Imagine my surprise when I heard that atheism was based on a search for truth. We all know that’s false.
Let’s examine a couple recent examples.
Patrick claimed that I did not provide any links.
You’ll note the complete absence of any links…
I provided links. Patrick lied.
KN claimed that Immanuel Kant was an atheist philosopher.
KN lied,
Patrick demands morals of others while denying that there are any objective moral obligations.
Why do atheists care about what is true and what is immoral?
Why do atheists attack the object of their ignorance?
I’m not sure that’s actually the distinction Allan was making, Clarence, but never mind.
As I understand it, subjectivism IS a form of relativism. Maybe it’s YOU that hasn’t gotten that over the past five years or so.
I don’t know about Pihlstrom’s argument, if it would support any kind of theism, but there’s certainly a good transcendental arguments for theism through the lens of pragmatism. As there is for acausal free will.
It’s 130% pretty flawless by my calculations.
I like living on the grammatical edge
Am I the only one wh gets the feeling that William believes that objective morality is a fact, even though he denies that he has ever claimed this?
Hilter agrees with you , the only practically useful and morally acceptable morality is absolute,the assumption that end justifies the means. He believes for practical reasons this is self evident. Is he justified under your system?
Whether it exists or not is irrelevant, it has the same moral force. Practically, no advantage to claim it is a fact.
The important thing about WJM’s take on morality is what’s also important about ID. It doesn’t question their preconceptions, it merely reaffirms them by using them to come to an “unassailable” conclusion.
Because they think that way, everyone does, hence anyone who says otherwise is just lying or so committed to their “atheism” (or whatever) that they deny it. Projection, but it gets them through the day.
It’s a closed-off world protecting their preconceptions. Of course WJM’s claims about morality aren’t intended to lead to investigation, rather to close off investigation, much like ID does (any meaningful ID research is really evolutionary research attempting to make a gap into which a god may be stuffed). The answers are already known, the conclusions are “obvious,” and you are to submit to such superior thinking. So do it!
Glen Davidson
What would be the point in investigating when you already have a flawless moral system?
That’s “pretty flawless,” Newton.
But they think God commands them to kill infidels. I take it you would respond that God would never command such a thing because it’s immoral, but how would you know what’s moral and what isn’t? You would need to know God’s nature. I don’t think there’s any difference between the delusion of believing one knows what God’s nature is, and the delusion of believing that God commands them to do things
Dazz said:
My claim is not that my moral system is true, nor that it would result in people behaving better if adopted. It won’t stop the delusional or the stupid or evil from doing delusional or stupid or evil things. My argument is that my moral system is better in terms of rational consistency and real life, day to day practicality than any other moral system.
What’s wrong with theistic objective morality–in 60 seconds
Oddly enough, so is mine.
Just wanted to note that that assertion is not an argument.
Why do you think this is true, Elvira?
I mean I know you’re never wrong, but that seems wrong to me.
walto,
The difference is simple and easy to understand. William is taking the relativist tack here:
He is arguing that the group cannot be judged by anyone else’s subjective standard.
Allan rightly rejects this:
Subjectivism does not imply relativism.
PS Just to make you even happier, walto, let me point out that it was a dangling modifier in William’s sentence, not a dangling participle.
I’ve noticed the same thing about my own as well.
walto,
Why the compulsive lying? Never mind — I already answered that question. It’s a defense mechanism.
Why do you think it’s wrong?
Do you maintain that one can’t know any objective moral rules to be objectively good or bad?
I’m Brian and so is my wife!
I say it does and that you’re wrong Gretrchen.
Well, that settles it.
Itr seems obviously wrong. Why in the world do you, or would anyone, think it’s right?
keiths,
I don’t think you even know what relativism is, Lon. If you did you’d get that subjectivism is just a particular type.
Maybe you should first concentrate on learning your name, though.
Could you elaborate? Fifth’s presuppositionism seems rationally consistent
Well, mine is more fun.
Glen Davidson
I don’t know how I missed that OP before. It’s like an attempt to get the most nonsequitors into one place in 60 seconds.
Do you just not care whether a single thing you pontificate about makes any sense at all? I mean if you told me Murray actually wrote that I’d believe it.
Definitely.
walto, to William:
…followed by six comments in which walto makes assertions but offers no arguments.
You wouldn’t know an argument if one fell on your head, Rachel.
I bet you’d feel better about yourself if you were able to defend your claims, walto.
Why not give it a try?
Well, there is this recent gem by keiths:
Also, by your faulty logic, any book could be inerrant, because humans on their own can’t recognize inerrancy. That puts Mein Kampf on an equal footing with the Bible.
Notice how the therefore “that puts Mein Kampf is on an equal footing with the Bible” logically follows from what came before? Cuz keiths sez so.
