The making of western morality

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Cypress

Well-known member
Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind is a 2019 non-fiction history book by British historian Tom Holland. The book is a broad history of the influence of Christianity on the world, focusing on its impact on morality – from its beginnings to the modern day.

Holland contends that Western morality, values and social norms ultimately are products of Christianity, stating "in a West that is often doubtful of religion's claims, so many of its instincts remain — for good and ill — thoroughly Christian". Holland further argues that concepts now usually considered non-religious or universal, such as secularism, liberalism, science, socialism and Marxism, revolution, feminism, and even homosexuality, "are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed", and that the influence of Christianity on Western civilization has been so complete "that it has come to be hidden from view". (Wikipedia)


View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c0gsPo2ilj8
 
Cypress said:
Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind is a 2019 non-fiction history book by British historian Tom Holland. The book is a broad history of the influence of Christianity on the world, focusing on its impact on morality – from its beginnings to the modern day.

Holland contends that Western morality, values and social norms ultimately are products of Christianity, stating "in a West that is often doubtful of religion's claims, so many of its instincts remain — for good and ill — thoroughly Christian". Holland further argues that concepts now usually considered non-religious or universal, such as secularism, liberalism, science, socialism and Marxism, revolution, feminism, and even homosexuality, "are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed", and that the influence of Christianity on Western civilization has been so complete "that it has come to be hidden from view". (Wikipedia)


View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c0gsPo2ilj8
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Religion is for dumb people. Ethics and morality is not invention of your religion, Cypress.
 
"Human morality provides the foundation for many of the pillars of society, informing political legislation and guiding legal decisions while also governing everyday social interactions. In the past decade, researchers in the field of cognitive neuroscience have made tremendous progress in the effort to understand the neural basis of human morality. The emerging insights from this research point toward a model in which automatic processing in parallel neural circuits, many of which are associated with social emotions, evaluate the actions and intentions of others. Through various mechanisms of competition, only a subset of these circuits ultimately causes a decision or an action. This activity is experienced consciously as a subjective moral sense of right or wrong, and an interpretive process offers post hoc explanations designed to link the social stimulus with the subjective moral response using whatever explicit information is available."
(Emphases added)

Chadd M Funk, Michael S Gazzaniga, The functional brain architecture of human morality, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Volume 19, Issue 6, 2009, Pages 678-681, ISSN 0959-4388

Here:
 
Hume said:
Religion is for dumb people.
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Hume said:
Ethics and morality is not invention of your religion, Cypress.
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Correct. The Greeks and Romans made their own code of values which venerated reputation, courage, honor, individual achievement, the heroic ethos above all else. Although their ethos was entwined with their religious and cultural traditions.

That is precisely why Nietzsche was drawn to the ethos of antiquity and considered Christian ethics a slave morality suitable only for the weak.
 
Cypress said:
Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind is a 2019 non-fiction history book by British historian Tom Holland. The book is a broad history of the influence of Christianity on the world, focusing on its impact on morality – from its beginnings to the modern day.

Holland contends that Western morality, values and social norms ultimately are products of Christianity, stating "in a West that is often doubtful of religion's claims, so many of its instincts remain — for good and ill — thoroughly Christian". Holland further argues that concepts now usually considered non-religious or universal, such as secularism, liberalism, science, socialism and Marxism, revolution, feminism, and even homosexuality, "are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed", and that the influence of Christianity on Western civilization has been so complete "that it has come to be hidden from view". (Wikipedia)


View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c0gsPo2ilj8
Click to expand...
No doubt the Holy Roman Empire* had a strong effect upon Europe, but the same can be said of the Roman Empire itself. Roman rule imprinted a lot of its culture upon what is now Western Europe.



*which many historians recognize as neither holy, Roman nor an empire. LOL
 
Dutch Uncle said:
No doubt the Holy Roman Empire* had a strong effect upon Europe, but the same can be said of the Roman Empire itself. Roman rule imprinted a lot of its culture upon what is now Western Europe.



*which many historians recognize as neither holy, Roman nor an empire. LOL
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Roman law and politics is deeply influential in the West. I would look to the Greeks for our western legacy of art, literature, science, medicine, philosophy.

The fact that Constantine pivoted the Empire towards Christianity had profound and lasting influences for the rest of western history.
 
Daylight63 said:
"Human morality provides the foundation for many of the pillars of society, informing political legislation and guiding legal decisions while also governing everyday social interactions. In the past decade, researchers in the field of cognitive neuroscience have made tremendous progress in the effort to understand the neural basis of human morality. The emerging insights from this research point toward a model in which automatic processing in parallel neural circuits, many of which are associated with social emotions, evaluate the actions and intentions of others. Through various mechanisms of competition, only a subset of these circuits ultimately causes a decision or an action. This activity is experienced consciously as a subjective moral sense of right or wrong, and an interpretive process offers post hoc explanations designed to link the social stimulus with the subjective moral response using whatever explicit information is available."
(Emphases added)

Chadd M Funk, Michael S Gazzaniga, The functional brain architecture of human morality, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Volume 19, Issue 6, 2009, Pages 678-681, ISSN 0959-4388

Here:
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Explain the article adequately in your own words, not by cutting and pasting the scientific jargon out of the abstract.
 
Cypress said:
Roman law and politics is deeply influential in the West. I would look to the Greeks for our western legacy of art, literature, science, medicine, philosophy.

