Gary Childress wrote: ↑Tue Jul 29, 2025 3:55 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 11:39 pm
Gary Childress wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 9:14 pm
The part where many of us suffer for no good reason under a dictatorship that ignores our needs.
Where does Secularism claim that your needs matter at all? Secularism doesn’t have a view of that, either.
Of course, secularists have needs.
Nobody suggested they don’t. But Secularism does not provide any rationale to think they
deserve to be met, or that it’s
more right if they are, and
more morally wrong if they’re not. “I need” is not a privileged utterance, by way of reasoning from Secularism.
The fact that my freedom to wave my fist ends where your nose begins.
Is that a reliable moral axiom, or just a cute phrase you’ve heard? What’s the warrant for it, from Secularism?
Secularists can't have morality because why?
Nobody said that, either. I said the opposite. I said that Secularists can behave morally, or behave immorally, and Secularism will not give them any way of knowing which is which. But yeah, they can do the (conventionally) moral thing: they just can’t ever explain to themselves WHY it’s right.
Do you not agree that moral axioms have limits at which point they are no longer perfect guides?
The problem’s not with the axiom, necessarily.
It’s the tangled circumstances of application that present the challenge. But without the axiom, you don’t even know which direction is up, morally speaking, and have no hope of finding the right application, in any circumstances. Secularism won’t help.
OMG!! You're repeating my very point and saying I'm wrong about it!!
No, I’m not, actually. You’re wrong about the axioms being faulty. It’s
human attempts to apply the axiom that fail.
Think about it this way: there’s nothing wrong with the speed limit being set at 60 mph / 100kph. It’s not a faulty axiom or rule. But that doesn’t mean that everybody who travels that road will obey it by going exactly 60 or 100. Many will not, for various reasons…some legitimate (as when a car is hauling a trailer, and goes more slowly) and some not (as when a speeder exceeds it).
That depends. If by “religion” one only means, “something one believes,” then yes, it’s that.
Religion is not just a belief. It's the belief in a sentient creator. Do you wish to hold to the idea that all beliefs amount to "religion"? If I believe the Earth orbits the Sun, is that a "religious" belief?
It’s your definition. I’m just pointing out it can be too loose or too tight. The defining of a “religion” is a very difficult matter, actually; even the most academic experts recognize that. Read any textbook, and they’ll introduce you to the difficulties, probably in chapter 1.
Who gets to define “beneficial”? Some people end up in jail because of moral rules. How does it “benefit” them to be afoul of rules that are just made up, and have no objective grounds behind them at all? That seems a hard case to make.
AGain, we all define "beneficial".
That’s not going to work. Some people regard the killing of others as “beneficial,” because it “purifies the gene pool” or “eliminates unwanted children” or somebody else who is a “burden on society.” But then, how committed can they be to the basic immorality of murder? They’re not, obviously: they’re “defining” something so as to allow them to do the immoral. That’s not morality, obviously; that’s rationalization of evil.
We’ll get to it. Right now, the important point is the realization that it doesn’t exist without God. So a rational person really has a choice: first, abandon morality and become a moral Nihilist, as Secularism would imply; secondly, become a hypocrite — keep insisting Secularism/subjectivism is true, but force self or others to conform to rules one secretly believes are illegitimate and arbitrary; thirdly, consider God.
You're not going to explain your evidence that there is no morality without God until I've agreed that there's no morality without God.
Right. So long as you’re living in the “straw house” of belief that Secularism can answer the question, you’re merely deluding yourself. Interestingly, I’ve pointed out that it’s easy to test, and you just refuse to employ the test. So perhaps one can’t go forward until that’s resolved.
So we have to “pick a horse and ride it,” so to speak. But the middle one’s just dishonest, so maybe we can rule it out, too…assuming we’re prepared to think dishonesty is wrong. And again, Secularism will not tell us that being a hypocrite is wrong.
No one takes hypocrites seriously, why should they?
Oh, yes, they do. They’re called “politicians.”
You're demanding that one person allow another person to knowingly dick them over.
I’m not demanding anything at all. I’m merely pointing it out, because it happens so often. And yes, people do it all the time. Sometimes they know they’re dealing with hypocrites, and sometimes they keep themselves willfully ignorant. For example, they refuse to think anything critical about a particular ideology or politician, even though they have every reason to know they’re being had. Examples can be multiplied, of course.
But to the point: all Secularists who
moralize are acting like hypocrites. They have no reason to believe X is right or Y is wrong, that they can get from Secularism. Not one of them can connect Secularism with a moral axiom, anymore than you’ve been able to do it. But they insist their preferred morality is “right,” or “better” or “beneficial,” or whatever honourific word they choose to employ to decorate the thing they can never explain or justify. Yet they insist on it, and utterly refuse to think about the fact that Secularism would require them to believe there’s no substance to any moral assessment at all. That’s hypocrisy.
