ELCA are the enlightened liberal Lutherans.
If you want to find the hardcore conservatives, check with the Missouri Synod or Wisconsin Synod.
My cite is that I was raised Lutheran and we went from Missouri to ELCA, big difference. Now I am non-religious though.
No, I was lazy and didn’t bother looking past the premises.
~Max
Consider this situation. A state senate candidate has a majority evangelical constituency. He runs on his religious views informing his political views. His major rival in the election refuses to support the abortion ban because he thinks it has no secular justification. In the election debate, where the majority of the interested audience are pro-life evangelicals, he argues that he will support an abortion ban in the next legislative session and accuses his opponent’s position of being immoral on religious grounds. He wins, and presents the abortion ban in the next legislative session. His colleagues ask him to justify his bill. Alternatively, a Catholic colleague presents the bill and our state senator is asked to justify his cosponsorship.
What do you think he should say? Should he blatantly lie on the senate floor? Anybody who doesn’t live under a rock would see right through him. Or do you think he should just resign then and there?
~Max
The existence of God as a hypothesis in and of itself, without any specific description of what God does, has no evidence and is non-falsifiable, to accept that hypothesis is in my opinion a leap of faith and unscientific. In fact it is implied by the Abrahamic religions that no amount of pure reason can prove providence, c.f. revelations of God in Genesis, Exodus (“Show me Thy glory!”), Job, etc.
Yes, “there is no salvation except through Christ” is, for everybody I know, a non-axiomatic premise. I think most people who accept that premise believe a certain text in the Bible or the oral tradition that preceded it was divinely inspired and true.
Nobody did. 
I do believe the axiom of salvation can be “valid for discussion”, as in it can be used to express their opinion. You can deny it, I can deny it, but they do not necessarily need to deny it unless we find a conflict within their own argument (other axioms they accept). If the discussion is to inform a vote on whether a certain action is moral or immoral, as it would be with public policy debate, I don’t see any benefit in preventing participants from voicing their honest opinions. They probably won’t convince people who reject the axiom, but it seems to me that laying out each argument is a good thing, not a bad thing. That way you, the opponent, can test it for inconsistencies. If none are found, there is no resolution except the numerical vote.
If I reject universal morality, which I do in this post for the sake of argument, then the only way to resolve whether something is ethical is by voting (or by use of force). So yes, same sex marriage would literally go from unethical to ethical when the Supreme Court ruled that it is constitutionally protected, as far as society is concerned. Individuals might disagree, but on the whole our country enforces the Constitution on threat of force and the Constitution says the Supreme Court is right because it is final.
If you also claimed that what Jesus told you in the dream must be true, that would be falsifiable and therefore a scientific hypothesis. The mere existence of God is not comparable, neither are pronouncements on what is “moral”, nor pronouncements of nonphysical or unfalsifiable phenomena such as the effects of morality upon one’s soul or prospects in the afterlife.
The Orthodoxy lobbied against and was “disappointed” with the legalization of same-sex marriage, for entirely religious reasons, just like they lobby for abortion bans now.
And I think same-sex marriage is still controversial for Conservative Jews, too. The debate wasn’t whether anal sex is allowed - a universal ‘no’ - but whether other sexual acts were allowed (yes), whether the purpose of marriage is to be fruitful and multiply, and whether God would view a society that sanctioned homosexual marriage similar to Sodom. From my reading of Wikipedia, the most prominent Conservative Jewish council issued two contradictory rulings and basically said “let each rabbi decide for their community”.
