Ultraconservatives pretend homophobia/racism doesn't exist

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We don't live in a totally secular society. We have to share the world with each other.

"He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees." - Benjamin Franklin

Thats correct I don't know of any secular society, But our government is secular so you should give up on trying to force religious morals into law. and if your American you should really know better its kind of un-American to inject religious principles into our countries law.

The problem is that modern atheists - at least those with any philosophical education - aren't vulgar empiricists and use a host of epistemic tools to mitigate the a priori probability of a Cosmic Santa Claus.

Oh, I get so tired of this trope. Morality exists because humans are social animals; those of us with reasonably normal wiring - including us aspies - have no *desire* to kill someone. The very idea makes our throats clench and our stomachs rile, not because of some god but because of the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution which hammered into us that we should try to get along with our fellow humans and that being kicked out of the group means a solitary death.

There's also the little fact that the monotheist god commands genocide on occasion*; is anything moral, as long as someone says that a god commanded it?

*not to mention dozens of other acts considered immoral by today's standards

I agree with this, LKL. But why not follow this logic further? If you do, you will come to an evolutionary explanation for what it today pathologised as "racism".

People evolved in groups, clans, tribes and (later) nations. Morality evolved to regulate the behaviour of individuals within their group because it was recognised that the survival and health (and genetic continuity) of each individual in the group was tied up with the survival and health (and genetic continuity) of the group as a whole. So morality evolved because it was biologically adaptive.

But when the same "moral code" is extended outwards to cover the entire population of the planet, it becomes maladaptive.
Groups practising "universal morality" will be ultimately outcompeted by groups practising particularist morality.

I never said that Atheists are animals. However, if God doesn't exist where do we get our rights as human beings from?

Rights? If I shoot a man does whether or not I have the right to shoot him matter? The rights we have our given today by our government. The only time we don't have the right to do something is when someone with power convinces us that we don't have that right. Rights are an imaginary construct(of human invention) and only come into play when people need to interact with each other while not oppressing each other. God doesn't give us any rights I don't even understand why you would think he does.

Last edited by ikorack on 08 Nov 2010, 5:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

So if Government gives you your rights then government can take them away. Then by that logic the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence aren't worth the paper they are printed on.

How so? By that logic they have nothing to take away. Also since it worked they are worth the value our nation gives them that is too say they affect an innumerable amount of people. To say that an illusion is worthless just because its an illusion is foolish.

Indeed.

And in much the same way, illusory value is the 'substance' of a monetary economy.

This starts as a good point - that our evolved morality is tribal - but the idea that extending our morality to cover all of humanity is 'maladaptive' ignores the fact that we no longer live in small tribes. Thankfully, humans also have the intellectual capacity to think about morality and to allow logic to influence what we consider moral.

I agree with the sentiment here, though I would argue that 'nothing could be considered wrong without a concept of objective morality'.




This is contingent on some assumptions

1) That social evolution can be considered evolution. This essentially infers a philosophical viewpoint onto a scientific principle. The fact that the scientific viewpoint is correct, does not mean that the philosophy is equally unchallengeable.

2) That objective morality does not exist.

Objective morals exist and are not contingent on our believing in them. One such objective value is the concept of people having intrinsic values (something that exists as simply an end in itself). If one does not hold that human have intrinsic values, then then people would have extrinsic value (something that must have an purpose to justify its existence), otherwise people have no value. According to St. Augustine we should love people and use things. Without recourse to objective morality there is not way of saying acting in the inverse is wrong.

If our values exist as part of some developed herd mentality then someone who goes against the those values cannot be described as wrong. At best one can argue that the action has no social use, but this simply qualifies the action as unfashionable.

I encourage you to investigate the concept of memes, social r/k selection, etc.


There is no objective human worth outside of human beliefs. A leopard or a white shark will not pass up munching on a human just because he's a human; the vacuum of space will kill a human astronaut just as quickly as it would a canine one (yes, I do know that Laika did not die by vacuum). The universe is completely indifferent to humanity, to the exact same degree that it is completely indifferent to any other collection of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and other atoms.


Only if one assumes that herd mentality has no value. Humans make human values, and as humans we view the things that we believe and the things that we create as important. A white shark won't give a damn if you murder your neighbor, but your other human neighbors will.

I have read Dennett's work on the subject of memes. The fact you have mentioned them kind of indicates my point. Dennett is a philosopher, not a scientist and his work on the subject can at best be described as evolutionary psychology or sociology.



This argument begs too many questions and so I will leave it for another place and time. Suffice to say this position has been discredited by the Teleological Argument from Fine-tuning.



Your argument proves my argument. If the naturalist argument is to be true, it becomes impossible to condemn anything for being anything other than useless. Not everything that is useless is wrong. Some action, say, incest, may not be biologically or socially advantageous and so in the course of human evolution has become taboo; but there is on the subject view nothing really wrong about committing incest. If, as Kurtz states, “The moral principles that govern our behavior are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion'.

This view becomes unsustainable is it is contingent of the predication that it is within the social self-interest to adopt a moral life-style. But this is clearly not the case, since we can all imagine situations where self-interest runs counter to morality. If someone is sufficiently powerful to avoid social pressure, for instance a dictator then it is clearly not in their self-interest to be moral. Historian Stewart C. Easton put it best when he stated “There is no objective reason why man should be moral, unless morality ‘pays off’ in his social life or makes him ‘feel good.’ There is no objective reason why man should do anything save for the pleasure it affords him.”

Dennett is not the originator of the idea, nor is he the sole authority; Dawkins (an evolutionary biologist) coined the term, 'meme.'


BS. The fine-tuning argument works just as well - better, in some ways - for the argument that the universe was created for white sharks. The entire idea that a universe which is >99.99% inimical to human life is 'fine-tuned for humans' is just laughable.


Again, you're being either disingenuous or foolish. Incest is wrong because it leads to birth defects due to the decrease in heterozygosity of the offspring, and as such we have evolved natural subjective aversions to it.


Funny how dictators tend to be immoral, sort of proving my point.
We are moral because we are social, and there are social consequences to being immoral; remove those consequences, and only the vestiges of hard-wired morality remain.

Using your own arguments how are they immoral? Who determines that they are immoral. By your own argument, whomever has gold makes the rules so to speak. The dictator in their own minds probably don't think they are evil.