I understand that you don’t believe an appeal to a god has any validity.
My point is that an appeal to secular humanism has no more validity either.
Both are entirely arbitrary inventions.
This phrase: “The collective enlightened self interest and desires of humanity” sounds sweetly naive, but carries no absolute validity. In fact, quite the opposite, and in many cultures and many histories might be completely different from one place to another. It’s not as if the collective enlightened self interest and desires of humanity is some sort of specific thing. It’s simply the thinking du jour.
Put less nicely: it’s bullshit. Today’s enlightenment is tomorrow’s backward thinking.
Far more validity than a god does. For that matter, “because I say so” has more validity than basing moral claims on a god does; doing the latter piles baseless claim upon baseless claim.
Nonsense. Some things are clearly better, more effective than others. We aren’t bodiless entities floating in some physics-less void with infinitely reprogrammable minds; we live in a physical world that has objective constraints, we have built in tendencies and needs.
And you are creating a false dichotomy; there is no black and white choice between some mythical “absolute” and equally mythical complete arbitrariness. We exist in between.
So, for instance, life under a dictator is in no way distinguishable from life under an elected government? Children who are beaten cannot be told apart from children who grow up loved? Religious bigotry is no worse for a society than religious freedom? Human rights, as a moral cause, is backwards thinking?
I don’t think I like the direction of your philosophy.
Unfortunately, whether you like it or not has no bearing on whether or not a point of view is correct.
Religion invented morality. It is morality. An atheist who subscribes to a moral code has simply substituted that arbitrary code for god.
It’s not a question of whether or not one system is distinguishable from another.
The question at hand is whether or not the concept of “moral” has validity once one accepts there is no external arbiter to which one can appeal a course of action.
The universe has no such opinion. No opinion on whether or not anthropogenic global warming is a good thing; no opinion on whether or not male lions should kill a competitor’s cubs; no opinion on human slavery. That we as humans have an opinion on these things is a consequence of our intellect, but the opinion itself is essentially a reflection of prevailing (and often, competing) notions, fungible and malleable. Superiority for one approved course of action over another may be argued along any number or lines, including a perception of what is “worse for society.” However the concept of whether or not a course of action is “moral” in any absolute sense–i.e., any given action is more moral than another–is meaningless if there is no external arbiter.
Interestingly, CS Lewis thought your and Der Trihs’ instinctive appeal that “some things are clearly better” is one of the best evidences that God exists. Humans seem to universally appeal to this sense of absolute, with even such rabid atheists as Der Trihs shying away from the abyss of nihilistic savagery when confronted with the natural consequence of eliminating a third party arbiter.
Okay, so this raises certain questions about arbitrariness.
Does sexual attraction among heterosexuals exist, or not? It seems obvious to me that it does, though the exact evolutionary process through which it has come to exist is long and complex. Does an instinct to pair-bond among heterosexuals exist, or not? Same thing.
It seems to me entirely unarbitrary to recognize that something exists when it obviously does.
Now, do sexual attraction and the desire to pair bond exist among homosexuals or not?
My follow-up questions depend on your answers to these questions.
Of course it does. A system that gives people what they want is better than one that doesn’t.
An “external arbiter” has nothing to do with morality in the first place. If your “external arbiter” existed and said that rape and torture were good things, should we just go along with it? Of course not.
Again, that is totally irrelevant. Morality isn’t about the universe in the first place, it’s about humans. You might as well claim that morality doesn’t exist because my left sock has no opinion on the matter.
Religious people are prone to think that pretty much anything is proof that their god exists, including bananas and salt stains.
There is no such “natural consequence”. And even if there was, an indetectable, silent “third party” is indistinguishable from having none at all, so if those consequences were real they’d happen anyway.
This was CS Lewis’s argument, of course. We are wired with a fairly universal sense of what is right and what is wrong, and a fairly universal sense of outrage when it is violated. This, for Lewis, was evidence that God was speaking into our lives. (I have not personally found this persuasive, but I admit that you exhibit a wonderful example of what Lewis was talking about.) I always find your diatribes about religionists–especially Christians–delightful, especially when you turn around and argue vehemently for principles that you present as obvious and absolute.
The consequence I was referring to is the philosophic consequence of denying any external Absolute. When you do that, you are left with creating pleas to “moral” constructions which have no more intrinsic weight that the assertions of the religionists.
To focus back on the OP: there may be secular arguments against same sex marrriage, but none of the “moral” arguments for or against same sex marriage carry any more weight than the religious arguments for or against it.
