re: Pornography is not conservative

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Is it leftists posing as Conservatives?

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Probably, yes.

You know what? frick it, I believe in God now

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Here's our Conservative Big Tent Party:

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Agreed, lets kick out all the alcoholics, fatties, adulterers, people who've divorced for non abusive reasons, and non-Christians.

Anyone else you want to add to that list?

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More "concrete"? You're in here trying to play a poor man's Friedrich Nietzsche and you just made an appeal to the majority?

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For the purpose of forming a society with broad social norms, yes. The majority does rule. You can oppose the majority. Your opposition can move the majority to re-evaluate its position. But the majority at any given time will support the values that everyone in a given place hold sacred. There’s nothing controversial about that, even if I’d get dinged a point for doing it in high school debate club

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There’s nothing controversial about that,

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Apparently the majority of TP USA thought this woman should be disinvited. I don't know that they did the right thing, but it doesn't seem to be a non-event judging by this thread.

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Agreed, lets kick out all the alcoholics, fatties, adulterers, people who've divorced for non abusive reasons, and non-Christians.

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I think we should stone anyone who’s touched a football, as his hands are unclean.

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American political conservatism has nothing to do with religion.

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Aside from faithfully protecting the rights of believers to practice however they wish, I 100% agree. Your distinction between political conservatism and social conservatism is also spot on.

If I've learned anything in the first 19 pages of this thread it's that evangelical conservatives are resolute to die on the hill of social issues and reject the notion that morality can exist outside the teachings of the Christian bible. For example, this remark is objectively false:

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Without a belief in a transcendent moral order, there is no Constitution. You’re living on a vestigial tail of morality engrained from Judeo-Christian tradition and you don’t even know it.

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Among many other reasons, the Constitution was drafted as a rejection of King George III's claim to authority by virtue of the Divine Right of Kings (God).

Seems like a wasted opportunity to flesh out the issues where the interests of evangelical conservatives and the independent/centrist/moderate crowd actually do overlap, because without a voting block ally social conservatives aren't going to accomplish much of anything politically.

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Right there is no basis for distinguishing beyond subjective assessment which becomes more concrete the more people come to the same subjective conclusion.

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Consensus doesn't create truth, even moral truth. Your worldview precludes the notion of truth and the ability to know it if it existed.

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For instance, there’s broad disagreement in this thread about whether porn is bad but no disagreement about whether people matter more than shite.

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Disagreement or consensus doesn't make something moral or immoral on its own. There was a great deal of consensus centuries ago that black people could be enslaved against their will and forced into labor for the benefit of others. Today, in our society, we look at that and think it was immoral, yet according to your explanation, it wasn't immoral for them, because there was broad consensus at the time.

If the common person in Germany during Hitler's rule thought Jews were an evil plague on society, that was perfectly moral to think, and if the people generally agreed that they should be killed off, that, too, was perfectly moral in that context. A great number of people in America today have no problem thinking their political opposition should be killed off or imprisoned against their will for their ideas. If we came to a general consensus that such things were morally good, would the consensus make it so? All we need is a few more years or decades of indoctrination and we might just be there, but we shouldn't worry about it if we're on the losing end: as long as the consensus is OK with it, it'll be the moral thing to do.

Societal consensus, is, itself, an arbitrary standard for morality. Why is that better than decree from a dictator or religious leader, or picking some vices out of a hat or spinning a wheel? Objective morality is important because without it, literally anything can be deemed moral in the right circumstances, and if anything can be moral, nothing is moral, which is why I said this view reduces morality to nothing more than personal preference.

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I can’t believe I have to say this but life matters more than non-life because we are alive, and human life matters more than other kinds of life because we are human. For that matter, American lives matter more than lives elsewhere because we are American. It’s the broad consensus that matters.

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Why does being alive matter more? What's the standard you are using to make that moral determination? Or, are you just providing me your own opinion on the matter? Because if it's just your own opinion, then you shouldn't have to act befuddled that I don't know your own, personal opinion about the matter.

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I can make whatever value judgements I want without an “objective morality”, just like you can.

