In this specific context? No. Unless the rule is, “Only appeals to theology with which I agree are allowed in public debate.”
Excellent point. So, a religious person advocating for LGBTQ rights because they believe Jesus said to love everyone? Not unheard of. However, far from the more commonly heard argument from the religious right.
If challenged to restate his position without drawing on his religious convictions, could/would he say it’s also a humanitarian and moral position to hold, or would he abandon it?
Sure. But we’re discussing a more narrow definition of “public debate”, ie. public policy in the context of establishing legislation/laws.
N.B. I’ve stipulated back on page one of this thread that appeals to theology in open public debate should not be restricted.
You might have noticed that he gave plenty of secular reasons to be against segregation. You might also have noticed that he had plenty of supporters who were not Christian. If you removed all the religion-based arguments from his speeches, you’d still have powerful speeches and powerful reasons to be against Jim Crow laws.
And his arguments would have been a lot weaker if restricted to “Jesus said so.”
If it was truly a-historical, would it not be likely that a just society arose from some other area in the world. The oppression and torture cannot be considered aligned with Christian values since it is diametrically opposed to these values. This brutality is considered worse than the oppression and brutality of others since Christians knew better and should not have allowed it to happen.
I have difficulty in understanding your contention that increased secularisation inevitably lead to improved outcomes. Wasn’t Pol Pot Mao’s China and the USSR secular?
Please let’s not have a, “No real Christian would _______…” conversation. The fact is that under the auspices and direction of Christian faith and its many leaders, terrible injustices were committed over centuries. You don’t get to claim now that it was not so. Christianity has a lot to answer for. As do the other major religions. So they are all share that ignominy in that respect.
Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Hitler… All said to be secular or said to lead secular societies. Not true of all of them as both Stalin and Hitler enjoyed the support of the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Church, respectively. Stalin, was a seminary school graduate and knew very well how to control the largely peasant population through the local churches. The Communist Party government leveraged Stalin’s model of rule and turned it into a kind of Communist Orthodoxy for years after his death. Mao and Pol Pot actually banned all religions, however, it may be argued that they did so to set themselves up as the ultimate godlike authority, and they were treated as such. Much like the three generations of Kims in NK.
All that to say, being secularist doesn’t mean you can’t be a sociopathic monster. But at least you can’t say you have divine authority to commit atrocities. To do that successfully, you need to set yourself up as the divine authority.
This is probably a fair point. But.
Suppose someone knocks on your door, and when you open it, they say, "Hi, I’m a good friend of (name of one of your best friends), and he told me that I should look you up and (hang out together, or help you with something you need help with, or something like that that makes you think this is a good person to let into your home).
You let them in and offer them hospitality, which they take advantage of by tying you up, raping you with a plunger, and stealing all your stuff. Needless to say, this person is actually not a friend of (name of one of your best friends); they were just saying that.
Under these circumstances, is (name of one of your best friends) culpable for what happened to you? I don’t think so. And neither do I think that Christianity/religion should be held responsible for everything that is done in its name.
All deeds, evil and good?
That’s a common refrain, however, I’m not sure it’s a plausible deniability.
As Christopher Hitchens noted:
“The Vatican agrees that HIV/AIDS is bad. But not as bad as condoms.”
Additionally, the crime of child abuse (rape) and subsequent obfuscation is an institutional problem.
No arguments on both those counts, I assume.
I’m not sure who the best friend is here. If it is God, then you’ve never actually spoken to your best friend, but just heard he is cool from others. Exactly the others who are hurting you. If it is the Pope or the church, they harm you directly also.
Not to mention that many of those hurt don’t even claim the “best friend” as their own. Which infuriates the person coming to their houses.
The harm done by Christianity was in large part instituted by official Christianity, not some wacko cult.
I thought I had made my point explicit: “neither do I think that Christianity/religion should be held responsible for everything that is done in its name.” Some things, yeah. But not everything.
