re: Pornography is not conservative

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Have you met or run across a lot who are itching to be prostitutes, but for the illegality of it?


How is that relevant?

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Is it illegal because it is considered societally taboo or is it societally taboo because it's illegal?

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Because I don't just care about me. I'm in the business of saving souls and that doesn't just include my own.

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So is it purely your personal moral beliefs that we should codify, or is there another figure we should look to in order to make sure we get it right?

Since there is so much consensus across even Christian society on these issues, it shouldn't be difficult to draw the lines and get it all down. /s

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The core of conservatism is constitutionally limited government.

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The GOP claims to be for freedom of speech, economic liberty, and personal responsibility

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And yet the people that claim to be faithful to those ideals have conserved absolutely nothing and the degeneracy and rampant communism we see today from the left has gone largely unchecked by them.

They have allowed conservatism to be defined as having the highest GDP, the highest profits and helping big business cut costs as much as possible.

That's not conservatism. It's a morally bankrupt and cynical, frick you I got mine view of conservatism.

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No, it's a problem caused by evil

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What an utterly ridiculous take!

So, murder is evil. Does that mean people are automatically trafficked into the country and forced to become assassins?

Prostitute slaves can exist because prostitution is a black market industry. Without regulation or the ability to seek legal recourse without risk of themselves being imprisoned, prostitutes are at the mercy of their pimps. Black markets are ruled by force and risk. Legal markets are regulated, with inspections, accountability, and steps for redressing grievances. You can organize labor unions and collectively bargain. You can lobby the government. Legal prostitution would largely eliminate sex slavery and trafficking in the U.S.

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So is it purely your personal moral beliefs that we should codify

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These aren't MY personal moral beliefs. These are moral beliefs that we were founded upon, the moral beliefs that have guided us through almost 250 years, and the moral beliefs I just so happen to subscribe to. This is Christian morality and, despite what the Left would have you believe, the population makeup in this country is still majority Christian.

The degradation of morality in this country has led to where we are as a society in the present day. It's not the only thing that has led us here, but it's definitely a major cause.

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I’m pretty sure the evolutionary worldview is not “we are all pieces of crap”. The statement that life is just chemistry so all chemistry is equivalent to life is really dumb.

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Life vs. non-life doesn't matter in terms of objective, inherent value in an evolutionary, materialistic worldview. There simply is no basis for distinguishing value outside of personal, subjective assessment. People value inanimate objects more than human beings all the time, for instance.

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And for the record, I wasn’t calling you a piece of crap. I was saying if the only thing that prevents you (the hypothetical you that includes us all) from killing people is believing that there’s an invisible force watching you, than yeah, you (again not specifically you) are a piece of crap.

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I didn't think you were attacking me personally but I appreciate the clarification.

That said, you are making a value judgement when you say anyone is a piece of crap for thinking or doing something. You're essentially saying that they are acting immorally or are an immoral, maybe even "evil" person for those things. My point is that you have no basis for making a statement like that within your own worldview. All you can consistently do is say "I don't like that", but you can't condemn something as if it is objectively immoral or wrong. That's what I'm getting at.

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We have a society, man. We argue like this. We reach agreement. Those agreements are themselves subjective, but so are religious beliefs. And so what?

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The arbitrary (at their core) and subjective nature is the "so what". It's important for people to realize that they are acting inconsistently against their own presuppositions when they make definitive moral judgements. If people were consistent, they wouldn't judge anyone at all as being "immoral", but even if they wanted to be a little judgy, they couldn't judge anyone outside of their own cultural or political context. Americans would have no rational ability to condemn Muslim countries who throw homosexuals off of rooftops or the CCP for their slave labor or human rights violations. Those countries would be acting according to their own social contracts and according to their own arbitrary moral values just like we are.

We here in the West would have no ability to make a meaningful judgment or critique against them because morality would be reduced to opinion and preference, and one country that makes laws for one set of preferences isn't objectively any better or worse than any other country that determines their own laws according to their own sets of preferences. So if the preference of one society is to kill off everyone who resides in that society that is Jewish, or is homosexual, or is Christian, then who are we to condemn them?

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If you found out conclusively that god does not exist tomorrow, would you also no longer believe in the American way of life? Or everything you ever learned in your church for that matter? I don’t think you would. I think you’d still see numerous things of value in both, and much of what you didn’t like would remain the same as well.

