Deconversion and some doubts

[Abaddon_ire]

Acrobat,

You have expended all this energy trying to tell people why they are wrong.

Why don't you explain why you are right?

[The Grand Nudger]

The username is certainly fitting, all those mental gymnastics.

I made that connection when I first saw the username and always wondered if any one else noticed it. Funny.

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Gae and Acrobat have been arguing for four days straight now. Must be nice to not have to work or deal with people in the real world. To spend all of your conceivable time on AF. How fascinating.

lmao

It’s good to be the king.



( if you wanna know how I make my money just ask, could always use another hand in this business, all you need to get started is any acreage in excess of 50)

[EgoDeath]

I made that connection when I first saw the username and always wondered if any one else noticed it. Funny.

---

Gae and Acrobat have been arguing for four days straight now. Must be nice to not have to work or deal with people in the real world. To spend all of your conceivable time on AF. How fascinating.

lmao

It’s good to be the king.



( if you wanna know how I make my money just ask, could always use another hand in this business, all you need to get started is any acreage in excess of 50)

lol wish I had a small group of friends with backpacks and some scary black assault rifles. I'm always down for a good free harvest.

[Acrobat]

But Good exists, and we both agree it does. So the matter is settled, and we agree on that.

Yes, we both agree on this.

Nor has he proven that you can't get an ought from an is.

In my view one derived the ought from the Good, and not from the “is”/the facts on the ground. The “is” is descriptive, while the Good is normative.

And that's the difference between you and me. And that's the difference between you and Plato. Do you think morals are obligations? They aren't.

But for those who realize an ideal and strive to attain it, that is moral realism. Moral realism isn't like the law of gravity that you are compelled to follow whether you want to or not. Moral realism is that which you can either ignore or acknowledge. How you treat others is a reality. It is a significant reality.

Yes, I think morals are an obligation, more real than any other obligation. But this doesn’t mean we are compelled to follow them whether we want to or not, like the laws of gravity.

The similarity here would be to love. I love my daughters more than anything else in the world. Love places a great deal of demands and obligations on me, to not fail them, or do them wrong, to raise them rightly, to be a good example, etc... These obligations placed on me by love, are more real to me than any sort of legal obligations.

I don’t see the Good, as some sort of pretty dress in the window, which can be admired from a distance at how pretty it is, but like that of an intrusive wife. The Good illuminates our failures to be good, exposes the weight of it, a father you want to love and kill at the same time.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that when the man who tried to tell his friends in the cave about the Good, he wasn’t welcomed as someone giving them a great gift, but preferred to kill him instead.

[GrandizerII]

But Good exists, and we both agree it does. So the matter is settled, and we agree on that.

Yes, we both agree on this.

Nor has he proven that you can't get an ought from an is.

In my view one derived the ought from the Good, and not from the “is”/the facts on the ground. The “is” is descriptive, while the Good is normative.

And that's the difference between you and me. And that's the difference between you and Plato. Do you think morals are obligations? They aren't.

But for those who realize an ideal and strive to attain it, that is moral realism. Moral realism isn't like the law of gravity that you are compelled to follow whether you want to or not. Moral realism is that which you can either ignore or acknowledge. How you treat others is a reality. It is a significant reality.

Yes, I think morals are an obligation, more real than any other obligation. But this doesn’t mean we are compelled to follow them whether we want to or not, like the laws of gravity.

The similarity here would be to love. I love my daughters more than anything else in the world. Love places a great deal of demands and obligations on me, to not fail them, or do them wrong, to raise them rightly, to be a good example, etc... These obligations placed on me by love, are more real to me than any sort of legal obligations.

I don’t see the Good, as some sort of pretty dress in the window, which can be admired from a distance at how pretty it is, but like that of an intrusive wife. The Good illuminates our failures to be good, exposes the weight of it, a father you want to love and kill at the same time.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that when the man who tried to tell his friends in the cave about the Good, he wasn’t welcomed as someone giving them a great gift, but preferred to kill him instead.

Stronger obligation, maybe. But that's a difference in degree, not a qualitative difference.

[vulcanlogician]

[Acrobat]

But what if you didn't love your daughters? What if you hated them? Would you still be "obligated" not to fail them?

Yes, because I’m obligated to love them, whether I do or not.

Imagine being a child of such a father, his failing would be quite evident. “He wasn’t a good father, when he ought to have been a good father.”

None of my life duties obligates me to do anything. If I fail in some of my duties, there may be consequences. But that doesn't mean that consequences determine my duties. "The Good" or the "making things better than they are, are what defines my moral objective.

I agree it’s the Good that defines our goal. It is what obligates us.

The Good doesn’t exist as a pretty dress in a window which I can casually decide whether I want to put on, hence why Plato’s description involves the collective murder of the one trying to reveal it to the cave dwellers.

[The Grand Nudger]

Are you obligated to love my children, or me? Do we even have to love our own children in order to be “good parents”...and what, exactly, does that entail?

It’s tempting to imagine that relational ethics express some fundamental realist unit of moral currency, but they don’t. They’re a description of subjective state when contemplating the affection we have for our kids. To be blunt, basing a moral system off of love can be nothing other-than subjectivist.

This isn’t to say that they’re not a useful set of positive obligations, ofc. A species with children who need substantial care wouldn’t survive without some biological compulsion towards their offspring.

[vulcanlogician]

[Acrobat]

You aren't obligated to love your daughters, man. You just do.  And since you love them, you are bound to do right by them.

I don't always love my daughters, i sometime hate, and resent them as well, that's just the nature of most people's moral life's, as conflicting.

It's very well possible, that I might find a lover, leave my wife and kids, and shack up with her and have no further contact with them at all. But one thing I couldn't deny even in this new found life, is that I was obligated to love my children, that I ought not to have done what I did, at least not without lying to myself.

If you ever had to deal with a failed father, a man who wasn't a very good father, or husband, even they seem aware of this, at some fundamental and deeper level.

In fact such an obligation, seems more real than any other obligation, they even appear more real than you or I.

Perhaps you say it's product of social normativism and conformity. Yet you do make a distinction between a group mentality vs moral mentality.

You also seem to acknowledge, that "leaving my children to starve in the cold is good fathering" isn't right, and that the rules of being a good father aren't arbitrary. This doesn't seem to be in your view to be a product of social normativism and conformity. Perhaps you agree that what's Good, even in fathering, is a product of the Good, and not society?

I see the obligation of being a good father as a product of the Good as well, though you seem to disagree.

I want to know more about The Good, and how it "inwardly works in the soul".

Let's say I'm a bad father, who then comes to recognize "The Good", what effect would it have on me? Would it compel me to be Good? Or just something I acknowledge as casually pretty, that doesn't compel or move me morally one way or the other?


(As far as homosexuality, "Christian love" etc, I have no interest in that discussion, most of it seems to center around white American evangelical Christianity, tied to politics and nationalistic ideals, in which I have no real connection with, to defend. )