Given that in religions nothing is as important as loyalty, you should not convert.
There is a letter from Imam Ali (cousin of Muhammad, and his son of law, the 4th Khalif after Muhammad and the first Imam of Shia Muslims) the first Imam to Malik Al Ashtar, who was sent to Egypt as governor. Ali tells him, if you promise something to your enemy and afterwards you see, your life will be in danger if you act like you did promise, you still have to do what you did promise, even if it should cost your life.
The son of Ali, Huseyn, the third Imam of Shia Muslims.
Ḥusayn was invited by the townsmen of Kūfah, a city with a Shīʿite majority, to come there and raise the standard of revolt against the Umayyads. After receiving some favourable indications, Ḥusayn set out for Kūfah with a small band of relatives and followers. According to traditional accounts, he met the poet al-Farazdaq on the way and was told that the hearts of the Iraqis were for him, but their swords were for the Umayyads. The governor of Iraq, on behalf of the caliph, sent 4,000 men to arrest Ḥusayn and his small band. They trapped Ḥusayn near the banks of the Euphrates River (October 680). When Ḥusayn refused to surrender, he and his escort were slain, and Ḥusayn’s head was sent to Yazīd in Damascus (now in Syria).

The thing about Husayn is, that he was warned and they had even killed his envoy, but he had promised, to go there, so he didn't turn around. People who did accompany him, were allowed to go back and many people did leave him.

Conclusion: I don't think that it is a sin to convert if it saves your life, as long as you are not forced to do things, which harm others in an unrighteous manner. But it "might be" higher no to convert.

No I don't. I could very reasonably believe that there is a moral difference between not saving oneself and killing others. The difference between actions you do to yourself and those you do to others is pretty widely felt as significant. Again, your attempts to say "if you believe X you must believe Y" are almost always not just wrong, but obviously ridiculous. Maybe start yet a new thread to say it a bit differently? Or are you done?

(Not that I am endorsing your use of "excuse" in any way)

+1

First of all even by those standards you have to become "anti" once you bring in sacrificing your family.

Secondly I am not saying that if you believe that you should sacrifice yourself it means you should believe that you can kill others. I'm saying that if you uke-master, can excuse a different viewpoint from your own because he starts with a different axiom or worldview, then that includes worldviews where killing is ok. You can't pick and choose. The general principle that other worldviews allow for excusable actions either applies or doesn't.

Put another way: You berate me for asserting that death to avoid fake conversion is plain wrong, because such assertions don't take into account their axioms or world view. But then you do the exact same thing if you say killing others to please God is plain wrong regardless of their axioms or worldview.

I think this argument fails. There is, as pointed out by uke_master, an important distinction in both practical and theoretical ethics between letting something happen and actively causing it to happen (there are five million trolley scenarios that are supposed to explore this distinction). Thus, it is common to believe that it would be wrong to kill someone in a case when it wouldn't be wrong to let them die.

Of course, this distinction is usually used to support some kind of categorical moral system like divine command or Kantianism (in general, most rights-based moral systems make use of this distinction). Thus, insofar as you are sympathetic to these moral theories, you will probably regard the distinction between letting your family being killed and killing others as very important.

If, on the other hand, you accept some version of consequentialism, which I think you do, then you might think that all that really matters (morally) is the consequences of your actions, and the consequences of letting die and killing can be the same (or even worse for letting die). However, consequentialists usually will also distinguish between an action being morally wrong, and it being morally blameworthy. Thus, it would be coherent even as a consequentialist to excuse in the first case but not the second (if you think that killing infidels is morally blameworthy but letting your family be killed is not, or at least not to the same degree).

Finally, I think there is at least some reason for consequentialists to accept this distinction as relevant to moral blame. In a two-person game, total utility would be higher if they accepted the rule, let your family die for x, but don't kill for x than if they accepted the rule, let your family die for x, and kill for x.

In my previous post I explicitly said I don't condone the use of "excusable action". I don't really know what you mean by it, but I probably don't accept such a bolded principle. Different worldviews accept different principles and allow different sets of actions...this isn't an "excuse"...

To be clear, my objection was your consistent pattern where by you would make statements that are essentially "if X believes Y, then X must also believe Z". Sometimes X was "uke_master", sometimes X was a theist. But each time you brought it up, such a deduction just didn't follow. In my worldview I could readily imagine accepting X but not Y and likewise for the theists under question.

