DP claims you can’t criticize Mormonism without Mormon morality

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Philo Sofee
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Re: DP claims you can’t criticize Mormonism without Mormon morality

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Moksha wrote:
Sun May 08, 2022 4:44 am
Dr. Shades wrote:
Sun May 08, 2022 2:20 am
So if DCP believes his own scriptures, then he already believes that moral principles exist superior to, and independent of, God Himself, since God Himself is bound by them.
What if Dr. Peterson were to reply, "Not so, since Joseph was just making it up."?
I'll take $600 for "It ain't gonna happen" Alex....
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Re: DP claims you can’t criticize Mormonism without Mormon morality

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Moksha wrote:
Sun May 08, 2022 4:44 am
Dr. Shades wrote:
Sun May 08, 2022 2:20 am
So if DCP believes his own scriptures, then he already believes that moral principles exist superior to, and independent of, God Himself, since God Himself is bound by them.
What if Dr. Peterson were to reply, "Not so, since Joseph was just making it up."?
Thank you very much for your highly valuable contribution to this thread.
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Re: DP claims you can’t criticize Mormonism without Mormon morality

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Dr. Shades wrote:
Sun May 08, 2022 8:53 am
Thank you very much for your highly valuable contribution to this thread.
You're welcome.
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Re: DP claims you can’t criticize Mormonism without Mormon morality

Post by Analytics »

Physics Guy wrote:
Fri May 06, 2022 7:08 am
Isn't Mormon morality derived, not from God, but from the eternal gospel principles by which the Mormon God gained exaltation?

In mainstream theism, God is the author of all reality, not just an exalted organiser. So I think some typical theists do consider God to be the source of morality. Even in mainstream theism, though, a major school of thought holds that morality exists independently of God. Theists in this school might still insist that it was logically impossible for God to be evil, but not because God defines right and wrong. They would say that God could not make wrong be right any more than God could make 2+2 equal five.

So it would seem that plenty of theists, including Mormons (if we count them as theists), believe in objective morality that is not defined by God. If theists can do that then I don't see why atheists can't do the same, and have objective morality that does not depend on God.
I can't peel back all of the levels of irony in Peterson's position here.

According to Mormon morality, whether or not what Ron Lafferty did was wrong depends upon whether or not God really commanded him to murder them or not. According to Mormonism, God does command such things on occasion, and the correct thing to do is obey what God commands.

But even if God didn't command them to murder, Mormonism would cut the Laffertys some slack if they sincerely believed that's what God commanded. In lessons on obedience that include God commanding Isaac to kill Jacob, Mormon prophets emphasize that if you are commanded to do something that is morally wrong, you ought to obey anyway, and that you'll be blessed for your obedience, even if your course of action turns out to be "wrong."

So where is this absolute morality in Mormonism? There is none. That's because in Mormonism, the God of the mainstream Christian-Judeo tradition is dead. Mormonism's Elohim isn't God. He is a power-hungry entity who wants to increase his power by getting others to follow him. In a word, Elohim is merely an Übermensch.

So what is Mormon morality? Mormon morality simply promises that if you obey the most powerful being in the universe, that being will make you powerful too. In Mormonism, goodness is defined as following the course of action that will lead you to being a priest or priestess, a king or queen, a God or Goddess. It's all about acquiring power for the sake of having power.

So what's the difference between Mormonism's ethics and Nietzsche's ethics, exactly?
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Re: DP claims you can’t criticize Mormonism without Mormon morality

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Analytics wrote:
Tue May 10, 2022 6:56 pm
...
According to Mormon morality, whether or not what Ron Lafferty did was wrong depends upon whether or not God really commanded him to murder them or not. According to Mormonism, God does command such things on occasion, and the correct thing to do is obey what God commands.

But even if God didn't command them to murder, Mormonism would cut the Laffertys some slack if they sincerely believed that's what God commanded. In lessons on obedience that include God commanding Isaac to kill Jacob, Mormon prophets emphasize that if you are commanded to do something that is morally wrong, you ought to obey anyway, and that you'll be blessed for your obedience, even if your course of action turns out to be "wrong."
...
Of course, it's not just the god of Mormonism who is to be obeyed.
Elder Marion G. Romney wrote:[President Heber J. Grant] said: “My boy, you always keep your eye on the President of the Church, and if he tells you to do something wrong, and you do it, the Lord will bless you for it.”
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Re: DP claims you can’t criticize Mormonism without Mormon morality

Post by drumdude »

There's some quality discussion going on over at DP's blog:
Writing to a commenter called F Cratz, who seems to be a skeptic of Mormonism:
DP wrote:that's very nice. But it's not what I wrote about.
DP wrote:this has nothing to do with the subject that I raised.
DP wrote:I won't cooperate with you in your attempt to hijack what I wrote.
DP wrote:You still don't seem to grasp the fact that what you're writing has virtually no point of contact with what I wrote.
DP wrote:yiou[sic] don't understand the subject

Writing to a commenter called BLarsen, who seems to be a believe in Mormonism:
DP wrote:Please try to comment on the topics central to this blog. The incessant and continual complaints grew tiresome quite a while ago.
DP wrote:Please write about something else.
DP wrote:Not interesting at all. Sorry.
DP wrote:Please find different topics on which to comment.
Writing to a 3rd commenter, Noel:
DP wrote:Have you examined the actual subject of my blog entry and, thus, of this thread?
DP wrote:May I point out, yet again, that this isn't the topic of my blog entry?

