How is religion "encroaching" on everyday life?

[Malacandra]

[QUOTE=BrightNShiny]
You can justify it with an economic argument. I’ll explain this below.

It could be, but it doesn’t have to be. Look at anything you own. Does it have value? Why? It has a value because you assigned it a value. Now, the way you made that assignment is complex and going to be based in part on how the rest of us value it, but ultimately you had to assign it some value, right?

I’m going to make this argument with a theft example, because I think it’s easier to illustrate. But you can apply this argument to murder and slavery if you want to:

Let’s say Person A has a painting that he values at $10. Person B wants to buy it, and B values it at $30. So B offers A $20 for it and A agrees. Now, B is ahead $10–he got a painting valued at $30 for $20. And A is ahead $10. He sold a painting for $20 he valued at $10. This transaction is economically efficient* and the total wealth of the system has increased $20.

Now, instead, lets say that Person B smashes a window, breaks into A’s house and steals a painting. B is ahead now $20 (remember, he valued the painting at $20). But A has lost $10 (the painting) and another $15 (for the broken window). So, B is $20 ahead, but A is $25 behind, and the total wealth of the system has decreased by $5. This is economically inefficient.

So, if you don’t want the total wealth of society to decrease, you ban economically inefficient transactions such as theft.

I can do this argument for murder and slavery if you want, but it’s pretty much going to be the same.

*I realize I’m using a specific definition of economic efficiency, and we can spend a lot of time discussing whether this is the appropriate definition to use. But, this isn’t an economics thread, and I just wanted to show that one can make economic efficiency arguments in favor of laws that prohibit murder, or theft, or slavery.
[/QUOTE]

Well, but look at it this way. I have a bucket of shit and you have a bucket of apples. I personally think that I’d be lucky to get one apple for my bucket of shit, but for some strange reason you seem to think that a whole bucket of apples would be fair exchange for my bucket of shit. However, you make me the optimistic offer of half a bucket of apples for my bucket of shit and I accept with startling alacrity, and we both think we’ve got a bargain, but when all’s said and done our total wealth still consists of one bucket of shit and one bucket of apples, just distributed differently.

Now let’s go back to our art thief. Out of necessity the artist has to repay the guy who is going to fix his window so he sits down with some low-value materials and applies the high-value function of his brain to them. Then he misses the picture he had about the place so he paints another one for himself. At the end of the day there are now three valuable paintings in circulation where before there was only one, so the theft has promoted economic growth - the turning of valueless resources into valuable products. Therefore, theft is moral but trade only redistributes shit and apples.

[BrightNShiny]

[QUOTE=Malacandra]
Well, but look at it this way. I have a bucket of shit and you have a bucket of apples. I personally think that I’d be lucky to get one apple for my bucket of shit, but for some strange reason you seem to think that a whole bucket of apples would be fair exchange for my bucket of shit. However, you make me the optimistic offer of half a bucket of apples for my bucket of shit and I accept with startling alacrity, and we both think we’ve got a bargain, but when all’s said and done our total wealth still consists of one bucket of shit and one bucket of apples, just distributed differently.

Now let’s go back to our art thief. Out of necessity the artist has to repay the guy who is going to fix his window so he sits down with some low-value materials and applies the high-value function of his brain to them. Then he misses the picture he had about the place so he paints another one for himself. At the end of the day there are now three valuable paintings in circulation where before there was only one, so the theft has promoted economic growth - the turning of valueless resources into valuable products. Therefore, theft is moral but trade only redistributes shit and apples.
[/QUOTE]

I think you should take an economics class and try this explanation on the final. At the very least, you can watch your professor’s head explode, which is always good for a few laughs.

[Shodan]

@Diogenes the Cynic

We have done this in the past, and your usual response is to repeat over and over that your own subjective opinion ought to dictate other peoples’ behavior because that’s how you feel.

Nope. I’ve never said that.

@Diogenes the Cynic

My aesthetic is the only one in the universe that matters.

@Apos

We’re not begging anything or ad populumn anything precisely because we are not trying to establish any sort of objective truth. What people’s values are to begin with is the be-all and end-all of the issue period. They are the only question on the table.

The trouble is, there is no standard by which we can judge anyone’s standards as being any “better” than anyone else’s, and therefore no reason to choose one over another. Thus my point - Fred Phelps has a standard based on his values. It certainly disagrees with your standard and therefore your values (and mine as well). But there is no objective way to decide this (absent some transcendent, objective standard, and we are ruling this out).

[QUOTE=BrightNShiny]
Shodan, I asked you a question: Do you define religion to include capitalist economics? I would appreciate an answer to the question. Thanks.
[/QUOTE]

No, of course not. What I am doing is that atheists base their morality on unproven assumptions, in the same way and to the same degree as theists.