I was mostly agreeing with what QuickSilver said (particularly his first paragraph from Post #267), but I was qualifying that agreement: Just because someone (some person or entity or regime) claims to be Christian (or some other particular religion) does not necessarily mean that Christianity/religion can legitimately be held responsible for their misdeeds.
Or their deeds.
That ethics are not universal is itself either an axiom or derived from axioms. You have made your opinion on that clear, but there are certainly people who disagree with you.
What do you say to a man who claims that ethics are in fact universal? No religion or supernatural power involved, it just so happens to be that there exists a universal code of ethics, regarding certain actions. He might say, I don’t know… the purpose of life is to ensure the continuation of the species, and that any action that does not serve this purpose directly or indirectly is unethical, and that children should be instilled with these ethics. What if he uses that as an axiom (with others) to build an argument about public policy? And what if you disagree with conclusion of that argument? Do you debate, or dismiss him, or what?
Ignore the rhetorician at your own peril, for without opposition he may gather a following and effect his policies. Neither can you forcibly quiet the man who demands freedom of speech; that is his right to speak freely (with certain restrictions). What do you do?
It seems that you would debate him, if not directly then indirectly by convincing others of your own position. You might say to a group of undecided friends, “don’t listen to this man because…”, and if they hesitate to agree I assume you will argue your position. It is not difficult to see how such a conversation becomes a full fledged debate. Do you walk away?
What if everybody who disagrees with the rhetorician walks away and refuses to debate him, or anybody who entertains his position? What would that mean for the uninformed public? In the worst case, public policy becomes a race: who will make their argument first? Say a citizen appears, tabula rasa, and the rhetorician reaches this citizen before you do. The citizen takes on a default position that ethics are universal, therefore… they support that horrible conclusion you so strongly disagree with. You approach the citizen and refuse to speak to them unless they accept the “fact” that ethics are not universal; you might say to yourself: if they cannot accept this basic axiom, you are wasting your time. The citizen in turn thinks that you are pretentious and illogical, and they are justified in doing so because all they have it on authority (even if misplaced) that ethics are universal. There may be some who come to the alternative conclusion on their own, sure, but it is implied that these enlightened people never return to the cave.
Let’s carry this worst-case to the limit. Let’s say the rhetorician’s conclusion is that people should have lots of monogamous, unprotected sex and lots of babies and raise their children to do the same; that the law should outlaw birth control and fornication because they are universally unethical. If an individual’s political opinion is merely a race to make the first political impression, and the rhetorician’s policies are not self-destructive, over time “they” will simply outnumber “you”, and by the principle of majority rule they will out-vote you, if not by statute then by constitutional amendment.
The point is that there is no difference, in terms of effect, between a disagreement over the universality of ethics (or underlying premises) and a disagreement over religious premises. If you are willing to debate the former you should be willing to debate the latter.
~Max
Au contraire, the idea is that there are multiple axioms beneath any given religion. For example,
[ul][li]God exists[/li][li]The will of God is…[/li][li]To be moral is to adhere to the will of God[/ul][/li]
If these are religious axioms due to their inclusion of a superhuman controlling power (God), we could say any argument which relies on one of these (at any point in the logical tree) is a religious argument, unless the same argument could be made with entirely secular premises.
It is impossible to prove an axiom without using circular logic, otherwise it would not be an axiom. Similarly it is impossible to prove a religious argument if you flat out deny the truth of any religious axioms. So when you say:
That is not difficult, but logically impossible without religious arguments. You didn’t say to prove the existence of God without religious arguments, but this is implied. To ask for proof that a “particular god giving morals exists” is to beg the question. Begging the question is fallacious, therefore to ask for proof of God without using religious arguments is itself fallacious.
~Max
Never meant to imply that what I gave was the only axiom. However “God exists” is not a good axiom, and is not treated as such even in the Bible. Abraham had direct evidence of God. He certainly did not consider God as axiomatic. And more recently, if God were axiomatic we would not have religious types offering proofs for his existence.
