Precedent: Obedience to commanding officers does not absolve you of guilt!
Morality involves choice. If objective morality requires obedience to a capricious god then obedience is immoral. There is no choice involved. Kill when god tells you to kill. Do not kill when god tells you not to.
Subscription Note:
Choosing to subscribe to this topic will automatically register you for email notifications for comments and updates on this thread.
Email notifications will be sent out daily by default unless specified otherwise on your account which you can edit by going to your userpage here and clicking on the subscriptions tab.
Obedience to commanding officers does not absolve you of guilt!
The Milgram experiments.
Though paradoxically blind obedience to a deity does? That's some double standard Breezy. Which of "god's" "objective morals" is it ok to ignore? Stoning unruly children? Murdering people who take too long a walk on a particukar day of the week? Wearing blended fabrics? Owning and beating (to death) slaves?
John: I was referring to a legal precedent enforced during the Nuremberg Trials. Necks were stretched!
The Milgram experiment participants were morally more guilty than people like Eichmann. Disobedience during the Milgram experiments brought no adverse consequences. Disobedience in the Nazi chain of command could mean death.
So who's more likely to rebel against authority: atheists or theists?
Algebe: Who is more likely to rebel against a fairy tale vs. a man with a Luger to your temp!e?
Algebe, I suppose that against Earthly authority I would expect the theist, but against Heavenly authority I would expect the atheist.
John:I have no idea what your rep!y means. Even comedians have to admit when they are out of shit!
When you don't understand something ask for clarification.
John : You are not the default authority! I am free to disregard you!
Be free my child.
John: I am most certainly not your child, you arrogant shithead!
@John 61X Breezy:
So how many theists rebelled when the Crusaders massacred the people of Constantinople and Jerusalem? How many theist conscientious objectors were there in the 30 Years War?
How would you define "heavenly authority." Who wields that?
I think theists are conditioned to surrender their consciences to authority, whether heavenly or mundane.
If a theist is convinced the Crusades are truly a Holy mandate, then I can see them taking part of it. Particularly the lower masses; perhaps the authority figures are convinced its God's plan too, but perhaps they're using religion for political aims. An atheist would object under those circumstances.
However, if authority violates a Christian's beliefs, they have no problem opposing it and even being killed for it, after all, death is but a doorway to bliss. People remember the Catholic atrocities, but forget the victims were fellow Christians that opposed them. Christianity was born from a person that defied the authorities of his day, and taught His disciples to do likewise. And though I can come up with many noble examples, I think even the bad ones prove my point: Christians opposing gay-marriage, Christians opposing evolution in schools, Christians opposing stem cell research. They don't care if authority and society are against them. I personally have been fired from a few jobs (McDonald) because I refuse to work on Sabbaths.
Don't know much about the 30 years war, but I do know my father was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war.
So do you think there are any circumstances where murder is morally acceptable?
"Christians opposing gay-marriage, Christians opposing evolution in schools, Christians opposing stem cell research.
****They don't care if authority and society are against them."
Or facts, common decency, or basic morality. That's religious bigotry for you. The arrogance of religious absolutes, brainwashed amoral automatons no longer able to reason for themselves.
Which brings us neatly back to Nuremburg.
There is no heavenly authority unless someone can demonstrate some objective evidence for it.
There is no such thing as heavenly authority so the point is moot!
I always wondered if I got really powerful laser projectors and projected my face on the clouds at night, and some sort of long range speaker system, if anyone in the area that could see/hear it would decide I was a "heavenly" authority. And if people did not see me as a heavenly authority what reasoning they would use to explain why not compared to the one they do consider a heavenly authority.
Especially if I took such technology back in time 100-200 years or more ago.
In a nutshell, my priorities in regards to the OP and "morality" are as such:
In order of priority, I first and foremost answer to myself and my own conscious. Secondly, I answer to my wife. And lastly, I answer to the law. (Before my wife ever came along, there were only the two options of myself and the law.)