You can base a morality on economic efficiency if you like. In the same way, and with a equal degree of validity, you can base a morality on religion (any religion) or a love of the White Sox or “what’s in it for me” or anything else. Anything else.

It has to be taken for granted that economic efficiency is a valid basis for morality. There is, in other words, no sustainable answer to the question “why is economic efficiency the Good?” It just is, and therefore ultimately it has to come down to what Apos concedes - the stronger imposes their will on everyone else. You know, that sort of “forcing your morality onto me” that is usually considered a bad thing.

It might be economically efficient to kill old people, too - is that moral?

Gay marriage, for example - a majority of voters rejected it back in 2004. I don’t hear a lot of Dopers arguing that therefore it was a perfectly moral decision. There isn’t any consistent reason, therefore, to argue that some fundamentalist Islamic country should allow homosexual behavior or gay marriage (or abortion or whatever), because the majority, or at least the stronger, can impose its will on its population.

Likewise the Holocaust. The stronger there was the Nazi party, and they decided that it was moral to kill Jews. You have to take it for granted that there is something wrong with killing people before you can argue against the will of the stronger here. Trouble is, there is ultimately no basis on which you can establish that standard either. Why is it wrong to kill people? Well, it just is, because it furthers some other standard, that just is, because it furthers something else, that just is, and so forth and so forth.

Arguments from consequence when trying to establish a moral standard are begging the question.

Subjective != faith.

Sure it does. You have faith that economic efficiency or whatever is a valid basis for a moral code. There is no objective evidence of this; it is merely an assertion. You can point to the fact that the majority wants it, but that is an assertion of faith in the validity of majoritarianism.

Or you can simply say morality is subjective, but can be imposed on others because you are stronger than they are. Which doesn’t prove you are right, just that you are more numerous or louder or whatever.

If the majority of a population is in favor of Islamo-fascism or female genital mutilation, does that mean these things are moral? If most people accept a certain religion, then is their morality validly based?

Regards,
Shodan

[Apos]

Let me summarize the issue as I see it.

Rationalists insist that faith is a bad thing to employ for empirical truths. I don’t think there is any good response to this assertion, so instead the tactic is to generally change the subject to something else (as Scylla did, for instance, by trying to sneak estimations of value in through the back door and pass them off as pure rationality).

Shodan has taken a different approach: trying to assert that faith is applicable to moral value. I think this position has already been well addressed, but it’s worth noting that this position is interestingly backwards from the way things normally go. It is generally those arguing for the superiority of faith or theism who insist that their faith in god gives them some special insight or access to moral truth that everyone else lacks (the old “without god, all is amoral” argument). Shodan, however, starts from the premise that we’re all in the same boat when it comes to morality (which is the position of most non-believers who are supremely unconvinced by the idea that the existence of god provides any special advantage for morality), which seems to basically concede the whole game away. The only tweak he has added is by calling it “faith” (in another attempt to find a place for faith given the inability to justify it in the sense of factual matters), which of course many people have pointed out is pretty unconvincing itself.

[Apos]

Uh oh, looks like the old blank posts bug that they tried to fix the other day.

[Shodan]

Thanks, tomndebb. What was wrong with my quote tag?

Regards,
Shodan

[tomndebb]

The first nested quote had three opens and one close. I do not know the technical reasons behind the glitch, but if a post is invisible except in EDIT, the first thing to check (in one’s five minute window) is that each open QUOTE has a corresponding close QUOTE.

[Apos]

[QUOTE=Shodan]
The trouble is, there is no standard by which we can judge anyone’s standards as being any “better” than anyone else’s, and therefore no reason to choose one over another
[/quote]

As I said, this is both true, and yet also grossly misleading. We DON’T have any ultimate standard (nor can the existence or non-existence of God provide one, because the concept is incoherent: it’s like asking for an objective subjective judgment), and yet to keep repeating that mistakes the reality that it is just a plain fact that we do, in human societies, have a lot of common values and empathy that we can reasonably appeal to in arguing with others.

You’ve by and large simply avoided this point, for instance when you simply restate the Nazi example I already discussed.

Thus my point - Fred Phelps has a standard based on his values. It certainly disagrees with your standard and therefore your values (and mine as well). But there is no objective way to decide this (absent some transcendent, objective standard, and we are ruling this out).

Ultimately, yes. Can you offer any solution to this problem that I cannot? No? then we can move on to what’s left, which is that there are some common values and basis for argument, nevertheless, maybe even with Phelps.

No, of course not. What I am doing is that atheists base their morality on unproven assumptions, in the same way and to the same degree as theists.

