A Sincere Argument Against Conservatism
The purpose of this post is to present the best arguments for certain conservative stances, and then refute them. Too often in political debates people strawman their opponents, such as claiming that all republicans are greedy and looking to hoard money or that all democrats are lazy and don’t want to work for their money. There are some people who fit these descriptions, but it is dishonest of either side to categorize the other generally like that.
I also want to brush over certain conservative ideas that aren’t worth debating. Anti-socialism is a scare tactic, we already have socialist education, medicare, and financial aid for higher education. Conserving the ideology of the founding fathers, while a central part of many people’s ideology, is similarly unworthy of debate. The founding fathers were pro-slavery, against women’s rights, and had no concept of the political climate of today. Clearly, the current political debate must focus on what is best for now and the future, not what the founding fathers were aiming for.
There are, however, three stances I want to refute: the argument against gay marriage, the argument against universal healthcare, and the argument that the rich should not pay higher taxes. There are sincere, intellectual people who believe in all of these arguments, and I am hoping to grasp their arguments in order to succesfully refute them. Here goes:
1. There are a few arguments against gay marriage thrown around, each with a different motive. These motives range from disgust to religious belief, or even personal conviction on the morality of homosexuality. To refute this, I want to present a sound argument for why gay marriage has to be legalized, and granted as a constitutional right:
- 1. Everyone has a right to pursue happiness so long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others.
- 2. Gay couples desire to be married in order to pursue their own happiness.
- 3. Gay couples getting married does not infringe upon the rights of others.
Therefore,
-4. Gay couples must be granted the right to get married.
This argument is logically valid in that, if someone accepts premises 1-3 as true, they must accept the truth of the conclusion on pain of being irrational. Premise 1 is in the United States Declaration of Independence (with the added stipulation of not infringing upon other’s rights), and I doubt anyone has an issue with its truth. Premise 2 is undeniable, there are gay couples who would be more happy if married then if simply in a civil union (due to both the legal benefits and the social acceptance). Therefore, if conservatives want to contest conclusion 4, they must refute Premise 3.
The best possible argument against Premise 3 would be a religiously based attack. A conservative could claim that religious people have a right to their beliefs, and that allowing gay marriage infringes upon religious freedom. However, this argument confuses religious freedom with imposing religious doctrine. People have the right to believe homosexuality is immoral, but unless there are clear victims of homosexual acts, they do not have the right to impose their own beliefs on homosexual couples. It is not a right to have religious doctrine imposed on those who do not share it; in fact, the bill of rights clearly states that freedom of religion mandates the absence of imposing religious beliefs.
There is also the argument that churches will have to accept gay marriages, and that this infringes upon religious freedom. However, this argument confuses a legal marriage with a religious marriage. The Christian/Mormon/Jewish church does not have to acknowledge or accept gay marriage as valid. Rather, accepting gay marriage is a civil matter where gay couples are granted civil rights regulated by the government.
Without citing rights that gay marriage violates (which do not exist), conservatives would be unable to refute Premise 3. If they are unable to refute the truth of any of the premises, then gay marriage must be allowed.
2. There are also differing arguments against universal healthcare. One argument is that these systems are too ineffective to work (clearly refuted by the fact that the United States is the only industrialized country without it, and the U.S. healthcare system is currently ranked #37 in the world by the World Health Report). I don’t believe this argument has any credibility due to the substantial amount of contrary evidence (another interesting note is how much more we pay per person for healthcare in America than countries with socialized medicine).
The other argument that I want to focus on is the ethical argument that people should not be forced to pay for other’s medical needs. Basically, this argument focuses on either the right of individuals to choose their own healthcare plan, or the right of individuals to keep what they earn. I’ll focus on each separately.
- The right to choose your own healthcare plan is basically the right to be able to buy whatever plan you like best. It’s basically a consumer’s choice right, similar to how we are able to choose which car we want to buy. However, the problem with this is that it ignores what other countries has established as the right to healthcare. What justification is there for preferring the consumer’s choice right above the right to healthcare? Which, ultimately, is more critical to human happiness and well-being? If you focus on the quality of human life (as I do), it is clear that a right to healthcare will insure greater quality of life than a right to a consumer choice will.
- The right of individuals to keep what they earn is closely related to the third conservative stance, so I will elaborate more in the next section. Brushing over, I want to draw out what this argument is really saying. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that universal healthcare would cost the average taxpayer more than they are paying in taxes now (debatable, but assume for the sake of argument). Let’s label the average higher percentage of taxes on individuals as X%. Now, which right will ultimately lead to greater quality of life: the right to keep X% of your income from taxes, or the right to healthcare? For a certain few, the right to keep X% will be greater. However, consider the middle and lower classes who cannot afford regular doctor visits, and suffer from a lack of healthcare. A study done in 2009 by the Harvard and Cambridge Medical schools found that uninsured adults are 40% more likely to die from the same illnesses as their insured counterparts. This leads to approximately 45,000 extra deaths that could have been prevented if everyone had a right to healthcare. Can people really make the argument that the right to keep X% of their income is a greater part of quality of life than the amount of illness and death that could be prevented with a right to healthcare?
Ultimately, as the rest of industrialized nations have done, the United States needs to establish access to healthcare as a fundamental right. There are no rights that would be infringed upon that would cause more harm than the right to healthcare would prevent.
3. The right of the rich to keep what they earn has perhaps been the central doctrine of the Republican party since Reagan. This started with the “trickle-down” theory that said that if the rich got tax cuts, jobs would be created and the overall situation of everyone would improve. This theory adheres to the Rawlsian idea that social inequality is only justified if the inequalities are to the benefit of everyone.
The idea that trickle-down economics benefits everyone has largely been shot down (especially during the Bush administration). Intuitively, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that a few percentage tax cut would lead rich people to use their personal incomes to hire new people. Rather, it would seem that this tax cut would lead to a lot more savings in their bank accounts. However, this type of economics is a subject too complex for me to go over on this blog. There are many economists on both sides of this argument, and while the debate has heavily leaned toward condemning trickle down economics as a failure, neither side can be conclusively proven yet.
What I want to focus on instead is the ethical part of the debate. Basically, as seen in many political message boards, the argument goes like this: “why should the rich give up the money they earned in order for the poor who didn’t work for it”.
This argument is flawed in several ways. First, I do not understand how the connection is being constantly made between taxation on the wealthy and programs like welfare and medicare. Income taxes support the army, government, medicare, public safety, education, and so forth. Reducing taxation on the rich doesn’t eliminate programs like welfare, it simply lowers the amount of money the government has to spend on all of its services. Therefore, the argument needs to be split into two parts: the argument that the poor shouldn’t get monetary help, and the argument that the rich shouldn’t pay more in taxes.
- Arguing that the poor shouldn’t get help demands an egoist view. Imagine that eliminating all forms of governmental security nets (unemployment, welfare, medicare) would save taxpayers an average of Y% a year of their income. Eliminating these programs, however, would result in thousands of those dependent on welfare starving to death (including children), thousands dying much earlier for illnesses that could have been treated, rampant homelessness, and a complete loss of economic safety for those with temperamental jobs. Is a savings of Y% really worth these negative effects on society? Conservatives cannot claim that people wouldn’t be hurt by the loss of these services. Further, they cannot claim that the savings of Y% would prevent more harm than the services that use Y’s money. What they could claim is that people should not be forced to help others. This is the egoist view. Basically, it means that people should only look out for themselves, and should not be concerned with helping others. If this is the conservative view, I cannot logically refute it. However, I doubt many conservatives would be willing to endorse this view.
- Lastly, the argument that the rich shouldn’t pay more in taxes is central to the current Republican viewpoint. To refute this, all I need to ask is: how should people be taxed? Should every adult be charged an equal amount of money per year? This would result in teenagers out of high school being charged the same amount as billionaires. Most people would be unable to pay the average amount needed to support the United States government. Should every adult then be charged an equal percentage of their income? If so, would low income families who live paycheck to paycheck be able to sacrifice the 20-25% needed on average in order to support the U.S. government? The rich, who can easily afford the 20-25%, would not face near the same amount of hardship in paying taxes as the poorer families in which the difference between 5-10% and 20-25% is the difference between eating and not eating, or having a home and being homeless.
Ultimately, is it wrong to claim that everyone should sacrifice roughly the same amount of their lifestyle in order to support the services we need from the government? Taxes are a necessary evil to support these services. If people are asked to sacrifice the same amount of their lifestyle, this would mean taxing the rich at a much greater rate than low and middle income people. This is the progressive tax rate that America has, and it works. Unless conservatives are willing to claim that people should be taxed in equal amounts or percentages, the rich must be taxed at a rate greater than the middle and lower class.
You’re waying in on issues that deserve far more than a single blog post. I won’t try to argue the whole post, but just one thing to note.
You say that the taking of a principled anti-socialist stance is not even worth consideration because we’ve already socialized large segments of the economy. Leaving aside that that quick dismissal makes the mistake of assuming that the way things are is the way things should be, I’m concerned that you seem to be assuming that current levels of socialization in American politics are sustainable, which is strange in view of over fourteen trillion dollars in government debt, which translates into $130,000 per American taxpayer, growing at about 9% per year.
The reason I glossed over that is because I don’t believe that many anti-socialists are against socialized education, medicare, and such. The reason I don’t believe that is because if people were against medicare when they are old, they would protest against it, not solely socialized healthcare as a whole. The point was that I don’t think people are against all forms of socialism, though if someone is then my dismissal doesn’t work.
You are right that our debt is ridiculously large. However, the percentage of that debt that is a result of education is minimal. Medicare plays a huge part in that,but so do the wars we are engaged in. In fact, our military budget is, if I recall correctly, greater than the 2nd-11th biggest military spending countries combined. I agree with Republicans that we need to cut spending to stop the ridiculous debt, but those cuts should not be in the areas that are more important than the economy (healthcare and the livelihood of people).
Further note- We pay more per capita for healthcare than any other country in the world. Countries with socialized medicine will often pay less than half per capita what we do. I don’t see how you can make the argument that socialist policies will increase the national debt when evidence shows that they cost less than our current insurance based system.
Fair enough. You’re just calling closet socialists to admit what they really are.
For the sake of future discussion (because I find your blog interesting and often deserving of correction), I’ll come right out and state my positions on these topics.
Our deficit runs 1385 billion per year, and federal spending on public education is 129 billion — 10% of the size of the deficit. Where the real dollars are on public education are at the state (205 billion) and local (609 billion). I would, if given the power to, completely eliminate all 880 billion in public education. For a public education spending breakdown, see here.
Medicare and Medicaid combined cost 818 billion dollars. Repealing both, as I would, would take away 59% of the deficit overnight.
According to this article, we outspend the next 17 countries militarily. We spend 700 billion with our constant multi-front wars, and I think it’s about time we stopped.
Interesting. While I know our views are almost polar opposite, I do appreciate the feedback on the blog.
For starters, we both agree that military spending needs to be seriously cut. That being said, if you claim we should eliminate all public education and healthcare then we have entirely different value systems. My value system, which my political views are derived from, focuses on the well-being of people as the primary goal. From what I understand, you are either valuing complete freedom (in a liberatarian view against government) or valuing an economic bottom line.
Here’s three different hypothetical worlds to make my point:
World A: Everyone has a decent quality of life (significantly higher minimum and average quality of life than B or C)
World B: Everyone is able to live free from any form of government or taxation
World C: The government is run to maximize aggregate economic power (and has significantly higher economic power than either A or B)
My views demand that governments should strive toward A. This doesn’t mean a totalitarian, paternalistic government as freedom is necessary in order for people to have a higher quality of life. There are, however, significant taxes (roughly similar to what we have now) that provide public education, public healthcare, and public food.
It seems though that your views would strive toward either B or C. I can’t logically convince you that these goals are wrong if you value differently than me, that’s a logically irreconcilable difference.
So my question would be: are you for B or C? I would guess C, but am not sure. If so, why should we as a society value economic power more than our basic quality of life?
(The reason I am assuming you are not striving for A is that I don’t see how you could think that eliminating public healthcare and education, which would significantly hurt a large amount of the population, would improve overall quality of life).
I wouldn’t comment on a blog if I always agreed with it. I’ve never found conversations with people I totally agreed with to spur growth.
I don’t value complete freedom or the economic bottom line as legitimate ends in and of themselves. Complete freedom is a hopeless goal that results in anarchic disaster, and the economic bottom line is meaningless if pursuit of it results in increased human suffering.
I genuinely believe that eliminating public healthcare and education would improve overall quality of life. I can understand why people would disagree with me.
Neither of the three worlds fully captures the policies I would like to see, but World A is closest to what I would like to see.
But if we do have fundamental differences in policy, I would suspect that it will eventually boil down to one of two issues. First, you completely reject the possibility that religion has anything meaningful to offer to politics. I don’t. Second, I believe that an understanding of the “Austrian” method of economics advocated by Mises and Rothbard must be the basis for any productive discussion of modern political/economic issues.
Interesting that you see it that way, but what you claim is really dependent on how you define “overall quality of life”. If you mean aggregate quality of life, then your claim could be correct, though I would highly doubt it. Education is the primary way people can make a life for themselves, and the main way a society advances. If public education is abolished, millions of children will be unable to go to school as there parents would not be able to afford it (though this is assuming you mean all public education, not just public higher education).
The definition that you can’t use is one where the minimal quality of life would be increased (as someone like Rawls would focus on). There are undeniably people at the bottom economically who would suffer from a lack of public healthcare and education. I would argue that while the degree of suffering would vary depending on how poor the person is, the amount of people negatively affected by the lack of public healthcare and education would be over 50%. The bottom 10% would be especially hurt.
Though I don’t really want to debate about that, because neither of us could have rock solid proof to support our positions, as neither of our ideal scenarios has happened in reality.
The two issues you think we disagree on may be right. I definitely believe religion has no place in politics. I see religion as a tool like a gun. It can be used for good, but it has much greater potential to cause harm and in reality it will cause more harm than good.
I have to plead ignorance on the Austrian method of economics. I wikipedia’d it but I can’t really get a good grasp on it from the article.
Let me be even more clear (and maybe, crazy-sounding). I believe that the complete abolition of all levels of public education would benefit the poor most of all. It is my belief that the destruction of public education would benefit all social classes, but especially the bottom 10%.
Education is the primary way people can make a life for themselves, and the main way a society advances.
Here also we disagree. Where you have education, I would put ‘hard work and thrift.’
I see religion as a universal in that everyone, consciously or unconsciously, organizes their life around a framework that tries to answer “religious” questions, either positively (there is some higher power above us and we live, act, and think accordingly) or negatively, (there is no higher power and we live, act, and think accordingly). I think the idea of religious neutrality is a myth — really more of a temporary political truce than a real, sustainable political ideal.
We can debate any of these issues as much or as little as you like. I believe some unusual things and have no illusions about the possibility of changing everyone’s mind.