I spent a great deal of time in the military under an extremely wide variety of conditions ranging from routine training, to combat zone deployments, to domestic emergency disaster-relief missions. (Rescue ops in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina are particularly memorable. "chuckle*) Anyway, just like Chimp said in the OP, following orders does not necessarily absolve a soldier of guilt. In fact, we were told regularly during various briefings over the years that following unlawful orders is strictly wrong, and there were specific protocols given to us to deal with such matters. Thankfully, I never had to put that to the test. However, it WAS something I often considered just in case I ever did have the misfortune of encountering such a situation. (Basically, mental preparation, in other words. A useful exercise I was taught in another field of work.) And what it boils down to are those priorities I listed above, meaning my own conscious and sense of personal integrity trump anything and anybody else when it comes to making a moral decision. People are not robots who act exactly the same way every single time in any given situation. A situation in one incident cannot always be handled exactly the same way as the same situation in another incident with different people in a different area. Life is NOT static. It is DYNAMIC. Fluid. Constantly changing. What may be morally right to do in one situation with Person A. may be completely morally wrong to do with Person B. in the same situation. Bottom line is, IT MAKES ABSOLUTELY ZERO SENSE TO PRETEND THERE IS SOME TYPE OF ABSOLUTE TOTALLY OBJECTIVE MORAL CODE THAT CAN BE APPLIED TO EVERY SINGLE IMAGINABLE SITUATION MANKIND ENCOUNTERS IN HIS LIFETIME. Man is an intelligent creature. Man is a highly adaptable creature. Man learns by trial and error. Man does great things. Man does very foolish things. Man is not perfect, and it would be completely boring even if he was. But overall, man is self-conscious. Man is self-aware. And, with the exceptions of those with various forms of mental disorders, Man has considerable empathy for his fellow Man and other creatures of the Earth. (Not intending to leave out the ladies, by the way. Just using the term Man generally.) And because of all of these things (and a few others I may have missed), Man makes and follows his own SUBJECTIVE morality based on his culture, his education, his financial conditions, his own individual experiences, and sometimes right down to a split-second decision that has to be made during a sudden and unexpected event. In my personal opinion, anybody who believes otherwise is pretty much delusional or intentionally being dishonest with themselves and/or others.
Didn't mean to go off on a rant like that, but I've been holding back as long as I can. Finally snapped, I guess.
chimp3,
The Nuremberg trials were a joke. They were pushed at the urging of the Zionists and then we had to put some of the Japanese leaders on trial to be consistent. If there had been any equal justice the Allied leaders would have also been executed for their war crimes as well.
As was true during the American Civil War and WWII the people who always end up getting hung are the concentration camp guards on the losing side. So anyone who gets stuck with that duty better hope that his side wins because if it loses then he's a goner. Heck, even our own troops got stuck with the tar in Iraq when their fellow dummies took pictures of them with some POWs.
One of our favorite activities during WWII was burning people alive. If that isn't a war crime then nothing is. During war people follow orders, regardless of what those orders are. If the order says to kill a million people in a town you do it without a second thought.
The Japanese war crimes trials were also a farce. Senior politicians were hanged without proof of any involvement in war crimes, while the monsters of Unit 731, which had done germ warfare experiments on live prisoners, were given immunity in exchange for information. (This parallels the story of Werner von Braun.)
One of the judges had been on the Bataan Death March and should have been disqualified. The Dutch judge commented that the tribunal was judging war crimes without considering some of the biggest war crimes in history: the fire bombing of Tokyo and Yokohama. The Indian judge wanted the tribunal to look at Western imperialism in Asia and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There's no excusing the crimes committed by Japanese forces in the Sino-Japanese War and World War II. But there was an historical context for their aggression. Japan had closed its borders for two centuries after observing the fate of other Asian countries, such as the Philippines, at the hands of the Spanish. In the 1860s, the American government sent a squadron of ironclad warships to force the Japanese to open their ports at gunpoint, mainly for the benefit of the whaling industry. The Japanese saw that Western powers had colonized most of Asia, and that it was itself under threat. It responded by adopting the "Rich Country, Strong Army" policy, which took it from feudal fiefdom to modern industrial state in a single generation. That was despite being cheated and oppressed through unequal treaties with Western powers.
What's were the lessons that Japan learned from the Christian countries of the West? Conquer or be conquered. Win at all costs. The law of jungle. Strengthen the military-industrial complex. And of course, god on our side.They turned their country itself into a religion through State Shinto, with the Emperor as its god.
They learned well, and in 1904 they were able to defeat the Imperial Russian navy. That got them the nickname "Yellow Peril." There has always been an element of racism in Western attitudes toward Japan.
I doubt whether there was a single crime committed by Japan that hadn't been committed on a far greater scale by the nations that sat in judgment.
"The Nuremberg trials were a joke. They were pushed at the urging of the Zionists"
Oh dear, that's absurdly wrong sorry. The Holocaust was a crime of unprecedented barbarity in modern history, and those responsible were rightly made to answer for it.
The Japanese fascist government was one of the most barbaric regimes in human history, some argue more so than the Nazis, see the aptly named Rape of Nanking, and the only reason they were not held to account in the same way as Germany was the strategic importance America attached to having them as an ally in the post war region against communism. In retrospect the carpet bombing of German cities is difficult to offer any moral justification for, but at the time there was no real moral angst, partly because these were tactics the German fascists started themselves in Spain and throughout several eastern European countries. Their tactics throughout the war had been ones of unrelenting barbarity, it's hardly surprising the allies were inclined to give it back, and many millions of ordinary Germans paid the price, but hindsight is always 20/20.
The main difference is in the way the allies treated those they defeated, and in that there is no comparison with the evil nature of fascism and Nazism.
@Sheldon: but hindsight is always 20/20.
Very true. But it's important to ensure that everyone has a clear understanding of what was done by all sides in World War II. The Germans bombed London and Coventry, so the Allies bombed Cologne and Dresden. The Japanese bombed Darwin and bombed and raped Nanking. The allies firebombed Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese starved and killed allied prisoners of war at Changi. New Zealanders machine gunned Japanese prisoners of war at Featherston and massacred surrendering Italians in Tunisia.
The Allies treated the vanquished nations very well after WW2. But let's be clear about the reasons. America wanted Germany to be a bulwark against communism in Europe, and they wanted Japan to be an unsinkable aircraft carrier to keep the Soviets out of the Pacific. If those factors had not been present, the Allies would have left Germany and Japan to rot, as after WWI, and we'd be on WW3 or WW4 by now.
When we look back at all this, we just need to ask ourselves one question. Under what specific circumstances it is morally acceptable to burn small children alive, even if god is on our side?
Sheldon,
Other regimes were as barbaric if not more so than the Nazis and the Japanese. They get a pass. People are just pissed at the Nazis because they killed white people instead of black and brown people. And the Zionists had it in for them so that they could get sympathy for stealing Palestine from the locals.
The ‘locals’ included Jews. The Brits, who were ruling the area, had instituted quotas for both Arabs and Jews in the area decades before the end of WW2.
CyberLN,
There was only a handful of indigenous Jews in Palestine in the late 19th Century. By WWII they were all illegal aliens.
Are you actually going to assert that the majority of folks who were living in the area between the end of the 19 century and the end of WW2 were indigenous to the area?
"Other regimes were as barbaric if not more so than the Nazis and the Japanese. They get a pass."
That's just a rediculous oversimplification.
"People are just pissed at the Nazis because they killed white people instead of black and brown people. "
Utter rot, do you find Nazis generally show more disdain for white skinned people?
"And the Zionists had it in for them so that they could get sympathy for stealing Palestine from the locals."
You're delusional, and you're becoming more and more antisemitic as well. I don't care for it sorry. The Palestinians have been badly treated and their rights abused, and this must be corrected with stolen settlement lands being handed back just as a start, but Israel is now a sovereign nations and that must be respected as well, so those on both sides who think they can deny rights to people, have to relinquish their denials of the rights of the people of the other nation. Whenever I hear someone talk of Zionists it sets off alarm bells. I prefer to think of people, and sovereign nation states, and both have rights as far as I am concerned.
Monotheists hero: Abraham - God says "Abe! Go slit your son's throat and then roast him over coals, because I like the smell of savory meat!". Abe says " Uh, OK!".
Atheist hero: Bertrand Russell. King says "Go kill Germans because I said so! Russell says no and goes to prison.
The " Rules of War" are an obscenity.
Cut the bullshit.
If you really need to go declare war on another country -fine do so. Do everything you can imagine to overpower, enslave or kill your enemy.
Expect that they will do likewise.
If that's unacceptable, try peace.
Making war " civilized" makes it too easy to willingly participate.
Pages