How does atheism avoid falling into moral relativism?

Maybe a hundred years ago, but today atheists don't really give it too much thought. The only people I know who talk about religion are the black women at work, and surely I would want to do anything that they do.

>Christ is God and said the Spirit of Truth would protect his Church
Which Church? Which "Truth"? Everyone and their cousin interprets His word differently, as does every age, so where's the absolute in that?

>How does atheism avoid falling into moral relativism?

Create their own moral absolutes and enforce them with State violence like Christians did.

>We shall see in the next chapter, on the other hand, how a politics that rejects Christian Truth must acknowledge "the people" as sovereign and understand authority as proceeding from below upwards, in a formally "egalitarian" society.

Laughably Eurocentric and down right embarrassingly lazy for any commentator born after the 19th Century.

Christianity puts moral relativism into practice.

>we don't have to follow these laws in the Old Testament because they only applied to those living at the time

Literally by arguing for objectivity they are arguing for subjectivity instead. The definition of cognitive dissonance.

To my knowledge it does not. Or the people who claim to be atheist simply don't think about it and claim their current set of morals is correct. As for your quote I can't say I've seen true 'existential' atheism and as to whether it's spiritual, I would say yes, though by definition alone.

Is the only thing preventing you from butchering and eating a baby the thought that God might be upset?

Because reality without a linchpin would be a collection of abstracted points.

The Church is the body he founded.

The truth is the truth he imparted. New interpretations obviously don't accord with the Spirit of Truth, because the Spirit of Truth guards the truth continuously. The doesn't evaporate and then re-emerge, at least within the framework we're talking about.

If your morals are created, they're not absolute.

Jews similarly say non-Jews don't have to follow the Jewish covenant, only the Noahide covenant. Christianity is the *new* covenant which is prophecized in the old testament, when the Ark of the old laws will be done away with.

No. There's also the limited supply of accessible babies, the low amount of meat on baby carcasses and prion diseases.

God doesn't get upset, at least in Orthodox, except in the sense that we might experience him that way, similar to saying, "The sea was angry" Sin is defined as being dissonant with his energies.

Anyway, I'm not sure how what you're saying has anything to do with absolute morality. There are countless things you wouldn't do, that doesn't mean you think absolute morality is why you wouldn't do them.

Nothing you said disputes anything I said. The idea of having more than one "covenant" or even covenants at all is moral relativism. If morality is absolute, then they can apply to all peoples for all time, and don't need revisions or cultural contexts.

Firstly, this is retarded question because atheism isn't moral position, it is a broad class of believes so it isn't more relative than abscract theism that could mean anything from scientology to fucking aztec cults. If you want an answer, just combine atheism with any absolute ethical system based not around Gods but around anything else like in case of categorical imperative.

>Because reality without a linchpin would be a collection of abstracted points.

No it wouldn't. The world we live in is governed by sets of principles we as a species have a pretty good grasp of. And not one of the explanations requires a deity.

>If your morals are created, they're not absolute.
Oh dont worry every group "discovers them" via reason or revelation.

Does Mr Rose know that countries exist outside of Europe and North America that Arent Australia and NZ?

> How do you substantiate an absolute morality without deities?
By any other absolute. Coca Cola isn't the only drink and deity isn't the only absolute known to human.

>Coca Cola isn't the only drink
Burn the heretic!

>If morality is absolute, then they can apply to all peoples for all time, and don't need revisions or cultural contexts.

Its their way of dodgy relativism like Muslisms, "there is an absolute morality the however despite ours popping centuries later and only in this one place others ours is actually true because the absolute gave us a special update"

>Its their way of dodgy relativism like Muslisms

*dodging

>The Church is the body he founded.
Which multiple Churches lay claim to.

>The truth is the truth he imparted. New interpretations obviously don't accord with the Spirit of Truth, because the Spirit of Truth guards the truth continuously. The doesn't evaporate and then re-emerge, at least within the framework we're talking about.
Every reading is a new interpretation - I'm not talking "translation" or "transcription", I'm talking about what each individual who reads the Bible thinks it means. This changes, not only from individual to individual and from age to age, but even from time to time with the same individual. It's about as un-absolute as you can get.

