How should govt determine right and wrong?

[CanadianPatriot]

The last topic about Church and State unity got me thinking... how should the government measure right from wrong? The Bible has been used by many countries as a basic standard, including our own and the United States. Many argue against using the Bible by saying not every one follows the Bible. If the government shouldn´t measure morality by the Bible, then what should it use as a guide? Since we are a democracy does that mean the majority is always right? (ex. Majority suddenly decides murder isn´t ´´wrong´´ anymore... should the government follow the majority´s wishes? ) What should the government base its morality on?

[idealisttotheend]

The government should determine what is right by asking the majority when said majority has the most money, food water etc. (at the top of the economic cycle), and then enshrining that in a constitution.

The government should determine what is right by asking people who live in communities where people of all diversities (ethnic, economic, age etc.) live together.

The government should determine what is right by ensuring that a majority of the weakest members of society agree with any set standard.

The government should determine what is right by giving people the responsibility to choose for themselves in all cases where their choice will not hurt someone else substantially.

[DAC]

What should the government base its morality on?

It’s an excellent question, but I’m afraid it’s a question for which there will be no agreed answer as long as people have differing religious (or anti-religious) viewpoints.

Muslims believe that the Koran should be the basis of law, because they think it is God’s rule to show us how to live. Some among them, perhaps all in principle, believe that the Koran should be the law of the land. We’ve seen some of the problems that leads to.

As a Christian, convinced that the Bible is God’s message, and the only basis for knowing right from wrong, I believe the Bible should be the basis for our law. I don’t believe it should be part of our law, because the Bible makes plain that much that it speaks about is not government’s business. Further, where it deals with government and civil law, it is written in terms which apply to a rural, agricultural society, for the most part. We have to interpret them to apply them to our modern urban, industrialized society.

Many others will argue for their different religious traditions. Still others will argue that majority opinion establishes right and wrong - except where they disagree too strenuously with majority opinion.

It’s a question we need to face, but the answer you come to will depend on your starting point. That doesn’t mean all the answers are true. In fact, since they are mutually contradictory, we can be sure that most of them are mistaken. Like everybody else, I think my position is correct. Proving that, though, can only be done by establishing that its presuppositions are the ones that actually account for the world in which we live. It would be fun to get into that, though.

[playfullfellow]

A very simplistic view is that our laws are already based on the 10 commandments. We as a society have just allowed the lawyers to expand them a hundred fold to the point of not being able to understand them ourselves. We as a society believe we can always make things better by complicating the hell out of everything.

[CanadianPatriot]

A very simplistic view is that our laws are already based on the 10 commandments. We as a society have just allowed the lawyers to expand them a hundred fold to the point of not being able to understand them ourselves. We as a society believe we can always make things better by complicating the hell out of everything.

Amen to that

[Liberal Krusty]

So I am suposed to hold some sort of stupid belief in the Judeo Christian values that this country was formulated with? Cut me some Slack. I have no solutions but that doesn't mean that I can't be against everything that is going on.

Check out the Orotu tribe, they provide examples for all of us; they harvest banannas four times a year and feast foiur times a year. When challenged by outsiders, they cut off their heads. They are open to all beliefs no matter what colour, race or creed (provided they have a head) and havn't changed in thousands of years. (Locations have changed due to sewage issues but other than that, none.)

[DAC]

they harvest banannas four times a year and feast foiur times a year. When challenged by outsiders, they cut off their heads. They are open to all beliefs no matter what colour, race or creed (provided they have a head)

Sounds like a true Liberal -- totally unliberal -- cut off the heads of those who dare to disagree with you.

[Liberal Krusty]

Sounds like a true Liberal -- totally unliberal -- cut off the heads of those who dare to disagree with you.

And I suppose that installing democracy and stealing oil and any left over WMD is preferable in your distorted right wing world that is fueled by the military industrial complex right?

[DAC]

Sounds like a true Liberal -- totally unliberal -- cut off the heads of those who dare to disagree with you.

And I suppose that installing democracy and stealing oil and any left over WMD is preferable in your distorted right wing world that is fueled by the military industrial complex right?

Well, yes, I do think that installing democracy is preferable to murdering those who disagree with you. Not that I'm convinced that the installation will be a success. But it is clear from the statements of many Iraqis that they are safer now than they were before. There is less murder, and there is actually an attempt to punish those who engage in torture.

I'm not sure what imaginary world you get oil theft & "theft" of leftover WMDs. Actually, I guess I do know. It is the extreme left wing, one-sided, blind analysis of the Iraq war, I presume. Though the trip from accusations that there were no WMDs to accusations of stealing them is possible only when ideology becomes all important and truth meaningless.

You see, I believe that a government should try to figure out what is right and what is wrong, and legislate accordingly, not just according to their ideology.

[Liberal Krusty]

Well, yes, I do think that installing democracy is preferable to murdering those who disagree with you.

Of course. The end justifies the means, even if millions more die while installing that democracy.

[Michael Hardner]

DAC, you appear to be arguing with a clone here...

[theloniusfleabag]

Dear CanadianPatriot,

The difference between 'right and wrong' is interesting indeed. The problem is that most people limit it within the bounds of humanity, while the true answer lies beyond man. It may seem like I am saying I know the answer, and indeed I do. One must look at the absolutes, and the meaning of life. 'Right' serves that meaning, and 'wrong' is that which works against it.

[August1991]

I read through the first few posts on this thread some time ago (silent people read what you post!) and wondered whether I should get involved. I decided not but with these past few posts, I feel I must.

The question seems to be, "Right and Wrong: How to Know".

Here's a simple, obvious answer. It's straight from nature and in practice, the basis of existence. "Don't Waste."

IOW, the only good (right way) is to use wisely whatever we have. The only bad (wrong way) is to squander, collectively or alone.

I think that's a good moral guide, and it has the advantage of possibly getting universal agreement.

[willy]

August1991,

Why?

[August1991]

Why?

Got me there Willy. What's your point?

[willy]

Right and wrong implies a value of good and bad.

My question of why, is clear. What are you not squandering for? What makes it right not to squander.

Is it fair to say that you think this is what "good" would be (not to waste)?

You also refer to a universal agreement. This would be challengeable as some people believe in survival of the fittest. If they can acquire it, it is right.

I am sure I could come up with other examples but that is the point. No universal consciousness really exists in a consistent manner as to what is right and wrong.

Under what authority then would make anything right or wrong. We know that if we hit someone it hurts them but why is that wrong.

It is getting late so I will boil this, what could be a long statement down to sort statement.

If there is no God, things like good and bad would be relative and changing. Thus they would loose meaning because they are changeable.

However with God, we have a creator and a design (an absolute), IOW a way the world is suppose to work and function best (good). This God has given us a revelation (the bible) to give an authority base of what is right and wrong. Part of the revelation explains that the world is not the way they are supposed to be (bad, evil, wrong). The revelation also shares how we can rectify this.

Just to sum up.

If we did not squander, would we have rape, murder, adultery, greed, pride ect.? How does conservation deal with a broader morality, good/bad, or right/wrong?

[theloniusfleabag]

Dear willy,

Right and wrong implies a value of good and bad.

Incorrect. Right and Wrong are indicators of direction in a 'polarized value system'. There is no morality attached to them save for the 'ethical moment'.

Good and Bad are religious based, to be sure, but a separate animal.

If there is no God, things like good and bad would be relative and changing. Thus they would loose meaning because they are changeable.

Correct. It all depends of the God you worship. Mammon dictates (especially in the USA) that what sells is therefore 'good' or 'right'. What was once unacceptable becomes 'pop-culturally desirable' and is rewarded accordingly. Lesbian sex (not that I'm against it, because I sometimes like to watch) on the six-O-clock news can go from 'wrong' to 'right' if the profits for the quarter show it to be so. That which was once sacred becomes trivial commodity, in a heartbeat, when money and profit become the 'moral compass'.

