Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Wed Aug 29, 2018 7:51 am
Yes, I agree Kant's philosophy do not generate precise absolute moral laws but the Five Categorical Imperative is near enough for humanity to refine it by providing deeper groundings from other sources of knowledge based on empirical evidence with higher critical thinking.
You can't refine dust. If Kant's philosophy does not generate an absolute moral law, then even the CI is dust. There's nothing from which humans can build anything there...no foundation, no "grounding."
Even Kant knew precisely that "grounding" was exactly what he would have to do. He hoped he had achieved his "groundwork." But you and I know he did not.
As I had stated it is matter of sooner that we [humanity] will be able to establish an effective Framework and System of Morality and Ethics based on the current trend of the exponential expansion of knowledge and technology.
Neither "knowledge" nor "technology" are morally-generative entities. Our "knowledge" has given us perverse things like mass-manipulation and eugenics, and our "technology" has given us superviruses and atomic bombs. Too look only at the things we happen to like is to be hopelessly naive about the powers of these things. They don't make us better: they make us more
powerful whether or not we happen to be
good.
And power without concomitant goodness is very dangerous.
This is a complex issue and the discussion will get frayed and split into off topic side issues like the one on chattel slavery.
In my view, the chattel slavery issue isn't a "side issue" but is rather an important
test case. Test cases are very useful in examining moral problems when "the rubber meets the road," so to speak, or better put, where metaethics meets applied ethics.
I deliberately chose chattel slavery as an issue because I was quite sure you and I, and many other people on this particular forum, would be in agreement that (at least intuitively) we would regard it as immoral. By moving beyond the contentious, we can ask, "How is it that we all know slavery is wrong, especially when it is an old, dignified practice of many other societies?" And by tracing our own reasoning backwards, we can arrive at rational agreement.
I mentioned the principle of respecting one basic human dignity and also the Golden Rules plus other approaches to get to the deepest groundings.
Well, unfortunately, these are so far entirely ungrounded. The GR needs to be grounded, as does the notion of "human dignity." What are your grounds for them?
Theism is after all merely a psychological impulse that drives theists to believe in a God for very selfish reason, i.e. one personal salvation from an existential crisis.
This is again, the
ad hominem Freudian thing. You really need to give that up. It's such a bad fallacy.
True, not all theists and theistic ideology are evil laden but the idea of theism works on a collective basis to provide psychological support for the evil prone to commit terrible evils in the name of God.
So...Theism, you imagine, causes "terrible evils," but Atheism causes sunshine and light? Wow. Ask the victims of Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot or today, North Korea what they think of the power of Atheism to save us from evils.
I agree the caste system is a part of Hinduism but not all Hindu sects adopt the caste system and in modern times the caste system is made illegal.
And yet, it is an inextricable part of Hinduism: meaning that Hinduism can abandon its fundamental concepts of "reincarnation" and "karma" only by becoming something other than Hinduism. And that may well be happening in the West. But a traditional Hindu can certainly tell you that that is not Hinduism as he knows it, and not as it still exists in most of India.
160 million voices can tell you that.
As I had stated not all sects of Hinduism agree with the caste system.
Well, the "Untouchables" have certainly been skeptical of it. Some of them have converted to Buddhism, in an effort to escape it. But that's not really relevant, even if their are other "sects" you refer to who reject those beliefs. The real question is, "Does a
genuine Hinduism require those things?"
It does, unless Hinduism can exist without any doctrines of reincarnation, samsara, and karmic cycles. But I suspect that any Hindu you ask will tell you that's not possible. It would completely shatter the Hindu cosmology upon which everything depends.
One point with Hinduism is, the doctrines are not claimed to be immutable...
No, that's not how it is: in Hinduism,
reality is claimed to be mutable -- but
the fact that reality is mutable is not mutable. That latter belief mutates, then Hinduism itself becomes untrue.
Re history, if theists had not killed non-theists and imposed theism on non-theists there would be no serious issues.
???
I'm sorry: no "principle of charity" can save a statement so vague and wild.
Actually in the OT, non-theists are condemned as 'fools'
This is true. "The fool has said in his heart, 'No God.'" Is how it literally reads. The debatable point is not what it says, but whether or not it's true.
However, you will not find it says, "Therefore, kill all the fools." In the Bible, the existence of such fools is taken as a permanent fact in human history. It may be regrettable; but it is not something one can change. The fool can only change himself.
Many people are not theists because they find a belief in God to be irrational which is very true due to lack of evidence.
When you say "lack of evidence, " do you mean "I, AV have no evidence of God," or "Nobody else has evidence of God?" In charity, I have to ask before commenting further, because your claim could be either.
I used to think of non-theists as fools not to believe the 'so-obvious-God' but now I know that thought was merely a psychological consolation for my own weakness.
I can't believe you're so impressed with the Freudian psychological dismissal of Theism, but don't even think about Freud's parallel dismissal of Atheism in his book "Totem and Taboo." And I can't believe you still can't see that it's
ad hominem and ridiculous as an argument. But okay.
Your number aside, I agree many are killed in secular wars but in this case we effectively must trace to the respective individual positive root ideology that trigger the killing, e.g. communism, fascism, Nazism, tribal/clan wars, drug wars, gang wars, etc.
Where then is this wonderful effect of Atheism to induce moral improvement?
The answer is quite simple, really. Atheism, being empty of anything but the disavowal of belief in God, offers nothing by which to structure a society, a concept of justice, a legal system, education or whatever. Instead it leaves a complete vacuum, into which some other secular ideology must rush -- for people must go on living together, and cannot do without morals, laws, education, equity, and so on -- with the result that that ideology produces all manner of evils.
But Theism's not even involved in that. And, as I say, 148 million people paid the price for our ignorance of this principle.
It would be ridiculous to say that all non-theists must be theists to meet the theist expectations.
It would, however, be impossible to say that they could do so for sound reasons. Non-Theism gives no reasons for any "expectations." It's a big, fat void on all positive questions, except for its one basic claim -- that there is no God.
Thus if non-theistic communism is evil, then deal with communism specifically.
See above. I have outlined the natural symbiosis between Atheism and malignant secular ideologies there.
The matter of the present is merely this: Non-Theism has no universal, objective standard by which to condemn anything -- anything any Theist might do, but also anything anyone else might do.
And conversely, Non-Theism has no basis for praising any "good" action. It has, in fact, no information on any moral question at all. It is, as you have said, mere negation, and negation limited to a single issue.
It stays "slender" in order to avoid creating its own ideology, and then having to defend it. But in placing itself in that epistemologically-slender position, it is empty of value. It cannot ground morality, human rights, fairness and justice, political solutions, social customs, or any values whatsoever. It' is simply silent on all these questions.
And this is why it has nothing to offer on the "chattel slavery" question, too.
What???
You want me to repeat? Okay.
Non-Theism can tell us nothing about the "chattel slavery" question. To put it another way, the statement "There is no God" does not give us any more information than that. It does not even have an implication for chattel slavery. It has absolutely no moral content, just as Peter has elsewhere so clearly said.
Non-theists do not have any basis to condemn the killings by certain theistic Muslims?
Correct. But you can see this for yourself. Try to get the claim, "There is no God" to be rationally connected to the conclusion, "Therefore, killing people is wrong." You'll quickly find that there's no logical connection possible there at all.