Yuku free message boards

LanDroid: Consider that religious morals change over time....
Consider that many religious morals are in conflict...
Consider that modern societies reject many religious morals....

I don't see how any of those three points serve to undermine my suggestion that a religious framework may be necessary in the creation of morals. Until someone can demonstrate the development of moral systems apart from the conceptual premises provided by religion, it remains an open question. I would not, as yet, argue that a secular society is incapable of asserting standard codes of behavior, but it seems to me that those are likely to stand only as the writ of law, which differs in a number of key respects from morality.

lawrenceindestin: If that is true, then she places the thrust of her argument on her "belief" that there is some magical ether out there named human reason and logic that is so beautiful and accurate she is astounded that clear thinking people could not see its wisdom except they are blinded by the dogma of organized religion.

Interesting point. While I'm not reading the Jacoby book, I have been reading a great deal lately about the development of the Enlightenment attitude concerning reason, and it has become clear to me that Reason came to mean something during that period which it had not meant in previous eras. Our society is still tracing a trajectory more or less congruent to that charted by the Enlightenment redefinition of Reason.

LanDroid: That's OK, I really didn't expect you to see it...

I'm a pretty dense guy. Maybe you should explain.


Me: Until someone can demonstrate the development of moral systems apart from the conceptual premises provided by religion, it remains an open question.
LD: The U.S. has done so.

Not hardly. U.S. legality, which is, again, a thing apart from morality, is still based on the framework of moral and legal codes that were in place long before the European discovery of the New World and which were widely considered, at the time of the Declaration of Independence, universal or innate. Since that time the notion of innate or universal standards for human concept has been so decayed as to remain untenable. What has arisen in its place is a recognition that the morality of most modern cultures stands on a foundation established by the cultures from which it has developed -- in a broad sense, from the whole development of Western civilization, including the religious influences throughout. Until there is an attempt to refound the moral concepts that lay at root in any modern cultural unit on a thoroughly secular foundation, the suspicion that those moral concepts are actually dependent on latent, possibly forgotten, religious trains of thought ought to remain firm. I can understand why that notion would meet with a hostile reaction among atheists, but to my mind it's simply a matter of historical development.

To frame the concept along different lines, imagine a mathematical argument founded on the supposition that D=c+e. The argument develops from there into increasing levels of sophistication, until it eventually arrives at an interesting and useful conclusion. Later examination, however, reveals that the foundational supposition, D=c+e, is unusable for one reason or another -- either because the mathematicians have the strong suspicion that it is not true or because use of that particular formula makes possible certain perceived "misuses" of the argument. Once we've excluded D=c+e, we find that our entire argument is left simply floating in mid-air, as it were; it has no foundation, and while we may still make some use of the conclusions at the far end, we have no justification for asserting their truth because the argument is missing some crucial steps. It's necessary either to find a new basis on which to settle the more advanced portions of the argument -- which may also lead necessarily to a revision of the upward portions of the argument -- or to lapse into a kind of mysticism that says, even though we cannot link the conclusion to the premises, we affirm the truth of our argument as a matter of sheer will.

That appears to me to be more or less the case with so-called secular morality. It essentially takes whichever conclusions of a religious-based morality it deems good and upholds them. In doing so, it has largely ignored the need for a new understructure, nor has it considered the likelihood that even the "good" that guided the decision of which morals to retain is founded on a latent religious conception of the world.

A secular Gov't is necessary to prohibit the genocide required to enforce "Thou shalt have no other Gods before me."

How does that commandment require genocide in its enforcement? Even historically, that's not so, as Jews have lived in any number of other religious contexts and have allowed persons of other faith to live within their own. There are, of course, examples in the Hebrew scripture of war and genocide against other nations and faiths, but those were typically fitted to the commandment after the fact -- I'm not aware of any instances of Israelite-committed genocide that extended directly from obedience to the First Commandment. (Plug: check out the Bible thread in the Additional Book Discussions forum; we're getting started soon.)

For that matter, why do you think that it's exclusion from the U.S. legal code means that it's no longer a part of the majority morality in America? The latest statistic that I've seen has roughly 84% of Americans polled claiming to be Christian. Morality may be reflected in part in the legal sanctions of a nation, but never in whole.

As I mentioned before, religious morality changes over time also. Later in the book, you'll read the following.

Again, I don't understand what the mutability of morality has to do with my argument. I've argued all along that morality is the product of social forces and individual consideration. That naturally makes it subject to change. My argument has nothing to do with the supposed universality or eternal nature of morality asserted by some. My point is that morality stands on the foundation of concepts that developed in religious thought, even if the connections between the two is sometimes obscured by further developments in thought. And it's unlikely that I'll read more about anything further along in the book -- I'm not reading it.

Consider the Golden Rule is a secular moral, it makes no appeal to supernatural authority.

It also makes no explicit reference to its underpinnings. When faced with a question -- why? -- the Golden Rule immediately becomes problematic as a moral precept. Its historical antecedents were founded in religious thought, and it strikes me as highly likely that the Golden Rule is susceptible to the criticism that I logged before: that it was adopted by secular culture with little consideration as to its relation to its religious underpinnings, nor as to how it should be substantiated by secular thought only. The easiest way to substantiate it from a secular point of view is to take it as merely irreducible, that is, as reasonable, without any appeal to reason -- in other words, without really substantiating it. When that's the case, it becomes difficult to provide any argument for why we should take the Golden Rule as a moral superior to any other "morality" you might posit as from a wholly secular viewpoint -- from the social Darwinian maxim that we ought to act in the interest of our competing genes, for instance.