"If there is no god, and everything is not permitted, then perhaps everything is prohibited and we act as if, sin were the case in order to satisfy our own masochistic need to feel guilty."

Perhaps you can restate/expand upon this point? I confess I do not understand what you're saying.

@pnfullifidian

Actually just a thought.

That without a transcendental limit (god) a psychic vacuum is formed, an empty space in which we question everything we do, because we seek and need limits, which must be immanent. These rules/limits we give ourselves, must be given (superego), they enable us to feel guilt when we transgress what we instinctively feel is right.
Nietzsche somewhere says that Christianity gave man a depth of psyche that would have been impossible without it. A masochistic finds pleasure in being guilty, like the pleasure of repenting for sins. Without god that impulse is not gone, rather it is stronger and we tend to question all our actions as if all were prohibited.

@cava Okay, now I'm even more confused! Perhaps I should have asked for more specificity, as opposed to an expansion? "Transcendental limits" and "psychic vacuums" are foreign concepts to me. Can you define what you mean by them? Having essentially no experience with masochistic needs or associating pleasure with guilt, I must admit to being mystified by your point on this topic, with or without a deity.

@pnfullifidian

I am not sure this will be any clearer, but here are my thoughts:

'Transcendental limit' means that which we can't go beyond like the concept of god as the limit of what can be known. If there is no god then all knowledge is necessarily contingent and immanent and all universals nominal, in name only. The impossibility of an unconditional guarantee/necessity is not a tenable position for man because it means that all knowledge lacks fundamental certainty. It makes us yearn for such a guarantee...to know why things are as they are...the mind or psyche wants to know reality for what it is. The 'lack', 'want' or 'yearning' for reality is what I mean by 'vacuum'.
If there is no god then we have to act as if there were a god, to act as if certain actions are inherently wrong (which as I indicated above we can't know). This 'acting as if' means that we understand that the rules we give our self are of our own invention. The guilt we feel when we err is therefore not based on some divinely given code of conduct, but rather it is based on our own inability to grasp the essence of reality. It is masochistic because in doing so, our guilt cuts our self through our own invention.

Without god all is prohibited, because without god we must assume god's role, and as such we can never be certain in the same way a perfect being could provide certainty.

@cava The more I read, the less I understand. Your prose reminds me of Chopra.

The word ‘transcendental’ is an unnecessary deepity—better to just say limit.

Of course we cannot describe God. Who can? The attributes it/he/she is alleged to possess have never been universally defined, much less understood. The very idea of an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent God defies description and is therefore irreducible and inexplicable. God is a guess! His/her/its characteristics are therefore subjective and unique to each individual who has ever considered the possibility of a supreme being.

Unconditional guarantees do not exist in the universe, and I for one do not yearn for such. As Karl Popper observed, ‘all knowledge is provisional,’ and I am quite comfortable with uncertainty.

Similarly, I do not feel guilt, nor do I masochistically punish myself, particularly when making a mistake. And I most certainly don’t need to act ‘as if’ there were a God.

We need only live by codes of conduct that predate the invention of the Gods we have today, and the fabrication of religion. These codes are neither inherent nor are they written in stone by a religious authority, but are based on the higher emotions / thought processes of empathy and reciprocity—the evidence of which is seen even in other primates.

Finally, the ‘essence of reality’ is yet another deepity, or vagary, which is better condensed to ‘facts.’

@pnfullifidian There is nothing wrong with the word transcendental, it means beyond. Long before Karl Popper, Imanuel Kant used the word transcendental to encapsulate what is necessary in order to make sense of what we experience. He denied man can know reality as it is, and he thought that certain transcendentals are necessary in order to explain how we experience what we experience.

It is to the person who believes in god that "All is Permitted". Abraham's faith allowed a teleological suspension of the ethical according to Kierkegaard. God allows what he allows to the faithful regardless of what it is, i.e., "All is Permitted" if you believe in god.

If there is no god then all the faith in the world will not suspend the ethical and I think in this realization we become much more self-involved with our actions. People don't normally want to hurt other people, yet if Freud is correct, we are all largely motivated by the pleasure principal and we are aware that seeking our pleasure may be harmful to others. I think we generally proceed along the lines of the prohibition "do no harm", along the lines that "All is Prohibited", anything can cause guilt.

I think that a lot the guilt we feel for acting the way we do can be traced back to our reaction to the pleasure principal. That something inside of all of us that feeds off our sense of guilt, a hunger that feeds off both pleasure and pain from the guilt we feel... an Oedipal reaction.