Your demand for "objectively real" support for morality only confirms my point that atheism inevitably destroys morality because there is no evidence anyone could provide that you could not say was "not objective," using that dodge to reject it. The evidence for equal inherent rights and a moral obligation to respect those, even when you don't want to, even at your cost is as abundant as the human experience of what happens when those things are denied, slavery, rape, exploitation, murder, genocide.... Those experiences are as direct and as obvious as any other experience that the "Earth is objectively real" and the atheist demands for "objective evidence" and "proof" are merely ruses to deny what is as obvious as any other experience.
I also showed you that you bogus framing of rights as "created by "social consensus" means when a society that doesn't "create" rights for atheists that atheists who complain about their equal right being violated are delusional because, under that atheist framing of rights, those rights wouldn't exist until the very society that denied them created those rights. That is even worse than a society that refuses to grant rights that are inherent because those rights would not exist and there would not ever be a right if society didn't decide to change their mind. Your framing sets it up for a majority that benefited from the oppression, subjugation and even death of a minority group would be under no obligation to create rights for that minority and they could, rationally, honestly, deny that they had rights because it was solely in in their power to create or deny the creation of those rights, at a cost to themselves.
Your demand for "proof" in this is hilarious considering against one lame ass-covering quote by the pedophilia advocate, Vern Bullough, produced by yankee2, I produced the fact of Bullough's membership in a group that advocated the "normalization" and legalization of pedophile rape, a fact he admitted in his CV, something that his atheist colleagues in the "Humanists" and CSICOP and Paul Kurtz, who made him the "human sexuality editor" at Prometheus publishers all knew and couldn't possibly deny. I also gave him a link to the study of the sTARBABY scandal by Richard Kammann, a "skeptic" and atheist who, along with Dennis Rawlins had been one of the members of the upper eschalon of CSICOP and a "true dis-believer" until he had to face up to the scandal and the scandalous and unscientific behavior of Kurtz, George Abell, Marvin Zelen, Kendrick Fraiser, James Randi.... and virtually every one of the CSICOP luminaries who knew of and covered up the sTARBABY scandal.
I provided the evidence and you refused to look at it even though the sources of it were atheists who yankee and, obviously, you hold up as heroes. You are as bad as the people who deny that the pedophile priest scandal happened, covering up for men who went much farther than the bishops and cardinals who covered up, but who elevated a man who promoted making what those priests did legal and considered a normal part of life.
All of this is massive evidence that the consequences of atheists not believing in sin and so not believing it is a sin to lie, will twist reality into any lie that is convenient to their preferences and then twist it back when it suits their preferences, that is the morality that is produced by atheism, by a denial that morality is the product of God's intention in creating us and the universe. It is the product of your hatred of the God which the absolute necessity of the inherent nature of equal rights and moral obligations demonstrates, otherwise there is no explanation of the origin and presence of those rights. Your hatred of God leads you to massive and cynical dishonesty and an irrational and illogical substitute for God with "social consensus" which, as I demonstrated, works to destroy rights and moral obligations, making those subservient to selfishness. I suspect that selfishness is the real basis of your hatred of God. You hate having moral obligations imposed by God, and I think that is why you really hate God and look for any possible reason to deny God's reality.
Update:
kogwonton Anthony_McCarthy • 14 minutes ago
You said morality and human rights had an existence as real as physical reality, independent of belief. Your words. That is the very definition of 'objective, dear.
Anthony_McCarthy kogwonton • 2 minutes ago
I can assure you my opinions on this are real and they are anything but objective.
The reality of the right of a black woman on June 26, 1857 to "to eat the bread that she earned with her hands without asking leave of any one else", to quote Lincoln, was entirely real yet its reality was not held to be "objectively" real. It was denied by the law and society he was addressing after the appalling Dred Scott decision denied that black people had the rights of citizens, and, according to your framing, since the society slaves lived in did not agree, according to you her right didn't exist and Lincoln and she would have been deluded if they believed that she did have that right. I absolutely disagree, those rights were real if every single other person in the world, including Lincoln had said they weren't even if the woman, herself had been gulled into believing they weren't. They were always there because she was created by God in her image and given those rights by grace of that fact. I admit those rights and am glad of them, you deny they existed until society condescended to "create" them.