If we did not squander, would we have rape, murder, adultery, greed, pride ect.?

We have always had these things, only squandering has become revered as an economy-builder. the others can all be attributed to selfishness.

[willy]

theloniusfleabag, this will not help the discussion further but I agree.

[August1991]

Willy,

You also refer to a universal agreement. This would be challengeable as some people believe in survival of the fittest. If they can acquire it, it is right.

I am sure I could come up with other examples but that is the point. No universal consciousness really exists in a consistent manner as to what is right and wrong.

I agree with you. Any method of knowing what is good and what is bad is open to dispute. Someone invariably has a different view of what's right and what's wrong.

However with God, we have a creator and a design (an absolute), IOW a way the world is suppose to work and function best (good). This God has given us a revelation (the bible) to give an authority base of what is right and wrong. Part of the revelation explains that the world is not the way they are supposed to be (bad, evil, wrong).

So, you have a God and the Bible to determine the true right way and the true wrong way. (BTW, which God and which Testament are you referring to?)

My take on what is good and what is bad does not require God, and everyone can agree on it. Give it some thought if you will.

My question of why, is clear. What are you not squandering for? What makes it right not to squander.

I think I can get everyone's agreement that smashing (squandering) your computer is "bad". You'll lose a computer and everyone else is unaffected.

By the same logic, if you find a new way to get to work in the morning that saves you 15 minutes, then that's "good" - and we all can agree it's good. (Assuming of course that your new route doesn't somehow cause delays for others.)

[DAC]

So, you have a God and the Bible to determine the true right way and the true wrong way. (BTW, which God and which Testament are you referring to?)

There is only one God set before you for your worship in the Bible, and the two testaments are only superficially different.

The Old Testament looks forward to the coming of Christ to redeem us, and the New looks back at that. That means the forms of worship are different and the clarity about Christ and his work is different. But they offer the same salvation and the same God.

The Old Testament is set in a context in which the church is a particular race and for most of it a whole nation, while the New’s context is a church which includes people of every race and nation. That means that penalties for some offences in the Old Testament are more severe - you cannot exclude a person who rejects the basis of your race or nation by excommunicating him, but must exile or execute him. But the moral standards are the same.

Same God, same principles, same message in both testaments. The message? That in our rebellion against God we incur such guilt that only God’s provision of a substitute for us (Jesus Christ) can restore us to peace with him.

[DAC]

I think I can get everyone's agreement that smashing (squandering) your computer is "bad". You'll lose a computer and everyone else is unaffected.

I can answer that very simply. My wife would dearly love to “squander” my computer, because she thinks (with some justification, I confess) that it interferes with our spending time together. (or should that be )

The problem in this discussion is that unless you have an absolute reference point, there is no basis for assigning value to anything. You can say right or left on some arbitrary scale (as we do in politics), but not right or wrong, because “wrong” always includes a value judgment. Far less can you say good or bad.

From the materialist, secularist viewpoint, the universe we know began with a major accident, the big bang. Thereafter it developed through a series of accidents. Life formed by accident. Evolution involves such a long unlikely series of accidents that it is hard for anybody with mathematical inclination to believe. From that perspective, you and I are the results of a billion accidents. We have no value. We are simply each one particular bit of accident. Accidents have no value. If someone kills another person, those who accidentally care about that dead accident may be upset, but it’s really just another accident. A live accident is neither more nor less right than a dead accident.

From that perspective the only thing that matters in the end is what each person happens to want for himself or herself. Some take the evolutionists view of survival of the fittest, and trample over everyone else in their drive to survive and get the pleasures they want from life. Some decide the most helpful path for themselves is the path of cooperation, so they gather others together with whom they can forge an agreement on some values they will live by, and then try to enforce those on others. But in the end, all such choices are arbitrary. From that philosophy, you have one or more accidents trying to impose their accidental ideas on other accidents.

