Morality without God

[Belacqua]

Exactly. You can have moral beliefs about how to treat other human beings, and so long as you are willing to have a discussion about it-- and you don't insist that others hold the belief just because you say so-- then it ISN'T a dogma.

You can have a discussion about "oughts." Your oughts can face criticisms from moral skeptics or people who argue for different oughts. So long as you are willing to subject your particular beliefs to rational discourse, then you aren't being dogmatic.

Sure, science can't tell us anything definite about oughts. But that's why we have moral philosophy. I mean, physicists can't tell us anything definite about economics... that's why we have economists. The natural sciences are great, but they can't tell us everything. That's why we have other disciplines.

Humanism is a definsible view. So it doesn't need to rely on "undefended certainty." And therefore, it isn't dogmatic.

I guess I have a less negative view of the word "dogma." To me it meant just a set of guidelines or rules that we know to be unprovable -- committed to, rather than proved. But I guess it's more negative than I thought. 

As long as people acknowledge that their particular set of rules is contingent and chosen, rather than somehow universal, then I agree that we can have reasonable discussions. There are always "if - then" statements that need to be made, concerning what we want our morals to aim toward."If individual freedom is more important than the overall good of the collective," etc. 

In my experience, anyone who claims not to have an ideology is just someone who hasn't examined his ideology. So I guess a humanist who doesn't understand that he has one is more dogmatic than one who does. 

I just want to avoid prideful statements. Like the people who separate belief from knowledge by asserting that the things they don't agree with are belief while the things they themselves believe are knowledge. Likewise a humanist who says that a non-humanist has an ideology but he doesn't.