“DP” wrote:My question, to those who believe that “God is dead” (or, less literarily, that God never existed) and that, accordingly, there are no absolute, unconditional, or objective values in the world and that whatever meanings that exist in life are put there by us, by human beings, by “value-creators,” is this:
You may well find Nietzsche’s moral stance above distasteful. I certainly do. But is it “wrong”? Can anything, in a world where there are no objective or absolute values, actually be said to be “wrong”? And, if you believe that it can be, how would you demonstrate to someone agreeing with Nietzsche that he or she is “wrong”?
To take it back to Under the Banner of Heaven and the Lafferty murders, on what Nietzschean basis can you condemn the Laffertys? On what basis, even, can you, if you’re a follower of Nietzsche, condemn alleged Latter-day Saint misogyny, patriarchy, obscurantism, and fanaticism?
This is a very interesting double bind. A double bind is a situation in which a person is confronted with two irreconcilable demands or a choice between two undesirable courses of action.
DP is essentially saying, “yes our religion may be evil but if you don’t believe in our religion then you have no moral grounds for condemning it as evil.”
The larger absolute morality argument is absolute nonsense. Each religion claims it has an absolute morality, and they are all absolutely contradictory. Your morality ends up being completely relative to whatever religion you were raised in or indoctrinated into.
Humanism, for all its faults, is at least an attempt to escape this religious relativist perspective on morality.