Revision isn't about cultural context, it's about humans are spiritually capable of prior to Christ, versus after Christ. Just like it's morally wrong to force a child to eat from the floor, but ridiculous to try to feed a dog at the dinner table.

These principles are broad guidelines, not linchpins. Many of them aren't coherent in quantum physics. Just like the naked eye understands reality in a more simplistic way than a microscope. The principles you're talking about are manifestations of reality, not vice versa.

What's your reasoning? And who is doing the revealing?

What other absolute did you have in mind?

>Which multiple Churches lay claim to.
Yes, but most haven't existed for more than a few hundred years, max, let alone 2,000

>Every reading is a new interpretation
Different interpretations aren't really a problem unless they're dissonant.

>The Church is the body he founded
I'm sorry, what? Even if you did think God explicitly created a Christian Church, the Catholic and Orthodox churches have equal claim on being the direct descendants of the one true Church.

> Because reality without a linchpin would be a collection of abstracted points.
Maybe reality is a collection of abstracted points, maybe it isn't even without any linchpins. By any means, this seems like statement that itself isn't really based on reality that much.

>What other absolute did you have in mind?

The ego, self interest, pleasure, herd mentality, patriotism, love for family, tribalism, greater good, globalism, pacifism, plenty of ideas that justify what is moral and what isn't.

Even just being a vegan is enough of a moral compass for 90% of your daily problems.
God and religions are similar such compasses. The atheists simply choose to use another, more fitting and often more modern compass, instead of the old one that doesn't belong in the modern world of science and technology and busy urban life.

Not really, since the Catholic Church admits to having introduced new teachings, such as Papal Supremacy. The Filioque is also something totally foreign to Christianity for the first several hundred years.

If reality were a collection of abstracted points (in other words, each point has no relation or interaction on any level with any other point), what would consciousness be?

None of those are the Absolute.

And who is doing the revealing?

Depends on which group you ask, it ranges from everything from angels, gods, ancestors, spirits, prophets, mystics, philosophers, logic, dialetical interplay

>What's your reasoning?
That Mr Rose's analysis is entirely ignorant of Asia, India and most countries where white people arent or have been in charge.

Unless of course he plays a semantic game and stretches every kind of moral absolute to mean Christian Truth.

Nothing is absolute in the sense that you assume.
You believe that they are (the way you believe in a dead gypsy on a stick) and act as if they were, and thats what we call morals.

>How does atheism avoid falling into moral relativism?

because usually atheism is materialistic in nature, thus atheists generally assume their consciousness is a function of their brain and so dose morals, from evolutionary point of view social mammals have inborn concept of fairness as this is required for cooperation within a group

so, morals have evolutionary origin and later on are build up by society

if moral relativism seems to me to come from the notion each individual morality is vastly different and uncompromisable to others, this as observed is not the case

so, in the name of social cohesion concepts as fairness, justice and truth must be upheld

that's my take on it but I do consider my self more of an agnostic or at most weak atheist

>Revision isn't about cultural context, it's about humans are spiritually capable of prior to Christ, versus after Christ. Just like it's morally wrong to force a child to eat from the floor, but ridiculous to try to feed a dog at the dinner table.

Again, that is still relativism. You are saying that one culture should have one set of moral standards and another culture should have another set of moral standards. In this case, the difference is their "spiritual capacity". Who's to say that the modern world's spiritual capacity isn't significantly different from that of the time of Jesus Christ? Should we be expecting "The NEW New Testament" any day now?

This is why Christianity and absolute morality are incompatible, unless you're willing to accept a ridiculously literal view of the Bible and practice its morals whole cloth (not mixed cloth, that's not allowed). But that itself is incompatible with modern society, which is why theologians came up with the relativistic excuse. It's religion that adapts to the morals of the times, not the other way around.

Seraphim Rose was an Eastern heathen before converting to Christianity. His disciple ended up writing "Christ the Eternal Tao," which expresses Orthodox Christianity in Taoist terms.

>Nothing is absolute in the sense that you assume.
>Nothing is absolute in the sense that you assume.
Thank you for answering the OP

Our idea of "fair" has changed drastically every century for a while now.

