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  • Originally posted by seer View Post
    No your position is that you, personally, make the rules. But you do like using the majority when it agrees with you.
    My position is that each of us determine what is moral based on what we value, including you. And we all tend to like it when the majority agrees with us, because it makes life that much easier. When they don't, then we are out of sync with the society and that is always challenging. Some Christians are experiencing this now as acceptance for the LGBTQ communiity becomes mainstream. I was experiencing it in 1978 when it wasn't.
    The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

    I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

    Comment


    • Originally posted by Cerebrum123 View Post
      His morals are relative to the point in time he makes his posts.
      Originally posted by carpedm9587 View Post
      OK - that was good...


      And actually not completely inaccurate...
      If true that's actually kind of sad.

      I'm always still in trouble again

      "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
      "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
      "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

      Comment


      • Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
        If true that's actually kind of sad.
        No - it simply reflects the fact that morality is not fixed - it is malleable. Moral codes can and do change over time. We are seeing that in operation today with the LGBTQ debate. It has also happened with the role of women in society, slavery, and the list goes on. It's neither "sad" nor "joyful;" it just is.
        The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

        I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

        Comment


        • Originally posted by carpedm9587 View Post
          My position is that each of us determine what is moral based on what we value, including you.
          You know, I'm not sure that is exactly right. There were a number of moral positions in Scripture that I did not agree with - and would have it otherwise, even today. But I accept them because I believe they are God given and that He knows better than I.
          Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

          Comment


          • Originally posted by seer View Post
            You know, I'm not sure that is exactly right. There were a number of moral positions in Scripture that I did not agree with - and would have it otherwise, even today. But I accept them because I believe they are God given and that He knows better than I.
            All you are saying, Seer, is that you value your god above all else, so you subjugate your moralizing to your interpretation of what you think this god wants as documented in the Christian bible. If you did not value your god so much, then you wouldn't do that.

            My guess is that there is a mixture of valuing going on there. It may be that you value this god above all else, or it may be that you value the disposition of your "immortal soul" above all else, and are seeking to adopt moral positions you believe will most enhance/protect that. Only you know which it is, or if it's some combination.
            The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

            I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

            Comment


            • Originally posted by carpedm9587 View Post
              All you are saying, Seer, is that you value your god above all else, so you subjugate your moralizing to your interpretation of what you think this god wants as documented in the Christian bible. If you did not value your god so much, then you wouldn't do that.

              My guess is that there is a mixture of valuing going on there. It may be that you value this god above all else, or it may be that you value the disposition of your "immortal soul" above all else, and are seeking to adopt moral positions you believe will most enhance/protect that. Only you know which it is, or if it's some combination.
              In either case the morals could not exactly be called mine, where in your case you would call them yours.
              Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

              Comment


              • Originally posted by carpedm9587 View Post
                My position is that each of us determine what is moral based on what we value, including you. And we all tend to like it when the majority agrees with us, because it makes life that much easier. When they don't, then we are out of sync with the society and that is always challenging. Some Christians are experiencing this now as acceptance for the LGBTQ communiity becomes mainstream. I was experiencing it in 1978 when it wasn't.
                But that pretty much undermines your whole argument with Ox and everyone else in this thread, where you have been saying that us thinking homosexual behavior is immoral is actually bigotry because of genetics. That is just YOUR personal value judgement. That doesn't make it true, or a correct moral judgement on those who disagree with you. You are trying to pretend it is scientifically based when in fact it is nothing but your opinion and now you can't even appeal to the majority view. All you are arguing is your personal view and preferences.

                Comment


                • Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                  But that pretty much undermines your whole argument with Ox and everyone else in this thread, where you have been saying that us thinking homosexual behavior is immoral is actually bigotry because of genetics. That is just YOUR personal value judgement. That doesn't make it true, or a correct moral judgement on those who disagree with you. You are trying to pretend it is scientifically based when in fact it is nothing but your opinion and now you can't even appeal to the majority view. All you are arguing is your personal view and preferences.
                  And he holds to his opinions as strongly as any theist - even though he knows those opinions are ephemeral as smoke...
                  Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

                  Comment


                  • Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                    But that pretty much undermines your whole argument with Ox and everyone else in this thread, where you have been saying that us thinking homosexual behavior is immoral is actually bigotry because of genetics. That is just YOUR personal value judgement. That doesn't make it true, or a correct moral judgement on those who disagree with you. You are trying to pretend it is scientifically based when in fact it is nothing but your opinion and now you can't even appeal to the majority view. All you are arguing is your personal view and preferences.

