Gary Childress wrote: ↑Mon Mar 16, 2026 12:25 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Mar 15, 2026 11:54 pm
Gary Childress wrote: ↑Sun Mar 15, 2026 11:17 pm
It's the fact that you don't use logic that annoys me. I've taken logic, you don't use it.
Show that. I'm ready to see you correct me.
Produce a syllogism that shows that secularists are obligated to even one moral precept. Just one. Go ahead.
You're the one making the claim that secularists can't be obligated to any moral precepts. I'm saying that you haven't yet demonstrated that to logically be the case. I haven't made any other claims than logic doesn't prove that secularists can't be obligated to any moral precepts. Or if it does, you haven't demonstrated it. Can you show that they can't be obligated to any moral precepts with a syllogism? Can you back your claim with logic?
All the secularist has to do and some do this is to say. I feel that X is objectively wrong.
The religious person says I feel that scripture X is the true God's word. Scripture X says that Y is wrong. Since God is the creator, this means Y is objectively wrong. It's actually got more steps.
Of course some secularists agree with IC. Others perhaps have not thought out and reconciled potentially contradictory beliefs.
But most secularists I meet seem to feel that things like pedophilia are objectively wrong and a whole host of other commandments come out of this. Since most are not philosophers, they are going to word it more like 'that's just wrong' 'or course it is wrong'. And if you start saying but you don't believe in God how do you know, it will come down to it being self-evident to many.
Religious people KNOW, somehow, that their intuition about scripture, for example is correct. They know it isn't, for example, a demiurge. Perhaps an entity that created or influenced scripture. No, they know.
Well, they can't then say that secular people can't just know that things are wrong. The door is open to intuitive just knowing things, and the religious people have already walked through it.
It's true that some secular people, perhaps more philosophically inclined, may have made assertions that sit uneasily with objective morals. Those secularists might have to work out a defense, especially if IC actually managed to present a good version of the argument he's generally more happy to present with leaps and assumptions. But these are a subset of secular people, and there are many different subgroups and many robust defenses of what they are more likely to call moral realism.
In IC's mind he has defeated all of these various positions and they all must be at root moral relativists or hypocrites. In his mind.
I'm not secular. I am also not confused about IC's behavior and attitude.