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VanitasVanitatum
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That’s said on both sides of the field.
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Bradskii
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I’m not sure you have the meaning of secularist correct, Harry. It simply means that which is not concerned with a specific religion. So the government of the US is secularist. You can be a Catholic and accept a secularist position. It has nothing to do with materialism (which you misrepresented in any case).YoungSheldon:
Speaking of “indefensible,” you do realize that if the secular view of the world is true and the material universe is all there is then all our thoughts, emotions and values are merely chimeras conjured by biochemical reactions.Indeed. But it is fun to see the convoluted “non-arguments” they bring up in defense of their indefensible positions.
That would imply secular values are not really what they purport to be – not true and meaningful statements about the world but merely caused phenomena in our brains.
You don’t, on a secularist world view, actually value what is valuable for its sake, but because biochemical reactions in your brain cause you to “value” stuff.
Kind of undermines and makes indefensible – based upon a secularist’s own premises – the entire facade of secularist values.How embarrassing for the secularist.
An atheist position on the value of human life is a result of empathy (with a dash of reciprocal altruism). Which makes it no less a position than simply stating ‘life has intrinsic value’. In fact, knowing from whence it comes makes it a more valuable position. In my humble opinion.
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PRmerger
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There’s an interesting double standard here.
Your approach is very commendable and totally futile…surely you see that, yes?
YoungSheldon
I am simply curious, which is more important, the prevention of abortions, or prevention of unwanted pregnancies? Are abortions equally “sinful” as “contraception”?
Mind you, I already agreed with your new, improved assessment about the development of the brain. Before that happens, there is no human “person”, just a blob of cells, which - under some circumstances - will develop INTO a human person. So up until that deadline, abortions do not get rid of a human person.
Your approach is very commendable and totally futile…surely you see that, yes?
YoungSheldon
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March 19Bradskii answered this very well. Your approach is very commendable and totally futile. Not even all Catholics accept the “abstain until you want children”.
I am simply curious, which is more important, the prevention of abortions, or prevention of unwanted pregnancies? Are abortions equally “sinful” as “contraception”?
Mind you, I already agreed with your new, improved assessment about the development of the brain. Before that happens, there is no human “person”, just a blob of cells, which - under some circumstances - will develop INTO a human person. So up until that deadline, abortions do not get rid of a human person.
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Isearch
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According to official Roman Catholic teaching, both are mortal sins (sins that can damn a person to hell) but they are not equal in gravity.
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PRmerger
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I suggested 9 weeks was when brain activity began? No…no, I didn’t. This was my coment: “That would then mean that a 9 week old fetus is sapient as well”PRmerger:
You were the one who suggested 9 weeks. Ok. Let’s use your “new improved” number.
Regardless…all abortions would be wrong from your point of view, and I salute you for this very moral reckoning.
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PRmerger
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You do realize that you, too, are “just a blob of cells”, right?
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PRmerger
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I find discussions as to which sin is more serious, generally, to be otiose.
And I am really not loving this new-fangled forum format. I deleted a previous post to try to make my new one look more pretty and neat…and it’s not letting me, unless I add more stuff. So here it is…
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HarryStotle
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@PRmerger:
Place any bracketed code on its own line, as follows:
Compare with the above…
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PRmerger
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Testing…
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HarryStotle
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We can leave the definition of “secularist” aside for the moment.
I think a strong case can be made that an atheistic position logically collapses to materialism and materialism, based as it is upon physics and chemistry, implies an inherently causal nature of reality. That entails that materialism, being fundamentally causal, provides no grounds upon which to derive neither a proper morality nor a proper epistemology of truth.
I agree with CS Lewis on this one.
A causal order (materialism) provides no foundation upon which to build a ground-consequent epistemology, such as would be required by any claim to know anything to be true.
Being caused by the chemistry of your brain to “know” something is no assurance that you have any logical grounds for thinking that ‘something’ to be true.
And neither does being caused by the chemistry of your brain to value something entail that that something has any real value on its own accord. So value becomes completely unmoored from any objective grounding.