If I’m wrong, Austrian economics is a fringe theory not worth your time, and you shouldn’t try to figure it out because it could waste anything from fifteen hours to several years of your time before you realize its nonsense. If I’m right, you really, really need to read either Mises’ Human Action or Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State before you try to argue economics one way or another, or you’re going to spend pretty much every political conversation you ever get into advocating things that will hurt the people you’re trying to help.
I don’t really see how you think abolishing public education would benefit the bottom 10%. If education is completely private, then there are children who would be unable to go to school solely because of the financial state of their parents. This happens in impoverished countries worldwide. I would disagree, but I could see the possibility that a completely private education system would ultimately lead to better education, and benefit those who do go to school. However, you cannot deny that there are many who simply cannot afford to pay any amount of tuition of their children. No matter how good an education system is, it is useless to those who cannot attend it.
Hard work and thrift are important to society, but not as much as education. To make this point, I’d separate individual benefits to aggregate societal benefits. On an individual level, people flat out need some education both in order to understand concepts as well as open opportunities. Hard work is simply not enough to be successful, you need to be intelligent, make connections, have opportunities, and often be lucky. The most important parts of an education for an individual are the opportunities it creates. An individual without a high school degree has simply no chance at countless jobs and opportunities. While hard work will always improve chances, there are certain obstacles that simple hard work won’t overcome.
Aggregately, you can’t really regulate hard work or thrift. They are simply up to the people who are making their own lives. Education, on the other hand, gives people the chance to put their hard work to greater ends then would be achieved without it.
I agree to an extent about your view on religion, if you include atheism as a religion. However, the point I was making earlier was that positive religious beliefs should never influence politics. People will believe what they choose on deities and spiritual matters, but the moment they let that influence public policy they allow their own religious beliefs to be imposed on others who do not share the same views. Atheism isn’t a religion in this way, there are no policies that can really be made in the name of atheism. Political policies should be made solely in the idea of morality, a concept that is separate from religion. Basically, policies should be made with the defense “this will ultimately benefit people”, not “this is what my religious beliefs demand”.
Because I’m making a very unpopular case, I’m going to lay out what I’m saying very carefully, which will probably result in a really, really long comment. Should you get bored, that’s okay. I don’t want to be that unreasonable guy who writes really long comments and expects everyone to read them.
To understand how education could be better for the lower 10%, we need to look at how education worked in the United States before public education arrived. In most states, even in that primitive age, the majority of states had schools which, though private, would admit the poor for free. Perhaps more shocking is that in that age schools did not teach basic literacy — almost all of them would not admit a child to first grade unless its parents had already taught it reading and writing. The education system did not provide literacy at all — people did. And yet literacy rates then were higher than they are today — that alone should give pause.
We throw more and more money at education, we have smaller and smaller classes, and illiteracy still continues to grow. You say hard work and thrift can’t be regulated; I say education can’t. People do “flat out need some education.” They just aren’t getting it in our public schools — they’re getting some, but less than back when they weren’t given public schooling at all. But no one will admit that, and everyone acts as though our education system is the only lifeline keeping everything from falling apart.
The quality of literacy is dropping like a stone, too. Daniel Defoe’s novels were popular in their day, and average Joe bought and read them. The average Joe today winces, and only a small proportion of college students today can handle his very large vocabulary and complex sentences for comfortable reading.
One of the most talented teachers ever to exist in the United States, a man who enjoyed phenomenal success with his students, won Teacher of the Year for New York City in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and in 1991 also won Teacher of the Year for the State of New York. That very year, he quit, writing a caustic letter to the Wall Street Journal called, I Quit, I Think, which outlined the reason he was giving up on public education. He’s layed out his reasoning in more depth in his Underground History of American Education.
To the extent that public education works, it’s primarily due to correlation. When someone drops out of high school, they’re not discriminated against because they failed to receive the special useful knowledge the rest of us supposedly get. When somebody drops out of high school, they’re discriminated against because the sort of person who drops out of high tends tends to be ridiculously slow, incredibly disrespectful, or significantly unreliable in some other way. If significant numbers of conscientious, hard-working, bright people weren’t going to high school, they’d get hired, because employers and customers have incentive to seek out good work. The Amish are a case in point. They quit school after the eighth grade, are renowned for their work, have extremely low unemployment, tend to own their own businesses, and their businesses fail only 4 – 8 % as often as non-Amish businesses run by college graduates.
It’s good that you’ve seen your approach to politics is not religiously neutral. Your approach to politics is only logical if we start with the assumption that there is no God who makes political demands. You can expect agreement only from those who believe there is no God, or that God makes no political demands. But those who believe that God does make political demands cannot be expected to agree with you. When they demand, for example, the banning of gay marriage, they’re not being unreasonable — they’re simply working from a different underlying assumption about the nature of the universe. This is why your arguments against religion informing politics are useless — not because you’re wrong, but because if anyone is to agree with your argument, they’re going to have to agree with your underlying assumption about God. Which they don’t.
If there is no God who makes political demands, they are being unreasonable. If there is a God who makes political demands, you are fighting against him. But there is no truly religiously neutral ground in politics. Everyone must line up in one of the two camps.
Don’t worry about posting too long comments, I usually find that comments are too short and leave me guessing at what the person really meant.
First, I want to focus on the statement “the majority of states had schools which, though private, would admit the poor for free”. What happens when there are no schools that do? Is education (up to a certain point, say at least up to 8th grade), a right guaranteed by law or are children allowed to never attend a day of education? If they are not guaranteed the right, then there will be children that will never get an education due to the place that they live in and the financial situation of their parents. If they are, how can they be? Imagine that most schools let in all children whose parents make less than 30k a year for free. Due to the way that neighborhoods and communities have developed, there are poor regions in which the large majority of children would fit this description. How do schools in these areas survive? They would not generate enough income to support their teachers, and would ultimately move to a richer neighborhood or shut down altogether. Private schools would not survive in low income neighborhoods.
Another issue with looking back at the old system is how different our current society is. Racial segregation in education no longer exists. Our population density is much, much higher than it used to be. City planners/local neighborhoods/other factors have very much segregated the rich housing from the poor housing. Poor neighborhoods already receive lower quality education, which is why we have current programs like Teachers for America to try to fix this.
Also, I wholeheartedly agree that our current education system has its flaws. Nationalized testing is not the answer, and neither is throwing money at it. Smaller class sizes do make a difference, but the problem is that low income schools still have issues with accomplishing this. We also need quality teachers, and this may require higher salaries in order to attract brighter minds into teaching. However, from what I’ve learned from my sister (a 7th grade math and science teacher) and the other teachers I’ve talked to who teach at low income schools, the problems lie in policy. There is too much teacher turnover, where old teachers are guaranteed jobs regardless of performance. Administrations focus their jobs on funding and nationalized testing instead of the students. There are other problems too, and they do need to be improved upon. However, completely private schooling is not the answer.
Another flaw in what you said is relying on parents. Intelligent parents will often teach their kids what they know regardless of the school system, and will find better schooling if their children are not getting a proper education. However, there are parents who are not fit to teach their children. Many parents in America cannot even speak English, much less teach it. We should encourage parents to take a larger role in their children’s education, but you cannot depend on them as the solution.
The correlation between higher education and opportunities is indeed largely based on views like you mentioned. However, I strongly doubt that these views could be eliminated by your plan. We already realize that there are geniuses who drop out or fail in school. Further, with fully private education, those who got an education would still be heavily favored to those who do not.
In summation, the reasons a completely private schooling system would not work is due to the harm it would do to the communities that could not support a school. I could easily see how a fully private system would have stronger schools than a public system, private colleges are on average higher quality than public colleges. However, these schools would not be able to fully accept all children in America. The bottom 10% especially, who live in poor neighborhoods, would be left out of the system.
I understand your point about God demanding political policies, but implementing any religiously based law is still wrong regardless of whether not God exists. As you said, if God does not exist then any religious law based on God is wrong. However, even if God exists, implementing his/her laws would infringe upon the freedom of religion of people who live under those laws. To clarify, imagine that God commands all people to repent for their sins and believe that Jesus is the son of God (which Christians do believe). Can Christians justifiably command all people, regardless of faith, to repent and believe in Jesus? Even if the Christian God does exist, this policy would violate the freedom of religion we value as a society. You can’t use the argument that “if they were right, then they would be right in implementing their policies” because that argument would justify a nationally imposed religion similar to what happened in the middle ages. Unless a God can be conclusively proven (which it can’t), no religiously based law can be justified due to its infringement on the freedom of religion.
This post is long but I felt the need to be as clear as possible.
John,
Let there be no doubt. Some people would fall miserably through the cracks in my system. Your primary objection comes down basically to one question — what if a child is raised with too little money and no one pays for him to go to school? And I won’t duck and weave and hide my actual answer: that child would receive no formal education. He would have to pick up what bits and pieces he could from libraries, employers, and parents. Sometimes this would be slim pickings.
But as I see it, some people slipping through the cracks is not a fatal objection. People already are slipping through the cracks. I volunteer at an inner-city youth program that provides free tutoring to inner-city kids. In this particular neighborhood, 60% aren’t graduating at all, and of those who do, almost half have an IEP (Individualized Educational Plan), which more or less means that their diploma, when they get it, is worthless. The people you worry would get left out if we abandoned the public school system are the ones already getting screwed. Even my uncle, from a “good” family in a “good” school, graduated practically illiterate.
I don’t buy the smaller-classes argument. Classes have gotten smaller and smaller, decade by decade, as literacy has eroded. Your sister sounds much like a young John Taylor Gatto — a concerned teacher seeing some really bad policy decisions and hoping to fix them. Gatto fought for change for decades before he decided it couldn’t be done, and that the only thing to do is to tear down the public school system.
Don’t get me wrong — if my worldview eventually wins on public schooling (and I’m pretty sure it will in the long run) the rich will get off easiest and the poor will have an uphill battle to climb. That’s the way it already is, and that’s the way it always will be.
But what it sounds like now is that we’re each speculating as to how the world might be if we got rid of public schooling. This could go round and round in circles for some time, and neither of us, I think, can come out ahead. Perhaps we need a tie-breaker of some kind.
Your comments on God are quite unusual. You’re saying that if an omnipotent, omniscient God who is the source of all truth and morality does exist, we should still ignore what he says? My goodness. Finally, you assert that the existence of a God cannot be proven conclusively. What constitutes conclusive proof in your book?
The people who fall through the cracks would be much worse off. In our current system, kids from all families are forced to go to school up until at least some high school. The ones who gain the least (those who do not want to be in school) still gain a minimal amount from the schooling they do receive. Even the lowest scoring students have higher mathematical, logical, and communicative skills than someone who received no schooling at all. These are some of the skills schools are originally meant to teach; they have value regardless of whether or not there is a degree for them.
In your system, there would be two types of kids that would never get schooling whatsoever (not even elementary school) due to their parents: kids who care about their education and kids who don’t. The kids who care about their education could manage to scrap information together, especially with the existence of the internet. However, the kids who do not care about their education would never achieve simple elementary school knowledge even as adults. The reason this is a problem is that we do not, as a society, want to give kids this kind of heavy responsibility that would make or break themselves as adults. It’s a kind of paternalism for kids, we force kids to go to school, don’t allow them to drive, enlist for the army, get a job, or get married because we do not believe kids have the intellectual maturity to be able to handle these types of decisions on their own. A kid may think an education has no purpose (as many do), and completely skip out on it. When that kid grows up, his adult self will suffer his entire life due to a decision he should not have been able to make.
The benefit of an entirely private school system would potentially be in higher quality average schools. But the harm it does to the kids who not only never got an education, but didn’t try on their own, is far greater than the benefit. The result would be, in my opinion, an even greater discrepancy between the rich and the poor. Kids from poor communities already have a hard enough time trying to work themselves up even with the amount of financial aid, guaranteed schooling, and affirmative action programs we have. Eliminating these programs would just add a greater degree of difficulty to the equation.
A side note-we already have private schooling throughout america. I would guess that, on average, these private schools are better than their public counterparts. So the potential benefits of a private school education are already there. Charter schools for example, have higher quality education due to their ability to govern their own curriculum. Still, public schools exist for those who need them because private schooling cannot fully accommodate every student.
As for the religious part, I’m saying that until there is conclusive proof of a particular God, no religious laws are justified. Conclusive proof could be a number of things, God coming out and showing himself would be one (if God exists, he would be able to figure out how to conclusively prove himself better than I can).
In our current state, we do not have conclusive proof for any particular religion. I’m saying that in our current state, no religious laws can be justified because they impose on the freedom of religion. It doesn’t matter if someone ends up being right, the only factor that matters now is what can be proven now. A law imposed today that would force Christianity as the national religion is unjustified even if in a hundred years Christianity is proven. Once that happens, religious law can be imposed. Until then, freedom of religion (as long as you recognize that as a right) demands that no religion can influence political decisions. Consider what you’re saying: if we can justifiably implement Christian influence in law because someday it may be conclusively proven, we can justifiably install Islam as the national religion and execute anyone who doesn’t pray five times a day because someday it may be conclusively proven as correct. You can’t selectively choose which religions are okay to impose and which are not, and you cannot choose any religion if you believe in the freedom of religion.
I think one source of our disagreement on this school issue lies in what we think school does. You think that, even for those who are doing badly in school, school is a net plus, because some education is always better than none. I, on the other hand, think that school carries with it some major costs that aren’t being adequately factored into the discussion. The child who goes to school is not simply gaining school and losing nothing. He is gaining whatever schooling is doing for him but losing whatever out of school learning he would have been doing with those hours. The child who wants to learn is losing time that he could be using for actual learning instead of repetitive one-size-fits-all class-wide drills. The child who does not want to learn is being bumped along from grade to grade and missing the spectacular wake-up call that the discipline of low-wage labor provides. Mathematical, logical, and communicative skills are not just learned in school. I’ve known children who were mind-blowingly stupid in school who finally learned these skills rapidly and almost effortlessly in the job world. Admittedly, the market will not teach average Joe algebra outside of school, but then again, the average Joe doesn’t remember or need his algebra when he hits the job world anyhow.
I don’t think the fear that some would get “no schooling whatsoever” is justified. Realistically, the worst off children socially would get a hodge-podge of experiences: some from work, some from what scraps of schooling they could pick up, etc. George Washington is a perfect case in point. Yes, there were tremendous gaps in his education. The man couldn’t spell to save his life — I’ve read his writing. At the same time, he learned through a collection of experiences: a few years of off-and-on school attendance, working as a surveyor through what we would call “middle school”, engaging in land speculating in what we would call “high school”, and then growing marijuana and starting a fish-catching business in what we would call “college.”
I’m not sold on the idea that tax-financed education produces better results than letting society sort those things out itself. Everyone assumes this, but what little statistics and anecdotal evidence is actually out there points in the opposite direction.
The potential benefits of private schooling are most certainly not already here. Though private schools on average cost $3000 / year as opposed to the approximately $10 000 / year, private schools are absolutely kicking the butts of public schools in terms of performance. That alone should say something about how incredibly upside-down our public school system is. The reason more kids aren’t in public school is private school families have to pay an unfair burden. They have to pay taxes to support the public schools which they do not use, and then on top of that they have to pay the private school tuition. This is a significant barrier to private school use, but it will continue to exist because the public school bureaucracy is a much more powerful political interest group.