> What other absolute did you have in mind?
Truth is the most common choice for the absolute as deities are pretty easy suspected for not being trustworthy. In a sense, Absolute Morality already based on The Truth. Faith just claims, that deities can lead you to The Truth, but Deities themselves aren't really important from logic point of view here as they just act as mediator between us and The Truth here. The last is what is a real basis of any absolute morality, but you can claim existence of The Truth from many other positions like some of pure logical, mathematical or philosophical ones.

Could you define Truth here? For Christianity, Truth means God.

Technically if Islam is correct the Quran is objective.

>Seraphim Rose was an Eastern heathen before converting to Christianity. His disciple ended up writing "Christ the Eternal Tao," which expresses Orthodox Christianity in Taoist terms.

So how was China, India and Japan able to not "acknowledge "the people" as sovereign and understand authority as proceeding from below upwards, in a formally "egalitarian" society." despite rejecting Christian Truth?

You also forgot the

"Depends on which group you ask, it ranges from everything from angels, gods, ancestors, spirits, prophets, mystics, philosophers, logic, dialetical interplay "

Many, many groups have some way of claiming a stake to the absolute, East Orthodox Christianity is not unique here.

> each point has no relation or interaction on any level with any other point
There exist many options between no connection whatsoever and everything connected by a single linchpin. For example, an each point can interact only with some points, but not with any point. So consciousness can be a local, relative to context thing. I am sure that your consciousness doesn't exist in some places of The Universe. It is barely exist outside of your head, after all.

The basis of it didn't. Experiments were conducted with very young children to distribute candies and even without big amount of social influence they have shown the ability to agree on what is fair and what isn't. The similar experiments were done with apes and the results were remarkably similar.

The bases of our morality is evolutionary, the way it is applied varies as societies change.

All across the world and thought history innumerable societies have shunned murder, theft and unwarranted violence.

Yes it varies when those things are premissable and against whom, this is the social part of it.

In general however humans have innate morals that are for the most part pretty similar, it's their upbringing that sets them apart.

This excludes psychopaths and other damaged individuals as their capability for empathy and thus morality is limited.

Dont waste your time the OP literally only comes here to convert people to Orthodoxy.

Literally no answer is acceptable to that poster unless its "Orthodoxy is the only truth"

You might try reading Christ the Eternal Tao to understand this. Eastern heathen religions have elements of truth in them.

All the things you're saying are *not* the absolute. When you talk of spirits and ancestors, you're talking in plurality terms, not Absolute terms.

If one point connects to another and another and so on, so that all points can be connected to each other by some path, then they are all ultimately connected, taking the broad view.

I'm sure they distributed them according to primitivist conceptions of fairness. It gets a lot trickier with more complex societies, though.

You can't define Absolute. To define absolute truth means to be omnipotent, on top of the omniscient.
> Truth means God.
God himself is undefinable. To define object is to explain it exact nature and there is basically the impossible task in a case of God.

>but most haven't existed for more than a few hundred years, max, let alone 2,000
There only has to be two, and there's at least three, while most of the remainder claim to have formed specifically because their mother churches had abandoned that "Spirit of Truth" you speak of.

>Different interpretations aren't really a problem unless they're dissonant.
They are often incredibly dissonant - we've fought wars over this shit.

>the Catholic Church admits to having introduced new teachings
So does the Orthodox. Jesus didn't lay down a whole lotta specifics when it came to the structure of His church. If anything, he kinda suggested there shouldn't be one, save in the individual believer's heart.

>You might try reading Christ the Eternal Tao to understand this. Eastern heathen religions have elements of truth in them.

Which is what eastern faiths say about western ones, and still fails to tackle the point of why not being Christian doesnt lead to the outcomes described.

>All the things you're saying are *not* the absolute. When you talk of spirits and ancestors, you're talking in plurality terms, not Absolute terms.

They are to those people who follow them as the absolute just as you follow the multitude of people who claimed to hear messages from angels, God and people who heard messages from people who heard messages from God and angels.

Your absolute differs from theirs only in the most superficial of ways. Gods Will, the Dao, "Nature", the divine - people who listed to angles and Gods but aren't sanctioned by your specific creed, a pluarlity of terms but still the one same claim and outcome.