Writing to a 4th commenter, Gemli:
DP wrote:It's cute that you imagine the problem that I raised to be only one of technological progress or science. It's not. Not even remotely.


And finally coming full circle back to FKratz, all of these within the last few days or so:
DP wrote:You're flailing, and are plainly unwilling to engage my point.
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Re: DP claims you can’t criticize Mormonism without Mormon morality

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Analytics wrote:So what's the difference between Mormonism's ethics and Nietzsche's ethics, exactly?
It really starts blurring when you consider the bad Third Reich interpretations of Nietzsche from Added Upon with the master race of Gods.

But I think a better criticism of Peterson's positions is here.
DCP wrote:Groundhog Day is the greatest movie ever made.
What makes it so great?
Michael Faust wrote:Is Groundhog Day one of the great philosophical movies? Viewed on the most trivial level it’s just another Hollywood rom-com, but on closer inspection it furnishes a dazzling treatment of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, even illuminating Deleuze and Irigaray’s conflicting interpretations of this key Nietzschean idea. It also throws light on postmodern thinking regarding simulacra – representations without originals. Finally, it updates the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, casting its protagonist, played by Bill Murray, in the role of Sisyphus, the absurd hero.

Eternal recurrence is Nietzsche’s idea that we have lived the exact life we are living now an infinite number of times in the past, and will do so an infinite number of times in the future. If we’ve enjoyed a particularly eventful and pleasurable life, this might sound like the greatest of tidings. If not, eternal recurrence may strike us as a curse. Our misery, far from being over when we die, is destined to echo through eternity. This is a chilling recasting of Hell, as horrific as anything Dante conceived.
He likes groundhog day so much specifically because it challenges the Christian conception of morality he's promoting. His rule-based morality with a unquestionable law-giver is a useful throw-away apologetic to put in Gemli's face, but that's all. A movie about a guy being given a rule to follow by a proper authority, and then following the rule to exactness, and then +1UP and he gets another rule would put him to sleep.

I wonder if he's watching Russian Doll.
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Re: DP claims you can’t criticize Mormonism without Mormon morality

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Dan has declared victory again against the atheists:

Do I have any actual grounds for rejecting Viking morality? For finding it appalling and horrific? Or is morality merely a matter of custom and taste, as liking or disliking Norwegian lefse is a matter of taste? (I love it, by the way.)

I’ve raised this issue previously — see my little essay “If God Does Not Exist, Is Everything Permitted?” — but have had a great deal of difficulty persuading the atheists who comment on my blog to engage my question. They reply to it, after a fashion, but they seem, candidly, to have an extraordinarily difficult time even grasping what it is. I find this exceedingly puzzling.
He’s banned all the atheists on his blog and surprisingly no atheists have been able to refute him! Checkmate!
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Re: DP claims you can’t criticize Mormonism without Mormon morality

Post by Gadianton »

Or is morality merely a matter of custom and taste
Which is why he's argued to Gemli, that life is meaningless without a resurrection where one is guaranteed to take part in the same activities that they enjoy on earth indefinitely. Such as, just for instance, dining at a nice restaurant with friends.

What DCP doesn't get (one of the many things in addition to his fondness for Nietzschean cinema), is that if morality exists as imperatives from a divine source that are True because of divine authorship, then there is no guarantee that morality will line up with anybody's tastes and preferences, let alone his own. For instance, if God damns everyone who is left-handed to hell and he made them all left-handed, then that's just the way it is. He must accept that -- but he hates predestination and so on. Well, you can't have it both ways, you can't be a divine command theorist and insist that God's commands must map to certain categories of imperatives else they aren't divine, because then you're acknowledging a criteria that undergirds God's authority.

It's possible that God decreed dining at restaurants with friends a great moral good. If so, fine. However, it's not a moral good because DCP happens to like it. In other words, it's a complete accident that the command and DCP's tastes line up. It becomes True by accident, similar to the Gettier Counterexamples. It's wrong to argue that for life to be meaningful, we have to fulfill our desires forever -- if that's the case, he's a hedonist just like Gemli.
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Re: DP claims you can’t criticize Mormonism without Mormon morality

Post by Gadianton »

In other words, if predestination is evil, it's not evil because it isn't fair on hedonistic terms (grounds that consider people's tastes and preferences for living and not being in pain). DCP can't argue Calvinism is wrong because it inflicts all this pain on so many people who never have a chance to choose, he must argue that it's wrong simply because God said it's wrong.
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