Oddly enough, you seem to have a double standard for conclusive proof. For twelve years of full time compulsory attendance by all the school-children in the country and for $120,000 or more of forced contributions for child, the only proof you require is fear of what might happen without public schooling.
Let me try to restate my position with regard to religion another way.
What I contend is that no system of government is religiously neutral. You claim that as long as no religion has been adequately proven (and apparently, according to whatever standards you hold, none has been), no religious views may be used in shaping public policy. On the other hand, approximately three million people or more think that a particular religion has been adequately proven. According to your logic, there’s no reason at all that those people shouldn’t be trying to impose their religious preferences, is there? And if they should not impose their religious preference, why not?
Your answer, if you have one, will have to come down to denying the truth of what they believe about God. If so, you will be forced to acknowledge that your view of how politics should be can only be correct if they are wrong. And we’ll be faced with the truth: that no government can be neutral toward religion, and that a government must side with or against those who believe God makes political demands.
You’re missing a key concept to my argument: most children who don’t go to school would not work, would not find education outside of school, and would never learn necessary skills. All you have done is list examples of people who have made lives for themselves, and I don’t deny that it is possible. However, if you talk to the average kid (especially in low income neighborhoods), you would realize that kids aren’t operating under the idea that you have. If you give kids the chance to never go to school (or make it so that certain parents can’t afford to send their kids to school), most of these kids will not adapt in the way you envision. You are picturing successful examples, yet ignoring the fact that most kids are not concerned with their future, not concerned with their future job prospects. Further, uneducated kids will not be learning skills in the workplace. We have anti child labor laws, and these are core to protecting the rights of children from use and abuse by their parents and/or community. By the time these children grow up, the majority of them will not have the skills they need to adapt to society and will be forever stuck in poverty.
The skills that they miss aren’t based in algebra, english lit, or science. The skills everyone needs are communication skills, learning to work with others, and some basic logic. The majority of kids who grow up never learning these skills will not have the cognitive capacity to adapt to the workplace like you imagine. You can’t focus on a few anecdotal examples and generalize to the entire group.
Once again, I acknowledge the benefits of a private school education, I had it for years as a child. Still, that benefit does not justify the harm it does to the lower class. If we eliminated all public schooling, the 75% of kids who can afford to attend/live in an area where the schools can survive to admit some kids freely may very well get a better education. But the cost of this would be seen in the severely damaged futures of the 25% who would never go to school. With the internet and job market, a small fraction of that 25% would be able to scrap together a future and figure it out for themselves. However, the majority of that 25% would be left behind and create an even greater gap between the upper and lower class. This is where our disagreement. I am simply not willing to sacrifice the majority of the lower class to benefit the majority of the middle and upper classes.
As for private school parents paying public taxes, that isn’t unjustly unfair. Everyone pays taxes in order to give their kids a right to a public education. Parents who can afford it are able to pay extra in order to give their kids a better, private education. Not using a service does not mean they are unjustly being charged for it. If they are, should people only have to pay for police and firemen when they need it? Should the army be supported by only the people who support our wars? Taxes are inherently unfair in that our money goes to causes we don’t support, but that is the best system we have, and sacrificing it would eliminate government.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make with my definition of “conclusive proof”. Conclusive proof is roughly similar to what it takes for a scientific theory to be proven. The reason you don’t have conclusive proof that a private school system would be better is that, even if I accept that on average the schooling would be better (which I do), the sacrifice would be in the lower class getting shafted.
As for religion, you cannot claim that people “believing” they have conclusive proof is conclusive proof. There are still people who believe beyond any doubt that the world is flat. Does this mean that we can’t know the world isn’t flat, or that they have conclusive proof the world is flat? Same with religion. If you accept faith as conclusive proof, then every religion worldwide is validated and is true since their believers all believe it to be.
The point about religion that you seem to be missing: no religion has been conclusively proven. As an educated person, I know you know what I mean. Gravity, as a theory, can be conclusively proven. The atomic parts of water can be conclusively proven. Religion, so far, has not been conclusively proven. Until this happens, and no logical person can deny the evidence for a single religious belief, then no religion can be used for political policy due to the freedom of religion. I don’t know how to state this any clearer; if you are okay with Christian beliefs making laws, then you are okay with Sharia law being made into national law, okay with a nationally mandated religion (such as a nation of scientologists), and okay with being executed for your beliefs if you are not Muslim.
This isn’t an equal debate; freedom of religion (which is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights), guarantees the right not to have other religious beliefs imposed on you. Unless God himself comes down and proves himself, beliefs are simply beliefs. Additionally, you seem to be ignoring all other religions, focusing instead on a Christian vs. Atheist view. “God” is not a concept monopolized by Christianity, there are thousands of different takes on him that you are failing to acknowledge. If you want to keep your view that Christian laws are justified, then you have to admit that you don’t believe in the freedom of religion, and further that you would be okay with an Islamic state.
With regards to the school issue, if I got my way I’d tear down almost all child labor laws, especially for kids about twelve and up, and remove the minimum wage. No doubt you’ll have scary mental pictures of that would lead to as well.
I agree that people need communication skills, learning to work with others, and some basic logic. Where we disagree is over whether public schooling is the best way for people to learn those things. I think that in many ways what kids learn in public schools sets them back. As to generalizing, we’re both generalizing. We’ve got no other option. My generalizing with examples is no worse than your generalizing without them.
I don’t buy the idea that our schooling systems closes the wealth gaps present in our society. I think it reinforces the wealth gap, which was, by the way, far smaller in the days before public schooling herded all the poor kids into awful schools and all the rich kids into much better ones.
I’m not willing to sacrifice the majority of the lower class to benefit the majority of the middle and upper classes either. All eighteen years of my childhood were spent well below the official US poverty line. I still spend significant time every week with kids below the poverty line. I care about them. Our disagreement isn’t over whether it’s okay to sacrifice the poor. We both agree that the poor should not be sacrificed for the benefit of the wealthy. Our disagreement is over what’s better for the poor.
I’m glad we rolled around to the justice of taxes. Your standard as to the justice of taxes — correct me if I’m wrong — is that it is okay to take money away from people forcibly from people if it is used to further causes which you think will be better for society as a whole. My standard of justice allows government to take revenue for clear and present emergency spending (firemen), and law enforcement (police), but not to force one person to pay for another person’s bills (schooling). Our standards on this are different, and I think using this as a case study will help illustrate what I’m getting at.
My standard for what is just with regard to compulsory spending is based on my religious beliefs. My faith, as I understand it, demands that “Thou shalt not steal” be a universal principle applied throughout society, including to government. Because I see the principle of “Thou shalt not steal” as coming from God and not from government or human invention, I don’t allow government to alter it at will by making one person pay for the expenses of another, except for areas which are clearly identified as legitimate functions of taxing government: life-and-death rescue situations, law enforcement, and the imposition of minimal life-saving safety standards. This is, I’ll admit, a religious standard, and it’s one I want to impose on society, including non-religious folks. And I fully realize that I’m seeking to impose this standard despite the fact that I don’t have what you would call conclusive evidence for it.
If I understand your position correctly, you believe that I should not be allowed to use religious criteria like this for government because I cannot conclusively prove to you that my criteria are based on a valid reason. That is, my standard of justice with respect to this issue has no place in political discussion.
You, on the other hand, hold to another standard of justice, which, if I understand what I’ve heard you say so far, is based on the idea that poor children have a right to the tax money of less poor adults to better their lifelong job prospects. In general, the idea is that it is okay for some people to live, in whole or part, on money taken without consent from other people. You base this on your ideas about what the world would be less just if we took away these policies. At the same time, you are unable to conclusively prove that this standard of justice really has any validity.
So we’re at an odd stalemate here. You claim that my strongly held but not scientifically proveable beliefs about justice may not be imposed on you because mine are “religious”. On the other hand, you claim that your strongly held but not scientifically proveable beliefs about justice may be imposed on me, because they are not “religious.” (Or, at least, you say they are not religious. How much your beliefs about individual freedom and such may be influenced by the religious heritage of our society is something you really can’t prove one way or another.)
So my question is simple: what authorizes you to impose this double standard? Why may the non-religious rule over the religious on the basis of their principles but not vice versa? As I’ve tried to argue above, the “conclusive proof” argument doesn’t justify the double standard, because ultimately all values are based on something which cannot be conclusively proven in any scientific way.
The only other explanation you’ve offered, once we exclude the “conclusive proof” explanation, is a “slippery slope” explanation. My religiously-based beliefs about morality require a government which does not redistribute wealth systematically and a government which does not force anyone to accept any religious belief. But, you say, if we allow religious reasoning into politics once, we must allow all religious reasoning. Somehow, if I think its okay to let my Christian views with regard to theft into the discussion, you say this logically requires that I allow Muslims to execute me for my beliefs. Just like the frequent anti-socialist scare method, what you’re setting up is simply a scare tactic. It’s beneath you, because it’s just a convenient method that can be used to equate anyone with anything else.
For the sake of illustration, I’ll turn it around in the opposite direction, paraphrasing your own words back at you to show how unproductive the slippery slope argument is.
I don’t know how to say this any clearer: if you are okay with secular consequence-based beliefs not hemmed in by religious principles making laws, you are okay with Stalinist law being made into national law, okay with a nationally-mandated secular justice system (such as the ‘committee of public safety’ of the French Revolution), and okay with being executed for failing to cooperate with the re-education efforts of the secular Vietnamese communists. If you want to keep your view that non-Christian laws are justified, then you have to admit that you don’t believe in freedom at all, and further that you would be okay with a Fascist state.
We can both easily provide examples of both horrifying religous and secular governments. For you to say that my Christian beliefs require being okay with an Islamic state is ridiculous — it’s like me saying that your non-religious mild socialist beliefs require you being okay with Soviet communism. As we agreed at the beginning of the discussion, scare tactics like that aren’t real arguments.
I definitely have scary mental images about that, as child labor laws protect children. I see your policy as treating 12 year olds and up as legal adults, and I simply don’t agree with that. I personally believe that a society where children have more time to grow up leads to a higher average quality of life. If children stick to jobs like retail or other non-threatening jobs, I don’t have conclusive proof for this, it is simply an intuition.
I don’t think schooling is the best place to learn them necessarily. It can be, and often is. Ideally, every child could get a great education, have intelligent parents who guide them through life, and understand the workplace. Realistically, this won’t happen. I’m not generalizing about all cases, I readily admit that your system would benefit some people from all classes. My point is that there would be too many kids in the lower class especially who would not be able to develop their skills to succeed even marginally in life.
Our schooling system doesn’t close the wealth gap, and outside of communism the wealth gap will never be closed. What I’m claiming is that, if public schooling is eliminated, those who never go to school will, as a majority, comprise a much larger bottom class than what currently exists.
If we focus solely on the poorer classes, then we have an odd dilemma. There are two types of lower class kids that would be significantly affected by your change: those who are able to get better schooling due to the higher average quality of schools, and those who never go to school because they are not legally forced to. It’s illogical to try to give either one of these groups an exact number. You seem to be focusing on the former, while I’m focusing on the latter. If the two groups are roughly equal in size, I’d argue that the change is worse (I’d rather have two groups equal at a quality of life of 5, than one group at a 9 and the other at a 1). If the former group is significantly larger than the latter, though I don’t believe it would be, I would agree with your policy change.
For the religious debate, I want to highlight a common argument in ethics involving disgust as the basis for ethical judgment. Basically, it seems that some people condemn things such as incest as immoral based on nothing more than disgust (the study I am referring to controlled for factors such as pregnancy and emotional harm). So the question is, is disgust a reliable source for moral judgment? Basically, is disgust sufficient to judge incest as immoral? To find out, you apply disgust to other judgments and see if it is sufficient to condemn other things as immoral. Eating worms, for example, is disgusting. Is that disgust sufficient to condemn eating worms as immoral? (Sufficient being used in the philosophical sense in which if P is sufficient for S, then whenever P, then S)
I admit I used extremes on my last post, but I wasn’t using a slippery slope argument. I’m trying to draw out your claim that religious belief is sufficient for a justified political policy. If a religious belief is sufficient, by definition any law backed by religious belief is justified. So I took the same route as the disgust argument:
If religious belief is sufficient for a justified law, the religious belief that Islam should be nationally imposed is justified. My point is that if religious belief, on its own, is sufficient for a justified law, then every religious law imagined is justified.
My own views are not based in my non-religiousness. If they were, they would be similarly unjustified and illogical. I cannot justly say “all religions should be banned, because I am not religious and religions suck”. A secular viewpoint isn’t what I’m claiming is the sufficient justification for law.
So the question is: what is either a necessary or sufficient justification for making political policy? My own answer: a sufficient justification for a political policy is being ultimately aimed at benefiting its citizens. “Benefiting its citizens” is admittedly vague, but that’s where political debates should be focused on.
Using the above definition, religion has no place in law. Consider two cases: One policy adheres to a religious doctrine, but hurts citizens overall. The other policy benefits citizens, but goes against religious doctrine. Which policy is just?
I saved the tax view for last because it’s the hardest to explain. I am going to outline my view based on my view of rights, which can get complicated at times. Basically though:
- Rights are a fluid concept, a society grants rights based on which rights will ultimately produce a society with the highest quality of life for its citizens.
- The right to property is a society granted right (as without a society, you only have what you are capable of protecting. In society, the law protects your right to keep your property).
- Social rights (such as healthcare, education, and public services such as protection by police) are granted because a society with these rights ultimately has a greater quality of life than one that doesn’t
- Taxes that infringe upon the right to property are necessary to support social rights.
So the dilemma: which ultimately leads to a greater quality of life: eliminating social rights to maintain a full right to property, or taking a portion of the right to property in order to establish the social rights?
My argument is that the social rights are more important to a quality of life then the portion of the right to property, so the taxes are justified.
As for your own tax view: how do you define “clearly legitimate functions of government”? The military protects everyone from dangers here and there, is that okay to tax for? Also, what do you believe should happen if someone is rushed to an emergency room, but cannot afford his treatment?
The reason I’m bringing up the above is it seems to conflict with the sacrificing philosophy of Jesus. The parable of the rich man is often abused by atheists, but it does have some point. A distinction that you could, and perhaps should, make is that Jesus called for personal sacrifice to help others, and didn’t really talk about state mandated charity. Still, do you believe that Jesus would have been against a system like universal healthcare solely for this distinction?
Just a note-holy crap my posts are getting long. Sorry if it’s boring.
No worries about the length of post. I may not always be able to read and respond right away, but I’ll get to it. We’re talking through a wide range of topics, from positions that are miles apart, and so it’ll take time. I’ll try to move my way through the main things you addressed one by one. If you think I haven’t treated a particular topic in enough depth or I’m not being clear, jump in and let me know.
You say that child labor laws protect children. It is certainly true that in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution there were practically no child labor laws, and conditions were in some cases awful. It is also true that today there are very stringent labor laws and you don’t find kids dying in mines or factories. But the tale of child labor as told in high school history books badly distorts how child labor was abolished. Through the 1800′s and the first three decades of the twentieth century, child labor became less and less common as there was less legal interference, until by 1930 less than 7% of children 10 to 15 were employed in any capacity at all. More than three-quarters of these were rural children helping out on local farms. In the urban areas, child labor was almost unheard-of. It was only then, in 1938, that government swooped in and passed a law which outlawed a practice which was already more or less gone: child labor. The difference between now and the 1800′s isn’t child labor laws, it’s the vastly improved standard of living which makes dangerous child labor unneccessary.
As to public schooling, I think the fundamental difference between us is that we don’t agree as to what would happen if public schooling were removed. I imagine we can probably leave it at that for public schooling.
To say that a policy is justified if it is aimed at benefiting its citizens simply does not answer the question of which policies are justified. For one, it provides no criteria for what constitutes a “benefit”, nor does it provide a means to test whether a particular policy will actually benefit the citizenry. That standard is so vague that it is really nothing more than a blank check to power.
For example, when the Catholics in the inquisition tortured a heretic woman who was going into labor by tying her legs together so that she would die unless she recanted, they believed they were benefiting her. After all, they thought, if we don’t do this she’ll likely die in her sins and go to hell forever. On the other hand, if she does recant, and most people will under that sort of pain, she goes to heaven and lives in eternal bliss.
Now, the “ultimate aim of benefiting citizens” has no meaning at all except within some sort of pro- or anti- religious framework. If we believed, as the Catholics of that time and place did, that torturing her that way would likely save her from an eternity of roasting, the logical thing to do would be to torture her. Not to torture her would be absolutely heartless.
I, for one, don’t believe that torturing her will save her, so I think it’s absolutely wrong to torture her. You also don’t believe that torturing her will save her (right?) and so you also oppose the torture. We think it will benefit her, instead, to avoid useless and severe pain, to give birth to her baby, and to go about her life as best she can, even though she happens to disagree with the Catholic Church.
Note that both you, I, and the medieval Catholic all base our policy in this case on the ultimate benefit of the citizen. The real question at hand, in this case, is a religious one. Do we believe in the presuppositions underlying the medieval Catholic treatment of heretics, or do we not? On this issue, our public policy must be either pro-Catholic or anti-Catholic in nature. There is no middle ground. To pretend there were a religiously neutral answer to the question of whether the woman should be tortured would be simply to evade what’s really going on. If we claimed we were religiously neutral and rushed in and saved the poor woman, we’d be betraying the fact that we — whether we acknowledge it or not — aren’t believers in 1488 Spanish Catholicism. If we did support it, we’d similarly be betraying our belief. Any pretense of running a religiously neutral government is a charade: every action we take agrees with some views of reality, and conflicts with others.
What I’m hearing you say is that you wish the government to avoid using religious beliefs; that is, to act as though there is no God above. That’s not neutral. It’s a fundamentally anti-religious stance. There is no neutral. Neutrality with regard to religion is an illusion.
As I see them, government has the following legitimate functions, and I won’t deny that I derive these from my understanding of my religious tradition: to uphold the basic rule of law by protecting people and property, to punish those who threaten others, to defend the nation militarily, and, when possible, to rescue people from imminent life-threatening disaster.
In principle, I would be okay with my tax money funding a military. As to what is happening right now, I believe our military has far outstepped its bounds as a defensive force and needs to return to being a solely defensive force. Under current US law, if someone is rushed to an emergency room and cannot afford treatment, the law currently states that doctors may not deny that person life-saving care. I don’t see a reason to change that law.
There’s a lot of different views out there on what Jesus actually thought. I base mine on the New Testament, and though I would hesitate to speak for him, all I can offer is my best reconstruction of what I think he would say based on the things he actually did say in the New Testament. First, he would continue to tell people to care for the sick, as he did in at least one of his parables. Secondly, I believe he would uphold the principle of not stealing, as he did when a rich man once asked what to do to enter into the kingdom of God, but I suspect opposing universal healthcare would be really, really low on his to-do list. And third, he would remind his followers to pay their taxes and not to revolt against the Empire that was imposing them.
In the long run, though, it wouldn’t have mattered whether he allowed the Romans to give universal healthcare out or not. Because the Roman government was in the slow process of burning out financially as welfare expenditures and government subsidies to the rich and rampant military spending grow year by year, emptying the governments coffers and eventually resulting in the collapse of the Roman system. Sort of exactly like what’s happening in the US right now.
Well it’s a little hard to make this argument, since it is very subjective. But the point about child labor I was trying to make is that life for everyone growing up is better when adult responsibilities (like a job) are not allowed until one is mature enough to handle them. Most jobs today aren’t all that dangerous, and I’d guess that if child labor laws were rescinded most children who worked would be at McDonalds, grocery stores, and other forms of retail. It isn’t the danger in these jobs that I’m worried about (as it used to be), but the robbing of a part of life that can’t be had back (childhood). For some parents today, having their kids work would be appealing and that child would very likely be pressured or forced to have a job at a young age. I simply think this shouldn’t be; childhood has an inherent value to an overall quality of life.
As for public schooling, the difference is in what we think will happen. As I outlined in the previous post, there are two groups of lower income kids that would be significantly affected. I hold to my position that the group harmed would be too large a percentage for it to be justified, and i believe probability is on my side. But I am willing to leave the debate at that, since I obviously can’t prove that.
The reason I left “benefit everyone” vague is because I don’t think politics are simple. People don’t agree about issues, and I believe the ensuing debate should focus on what “benefits everyone”. So for example, in the abortion debate, people on the pro choice side would say “abortion should be allowed, because a women having the right to her body and a choice to prevent suffering is better for everyone”. On the other hand, a pro lifer would say “abortion shouldn’t be allowed because people should have a right to life starting from conception, and we are all better off with that right”.
The point is that I don’t believe politics have clear answers always, but that the debate should be solely focused on people’s benefits. If a policy clearly benefits everyone, then that is a sufficient condition for it being a justified policy. My argument against a religious influence is that a law that simply states “this is what my religious beliefs demands” regardless of whether or not it hurts people is not justified. Using religious beliefs as a sufficient condition for a justified law results in any crazy religious belief being justly implemented in law.
I also disagree with you’re stance on religiously neutral, as there does exist such a thing. Anti-religion is the opposite of pro-religion, but anti-religion is what Soviet Russia was. An opposite, anti religious government would be one that outlawed any and all religious practices. A neutral stance is to keep the government secular (for the benefit of people on earth), and let people practice their own religious beliefs on their own. That’s religious freedom in a secular society, and that is not an anti-religion state.
Using your example: the pro-Catholic action would be to torture the women to help her soul. The anti-Catholic action would be to forcibly prevent her from ever trying to get rid of her heresy. The neutral action would be to let her practice her own religion, and stay out of the matter entirely.
Here’s basically what I’m saying: the government must be entirely secular. Implementing any religious beliefs into law would be infringing on the religious freedom of individuals. This way,the government can be truly religiously neutral: it doesn’t tell you what to believe, and it doesn’t tell you what you can’t believe. Once again, an anti-religious government would be one that outlaws all religious practices, even in private life. Basically, there are more than the two sides you are imagining.
I’m familiar with the debate about Jesus’s views, and I have actually read that New Testament several times. Jesus wasn’t what we think of as a 1960′s hippie, but he was definitely not a 2010 conservative. He was radically liberal against the Jewish church, and he was against the replacement of faith with religious traditions. The point I was making is that he was clearly in favor of benefiting the poor, there is no denying that. If keeping the poor healthy required a higher tax on the rich, I cannot imagine him doing anything but being a full supporter of that policy. Financial arguments wouldn’t interest him in the least, he never had an cared about the value of money. I’m not saying that his view of money is right, but I am also not a Christian who believes in him as a deity.
(It may take me a couple days to respond, I’m in a place without internet for a few more days)
PS: Jesus wasn’t the soft-spoken long-haired pre-hippie idealist he’s often depicted as. (Well, maybe he was longer-haired than most. But the rest I stand by.) In just the four short gospels, he takes a whip and uses it to disperse a crowd at a religious establishment, he announces that when he comes back he will be the political ruler of the world, he says that he did not come to bring peace but rather to bring family division, and he repeatedly calls people wicked and hypocrites.
Both Christians and non-Christians alike make the mistake of assuming that the answer to “What Would Jesus Do”, as the annoying little Christian bracelets have it, is giving someone a hug, or donating a dollar to fight ALS, or telling another person how much you appreciate them, trying to help us all see that we’re not so different after all, preaching eternal peace and happiness, or some such idealistic silliness completely removed from the historical record. Not that those things are bad — it’s just that they’re not the whole story.
Thank you for your subjective argument about childhood. I suppose my own feelings about childhood as equally subjective, and, like all subjective things, is highly affected by my personal experiences and the experiences of those around me. In my case, I’ve lived in urban environments where kids don’t have work, and I spent three years in a small town where it was no big deal for a ten-year-old to have a paper route, where it’s not unheard of for a twelve-year-old or thirteen-year-old to put in long hours on a farm, and where high schoolers, in general, just work. It’s part of life. And I can’t help but think that its the urban kids, the Walnut Hills types who live in an artificial academic world disconnected from the actual give-and-take of being a producer/consumer, who are missing something vital and life-affirming.
I do believe that there is a certain beauty in childhood, and I hate to see it squashed, whether by overly strict controlling parents, a chaotic home life, overfocus on academics, or a high-pressure job at a young age. Abusive parents are abusive parents, regardless of child labor laws.
Perhaps above all, I believe that human beings are too complex and varied to be adequately cared for and raised in a compulsory mass system sitting in a row and forbidden from working. From puberty onward, humans all through history has been allowed to contribute and participate in the community as participants in it. Today, we’re in the midst of a relatively recent experiment in which we use the force of law to yank these kids out of the community, cut off work opportunities both through minimum age and wage laws, and put them in chairs in large rooms where they are constantly evaluated and re-evaluated and given busy work to do. From what I can see, this system has progressively torn apart families and communities, created a new and severe class consciousness based on grades, while undermining economic progress, basic literacy, social mobility, and human freedom.
The best case against public schooling I’ve ever seen is John Taylor Gatto’s “Underground History of American Education”, which I highly recommend. To keep this evensided, if you do decide to read it, I’ll give you the option of assigning any book you like arguing the opposite take. I have been seriously unable to find anything that even comes close to a comprehensive justification of the public schooling system, other than speculation about how terrible things would be without it. On the other side, I see countless examples of public school failure next to private school and home school success, along with plenty of historical data which suggests the experiment with forced mass schooling has not been a good one.
A policy that “clearly benefits everyone” is nowhere to be found, and the idea that it exists at all is part of why people making the mistake of believing in the neutral state. Remember, the government only exists to make people do what they cannot or will not do spontaneously. Whenever the government does something, it either directly or indirectly uses coercion to accomplish its ends, because, every time there is a policy, some group sees itself and losing and therefore will not cooperate without being made to. The government then must constantly choose between groups of people. For example, all efforts financed with tax money involve forcing some people to lose some of their money to subsidize other people. The real question, then, when a new policy is proposed is not, “Will this benefit everyone?” but rather, “Will the benefit to the beneficiaries morally outweigh the losses to the losers?” And that is a trickier question, which requires standards of justice, plus methods for working out what will be the real consequences of an option. Though I acknowledge that politics is complex, I search my religious tradition to help me find standards of justice and laws of cause and effect. You, on the other hand, go somewhere else for your framework: where that is I do not know, but I suspect it’s a mishmash of popular cultural ideas, what you’ve been taught in school, some stuff you picked up in books, and so on, vaguely organized around the basic ideas of the Democratic Party.
Russia is indeed an extreme example of the anti-religious state, but I’d argue that the US is also functionally an anti-religious state, even if it clings to myths of neutrality and avoids such overt acts as slaughtering the religious or sending them off to the Gulag. I’ll give you another practical example.
In the little town of St. Marys and the surrounding countryside, there is a community of more or less like-minded religious people, mostly independent Baptists, but with a smattering of other Protestants and even Catholics. What this community agrees upon is that, for a variety of reasons, especially the value they place on a particular passage in Deuteronomy, it is a religious duty for Christian parents to give their children a thoroughly religious education. This, for them, is not just an idea; it’s an idea they hold so important that they sacrifice for it. These parents sacrifice about three thousand dollars per child to give their children a highly religious education at a little school which they’ve worked together to found.
There’s also a public secular school in St. Marys, where kids go to get a “neutral education.” Kids who go here are molded, almost without exception, into typical “St. Marys kids.” They joke crudely, they have an appaling amount of sex for high schoolers, they get pregnant, their lives revolve around the meaningless merry-go-round that is high school dating, and they drink, a lot. Though for most St. Marys parents, this is just the way things are, with its good and bad points, the religious folks I mentioned previously think this is a terrible fate to be avoided at great cost.
You seem to think that the sort of secular school system we have in the US today is neutral, but to see it that way is to fall prey to the fallacy which causes most sports fans to think that their team didn’t commit a foul, even when most disinterested observers think they did. But let’s follow the money and see whether the effects of this policy are religiously neutral. On the one hand, you have the non-religious-educating larger community. They do not contribute directly to the cost of their children’s education, though both they and the religious-educating smaller community pay taxes to fund the secular schooling. On the other hand, the religious community is forced to pay for the secular community’s schools, while they themselves must bear the full price of their own educational system.
The situation is frightfully one-sided. The secular folk are allowed to loot the religious folk to pay for a non-religious education system. The religious, however, are not allowed to loot the non-religious folk to pay for a religious education system. You can say all you like that the government is being religiously neutral in this case, but religious neutrality is a mere formality. The practical outcome is anti-religious. Under the more lenient Islamic overlords of the middle ages, Christians who chose to stay in their Christian communities were allowed to continue in their ways so long as they agreed to hand over a portion of their earnings to subsidise the religious institutions of the Muslims. Under the rather lenient secularist republics of the twentieth century, Christians who choose to stay in their religious education systems are allowed to continue in their ways so long as they keep on handing over a quite large fraction of their earnings to subsidize a secular education system. In either situation, Christians who refuse to fund the institutions they do not participate in are subject to steep civil and criminal penalties. No matter how mild the persecution may be, to call either situation neutral is a distortion. Lenient, perhaps, but not neutral.
Neither the secular overlords nor the Muslim overlords tell Christians what to believe. Both demand that the more conservative Christians subsidize systems they disagree with and do not benefit from directly. (Both the secular rulers and Muslim rulers think, of course, that they are benefiting their Christian subjects indirectly by providing them rule of law and some freedom.)
With regard to Jesus, I recommend a thorough and detailed reading of the Old Testament, followed by a look at all the times that Jesus endorsed the Old Testament system without reservation. Divorced from his religious context as a practicing, law-upholding first century Jew, Jesus can look like a variety of people. Radically liberal, however, is not a good title to give a man who demanded that his followers scrupulously follow Old Testament law.
Interesting that you bring up Walnut Hills, because it’s a public school that I believe most resembles a quality private school. Walnut is consistently ranked highly by Newsweek and such, and its college acceptance rates are much, much higher than average schools (especially considering the district it’s in). If a private schooling system was implemented, I feel the emergence of more schools like Walnut would be the primary benefit.
The other subjective note that you’re bringing up is the value of “real-world experience” vs. academic knowledge. I don’t deny that real world experience is more useful in most cases, especially when considering things like money management, being a salesperson, or maintaining responsibility for something. That being said, academic knowledge also has it’s own benefits: greater knowledge of the material taught (some directly useful to work, others useful to better understanding the world, and some only useful to those interested), advancing public knowledge (primarily through higher education), and so forth. These benefits exist for those who get educated in either a public or private system. I’ll get back to this in a few paragraphs.
I read over a summary of Getto’s book, and it’s not something I would try to refute. If I read the summary correctly, it is mostly a critique of how our schools system is set up (administrations having a stronger focus on rules than students for example) and other areas in which our schooling is ineffective. I don’t deny either of these premises: I believe many school administrations are some of the most incompetent organizations around, and the American education system is lagging behind many first world countries. I haven’t researched education to the point you have, and I don’t have a book I can bring up against Getto, but I don’t think I need one.
The reason for this is because I think the debate has slightly geared off what I’m really fighting for, and what I believe are the real disagreements we have. First is where the money that would pay for schooling comes from, and secondly whether or not children should be legally required to go to school up until a certain age. In terms of funding, you are arguing that money should only come from the people who pay for their kids to go to school, while I am in favor of a publicly funded system by taxes. In terms of legal requirements, I believe you want there to be none, while I advocate some level of compulsory education.
Our disagreement about funding can largely be placed on your religious views. It’s hard for me to argue against that without getting into a religious debate, so instead I’ll reiterate a simplified version of what we’ve discussed before. Consider two groups primarily affected by public funding: those who have to pay extra for other’s schooling, and those who would have higher quality of lives with education, but would not receive an education without a publicly funded system. I believe it is just to tax the first group to benefit the second because I believe the right to a public education will give a greater benefit to quality of life for the average individual (I’ll explain this later when explaining my justice system) than the taxation on the right to property will hurt the first group. The second group will exist as a significant part of the population; to prove this I would point to the affect our private healthcare system affects our lower classes (the amount of people who avoid medical treatment because they cannot afford it, which ultimately causes uninsured people to die at a rate 1.5 times greater for the same diseases than insured patients; source: Harvard Medical). I don’t want to get into a healthcare debate just yet, but I brought it up to clarify the way in which I think lower class people will be affected.
Compulsory education is a different matter from funding, and it could exist or not exist in either a public or private system. The reason I am for compulsory education is for the benefits of education described above. I don’t believe children should have the option of avoiding these benefits that could significantly help their adult selves because I don’t believe children should have this type of responsibility. The benefits of real world experience can still be had (in things such as paper routes as you mentioned), and will be had mostly after education is complete. A big difference between the modern day and the past is our increased life expectancy/average health. In simple terms, we have more time now to get real world experience and it isn’t as vital to get as a child.
Points I agree with you: we need to fix the education system. I would have no problem with a privately governed system that was funded publicly where kids have a right to education up to a certain level. In this system, privately governed schools could better focus on education rather than policy, and they could implement a system better than the 30 kids a classroom, nationally tested one we currently have.
I was a little unclear about “benefiting everyone”, but I’ll describe it now. Basically, I go back to my view of ethics, which is based on establishing rights for individuals and developing a consequentialist view around these rights. Rights are established in a manner similar to Rawl’s original position. For each proposed right (such as a right to education), you determine whether or not a person who does not know what his/her social status is would be better off without or without the right. A simplified version would say that a right is established when the average person would have a greater quality of life with the right than without it. This is my answer to ““Will the benefit to the beneficiaries morally outweigh the losses to the losers?””. (A note: this isn’t focused on aggregate benefits like a utilitarian system. Rather it’s a focus on a sort of “median individual”, and how to increase the quality of life of that median. Let me know if I didn’t explain this well/clearly)
So for governing, I would ask for each policy: what rights are being affected, and which option best protects an individual’s rights? For education, I would argue that protecting a right to education is more valuable than the partial loss of the right to property imposed by taxes. Using my system, each policy would establish a subjective debate, but would have an objective answer. The reason I believe politics/ethics should remain this way is because the objective answer (which policy ultimately leads to the greatest quality of life) logically exists, but is not usually possible to know because we cannot know the exact effects of every action. That’s what I mean when I say that politics are a debate about what “ultimately benefits everyone”.
About your St. Mary’s example: the reason a secular system is religiously neutral is that it would affect private atheist schooling the same way as it does the Christian schooling. Imagine the same example, where a secular school exists alongside a private, atheist school that teaches the flaws of religion and the idea that all religions are myths. Any parents who sent their kids to the private atheist school would still have to fund the public schooling in the same way that Christian private school parents would.
The basic flaw in your argument is the idea that secular means atheist, which it does not. In a secular realm, you are free to believe what you want to believe, and policies are made so that you are not forced to believe anything. It is true that secular realms are more atheist/agnostic than Christian communities, but this should be obvious because, given the ability to believe freely, people will choose to believe or not believe in a multitude of things. This isn’t anti-religious, it is separate from religion. Anti-religious is atheist, and your point only works if secular policies directly promote atheism. They don’t, and that is why secular is religiously neutral.
I have also read and studied the Old Testament, and Jesus did not ask for a strict following of the Old Testament, as exampled by Acts 10 (where Jesus told Peter that animals forbidden by the Old Testament were not unclean) and John 8 (where Jesus prevented a women from being stoned for adultery, which the Old Testament commands).
My point wasn’t that he was radically liberal against the religious beliefs of people (he said something along the lines of “I have not come to abolish the law, but rather accomplish their purpose). Instead, he was radically liberal against religious customs, such as observing the Sabbath to absurdity (he saved a boy from a ditch on the Sabbath), and the pride and hypocrisy of the high priests. In modern times, I strongly believe he would be against the rituals of the Catholic church, against the focus on economic matters in government (and instead being on helping the people, especially the poor), and would very possibly be appalled at the amount of materialism that exists.
In the interests of focus, I’m going to leave Jesus, Gatto’s book, and healthcare aside and just go at the neutrality concept until we come to some understanding or just agree to disagree. If you really feel we need to get back to those things, feel free to reintroduce them at your convenience.
I would have no problem with a privately governed system that was funded publicly where kids have a right to education up to a certain level. In this system, privately governed schools could better focus on education rather than policy, and they could implement a system better than the 30 kids a classroom, nationally tested one we currently have.
‘Privately managed, publicly funded’ is an oxymoron. He who pays the piper calls the tune. The moment government starts funding educational systems, the government becomes accountable to make sure its money isn’t being wasted or used counter-productively. And then we’re back to square one: the starting point of public education. There is no field with government funding that doesn’t have government management.
You think it’s just to tax those who can afford private school to pay for those you can’t. So be it. Our presuppositions lead us to separate beliefs about the justice of coerced payment. But the St. Marys example isn’t about taxing those who can afford private school to pay those who don’t. Independant Fundamental Baptists tend to only have a high school education — something like 5% of them have attended college. What we’re dealing with here is a slightly-poorer than average religious community being forced to pay for the education of people who are as well or better off than themselves.
Similarly, the Amish run their own school system which they pay for, while they also pay for the school system of the non-Amish. They take care of their own social welfare and healthcare as a community, but they also pay for the social welfare of non-Amish through taxes.
In effect, both of these (generally under-educated, lower-to-middle class) religious groups give out benefits while not taking them in. In the more honest ancient world this was called ‘paying tribute.’ It’s what a small, less wealthy community did for a larger, more powerful, militaristic conquerer. In effect, those who live in tight-knit religious communities have to pay tribute to those who don’t.
Now, you can say that this situation ‘benefits everyone’ in a Rawlsian sense if you like. I would disagree, but maybe you’re right there. What you can’t say is that this set-up is religiously neutral. To call it religiously neutral is to ignore the visible realities of the situation in favor of its legal formalities.
I’m glad you brought up the distinction between secular and atheist. Atheism says “There is no God.” Secularism says “God is not relevant.” From the standpoint of a religiously committed person like myself, secularism is by far the more dangerous of the two. The atheist is very clear about what he believes, and no matter how logical he is, he will never get the masses on his side. Secularism, on the other hand, is able to do much more damage to religion because the religious masses are easily convinced that it is neutral.
Here’s what I mean when I say that secularism isn’t neutral. From kindergarten on, children are taught a wide variety of subjects without reference to religion. The implication is that religion is of no importance to the major subjects of society. The disciplinary system at school teaches standards of fairness and authority divorced from religion. The history teachers teach history divorced from religion. (And this is no minor ommission, either. My history teachers in public school, on the other hand, justified the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in terms of its supposed good consequences. My religious upbringing, on the other hand, taught a doctrine of imago Dei which forbid the deliberate killing of two hundred thousand innocent people by incineration. But, if the discussion in history class is any indication, my theology has no place in constructing public policy and all 200,000 of them must go up in flames, lest crazy religious people impose oppressive religious law.) Similarly, law is taught as a human institution divorced from religion. Ethics are taught divorced from religion. Health is taught divorced from religion. (STD’s and obesity and alcoholism are tackled as technical issues, not as side effects of transgressing the law of God concerning fornication and gluttony and sobriety.) Psychology is taught divorced from religion. The implicit message given by this sort of education is “Perhaps there is a God. But any God or gods out there are not relevant to tackling all the major social and moral issues of the world.”
It is true that secularism doesn’t discriminate against religion itself. It has no problem with the sort of God who benignly blesses America when, say, a terrorist attack occurs. It does have a problem with any God that makes demands that in any way impinge on the political sphere. Indeed, secularism encourages therapeutic spirituality. If the “universe” or “God” or “divine cosmic energy” or what have you makes you feel better, excellent. But don’t claim that there is someone above who punishes disobedience and rewards obedience. Not cool.
This tendency toward limiting the scope of religion to personal devotion does not just show itself in the education system indirectly. It is directly enshrined in our legal systems. One of the first things churches do when they are being founded is to incorporate and file for 501(c)3 tax-exempt status. 501(c)3 status requires silence on political issues. The legal system governing non-profits is set up to punitively tax churches whose doctrine demands political action on this or that issue. A church is legally safe if it talks about how God wants us all to hold hands and read the Bible and feel compassion and donate money to charity. A church is not legally safe if it decides that God condemns abortion, or the dropping of bombs onto weddings in Yemen, or coercive welfare schemes, or monetary inflation, or something else that our legal system has decided is a political rather than a religious issue.
Throughout history, every major religion has made extensive demands inside the circle which modern secularism reserves for politics. Islam self-consciously asserted a goal of world conquest with some tolerance for other monotheistic religions. Catholicism likewise claimed the right to a ten percent tax throughout the Christian world. Hinduism claimed the right to firstborn sacrifices, the burning of widows, and strict public segregation. Traditional Chinese religion claimed that the government should subsidize religious sacrifices. Rabbinic Judaism claims the right to control marriage laws in Israel, and pre-Rabbinic Judaism imposed the death sentence on anyone who made or worshipped idols.
Secularism works overtime to reign in all of the above parts of every major historical religion, and then some. With education, income tax, and non-profit laws, secular government works to neutralize the effects of religion on society and destroy any sort of organized religion which claims a divine will for politics. A system which attacks the political claims of every major world religion is by no means neutral.
If the government were to restrict the places I could go until I was only allowed to move about on my own property, but it allowed me to do whatever I liked on my own property, the assertion that the government is “Mitchell-neutral” and “has nothing against Mitchell” would be silliness. Similarly, if religion is to be pushed into the so-called “private sphere” and out of the public arena that all historical religions grew up in, there’s no sense in declaring that governments are religiously neutral.
Religious neutrality is simply the cover that is used to make the population complacent about a whole basket of policies which are effectively neutering religion.
“Privately managed, publicly funded’ is an oxymoron”
The truth of that depends on what you’re expecting the government to mandate. I’m not saying this system is ideal (it could be, but I don’t know), but it is possible. A real world comparison would ironically be the private prisons that are currently running. I’m no expert on it, but basically taxes pay private prison companies per inmate that they hold. The prisons are theoretically obligated to obey the law with their prisons. The rest of the details, however, are up to the private company.
To be clear, I am not for private prisons and I think that criminal justice is one area that should not be privatized. However, it is a real example of how public funding doesn’t fully control a private company. For education, schools would be paid per student, would be obligated not to break any laws, and would then have to run the rest themselves. Like private prisons, the goal of private schools would be to get more students to get more funding. This wouldn’t be a problem if there were enough schools, as this goal would force schools to offer the best education possible in order to attract kids and get more funding.
So basically, it’s unclear what you really are expecting to be free from government management. The obviously wrong policies (such as basing funding on test scores) wouldn’t necessarily be in place, and there wouldn’t necessarily have to be strict guidelines on how schools decide to teach their kids.
Again about St. Mary’s: that policy isn’t anti-religious, it is anti-making your own schools (if you see taxes that way). If an atheistic group wanted to make a private school, they would face the same taxes and added costs. Or to push this further, imagine a group of secularists who believe that the public high school has too much religious influence for whatever reason. If they wanted to make their own private school to avoid this, they would have to pay the same amount extra as the St. Mary Christians.
Even if I accept that a secular public schooling system is unfair to those who choose private schools (which I don’t, as evidenced by the preceding argument), it isn’t anti-religious.These systems are religiously neutral because they do not focus on religious private schools, they focus on all private schools. In the cases you brought up, the private schools happen to be religious. Since the system is unfair to private schools, it will be unfair to a religious private school. The key distinction here is that the alleged unfairness is against the private schooling, not the religious schooling.
A note: I understand that religious people are more likely to prefer a private school that teaches their beliefs (as opposed to atheist people who are okay with a school that doesn’t actively teach that God doesn’t exist). But once again, the policy isn’t anti-religious because it doesn’t focus on religions, it focuses on all private schooling.
A key flaw with your argument that secularism is anti-religious is that you are grouping religions together as if they agree. Christianity is anti-Islam, Islam is anti-scientology, and Hinduism is anti-Mormon. These religions don’t agree with one another on basic truths; Christianity is the only religion that accepts Jesus as a deity, Islam is the only religion that supports Sharia law, and Scientology is the only religion that I know of that talks about aliens. The exclusion of religion in secular teaching isn’t a singular front against a consensus doctrine that all people believe, it is the exclusion of a heated debate that isn’t based in scientific fact. We shouldn’t teach the creation story as scientific fact because, without religion, we wouldn’t even consider it to be a valid theory anymore. If we chose to teach the Christian creation story, we’d have to teach the Hindu creation story, the Greek creation story, the Scientologist story, and so forth. You can’t select only Christianity as acceptable in public curriculum without being arbitrarily biased toward your own faith. If it is okay for you to be biased, then it is okay for a Muslim to be similarly biased.
Another issue is that you cannot expect other people who do not share your beliefs to be forced to abide by your God’s laws. If there is a Christian God out there, it is your responsibility to follow his/her laws and do right by God. It is solely my own responsibility to be accountable to that God, not yours. If I freely choose a different god, or none altogether, that is my choice. That’s what a public secular system promotes: free religious choice. That can only happen in a system where religion is made a personal matter, not a legally enforced one.
Also interesting is that you bring up how religion has been separated from science/other areas of discipline. Over-generally speaking, I’d say this process started during the Enlightenment. Beforehand, religious ideals clouded the academic world and hindered actual progress. Example would be: sticking with a geocentric theory, basing philosophy with the assumption of a Christian God (as exampled by Berkeley), and any other field that questioned religious doctrine. The reason religion needs to be kept out of academics is that it gives assumptions without proof, such as the idea that the universe was made in six days, that the world is only thousands of years old, and so forth. If it wasn’t for secular academic progress, people would still see these stories as hard fact rather than a sort of metaphor.
This process isn’t anti-religious either. If you ban all religious assumptions and stick with only what you can prove, then you will eventually reach actual facts. If religions are correct, then these facts will eventually point toward religious truths. However, you cannot start a search with your conclusion already made (a begging the question fallacy) and expect to make real progress. That is why you have to teach these subjects separate from religion.
A note about churches: what, exactly, are you expecting from the government? Should churches be allowed to receive income tax free, and be able to use this money freely in any way? The point of the laws that restrict political action is so that religion is not used as a political tool that can bypass taxing laws that others cannot. If a religious group wants to be politically active, they can do so the same way all other political groups have to: as a non-charity that doesn’t get religious tax benefits.
About your metaphor: you are missing the fact that you are allowed to practice religion in public areas, so long as it does not infringe on the private lives of others by imposing laws on them. So, if we adjust your metaphor accordingly, you are allowed to move around in your home, and you are allowed to move around in public areas. You are not allowed, however, to move around in other people’s homes and invade their private area. That law isn’t anti-Mitchell, it’s basic law that protects the rights of others. (A note to understand: “public area” cannot be generalized into one idea. My opinion of public area in the metaphor involves your freedom of speech, your freedom to choose any religion or church, and your freedom to be open about your religious beliefs to others. This does not include public law, which is imposed on other people.)
So I want to give you all possible choices to understand your position and for you to understand my argument. Should public law:
A. Be secular, and keep religions from infringing on anyone’s right to religious belief (my view).
B. Be atheist, and ban all religious practices (anti-religious)
C. Be pro-all religions, and allow any and all religious beliefs to be justly implemented into law (resulting in Islamic policies, Christian policies, and so forth all being a part of law)
D. Be pro-Christian, but be secular for all other religions (so that Christian laws can be justly put into law, but any Islamic, Scientologist, or Hindu law would be unjust)
Preface
From what I remember of you, you seem like a really cool person, putting up with such fun shenagigans as trying to buy out all the mints at Skyline. If we were speaking face to face, I imagine we’d talk about our families and what we’re involved in and maybe even some philosophical disagreements, but I’d bet we’d be more friendly about it. That said, we’re currently not face to face and we’re talking through writing across the internet about philosophy, so I’ll keep on going. Sometimes I do hate the internets, though, for the way they allow people to go straight to what they differ on.
My Central Thesis
If I understand you correct on St. Marys stance, you hold that being against the sort of things that only religious people do because their religion requires them to is not anti-religious because, hypothetically, non-religious people could do the same thing and be equally penalized. I agreed, at the beginning, that formally speaking the state is politically neutral. The effects, however, are clearly not neutral, and I think that as a consequentialist you especially should acknowledge that. If a system deliberately sets out to financially attack both a significant real segment of the religious population and a hypothetical but non-existent non-religious population, you seem to call that religious neutrality. I think that’s stacking the deck.
I am most definitely not grouping together the religions as though they agree. I realize they don’t. What I am trying to point out is that they are in conflict with one another, they are in conflict with secularism, and secularism is in conflict with them. In any case, one has to pick a particular view of reality and enforce it against all other views. In your case, you want government to take your view over against the historical views of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and every other major historical religion. I’m not asking you to change that choice. I’m asking you to simply acknowledge that choice.
If you ban all religious assumptions and stick with only what you can prove, then you will eventually reach actual facts.
That sentence probably sums up our fundamental disagreement far more than anything else. As you’ve certainly realized by now as a philosophy major, any attempt to prove anything must rest on assumptions. You have decided that the correct methodology to find truth, at least the truth for every academic and moral subject that matters, is to start with some sort of non-religious assumptions. But with you as much as I, your end-point is implicit in your beginning-point. It is my opinion that the very beginning-point any person chooses to build on, that is, every epistemology, is simply not a neutral matter. And any worldviews fundamental assumptions will put it in a state of irresolvable conflict with every other set of assumptions. A humanistic worldview, built one way or another on man as the final arbiter of fact and morals, will be at odds with every non-humanistic worldview in which something outside of man is the ultimate arbiter.
You choose to start your approach to every topic you’ve brought up so far with an exclusionary rule against religious assumptions. And I appreciate the very real and compelling reasons one would do that. But a necessary consequence of an exclusionary rule against religious ways of knowing is that you are logically unable to argue with anyone who has a religious worldview. The only people you can logically argue with are humanists, and even then that subset of humanists who accept your basic ethical approach (a secular Rawlsian one) and who value more or less the same sorts of worlds that you do.
The point that all this is leading to is this: you have fixed an unbridgeable gulf between yourself and the majority of the conservatives that you think you are engaged in argument with. Your efforts at setting up multi-step arguments, as in the gay marriage case, really say nothing more than this: If you agree with my non-religious way of looking at the world, and if you agree with my arbitrary non-religious ethical rules, and if you agree with what I foresee as the consequences of certain current actions, you will agree with my conclusion.
I am not attempting to argue against your conclusions or your choice of assumptions. I have no idea how I would even try such a thing, or whether it’s possible at all. Where I disagree with you is in this: you seem to think that arguments you set up beginning with your assumptions somehow have binding force on the minds of people who do not share your assumptions.
You see what you’re doing in these cases as logical argument. I see it as simulated argument which artfully conceals the truth, which is that it’s really just a repetition of what you believe dressed up as logical argument.
Answers to Specific Questions
A note about churches: what, exactly, are you expecting from the government? Should churches be allowed to receive income tax free, and be able to use this money freely in any way? The point of the laws that restrict political action is so that religion is not used as a political tool that can bypass taxing laws that others cannot. If a religious group wants to be politically active, they can do so the same way all other political groups have to: as a non-charity that doesn’t get religious tax benefits.
In a word, yes. I do think that government ought not to tax the churches, even if they address political questions. Given the fact that pretty much all religious views speak to political questions, I think freedom of religion demands that government not use tax threats to politically silence churches. I do recognize that this would provide a lop-sided benefit to churches, and so what looks fairest to me is to remove that unfair advantage to churches by not taxing any political activity whatsoever. That is, to my mind, also a way to achieve a purer right to free speech.
Should public law:
A. Be secular, and keep religions from infringing on anyone’s right to religious belief (my view).
B. Be atheist, and ban all religious practices (anti-religious)
C. Be pro-all religions, and allow any and all religious beliefs to be justly implemented into law (resulting in Islamic policies, Christian policies, and so forth all being a part of law)
D. Be pro-Christian, but be secular for all other religions (so that Christian laws can be justly put into law, but any Islamic, Scientologist, or Hindu law would be unjust)
Well, option A looks swell, but I don’t think it’s actually possible. I don’t think that your organization of the world actually avoids infringing on religious belief and practice.
B. I of course have to reject this.
C is an oxymoron, because the laws of various religions don’t directly clash.
D. looks like the only option left. Of course, I don’t think Christianity allows for forcing others to be Christian, so don’t think I’m condoning forcing others to practice my religion, but I do think I would base my views of morality and the role of government on what my religion says about those things. I don’t see any other option. For example on taxation, I think it’s wrong to engage is compulsory wealth distribution for religious reasons. Can I believe that and still vote to engage in compulsory wealth redistribution. I don’t think that option is open to me without engaging in intellectual schizophrenia. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very attracted to A, but I just don’t think it’s a real possibility. If it were, and I can’t imagine how it would be, I’d be glad to give it another look.
PS:
In addressing option C in my third section, I said the laws of various religions don’t directly clash. What I meant, of course, was that the laws of various religions directly clash. Oops.
Response to Preface:
Hopefully your opinion of me hasn’t sunk too low, as my opinion of you has definitely not. If anything I wrote sounded unfriendly, it wasn’t intentional. If we were face to face, I doubt either of us would have the patience required to go through everything that’s been discussed so far. I do however enjoy getting to what we disagree on, because I love debating and actual conclusions almost never happen in internet debates. That being said, I would love to sometime catch up about families and issues, because we’ve both probably gone through a hell of a lot since our middle school math competitions.
Response to your thesis:
The issue with the St. Mary’s example is that I’m entirely focusing on the theoretical, and the policy itself rather than the consequences. The reason for this is because we’re not debating about what the policy should be in St. Mary’s, we’re debating about what the policy should be nationwide. In theory, the policy in St. Mary’s, which is a secular public schooling system, is not anti-religious. It’s a law that treats religious people and non-religious people equally in origin, and gives each group the same schooling options. In practice, I acknowledge that the results hurt the religious more than the non-religious. But the reason I’m brushing past this is that I don’t think that secular policies in general will result in this sort of uneven treatment. In the St. Mary’s case, a religiously neutral policy results in religiously discriminatory results. However, I believe that secularism, in its purely theoretical form, is not anti-religious (which is why I drew out the distinction between neutral secularism and anti-religious atheism). Since secularism, as a theory, is not anti-religious, I do not believe the majority of cases will have the same religiously discriminatory results as St. Mary’s.
About assumptions, to explain myself I have to briefly go over the philosophy of knowledge. In condemning religious assumptions to facts, I’m distinguishing between assumptions and knowledge. Philosophy as a practice isn’t based in assumptions, it’s using prior knowledge to prove or disprove assumptions. So from here the question becomes: what is knowledge? This is a question that actually still hasn’t been adequately defined (as philosophers like to poke holes in any offered definition). However, I generally go with the common sense idea of justified true belief, which is based in having enough good reason for an idea to move from assumption to knowledge. This isn’t mathematically exact, as I can’t logically eliminate the possibility that I am a brain in vat being fed stimuli to give the illusion of a world. I can still have knowledge that this isn’t the case due to the relevant alternatives theory, which claims that I only need to consider relevant alternatives to assumptions to assert knowledge.
My quote of “If you ban all religious assumptions and stick with only what you can prove, then you will eventually reach actual facts.” is in line with this idea of knowledge. We can know certain things “the earth exists”, “1+1=2″, “water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen” and so forth. These can be proven beyond relevant doubt. Assumptions, on the other hand, are things that cannot be proven beyond this type of doubt. Example assumptions are “God exists”, “this religion is the correct one”, and even small things like “the Reds will win the World Series”. Real facts (knowledge) is made when assumptions like these can be proven beyond a relevant doubt, in the same way that we can prove the chemical components of water. This is what I mean when I say to give up religious assumptions. Faith, such as faith in the existence of God, is an assumption of a certain idea. You cannot begin with these assumptions and expect to come to facts. If you stick with knowledge, and work to prove assumptions before believing in them, then you can come to real facts (the process of philosophy as well as science).
For my views of morality and justice, I start with one basic assumption: we should value the quality of other people’s lives. This is the only assumption I make, and it isn’t something I can logically prove if your an egoist. It’s a simple divide: either you think we should value other people, or you don’t. So, ignoring egoism, I work my way up from this one assumption. The reason I am okay with using this assumption is that it is necessary for any view of morality, and I don’t believe too many people will reject it. Valuing others is somehow ingrained in most of us, whether evolutionary or divinely. I do not think this is an unbridgeable gap between me and the religious, and here’s why:
1. We should value other people’s lives (assumption).
2. To promote this value, we need to treat others in a way that either helps or refrains from harming other people’s lives
3. Certain harms and benefits can be proven knowledge, not assumed (such as the harm of pain and torture, or the benefit of health and happiness).
4. Morality, as we think of it, should promote the value of other people’s lives (not really an assumption, since morality is just a clarification term for ways we should act)
Therefore, morality should demand people to act in ways that either promote the knowable benefits or prevent the knowable harms.
My morality sees the best answer to this demand as a system of rights. But that isn’t the debate here, and I can only have that debate once someone accepts the above conclusion. The reason I believe that religious people can accept that conclusion is that it isn’t anti-religious. Regardless of belief, anyone can understand the need to benefit others or prevent harm. A secular view simply demands that these benefits and harms be knowable, as opposed to religiously assumed. For example, saving a person’s life is a knowable benefit that we can promote without fear of any unwilling assumptions. However, forcing a person to convert in order that they go to heaven instead of hell isn’t a knowable benefit, it is assumed by those who believe in that type of Christianity. You can’t equate the two without illogically confusing faith and knowledge, and even the basic Christian doctrine acknowledges this difference (as faith is a virtue not equated with simply knowing something’s truth).
Issue with your idea of churches and taxation: Fairness isn’t the correct word to use. Other action committees face the same taxation as churches if they are politically active. Their voices are no less silenced than the churches. Removing all taxes may make everyone’s situation better (which I doubt), but the situations would still be equal, and thus fair, in either scenario.
Here’s the dilemma with you choosing D: by the same logic, you are admitting that a Muslim cannot be expected to implement any policies other than the ones directly in line with their faith. You could arbitrarily say that only Christian policies are justified because they’re what you believe in, but that’s not what you’ve been saying. Basically, the argument that I am understanding is that religious beliefs are too ingrained in people’s views of morality for a secular view to be actually possible. And that is where we disagree. If I accept that people can only justify policies in line with their religious beliefs, then you are actually choosing C, which you admit is impossible. We cannot expect Muslims and Scientologists to cast their beliefs aside if you are unable to do so yourself. If you are adamant that people cannot think outside their beliefs, then option C is the only possibility.
The reason I stick with A is that this isn’t the case. If you accept my distinction between knowledge and assumptions, then we can justify polices that promote knowable benefits and not justify policies based on assumptions. In practice, most policies will be implemented with a great deal of assumptions as to what the actual effects of the law will be. However, in theory the law can be justly based in the promotion of knowable benefits, and that is what a secular view is or should be.
Worry not. No opinion sinkage here. I just know that conversations of this sort tend to be way more direct and emphasize disagreement more than face-to-faces do, and sometimes people get offended, but from my standpoint this has been a good productive conversation. Our underlying disagreements are becoming clearer by fits and starts, and that in itself is a helpful thing.
With regard to St. Marys, my understanding is that you see the St. Marys religious inequity as more or less isolated and unique. This is one place we significantly disagree. The people of St. Marys are not the only people of faith swimming upstream against the demand that the significantly religious pay at least double if they want to educate children in their own values. Approximately 8% of children in the US are given religious schooling, mostly Christian but other religions also, while another 3 or 4% of children are being educated at home, again, mostly for at least partially religious reasons. In addition to this 11-12% of the US subject to this effectively discriminatory system directly, there are many more parents who would have their children in religious schools if offered an equal playing field. Before national controls regulated the teaching of religion in public schools, the vast majority of schools in the US taught some sort of Bible-based religion, because that’s what most parents wanted to raise their children in. The St. Marys example is not an unusual case, but representative of a very large and educationally marginalized segment of the US population.
Your hypothetical atheists, on the other hand, are simply nowhere to be found. To the best of my knowledge, atheists have not formed a single school in the entire US. Secularism may sound neutral in theory, but in practice it only marginalizes the religious, not the anti-religious. Secularism as it exists in the US primarily serves the interests of the non-religious, nominally religious, or vaguely spiritual, while marginalizing the interests of those who live by thoroughly religious world-and-life views.
Perhaps “assumption” isn’t the word I should be using. Perhaps I should be saying “presuppositions.” A child will ask why you have to go to the laundromat, and then when you answer he will ask why you need your clothes clean, and once you tell him he will ask why you need to avoid being fired, and so on. I’m sure you’ve seen the “why” game. Eventually, no matter how patient you are with the child, you run out of answers, and you say that something is true just because you know it to be true. Those things you reach at the very end of the “why” game are the things I’ve been calling “assumptions.” They are the final human answers to any question, and the human cannot justify those final answers.
If I understand you correctly, you are making a distinction between invalid final answers, which you call “assumptions”, and valid final answers, which you call “knowledge” or “real facts.” But, as even you admit, your criteria for which answers fit in which category are fuzzy and undefinable. But regardless of your lack of definition, you are confident of one thing: that religious starting points fit in the realm of invalid presuppositions. This is not a small issue, because over 50% of the world’s people identify themselves as believers in one or another form of Abrahamic religion, all of which hold that morality and ethics come from a source which you declare invalid. Your presuppositions are anti-religious in that they declare invalid the view of ethics which is central to all the major world religions. Now, you yourself may not be hostile to religious folks, and you may not feel any hatred or antipathy toward religion itself, but your views of truth and justice are nonetheless clearly opposed to what religion stands for.
When you begin to construct a morality, it is true that you have at least some elements of common ground with the religious in point (1). Every religion, except for a few fringe ones, agrees that we should value other people’s lives. But from point (1), paths will diverge based on whether this point is pursued in terms of a secular worldview or a religious one. Point (2), for example, will be applied differently depending on what one thinks is really in the best interests of a person, and based on what circumstances justify sacrificing the self-interests of some for others. After all, every system sacrifices the well-being of some for others. In addition, there is the major question of what constitutes “other people’s lives” which will impact the abortion issue and others. (3) sneaks in the old “proven knowledge” secular viewpoint discussed above. And finally, (4) is incomplete, because while almost all agree that morality should promote the value of other peoples’ lives, it does not answer whether they are not other ends which morality must also promote, and whether those other ends might conflict at times.
The issue of churches and taxation is another one of those areas in which secularism proclaims equality while practicing inequality. A political action committee (PAC) can operate for a few weeks of the year, rent space when needed, and pays taxes on its political activity. A church or synagogue or mosque, on the other hand, almost always has a building large enough to fit all its members in, which it must maintain year-round. If just one of the messages these religious communities feel duty-bound to teach impinges on the political sphere, the church is in danger of losing its exemption. Then the church has to pay substantial property taxes taking up a far larger proportion of its income than a PAC would, year-round, for engaging in far less political speech than a PAC. In this issue as in others, secularism sets up a wall of official neutrality which does not correspond to the effective realities of the situation.
To go back to the A-B-C-D options from earlier, let’s look at the question of tax money for public schooling. Let’s say, whether David is right or wrong, that he doesn’t think it’s right to tax the population to pay for state schooling. And let’s say that this is a direct result of his religious beliefs about the right to property. Further, let’s even say that he believes that not doing so will bring down judgment on his society in the form of social breakdown, increasing poverty, and rising national debt levels. So at this point, then, David believes that both the obligation to obey God and the obligation to look out for the quality of other peoples’ lives demand that he vote down funding at every possible turn and do his part to bring down the public school system.
Not, if I understand your position correctly, what you demand of Dave is that he practice intellectual schizophrenia. You say that David may believe any religious beliefs he chooses, but that he must make his political decisions based on non-religious criteria. Thus, David has to set aside his religion-based views of cause and effect in society, construct an alternate religiously-neutral system of cause and effect, and then vote accordingly. That’s an astounding thing to ask of him. You say that you are okay with his beliefs, but just as long as he behaves as though he believes something else.
A world which operates according to the secular ethic you are trying to construct is a world that has been rid, by one means or another, of consistent religious people.
When I choose world D — and I would love to choose A if only it were more than a mirage — I do realize that a Muslim will act on his Islam, that a Hindu will act on his Hinduism, and that you will act on your unbelief. Acknowledging that every belief system will work to impose itself on society is very different from saying that every belief system is equally valid. You, for example, prefer your secular ethics of taxation to my religious ethics of taxation. Because you believe that you are right and I am wrong, you will seek to win. Even without convincing folks like me, you have won by gaining political power and imposing your policies on us over our objections. I’m not seeking to make you ashamed of that. I’m just pointing out that seeking to win is the logical outgrowth of your ethical system. Secularists talk neutrality, but whenever there is a functional political difference between their moral conclusions and those of religious people, they seek victory. As someone who believes in Christian ethics, I similarly have no urge to persecute Muslims or non-believers, but when their beliefs about political morality differ, I seek to win politically, just as you do. The difference is that I don’t cloak my desire to win in rhetoric about neutrality. I seek consistency and refuse to engage in trying to impose my beliefs on others while pretending I’m not doing just that. Modern American secularism, on the other hand, is still in a state of denial about its own aims.
St. Mary’s may not be a unique example, but our disagreement stands on exactly how representative of the nation it is. And when discussing private and home schooling you’re failing to acknowledge that many, many non-religious kids are sent to private schools due to either the better education or smaller class sizes. The religious are the majority, but the non-religious schools are not an insignificant minority (from what I’ve researched, national averages tend to be around 40% Catholic, 40% other religious, and 20% non-religious). This does seem to point toward negative consequences for religion, but this isn’t the case due to the number of religious people in the U.S. (with around 76% of Americans proclaiming to be Christian, and only 12% being atheist/agnostic/unaffiliated). Generally speaking, this seems to be a fair and religiously neutral policy, as 80% of religious private schools relate to an 88% religious population. It’s hard to be specific with such general numbers, but you get the basic idea.
I don’t know how much further we can go with this particular debate, as I think we’ve drawn where our lines are pretty clearly. From what I understand, you agree with me that in pure theory a secular schooling system is not inherently anti-religious. What you are arguing is that in practice, the religious are unfairly treated and the result is an anti-religious system. It’s hard to really debate this without full knowledge of the educational system, and a problem with my stats is that the 20% of private schools that are secular aren’t going to be full of atheists and agnostics necessarily. However, I maintain my point that the results aren’t unacceptably unfair toward the religious because the religious are such a heavy majority, and private schooling has to accommodate the majority.
My issue with your view of knowledge is that you are polarizing all possibilities and leave yourself with only two options: complete skepticism of knowledge or an all encompassing definition that equates a belief in Santa Claus with mathematical knowledge. In the “why game” there are points where you have to stop, but if done correctly those points will be knowable a priori, or separate from experience. Here’s an example:
Why do candles burn?
- Because they’re on fire.
Why does fire burn things?
- Because that’s what fire does.
Why does fire do that?
- Because that’s the results of it’s physical laws.
Why do physical laws work?
- Because that’s the way the universe is.
Why do we know that’s the way the universe is?
- Because we can test things out with the scientific method and find it out.
Why does the scientific method work?
- Logic.
This is not the best example, but I hope it shows my point. That last step, or the “logic” that supports the scientific method, is knowable a priori (if you don’t like the scientific method, you can imagine a different example that ends with 1+1=2). Your argument seems to be denying the existence of any a priori knowledge, but that isn’t right. If we can’t know any a priori knowledge (like mathematical truths) or trust a posteriori knowledge (like sensory data), then we can’t know anything and knowledge is completely impossible (skepticism). The only way you could defend this skepticism is by alluding to an evil demon like Descartes, or a hypothetical brain vat that is tricking us. These are logical possibilities, but I hold onto the relevant alternatives theory to claim that I don’t need to eliminate them to have real a priori or a posteriori knowledge. If you aren’t comfortable with this level of skepticism, then you have to admit that certain things are knowable, whether a priori or a posteriori. From this knowledge, we can discover other knowledge if done correctly. So from logic, we get science. From science, we discover that water is made up of. We can now have knowledge of what water is made up of.
Religious beliefs are not knowable in this way. That is why they are assumptions. You cannot start with knowledge (like logic or math) and work your way up to religious beliefs in the same way you can work up to knowledge of water. This is what distinguishes knowable facts from assumptions, and knowable benefits from assumed ones. I can work my way up from knowledge to knowable benefits of others, such as the bodily need for food to survive. Religious benefits, such as the eternal soul, are not knowable in this way.
The key point I made in my last post is that I was using one assumption that cannot be known derived from knowledge: that we should value the lives of others. That is my only assumption, and I would need support from everyone else in order to justify this assumption. However, as I noted earlier, I don’t think this is too difficult of an assumption to make.
So my ethical system promotes these knowable benefits, and if people accept my assumption that people should be valued, I can knowingly prove the need for actions to help others.
The issue comes with unknowable benefits, such as the eternal soul. These are not knowable, and the assumption that a certain religion is correct is essential for anyone to accept any ideas derived from it. But my point is that people who do not share that religion will not accept that assumption, and therefore will not accept any beliefs derived from it. Which is why I think my prior assumption is the only way to go, as people will accept that and the results derived from it.
(A note: using my assumption doesn’t derive clear answers for every case, like abortion. As I said earlier, the ensuing debate would be about which policies actually provide knowable benefits and which don’t. That’s the political and/or ethical debate, and it is possible entirely without religion and without anti-religious policies).
Since I’m not an expert in PAC’s, I’ll keep my rebuttal simple: is it illegal for a church to form a PAC separate from the church, and keep its funding separate? So any amount going to the church building is tax-free, and any amount donated to the church from people being tithed is untaxed. What is taxed is any money that goes into the PAC, either from donations or the church. The PAC would be able to use its taxed money in any political way, and would not risk the church’s tax benefits so long as the church doesn’t do anything illegal.
About David: you are making it seem like he can’t tell the difference between knowable facts and his own beliefs. And you are right in that a lot of people cannot make this distinction. Moving past this though: if David, even if it is based in his religious beliefs, thinks that a funding policy with have knowable damage to people, then he is justified in voting against it. He doesn’t have to think that it will have knowable damage and vote for it, as he is justified in wanting to prevent knowable damage. His method is illogical, as it is based in religious assumptions, but his outcome isn’t unjustified.
Here’s what David can’t do: vote against a policy like gay marriage because it will cause assumed harms (eternal damnation or such). That isn’t a knowable harm, and David needs to be able to recognize that. If the policy has knowable benefits (happiness and less discrimination) and no knowable harms, David is completely unjustified in voting against it due to his own assumed harms. The only way he could justifiably be against gay marriage is if he thinks that gay marriage will result in knowable harms, like people dying or something.
“Acknowledging that every belief system will work to impose itself on society is very different from saying that every belief system is equally valid.”
That is the issue. You cannot justifiably claim that your belief system is more valid without some sort of knowable proof. And I am not doing the same, I separate my own religious beliefs from my secular beliefs. Religiously, I believe the possibility of a God existing is so small that it isn’t worth considering. Further, I believe a society without religion is better than one with it. However, I do not want to implement these beliefs in law because I acknowledge that people need the freedom to believe what they want. That is my secular view, and that is religious neutrality.
Here’s a further point: there are knowable benefits that we can both agree on that should be promoted (health, happiness, so forth). There are also assumed benefits that we cannot justifiably use for policies (eternal salvation, or for me the elimination of time spent on earth worshiping a fake god). My belief in the non-existence of God isn’t a knowable fact, and that’s why I can’t implement policies that stop people from wasting time in religion. I believe there are benefits in not participating in religion, but since I can’t prove it as knowledge the benefits aren’t knowable. I am able to make that distinction, and so can religious people.
The conclusion that I’m beating around: Separating religion from politics does not unjustly discriminate against religion. Politics should only promote knowable benefits and prevent knowable harms. Religion is based in assumptions, whether you are for or against beliefs. These do not belong in politics. If politics focus only on knowable benefits, it will provide knowable benefits. The religious sphere, on the other hand, can on its own work to provide assumed benefits for those who accept the assumptions.
Come, now. It’s not I saying polarizing the entire world between a real-life secular worldview and an all-encompassing view that includes everything including Santa Claus. You’re the one who keeps saying those are the only two options. I’ve never said such a thing at all.
With regard to the scientific method, there’s some more assumptions besides just “logic” that are entered. We also assume, at the very least, the basic truthfulness of our memories, the validity of our sensory experiences, the honesty of people who passed down truth to us, the orderliness of the universe, the capacity of our minds to handle logic accurately, the unchanging nature of the laws of the universe, and the reliability of past data for predicting the future. These are all a priori also.
As to religious truths not being knowable, that’s where we disagree. You apply what appears to me to be a simple across-the-board exclusionary rule with regard to all things religious. For many people, the assumptions of basic truthfulness of memories, the validity of experiences, the honesty of people who passed down truth, the orderliness of the universe, the capacity of our minds to handle logic accurately, the unchanging nature of the laws of the universe, and the reliability of past data for predicting the future all point to and arise from the truth of a creator. And this creator, for these billions of people, is not only knowable but gives orders which must be followed.
If you really want to, you can apply your exclusionary rule and decide that what all these people are saying and thinking is invalid. After all, truth doesn’t lie in numbers. But if you apply an exclusionary rule to the discussion of any topic and the formation of policies, you’ve effectively cut off the possibility of real political conversation with the vast majority of humankind. You’ve thrown a party and invited the 12% of the US which is thoroughly non-religious to it. Perhaps there will be fun conversations at such a party, but while such conversations could be very relevant to the running of a dictatorship run by that 12%, they will be utterly impossible for that limited conversation to set the agenda for the country. I think you implicitly recognized this when you reached out and invoked the opinions of Jesus with regard to modern politics.
If the politics in a democracy are crafted around the belief system of 12% of a country, that democracy is simply going to be unworkable. You haven’t given David an answer, other than your sincere hope that he won’t actually act on his crazy religious beliefs. You can’t effectively have any conversation with David because you start with the presumption that his beliefs are invalid and he should act accordingly. It simply can’t work for a democracy. And the constant back-and-forth politically, the venom that characterizes our national politics, and the financial breakdown that we are currently in as a result of throwing money at everyone to keep them happy are, as I see it, Exhibit A for demonstrating this.
