Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts

Sunday, October 11, 2020

Kant and the justification of believing in god

 So I'm writing a paper about hermeneutics, and Schleiermacher is becoming a big part of it. I'm trying to start the paper off, and I'd read something (I think) about how Kant changed the way people thought about the Bible as an unquestionable source of truth. Rather than try to find that source again, I started reading Kant's Wikipedia page. I found more than I bargained for.

Kant provided a justification for believing in God, even though his existence cannot be proven. He basically says if you can't prove or disprove a thing, the question becomes whether it's in your best interest to believe it. What caught my attention is that he says it's no longer a question of whether we are deceiving ourselves or not if we take the position. I'm not trying to understand it completely right now, but what I'm getting is that he saw morality as a system but not happiness. He saw happiness as dependent upon morality. And apparently he saw morality as being intertwined with the presupposition of God, the soul, and freedom. Since God can't be proven or disproven, he's not saying that these beliefs have to be exclusive. God to Europe was the Christian God, but there could be other concepts of God that would be acceptable under this criteria, though not all.

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But that brings me back to the idea that believing in God doesn't necessarily equate to believing in the Christian God or the Bible. You can hold to a belief that the universe was created by a supernatural being and that there are higher moral laws without holding to the Apostles' Creed.

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Moral Education

I went looking to see where we are as a nation in terms of educating our students on morality. I came across this article in the Atlantic by Paul Barnwell entitled Students' Broken Moral Compasses. The tab shows Why Don't Schools Teach Children Morality and Empathy?

How did I get here? I'm seeing that unity is important to me. And social harmony. How do we get along together? And I am realizing that we need to have a common ethical and moral framework to get there.

I've been floating around this topic before. The article hit some points that I've discussed recently. Here's one:
A reluctance to teach about religions and value systems is coinciding with a steady decline of teen involvement in formal religious activity...And while attending church is only one way young people may begin to establish a moral identity, schools don’t seem to be picking up the slack. 
Here's another:
Narcissism is on the rise, especially in the Western world, as more teens concur with the statement: “I am an extraordinary person.” If empathy is crucial to developing a moral identity, then this trend should be troubling to parents and educators who hope that students foster the ability to see the world through others’s eyes.
So what I'm understanding is that young people aren't learning morality or empathy in school, and most aren't getting it at church either. So are they getting it at all?