God gives us a reference point which is not an accident, a reference point from which to measure right and wrong. While some may choose arbitrarily which God they will serve, there is sufficient evidence to direct you to the truth, if you will examine it. The God revealed in the Bible is the only sufficient explanation for the world/universe in which we dwell. He has entered into history, taking human form (Jesus Christ) to make it possible for us to know him. Because he came in recent historical time, we can actually test his claims, and see that he is God. I think that is off our topic somewhat, so I won’t go into that.

The point is that God has, in the Bible, given us an absolute standard of right and wrong, good and bad. We can twist it into pretzels (and we have frequently), but it doesn’t change, and keeps telling us to untwist the pretzels. It is frequently condemned by people who have not bothered to study what it says. It is often offensive to people who want to do things it condemns. Lots of people have thought they could come up with better approaches, but those better approaches litter the junkyard of history because soon or late it became evident they were not better. But God’s word stands as a resource anybody can pick up and use for their own growth and to challenge the corruptions that our self-centeredness introduces into our social systems. That’s how slavery was abolished. That’s how sexual equality was established. That’s how labour laws which protected the weak were established. In fact that’s how our present democratic approach to government was established. Christians picked up their Bibles and saw problems, and worked to bring change for the better. They succeeded because they knew they had an absolute standard, and so could hang in there when their world was against them.

People may reject God’s standard, but it is the only one which will build a society in which there is real freedom, real toleration, real peace, real justice.

[Reverend Blair]

Which god are you referring to, Dac? There over the history and through the many cultures of mankind, been many gods. Why should we believe in your particular version? Why not Zues, or Gaia, Zimbo the Two-Headed Clown?

The vast majority of cultures have come up with the same laws...don't kill, don't hurt others, don't steal, don't be a bad person. The first three are valid, the last one is really cultural. That's where commandments like, "You shall have no gods before me," show that out laws are no longer based on religious doctrine.

The first three are really what all of our laws stem from too. If you look at our laws, they are really just extensions of that. The other laws, those based on Christian doctrine, have fallen by the wayside. I can have whatever gods I want or, in my case, none at all. I can, and do, work on Sunday. I could, if so inclined, commit adultery and would be breaking no law but my wife's.

Religious belief has no place in politics. Right and wrong should be based on what is best for the community at large and individual rights in general.

[DAC]

Religious belief has no place in politics. Right and wrong should be based on what is best for the community at large and individual rights in general

Amazing how many people toss up this garbage statement. Let me put it in plain language for you. What it means is: “My religious beliefs have a place in politics, but nobody else’s are acceptable.” :angry:

By definition “religious beliefs” are the base of a person’s deepest convictions on what is right or wrong. They are the views which give a fundamental shape to what you do in the political arena or any other arena, unless you are coerced to hide them.

The statement quoted above is a club. It is an attempt to coerce people who put their religious beliefs up front ( instead of pretending they don’t act on their religious beliefs) to opt out of politics. Intolerant and anti-democratic in the extreme. :angry:

What is your standard, Reverend Blair, for deciding “what is best for the community at large and individual rights in general”? What makes your idea any better than that of the leader of the political party you most oppose? Or for that matter better than Stalin’s or Hitler’s? I’ve told you plainly my basis. You don’t have to agree. But what alternative are you offering? As far as I can see, you are saying, “I don’t like your views so you and those like you should shut up and let people like me run things”. Surprise! I don’t agree. Have you any reasons to support your view?

You’ve argued that there are all kinds of choices, so how do I know my choice is right? That argument cuts everybody equally deeply. It really doesn’t go anywhere unless it is answered.

Given multiple choices, there are two ways to get to the right one. I’m assuming they are exclusive choices, though many religions are not completely exclusive. But the partially inclusive religions can be lumped together as one broad choice, excluding all the exclusive religions. One way to get to the right one is to try each and eliminate until there is only one left. The second is to find evidence that supports one in particular. That automatically excludes others.

