On 09 Feb 2013, at 15:16, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 12:19 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 2/8/2013 12:04 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:23 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 2/7/2013 3:15 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 10:53 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 2/7/2013 12:01 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
“A secular purpose” is a nice ruse, because it is “theology-free”,
right?
Yes it is. It's not dependent on any ultimate foundation of the
universe (per Bruno's definition of 'theology') or even any
agreement about what that might be. It only depends on the public
subjective non-religious values of society as expressed in their
laws. That's what 'secular' means.
By what mechanism does a value become "non-religious"? How did
"marriage" become secular for instance?
Can you define non-religious values?
I can where religions are certified by the state.
Care to share an example of a secular value stripped of all
religious and transcendental connotations?
Sure, murder is bad. Of course this may be incoporated into many
different religions as a value imposed by some transcendental force
- but it's constancy across many cultures and religions, it's
obvious relation to evolutionary survival makes it pretty clear that
it's a secular value.
You take "negation murder" to be a secular value? Ok, I'll go along
with this even though I believe no state or individual sees that, as
an ethical end to strive for in the sense of a negative intrinsic
value.
"Not murder" is, along with all these cultural and evolutionary
factors, transcendental, as it follows from valuing life in the
simpler self-referential statement: "I live, hence I don't want to
die. I live, therefore I wouldn't want to be killed, therefore
murder is bad."
You ask why, and you'll get a transcendental answer: "Because my
life is not worth killing." => simply belief, as the person in
question could be a Hitler type, with a Stauffenberg waiting in the
next room. Human life appears as the primary, intrinsic value even
here, and not "not murder", which is merely instrumental negative
value implied by the primary value of affirming human life. The
negative instrumental value can be overridden, to assert the
intrinsic one. "I value human life" in the general intrinsic,
affirmative sense is much harder to override.
"Value human life" is common sense with transcendental roots; not
some naive nonsense imposed onto religions by their arbitrary
transcendental false deity.
Additionally, some mystics, theologians, and religions were able to
nail this point without recourse to "historical appearance of
cultural consistency and religions, evolutionary survival", in which
you've obscured the transcendental quality to make your point: these
are imho just sophisticated justifications (still products of
science's narrative of seeking truth; a truth beyond our reach =>
transcendental smiles back at us again anyway, if you ask "why?"
enough times) of something much simpler: the will to live, including
the irrational belief bit we can't wrap our minds around, as we
could also be evil and our value of life misplaced at times.
If you make evolution set the standard, then you have to buy the
darker side of its theology: "Good Tsunami, asteroid, CO2, mass
extinctions of life forms; as these shocks will create a stronger
forcing function on populations and individuals to adapt in the long
term; good my family got killed in that last quake".
Good points.
In fact some people seem to have hard to understand that physics is
not theology, as they bear on different questions. But saying there is
no theology, makes physics (usually) into a theology. It is no more
physics: it is physics + a theological assumption. It becomes *a*
theology.
Not saying it makes it authoritative, which is, provably with comp,
the theological trap.
In science, locally, we can still tolerate an amount of authority and
conservatism, but in religion we can't.
The contrary can happen, and that's we have not really begin to do
science.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