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Thank you for confirming that value judgements are entirely subjective in your worldview. I'm still waiting for you to agree that all personal value judgements are equal on their face.

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In fact, I might be at greater liberty to make value judgements than you because they are my own. There’s no force out there that I am trying to impress.

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I'm not trying to impress, either, but that's beside the point. Feeling like we are at liberty to make a value judgement isn't the point. Being consistent between our judgements and our worldviews, is the point. You have no rational basis for calling anything objectively evil (for the sake of condemnation) while I at least have that possibility within my worldview.

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Now it’s true that you’ve got the advantage once we move to the society level which relies on mass consensus because religion helps move people. That said, we are capable of mass consensus on things without religion. 50 years ago it was common to throw trash out your car window while you drive down the road. Obviously there are anti-littering laws, but if they were removed tomorrow no one would throw trash out their window who wasn’t already doing it. A consensus that this is a shitty thing to do has been reached without any appeals to objective morality.

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Again, I'm not saying people can't make up their own standards of morality without religion. I'm saying that those who make up a standard apart from an objective moral standard (God) are being arbitrary and irrational, especially when they try to force their own personal preferences on others. Just imagine if a majority of people who liked the color red started hunting down and killing people that liked other colors? That's where we are with morality when we reduce it to personal preference like your worldview has to do.

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You seem really hung up on things needing to be objectify. It is enough that I was raised in this culture and prefer it. When I look at another culture I can say, woah that’s fricked up. And they say the same things looking at us. To say that all cultures are judged by the same objective standard is a neocon delusion that’s cost tons of American lives and treasure.

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Objective moral reasoning is necessary to not be arbitrary, and therefore, irrational. It's fine if you have a personal preference for certain actions over others and want to call that your moral standard, but you have no rational basis to hold anyone else to your moral standard because you cannot identify a "true" moral standard to hold others to. Like I've said a few times now, your opinion is just that, and it's no better or worse than anyone else's opinions because they aren't based on truth.

Ironically, you seem to be condemning the "neocon delusion" while claiming that morality is based on consensus. If consensus says that we have the right to impose our morality on others, why can't we? Why is that a delusion? Aren't you proposing that morality is nothing but consensus?

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That’s incredibly sad.

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Again, you seem to be making a value judgement with that short statement, to which I can retort: "so what?"

Who cares if you think that's sad? Your opinion, in your worldview, is just that: an opinion

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What’s wrong with enjoying things that bring me pleasure? If someone is getting pleasure hurting other people in a way that is not condoned by society’s consensus, they get punished. If they are hurting people in a way society condones they are left alone regardless of whether they take pleasure in it or not. Think of abortion. Or how we gleefully celebrated torture a decade ago.

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And yet people get punished for doing "good" all the time. People get rewarded for doing "evil" all the time, too. This illustrates the ridiculousness of your own arbitrary standard. Clearly it's "moral" to lie, cheat, and steal in D.C. because that's the consensus there and you get rewarded for it. At the same time, it's immoral to tell the truth, play by the rules, and only take what belongs to you because that isn't the consensus in D.C., and you get punished for those actions.

But more to your point here: in your worldview, there can't be anything objectively wrong with enjoying things that bring you pleasure, because objective "wrongness" doesn't exist. Within the objective Christian paradigm, it's wrong to do that which gives you pleasure if the thing you are doing violates God's standard of righteousness.

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The two biggest scientific theories that explain all of reality are Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and they don’t speak to each other. The idea that we can make sense of reality is just one more human delusion.

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And yet we live our lives being able to make sense of reality, at least in a sense. I'm saying you wouldn't be able to even know if you can make sense of reality if God didn't exist because He is the source for all knowledge, reasoning, morality, beauty, etc.

pr0n is definitely not conservative.

but it is libertarian.

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I'm saying you wouldn't be able to even know if you can make sense of reality if God didn't exist...

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The three classical laws of thought are self evident, no God needed. Once you have anything it's reasonability is baked in by virtue of simply existing.

Hell those laws even apply to "nothing".

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He is the source for all knowledge, reasoning, morality, beauty, etc.

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He's only the transcendent source for good things, though, right?