Can the Secularists be Trusted?

[Gary Childress]

Good thing I didn't say that. And if you paid attention, you'd already know that. It's something I have never said, in fact: I've said the following, instead.

Atheists, as people, may well be moral (in, say, somebody else's sense of that word). But there is nothing in Atheism that warrants any particular morality at all. There is no "Atheistic morality." So while Atheists, might arbitrarily sometimes prefer to be moral, if that's what they feel they want to do on a particular occasion, or even on a regular basis, they can't draw on their Atheism to provide them with any kind of reason at all that they ought to do it.

Get it now?

My misunderstanding then. Atheists can have morals. Problem solved. My apologies.

Yes, they can...but none they can ground. They cannot require any moral precepts at all, of anybody...not even of themselves. So their moral behaviour is never a product of their Atheism, but always a product of having some other incentive, or of borrowing some other conception of morality which Atheism knows nothing about.

So atheists behave morally without any perceived benefit for it or punishment for not being so. That sounds kind of admirable.

[Immanuel Can]

My misunderstanding then. Atheists can have morals. Problem solved. My apologies.

Yes, they can...but none they can ground. They cannot require any moral precepts at all, of anybody...not even of themselves. So their moral behaviour is never a product of their Atheism, but always a product of having some other incentive, or of borrowing some other conception of morality which Atheism knows nothing about.

So atheists behave morally...

Some do. Some don't. And none have to, and none have warrant from Atheism for so doing. But you already know all that.

... without any perceived benefit for it or punishment for not being so.

Why would you suppose that's true? Do you think Atheists are unaware of the legal system, or of the practical advantages of things like embezzlement or theft? I don't see why you'd suppose they're ignorant of those things. I would think they certainly do weigh benefits vs. punishment, though. Everybody does, whatever they believe.

But they don't imagine God will ever establish justice. That much might be true. By definition, they don't just disbelieve in objective morals but also in God and in the Final Judgment...so how could they? Unfortunately for them, disbelief is no insulation against ultimate realities.

But why would an Atheist consider moral behaviour "admirable," whatever the motive? Atheism gives no reason for a person to be more admired for being good than being evil. It's not just blame that disappears in their worldview, but also praise. There's no basis for either.

So you can note their behaviour. But if you were an Atheist, you would have no grounds to "admire" it.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Alexis, your response is a smokescreen of intellectual posturing, couched in vague platitudes and high-minded abstractions that do little to disguise the hollowness of your argument. You dress up your position with references to "symbolism" and "synthesizing approaches," but the substance is as shallow as the "shallow secularism" you seem so desperate to dismiss.

Dismiss? No. Acknowledge, understand are better terms. I don’t dismiss secularism and I do not dismiss the radical form of it that animates your approach.

Man as symbol-maker is an important point for a better understanding of Man.

The people I get the most from in the realm of bridging the conflict between religious views and “secular” views are, indeed, synthesizing minds. I value synthesis.

Let’s call it what it is: an elaborate dance around the fact that you can’t meaningfully engage with the core critique of your worldview. Secularism doesn’t need your approval or your condescending acknowledgment of its limitations.

I do not think you could (fairly) state what my worldview is. You seem to me too full of your own. OTOH, I think I could very easily state for you what yours is. Because it is quite simple. Reductionism reduces complexity to bits that are easy to express and to influence people with. And ideologies are often similar.

Secularism may not need my approval, but it can certainly be examined by qualified minds aware of the full gamut of the issues. And it is examined. And critiqued.

It stands as a framework grounded in reason, evidence, and empathy—not in the crumbling scaffolding of outdated religious dogma or the “symbolic content” you claim to grasp but clearly haven’t wrestled with on anything more than a surface level.

You are referring to your own position as “a framework grounded in reason, evidence, and empathy”, however I see many flaws in your position that in my view need to be addressed.

…the crumbling scaffolding of outdated religious dogma or the “symbolic content”.

This is an idea, a reality, that deeply concerns me and a problem I am involved with. It needs to be examined in depth.

A “scaffolding” can be described as descriptive order around something. You offer a “scaffolding” in the presentation of your understanding and conclusions.

You lament the "collapsed" religious models of the past and pine for some vaguely defined "proper religiousness," yet you offer no coherent vision of what that might entail. Instead, you retreat into an intellectual fog, pontificating about "layers of symbolic content" and "well-prepared intellects" as if that absolves you of the burden of making an actual argument. It doesn’t.

No. I see those “collapsed” systems as scaffolding sets that enabled entire realms of understanding and value-definition to come onto the scene. I don’t “lament” the collapse of old orders of view — like the Great Chain of Being — but I do not flippantly dismiss the meaning content in them.