> all points can be connected to each other by some path
Points can be connected to each other, but path that connects all points doesn't necessary exist. Black Hole is great example here. No path exist from one to another. Who knows how many one way road interactions exist in real world.

Right, unless one is being poetic, in Orthodoxy, the best way to describe God is apophatically

>There only has to be two, and there's at least three,
No, as I've pointed out, Catholic doctrine is innovated, even Catholics say this.

As for the Oriental Orthodox--Copts and the like--they are not dogmatically separated from us, only canonically. Not de facto, in other words, just de jure. In most cases we can take Communion at each other's churches

>They are often incredibly dissonant - we've fought wars over this shit.
My point is that different interpretations are not innately conflicting, they can in fact be entirely harmonious. It's when you're interpretation is dissonant with the Church Fathers that you have an issue

>So does the Orthodox.
No, not at all. For us, dogma is what Christ taught, and just that.

>Jesus didn't lay down a whole lotta specifics when it came to the structure of His church
No, and most of our structure is canonical, not *dogmatic* (like the Papacy is). Christ did establish the office of the bishop/priest though, and their authority to do things like absolve sins.

The Quran doesn't interpret itself anymore than the Bible does. No written word is objective in human hands, even modern law has to be written in such detailed minutia so as to prevent misinterpretation insomuch as possible, and even that momentous effort, so great it makes the law all but indecipherable to the layman, often fails in this endeavor. Meanwhile, religious doctrine is more often written akin to poetry, and has nearly as many interpretations as there are readers of said.

>and still fails to tackle the point of why not being Christian doesnt lead to the outcomes described.
Because they're nearer to Christian in some respect. You can be gradually closer to being Christian, and you can be gradually further. Eastern religions, at least their positive aspects, are about the search for Christ, only they don't realize it.

Tao and "gods" are not really comparable. Tao is a sort of Absolute, but gods are different forces, often antagonist to each other.

>No, and most of our structure is canonical
You're telling me you agree that Jesus didn't say much of anything about his church, and somehow your church structure is canonical?

Of course a path exists from one to another, it's through space, which is a thing that can bend, not just nothingness.

Black holes don't necessarily "go" anywhere, if that is what you're getting at. They are just unfathomably intense concentrations of gravity.

"Canonical", in Orthodoxy, means pertaining to non-dogmatic rules.

Jesus taught plenty about his Church, the job of bishops was to be teachers and authorities who would pass on his teachings into the future like a relay race. Many of his teachings were later written down, but bishops are the heart here of the tradition.

>My point is that different interpretations are not innately conflicting, they can in fact be entirely harmonious. It's when you're interpretation is dissonant with the Church Fathers that you have an issue
They often do conflict, as do even the views of the "Church Fathers", having written different accounts of the same events. True, their differing views weren't so disharmonious as to lead to violence, but those of the rest of history often have been. (And, in cases where interpretation has evolved over time, would have been, had they existed in the same age.)

Did Jesus say if genetically altering embryos is acceptable?
Did Jesus say if using chemical weapons and nuclear weapons is acceptable?
What did Jesus say about artificial intelligence, androids, cloning organs, cloning people?

The earliest exegetic schools in Orthodoxy were the Antiochene and the Alexandrian, and though they had very different approaches, they stayed very consistent in their particular approaches and only ever got into serious conflict about Christology, a lot of which was more semantic dispute than Scriptural exegesis.

Not specifically, but he left teachings that can tell us plainly about these things.

>Not specifically, but he left teachings that can tell us plainly about these things.

What did he say that tells us plainly about these things?

> It's through space, which is a thing that can bend
This is exactly the reason why the path from black hole into another black hole doesn't exist because space bends in such way that you can't leave one. If even light can't reach point A to point B than the path from A to B doesn't exist [if you exclude rare case of merging black holes, you can't jump from one to another]. My point here is that is hard just to rule out all exceptions, that can made the path from any point to another impossible. Even in the case of Christianity, it is pretty hard to move from heaven to hell or other way arond, so it isn't pure physicalism here.

>Not specifically

Then his morality isn't absolute. I also get the impression that you have no idea what the word 'absolute' means. 'Absolute' means applicable to everyone, everywhere, everytime. For this, the people who use it would need to possess absolute omniscience, in order to know every possible moral obstacle to overcome.

