re: Stunning Admission By Renowned Atheist; Decline of Christianity is Hurting Society

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Curious how that seems to correlate with the number of liberal voters in the country.

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Curious how you derived that number since the total votes cast in 2016 was around 130 mill.

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30% of the population of South Korea is Christian, roughly the same as the United States.

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It's actually 73% but ok also where are you getting your facts about Japan from?

Think boatshoes will tell us what % of the US prison population is Christian?

Nah he'd rather suggest that Japan is going to be extinct in 3-4 generations despite their population being stable (within 1% of its maximum) for nearly 2 decades.

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But I cant tell u if reality is objective..

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Stick your hand in a pile of hot coals and tell me if your pain is real.

(I remember that line but not which philosopher wrote it.)

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Which is a pretty good one line summary of recorded human history. It’s essentially a long story of various social and moral systems attempting to subjugate each other.

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I prefer the narrative that it's a summary of sinners twisting the law of God written on their hearts to make a law for themselves in defiance of the creator who made them to worship Him in holiness.

I'm a little confusedd by this religious rightenousses on a fan website dedicated to fans that have almost certainly been on Bourban street.

And asked girls to lift their shirts up.

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only if you accept the premise, that's the point.

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If you reject the premise then you are left with a nonsensical universe that lacks cohesion and ineligibility.

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actually, i think you are not grasping what "objective" means. or at least how the term can refer to precepts outside of the realm of your religious worldview. because act utilitarianism and the categorical imperative are both morally objective.

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You are the one who doesn't understand what objectivity is.

Moral objectivity is that which is considered moral outside of or in spite of an individual person's thoughts, beliefs, or feelings. Moral subjectivity is that which is considered moral based on an individual's personal thoughts, beliefs, or feelings.

Utilitarianism is not morally objective simply because people agree on a standard by which to judge actions and behaviors. I believe what you're thinking of is objectivity in terms of a single standard to judge actions. I'm talking about objectivity within the genesis of the standard, itself.

Why is utilitarianism the right moral framework to use - because it maximizes happiness? Why is maximizing happiness the best goal - because all people want to be happy? Not all people want to be happy and happiness is a subjective concept at that, because it originates within the individual and each individual experiences it differently and it is manifested differently in each individual.

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utilitarianism, and the categorical imperative, which i mentioned earlier both do and can. you're still not really getting what "objective" means. no sweat.

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As I stated, utilitarianism isn't an objective framework because it's a framework that originates from subjective human beings. Having a standard by which to judge actions doesn't make that standard objective simply because all actions can be judged by that standard. The question is why should all actions be judged by that particular standard?

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what macantyre is saying is that the intellectual premise is a matter of preference, and the morality derives from that premise. that's been my point all along. again, no sweat. you seem like a smart guy, so you will transcend this kind of thinking soon, god willing

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And my point was that the premise is certainly a matter of preference if moral subjectivism is true, and that the preference is valid, no matter what the premise is. Without an objective standard for morality that exists outside of the individual human mind, any and all moral frameworks are equally valid, including those that praise the suffering and destruction of others.

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...because there is absolutely no evidence that good or evil as universal concepts exists. If they did, we should have seen them manifest in nature long before sentient consciousness arose and then we should have seen some form of consistency once it did.

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C.S. Lewis thought otherwise.

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“Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao [the timeless truths and values generally held by human beings], or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses.”
-The Abolition of Man

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It's a pretty good read and makes a good case for a universal law of right and wrong called in his work, The Tao. One example of a nearly universal concept he discussed was that a man could have one wife or many wives depending on his culture but could not have another's wife. It's worth the read.

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Because that what you reduce morality to: a preference without an ultimate standard to judge it by.

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Yes, that's correct. This is what I keep saying to you, and you seem to keep thinking I'm denying or dancing around this point. This is literally my position; there is no "ultimate standard."

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If your personal moral preference happens to align with the personal moral preferences of the majority in a society you happen to live within, that doesn't mean you have any more basis to condemn anyone whose personal moral preference is different from your own. You can join a group of others whose favorite flavor of ice cream is rocky road but that doesn't mean you have gained any objective ground to stand on to judge those who like vanilla better.

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Again, you are reaffirming the exact position I'm taking. I can make judgements, and do, but I have no objective ground that I'm claiming to be standing on. As I said, however, that doesn't preclude me from making those judgements. To expound on your analogy, me joining a community of Rocky Road lovers who find chocolate lovers abhorant doesn't mean we hold some moral ultimate truth about the qualities of the two flavors. But it does mean that, in our society, the generally accepted moral framework dictates that a preference for chocolate is morally repugnant. That may not be the case in a different society - and there is literally nothing inherently "wrong" with that on some fundamental, base level.

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What you've just described is arbitrariness

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Yup. And morality is arbitrary, so that squares with my argument.

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Since taste is subjective, we can't comment on how ice cream tastes better than dog shite?

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You can say whatever you like but it's nothing more then subjective opinion. Taste, itself, is very subjective, as people react to the taste of things differently. There are some pretty putrid foods that people in different cultures consider delicacies because they are used to eating them.

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Subjectivity isn't nearly as hopeless as you paint it to be.

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Only if you don't care about consistency and coherence. If everyone lived their lives as if morality was completely subjective, there would be utter chaos. People have to live their lives as if there is an objective moral source.

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Also, maybe I missed it, but how are you not in the same boat?

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I'm not in the same boat because God is the very standard of goodness while without Him, there is no such thing. I have a worldview that can explain why evil exists and why it happens. Without God, there isn't even a standard of evil nor why it's necessarily bad.

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If God commands someone to kill slaughter a school, how can you say its wrong? While I cannot call a school shooting objectively wrong, you can't either if your God commands it. And seeing all the violence, genocide, and killing for petty reasons in the Bible you can't argue that there isn't a history of such things to point to when making this point.

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It's objectively evil for one human to unlawfully take the life of another human being. "Unlawful" is the key word here, as it's not evil to take life for various lawful reasons, such as self-defense or for lawful delegates of God to execute justice.

In this case, God is within His own mandate to kill those of His creation that rebel against Him. He can also delegate the authority to execute those law-breakers to other humans as He sees fit, as He did for ancient Israel when He commanded them to be His rod of justice against those nations that refused to submit to God's will.

God doesn't work that way any longer as He had a specific purpose for the nation of Israel and it's conquering of the land of Canaan. It was a picture of Christ and His spiritual kingdom that would be conquered by the spread of the gospel after Christ's ascension to Heaven. We've got God's moral law and the instruction of how to relate to one another and God won't be commanding others to do His work again as Christ will do the work Himself when He returns.