And if that’s not an argument, I don’t know what is.
Too bad there’s no real-world version of Cheers out there, where everyone knows his name.
It’s almost certain then!
A typical keiths-ism.
Here’s what walto actually wrote:
…or whatever the hell is going on in that “sentence.”
So thanks keiths, for setting us right when walto was so wrong.
By the way, by which of your senses did you pick up on that?
Actually, I think grammar marm might just be Abby’s wheel house.
It takes so little to prick walto’s insecurities.
WJM:
Yeah, the obvious crack everybody else made was going to be my comment too.
One can accept, as testimony, someone explaining how their moral approach works. But no, it goes much further with WJM and his multiple threads here, there and, presumably, everywhere, hammering that same nail.
The game is jiggling lures in front of atheodarwinerialists in order to get them to ‘admit’ that they must accept complete moral equivalence with Hitler, for the edification of the unseen audience. No matter that they do no such thing.
The argument crashes and burns when it resorts to importing some mythical ‘other person’. A Nazi, say. If YOU choose to act or avoid an action based upon your norms (albeit culturally and genetically informed), that is ‘logically’ unjustifiable because someone else (be they subjectivist or objectivist) might also act based on their norms. Which, of course, happens. But no, the possibility must lead you to reject your approach. One of you has to be ‘right’. Even better if it’s you, but that is of course the 64,000 question.
I have the answer in an envelope. Send me 64,000.
(edited – fucking latex!)
Euros? Vietnamese Dong?
walto,
Ha! Whatever you can spare! It was dollars, but it came out formulated as a mathematical expression thanks to Latex.
I read that as ” it takes a little prick” , weird. I do need to learn to read with comprehension. Apologies
No worries. Walto will recognize himself either way.
Thanks,himself.
newton,
🙂 🙂
newton,
No, recognizes himself.
Walto will thank himself once he’s come up with actual arguments for the assertions he’s making.
Something better than these inanities:
And:
It takes such a little prick to walto’s insecurities.
Whatever psychological advice keiths is dispensing doesn’t seems to be working walto. Have you considered a second opinion?
I DO recognize himself!
Good.
As happens every few years, I’ve gone back to reading Richard Rorty (in fact I’m trying to write an article on his use of Nietzsche and Sellars). One of the most prominent themes in Rorty’s philosophy is that one can be fully existentially committed to a norm (e.g. “love is good and cruelty is bad”) while acknowledging, in a reflective way, the contingency of that commitment.
If one had been born in a different culture, or if the historical trajectory that led from ancient Israelite henotheism and Greek philosophical speculation through Christianity to the Enlightenment had not occurred, we would have quite different moral norms. One of the more disturbing implications of the plurality and contingency of moral commitments is that it seems we need to suspend a certain kind of ethical denunciation.
Let us see how this is supposed to work.
Within the logic of dehumanization — of the architects of the Holocaust or white supremacists who believe that non-whites are ‘sub-human’ — dehumanization is seen by the dehumanizers as a moral commitment. There are many versions of this thought, from the ‘white man’s burden’ ideology of colonialism to — to take a particularly chilling example — Himmler’s October 4, 1943 speech to the SS at Poznan. (Himmler is interesting here because he explicitly says that the extermination of the Jews is a moral obligation.)
The challenge is now supposed to be this: how can anyone say that someone like Himmler is wrong and someone like Martin Luther King is right when he says, “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.” After all, given the plurality of moralities, Himmler is morally correct from his point of view, just as King is morally correct from his point of view — and it’s just a contingent fact that “we” having this discussion happen to be part of a culture that honors King (though arguably symbolizes the man more often than heeding the message) and despises Himmler.
So how can we even say that King is right and Himmler is wrong? In order to say that, wouldn’t we affirm that we can someone occupy a privileged point of view from which we can see that King is closer to moral truth than Himmler is? And isn’t that privileged position of moral absolutism precisely what we deny having once we affirm the plurality and contingency of moral perspectives? Wouldn’t we have to be hypocrites if we were to say that there is no privileged moral absolutism but yet King was right and Himmler was wrong?
I think this challenge is itself misguided.
The fact is that it is constitutive of our moral identity for us to say that King was right when he preached and practiced love, equality, and nonviolence, just as it is constitutive of our moral identity for us to say that Himmler was wrong when he preached and practiced dehumanization and extermination of non-Aryan peoples. The contingency of that identity is just to say that we would not believe what we believe if we were not us.
Another way of putting that thought is this: the first-order normative commitment to the moral badness of cruelty and moral goodness of love is not undermined by holding a second-order epistemic commitment to the contingency of that normative commitment. That epistemic commitment in turn is informed by the relevant facts about the contingency of natural and cultural history.