pop morality

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Swing and another miss.
I'm not saying one society is better than another. I am simply point out the justification processes you all use to make yourself seem better, then I am showing you your own hypocrisy in that no matter how much you claim this society has evolved.. by definition NOTHING HAS CHANGED! That is why your 'morality' is a crap standard that can not be used to judge anything except your own self delusion. Your 'morality' is nothing more than society lying to itself that it has changed and things are better. For some this is true, but is generally at the cost of the rest of the world's opportunity to be what we have become.

Or did you think that whole middle eastern rage against the west was just about religion?

Again not saying the world would be better off or that their society would befit the world better than this one. Just again pointing out the method in which they too use to justify their acts. Just like us, and just like the nazis they think they are the 'good guys.'

Funny how no one in the world going into a war set out to destroy the 'good guys.' That's the power 'morality' has. that is what you d-bags are defending. a system that can justify your actions no matter what they are, it just has to be marketed to the masses correctly. (which by all accounts and definitions is the meaning for the term propaganda.)

So why then do you defend a system that is controlled and regulated by propaganda?

I think you make some excellent points (here and in your similar reply to Rhythm), for once, Drich, and so I'll start with your last question:

We defend a secular society and the moral/ethical concepts that flow from working together because, while it often goes wrong when hijacked by powerful people with an agenda (especially, as you point out, when they have control of media/propaganda). it can be set right. It will never be perfect, but we can try to perfect  it.

So now I need to pause and ask, which is it? You seem to be implying that we here are enamored with the Capitalist system, while I constantly take flak from others who think we're all a bunch of Commies. Can it be that we're more complex than that?

And while I agree that no one ever claimed they went to war to hurt "the good guys", I will disagree with you that there is no such thing as justified warfare. Some people will only listen to force; I doubt Osama bin Laden could have been convinced by rhetoric to stop killing innocent civilians for the sins (as he saw it) of their governments. I doubt we could've talked Hitler into giving Poland back. 

On the other hand, there's quite a bit of evidence that the American public was tricked into joining that war for global hegemony by practically forcing the Japanese to attack us over the oil interests in the South Pacific. We did everything to provoke them except commit an act of war or send our Ambassador to tweak the Emperor on the nose!

But for all our sins as a government, in this regard (and they are many!), we do continue to improve. Yes, our Capitalists have twisted this country into a mockery of what it's supposed to stand for in many ways-- but we still have the power to fight back against this, and we have millions of people trying to convince the tens of millions of others to do so. You're quite right that OBL and the others in the Muslim radical world like him who hate us so much do not simply hate us for not sharing their beliefs, but for the ways in which our foreign affairs/actions conflict with their social values (such as not liking to be exploited and artificially divided into fake nations with puppet monarchs to serve the West's greed, tied up and bound with exploitative contracts/treaties that favor us, the powerful), but religion is still the main recruiting tool for their fodder-minions, just like it works here.

It is incumbent upon us to ask moral questions constantly, and to search for better solutions to problems, because no government or society is perfect, but it can always be made a little better for everyone. America is too-slowly waking up to the fact that it's not an island, and that the changes-for-the-better that we're seeing in other First World nations are not being enacted here because it doesn't serve our wealthy elite to make the changes, but we are awakening. We're seeing the exploitation of others, and trying to put a stop to it, but it's hard to turn the Queen Elizabeth II.  

So, respectfully, you're wrong. Lots of things have changed. Ask our mixed-race President. Not very long ago (1967) miscegenation was illegal in numerous states. Technically, had President Obama been born in Virginia, he'd have been a felony.

Some things have indeed been relabeled and continued in another guise. Lots of things need to be changed for the better. Some things have been allowed to get worse while nobody was looking. But none of that means that we don't use our personal, subjective ideas about morality to try to improve things in our societies. The argument is not "society makes it right or wrong", but "we try to make society more right and less wrong, together, by reducing harm to others, by using our personal ideas of what-is-moral, and by convincing other people of why the present idea is more harmful/wrong/worse than our idea.