Further, God exists is not adequate by itself. The axiom would have to specify something about the type of God exists. If it were valid to follow from the axiom that the Judeo Christian god exists, then systems postulating another type of god would be equally valid, and we’d have many mutually contradictory but equally valid religious systems. That’s another reason the axiom isn’t valid.
Axiomatic morality combines your second and third points. The will of God covers more than just what actions he wants us to do. But we could rephrase it as God wants you to be moral by doing the following moral things.
I agree that they are axioms because an existent god does not necessarily imply that we must follow his rules.
Okay, I think I didn’t consider that interpretation because it is trivially true. We should be more concerned with things done under the command of the official structure of a church. If the choice of a Pope is divinely inspired, then evil done under the direction of that Pope is the direct responsibility of Catholicism. And God, I suppose.
I definitely agree that some whackjob saying he killed because Jesus told him to is not the responsibility of the Church or Christianity.
We have evidence that ethical systems are not universal since there are so many of them and they evolve. The only way one could claim that an ethical system is universal is if you dismiss all the others.
People can say anything, but someone who makes his assumptions clear makes it possible to have those assumptions debated. I don’t know why you would think that someone would not debate them - the whole reason for secular ethics is that all points can be debated.
Which is not to say that someone couldn’t support their ethical postulates with an army. But we’re assuming a slightly higher level of discourse here.
I won’t go into the validity of this ethical system, since that would be a hijack.
If someone has a premise that an ethical system is universal, they have the obligation to answer counterexamples to this premise. And we can reject ethical systems based on premises contrary to fact.
I’m certainly willing to debate religious premises, and have been doing so for a very long time. Religious people often aren’t. When one uses faith as justification, it means that the existence of god is not subject to debate.
An honest secular debater would, I hope, accept that a premise is incorrect when presented with a counterexample. Faith being so prevalent, I wouldn’t call those who use faith as the basis of a moral system dishonest. Because faith by its nature is not subject to contradiction, so believing despite lack of evidence is not dishonest. Incorrect, but not dishonest.
“…faith by its nature is not subject to contradiction”
A faith based premise may or may not be factual. It is, at least, insincere to present it as a factual premise in a debate.
The real problem is that religion and politics are symbiotic social parasites. An excellent example is Russia pre-revolution - a corrupt theocracy, ruled by a God appointed Tsar. The secular Soviet Federation, raised the literacy rate from 16% to above 90%, industrialized the country, defeated Nazi Germany and launched the first earth satellite.
That is good to hear, although you previously made it clear that you don’t take that exact position. Another of my concerns is that religiously motivated individuals will be relegated to second class status when it comes to public policy discussions unless and until they present secular arguments.
I don’t understand why a theological axiomatic disagreement is any more problematic than a secular axiomatic disagreement. There is no room for agreement on certain issues between a consequentialist and a deontologist, between a dualist and a physicalist, between a utilitarian and a hedonist or personalist, or between a nihilist and almost anybody else. That groups with one set of beliefs (religious or not) are “alienated” from groups with another set of beliefs is innevitable unless all people share a homogenous set of beliefs, and I assert that all people do not share the same beliefs.
So I do not understand why irreconcilable disagreement is a disqualifier for public debate. If it is, what makes secular beliefs better than religious beliefs? This is a rhetorical question in the general sense, because a religious person might define “better” differently than a secular person, such that their religious beliefs are “better”, or vice versa, thus there is no argument that can answer the general question. Pure democracy would imply the answer is a head count, but it ceases to be a healthy democracy if the minority is disqualified from debating the majority until they accept the premises in dispute.
This is exactly what I’m concerned about.
That is what I believe, although as with most things I’m not 100% certain.
Allowing the public to consider religious arguments does not imply discriminatory public policy will be effected, although it is definitely a possibility. I may or may not be cool with a given public policy, but I am generally not okay with preventing the consideration of religious arguments or stifling the voices who express them. I would make exceptions, just as with other forms of free speech, but I do not extend the exception to every religious argument. I do hope you stick around because we seem to disagree here, for reasons I honestly don’t understand.
~Max