The fact that you can't name specifics disproves your proposition entirely

Genetic engineering is not acceptable, because God in the Bible is said to be the one who knits in the womb, and man is a God-made icon of God; man, by tampering on that level, constructs himself as an icon of himself, instead of God; this impairs his fundamental purpose.

Jesus said even using swords is not a good idea, and they should be kept at most as deterrents. The same philosophy could probably be applied to nuclear weapons.

I'm not really worried about artificial intelligence, but cloning separates reproduction from matrimony, which is a form of fornication.

>Then his morality isn't absolute
"Absolute" doesn't mean rigorously codified.

> 'Absolute' means applicable to everyone, everywhere, everytime.
Correct. Cultivating Christ's morality, is more about getting it written on your heart through practice, then about memorizing codes. Even the Old Testament says this is how Christ's covenant will work.

If man is made in the image of the creator, then man himself is a creator, and yearns to create. Is it then not man's purpose to create its own species, in its own image?

At any rate, you are looking at the clouds and saying you see a rabbit, a fish and the Mona Lisa, but in reality the information isn't there, you are rationalizing and making things up.
Christianity evolves all the time, new opinions appear, because new problems appear. The solutions to these didn't exist before the problems, so new solutions are invented, that don't come from your prophet of choice, rather from 21 century bureaucrats.

What is good and what isn't, even just according to christianity, evolves over time. Christianity was okay with stoning women before, it isn't now. It was okay with slavery, it isn't now. It was against banks, its fine with them now.
There is no absolute, and its self evident by a simple examination of all things that can be claimed to be absolute.

>"Absolute" doesn't mean rigorously codified.

Yes it does. In fact, 'absolute' means the most rigorous possible. It means that it can never be ambiguous, and that it can never have any shades of grey, under any circumstances

>Cultivating Christ's morality, is more about getting it written on your heart through practice, then about memorizing codes.

This is just pure bullshit. "Getting it written on your heart"? What in the hell does that even mean? How do you write something onto your heart? Your heart isan organ that pumps blood.

If this is your idea of an absolute morality, then I highly recommend you define your terms in advance, because everything you've claimed so far is an incoherent pile of woo woo and gibberish. It certainly isn't specific enough to be absolute, it might not even be specific enough to be subjective, because most of the terms you use are completely meaningless

I believe in one god but even I'm not naive enough to buy into bullshit like objective morality. There is just no reason whatsoever to believe any "true" notions of justice exist just because an all-powerful being happens to exist too.

It really can't as Nietzsche said 140 years ago, which is why he prophesied that the century after his death would be one of immense bloodshed between different authoritarian ideologies.

Protip: He was right.

Man's purpose is unite with God's energies, God's flame, and become deified. He's currently in a fallen state, so no, his purpose is not have his own creation beneath him.

The Church said slavery is good for humility, Saint John Chrysostom for instance, are to obey their masters in total love and submission. But he also said owning things is against God's intent, and if everyone were a serious Christian, all property would be common, and that having servants weakens you spiritually. The Church's position is radical, not of any age, but of God.

Orthodox Christianity is still strongly against usury, and by that I mean charging any interests on loans. They even proposed an alternative financial system in Russia that would do away with interest: globalresearch.ca/interest-free-banking-russia-debates-unorthodox-orthodox-financial-alternative/5495331

>Man's purpose is unite with God's energies, God's flame, and become deified. He's currently in a fallen state, so no, his purpose is not have his own creation beneath him.

Thats your interpretation, not an absolute. The one I suggested seems equally valid based on the objective facts.

Thats the point I am making, Very little is factual about religion, most is interpretation of these facts, treated as if it in turn is factual, when alternative interpretations can exist.
Church doctrine is an interpretation, and subjective, and changes over time. It isn't absolute.

>It means that it can never be ambiguous, and that it can never have any shades of grey, under any circumstances
Correct. But this doesn't require a rigorous codification. In fact, an absolute morality would be impossible to rigorously codify, since it would have to describe every single possible situation, and infinity. Hence why it is approached mystically instead of juridically for us.

