RE: Atheist only discussion of morality.
August 25, 2010 at 7:45 pm
(This post was last modified: August 25, 2010 at 7:46 pm by TheDarkestOfAngels.)
(August 25, 2010 at 7:28 pm)lrh9 Wrote: There are some atheists that believe in an empirical objective morality.
I dispute that idea. Namely because I have seen no empirical evidence for the existence of objective morality and no believer in an empirical objective morality has presented evidence for that empirical objective morality.
They have presented what they think to be evidence, but the 'evidence' has invariably been some version of a non sequitur. Most often, it has been a variant of the naturalist fallacy.
But the conclusion that natural is moral should not be exempt from the necessary proofs of valid evidence and reasoning.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at here.
Acting in a 'moral' manner is so poorly defined that the only clear concepts in it essentially involves treating others as you want to be treated. The golden rule, in other words, along with some BS about ancient religious traditions that no one honestly follows involving promotion of celibacy and abstinence and other retarded sexual and marital restrictions.
It's rooted more in human and animal social behavior that has evolved over time as a part of human sociology. In a sense, it exists, but it's entirely a facility of our social behavior and it changes with different social groups with only some commonalities.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan