Apologists wasting their talent

[_Coggins7]

Acceptable to whom and upon what criteria? Self preservation. Fear. Psychological fear, horror, and cultural conditioning. If I'm a serial killer and I like torturing babies, you have no intrinsic moral template, valid not only for you but for the universe as a whole, by which to judge my antinomian morality. This is the categorical imperative. As long as torturing babies is fulfilling for me, in Dawkin's world, this is as far as we can go epistemologically. You may quite rightly incarcerate or kill me for so doing, but you cannot judge me, at least not morally.

One aside here I have to mention is that the entire secular humanist paradigm has, in actual practice, had precisely the effect upon society Beckwith implies is should. One of the best evidences of this is the practice, popular for my entire life time, of calling Adolf Hitler insane, as opposed to evil. This shibboleth has worked its way into the very fabric of our culture, such that people like Charles Manson or heinous mass murderers are routinely called insane because our epistemologically relativist culture has lost its language of moral outrage.

Ideas have consequences.

[_Tarski]

1. The human context is not arbitrary. For example, it is unlikely that there could be a human moral system where torturing babies for fun was acceptable.

Acceptable to whom and upon what criteria? Self preservation. Fear. Psychological fear, horror, and cultural conditioning. If I'm a serial killer and I like torturing babies, you have no intrinsic moral template, valid not only for you but for the universe as a whole, by which to judge my antinomian morality. This is the categorical imperative. As long as torturing babies is fulfilling for me, in Dawkin's world, this is as far as we can go epistemologically. You may quite rightly incarcerate or kill me for so doing, but you cannot judge me, at least not morally.

.

On the contrary we can and do judge morally.

2. If the social context provided by an infinity of gods and other beings is enough to provide meaning then why cannot the context of man? In either case we just have a community of intentional beings (beings exhibiting intentionality).

Meaning isn't provided just by the social context. The Celestial Kingdom is not a glorified country club. Meaning is provided by the bare actuality that an intelligent being can acquire, immerse himself in, enjoy, and apply truth, knowledge, wisdom, and power without any fear that there will ever be a time when he will cease enjoying and immersing himself in, and applying the attributes he has acquired.

OMG, this is terrible. Meaning is aquired by a "bare actuality"?? You haven't really said anything.

"Man is that he might have joy", and this joy is precisely an infinite characteristic; it is not time bound, and hence, has inherent, cosmic meaning beyond our own subjective psychological constructions

Nonsense. Joy is just what normal humans think it is. I have joy in my family and in my music regardless of your imagined supernatural world populated by infinite procreating god-chains.


By the way. Just explain what you mean by "infinite characteristic".

Its clear you throw words around based on how they sound but not based on what they might mean in a given context.

[_Coggins7]

On the contrary we can and do judge morally.

Let's not go around the sugar bowl tarski. This is dead and buried.

OMG, this is terrible. Meaning is aquired by a "bare actuality"?? You haven't really said anything.

Care to respond to the propositions I've made here philosophically? What about this claim do you find troubling (assuming you can go with me and, for the sake of the argument, assume just a few of the core premises.

I said:

[

quote]"Man is that he might have joy", and this joy is precisely an infinite characteristic; it is not time bound, and hence, has inherent, cosmic meaning beyond our own subjective psychological constructions

[/quote]

Nonsense. Joy is just what normal humans think it is. I have joy in my family and in my music regardless of your imagined supernatural world populated by infinite procreating god-chains.

This is, indeed, what ants do; go around and around the sugar bowl until they die of starvation and exhaustion. Yes, in your self constructed, internal fantasy world, you have joy and happiness, and not one iota of it means a blessed bloody thing beyond that. When you and your family are dead, and when the earth is swallowed by our Red Giant sun, it will never have mattered one little bit whether you had joy or whether you experienced nothing but bitterness, fear, horror, and humiliation your entire wretched existence.

The internal fantasy world you have created and maintain shields you from these harsh realties and allows you to move on through life without psychological collapse.

At least, in Dawkinsworld and Saganville, that's the fundamental reality you must accept as a logical consequence of that belief system.



I

ts clear you throw words around based on how they sound but not based on what they might mean in a given context.

[/quote]


Its clear your a very clever and articulate intellectual wanna be who isn't really interested in a deep and penetrating philosophical discussion, or in exploring concepts and ideas outside of your own little black box. And let's not forget that even blacker little anti-Mormon box.

[_Chap]

Coggins the philosopher speaks:

Yes, in your self constructed, internal fantasy world, you have joy and happiness, and not one iota of it means a blessed bloody thing beyond that.

Here, as is boringly and repetitiously usual with Coggins, actual experienced human life is not so much analysed as negated at a stroke by the repeated use of such loaded terms as "self constructed" "internal" "fantasy", all of which imply that Coggins the Great Philosophical Beast has some other metaphysically superior standpoint to judge them from apart from his own "self constructed internal fantasies".

This he has never demonstrated, nor so far as I can see even attempted or purported to demonstrate. Indeed he refuses to do so, on the grounds that we might be rude about or dismissive of his beliefs.

When you and your family are dead, and when the earth is swallowed by our Red Giant sun, it will never have mattered one little bit whether you had joy or whether you experienced nothing but bitterness, fear, horror, and humiliation your entire wretched existence.

You need to rephrase that a bit Coggins, even from your own point of view. Whether I do here and now experience joy (which I frequently do) or other emotions does matter to me, and to my family and friends (or are you going to say now that atheists and their loved ones do not actually have real feelings for themselves or for others?).Therefore even when we are all dead, there will have been a time when in any normal sense of the word, our feelings will have mattered, contrary to what you maintain. Of course once we are all dead, we no longer have any feelings that can matter to anybody any more. But that is not what you asserted.

Coggins, whatever your fantasies might be, my existence is not wretched at all, but gets more and more interesting and fulfilling every day. I sincerely hope that yours is too. But my experience of life in many modes suggests that someone who emits such a copious stream of nasty invective as yourself, so full of the desire to categorise others' lives as miserable and pointless, may just possibly not be so happy as he might be. In certain technical circles, this phenomenon is called 'projection'. You might consider going to see somebody about it one day.