Sartre's "objective reality" (and he was as atheistic as he could be) was that, when one chooses a moral course, one chooses for all humankind. The choice you make, argued Sartre, must be available to everyone, and it must apply to everyone. The burden is that in making that choice, you decide what humankind is (this is true of Christian ethics, as well. Have all "sinned and fallen short of the glory of God"? Or are we all children of God? That small shift in emphasis can have profound effects on how you treat and, in Sartre's terms "create", humankind.)
ReplyDeleteIt is, for Sartre, a great burden, not a freedom from others. When you choose you choose for humankind, rather than for your own selfishness. I think it a much more objectively real stance than "You're not the boss of me!"
When the question is morality and the real consequences of it, the issue of if it works in real life is as important as any others. I don't think Sartre's scheme is even going to be understood by an effectively large number of people, never mind agreed to or put into practice. As I said, I think what happens in real life is the more impressive proof of the basis of a framing of morality, it is the real life consequences that demonstrate the reality of its theoretical basis, to put it in those terms. That is exactly the same kind of evidence and proof that supports much of science, does it work, it is exactly based in the same kind of human experience. If atheists are going to reject the direct experience of life and the observable lives of others, they're not going to be any more open to an atheist framing that they don't like.
ReplyDeleteI think the idea that atheism is a rejection of moral responsibilities also has the explanatory power for why so many atheists are such jerks, the kind of people who are inclined to be jerks would be the kind of people who were attracted to atheism on that basis. And I'm not pretending that the few nice atheists I've known are typical when just about every atheist I've encountered online, where they can really say what they want to without any consequences to themselves, are total jerks.
When the question is morality and the real consequences of it, the issue of if it works in real life is as important as any others. I don't think Sartre's scheme is even going to be understood by an effectively large number of people, never mind agreed to or put into practice.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I'm putting him up against the rank ignorance of those you reference, who think "morality" is something simple and easily discerned without needing any transcendence at all. Sartre eliminates the transcendent and is left with the crushing weight of responsibility. Your correspondents seem to think they can eliminate both, and your argument against them is: the end of that pursuit is tyranny, pure and simple.
Sartre's ethic really comes down to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," but he recognizes what a burden that is: without God, it means you are responsible for choosing what mankind is. So, do you choose to be Donald Trump? If so, you make the rest of the world in your image. Do you choose to be Ghandi? Again, you make the rest of the world in your image; but moreover, you are responsible for that image. Choose to be Dick Cheney, and the whole world is going to kill you if you don't kill them first. It's actually a pretty simple concept.
Mind, that's the basic idea of morality/ethics: responsibility for others. It is not a responsibility I've seen many people take up gladly, but your correspondents seem to think it doesn't exist at all because....well, I don't know why, except they just want to deny it.
Small wonder, that. I've known a lot of people who reject moral responsibilities, usually in the name of something that comes back around to: selfishness. I had a rather elaborate theory worked out in college, mostly on the back of the thought of W.H. Auden (Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world; or at least, too often, unacknowledged as serious moral agents; and moral agency has a great deal to do with the truly important questions, like "How should we then live?"), that was based on the idea that selfishness is the Original Sin.
I still think it makes a lot of sense; just as "sin" is a very valuable concept, though I try to see that more in the Jewish sense than the fundamentalist/Protestant sense (maybe all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but that should teach us humility and show us we are all children of God, not make us abject before the Preacher and the Elders).
That was the breakthrough in this brawl I documented here this week, for me. I will not pretend that I think it is possible for a society that doesn't really, truly believe that by God's grace we have equal rights and, also by God's grace, a moral obligation to respect those, will ever be anything but an oppressive, violent, cynical, dirty, nasty place to live and a danger to the entire world. I am done pretending that the handful of atheists I know who aren't jerks are typical of atheists who, through a tsunami of hate talk, bigotry, cynicism, advocacy of depravity and all else, have overwhelmingly shown themselves to the the typical result of atheism. Though, as I said, I think it is that jerks who don't like moral obligations place on them will tend to find their route to satisfaction through atheism.
ReplyDelete