Worship is inherently immoral

[Lanny]

SO WE HAD AN EXCELLENT CHAT ABOUT THIS IN THE CHATBOX

but I thought I'd make a thread because scrollback is pretty short. Anyway, this dude, James Rachels, argues that if you worship is immoral, or rather that worshiping precludes you from morality. here's my shitty reconstruction of his argument:

1. You must have moral agency to behave morally (can't really argue with this, if you deny it then you seem to be committed to the idea that inanimate objects have a moral code to exist by and other silliness)
2. Moral agency requires autonomy
3. Autonomy requires doing our own moral reasoning
4. Worship requires (or perhaps is defined as for the sake of argument) admission of an absolute moral authority
5. Any command from an absolute authority must trump our own reasoning
6. (from 3 and 5) if we accept an absolute moral authority we can not be autonomous
7. (from 6 and 4) if we accept worship we can not be autonomous
8. (from 7 and 2) if we worship we can not be moral agents
9. (from 1 and if we worship we can not behave morally

Now I don't actually agree with Rachels' but I think the argument is structurally valid and I think most people will accept his premises. Thus I think most people would, if they really thought about it, realize they can't be moral and worship (for this admittedly narrow definition of worship) the divine. Thoughts? Bullshit? If so why?

[equanimity]

Worship is an autonomous expression of moral agency.

[Lanny]

Like the idea that to elect to worship something and that's the last autonomous moral decision you make? Maybe, but I think there's an argument to be made that doing that isn't moral reasoning at all. Like Kant argued that it would be impossible to rationally consent to slavery because once under the condition of slavery you lose the ability to consent to anything and thus are no longer consenting to slavery and I think we can say the same thing here. Worship is an ongoing process and if worship mandates worship (maybe we can say that's an inherent property, but at least in the abrahamics it explicitly does) then by the same token we can argue that we can't autonomously renew or sustain our decision to worship since it's been made for us by a moral authority.

[equanimity]

Like the idea that to elect to worship something and that's the last autonomous moral decision you make? Maybe, but I think there's an argument to be made that doing that isn't moral reasoning at all. Like Kant argued that it would be impossible to rationally consent to slavery because once under the condition of slavery you lose the ability to consent to anything and thus are no longer consenting to slavery and I think we can say the same thing here. Worship is an ongoing process and if worship mandates worship (maybe we can say that's an inherent property, but at least in the abrahamics it explicitly does) then by the same token we can argue that we can't autonomously renew or sustain our decision to worship since it's been made for us by a moral authority.

It hasn't been made by a moral authority, though.  Worship isn't a choice you make once and then you're a submissive moral puppet.  It's a choice that must be made every single time you return to it.

[Obvious Alt]

To be honest, I don't really get it. The smiley is confusing me.

[komokazi]

Worship is for the weak.

[Lanny]

Like the idea that to elect to worship something and that's the last autonomous moral decision you make? Maybe, but I think there's an argument to be made that doing that isn't moral reasoning at all. Like Kant argued that it would be impossible to rationally consent to slavery because once under the condition of slavery you lose the ability to consent to anything and thus are no longer consenting to slavery and I think we can say the same thing here. Worship is an ongoing process and if worship mandates worship (maybe we can say that's an inherent property, but at least in the abrahamics it explicitly does) then by the same token we can argue that we can't autonomously renew or sustain our decision to worship since it's been made for us by a moral authority.

It hasn't been made by a moral authority, though.  Worship isn't a choice you make once and then you're a submissive moral puppet.  It's a choice that must be made every single time you return to it.

Rachels would disagree. To make it concrete let's consider a not-yet-christian contemplating worship of jehovah. Once they worship jehovah, if they really do by Rachels' definition, then they've subordinated their moral judgment to the moral authority of jehovah, and jehovah says keep on worshiping me. If you have to ask "should I worship jehovah again?" then you haven't really worshiped him to begin with because in asking that question you're privileging your own moral reasoning abilities over those of your god.

To be honest, I don't really get it. The smiley is confusing me.

I realize you're joking but when I saw that it bugged the fuck out of me. It was supposed to be the numeral eight followed by a close paren but it got turned into a smiley.

[Obvious Alt]

Yea, it should be changed to 8-).

On topic: Interesting thought.

[equanimity]

Like the idea that to elect to worship something and that's the last autonomous moral decision you make? Maybe, but I think there's an argument to be made that doing that isn't moral reasoning at all. Like Kant argued that it would be impossible to rationally consent to slavery because once under the condition of slavery you lose the ability to consent to anything and thus are no longer consenting to slavery and I think we can say the same thing here. Worship is an ongoing process and if worship mandates worship (maybe we can say that's an inherent property, but at least in the abrahamics it explicitly does) then by the same token we can argue that we can't autonomously renew or sustain our decision to worship since it's been made for us by a moral authority.

It hasn't been made by a moral authority, though.  Worship isn't a choice you make once and then you're a submissive moral puppet.  It's a choice that must be made every single time you return to it.

Rachels would disagree. To make it concrete let's consider a not-yet-christian contemplating worship of jehovah. Once they worship jehovah, if they really do by Rachels' definition, then they've subordinated their moral judgment to the moral authority of jehovah, and jehovah says keep on worshiping me. If you have to ask "should I worship jehovah again?" then you haven't really worshiped him to begin with because in asking that question you're privileging your own moral reasoning abilities over those of your god.

To be honest, I don't really get it. The smiley is confusing me.

I realize you're joking but when I saw that it bugged the fuck out of me. It was supposed to be the numeral eight followed by a close paren but it got turned into a smiley.

Then I guess I disagree with Rachels.  As much as we'd sometimes like to believe otherwise, we can't really give up our ability to reason.

[Lanny]

That could be true and Rachels might even cede the point, but then he'd argue that people aren't really worshiping in the way many holy texts demand.

A common objection to his argument is that he's  playing a semantic game by defining "worship" as something much more specific than what we usually use the word to refer to, and I'm quite sympathetic to that objection. He'd argue that his definition is natural because any notion of an absolute divinity (that is a being which is infinitely perfect) mandates personal surrender in deference to, but it seems that we would quite naturally call it worship if a person without absolute faith were to go to church or pray or whatever. And his notion of "the absolute" is clearly steeped in abrahamic notions of god. It seems obvious pegans engage in worship yet they clearly don't have this problem.

I think his meaning would be clearer if he had chosen a term like "absolute devotion", maybe qualified by what the devotion is towards, rather than just "worship" but I guess he was going for some level of shock factor.