God forgives. Not forgiving causes people to feel trapt and in consequence causes ____...

Atheists how do you reconcile this with yourselves morally?

Not being forgiven is the absolute slight. It’s the difference between the most loyal of friend and the most passionate of enemy...

As an aside everyone tests their boundaries. Life is about walking the line and having someone pull you back...


this mechanism is recreated by some individuals. (They can manage themselves) to these ppl I feel religion is not necessary... how many people can you count like this? Do you find yourself ever managing their feelings? That’s noble... how many people can successfully do what you do?

Forgiving is not a right. I do not have to forgive someone. I suppose it depends what you mean by forgiveness

God doesnt always forgive. He doesnt forgive, for example, someone who doesnt believe in god/jesus/the bible message

Atheists can also forgive people? I'm not sure I understand the question.

Well, I do not believe there is a god that forgives.

Whatever acts you commit must be judged by how they affect the world you live in and leave behind when you die.

This isn't taking into consideration the nuances of subjective experience. We dont know another individuals struggle. We dont see the whole picture.

How do you formulate a standard for judgement? The judgment is going to vary depending on who's doing the judging.

Even if we assume those questions become necessary to answer, I don't see how those questions go away just because you introduce "god" into the statement.

And while they may be hard to answer without "god" in the mix, they become pretty much impossible to answer with "god" in the mix. Unless you're content with just assuming the concept of morals is in the hand of some nameless entity due to some unknown metaphysical mechanism. And if that is the case, I wouldn't make too much noise about not seeing the whole picture.

Forgiveness is so complex a calculator can’t do it, but a human brain can.

As far as I understand Christianity, God does forgive all sins once the sinner shows confession,contrition, and penance.

People forgiving themselves for any and all wrongdoing, but who never would forgive others who wronged them is pretty much a basic tenet of modern secular "morality".

It's certainly true in my experience that people (and not just those who identify as secular) are prone to being more understanding of their own shortcomings than they are of others. I think it's not too difficult to figure out how that works: we all have intimate knowledge of all the extenuating factors we think are relevant to our moral self-evaluation and it's easy to be happy remaining ignorant of similar factors when others are involved.

But it seems a bit much to call this a tenet of secular morality, and I'm not sure what the scare quotes are supposed to mean. I don't think I've observed that people who identify as secular are more prone to this kind of failing than those who do not.

Hum..What if i forgive someones sins against me but God does not forgive those sins because they did not repent.

I’ve always enjoyed the unconditionally forgiving portrayal of divinity and that a human being alone can do it increases the joy.

Fundamental attrition error

Right. I almost worked in the idea of out-groups but decided not to. I've read conflicting things about experimental evidence of the fundamental attribution error and haven't gotten around to ever looking at much of it. The idea of it is very intuitive though

Same concept for intrapersonal and intra-group. Understanding it can make you act less like an ass, which is nice

Secular "morality' since it is an an experimental construct. Can ever be valid valid without a religious or God basis? Where does the concept of forgiveness fit in?


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Yes

You moved the quotes from secular to morality but if the use of quotes goes along with the question about validity than I think I understand. I'd imagine the answer to your question depends on what you mean by validity, which could be a pretty long conversation. The question seems to imply you doubt the possibility of a valid secular morality (given your understanding of those terms). If that's so, could you describe why?

I could give an answer using my own understanding but I'm guessing I'd just be interpreting all the relevant terms differently from you. As a very rough approximation, I think the simplest way of describing the validity of some moral claim is by grounding it in cultural legitimacy, and I wouldn't distinguish "secular" from "religious" morality in that regard. This is mostly descriptive: moral claims only possess normative force (or legitimacy, or validity) when they are actually recognized as such by people, who are also the only agents of their enforcement. That's highly relativistic, but it has the benefit of being an accurate description of what morality really is in practice.