The fact that Constantine pivoted the Empire towards Christianity had profound and lasting influences for the rest of western history.
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Agreed on the Greeks who influenced the Romans and, subsequently, those the Romans conquered.

Agreed on Constantine, both good and bad. While Christianity gave rise to people like John Locke and John Donne, it also gave rise to burning heretics at the stake and the Salem witch trials. Overall, I think human social progress benefited from Christian ideals, humans didn't always live up to those ideals as JPP MAGAts demonstrate daily.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
Agreed on the Greeks who influenced the Romans and, subsequently, those the Romans conquered.

Agreed on Constantine, both good and bad. While Christianity gave rise to people like John Locke and John Donne, it also gave rise to burning heretics at the stake and the Salem witch trials. Overall, I think human social progress benefited from Christian ideals, humans didn't always live up to those ideals as JPP MAGAts demonstrate daily.
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Agreed. I always make the case that nowhere does the New Testament say to follow the example of Christian hypocrites, Christian racists, Christian xenophobes. It clearly states one is supposed to follow the example of Jesus.
 
Daylight63 said:
And a HUGE shout out of thanks to the Muslims for safeguarding that for us in the West until we were ready to pick it back up.
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Correct. But it was also safeguarded by the Eastern Christian Byzantine Empire, which did not face the collapse of institutional learning and knowledge that the western Roman Empire experienced.

The problem with Islam is they abandoned their golden age of intellectual and rational inquiry quite early on. The Islamic Golden Age ended somewhere around the 13th century, whereas it never ended in the West.
 
Cypress said:
Agreed. I always make the case that nowhere does the New Testament say to follow the example of Christian hypocrites, Christian racists, Christian xenophobes. It clearly states one is supposed to follow the example of Jesus.
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Something no MAGAt ever does. Sad.

Back on topic; clearly religion has a strong effect upon culture. The same can be said for Buddhism in Asia and Islam in Africa and SW Asia. Human beings are not only physical and mental creatures but also spiritual.
 
Cypress said:
Explain the article adequately in your own words, not by cutting and pasting the scientific jargon out of the abstract.
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Sure! Glad to. I just read one of Gazzaniga's books on this as well.

Basically the brain is a neural network that creates intention prior to conscious choice of an action as shown by repeated studies using fMRI (functional MRI). This calls into question how much of our actions are our direct "choice" per se. But the system is not as simple as your brain telling you what to do.

As I understand this "softer" semi-deterministic type approach there is a significant role in the event chain of the neural network generating the intent (based on prior training...like an AI if you will) but there is also a role for selecting out of all the options provided that integrate input from other stimuli, like interactions with others.

Gazzaniga, in other writings, disavows a hard determinist position and feels that many aspects of morality and other social-influenced thoughts/beliefs arise from our interactions with OTHER members of the group.

If anything it is closer to the "emergent property" view of things (which is an area of science you are skeptical of despite it being pretty commonly accepted as a real effect).

What we KNOW is that the brain creates intention BEFORE we are consciously aware of a CHOICE. Indeed split brain studies show that there is an "interpreter module" which resides in our left hemisphere that creates ad hoc justifications for our actions even when it is not consciously aware of the stimulus provided to the other hemisphere (remember, these are people with a split corpus colossum so no signal moves through it).

I know you don't like to read a lot, especially science. But this is some really good stuff. I hIGHLY recommend reading G's book "Who's In Charge". (IT's short less than 200 pages and the science isn't so hard you won't be able to understand it. He writes in a very approachable manner for non-scientists as well)
 
Cypress said:
The problem with Islam is they abandoned their golden age of intellectual and rational inquiry quite early on. The Islamic Golden age ended somewhere around the 13th century, whereas it never ended in the West m
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I'd say it ended for us in the west some time in the last 40 years. We are becoming an increasingly anti-intellectual species.
 
Cypress said:
Agreed. I always make the case that nowhere does the New Testament say to follow the example of Christian hypocrites, Christian racists, Christian xenophobes. It clearly states one is supposed to follow the example of Jesus.
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A lot of Christian hypocrites are pretty damn sure they ARE following Jesus.

I've seen Second Amendment people cite Luke 22:36 rather than Matthew 26:52 because they want to live by the sword.

Which one is the "correct" Jesus? Want to hazard a guess?
 
Cypress said:
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Correct. The Greeks and Romans made their own code of values which venerated reputation, courage, honor, individual achievement, the heroic ethos above all else. Although their ethos was entwined with their religious and cultural traditions.

That is precisely why Nietzsche was drawn to the ethos of antiquity and considered Christian ethics a slave morality suitable only for the weak.
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but the golden rule is a better example of rational morality.

though that ethos is entwined with our religious and cultural traditions.
 
Daylight63 said:
I'd say it ended for us in the west some time in the last 40 years. We are becoming an increasingly anti-intellectual species.
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Disagreed. You're watching too much Fox News, Perry PhD. The same species came up with a COVID vaccine and has the ability to travel to Mars.
 
Daylight63 said:
Yes. Everyone knows you are "TEAM GOLDEN RULE!" And that's cool. Personally that is about the only thing you really need to know in order to be a "moral" person.



And it's a truism that crosses almost all societies
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and it doesn't work institutionally because..... evil people love to abuse government and do bad things?
 
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