                    I think it's quite Ok for carpe to do that. What I do think is wrong is for him (and other moral relativists) to borrow terms and language from objective morality to describe what are no more than his personal views.

                    When people read something like: "It is immoral and bigoted to deny this right to people who want it" the implication is that there is something objective grounding that claim. There isn't.

                    It's almost a kind of equivocation.

                    Ditto for all talk or implication of moral progress- doesn't exist under moral relativism. A change in moral views can't be any kind of objective improvement, but often the implication is given that it is.

                    Moral relativists should stop trying to borrow moral authority from moral objectivism.
                    ...>>> Witty remark or snarky quote of another poster goes here <<<...

                    Comment


                    • Originally posted by MaxVel View Post

                      Moral relativists should stop trying to borrow moral authority from moral objectivism.
                      Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

                      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

                      Comment


                      • Originally posted by oxmixmudd View Post
                        Is the issue under discussion whether minority group X, is inferior due to alleged trait Y, and therefore should be denied human right Z?

                        The problem is that your generalization can apply to ANY moral assessment.
                        I certainly don't think that's remotely close to true. It'll be interesting to see where you're going with this...

                        Is the issue under discussion whether minority group [people who genetically are predisposed to addition], is inferior due to alleged trait [illegal drug use] and there for should be denied human right [ freedom through incarceration]
                        If you are preemptively incarcerating all people in that minority group, that is obviously horrendous. If they commit a crime and then you incarcerate them after due legal process, then you're not violating human rights and it has nothing to do with them being a minority group.

                        The issue is even more difficult because ones (presumed) genetic disposition is tied to a particular historically moral action (same-sex acts).
                        That was what caused the Jews a lot of problems over the centuries. People thought that Jews were inherently immoral for being part of the people who had killed Jesus or because Jewish rituals were immoral.

                        When a lot of society is viewing membership of the minority group itself as immoral it's important to treat the topic really carefully, because history teaches us that we're on even more dangerous ground and in danger of committing serious atrocities, as compared to when the minority group is not viewed as itself inherently immoral but merely as having negative traits (e.g. Blacks).

                        In almost all cases we do not excuse immoral acts because a persons character or genetics predisposes them to commit the immoral act.
                        I would disagree. The court system is pretty quick to allow for diminished capacity. For example, in the US if a person is shown to have an IQ below a certain threshold, they cannot receive the death penalty because they are judged to not have sufficient understanding of their own actions. Or, lets say, a person suffers from kleptomania, and cannot stop stealing, they are likely to be remanded into psychiatric care by the courts rather than prison.

                        Our moral judgments of people are almost always predicated on the extent to which we think the person possessed true free will in the matter. If that free will is abridged in any way due to innate tendencies or temporary effects ("temporary insanity" was a historic legal defense for example), that is totally a mitigating factor.

                        1) The 3 major religions of the world define same-sex acts as immoral.
                        This needs some qualifiers. Judaism has historically been against male intercourse, which is only a limited slice of the broader LGBT issues, and Judaism today is split into multiple denominations, many of which are favorable to LGBT issues (including male intercourse). Within Israel, current polling shows a supermajority of voters favor same-sex marriage being legal, and Tel Aviv has a reputation as one of the most 'gay friendly' cities in the world.

                        Christianity, today, is likewise split. With support for LGBT rights / morality varying by country and population.

                        So that has been the moral position of a very large part of the worlds population for a very, very long time.
                        If you're working by some sort of majority consensus here it's worth bearing in mind a few things...