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If I found out conclusively that God does not exist tomorrow, it would render all of the values and morals instilled in me moot. Sure, I can adhere to them going forward if I want to, but the point is that if God didn't exist, there would not be any possible objective moral standard and therefore whatever I believed would be ultimately arbitrary and subjective.

I'm not denying that atheists, for instance, can have moral preferences and convictions. What I'm saying is that they have no rational basis to believe that morality is objective within their own worldview, and therefore they have no rational basis for making definitive, objective moral claims or judgements. So when the atheist reads a report of children kidnapped and sold into the sex slave trade where many of them are murdered after years of being raped and dehumanized, they can't rationally say that behavior is "wrong". The best they can say is that they don't personally like that behavior because it makes them feel sick, gross, or uncomfortable. As a Christian, I can definitively say that it's morally wrong to kidnap, rape, and murder children because it's a violation of God's objective moral law or standard. But for the naturalistic atheist, what one animal does to another animal shouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things. I don't see them get up in arms over lions raping, murdering, and stealing from other lions or other animals in the wild.

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What are you talking about? You don’t think that people with different religious beliefs or no religious beliefs enjoy sensory input or being alive?

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What I'm talking about is having an objective, rational standard to be able to make sense of reality and make judgements within it. Knowledge, itself, relies on a universe that is consistent. We need to be able to trust our senses. We need to be able to be able to identify and make judgements about good and evil. We need some sort of standard for beauty. We need a standard for reason. We need a standard for morality. All of human relations requires certain things to be true for us for us to move about and make sense of what we perceive.

Your worldview reduces all things down to accidents happening within nature. Even the pleasure you speak of is just specific stimuli in the brain. There is no objective reason why pleasure, as we interpret it, is a good thing or a bad thing. We usually like pleasure, because it's something that makes us feel good, but there are a lot of people that get pleasure from hurting and destroying, so pleasure by itself is no standard for objective morality. People experience pleasure differently and pleasure is created in different ways by different people. Some people are disgusted by music, sports, oceans, and rivers. Our senses alone aren't good standards for what is right.

What I'm saying is that the atheist (or the theist, but the non-Christian) ultimately has to borrow truths that exist within the Christian/Biblical paradigm that cannot be accounted for otherwise. In other words, you have to presuppose God's existence in order to make sense of reality.

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Because it's sometimes necessary to step outside a theoretical bubble.

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Which is fine, but neither of your questions are relevant to the issue of whether prostitution should be illegal.

I take issue with the concept of government codifying religion because I would prefer not to live under the codes many religions would dictate. Government is a sword without a hilt. It will cut you just as easily as it can cut down your enemies, and your enemies can wield it against you just as effectively. I would not like to force my religious views on others because I would not want the religious views of others forced on me.

The beauty of liberty, separation of church and state, and freedom of religion is that everyone gets to practice their own religion on their own terms. Once religious groups hijack government to enforce their own moral codes, then politics merely becomes a game of hungry hungry hippos while each religion jockeys for power in order to suppress all of the other religions. That idea resulted in the 80 years war in Europe. I would like to avoid similar conflicts and the oppression which would accompany them.

Sure they are. The touch at the heart of the 'why' as to the illegality of such a thing. In the perfect theoretical libertarian world, of course one would say it should be across the board "legal." Sometimes it's necessary for even the perfect theoretical libertarian to acknowledge such a place does not exist and maybe there is a reason it doesn't in certain areas, or at least some might not should be the first priority.

There are innumerable perfectly legal 'wink and nod' avenues to "pay for sex." So, why do street walking hookers still exist? Do you really think it's only because prostitution is not "legal"?

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Sure they are. The touch at the heart of the 'why' as to the illegality of such a thing. In the perfect theoretical libertarian world, of course one would say it should be across the board "legal." Sometimes it's necessary for even the perfect theoretical libertarian to acknowledge such a place does not exist and maybe there is a reason it doesn't in certain areas, or at least some might not should be the first priority.

There are innumerable perfectly legal 'wink and nod' avenues to "pay for sex." So, why do street walking hookers still exist? Do you really think it's only because prostitution is not "legal"?

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Still not following you. They exist because there is a market for them to exist.

No clue what the second question is getting at. I don't think I said anything in particular was the reason prostitution was illegal beyond a general adherence to Victorian/Christian views on morality.