I also think a somewhat less relativistic view of moral validity is possible if moral precepts can be grounded in universal aspects of human nature. That is, to begin with, the existence of human concern about morality reflects the fact that humans are inherently social and we naturally have certain prosocial and cooperative motivations. So it might make sense to view moral precepts which are harmonious with those aspects of natural human behavior as having more validity than precepts which don't. But I think that is also observable to some extent, despite obvious cultural variation. There are common themes to moral views across cultures because morality has to do with humans' social behavior, and there are structural similarities in our social lives across most cultures, e.g. with concern for kinship, the need to cooperate to meet material needs, retributive and distributive justice, and so on. I recently made a book review thread in SMP discussing some of these themes.

So that might help you understand how I'd outline an answer to your question, but I'm still curious about how you see validity. I could write more about forgiveness, but I might do that separately, and later

One role of religious moral rules is to promote trust between co-religionists to garner its pro-social effects. In order for this to work, it is important to be able to tell who is and who isn't part of the religious group. Thus, there are advantages to having formalized rules (eg through rituals and sacrifice) to clearly mark out those who struggle to follow difficult moral dictates but are still members of the religion from those who are not or are only pretending. Forgiveness, sacrifice, and propiatiation are all common religious themes used for this function.

You see a similar imperative in the purity tests of political factions today as well, but I'm not sure that in society more broadly forgiveness has the same utility since the pro-social effects of trust is based less on group membership and more on a strong rule of law.

I agree with you entirely here, but I think I read pokerlogists post differently from you maybe? It didn't seem to me that his comment was about secular societies not recognizing the pro-social advantages of formalized rules or rituals of forgiveness and propitiation. I thought he was mostly just calling secular people hypocrites with regard to forgiving individuals who wrong them directly :P

But I do think secular societies also need and would benefit from having social institutions that provide those structures or rituals that we think of as religious in traditional cultures. I think you see a lot of contention round this as liberal social norms around cultural issues are changing rapidly (e.g. #metoo, anti-racism, and so on). I don't think it's impossible for such structures to develop in a secular society. I think that people who deconvert from traditional religions may underappreciate those aspects of the religions they leave, though.

(edit: But also as much as those themes exist e.g. in Christianity I also think there are plenty of Christians who don't appreciate them or make much use of them either :P)

I wasn't really responding to pokerlogist's claim here, I'm not sure what he's trying to say. Rather, I'm suggesting that forgiveness plays a larger role in religious morality than secular morality because trust in religion is based on group membership and for secular societies it is based more on law. Law is equally as effective without forgiveness, but strict membership rules can weaken a group's growth unless forgiveness rituals are allowed for the less committed.

I don't believe I've ever felt morally obligated to forgive anyone because of laws.

I have absorbed the norms of society though. I trust others in my group because they seem to have also absorbed the norms.

There are probably big differences between outsourcing vengeance to an all-seeing god and the justice system, but they have similar usefulness.

Echoing BTM, I'm not entirely sure I agree that trust in secular societies is based more in law than shared cultural norms and in-group membership. Law is certainly relevant but morality and social cohesion are larger than formal legal institutions.

But also law can have a role for forgiveness, at least in some sense. Judges have some discretion in sentencing and often base that discretion on whether the convicted show remorse. Early parole is based on behavior in jail and interviews with the parole board. We have some sense that ex-cons should be reintegrated into society after "doing their time". All of those serve somewhat similar functions to forgiveness rituals.

I think the idea that forgiveness rituals are needed in a religious context in order to promote group growth is interesting, but those rituals also exist historically in societal contexts where the religion is highly integrated and everyone is expected to share the same religion. Modern churches think about membership and growth in ways that the medieval Catholic church did not, and in religiously integrated societies the religious rituals tied to forgiveness are also generally tied to the execution of law. I don't think religious ideas about forgiveness developed in particular because of concern about group growth. I think they developed because of more general needs to resolve conflicts and preserve social cohesion. Secular societies still have similar needs.

Preconceived notions about forgiveness are forgivable. Since a person can forgive without any social permission or any social signaling at all, it’s a big challenge for social forgiveness dogmas. There is no social performance of forgiveness actually required. They’ll never even know you forgave unless you tell them.