re: Pornography is not conservative

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Conservatism is based on the ideals of maximum freedom and personal responsibility and therefore, as limited a government as possible, with government existing almost exclusively to provide military defense and provide law enforcement and courts and generally protect citizen's rights.

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If this is conservative, it's a very new phenomenon

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This is as far as I'm going to wade into the morality topic.

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You said something earlier about finding common ground and for political pragmatism I don’t disagree. However, common ground is difficult when any issue of morality boils down to “morals that secular humanists believe in are ok to codify, but if Christians believe in something that’s at odds with secular humanism then it’s off the table because the Constitution says so.” The majority is fine when they have it, when they don’t the courts are supposed to step in.

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Pornography destroys families

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So does alcohol should conservatives be for prohibition too?

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It does for practical purposes which is what we need to do business with each other and get through our lives.

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If I may contribute, no it doesn't. That's not truth, it's just a majority societal agreement. Society has agreed upon some obviously untrue stuff throughout history.

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So if there was an objective truth there, we didn’t get it from Christianity.

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But that's not the argument. The argument isn't "What Christians do and say at any given time is the objective truth of morality." That might literally never have been the case...maybe during the time of Acts...maybe not even then. Christianity itself doesn't even claim that.

The argument is that without a transcendent moral absolute there is no such thing as objective morality. God as commonly conceived in modern times would qualify as a transcendent moral absolute or authority, although it might not be the only conception that is legitimate.

But you have to have one of those or morality is no more meaningful than simple preference. Such as, I like vanilla ice cream rather than chocolate.

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I like your idea of objective truth to a point, but if it exists, it doesn’t appear to be something we have any access to or consensus on.

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Basically the argument you're making is that because we don't have perfect access, we have none. This is a fallacy. Using the Christian perspective (again, not the only one that may apply), one is freely taught that there will be things beyond a finite human perspective that we cannot understand. But that doesn't mean no moral principles may be understood. I think there's a pretty strong consensus that murder is wrong. And child-rape. And theft. I could go on. And yeah, there are even exceptions to those general rules, but not many.

The problem is that without a real objective moral standard, morality doesn't mean anything. Even if you have 100% consensus. Not about right and wrong, anyway. You could define it in terms of being rewarded by society for doing this and punished for doing that, but that has nothing to do with whether those acts are morally right or wrong. And to say it does is simply to re-define the word morality to mean consensus. Which inherently proves the argument. Without the transcendent moral authority the very concept is lost.

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Being alive matters more to the collective us because right now we are alive and form our vantage point as living beings, being alive was good.

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No. Being alive in that context is preferable.

That's not the same as being morally good. See above. Again, to make this fit in this context you have to use the word "morality" to mean other things. That alone tells you that the idea doesn't work.

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Equal to whom? The Milky Way? I promise you it doesn’t care. I, however, am an American and was raised to be an American and so have values that are consequently apart of me. Again, I won’t hold these values when I am dead. There’s no me separated from that context. So no, I am incapable of seeing all things as equal. However, if I were born in another time and place, I would have an entirely different set of beliefs.

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This is s side-step. Intentional, I think. When making that statement you are taking something that he was obviously referring to as a philosophical hypothesis and equating it with the emotions of individuals.

He obviously didn't mean that every person would feel the same about different details of life. As a matter of fact, what he meant is that they wouldn't. The point, however, is that no one's differing values could be meaningfully criticized by another. The criticisms would be as meaningless as the values themselves, if a materialist universe with no transcendent moral authority exists.

Which is fine if you want to claim that, but when someone wrongs you or someone else in a way that all human beings universally respond to with righteous indignation, you've got to remind yourself that those feelings are just illusions and don't reflect the reality of the situation, just your perspective of it. It's one thing to make these claims theoretically, it's quite another to live according to them.

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entirely possible, but even if it is true, it’s not demonstrably true. It’s just a thing that sounds nice.

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Well, if it's a truth then it's more than just a thing that sounds nice. And this is a central point of disagreement in this discussion—one of the ideas back of many of the claims you're making is the notion that truth is something that humans make up. But there we go again redefining words to suit the narrative. If we just make it up, it's—by definition—not a truth. It's just something we make up and agree upon, and if we made up its opposite and agreed upon it, that would be what you'd be calling truth, which obviously contradicts the very meaning of the word.

I'd think I'd be much more persuaded of the validity of the argument you're making if, instead of redefining words, you said, "There's no such thing as morality. There's no such thing as truth. What you call morality or truth are just ideas people make up and agree upon."

But I find that most atheists will not do that.

I suspect that they will not because they wish to retain the force of what those words—defined as we commonly define them—mean to us, they just want to attach them to human rather than Divine reflection.

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The argument is that without a transcendent moral absolute there is no such thing as objective morality. God as commonly conceived in modern times would qualify as a transcendent moral absolute or authority, although it might not be the only conception that is legitimate.

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From FooManChoo's perspective transcendent moral absolute = the Christian God full stop. 0% chance it's any other god or some sort of natural force/law/entity.

Conservatism isn’t about maximum freedom and minimum government intrusion.

That’s the caricature sold in the press.

You bought it. Congrats.

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I'm not making an argument for FooManChoo.

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Just wondering, who do you think MAADFACTS was arguing with?>

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who do you think MAADFACTS was arguing with?

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18 different people?

So you’re just arguing against a Christian God but you believe in a god?