~Max
Weinreb, T. H. (June 5, 2006). Orthodox Response to Same-Sex Marriage. Orthodox Union Advocacy Center. Retrieved from https://advocacy.ou.org/orthodox-response-to-same-sex-marriage/
Jews Lobby On Same-Sex Marriage Legislation. (June 21, 2011). The New York Jewish Week. Retrieved from https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/jews-lobby-on-same-sex-marriage-legislation/
Orthodox Union Disappointed in Federal Court Ruling Striking Down Prop. 8 in California. (February 27, 2012). Orthodox Union Advocacy Center. Retrieved from https://advocacy.ou.org/orthodox-union-disappointed-in-federal-court-ruling-striking-down-prop-8-in-california/
The National Council of Young Israel Comments About Same Gender Marriage. (2012). National Council of Young Israel. Retrieved from National Council of Young Israel - Young Israel Statement On Same Gender Marriage
Orthodox Union Statement on Supreme Court’s DOMA Ruling. (June 27, 2013). Orthodox Union Advocacy Center. Retrieved from Orthodox Union Statement on Supreme Court's DOMA Ruling - OU Advocacy Center
Lipsky, S. (June 28, 2015). U.S. Gay Marriage Ruling Puts Orthodox Jews on Collision Course With American Law [Editorial]. Haaretz. Retrieved from https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-gay-ruling-puts-orthodox-on-collision-course-with-u-s-law-1.5374378
Rabbinical Council of America. (2019). RCA Opposes New York State’s Reproductive Health Act. Retrieved from The Rabbinical Council of America - RCA - RCA Opposes New York State's Reproductive Health Act The Rabbinical Council of America, the leading membership organization of orthodox rabbis in North America, strongly opposes parts of The Reproductive Health Act, New York State’s recently adopted legislation on abortion. The New York law permits abortion when “the patient is within twenty-four weeks from the commencement of pregnancy, or there is an absence of fetal viability, or the abortion is necessary to protect the patient's life or health.” In addition, the new law moves the section of state law dealing with abortion from the penal code to health statutes. Jewish law opposes abortion, except in cases of danger to the mother. Most authorities consider feticide an act of murder; others deem it an act akin to the murder of potential life. There are Jewish legal scholars who permit, in extenuating circumstances, the abortion of compromised fetuses. The RCA maintains that “abortion on demand,” even before twenty-four weeks from the commencement of pregnancy, is forbidden. There is no sanction to permit the abortion of a healthy fetus when the mother’s life is not endangered. The RCA supports that part of the law that permits abortion, even at a late stage, when the mother’s life is at risk. Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein, of blessed memory, a leading expert in Jewish law and mentor to many of rabbis of the RCA, wrote, “from the perspective of the fetus and those concerned with its welfare, liberality in this direction comes at the expense of humanity…" (“Abortion: A Halakhic Perspective,” Tradition, 25(4), Summer 1991). Rabbi Elazar Muskin, president of the RCA, said, “Jewish law is based on the theological presumption that a human being does not possess total ownership of his or her body. Our bodies belong to God; we are His stewards. Therefore, decisions about abortion must be made with due consideration of theological and moral principles.” Rabbi Daniel Korobkin, first vice president of the RCA, said, “The removal of any restriction from abortion access and the redefining of the word ‘homicide’ to exclude abortion, indicate a further erosion of the moral values of our society, where killing babies is no longer construed as immoral in any way, even when the fetus has a measure of personhood, actual or potential.” Rabbi Mark Dratch, executive vice president of the RCA, added, “We are very concerned about the potential physical, emotional, personal, and financial implications that abortion restrictions may have on the mother, the family, and the child. We maintain that it is the duty of the family, as well as that of society, to enable those impacted to live lives of dignity and we must prioritize ways to find means of support.” | Facebook
I don’t entertain nihilism in this thread or anywhere involving politics, but I do tend to take a position closer to relativism than universalism.
And I haven’t read Pratchett.
~Max
I can understand your view up until you want to prevent people from presenting religious arguments before reaching that goal - when the person’s religion informs their vote and you still let them vote, you wouldn’t let them explain their vote.
~Max
Relevant quote here.
More in this thread eventually, probably. Fields have dried out enough to work in.
I’m not sure the deistic god qualifies as a hypothesis since it is by nature impossible to promote to a theory. But that’s just quibbling. Honest deists are not at issue here, since if they cannot know what their god wants, they will not use what their god wants as a basis for an argument. Yes Jefferson more or less did this, but he was using a natural rights argument, and I suspect that today he’d recast it without any reference to God. I’m sure Paine would.
Are you saying then that the NT is axiomatically true? All of it or some of it? If just the part talking about salvation through Christ, then that is equivalent to my point. It would be odd for someone to take all of it to be axiomatically true, since it is very prone to refutation through lack of evidence for the events, evidence against the events, and internal contradictions.
In my experience many Christians find salvation as a basic belief, and believe in it even if they reject much of what is in the Bible.
If it is a premise, it certainly cannot be proved.
