Superiority of Secular Morality over Religious Systems

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Are you arguing the point that every form of government that is not religious is secular? So secular democracy, secular dictatorship, etc?
Difference with religious system, it can never change from being a dictatorship. It is eternally a dictatorship.
 
po18guy said:
You say so. Honestly, what religion teaches mass murder? Thus, how could a practitioner of any of those religions claim to be religious?
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Doyon recall the story of the battle of Jericho?
 
China, former Soviet Union, North Korea, Viet Nam…These are not just secular - they are atheist regimes.
 
You need to do some research on Hitler and the Nazis. The Nazis were extremely opposed to Judeo Christian Religion. There were more Priests in Dachau alone, than there were in Rome and the Vatican combined.

Hitler believed that the Fuher and the Reich should be viewed as all powerful, and religion ran counter to Hitler’s power structure. Organized religion was to be eradicated.

A good place to start would be looking at Nazi propaganda, science and medical research, and there is a great book on the Catholic Priests at Dachau. I can’t think of the books name, but if you are interested, I can look it up.

I’ll let others discuss the historical groups.
 
Are you arguing from the point of the Bible as history or myth?
 
It should be noted that the Catholic moral system is not strictly “religious” in that it is not based strictly on revelation believed with faith. It is first and foremost based on reason and human nature and has the good of humanity as its end. In that sense it has some commonality with the secular system described above. The difference is that we acknowledge that man is fallen and therefore his intellect can often be overcome by his passions, even in (or sometimes especially in) a group setting leading to irrational outcomes, as history amply demonstrates over and over. We also acknowledge that reason and human nature are universal across all men in all times, which is contrary to the secular system proposed, which apparently sees these things as variable across time and place.

Finally, we also acknowledge that, because of our wounded nature, God has also confirmed the reasonable moral order through supernatural revelation as well–but this is not strictly necessary.
 
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I’m trying to watch this video - as lengthy as it is - to see what it is about.

I’ve never heard of Matt Dillahunty, which is interesting because I live in Austin & may have actually seen some of his atheist programming on tv - at least in passing. But, in any case, I had to look him up, & I found this in Wikipedia:


He has his own website here:

http://mattdillahunty.com/

I guess it’s safe to say that he got a-religion as he got older. In my view though, that is another form of religion - albeit one with a more tangible deity.

His own claim in the opening of the video is that he was raised Fundamentalist. I, too, for a time was raised Baptist, later attended a Fundamental Church, fell away from church for a long while (long story), attended Nondenominational churches for many years, & finally, entered into full communion with the Catholic Church.

Am just starting on his first point of why secular morality is superior & why “Because I said so…” doesn’t answer the question. That’s kind of obvious, & I’m sure most of us - whether theistic or atheistic - would agree. Morality of actions based on some standard - subjective opinion vs objective truth. At least I think that’s what I’m hearing. I’m going to switch to my Mac as it’s hard trying to listen to this on my iPhone.

Will try to continue as points arise…I think this discussion would’ve been a lot easier to follow had an outline of the speaker’s main points with underlying arguments been provided.
 
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Damian said:
What I took from it was that the secular moral system starts from the subjective reference point that appears to be the most overlapping common goal of humans and human society: Human Well-Being.
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I think that this is an assumption. I don’t believe that all secular morality has that ultimate goal of human well-bring. Maybe for some, but for others, no. I have a friend who identifies as a secular humanist, & we’ve been friends for probably about 3 decades or more now…We have our different beliefs. We agree on some things, & we disagree on other things.
 
Secular morality seems more self centred, we do what we want to do. If we want a dozen sexual partners that’s ok. The breakdown of marriage and family is very much the result of secular morality. Children having no stability in their lives due to a number of step parents and step relationships.
 
Okay,
So before going down this rabbit hole, let’s define what it means to be a secular government first and a religious government and then apply those filters to this argument. I’m pretty sure a lot of your complaints will not apply to those governmental systems after that, but we’ll see.
 
kainosktisis said:
I think this discussion would’ve been a lot easier to follow had an outline of the speaker’s main points with underlying arguments been provided.
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I agree, but I couldn’t find one. That’s why I asked people to post one if they found it.
 
Damian said:
after running the social experiment
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Treating people as experimental test subjects is essentially the issue with a purely secular morality. Humans have a “nature” alongside a “being.” Therein, we must acknowledge human nature, prior to any “experimentation” and as such non-secular ethics are needed.

I wouldn’t say religious ethics are superior though, I would say that they merely come first. The issue with secular moralists is that they set aside these issues, and hence are prone to acting outside of human nature and invariably forcing a nature upon humans.
 
Do you have a specific question about this Matt’s discussion on his topic? I am going to look through the video tonight and see if he addresses that point and at what time in the video.
 
Are you suggesting that in a country with a secular government, is imposing a moral system to run rough shot over the morals of the majority Christians in this country and that is why the majority of christian families are doing everything you say is a bad thing? Since christians are the majority of this country, wouldn’t the majority of the people of this country be applying their own private religious cultural standards to their own lives and not doing what you are complaining about? Or are you advocating for a religious country with laws that force people to act religious without the freedom to choose to do it or not because when given the freedom to choose, the self proclaimed christians actually don’t act christian.
 
Damian said:
Ran across Matt Dillahunty’s lecture on the superiority of Secular Morality over Religious moral systems.

Everyone is allowed to the table to discuss what paths to use to attain that goal and all ideas are open for discussion but not all ideas are open to be entertained as an equally good idea.

Secular systems hold no path as absolute though. This is because we do not know everything and after running the social experiment, we learn that path fails, we update our model with that new data and pick a better path. So if it fails after trying a particular social experiment, everyone is back to the table to discuss the new path to take with the new data from that failed experiment. The secular system can fail, but it has within the system a way to fix itself.

Let me know your thoughts after watching the video. If anyone has a link to a transcript on this, please post the link.

Matt Dillahunty: The Superiority of Secular Morality - YouTube
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When Jesus was asked

What is the greatest commandment? Jesus responded

Everything rests on those 2 commandments.

So the question I have is, where does that answer, rest with Matt Dillahunty
 
Damian said:
What I took from it was that the secular moral system starts from the subjective reference point that appears to be the most overlapping common goal of humans and human society: Human Well-Being.
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This would seem to properly lead back to objective morality if the ultimate purpose is questioned. To what end?
 
Okay, but we haven’t defined what a secular system is yet, so let’s do that first before making pronouncements.
 
I didn’t watch the video, it’s too long. I have a couple of thoughts though.

You say that some things are better than others for people, and I agree, which leads me to believe that there are optimal behaviors for human happiness and flourishing, at least for people interacting with each other. That implies objective morality.

The trial and error process has been going on as long as we’ve been around and religion formalizes the teaching and adherence to those behaviors that have been discovered to work best. I know, it’s not perfect because people like complicate it. I think most religions have discovered good behaviors, and some do it better that others. Catholics do it best, of course. 🙂

One thing (I’m sure there are more) that secular morality has a problem with is recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of the human person. It’s hard to reason for someone being a “spark of the divine” if you don’t believe in the divine. I think Christians, specifically Catholics, focus on this the most. Without this concept we don’t have individual rights, or it’s very hard to argue for them.
 
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