And your defense of IC is laughable. "Better informed than many"? That's the faintest of faint praise, especially in a space where shallow, self-referential reasoning and unsupported assertions are commonplace. IC's arguments are just as flawed as yours—cloaked in a veneer of intellectualism but ultimately devoid of substance. His smug dismissal of secularism is no more thorough or "better grounded" than your attempt to deflect criticism with appeals to complexity and nuance you haven’t demonstrated.

It is not faint praise when the name of the game is to be informed.

So let’s drop the pretense: you’re not engaging in honest inquiry here. You’re propping up a worldview you’re too invested in to question, all while taking potshots at secularism because it challenges the foundations of your belief. If your ideas can’t stand on their own merits without hiding behind vague rhetoric and intellectual name-dropping, then maybe they aren’t worth defending.

Wait, I think you mean the inquiry I am involved in is not the sort that you favor, find needed, admire, etc.

If anything I value an “amphibious” approach to understanding intellectual history and the world of ideas.

Your position, your style, is far too brash, too certain of itself, too much tending toward domination and dismissal. You are “a sign of the times” in that sense.

But you are wonderful for what you stimulate as far as these recent conversations go. You are an “emissary of the age” in that sense.

[Gary Childress]

Yes, they can...but none they can ground. They cannot require any moral precepts at all, of anybody...not even of themselves. So their moral behaviour is never a product of their Atheism, but always a product of having some other incentive, or of borrowing some other conception of morality which Atheism knows nothing about.

So atheists behave morally...

Some do. Some don't. And none have to, and none have warrant from Atheism for so doing. But you already know all that.

... without any perceived benefit for it or punishment for not being so.

Why would you suppose that's true? Do you think Atheists are unaware of the legal system, or of the practical advantages of things like embezzlement or theft? I don't see why you'd suppose they're ignorant of those things. I would think they certainly do weigh benefits vs. punishment, though. Everybody does, whatever they believe.

But they don't imagine God will ever establish justice. That much might be true. By definition, they don't just disbelieve in objective morals but also in God and in the Final Judgment...so how could they? Unfortunately for them, disbelief is no insulation against ultimate realities.

But why would an Atheist consider moral behaviour "admirable," whatever the motive? Atheism gives no reason for a person to be more admired for being good than being evil. It's not just blame that disappears in their worldview, but also praise. There's no basis for either.

So you can note their behaviour. But if you were an Atheist, you would have no grounds to "admire" it.

I'm agnostic and I see no reason to believe that any God will ever establish justice, given his track record in this universe full of dangers and natural disasters. And it doesn't look like we can do anything about the climate crisis either except kiss the world goodbye. God in all his wisdom made oil pretty much the only viable fuel we can use aside from burning wood or playing around with radioactive waste. And I'm pretty sure deforestation isn't going to end very happily either.

What a joke the Abrahamic religions are. Go pray to God that humanity will survive the next 50 years. See if your God even sends a rainbow. Good grief! Get with reality.

[attofishpi]

Your optimism is only shadowed by your lack of vision.

[Gary Childress]

Your optimism is only shadowed by your lack of vision.

I think I see pretty clearly actually.

[Wizard22]

Wizard22, if your name reflects your age, maybe it’s worth considering a little patience and humility before making sweeping statements about “blind faith.” The brain, after all, doesn’t fully develop until around 25, particularly in areas related to critical thinking and decision-making. So perhaps hold off on equating verifiable facts with divine revelation until you’re firing on all cylinders.

Beginning your counter-argument with an Ad Hom, isn't going to help your case BigMike.

Observable, verifiable facts don’t require belief—they require observation and evidence. They’re not divine; they’re just what’s there when you drop the metaphysical hand-waving and look at reality as it is. Trusting experts isn’t blind faith; it’s recognizing that their conclusions are based on evidence that can be tested, replicated, and scrutinized. That’s a far cry from faith in an unprovable deity.

If you’re going to lump science and religion together under “blind faith,” you’re either ignoring the fundamental difference between evidence and belief or deliberately conflating them to score rhetorical points. Either way, it’s not helping your argument.

They are beliefs, and I'll show you in a moment.

[Wizard22]

"Or worse, they're not even self-aware of their own beliefs??"

Are you telling me i have beliefs that I'm not even aware of? May i ask how that is possible? How to have a belief without knowing it, i mean.

You believe that your car, or truck, or Escalade will be where you left it when you wake up in the morning.
You believe the Sun will rise and fall.
You believe the Moon will be in roughly it's same orbit, not crashing into Earth.
You believe in Gravity, holding the ground together, and you to Earth.
You believe in Air and Oxygen, although you don't see it.
You believe water is wet, ice is solid, and steam is gas...along with that old Chimichanga that's not sitting well in your gut.

You believe a lot of things, which you "aren't aware of", because you presume they're given and consistent.

But none of these beliefs are necessarily true. They can change. The entire world can change, and defy your beliefs & expectations.

[Wizard22]

Can't say I have. Could you give an example of such an observable, verifiable fact?