No, as has been pointed out time and time again, you are playing word games here. No one thinks that moral values are “assumptions” in the sense of being assertions of fact/not-fact. They are judgments. That’s not the same thing. This isn’t a crack through which you can shove through “faith” as triumphantly necessary, because moral judgements aren’t faith. I don’t have a “faith belief” that rape is wrong, and that I’m somehow going to be vindicated in my belief by some big reveal. I consider rape to be wrong because I value the feelings of others and their desire not to be violated. I can empathize with them. I don’t see how it makes any sense at all to talk about that being an “unproven assumption” and thus implying that it’s a good, as justified as any other, idea to believe that ghosts exist.

You keep repeating the fact that there is no final way to “prove” whose values are right and whose aren’t. But I don’t think anyone disagrees with you on that ultimate point, so why do you keep making such a big deal of pointing it out over and over?

You then simply neglect what I think is a far more relevant reality: that there ARE a lot of common values amongst human beings that DO allow for coherent and purposeful discussions of what is good and what isn’t that make the issue far more complicated than just “whatever the majority is powerful enough to impose.”

Indeed, the history of human society is chiefly composed of all sorts of different values spreading and appealing, not through violence, but through convincing people to change their minds about what their values really dictate.

[Revenant_Threshold]

I was kinda hoping Shodan would respond to my last post to him, which I think says roughly the same thing as everyone else is saying; atheist moralities certainly can have an aspect of faith about them, but they don’t need to, and i’d be quite comfortable saying that in most cases considerably less faith is required. Overall, there certainly isn’t faith “to the same degree”, no matter how many times this is posted.

[Apos]

And again RT, I don’t quite see your argument: how can anyone really have “faith” in a statement like “rape is wrong.” What are they expecting is going to come along and one day validate or falsify that statement?

[Revenant_Threshold]

I think it depends what you mean by “wrong”. “Rape is wrong because it hurts the victim” - no faith required (well, except basic universal faith). If you’re looking at it on a subjective basis, certainly in most cases you don’t need any faith. But if you’re saying “rape is inherently, objectively wrong” the problem is the very one you bring up; you don’t have anything tangible to actually compare it to.

It’s like measuring something. If I say that this font is 1cm high, I can easily get a ruler and check it. I can look and see whether the quality i’m ascribing is accurate with regards to the ruler. But if I say the font is splorn - I don’t have anything to check against. All I have to base my assumption on is my own splorn-guessing abilities. I have to have faith that, if we could somehow have access to the splorn-measuring device, it would show what I think it does. Same thing with objective morals; we don’t have a morality ruler, we don’t even know if one exists (i’d personally say no, but that’s totally IMHO). If we say something is objectively wrong, we have to have faith that it actually is.

[Apos]

But if you’re saying “rape is inherently, objectively wrong” the problem is the very one you bring up; you don’t have anything tangible to actually compare it to.

The problem is that I’m not sure this is even a coherent statement. It’s like an incomplete sentence: like saying “went to the bank.” Well, there is no “went to the bank” in isolation of a particular SOMETHING that went to the bank. In the same way, it’s not clear to me how you can talking about something being wrong without specifying whose subjective judgment that is.

In that case, it’s like saying that I have faith in a square circle. I can speak those words, but the reality is that I really don’t and can’t, because I don’t actually have any concept in my mind of “square circle” that I’m referring to. I don’t know what I’m really talking about, in other words.

[Malacandra]

[QUOTE=BrightNShiny]
I think you should take an economics class and try this explanation on the final. At the very least, you can watch your professor’s head explode, which is always good for a few laughs.
[/QUOTE]

Well, my example was intentionally simple and silly, as you know. You and I may each think that a whole bucket of shit, or a whole bucket of apples, is more than we have any possible use for, and in that case there’s plenty of validity in arguing that a system that sees us each end up with half a bucket of both is indeed increasing the total wealth in the system - since “too many” apples doesn’t make us wealthier than “enough”, or at any rate not to the extent that “enough” makes us wealthier than “none”.

But on the other hand it’s probably too simple to say that what’s wrong with theft is that it decreases wealth. On the contrary, it can be the stimulus that increases it. Similarly, given a situation in which population E has an advanced industrial society but no tea, and population I has enough tea for its own needs but no more, the total wealth can easily be increased if the E-people use their factories to produce Martini-Henry rifles and Maxim guns, which they use to coerce the I-people to produce a bloody sight more tea - but is this moral?

[Revenant_Threshold]

[QUOTE=Apos]
The problem is that I’m not sure this is even a coherent statement. It’s like an incomplete sentence: like saying “went to the bank.” Well, there is no “went to the bank” in isolation of a particular SOMETHING that went to the bank. In the same way, it’s not clear to me how you can talking about something being wrong without specifying whose subjective judgment that is.

In that case, it’s like saying that I have faith in a square circle. I can speak those words, but the reality is that I really don’t and can’t, because I don’t actually have any concept in my mind of “square circle” that I’m referring to. I don’t know what I’m really talking about, in other words.
[/QUOTE]
I agree with that. I don’t believe there’s an objective morality either. I can understand how it could work with a deity or two, but i’m not sure how there could be an objective morality in an atheist universe. Nevertheless, most religious people and i’m guessing some atheists *do * believe in an objective morality, and this is a matter of faith rather than actualities.