> "Getting it written on your heart"? What in the hell does that even mean?
"But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people."

> Your heart is an organ that pumps blood.
Wow, how enlightened of you. Science is truly cool.

>, then I highly recommend you define your terms in advance
Understanding spiritual truths is a matter of experiencing them. If you want to understand them, you have try living the Orthodox lifestyle.

Well, it is absolute if God says so, isn't it?

>Church doctrine is an interpretation, and subjective, and changes over time
For Catholics, maybe. Not for Orthodox.

>For Catholics, maybe. Not for Orthodox.

Currently Orthadox priest tech that contraception is acceptable in marriage, when a century ago it was considered a great sin.
This is an easy example. I am sure there are others as well, like which rites are used and which are excluded over time.

The kind of contraception mainly in use a century ago (oral consumed) is still forbidden. Condoms are generally okay because they're comparable to coitus interruptus.

Again you are rationalizing. Doctrine said no contraception. When it said some contraception is okay. This is a change.

>I am sure there are others as well, like which rites are used and which are excluded over time.
Rites can change, just like the language, but they still tend to follow a particular common structure. So long as this structure is adhered to, a lot of theoretical rites would be fine.

Coitus interuptus is a form of contraception, and it was generally fine, so Imma have to differ with you on that.

Was wearing a pig's intestine on my penis while having sex with my wife in the 19th century acceptable and promoted by the orthadox church?

I don't pig intestine was ever specifically addressed, probably because it wasn't common enough to warrant such.

The Orthodox Church never promoted contraception. Having it permissible and promoting it are two different things.

Personally, my atheism has moved on to absurdism, and my morality is based on empathy. I'm a simple man, sorry.

>you have try living the Orthodox lifestyle

If that one is absolute, then why are there different denominations of Christianity? Why are there other religions than Christianity. If your morality applied to everything, everywhere, then disagreeing with it shouldn't even be possible in the first place.

Your absolute version of morality is completely nonsensical. Throughout this whole thread, you didn't define a single term you used, and you never mentioned in which case your version of morality certainly isn't absolute. I'm not going to waste any more time on this pointless sophistry

>If your morality applied to everything, everywhere, then disagreeing with it shouldn't even be possible in the first place.
Non sequitur, unless you define moral good as "whatever is done," and moral bad as, "whatever is not done."

>Theism, true 'existential' theism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful existence, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true lack of God... Christ, in calling himself God, proved thereby his intense hunger for atheism.

How does theism avoid falling into moral relativism?

He called himself Antichrist because he was a Pagan, not to project your nature-hating icon to him.

God is absolute, and the wellspring of rectitude.

Nietzsche was more passionate about Christianity than anything else, even if that passion was negative.

God *is* abstraction.

Nothing more and nothing less.

An abstraction, that when taken literally, feminizes all the men of earth since no earthly man can compete with an abstraction.

At least the Earthly king could die and bear responsibility for his failure to perform but an abstraction is free from responsibility and thus is susceptible to the men who "wish" instead of the men who "act".

God can't be positively described, except figuratively. In literal terms, he can only be negatively described.

Because Christianity was pretending to be Pagan when in reality it was more like her mother Judaism.

This is why he admired the Jews, they were honest with their nihilistic, feminine, tendency unlike Christians and Muslims who hide their feminine nature under "hyper-masculinity" or "rationalism" instead of accepting the Pagan balance of both Masculinity and Femininity.

That is what an abstraction is, that is what language, mathematics, and any other medium that attempts to bring order to flux, but fails to do so because reality is always changing.

Jews were way more into warrior heroes than Christians, desu. We have some soldier saints, but most of our heroes are monastics.

>falling into moral relativism
Why is it bad?

God is changeless.

Atheists are either moral relativist or moral nihilists.

>God is absolute, and the wellspring of rectitude.

Abstraction is changeless.

Abstraction is a tool our binary wired brains developed to aid in survival, not as a means in itself.

Abstraction can only be taken literally as the ends, in a society where survival is no longer the highest priority.

God only exists insofar as your belly is full, your sleep is deep, and your dick is wet.

Take the sheltering away and you will see how quickly man denounces his Abstraction as his highest priority.

God told you to rape your kids, your next move?