You said that axioms are not subject to proof or disproof based on evidence. But it seems you think they can be rejected - just because someone accepts contradictory axioms. This seems quite inconsistent.
Unless you think that the truth of a proposition can be based on a vote, I don’t see why you keep bringing up voting. People vote for all sorts of stupid and immoral things, that unfortunately is not in question.
But surely there are ethical positions which are not Constitutionally protected, right?
I am pretty damn sure that a majority of the citizens of Alabama in 1960 would have voted in favor of the Jim Crow laws on the books. They after all consistently elected people who were bigots and proud of it. I don’t see how universal morality is involved in this at all. When I took Ethics in college I don’t recall voting coming up at all.
What I have in this scenario is a revelation. So you agree that revelations can be disproved, right? Revelations which just reveal that some god exists are pretty meaningless, but those claiming to have had revelations usually include specific things that came true after god told them about it, or wishes fulfilled. They know that no one is going to care about revelations saying they talked to a generic god.
Now the existence of God may or may not be falsified depending on the exact definition of that god. Tri-omni gods are logically impossible. Gods who created the earth 6,000 years ago and caused a worldwide flood 4,000 years ago or so can be scientifically falsified. Deistic gods can’t be. But it doesn’t matter, since anyone using the existence of a god as the basis for an ethical argument needs to demonstrate the existence of that god. Not being able to do so doesn’t mean the god does not exist, just that it can’t be used to justify anything.
The recent kerfuffle about eliminating religious exemptions for vaccinations in New York is an excellent example of what we’re talking about. Much of the opposition - and certainly the screaming opposition - was religiously based.
The dilemma is that even if you think it is ethically permissible for parents to put their kids at risk by not getting them vaccinated, it is not ethically permissible to put other kids at risk by doing so.
The secular argument against this would be if the risk was too great, but that has been soundly refuted. (If you doubt that, you can buy one of my wife’s books. ) Those opposed used a religious argument.
Which seemed to have been ignored by the legislators. I didn’t notice anyone even trying to refute it. They didn’t laugh at this argument, no doubt not wanted to be strangled by a tallit.
Does anyone think the god argument should have been carefully considered? Does anyone think it is a good reason to put children at risk?
If God told you the outcome of a future race, that is falsifiable by observing the race in the future. If God told you saying some magic word will cause rain, that is falsifiable by saying the magic word and observing rain.
If God told you shaving eyebrows is universally immoral or made any other pronouncement on morality, that is non-falsifiable because morality is immaterial, therefore not subject to scientific inquiry when the definition is in dispute.
~Max
OK, I can do this one fast:
Ideally, I think he should say “I propose amending or removing the First Amendment, so as to allow establishing my religious beliefs as the law of the land.” And then, ideally, I think that should be voted down by a very large majority.
I admit that this is unlikely to be what happens in practice. (Well, I hope the second half would; but the first half is unlikely.)
Alternatively, he could do what a number of people in this situation do: he could make secular arguments for banning abortion. You don’t think they’re convincing, and I don’t think they’re convincing, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or that some people don’t find them convincing. Would he find them convincing because his religious beliefs incline him in that direction already? Maybe, but that’s none of my business. Would he be lying? Only if he doesn’t find the secular arguments convincing. Would anybody who doesn’t live under a rock suspect that his real reasons were religious? Sure, that’s why we get threads like this.
But if he argues that the civil law of the land should be brought into accordance with his religious beliefs for the sole reason that they are his religious beliefs, without amending the Constitution to allow this, then he’s arguing that Congress should act in violation of the Constitution. This is true whether he comes out and says so or not. So since he swore an oath to upheld the Constitution, I think he shouldn’t do that. (I also think he’s not going to listen to me; but you didn’t ask me what I think he would say, but what I think he should say.)
Before I go on, I want you to know that I have not lost sight of the fact that you and similarly minded religious people are on the same side of many progressive issues as me and other similarly progressive secularists/atheists. I actually value that and I’m sure that has not come across in this discussion. Just wanted you to know that.
That said, if you feel that the religious community is evolving to a more progressive point of view, like yours, then please make that case. From my point of view, I see laws are being passed that are advocated by the majority religiously conservative, right wing minded members/believers, despite protests by you and those like you.
Hence my position.
