talking about intellectual coherence. It makes no sense to say that "right and wrong are relative, but I find your morals to be unacceptable". If everyone is entitled to their own definition of right and wrong, what makes one's own definitions superior? It's an intellectually inconsistent position that means one is either making an unfair judgment or one doesn't really believe that morals are relative.

EDIT: By you, I mean the non-personal pronoun. I could use "one" in it's place if you would prefer. Never mind, I made the change myself.

What's the distinction?

If one is a moral absolutist, one believes that right and wrong exist as facts.

If one is a moral relativist, one believes that right and wrong exist as opinions.

How cute. People who insist that everyone has the right to their own belief of right and wrong, demanding that everyone accept their belief.

At least if I were to do the same, it would be intellectually consistent. You guys frequently come off as people who haven't thought about your positions and are simply arguing for the sake of hearing your own voice.

The problem as a religious argument is that it's way over-simplified and very short-sighted, IMHO.

The argument that is being given basically reduces to the follow:

Humans seem to have an innate conscience concerning moral values of absolute right or wrong, therefore there must be a judgmental God who knows absolute morals and will delve out punishments or rewards according to how well people follow their conscience.

That idea alone, might have had some merit in and of itself. However, the problem with the dogmas that are attached to these kinds of ideas is that they go far beyond this.

In addition to having an innate sense of conscience, humans are also supposed to know which religious doctrines to worship as the 'word of God'. And clearly everyone is not drawn to the same doctrines when that is thrown into the mix. Once the man-made doctrines are tossed in as the 'supposed' word of God, then all conscience consensus flies right out the window. Many people, myself included obviously, do not agree that the actions and directives of the God of Abraham were wise. So the whole things falls all apart right there as soon as this arguments is claimed as a reason to follow a particular doctrine.

There are just way too many other things to consider. For example:

Why Mental Illness?

If the purpose of creation is for a judgmental God who is interested in judging the moral conduct of mentally healthy people, then why even allow mental illness to exist in such a creation? The very existence of mentally ill people would seem to fly in the face of such a divine purpose.

Why Doesn't the God Make Himself (or Herself) Known?

The argument that many religious people give on this on is that this would somehow violate human 'free will'. But that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Supposedly Satan and a full third of this God's angels rebelled against him directly. They supposedly had full knowledge of the existence of God but rebelled anyway. It didn't seem to have any detrimental affect on their 'free will'. That's also the way it should be! If a person is going to rebel or deny someone's authority they should know for a fact that the author they are rebelling against actually exists. It's ludicrous to even speak about rebelling against an authority that know one even knows actually exists. How can you rebel against something you don't even believe exists?

The whole idea of a God who plays "hide-and-seek" is a ludicrous idea to begin with. Such a God would be a game-playing God and couldn't be trusted anyway. Especially if he's demanding to be worshiped. How can you worship something that you have no evidence even exists?

Why Doesn't God keep-up with the Times?

This God has been playing hide-and-seek for well over 2000 years (and potentially for all of time since he only supposedly revealed himself to very few individual and even in dreams in those cases for the most part). Jesus would not count as God revealing himself because Jesus was clearly moral and died. Moreover, the individual people who claimed that he rose from the dead could be counted on the fingers of one hand. So this is a story that was basically made up by less than a hand-full of people (and even that story is hearsay that was written decades later!). And all of humanity is supposed to believe these few people?

And where is God now? His last directive was something like "Be fruitful and multiply". Well, we've already over-populated this tiny speck of dust he gave us to live on. Where is he now? Isn't it about time for a new directive?

Playing hide and seek is bad enough, but to totally ignore his creation as it enters new stages of growth and new problems that were never mentioned in any of his supposed writings is more than just a God playing 'hide and seek", he would basically be guilty of parental neglect and abandonment at this point. Most people who have any sense of conscience would surely agree with this. If a human parent give toddlers a few basic rules and then just left with no further mentoring they'd probably be found guilty of child abuse.

There's no sane reason for God not stepping forward in this day and age and saying something like, "Ok, you guys managed to do very well on my first directive to be fruitful and multiply, now it's time to move on to learning how to curb your overwhelming desire to procreator".

Besides, we all know that procreation is a highly instinctual drive. Would God truly have needed to tell anyone to multiply? That would imply that he had no clue what he had created!

So the idea that just because humans tend to agree somewhat on some very basic primal instincts, (like it's best not to kill each other if we all want to survive), is just not sufficient grounds to conclude that a judgmental God exists. There are many other factors that need to be looked at. And those other factors clearly don't support this idea of a God who is interested in judging people based on morals. The mere fact that mentally ill people exist is a major fly in that soup right there. Why bother allowing mental illness to even exist if the purpose of creation was to judge the moral behavior of sane souls?

That flies in the very face of the purpose of a judgmental Godhead. Why would a God toss a wrench in his own purpose?

If we're going to consider the idea of a God who instills morals in people, we need to consider that whole scenario and not just say, "Well it looks like most sane people agree on some morals so there must be absolute morals, thus there must be a God who made them".

That's just a very superficial argument that falls extremely short of any sincere considerations.

You're the one who's trying to sell your beliefs to us.

We don't care what you believe.

All we're doing is telling you why we're not buying what you're trying to sell.

No one is asking you to believe anything. Believe whatever you want.