                        1. The number of people living today exceeds the total number of people who've lived in the last several thousand years combined. If you're going by sheer numbers, historical peoples are largely irrelevant, and it's what people today think that matters. (One could also make an argument that it's probably better to pay attention to the opinions of the educated than it is to the ignorant, so you're probably better looking at what the OECD countries today think rather than say Chinese rice farmers or African desert tribesmen, and of course if you check today's OECD country's they're all but universally pro-LGBT)

                        2. Even within Christian Europe there were fluctuations in how LGBT issues were viewed over the last 1500 years. In plenty of periods the populace either didn't seem to know what the official teachings were on the issue or didn't care.

                        3. Anthropological surveys of different historical cultures and peoples reveal to us that indigenous peoples around the world were almost all okay to some extent or another with LGBT rights and issues. For example, across America, the common pre-colonial pattern among the native people groups was that any man was allowed opt out of the male gender and become 3rd gender, and a man could marry multiple women and also a 3rd gender person (and including a 3rd gender person among one's spouses was considered to bring luck). Overall, the majority of cultures in history have been fine with homosexuality.

                        2) The entire issue of whether this is a genetic trait or a genetic pre-disposition is unsettled. How is that different. As a genetic trait, the feelings of same-sex attraction would not be malleable. As a genetic pre-disposition, they wold arise more due to environmental influences than be a necessarily inherited trait that can't be changed or avoided. (I am aware that people that hail from your POV see this issue as more or less settled).
                        Not quite sure what you mean with the last comment here, other than being a vague attack on me. My view is that LGBT people report their feelings as innate, and that there are zero established reproducible and successful methodologies for altering those feelings despite quite extensive efforts by many people over decades to attempt to find some. As such it is irrelevant what the causes are (genetic, hormonal, environmental etc).

                        I know personally several people that have found that their same-sex attraction was more of an environmental consequence.
                        I don't understand what you mean by that sentence.

                        One of them left the gay lifestyle fairly early and has led a monogamous, hetero-sexual life ever since.
                        The term "gay lifestyle" is an offensive term, so I suggest you don't use it unless you mean to offend people. Also, it's not a very clear term - I don't entirely understand what your sentence here is meaning to convey.

                        If you are saying that someone had a same sex relationship, and then had an opposite sex one, then I would note that is a common thing for bisexual people to do. If you are saying a guy went to a lot of gay bars and eventually married someone of the opposite sex, then again I would note that that is a common thing for bisexual people to do.

                        The other left the gay lifestyle after more that 20 years in it. The issues that trapped him in that lifestyle and that were countered by working though the events that put him into that lifestyle were quite real
                        Again, the word "lifestyle" obscures more than it clarifies, not to mention is offensive. You'd be better explaining what issues he had if you want to communicate clearly.

                        I have no reason to doubt either of their stories about how same-sex attraction intersected with their lives.
                        From both anecdotes and scientific studies, it's pretty clear that on these issues a lot of people lie to themselves or others. The combination of societal pressure, family pressure, religiosity, self-doubt or self-hatred, and desire, can really mess with people's heads until they don't know how they feel, and there's been a lot of gay people decades later coming out of opposite-sex marriages who have confessed they felt like they were living a lie and lying to themselves and others. There was one scientist a decade or so ago who credulously interviewed a lot of gay people who had gone through therapy and then into what looked like successful opposite sex marriages, and who believed everything they told him about how fine they were now doing... the scientist later retracted his work admitting he had been far to credulous in believing everything they told him at the time.

                        Again though, there's nothing unusual about people who are bisexual getting married to someone of the opposite sex.

                        What you do with you simplification is dismiss a significant and very real component of this debate that makes this very different from the other issues you would try to equate it to.
                        Not quite sure which component you're referring to.

                        Nothing you've said makes me think that equating it to other minority oppression in history isn't valid.

                        Those a-priori assumptions and the dismissive disposition that drives you make it nearly impossible for you to be able to hear the voices of those that hail from a different position on this than your own.
                        Can you stop with the absurd and nasty psychologizing of me already? Critique the argument, please, not the poster. I think you're 100% wrong in these statements about me, and I think the fact that you're saying them reveals a lot about you, none of it good.