Given Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and a collection of “all ways lead to God” religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Baha’i, you have a mutually exclusive group. The “all ways lead to God” religions only seem to accept Christianity, Islam, etc. What they actually do is accept parts of these religions, but not all - they do not accept, for Christians, Muslims, etc, the first commandment, the command which rejects all other ways.

So how do you choose? That’s simple. Christianity comes with a built in, visible, public test. Jesus Christ walked this earth in historical times, and he made a drastic claim. He said that he was and is God; with his Father and the Holy Spirit, the only God. He said he is the only way to heaven, to peace with God.

That leaves you only three choices in your assessment of Jesus. Either he was a man of evil, a liar trying to deceive people about the most important choice of life; or he was insane, as C.S. Lewis put it, on the level of a man who walks about saying “I’m a poached egg”; or he spoke the truth. You can’t say he was a great & good man, a wonderful teacher, but not God, because great and good men do not falsely claim to be God. Read the gospels. Can you read them and deny that he was both sane and good? I can’t.

Further, he gave us a concrete test. He told us that the ultimate sign of who he was lay in that fact the third day after his death he would rise again - & then he did it. That makes the choice easy.

But let me stress, that does not mean legislating Christian religion. It means making civil laws whose basis is God’s teaching about what is good for society in its outward dealings. Belief, inward attitudes including who one worships, cannot be legislated.

[Reverend Blair]

Well, since I do not share your religion I find your willingness to force me to follow it's tenets a more than little outrageous. it would be like me stating that Churches should be forced to perform gay marriages and any woman I deemed an unfit mother, no matter her personal beliefs, be forced to undergo an abortion should she become pregnant.

Hell, I firmly believe that no woman should have more than two children. I wouldn't make that law though, not unless the future of Canada was seriously threatened by an all-Canadian population crisis.

If you want an example of the separation of state and religion, one performed by a political leader that I have little use for BTW, you need look no further than Jean Chretien.

He supported, politically, both gay marriage and abortion. The Pope was threatening to send him to hell by special pope decree, but Jean held his ground. Chretien, by most accounts, is a fairly pious Catholic. What the Pope says carries a lot of weight with Catholics...I know that because I was raised as one.

Now have a look at your Bible. Do you really think we should start imposing its own peculiar laws on non-Christians or even Christians who believe the more peculiar laws to be archaic remnants of a primitive tribal society? Should I be strung up for the statue of dope-smoking Jesus beside my desk? How about the Budda thing in the knick knack cabinet? The Gaia figure that stands beside it?

If we base our laws on your religion, then am I required to follow those laws since I do not believe in your god?

That's not even getting into the contradictions in your Bible. Do we turn the other cheek and let criminals run wild or do we start poking out their eyes? Actually turning the other cheek can also be interpreted as an act of defiance towards authority. Does that mean if I don't believe in a law I am entitled to openly challenge the police? To what extent? Which laws can I break?

We are a secular society. We do not come from one religion or from any religion at all. Our government's decisions need to reflect that.

[Elder]

Interresting post Rev. Care to answer his question, at all? I didn't notice him trying to "force you to his religious tenets" at all. He just put up an excellent arguement, which you didn't respond to at all.

My views, we shouldn't necessarily make religious doctrine laws. It's not so much about political correctness to me. I've just seen way too many examples of how religious figures misuse political power. It's easy to manipulate folks when strong convictions (including religious ones) come into play. No religion is innocent in that matter. I think that living by religions is the best way to go, and I live whole-heartedly by mine, but it should be on the individual level, as not even those of the same faith agree on how to worship (there are at least 4 different baptist churches in my town, and none of them agree). So religious doctrine should not be made law. Now should we elect religious officials who have the strength that religion gives to morals and conviction. I think so, and that's where my vote's going anyway.