All right I shouldn’t take the time but if I’m going to have this running around my head anyway I may as well get it out:
I would have said that it’s a matter of attempting to find ways in which we can all live together without murdering or seriously damaging one another.
With a side issue of sorting out how to tackle large projects that benefit large numbers of people and also require the cooperation of a large number of people; and sorting out which projects qualify for that category.
That they’re not falsifiable.
You can argue about how much effect a human behavior is having on the climate, and you can bring physical evidence to that argument. You can argue about whether the risk to a child of getting vaccinated against measles is greater than the risk to that child of significant damage from not getting vaccinated, and to what extent the presence of children unvaccinated due to their parents’ choice risks significant damage to children unvaccinated due to medical reasons: and you can bring physical evidence to that argument.
You can’t bring any physical evidence to the argument “God told us to do it this way.” A copy of a book isn’t evidence in that argument, because there’s no way to prove that the source of the words in the book were divine inspiration and not just a bad dream (or a good one) that somebody had and wrote down.
If they’re going to have the effect of squashing the ability of the religion’s followers to follow their own beliefs, yes, they can educate others about what those beliefs are and what the impact would be. Are you using peyote not for the fun of it but as an essential part of a religious ritual? Of course you’re entitled to say so, if the civil law is going to criminalize peyote use.
If what they’re going to squash is the ability of the religion’s followers to make everybody else follow their own religion, then that’s not relevant to civil law, at least in the USA. You can’t make everybody else take peyote too (not that those particular people were trying to do so; they weren’t.)
Where we run into problems is when some people seem to think it’s an essential requirement of their own religion to make everyone else follow it. This is indeed itself a religious belief; but it can’t, by its very nature, be fulfilled without violating other people’s religious beliefs. So at that point I, um, believe that the civil law is entitled to override it.
Re post #431: should note that this also applies to the state senator, except that I should have said that he wants his state, not the Federal Congress, to violate the constitution. I think all states currently require state – and sometimes municipal – representatives to swear to uphold it; it’s not only the federal offices that require this.
– yup, I was pretty sure I remembered swearing that just to be on a volunteer planning board: [ETA: nobody asked me to add ‘so help me God.’ I didn’t.]
What if he doesn’t think the court should strike the law down on an Amendment XIV basis (incorporating Amendment I or the right to privacy)? His colleages across the isle should point out how they think the law is unconstitutional, and he should respond to that on the floor.
And risk losing the next election cycle because he blatantly lied when presenting the single most important issue on his platform?
His and his constituency’s religious beliefs. Our hypothetical senator has the mandate of the people on his side, however misguided, you can not deny his right to vote accordingly. Regarding Constitutionality, it is assumed that the senator will argue the proposed law should be Constitutional, Supreme Court precedence to the contrary notwithstanding. It will be understood that the law will meet an immediate injunction, and the senator’s arguments on the floor count as a brief for the State.
~Max
Right. And you default position has to be not to believe me until I come up with some falsifiable evidence that I am in contact with some deity.
If I said that God told me something about morality and something checkable - which turned out to be true - wouldn’t it be stronger than if God just told me something about morality and nothing verifiable?
And if the verifiable thing turned out to be false, why believe in the moral command?
Now, given how the verifiable stuff in the Bible turned out to be wrong (like Jesus saying that some there would not taste death before he came into his kingdom.) If I was truly Biblical, I’d say the revelation was really about another horse named Beeblebaum who will win a race at some time in the future.
In other words, all revelation is bunk unless it includes some verifiable facts that come true with a very small p value.
Many religious beliefs are falsifiable, and have been falsified. See the Flood. The difference is that when a hypothesis has been falsified in science, while the proponent of that hypothesis may hold on for dear life (see Fred Hoyle) science as a whole moves on to what has been supported. On the other hand, many religious organizations have solid reasons to ignore evidence falsifying their beliefs.
Funders of science care about what is true. Funders of religion care about what makes them feel good.
Whatever his argument is with the Constitution, he should be having it with the Constitution first. Not just saying he ought to be able to ignore it.
Please re-read post 431. I’ve addressed that. I’ve addressed the second one repeatedly.