Your claim that for something to be valued it must be valued by someone, if taken to its logical conclusion – together with the materialism implied by your atheism – means that value is merely something endowed by human brains.
If human brains are mere biochemistry, then beliefs about value are causally derived from brain chemistry and say nothing about what is or is not valuable in reality.
The Euthyphro dilemma applies in spades here, since according to atheist belief human beings are the “gods” of reality (there is no higher order) and only humans ascribe “value” upon things. There is no other sense of “value” to be had, according to the atheist.
So what is “good,” is good because humans say it is good (value it). It isn’t the case that humans value something because it is good because there is no other objective determiner for value (or what is good.) The dilemma must be answered by the atheist as: It is good BECAUSE humans value it. Period.
So the attendant questions naturally arise: Which humans? Any humans? Or only the ‘good’ humans? How do we know which are the ‘good’ humans without some standard by which to determine that?
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HarryStotle
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If the meaning of ‘secularist’ implies ‘not concerned with a specific religion,’ that says nothing about the secularist’s concern for the proper grounds for the truth.
Some secularists are positively antithetical to religion. They are more than merely ‘not concerned’ for religion, but completely opposed to all religions.
So what would any secularist’s grounds for the truth be, exactly?
Shouldn’t it be the truth wherever that might be found? Even in religion? Ergo shouldn’t secularists be concerned with religion if their search for the truth gets them there?
Yet, if materialism – based as it is on an inherently causal universe – must ground human thinking on causation, there can be no assurance that human thinking can get us to the truth in terms of having logical grounds for our consequent beliefs about what is or is not true. Being caused to think something is true is not anything like having logical grounds for thinking or knowing it to be true.
According to materialism there is nothing except our thoughts being caused by our biochemistry. Both truth and value claims go out the window.
So the secularist is, here, presented with a dilemma. Pursue a materialistic view and admit no objective truth or good can be had or become “concerned with religion” as a possible resolution to the collapsed materialistic position regarding the good and the true.
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niceatheist
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And what if there is no objective “truth”? Human affairs, at least so far as we can look back, has been pretty darned subjective. Even in Christian societies, what is right and wrong has changed mightily. Five hundred years ago slavery was, in many Christian societies, a perfectly valid state for some people to be held in, and it wasn’t really until the Enlightenment where the notion of civil liberties began to evolve that certain long-practiced forms of bondage came to be questioned. The same can be said for rights of women, Jews, and in Protestant countries, even the rights of Catholics (and vice versa).
Now we can argue that perhaps Christians may have misinterpreted Scripture, but the fact remains that what we are often left with is Bentham’s Utilitarianism; the most good for the greatest number of people. But “good” is always going to be subjective, even in hypothetical Christian society. In more modern parlance, no liberty is absolute, humans are not purely independent actors, and we’ve already seen where justifying actions and policies based on “God says so” leads, because what God seems to say may differ pretty wildly from one church to another. It was the difficulty that Locke confronted, how can you have a society where there is a divergence of opinion, even on matters of ethics and morals? Do we go the way of the Puritans, and demand that all people behave in very precise ways, or do we admit that that is little more than an autocracy, if not outright theocracy, and then seek in some way to find at least some sort of common ground. You don’t have to believe what I believe, but so long as we can find a basic set of ethical precepts, then we can build a functioning society around it. And that means compromise.
Now we can argue that perhaps Christians may have misinterpreted Scripture, but the fact remains that what we are often left with is Bentham’s Utilitarianism; the most good for the greatest number of people. But “good” is always going to be subjective, even in hypothetical Christian society. In more modern parlance, no liberty is absolute, humans are not purely independent actors, and we’ve already seen where justifying actions and policies based on “God says so” leads, because what God seems to say may differ pretty wildly from one church to another. It was the difficulty that Locke confronted, how can you have a society where there is a divergence of opinion, even on matters of ethics and morals? Do we go the way of the Puritans, and demand that all people behave in very precise ways, or do we admit that that is little more than an autocracy, if not outright theocracy, and then seek in some way to find at least some sort of common ground. You don’t have to believe what I believe, but so long as we can find a basic set of ethical precepts, then we can build a functioning society around it. And that means compromise.