[Apos]

Sopa!

As I’ve argued time and time again, nothing about the existence of a deity could make morality “objective” if it already is not. Your parents may be responsible for your existence: we could even take it so far as to imagine them constructing or designing you. How does that make their opinion anymore than someone’s opinion, which you can listen to and care about or not? What makes it absolutely compelling?

A god can carry on and threaten and bully and even mind control his creation to believe whatever he wants. Nothing about that, however, relates to any power over making, say, rape a moral thing if it isn’t (or making it immoral if there is no one that cares to acknowledge it as such). All explanations as to how god plays into the picture contain unspoken arbitrary subjective values that are slipped in without acknowledgement.

[Revenant_Threshold]

I claim stress-induced dyslexia. Finals start tomorrow.

[Shodan]

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
I was kinda hoping Shodan would respond to my last post to him, which I think says roughly the same thing as everyone else is saying; atheist moralities certainly can have an aspect of faith about them, but they don’t need to…
[/quote]
Actually, as I think we have established, they need to have a faith basis (if only “universal morality is something we should accept”). The introduction of the word “should” is what requires faith.

That’s the point of my mentioning Phelps and the Holocaust. Phelps and Hitler both have a moral standard, and they believe/believed that this standard was valid enough to act on. Trouble is, there is no argument that can be offered to show that they are wrong - there is no more logical reason to accept “don’t hurt people” as a valid moral precept as there is to accept “death to f*gs”.

I also mentioned gay marriage and taboos on homosex as examples of things that are both part of a cultural/biological consensus, but still are not accepted by many as being morally valid.

The difficulty comes also in arguing in favor of some moral action. There is no reason to offer to someone who does not share the presumptions of the morality, that he should accept it. It’s all just an assumption, like someone assuming that God has established morality thru the Bible. No way to counter that, either.

Regards,
Shodan

PS - thanks for the explanation, tomndebb.

[Apos]

I guess Shodan’s strategy is to simply ignore the many different posters who already answered his objections, and simply restate his original argument as if no one had said anything.

Let’s summarize:

-Shodan has failed to provide any basis or justification by which moral imperatives can be characterized as “faith” The word makes little sense in that context, as many have explained. Shodan’s response? To simply ignore all that argument and restate that it’s an exercise of faith.
-Shodan has failed to deal with the argument that humans have many values in common on which there are rational grounds to debate second order moral conclusions like “be nice to people” and even “death to fags.” Shodan’s response? None. Some people say death to fags, some say that wrong, and no one ever even in theory ever offers any arguments that appeal to any common ground, even though that is in plain contrast with the reality of moral arguments made in the real world.

[Shodan]

@Apos

As I’ve argued time and time again, nothing about the existence of a deity could make morality “objective” if it already is not. Your parents may be responsible for your existence: we could even take it so far as to imagine them constructing or designing you. How does that make their opinion anymore than someone’s opinion, which you can listen to and care about or not? What makes it absolutely compelling?

Not really - assuming the existence of a God who created everything, then He has (or could) create a morality that is objectively true. Morality would then be like arithmetic - it makes no sense to argue that 2 + 2 = 11.

Your parents’ opinions do not have universal force, because they are not God. If God creates something, then that something is true by definition. “If A, then not-A” is not merely false; it is meaningless.

Regards,
Shodan

[Apos]

[QUOTE=Shodan]
Not really - assuming the existence of a God who created everything, then He has (or could) create a morality that is objectively true. Morality would then be like arithmetic - it makes no sense to argue that 2 + 2 = 11.
[/quote]

I don’t see how morality is in any way like arithmetic: arithmetic is defined to model reality and be internally consistent to a degree. That’s not even close to somehow making judgments objective.

But I guess you next task is to explain what is involved in creating a morality that is objectively true, or even what that means. This is a pretty basic problem in moral philosophy, and you’ve not even tried to provide some answer to it.

If God can make rape right, then morality is nothing more than “what God commands” which, frankly, doesn’t seem to have any special moral value to it at all. Commands aren’t morality, no matter how trumped up your alleged commander is.

Your parents’ opinions do not have universal force, because they are not God. If God creates something, then that something is true by definition. “If A, then not-A” is not merely false; it is meaningless.

This doesn’t even bother to even TRY to explain how God or anyone else can “make” say, rape morally good, or morally bad.

God can do whatever God wants, and anyone can still say “so what? I don’t value you or your commands, so why should I care.” What is even God’s retort to that?

All of this just smacks as you accepting logic for God that you’d never accept for anything else: much like the first cause argument in which it is asserted as a premise that ALL THINGS must have causes, and then somehow reaches a conclusion that God does not.