Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2019 4:33 pm
I am saying that, given I am not even religious, that the reality of religion is just one part of the secular reality.
A funny use of the word "secular." It's a religious distinction. If you're right, reality isn't "secular," because there's no "secular-religious" distinction. Everything, you say, including religion is "secular," so nothing is not-secular. The word has no particular content, then.
I'm using the term in its root reference as in the times with or without religion. As such, all governments HAVE to favor the 'secular' at a minimum.
Of course they don't. Islamic governments recognize no "secular" issues at all. For them, everything is religious.
If they were to serve religion, they would have to either serve ONE religion or SOME religions, but never ALL,
It's an issue worth discussing whether the purpose of a government is to "serve" any religion. Islamists say, "Yes," Catholics say "Yes," and many other religious groups would say "No."
But nobody would argue that the job of a government is to "serve ALL" religions.
You assume the non-theist as ANTI-religious when the intent of such governments where they exist were merely intent on separating church from state.
Actually, the separation of church and state is a Protestant idea from Locke, not a non-Theist idea at all. The Atheist idea is no churches, just State.
Also, I have to point out that when you also assert the 7%, you are telling me that you likely mean only the 7% of your own defining belief of what is truly 'religious' AND that any religion, OR Atheist non-belief, is what you think of as "secular".
That's not so.
The statistics I cite are from non-religious sources, and are based on self-identification criteria. It's because 93%
say they are religious that we say they are, and it's because 4%
self-identify as agnostic and only 3%
claim Atheism that we can say what they are.
You support a government that doesn't respect "cultural relativism" in its laws,
No I don't. I didn't say anything about government. Government has no business dictating religion to anyone...that's what I'd say.
But you misuse the term "cultural relativism" there. Cultural Relativism doesn't mean "everybody can have his or her own culture." That's just religious or cultural toleration. No, it means, "there is no singular truth value that makes any one culture better than another."' And that's clearly wrong.
And, the reason for those societies that HAVE officially assigned an anti-religious constitution that have done any atrocities, their 'secular' justification for annihilation of any groups are due to the relative extremes of those groups to segregate, not because they aren't free to BE religious necessarily.
Like in Soviet Russia, you mean? Or Maoist China? Or Pol Pot's Cambodia? Or Kim Jong Il's North Korea? Or Venezuela, Cuba and Zimbabwe? Your argument is that the religious people brought it on themselves by not knocking under to the secular regimes? Wow.
What's your evidence of that?
The fact that they both disdained the Jewish communities were related to the power of devotion of the Jewish communities have held onto regardless of external biases.
Wow. You're surely not blaming the Jews for what was done to them, are you?
In fact, any group so extreme as to create a devoted restriction of an 'us' and 'them' is counter to a secular system as it is to a strictly universal mono-religious system.
Maybe. But then you've got to exclude all of them from your "secular" toleration. And that means that you're not a cultural or religious relativist anymore...but rather you'd be imposing secularism by force.
Art, as culture and its dominant factor of religion involve, have no power of natural truth
That's an assumption, but not one most people would share. Religions, for example, all think they're involved in asserting the truth. In fact, do you not believe your "secularism" is the truth? So your view is actually no different: all these views are actually exclusive of one another, and all propose to tell us what the truth is.
Was it not you who wrote the phrase, "reality is secular"? Well, if so, you're saying secularism is realistic, but religious viewpoints are all non-realistic. That's not very "Culturally Relativistic." In fact, it's very exclusivist.
To make clarity in respect to your example: "What is 2 Good things + 2 Good things?"
That wasn't my example, actually. I was just speaking of the numbers, and pointing out that the presence of many wrong answers does not create an argument against the existence of one right one. That's all.
Is there absolute 'goodness' where no 'evil' exists by contrast?
In a world devoid of God, there is no "goodness" at all. Nor any "evil." There is only "what is."
A 'secular' non-cultural government is one that doesn't bias ownership NOR debt to our parents.
Do you have an example of that?
You mistake the difference of the meanings here. THAT culture is 'relative' is a FACT about people and thus any theory about culture in this is called, "cultural relativism".
Actually, that's wrong. "Cultural Relativism" is an ideology, one that says that all cultures have the same (or same absence of any) truth value as all others.
The "fact" to which you are referring is usually called "cultural
pluralism," meaning the existence of more than one such ideology within a single polity. From now on, we should change your terminology to reflect that more normal usage, and say "cultural
relativism" when you mean to deny there is truth to any culture, and "cultural
pluralism" when you are only trying to say "there's more than one culture here."
The Nazis thus enhanced a myth of the Aryan genetic puritanism...
You mean "purity." The Nazis were not Puritans.
Immanuel Can wrote:It is the religious factor which makes all political action bad.
If what you're saying is right -- that people are good, but religion is bad -- then from where did religion come? Who made religions?
It wasn't "reality," according to you, because you say "reality is secular." So who made religions?
Religion is not 'bad' as art.[/quote]
Well, in fact, it cannot be "bad" at all, according to you. For in a secular world, there is no meaning to the word "bad."
Country music is an art that acts as a defining typographic Christian American Southern link. One's preference to like Country, though not my particular favor, is justified as 'good' to anyone who like it for whatever personal reasons.
Nobody believes that country music is reality, though. If it were, we'd all have cowboy boots and pickup trucks, a shotgun, an old dawg, and a girl that done ya wrong.
So that's just a matter of taste.
But religions don't propose to be arts. They instead attempt to describe actual reality, and along with it, to define morality. That's a good deal more than you can look for in a country song.
Religions to me derived FROM secular origins
It's the dead opposite, actually. All ancient societies were religious, and the secular came out of late Protestantism.
The concept of temples and sacrifices, for instance, were actual secular rational means to bind contracts in ancient times.
They did cement contracts, but they weren't just that, actually. People really believed that they were doing something that corresponded to reality. Moreover, there really was no such thing as a "secular" person in those days...just many different religious beliefs.
Idols were literal legal proof of land ownership and forms of identity.
No, they were not. People actually incinerated their livestock and their children in the worship of these so-called "land ownership" icons. They really believed their idols represented the realities of the gods.
So religion IS natural...
Then it cannot be bad to be religious. However, it might be bad to have the
wrong religion, if one of them turns out to be true.
On the other hand, from a purely secular perspective, religion is neither good nor bad; it just
is. Secularism has in it no account of morality at all.
