|
OwlFancier posted:It also requires a rejection of the idea that there is anything to the world beyond the observable and material. Which is an idea you have been exposed to if you live basically anywhere on earth. No, it doesn't. I believe there's a lot to the world that isn't observable or material, I'm just not arrogant enough to say with certainty what it is. quote:It is a decision, insomuch as anything is a decision, to construct your entire worldview based on material perception, which most definitely is a belief system, it is simply based on a different reference than a religious one. You dense motherfucker. quote:Secular laws use materialist concepts of empathy, compassion and reason. Secularism, by excluding all non-materialistic positions, is by necessity a materialist position. you dense loving motherfucker jesus christ
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 06:39
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 1, 2024 21:35 |
|
|
Nude Bog Lurker posted:"i support helping the needy because i think it is nice" = good, correct thought yeah, it's pretty objectively bad. if the only reason you help people is because of fear, you are a bad person.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 06:48
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:If you want to argue that materialism is more correct than spriritualism I'm not going to argue, but I do require that you recognize that that is a relative position, just because I agree with it doesn't make it absolute. materialism as a philosophical framework is not, in any universe, equatable to religion. they are not equal things, they do not relate to each other or oppose each other. you have decided that they are opposing forces apropos of nothing, and you have no supporting argument for this except "it is so". moreover, materialism as a monism hasn't been relevant since the mid 40s. the discovery of quantum mechanics renders the traditional concept of it meaningless. you're demanding that your opponents adopt a necessarily reductivist viewpoint so that your argument makes sense. it doesn't.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 07:14
|
|
|
NikkolasKing posted:Isn't that a rather sticky moral issue? Like, if you do nothing but help people all your life, how can you be a bad person? Because in postmodern society, religious beliefs are relatively fragile. People pass in and out of them all the time, convert to this or that, or decide they don't believe in them at all anymore. Everyone has an inherent, primal, secular understanding of themselves and the world, to which religion is sometimes added like a pair of tinted glasses. If rules like "don't harm other people if you can help it" are based entirely on the religious part, and not understood as inherent, what happens when you lose or change your religion? Whenever I hear things like "how would people know how to behave without religion" it scares the crap out of me. It's a viewpoint that treats everyone as a sociopath, and religion as the only cure for that condition. It leads me to the obvious assumption that the person making the argument would gladly murder a bus full of nuns if they ever had a crisis of faith.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 07:35
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:From a consequentialist perspective you literally aren't. Well, it's a good thing I'm not a consequentialist then. Why do you keep arguing through first-semester philosophical constructs?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 16:45
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Again the only way that rule based ethics works is if you believe in something other than observable reality This is an inherently baseless, absurd claim that you haven't provided any argument for whatsoever.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 16:55
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:What do you propose is the basis for caring about the immaterial intent of the actor over the effects of their actions? I have no idea what you're trying to express with that turd of a sentence, but empathy and socialisation are inherent traits in a lot of warm-blooded species, humans included. It is not a learned behavior, and does not require religion or a philosophical framework to exist. Raccoons demonstrate cooperative planning, altruism, parent-child attachment and social cognition. I'm pretty sure raccoons have neither a concept of god, nor the Intro to Philosophy concepts you're regurgitating in this thread.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 19:01
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:And while I would concur that a conscious commitment towards material good is a good basis for ensuring materially good actions, the context of the initial question was whether or not someone who does materially good things is a good person or not, based on their method of arriving at those actions. The obvious issue is that if the positive intent of the person doing good things is based entirely on an intellectual construct and not inherent empathy, that necessarily implies that if that construct were to change or be dismantled, the person would be capable of monstrous acts. If a homicidal sociopath has created an intellectual strategy for dealing with their condition, it's entirely fair to remain extremely wary around them. They may become a "good person", until their strategy lapses or changes and all hell breaks loose. They are not inherently good. They are evil, wallpapered over. quote:Which, again, is a profoundly silly way of looking at it from a materialist point of view. Literally nobody is arguing from a materialist point of view, and you're not using this term correctly in any case. Stop arguing against outdated, irrelevant constructs.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 19:16
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:That's completely absurd, if I took your mind apart and replaced your values with other values then you would also become destructive... Unless you believe in some sort of good or evil soul that's assigned to you at birth then people are as they affect the world. Which part of this is confusing for you? Empathy as an inherent, evolved human trait, or the concept of sociopathy as an aberrant condition?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 19:52
|
|
|
Patrick Spens posted:Okay, but empirically religious people donate more of their time and money to charity than non-religious people, so religious belief in fact leads to more good actions. Empirically, religious people donate more of their time and money to churches, which are less efficient than secular charities and often use those resources to campaign against human rights.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 20:31
|
|
|
Please stop getting sucked into B5's endless holy war against perceived threats to his ego. Please, please just put him on ignore, he will go away. This was a not-terrible thread before he showed up and we can turn it around if we believe hard enough.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2017 00:47
|
|
|