I suppose it is vacuously true that if i had accepted "I excuse all wordlviews" I would indeed be excusing all worldviews, but I didn't accept that or really know what it means.

If you are going to pose the question "what kind of God", then you are evaluating a situation under the assumption that there is a God. You cannot do that "as an atheist" because that contains the assumption that there is no God. If you are going to look for inconsistency in a worldview, you have to retain that worldview or your analysis becomes circular.

Also, let's restrict this to "your own death". I completely agree that allowing the death of others under this scenario has to be evaluated differently.

Again, if restricted to "your own death", then this question is not so simple. It is not murderous or vindictive, because you are not actually harmed. The denial of God to retain a life that is ultimately finite and meaningless compared to eternity is potenitally more harmful then being killed, under the assumption that God exists. Put another way, under an atheist assumption being killed is close to the worst thing that can happen to you. But we are talking about theism. Under theism, that is far from true.

Making a distinction between putting your own existence at risk and putting the existence of others at risk is most assuredly not arbitrary. That is completely obvious.

If there are very technical non commonsensical ways to refute my position I don't care.

Here is yet another way to explain my position.

Suppose someone thinks that their God wants them to do something that goes against almost all people's opinion or common sense. Eg don't lie about their God even if it will save their family. And they believe they should obey. That means that that person, and the ones that sympathise with him, have made the decision that what the vast majority of what others think, and their own common sense, is not enough to disobey that command. But once they think that such commands should be obeyed, why can't that include killing non believers?

Actually I think that most of these extreme theists actually agree with me. In other words I think that those who wouldn't lie about God to save themselves, and especially to save their families, would probably also kill if they believed their god commanded them to.

Meanwhile the strongest proof that my assertions are reasonable is the fact that dessin d'enfant has not piped in to refute me.

As soon as one thinks killing is reasonable, ofc he might kill. But if you think that those who are fighting for Al Qaida, Taliban or ISIS, are killing because they believe god wants it this way, than you are going astray.
Around one year ago, I was visited by my Sufi Master and there was an article about a Fatwa, which prompted women to "Body Jihad". The Sufi said: if someone wants to be successful, this is the way to do it.
If ISIS, Al Qaida and Taliban wouldn't allow their fighters to have more than one wife, they would collapse right away. God and Islam are excuses. It saves their faces.


The point is: the excuse is almost always replaceable. What all massacres have common is a leader (as humans are gregarious animals, they have to follow what the leader commands), group pressure and the pleasure of exercising power.

Look: 35000 Iraqi soldiers did runaway, when they were attacked by 900 ISIS fighters, although all Iraqi Ayatollahs said ISIS belong to Koffar, are enemies of Islam and they have to be destroyed because of Allah. This means those Iraqi soldiers didn't earn enough money to build a family. Promise them money and women and they would have run over those ISIS fighters.

BTW: Even small terrorist groups like the one in Ireland "IRA" and/or Hollywood/political success wouldn't work without a liberal dealing with women. Just ask Erdogan from Turkey or Putin from Russia how often they did send to those and those ppl some women, directly or indirectly. The most obvious cases are Sarkozy (his wife was pretty often visiting Gaddhafis son and this did bring him millions of money for his election campaigne) and Berlusconi.

The distinction between not saving yourself and killing others isn't some highly technical non commonsensical thing. Differences between action and inaction are widespread within our legal system, common ideologies like libertarianism, folk philosophy like all the people tied to railtrack examples, and so on. Not that I am at all surprised you don't care about things that refute your position.


See how you keep forcing what you think is "common sense" into the worldview of such theists? But sure, most religious people don't do things because of what the "vast majority" of other people do, they do it based on their interpretations of their own religion. What is at all interesting about this?

Is anyone refuting this if you add the bolded? If you have the bolded (such as appeals to jihad) in the religion then clearly there are going to be people that will follow them. My objection was that you don't get to killing others just from the don't lie command. If all you are trying to point out is "believers in a religion that commanded people to kill might actually kill" I have no idea what you think would be contentious or interesting about this to start a thread about. Oh but wait, you don't have normal standards for starting threads, do you?