                        But that does not dismiss the fact that my religion very clearly defines the acts themselves as immoral.
                        And that's the issue. That's "what drives you and make[s] it nearly impossible for you to be able to hear the voices of those that hail from a different position on this than your own" as you put it in your projection of your own psychology onto me.

                        I am not alone and one can't just dismiss the moral conscience of billions of people.
                        They didn't arrive separately at the same conclusion through their conscience, they all got it from a single source, their religion. To determine if a religious teaching is right or wrong, the fact that a lot of people believe the religion isn't evidence. However, one might want to consider that the large number of religious believers in the present day who are rejecting that particular religious teaching, or rejecting that religion because of that religious teaching, as evidence.

                        These issues of morality need to worked through within the various religious contexts. IF you think anything less is going to solve the problem, then you are demonstrating your own ignorance of conscience and the depth of impact religious teachings have on religious people.
                        Oh don't worry, I don't underestimate the extent to which religious indoctrination messes people up.


                        ...if there was anything approaching a compelling argument that my original question (Is the issue under discussion whether minority group X, is inferior due to alleged trait Y, and therefore should be denied human right Z?) is invalid / unreasonable in all of that, I guess I missed it. To me, that question still remains key.
                        "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                        "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                        "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

                        Comment


                        • Originally posted by seer View Post
                          In either case the morals could not exactly be called mine, where in your case you would call them yours.
                          They are yours in so far as you have adopted them. If you were a devout Muslim, you would have adopted those. And it is, of course, your specific interpretation of what these codes mean. Since there is clearly more than one interpretation (i.e., there is clearly more than one Christian sect with the claim to be following the "will of god"), yes, I would say they are yours.
                          The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

                          I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

                          Comment


                          • Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                            But that pretty much undermines your whole argument with Ox and everyone else in this thread, where you have been saying that us thinking homosexual behavior is immoral is actually bigotry because of genetics.
                            I have no clue how you get to this conclusion...

                            Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                            That is just YOUR personal value judgement.
                            Of course it is.

                            Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                            That doesn't make it true, or a correct moral judgement on those who disagree with you.
                            It does not make it absolutely/objectively true. Each of us judges not only our own actions, but also the actions of those around us against our own moral framework. That's how morality works.

                            Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                            You are trying to pretend it is scientifically based when in fact it is nothing but your opinion and now you can't even appeal to the majority view. All you are arguing is your personal view and preferences.
                            Actually, my argument was about the inconsistency of seeing genetics as a poor basis for morality (mixed race couples) but then using it as a basis for morality with respect to sexual identity. In all honesty, your responses led me to believe you never actually understood that part of the argument.
                            The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

                            I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

                            Comment


                            • Originally posted by seer View Post
                              And he holds to his opinions as strongly as any theist - even though he knows those opinions are ephemeral as smoke...
                              No - they are not. That is the incorrect assumption you continually make. Essentially - Technique #1
                              The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

                              I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

                              Comment


                              • Originally posted by MaxVel View Post
                                I think it's quite Ok for carpe to do that. What I do think is wrong is for him (and other moral relativists) to borrow terms and language from objective morality to describe what are no more than his personal views.

                                When people read something like: "It is immoral and bigoted to deny this right to people who want it" the implication is that there is something objective grounding that claim. There isn't.
                                No. The statement is grounded in my moral framework. The only "objective" part of the argument was the inconsistency I noted in my previous post.

                                Originally posted by MaxVel View Post
                                It's almost a kind of equivocation.

                                Ditto for all talk or implication of moral progress- doesn't exist under moral relativism. A change in moral views can't be any kind of objective improvement, but often the implication is given that it is.
                                There is an element of truth to this. Progress in morality is similar to progress in evolution: it does not have an objective "goal." It is measured against context and, generally, in terms of its effect on individuals.

                                Originally posted by MaxVel View Post
                                Moral relativists should stop trying to borrow moral authority from moral objectivism.
                                Moral authority comes from the individual. It does not come from some objective standard. Even moral objectivists function this way, though they claim an objective basis for their views.
                                The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

                                I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

                                Comment

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