The Sun is bright. Everybody can observe and verify this in the daytime, depending on their time zone on Earth, depending on whether they are indoors or outdoors. At night time, it's not true though. It is no longer 'observable' but is instead 'verifiable' by how humans communicate with each-other, and can confirm that daytime is happening on the other side of Earth, or using video cameras to 'see' the Sun when it's night time.

Even this "observable, verifiable fact" is dubious...depending on whether it's day or night time, depending on a particular person's position, depending on whether a person was born inside a dark cave, a nuclear shelter underground, and has not yet seen the Sun before.

There are infinite factors that go into every Belief-system. That you and all the other Secularists overlook these "facts", demonstrates to me that very few, or none of you, are really serious about your 'Sciences'.

[Wizard22]

Treating those are given dogmatic "correct conclusions" who live in search of evidence to support their conclusion to those who make observations then derive conclusions from them, then adjust the conclusions as new observations come to light, as essentially two versions of the same phenomenon, is erroneous.

Correct, and many of these Secularists are guilty of the former.

[Atla]

Wizard shouldn't use dubious secular inventions like computers and the internet and online forums. Seculars have this weird belief that nature has stable laws, but that could be wrong and electronic devices could blow up at any moment, injuring Wizard.

[Wizard22]

Part of the problem is that "secular" simply means "non-sacred." It's a negation with no positive content entailed. Somebody who's a "secularist," then, would be somebody who thinks nothing should be privileged as "sacred."

But then, secularists still want various things to be treated as sacred. They still believe in human rights, for example, or in their own autonomy, or in the responsibility of the state to remain non-religious, or in moral duties, or the liberty to terminate their own life, or the right of law, or social justice, or a life they have created...some are even environmentalists or vegans, treating animals or the planet itself as sacred.

The only way one can maintain such beliefs turns out to be not to think very hard about the warrant for regarding any of those things as sacred; because once you've declared NOTHING sacred, there isn't a road back to justifying those values. So secularism can only be maintained by the expedient of not thinking, of not being consistent, of not trying to ground one's beliefs in reason.

Instead, secularism tends to expend all its energies on deploring the religious, as if insulting others was somehow the same thing as proving and rationally grounding one's own beliefs. But of course, it's not. Even if, say, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, paganism and Theosophy are wrong in their entirety, that realization would not go one step in the direction of showing that a secularist's own preferred values were justified.

If secularism behaved genuinely secularly, it would amount to Nihilism. There's no other logical resting place for it.

Fortunately for us all, secularism is never logically followed to its own natural conclusions. If it were, we would not be living in societies, but in a permanent state of confusion and strife...for no values at all would be justifiable. So we may all thank our lucky stars that secularism is not self-aware.

Yes, they have many, many, countless even, Beliefs that they automatically presume as 'Sacred' among the liberal-left-marxist contingent (socially), but they are not self-aware or self-cognizant of their blind-spots. I don't know why the "religious right" don't act offensively against them, and challenge their 'Secular' belief systems. It's been a one-way attack direction for decades now, at least since the 1990s that I've experienced. The attacks are against the 'Sanctity' of religious-right belief systems, but not against the Sanctity of secular-left belief systems.

One of the major differences is: the religious-right tend to write down their belief systems (The Bible), Constitution, and use these as textual doctrines and bases for beliefs. The secular-left, however, tend to presume their belief systems as "automatically given" and "not doctrinal". Yet, they treat Universities, Professors, PhD, "Scientists-Experts" as Divine figures. "Trust the Experts!"

They're then blind to how they act almost exactly same as the Fundamentalism of the religious-right, without being self-aware of their own biases, ignorance, and beliefs. But they do not have a Moral system against Pridefulness, disallowing their pretentions and haughtiness. The holier-than-thou attitude is not unique to the Right, but very much common among the Left.

[Wizard22]

If I owned a shop and two people both equally suited to the job I need one of them for, i'd employ the one that is Christian over an atheist (for obvious reasons).

Please do extrapolate on why. And what kind of shop is it? I presume it isn't a strip club then...

[Wizard22]

Wizard shouldn't use dubious secular inventions like computers and the internet and online forums. Seculars have this weird belief that nature has stable laws, but that could be wrong and electronic devices could blow up at any moment, injuring Wizard.

My computer and smart phone were not sent through Israel, so they should be clear of any explosive devices...for now.

I believe that mine is safe. Why would my beliefs conflict with Secular culture? And how many first Computer scientists, were devout Christians, hmm?

[Atla]

Wizard shouldn't use dubious secular inventions like computers and the internet and online forums. Seculars have this weird belief that nature has stable laws, but that could be wrong and electronic devices could blow up at any moment, injuring Wizard.

My computer and smart phone were not sent through Israel, so they should be clear of any explosive devices...for now.

I believe that mine is safe. Why would my beliefs conflict with Secular culture? And how many first Computer scientists, were devout Christians, hmm?

So you subscribe to the secular belief in stable laws of nature?