I thought us religious folks were the vast majority :P

Damned heathens getting all uppity

Two points. First, everything I said was based on common sense and non-technical.

Second, if it is really true that you don't care about counterintuitive possibilities, then you shouldn't say things like this: "I am saying that if you can excuse those who would let their family be killed rather than pretend to convert, because they have different axioms than we do, the[n] you must excuse those whose axioms require them to kill infidels." Also, all consistent moral theories have counterintuitve results.

It can. The difference here is not in the motivation for the action (which, let's assume is the same in either case), but rather in whether the actions are both immoral, or the way in which they are immoral. For instance, let's suppose that you view morality as a set of rules governing how people interact with each other in society. In that case, it is very reasonable to think that murder should be much more harshly condemned than merely letting someone die. Murder is a much sharper challenge to the social order than letting someone else die. You have enough people going around killing others and you end up with anarchy. On the other hand, merely letting someone die is not nearly as serious a challenge to society. We might think that the person who did it was wrong to do so, maybe a weak person, a deluded person, etc. But they don't pose a threat to social harmony in the way that a terrorist does.

I'm pretty sure that most people agree that if God actually commands you to kill someone you should probably do so. I'll agree with this (although knowing that God actually did so might be an insurmountable problem). Do you think this is where people here disagree with your claim?

Then I misunderstood your OP originally and do not agree with it. By the way, you are saying that excusing any moral position you do not agree with means you must by default excuse them all.

So for example if I excuse someone for saying grace, then I must also excuse school shootings.

No. It has to cross a line. Where the line starts is sometimes debatable. But sometimes it is obvious. For instance if you excuse Abraham for being willing to kill Isaac you should excuse him for being willing to kill someone else that he thinks God commands him to.

(By the way the practical application of all this is that if you think your God wants you to do something that seems outlandish to you and almost everyone else, you should seriously entertain the idea that you are wrong about your religion or you are misreading what your god actually wants.)

Right. Because clearly all interpretations of religious behaviors are equally valid regardless of the person engaging in the behavior.

Could the line possibly be, say, in between not lying to save yourself and murdering others? You effectively are asserting that the one is a "short step" to the other, but that depends where this debatable line is.

Don't get your point. And you don't get mine. Its not even about religion. It could be about a doctor. Or a football coach. If you can excuse someone for following their commands when they are way outside the norm or common sense you can't legitimately pick and choose when and when not to excuse them.

Could you expand on this a little please as I'm not sure I get the distinction, it seems to require blameworthiness for morally permissible acts. If this distinction is to do with the ability of the agent to forsee the consequences of her actions and so an act that is morally allowed carries with it a blameworthiness then I get it, if not I don't.

I've looked up a couple of discussions relating to blameworthiness v wrongness but I'm not sure why consequentialists in particular will distinguish between the two.

Yes, you can make choices and they are not inherently irrational simply because you cannot understand them.

Failing to deny your God to save your own life is one category. It does not automatically extend to any other example because you are only risking yourself.

Failing to deny God to save the lives of your family is different. Now you are sacrificing others for your belief which is morally suspect. But assuming that there is another agent actually responsible for the murder, you are not the murderer. There is another person who has the final moral responsibility for the act.

Killing for your God is different again. Now you are the final moral agent with the responsibility for the act.

Those are the differences, clearly explained. If you simply assert that you cannot see any difference between these, then fine. You do not see it. But it is there. Perhaps if you voiced a specific reasoning as to why my points are invalid, I might be able to clarify.

What this reminds me of (and where I thought the OP was trying to get to earlier) is the ethical dilemma of the Trolley Problem, and other similar ethical dilemmas, which concern itself with inaction vs action.

I can't "excuse" people who do stupid stuff to themselves (like not lie to save themselves) but not excuse people who do stupid stuff to others (like kill them)?

You have never clarified what you even mean by "excuse" someone, but no there is no standard like this where automatically everything "outside the norm" must be excuse or not excused in bulk. We can establish moral differences between killing others and not saving yourself, for instance.

This point has been repeatedly explained to you by several people.

Not if the reason you are excusing them is that they are following their god's orders.

But this isn't about religion.

Or their father's or doctor's or coaches. Sheesh

Of course they are different. Though not much between number two and three. But they all fall under the category of slavishly obeying someone's command to do something beyond the pale.