re: Bill Barr makes the Intellectual Case Against secularism

I agree those are the only universal truths.

Regardless, I don’t think we will ever agree on the realities of our understanding, nor do we need to. I respect your opinions here and appreciate the discourse.

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That is a hell of a mischaracterization of philosophical Pragmatism (as in the movement, which is where my mind goes).

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Perhaps I'm not explaining myself clearly. I'm talking about the philosophical implications of moral pragmatism.

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Written by men.

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Written down by men. It's the revelation of God to man.

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Also, you’re suggesting that because god revealed his truth to us, that truth itself transcends our limits. Otherwise, if “we can understand it”, our understanding is categorically subject to human limits, which includes insurmountable levels of subjectivity.

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Not at all. You're assuming that God has to take something away from the truth so we can understand it. No, He created us with the ability to understand truth. We do have limitations but the truth, itself, as it comes from God, is still the truth and not some watered down version of it to meet our limitations.

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Perhaps I'm not explaining myself clearly. I'm talking about the philosophical implications of moral pragmatism.

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Pragmatism in the philosophical sense refers almost exclusively to American Pragmatism. The ethical component of that Pragmatism would endorse something like a means-tested approach to morality, as in what works in practice is how you should frame ethical concerns. Nothing you've stated reflects that definition, though I suspect if you read the Pragmatists, you'd find yourself agreeing with them on how a society develops its morality, as it still relies on aspects of faith to determine interpersonal and societal morality.

I think you are more closely describing a utilitarian approach to morality, but even then it's not a neat category. The Utilitarian approach to morality would be how to act in a situation which would benefit the most amount of people, while the Pragmatic approach would assess the normative truth of a statement, in terms of how it is practiced (hence the pragmatic appellation). The Pragmatic effect on modern ethics is much smaller than other philosophical movements, and has only recently gained currency in certain fields, like bioethics (which has led to a lot of means-tested changes to patient care, for example).

Perhaps you could describe what you mean, avoiding key words that happen to be philosophical movements themselves, so we could avoid the overlap.

It seems you want to talk about the implications of repeatedly choosing the subjective over the objective, but I'm not exactly sure.

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I don’t believe we’re living in the most peaceful and prosperous time in human history because of religion. We’re doing that with advances in medicine, communication, and education.

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Those aren't mutually exclusive. I believe the Judeo/Christian worldview has provided the basis for such advances regardless of the personal religious beliefs of the individuals that helped with those advances.

My position is that only the Christian worldview provides the preconditions of intelligibility necessary to make sense of the world in a way that allows for such advances. In essence, the evolutionary atheist has to borrow from the Christian worldview to justify his use of the scientific method. It's a philosophical argument as much as it is a theological one.

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I get that you want to take this in a philosophical route with the infinitely regressive “objective truth” debate, but I’d argue that we have an innate understanding of right and wrong and they most approximate good and bad as it relates to human well-being.

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My point is that there is no basis for objective morality without God and that the "innate understanding of right and wrong" actually comes from the moral law of God being written onto the hearts and minds of humans who are made in the image of God.

It seems you want to forego the very basis of the discussion: does objective morality exist and if so, where does it come from, and if it doesn't, what are the implications?

I'm simply stating that without God there is no objective basis for morality and without an objective basis or standard for morality, morality itself is reduced to nothing but arbitrary preference. Whether that preference is agreed upon collectively by society or not is irrelevant because ultimately it is still nothing more than a preference. That means there is no basis to condemn one preference over another. A society ruled by selfish greed and lust where murder and rape are a normal part of every day life is just as morally "good" as a collaborative and altruistic society because each society can determine for itself which way it wants to live. While we think we're so sophisticated in the West, we would have no moral basis for condemning the societies in the Middle East who treat women and homosexual poorly, for example.

We have to get to the root of what morality is and where it comes from or else everything we praise or condemn in terms of morality is meaningless and can be responded to simply with a "so what?"

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that their horrific treatment was justified by the nation as a whole because they believed it was in the best interest of the nation to do so.

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But the Nazi's never got more than 30% of the vote, never a majority of the vote until all parties were banned. And that doesn't belie my point that the example would still be utilitarian in any discussion of moral philosophy.

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. The society as a whole (the majority) is a reflection of the wants/needs of the individuals within it. Societal survival is the survival of the individuals within that society. Therefore, what "works" for the individual is typically what "works" for society, but it's more or less what "works" for the majority within a given society. The minority may be excluded from this as their wants or needs may not be as important as the wants and needs of the majority within society.

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You're discussing utilitarianism again. While evolution has clearly delineated rules on what works for individuals in an environment, namely anything that can maximize their reproduction, there haven't been similar rules developed for societies for numerous reasons. But post-agrarian industrial societies have been anything but stable, seeing how they survive. If the goal of a society is to survive unchanged, or to survive at all, the societies that have done so are isolated populations which have social structures unchanged for millennia, and to avoid agriculture. No other human society could match that level of societal fitness.

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If all you care about is survival, you can justify a lot of "immorality" behavior to achieve that goal.

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My point is that the justifications for immorality in smaller societies, such as the ones humans evolved in and for, are not the same justifications one can use in a population-dense societies. Maybe our thinking hasn't evolved with regards to larger societies, but let's take this case. In a society of early humans, a birth defect in an infant would make the group weaker by virtue of the fact that they could not sustain the needed resources to extend that infant's life. The stretching of resources has a real effect. It might be immoral in numerous sense, but it might also be necessary for the survival of the larger group.

The manipulation of that sense might be an explanation of how minority groups can be targeted, but the ramifications of the use of resources to target minority groups has practically different effects in large-scale industrial societies. My point is that there comes a point in human society where not targeting a perceived obstacle is more beneficial to the societal fitness than targeting it, by virtue of the different resource considerations. In that sense, societal fitness requires a different set of imperatives in each case, as there is hardly a society that targeted minority members that did not suffer some serious backlash which hastened the fundamental change of that society itself.

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I'm happy to revise my statements to pertain to utilitarianism rather than philosophical pragmatism

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My point that these words have meanings and histories with regard to moral philosophy and those meanings are important. I know you are using the words in a colloquial sense, but even moral philosophers themselves use these words in their academic sense, so as to avoid confusion with their colloquial sense.

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I'm trying to point out that secular philosophy cannot provide obligation for moral behavior and reduces morality to subjective preference enforced by "might makes right" whereby the society or the leaders within a particular society determine the moral standards which can change from majority to majority or leader to leader.

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The broad brush strokes you are using isn't helping you be understood. Which secular philosophy says this, specifically? Which philosopher reduces morality to subjective preference above all else? Even the major philosophers of the 20th century, who are derided as "post-modernists" don't approach morality or ethics this way at all. I thinking you're giving far too much credit to the power of philosophy, honestly, and are using it as the scapegoat for a variety of societal ills that you perceive.

But what if the desire for "might makes right" was independent of any notion of "secular" philosophy? In this sense, regardless of the prevailing moral framework of the time period, rulers and societies always seek post hoc justifications for their behavior. It isn't as though people in the past, even before the schisms that led directly to notions of secularization, were particularly good, nor were their socialites particularly well-functioning. The notion that the 'strong conquer the weak' has existed since antiquity in some variation or another. Namely its prevalence isn't due to secularization, modernization, or particular readings of moral philosophy.

[quote]Attorney General Bill Barr: "This is not decay. This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion & traditional values."[/quote]

THIS

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Only his religion is. The other religions are just wrong due to the self-evident truth of the bible, obviously.

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Correct. Upvoted.