I didn’t mean the kind of religious belief that’s along the lines of “the reason there are fossilized seashells on mountaintops is because the entire planet was flooded”. I meant the kind of religious belief that’s along the lines of “God said that gay sex is bad” or “God said divorce is bad” or “God said we mustn’t do business on Sundays”.
And I’ll point out also that the reason no amount of physical evidence of geologic processes convinces some who believe otherwise is that, for those people, the belief comes into the category of “God said so.” Which takes it, for those people, out of the category of things that can be sensibly argued about outside their particular circle of believers.
Those are the ones where the response should be “show me that God said it.” They’ll point to the Bible. 'Show me why the Bible can be trusted." They say it is all correct. That’s where the falsifiable stuff comes in.
I saw a YouTube video of a creationist preacher saying “If the Bible said 2 + 2 =5, I’d believe 2 + 2 = 5.”
I’m not saying that trying to argue anyone out of anything will work. I’ve been around too long for that. You can’t even argue Flat Earthers out of their belief. Just laugh at them, that is all we can do. And not consider their crap arguments worth considering.
That may be the wrong question, I think. There have been progressive Christians and conservative Christians for generations. The makeup of Christianity among progressive and conservative elements ebb and flow based on the makeup of society and who is in charge. I have noted that before the American Civil War, along with those Christians who tried to assert slavery was ok with Scripture you had just as loud, if not louder, Christians who were on the forefront of the Abolition movement (including John Brown who tried to start a slave rebellion because he believed it to be God’s will). The American Civil Rights movement had progressive Christians marching and agitating for Civil Rights while conservative Christians declaimed them. In Latin America, you had progressive Christians standing with the poor proclaiming a Liberation Theology, while conservatives stood with oppressive regimes - of course that creates a very interesting question of Catholicism in general which tends to be very left on economic issues but very right on social issues.
Anyways, all that saying that I think a big issue is the mainstream news media for the last 40 years has ignored the progressive Christians (aside from every 4 years when some persons is now the vanguard for some sort of religious left - Buttigieg this cycle). I do know that Secretary Clinton’s very deep Methodist faith was minimized or treated as a joke. And President Obama’s faith was treated like some sort of non-entity (or fake, depending on who you talked to), even though he spoke about it quite often, even when he didn’t have to. It’s kind of strange considering the most outward religious President since the end of World War 2 is big liberal named Jimmy Carter, who still teaches Sunday School to this day.
So that’s a long winded way to say that perhaps the religious community isn’t evolving progressively rather than religious progressive elements are being covered more (and I know the news media is fond of having religious progressives speak out against President Trump but who know if that continues after). Religious progressives have sometimes shot themselves in the foot - for example very few of us were loud in critiquing President Obama for drone strikes (which we all disagreed with, but more in it’s a shame this is happening as opposed to let’s speak truth to power). But I think that’s part and parcel of seeing the religious right rise up in the 1980s and a desire to not be THAT, and retreating a bit from the outward advocacy of progressive religious beliefs.
Bright side is that a lot of young Evangelicals are listening to progressive mainline Christians on homosexuality and Creation Care - part of that may be that we are being covered a bit more and young questioning evangelicals may have realized that there is another part to conservative Christianity?
I dunno. But I have hope that this unveiling will allow for some evolution. I also think that the religious conservatives trying to act out about abortion is the last gasp movements of a dying animal - they’ve lost on LGBTQ issues (thought they think they have something on Transgendered persons because even a lot of liberal people don’t understand them) and are flailing. At least that’s my take. They have to know that they are completely damaging their brand by allying with someone like Trump - the only reason I can see it is due to the fear that they are finished (and willing to bet everything on the Supreme Court).
Uh… sorry, that was a book. But it’s not a simple questions. We’ve (religious progressives) always been around and we’ve always been fighting. It just depends on what box the body of religious believers end up falling into (and that’s not even getting into that plenty of religious believers post hoc religiously justify political positions they have found themselves agreeing with - conservatives and progressives).
(Mind you I say this as someone who was atheist moderate Republican who converted and through reading Scripture and attending Worship veered very very left - flirting with Christian socialism before coming more center left)
There are plenty of beliefs that are not falsifiable. Have you every tried to argue with a Marxist about the historical dialectic? Hell, our belief (hopefully we share it) that all people have inherently equal moral worth is a non-falsifiable statement. You can try to argue against it, but you can’t show physical proof against it.