(Insert title here)
Greenberg said:
You know that this is a position that allows for anything-goes, don't you? It is amoral and allows for you to scorn or praise anything.
Not necessarily.
If we take a Cartesian approach, the only thing I can be sure of is that I am observing and experiencing this reality. Whether or not it is reality is an unprovable proposition. However, this assertion of reality seems to be the only one going, and I might as well function within it. As far as I can tell, there is a rational basis for morality, it's just difficult to identify sometimes because humanity tends to invent things like gods to explain morality because it's easier that way.
To start simply,
why is it wrong to kill another human being in cold blood?
Or how is it that we all should be equal before the law?
These aren't arbitrary assertions. Once we work past arbitrary assertions like being God's chosen people, or a genetic mutation resulting in a pigment deficiency makes one person inherently superior to another, that men should run society because they have penises ... do you realize that men are nearly extraneous? (And by our own hand, at that.)
We settle on a certain sense of equality because it is all we have left. Equality isn't some high-minded declaration, but all that remains once we strip away the pretty decorations. Pharaohs may have been able to raise mountains in the desert, but humans, striving toward equality, can throw a hunk of metal into nowhere and hit another planet. (Beat
that, Amenhotep!)
We refuse dictators because we see the folly of their ambition; if there was something the species should gain by dedicating itself to one leader, we would prosper by that route.
Much of morality can be determined that way. I think certain Biblical rules about everything from sodomy to tattoos to taking a sh@t actually make sense ...
if we're wandering around for forty years in the middle of nowhere, unsure if we're ever getting out of this mess.
So yes, as this topic considers, I understand why God says we should not consume blood. I don't like blood in my bacon, and yes, I'm aware of a certain irony in that phrase. To the other, I like steaks rare and dripping red. But ask a hunter, a farmer,
anyone who kills animals for food: it's best to drain the blood; the meat is just better that way. There are all sorts of reasons that science could explain, but the Hebrews didn't have that, so it comes down to what God says.
But in the case of blood transfusions, are we looking at a repeat of Eden? Where God puts a huge gift in front of us and tells us we can't have it? If God didn't want us taking blood transfusions, God could easily have made it so that they didn't work. Of course, after the debacle at Eden, we can only wonder at God's notion of planning.
We have, in many ways, more accurate means of measuring morality, but most people—even some atheists—seem to accept that without God, morality is arbitrary, or even false. It is easier to assert that morality is a baseless construct than it is to seek and identify a rational basis.
And as long as
this is the life we're stuck with, as long as
this is the operating reality, I don't see why we shouldn't work within it, determine its ways, and understand its nature as best we can.
Thus, while there does, in fact, come a point at which I can no longer identify Ms. Gough's superstition as superstition, that point is so removed from any practical boundaries for the human experience as to be dysfunctional.
The world around me may be absurd, but it is, in the end, the world around me.
