this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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In a way, I try to live my life so that if some kind of higher power existed, they'd think I am a good person. Not as a gambit to get into heaven or whatever, I don't believe in that. But trying to imagine an objective arbiter of morality makes it easier to take myself out of the equation, which means I'm more likely to treat others as I want to be treated.
I use biology. Being grateful and kind just has an evolutionary advantage
Approaching kindness or generosity from a biological point of view seems (to me) to lead to The Prisoners' Dilemma. Everyone is better off if we are all generous, but if I can't trust others to be generous, I'm better off being selfish.
IMHO, religion is an evolutionary adaptation to "solve" this problem. It might have worked in small communities, but not in our global society.
I'm rambling...
It sounds like you might really enjoy an episode of Radiolab, The Good Show, on this very topic, the evolution of altruism. Indeed, digging into it leads them to the Prisoner's Dilemma. One of the segments covers a competition organized by a computer scientist around an iterative cooperate/defect game. Entrants tried to come up with an algorithm that would maximize the benefit to the 'player' in repeated rounds against the computer. I won't spoil it by revealing which algorithm won, but I'll say it's really fascinating.
It does, but the question is: how can we be grateful and kind in the right way? Being grateful and kind to a robber stealing things from your neighbours house is most likely wrong. Being grateful and kind to a single mother stealing food for her child is most likely right. Trying to see things from an objective point of view is a good way for me to do the right things in the right way.
I refuse to believe that a being incalculable in power and knowledge, omnipotent, able to see both the past and the future, is somehow, according to what religious people want you to believe, burdened by what we humans experience as emotions or morality.
Why?
I don’t know why your comment was downvoted when I got to it. It’s a perfectly valid question. To claim in incomprehensible being wouldn’t do any given thing is just as objectively baseless as claiming that they would do that thing.
How a being of inordinate power and knowledge even exists would 'feel' or 'think' is indeed incomprehensible to us. It's hubris to believe an entity with the power to create a universe could look down, at a single point in time, at a single place in the universe, and think "I'm really angry that creature masturbated" or "That woman showed her face in public, well she's dead to me now".
And that's exactly what religion wants us to believe. That we're somehow special in the universe, and there's some grand entity that watches over every single little thing we do throughout the blip of our lives in the eternity of the cosmos. It's honestly fucking bonkers.
I think the concept of such an entity being incomprehensible is baked into the idea of religion, or at least Christianity, which is the only religion that I have any actual experience with.
How can you be so sure this entity doesn’t look at every individual and each of their actions and make a judgement on them? The concept of omnipotence and omniscience are themselves incomprehensible to us.
The idea that we don’t know God’s motives is part of why people follow blindly, despite the pain and joy of existence
How do you know?
Sure, but does that mean the same being can't judge A as better than B? That it can't for example see one person pushing over old people, and another person helping them back up, and say "the person helping them back up is morally better than the person pushing them over"?
I think a grand being would definitely possess things like emotions or morality - some mechanisms of wisdom and good judgement. What I've always balked at is the idea that a grand being would have more ego-driven and self-serving human behaviours like jealousy, intolerance of people who are different, revenge, hatred, predudice, etc. Any idea of "God hates [fill in the blank]" has always been laughable to me. I think a grand being would definitely be morally superior to most humans