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meltzerboy2
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Using context, would you say a human stranger has more value or is worth saving more than a beloved pet, or the reverse?
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HarryStotle
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Except that adherents to the “no objective truth” or “no objective values” perspectives keep smuggling in values and truth as if they don’t really buy their own propaganda.
You do it above by using the word “evolve.” If there are no values and no truth then values don’t and can’t “evolve,” because that implies “getter better.” If there is no good, there can be no movement towards it – there is no moral evolution to the “better” because there is no “better” to be had. At least be consistent with your own sleight of hand propaganda.
“Keep your eye on this hand where there is no moral truth or values. Then I’ll magically take my other hand from behind my back where (to everyone’s astonishment) moral truth and goodness suddenly emerge (evolve?) out of thin air.”
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niceatheist
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Evolution in no way implies “getting better”. It implies change.
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HarryStotle
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Really?
So the morality of slave owners has merely “changed” to the morality of civil liberties, but the second is not a “getting better” compared to the first?
So why are you decrying slavery if it is no worse than individuals having liberty?
Again, do you buy your own propaganda or are you only trying to sell it by dressing it up as a moral world view? Lipstick on a pig, and all that?
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Rabbi
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It is obvious that there is value to life.
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Hodos
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Why argue? Human life inherently has value based on the fact that God created us for his purpose. It is up to the atheist to defend their viewpoint that life either has no value or we are selective in who or when we value life. The presupposition that life has only subjective value is not one that anyone should want to defend as it is inherently immoral.
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niceatheist
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To me it got better. You talk to a slave owner after the Civil War, you would probably get a different answer. Not all social change is ever good. For instance, during the pagan era of the Roman Empire, women did have some fairly considerable legal rights, but those were eroded to the point that by the Middle Ages, women largely became chattel. That was a change, an evolution as it were, but I’d hardly call it an improvement.
My position on slavery is that it is bad, because it violates my views on civil liberties. But for very long periods of human history, even during at least a part of the Christian era, it was deemed appropriate, though I will acknowledge that up until the Atlantic Slave Trade developed, slavery was viewed rather dimly by at least most Western Christians. So you had a shift that was "pro-slavery’ as it were during the Roman era, to a pretty consistent set of policies to end slavery during the early and middle Christian periods, and then when the economics of colonization demanded an indentured working class, suddenly you had all sorts of justifications, even theological ones, for why enslaving first the native peoples of the Americas (in particular the Spanish colonies in the beginning) and later importing slaves from Africa, was a right and proper thing to do. Heck, the Southern baptist convention was formed specifically because Northern Baptists could no longer stomach the idea of slavery.
And yes, I’ll give Christianity full credit for ending slavery, though one has to acknowledge that some churches certainly swung support behind it when it became an issue.
My position on slavery is that it is bad, because it violates my views on civil liberties. But for very long periods of human history, even during at least a part of the Christian era, it was deemed appropriate, though I will acknowledge that up until the Atlantic Slave Trade developed, slavery was viewed rather dimly by at least most Western Christians. So you had a shift that was "pro-slavery’ as it were during the Roman era, to a pretty consistent set of policies to end slavery during the early and middle Christian periods, and then when the economics of colonization demanded an indentured working class, suddenly you had all sorts of justifications, even theological ones, for why enslaving first the native peoples of the Americas (in particular the Spanish colonies in the beginning) and later importing slaves from Africa, was a right and proper thing to do. Heck, the Southern baptist convention was formed specifically because Northern Baptists could no longer stomach the idea of slavery.
And yes, I’ll give Christianity full credit for ending slavery, though one has to acknowledge that some churches certainly swung support behind it when it became an issue.
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Gingersnaps4
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Secularly or atheistically, there can be no inherent value of life. There is only any value according to each individual person’s opinion. Atheistically, it matters not one bit if the whole planet is wiped out by a giant meteor right now, because there is no bigger picture/higher power to assign inherent value or absolute morality to anything. That’s what I think, at any rate.
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