Confounding Factor posted:It's odd, I don't like B5's condescending pompous tone but I think he is right about the distinctions between religion and science (I agree with Gould, and Popper to an extent). I think science and religion are doing two completely different things that have their own domains of knowledge. It's nice to see some nuance rather than the same ol Dawkins/Harris dull-witted atheism that gets plugged on boards. When scientists try to philosophize it is disastrous. I agree, this is an important central point. I have a hard time with scientists who get suckered into the "science is its own religion" debate, since it's never presented in good faith to begin with. I wonder how you define an atheist if protestant practice is a disqualifier? I grew up a reform jew and realized I was an atheist in my early teens. My rabbi basically said "there's no conflict of interest between jewish culture and atheism, that's sort of the point of the midrash." I would imagine more progressive protestantism might have the same kind of view, but I know very little about how that would work.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2017 02:51
|
|
|
rudatron posted:But scopes wasn't able to bridge that gap, he lacked the self-awareness and understanding of ideology and philosophy to coherently formulate his opposition. So he was still stuck in the anti-evolution stance. Even if you take his stance and run with it, you then have to argue that erasing the concept of evolution from social consciousness is A: possible and B: an effective means to avoid social darwinism. I'm not sure I can find a very good argument for either.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2017 02:55
|
|
|
Cingulate posted:Don't you think this kind of thought - forcing people not only to abstain from damaging the community, but forcing people to actively contribute to the good of society, has a really bad track record? This is an extremely common capitalist narrative that also happens to be a lie. You can point to plenty of governments that have A: created legal obligation to contribute to societal good at the expense of personal wealth, and B: become totalitarian hellscapes. The problem is that correlation is not causation, and for every "slippery slope" you can find, I can respond with a very pleasant northern european democracy that's doing just fine, thank you. Current problems with social democracy have everything to do with failing to adapt to globalization and nothing to do with some inherent flaw in the concept of the welfare state.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2017 20:16
|
|
|
Cingulate posted:Then I will be a bit stronger here: I think the ideologies that were not guided by a spirit of being very careful when forcing citizens to actively contribute to the good of society have a very bad track record. Societies which place strict limitations here have a much better track record: that is, societies which try to find a balance between individual liberties and the community. And considering how extremely, tens of million dead, bad the history of totalitarian regimes is, I think we should be extremely careful to not err too much into that direction. You're still making the assertion that mandating participation in a welfare state has a causal relationship to totalitarianism, but you haven't provided any evidence to support that idea. Every state forces citizens to actively contribute to the good of society. That is a fundamental aspect of what government is. Does every government trend toward totalitarianism?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2017 21:09
|
|
|
Cingulate posted:Not Jesus' words. Also, there's probably a bunch of context. I assume this was aimed at slaves within Roman cities, whose lives were often fairly decent. You're really, really, really stretching here. There was no evidence whatsoever that there was any such thing as a popular abolitionist movement in the time of Jesus. There's equally no reason whatsoever to think that Jesus or any of his disciples would have been a abolitionists, or thought of slavery as anything other than a fact of life. Slaves show up in the background of just about every book in the New Testament. They're disposable, they suffer beatings, they're killed with no consequence, and there is no moral commentary on any of this that could possibly be interpreted as an argument against slavery on moral terms. Ephesians 6:5-8 - Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ Corinthians 3:22-24 - Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. Timothy 6:1-2 - Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the teaching may not be blasphemed. Peter 2:18 - Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh. I mean, come on. Slavery is not "tacitly tolerated" by ancient Christianity, it's explicitly defined and enforced.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 12, 2017 00:38
|
|
|
coyo7e posted:Like on "Black Jeopardy" You have got to be loving kidding me.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2017 06:00
|
|
|
magnavox space odyssey posted:Well, exactly. You can't prove something using itself, that's my point. You can't use science to prove science, this is an inherent flaw in it. So there's assumptions in it that someone, if they want to be confrontational about it, can say equals "faith". Why is it important to "prove" the scientific method? What would that proof look like? What does the lack of proof imply, for you?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2017 00:52
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:There's something pretty loving wrong with someone who, when faced with a capitalist and a charitable person, complains that the charitable person is just enabling the capitalist. NOBODY IS MAKING THE ARGUMENT THAT CHARITABLE PEOPLE ARE BAD.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2017 21:09
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:If all it takes to be a leftist is to ignore the unfortunate in hopes that the revolution will happen and help them, that's loving laughable. ok, let's do this one more time even though you're going to ignore this post and keep railing against your strawman: Charitable people are not bad. Charity itself is not inherently bad. A society structured so that poor and working class people have to rely on charity to survive is bad. Arguing that charity is as valuable and good as creating a society where it isn't necessary is bad. As long as a secular, democratic social safety net exists, there's nothing wrong with charity. If that safety net does not exist, charity only papers over the intrinsic societal problem.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2017 23:26
|
|
|
zh1 posted:What are you a tankie?? Are you some kind of communotard? Everything is the same and nothing is meaningful. Allow me to spin what I think is some kind of web but is just nakedly desperate flailing from someone who doesn't even know the terms they're trying to argue. Well sure, but you see, from a materialist perspective...
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2017 23:30
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 1, 2024 21:35 |
|
|
Potato Salad posted:Is the Christian Conservative mainstream in the US hostile to humanity? I can't imagine an argument for anything other than an unqualified "yes".
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2017 23:59
|
|