This is true whether or not you deny any external absolute. If God determines morality, then it’s not intrinsically moral- it’s just what God says is good. If God just tells us what the higher morality is, then God isn’t necessary- the morality exists with or without him. Either way, there’s no more connection between God and any true morality if he exists or if he doesn’t.
So then morality becomes (as it always was anyway) how people define it. Any claim of one “code of morality” being superior to another is just as valid if it’s supported by a hypothetical deity than if it’s not, for reasons above.
:rolleyes: That’s just silly. Our built in attitudes are shaped by the nature of the world, evolution and the consequences of those features of the world and ourselves. Those are all features of the real world, not some imaginary god. The two positions are not at all alike.
More nonsense. Any “absolute” if it even exists is irrelevant and without moral relevance. Its existence or nonexistence changes nothing, since we have no way at all of knowing what it is.
Yet more nonsense. Religion, being based on baseless assertions and outright falsehoods, is literally worse than nothing as the basis as an argument. It simply adds layer after layer of empty assertions on top of any that are in the original claim.
Exactly so, although the other way of saying it is that all moral codes are equally invalid.
This is why secular arguments against same sex marriage cannot make pleas to “morality” as there were some sort of absolute moral standard against which to decide what is moral.
Obviously, accepting or denying an external arbiter has no bearing on whether or not such an arbiter actually exists. Depending on how you construct the notion of God, the first part of your post is correct. In a paradigm where God exists outside the universe, and created man, then the “intrinsic” part refers to that creation’s properties. Such a moral code now “intrinsic” to the created being is, of course, ultimately arbitrarily decided by the creator. This is where Lewis found evidence that such a creator must exist.
It’s my personal observation that sex is a nearly universal drive and that (permanent) pair-bonding is substantially less pervasive. Outlets for release of a sex drive include pair-bonded partnerships between and within both sexes. The specifics around pair-bonding seem to me to be as culturally related as they are “instinctive.”
Sex is instinctive. Heterosexual sex is a more common choice than homosexual sex. A variety of partners over time is more common than permanent pair bonding. To the extent that permanent pair bonding works, it is because of an arbitrary choice to remain faithful against an instinct that wants to boink almost anything when the sexual urge raises its procreative head.
Again, nonsense. Morality having to be “absolute” is your hangup, not everybody else’s - an extra-ridiculous hangup considering you are going on and on about there’s no absolute standard. Apparently, the only absolute standard is yours.
I tend to be conservative, and I support SSM. But not for the reasons I’m inferring from your post (i.e., conservatives prefer codified conventions). I tend to be libertarian on social issues, believing that the government should intervene and stop something only when what it stops would otherwise infringe some material right. And I believe all true rights are some form of the right to be left alone, particularly (but not exclusively) to choose our own destinies and make our own choices. Such are the nature of personal liberties, and ISTM protecting those liberties are supremely conservative.
So, I have no gay hang-ups, I don’t think. And I believe that homosexual relationships are capable of producing all the value (love, mutual commitment, spiritual growth, etc.) possible in heterosexual relationships. I am pleased at the thought that gays would be able to enjoy the same benefits we heterosexuals do from marriage. But at the end of the day, none of that matters. I support SSM because it’s none of my business which consenting adults want to get married.
If major changes are made to laws related to legal unions, they should take this opporunity to make them fair to everyone, not just patch up laws with a provision for gay couples.
For example, why can’t two celibate sisters or friends with a lifelong bond who support each other in one household receive some of the benefits of marriage (pension, social security, taxes, medical coverage). What does a gay couple offer to society above these sisters that entitles them to extra benefits?
It has nothing to do with “benefits to society”; marriage is for the sake of the married people. It is the formal recognition of human pair bonding.
And those sisters aren’t getting it because not enough people want such an arrangement to form a political force. If fairness had anything to do with it homosexuals would have always had marriage.
Uh-huh. And having accepted that both heterosexual and homosexual pair-bonding exist, why does one have the option of legal recognition and the other not?
This is 100% incorrect, as was demonstrated over two thousand years ago in Plato’s Euthyphro, which Der Trihs rightly uses against you. Your “external arbiter” doesn’t exist, and cannot exist. All the “objective” aspect of morality comes down to is teasing out the logical consequences of various hardwired elements of our psychology, which may be summed up as “don’t be shitty to people unless they’ve given you cause.” The rest is similar to aesthetic preference.
Religion is an output of this system, not an input.