PS: In those things you said there was one sentence I didn’t address but should have.
From what I understand, you agree with me that in pure theory a secular schooling system is not inherently anti-religious.
Not quite. All theory has reference in some way to the real world, or it is simply meaningless abstraction. I believe that public schooling is not and can never be, under any circumstances, religiously neutral. Period. Any theory in which public schooling is religiously neutral is only able to maintain that claim by completely disconnecting from the real world and retreating into meaningless abstraction, or shifting definitions around. For that reason, I don’t see religious inequalities as a bug in a public schooling system, I see them as a feature. While the details and direction of these religious inequalities may change, they do not go away. For example, public schooling as it first emerged in the United States was effectively pro-Protestant and anti-Catholic (not that I support those policies), while today it is effectively pro-humanist and anti-theistic.
At least, that’s how I see it.
I think you’ve been misunderstanding what I’m arguing about for knowledge. I’m effectively trying to distinguish between knowable facts and non-knowable ideas (as I outlined in my previous post). The reason I said that you are polarizing to absurdity is that you aren’t acknowledging possibilities for a concrete definition of knowledge. I’m not sure why this has been an issue, since the doctrine of faith agrees with what I’m saying. Anyways, here’s an outline again:
Knowable facts (that can be deduced to valid, a priori knowledge): mathematical truths, scientific fact, sensory data, etc.
^These can only be denied through some form of skepticism, such as the demon scenario or a focus on hallucinations.
Unknowable facts (that cannot yet be deduced to valid, a priori knowledge): religious beliefs, future beliefs, hypotheses, etc.
^If you group these with knowable facts, then you are equating a belief in Santa Claus with mathematical knowledge.
So a question you could ask would be: what processes (such as logic, scientific method, religious beliefs, etc.) reliably result in knowable facts? Logic does almost by definition. You can’t logically prove a false fact. The scientific method is generally reliable in providing knowable knowledge.
Are religious beliefs a reliable method in providing knowable knowledge? This is logically impossible as religious beliefs directly conflict with each other. If Bill’s Catholic beliefs are a reliable route, then we can accept his belief in the divinity of Jesus as knowable knowledge. If Ahkmed’s Islamic beliefs are a reliable route, then we can accept his belief in the non-divinity of Jesus as knowable knowledge. The problem is obvious: these “knowable” facts directly conflict with one another.
I’m not asking you to admit anything that’s too difficult about religious beliefs. There’s a clear difference between what one person believes is true, and what that person knows to be true. The doctrine of faith makes this same distinction, you can know that the world exists but you still need faith that God exists.
My “exclusionary rule” applies to anything that cannot be knowable. Religious beliefs, as they are not a reliable method to knowable knowledge, are not knowable. They are faith-based assumptions, that many will not agree with. You can make the weak argument that the universe points to a creator, but that argument has nothing to do with any form of religion or specific religious laws. A person can think this argument valid, and still maintain that this god has no demands for humanity whatsoever.
So here’s where the political debate is left: exclude your own beliefs that others do not share (religious beliefs) and focus on what you and other people share (the belief that we should value the lives of others). I don’t know how to make this argument any clearer. Separating religious beliefs from politics does not exclude the religious so long as the religious still believe that we should value the lives of others.
Once again, secular politics do not work toward the interests of the 12%, they work toward the 99% that believe that other people’s lives should be valued. What you are arguing is that the beliefs and/or interests of the 55% Catholic, or a % of any particular religion, can be justly imposed on the rest. That is simply wrong. If you acknowledge that the 99%, religious and non-religious, all want to value others, than you cannot claim that policies based on valuing others is only in the interests of the 12%.
(A note: the key here is my argument that only knowable facts and accepted assumptions can be justly imposed on people. If 100% of the population was Catholic, then any laws that used the Catholic assumptions would be justified. However, that is not the case. Since the population is religiously diverse, you can’t justly impose any Catholic assumptions. The only assumption I am making is the one that we should benefit others, and that I believe would be accepted by a 99% majority. The benefits would have to be knowable, or undeniable, and cannot be for assumed benefits that people do not accept (like the assumption of an eternal soul).
Here’s my answer to David: understand the difference between what we, as a society, know, and what you believe. You cannot impose your beliefs on those who do not share them, but you can agree on what we can logically know. This isn’t saying that his beliefs are invalid, it’s saying that his beliefs are unproven.
Side note: the back and forth politics and political venom are a result of our two-party, voting system. Our response of money-throwing, or large unsubsidized tax cuts, are primarily the result of a knee-jerk voting majority that cannot bear to wait for continual growth.
An easy counterexample to your schooling view: imagine that the public schooling system existed in a religious country, whether Islamic or Christian. Non-religious people would have to pay extra for private schooling to avoid religious indoctrination in the public schools. In this case, the public schooling system discriminates against the non-religious. That’s why, in theory, public schooling is neutral.
Whatever this doctrine of faith is that claims religious truths are unknowable, I’ve certainly never heard a Christian preach it. Plenty of secular folks, though.
This idea that only secular beliefs are actionable knowledge, while religious ideas are not actionable knowledge, is where we differ. And every religious person whose religion is more than simply a security blanket agrees with me there, whether they could verbalize it or not. Those who have meaningful religious belief not only believe what they believe, but believe they know it well enough to organize their spheres of influence accordingly.
I, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, believe that the fear of God is the starting-point for true knowledge, and that knowledge is built step by step from there — from personal experience, community tradition, observation of the world, and scripture. Now, I’m certain you will declare that to be an intolerably fuzzy definition, or perhaps not a definition at all. Yet you yourself admit that all the secular philosophers in the world have yet to come up with an unfuzzy definition of knowledge. Somehow, you have decided that your rough outline is a valid way to find knowledge, and that nothing else can be.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to start with, have held that ethics are handed down by God, not constructed according to human notions of consequences. In the theistic traditions, it is independent human feelings and thoughts which are disqualified.
To ask people to adopt a standard of knowledge along the lines you propose is to call for the reversal of thousands of years of religious ethics. To adopt such a standard of knowledge is to say that historical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are wrong. And if that’s the sort of statement you want underlying your political theory, feel free. But if that’s what you want to do, realize that you are declaring the invalidity of religion and seeking a politics constructed on that base. Treat the religious as your political enemies, but do not expect them to work with you.
You say that logic leads to knowable facts. But that’s simply not true. Logic is like a ladder. It leads you up from a starting point of some kind up to something else. Logic by itself, without truths of some kind to build upon, is just about useless. Similarly, the scientific method you so love to bring up works well for what it does, but it is powerless when it comes to things like measuring aggregate fulfillment or economic analysis.
Despite the categorization you just set up, in which you put “future beliefs” in the unknowable category, it is strange to note that you have based every political opinion we’ve brought up so far on your beliefs about what will happen in the future if a given policy is pursued or not, with a heavy dose of your gut feelings about the situations involved. You proclaim an objectively grounded approach to politics, but when the rubber meets the road you fall back on sorts of “knowing” which you try to disqualify when they are practiced by the religious. Again, it’s an anti-religious foundation that you’re building your politics on.
When it comes to the common ground you think exists between yourself and the religious, you’re quickly looking back and forth between two different things. When you talk about the common ground of “trying to help others” all is well and good. But when you outline your supposed common ground in four points, you add the condition of “knowability”, pulling out the rug of common ground from under the feet of anyone who does not buy into your secular notions of what is known and what is not known.
With regard to David, at the end of the day you’re still asking David to grow up, abandon fairy tales, and to act in contradiction to his beliefs. You want him to recognize the frailty of his religious notions and set them aside. His case is yet another illustration of the impossibility of religious neutrality.
Your counter-example does not demonstrate that public schools are religiously neutral. All it demonstrates is what I’ve been saying all along: that public schooling is not religiously neutral because it always and everywhere imposes the values of the politically dominant upon the politically powerless. Whether it advances secularism, Protestant Christianity, Catholic Christianity, or Islam, public schooling is not a religiously neutral process.
You misinterpreted what I meant about faith. Most religious people would say they “know” to some extent that their beliefs are true, but most still acknowledge that faith requires more than a simple acknowledgement of fact. Faith is a “virtue” shown by one who has passed on the need for physical evidence to believe in the truth of something, I believe the quote is “evidence in things not seen”. I’m not saying that religious people think that their faith is a fairy-tale, but anyone with intellectual honesty would admit that it is easier/more valid to know a mathematical truth than to stick with faith. And the difficulty of faith is often seen as a necessary test of believers.
“And every religious person whose religion is more than simply a security blanket agrees with me there”
Right there is the flaw with all religion. Every single belief system states “we are right, we have the truth”. And these thousands of different belief systems contradict each other, so at best one of the thousands of systems actually has the full truth. How logical is it to validate the “we have the truth” philosophy when at best one could be true?
Once again you’re distorting the concept of knowledge. I don’t need a concise definition in order to understand what knowledge is. I’ll compare knowledge to porn; in that even without a clear definition, I can understand what is real knowledge and porn, and what is not, just by seeing it. You don’t lay it out clearly, but effectively you are making the argument that without a clear definition of knowledge, I cannot rule out any beliefs/ideas unknowable (which would validate the belief in Santa Claus as knowledge). From this, you are arguing that I cannot judge religious beliefs as non-knowledge (also false, as most religious beliefs have to be false simply by contradiction).
Logic is like a ladder, but when used correctly, does lead from knowledge to more correct knowledge. So what do you propose is correct knowledge? I would start with mathematics, and laws of physics that have already been proven. Additionally, sensory data is mostly reliable. However, at no point can you start with correct knowledge and logically lead to any religion. That is why religious beliefs are unknowable, you simply can’t use logic/any reliable method to start with knowledge and end up with religion. If you think you can, I would like to see your argument. If not, my point stands.
A key here is that there are more sides than just right knowledge and wrong knowledge. Right knowledge is math, correct physics, etc. These are the things that we can justly use without public opinion because they are knowable, if 60% of the population believed 1+1=3 we would still be justified in teaching everyone that 1+1=2. Wrong knowledge is something like “the earth is flat”, “gravity is an illusion”, etc. These are provably false. Religion, on the other hand, is in the middle category: unproven either way. No religion has been proven false completely, but no religion has been proven true. Certain religious ideas have been proven false: Mt. Olympus gods, source of lightning, age of the universe, etc. Certain haven’t: the existence of God, the deity of Jesus, etc. I am not asking religious people to think their beliefs are wrong, but to admit that their beliefs are in the middle category: not correctly proven.
Now look at my secularism again: knowledge can be justly implemented, and unproven ideas can only be justly implemented when almost everyone accepts the assumption (like we should help others). No where do I call people to admit their beliefs are false. But what I am calling people to do is to be able to distinguish between proven knowledge and unproven ideas, as well as distinguish them from proven false ideas.
Future beliefs are unknowable, in the sense that I cannot logically prove that things in the future will necessarily happen. What we were debating was what was most likely to happen, and given that, is the whole a negative or positive. Here’s a condensed education debate with definitions:
1. If Public schooling is abolished, schools will be privately funded (knowable by definition).
2. If all schools are privately funded, people will have to pay out of pocket for their kids education (knowable by definition).
3. If people have to pay out of pocket, some people won’t send their kids to school due to them not being able to afford school (not completely knowable, but incredibly probably due to basic knowledge that: some people have no extra income [or at all], and some people cut costs when they can)
4. Schooling has value (based on two assumptions: 1-Kids who go to school generally have higher quality of lives, and 2-We should care about other peoples’ lives)
5. If public schooling is abolished, then some kids will lose out on the value of schooling (logical following from premises 1-4)
I don’t think there’s much room left to debate in education, but it shows what I mean by assumptions vs. knowable knowledge.
So here’s my argument: To refute my secular view of politics as unfair, you have these options:
1. Dismiss my assumption that we should care about others.
2. Dismiss my ideas about knowable facts.
– To do #2, you have to either:
a. Claim that there is no knowledge (skepticism)
b. Claim that there is no reliable method of distinguishing knowledge from ideas (equating math with Santa)
3. Dismiss that policies have to be based in knowable facts and/or unproven knowledge that everyone accepts.
– To do #3, you have these options:
a. Justify any and all policies, regardless of what they are based in.
b. Justify policies that are based in unproven knowledge that you are okay with, but dismiss policies that are based in unproven knowledge you aren’t okay with (which is arbitrary, but also demands others to do something you are not willing to do yourself, in that they must be okay with your unproven knowledge but you can’t be okay with their unproven knowledge)
c. Justly any and all policies that are based in unproven knowledge (resulting in religious contradictions).
d. No policies are justifiable.
4. Dismiss my idea that religious beliefs are not proven knowledge (so you accept my distinctions between knowledge and unproven ideas and false ideas, but claim that religious beliefs are proven)
- To do #4, you have to either:
a. Prove your religious beliefs.
b. Claim that all religious beliefs are proven (and ignore the contradictions somehow)
I’ve done my best to include every conceivable option. And if you are unable to do 1,2,3, or 4, then my secularism is the correct, religiously neutral option. Here’s why:
1. We should care about others.
2. There are certain things we can know to be true.
3. Policies have to be based in knowable facts and assumptions that everyone accepts.
4. Religious beliefs are not knowable facts, and they are not assumptions that everyone accepts.
Therefore,
Policies can not be justly based in religious beliefs, but can be based in real knowledge and assumption #1.
Here’s my response to David: either you need to separate religious beliefs from proven knowledge, or you have to accept a society that imposes completely polar religious ideals into law, depending on the beliefs of whoever is in power.
The debate about public schooling is kinda tied into the above, so I’ll keep it short. If you cannot prove that secularism in the above isn’t religiously neutral, then secularism in schooling isn’t either. Also, key thing you seem to be assuming is that not teaching a certain set of beliefs is “against” that religion. So, if schooling teaches absolutely nothing about religion, it is against religion. That’s where the whole distinction between secularism and atheism lies. A school that teaches atheism is anti-religion because it teaches that religions are false. A school that is secular simply avoids the subject. That is as religiously neutral as a system could be.
You assert that knowledge is like porn, in that you can recognize it yourself upon sight, without a need for any justifications to back up the distinction-making process. The nature of knowledge, we might say, is self-evident or self-attesting, in that it shows itself for what it is in and of itself without the need to previously impose a framework of interpretation.
You have claimed that a number of things are self-attesting in this sense, making them sure foundations on which to build thought, and therefore action. Among these self-attesting truths you hold to be self evident are the laws of science, the scientific methods, certain basic scientific facts and laws, the unkowability of religious truth, the reliability of your own experience, the coherence of your thoughts, the existence of other people, the obligation to care about the welfare of these other people, the validity of the laws of logic, and so on. None of these things can you prove, yet each of them both you and I will fall back on implicitly. We cannot argue for their truth, nor do we care enough to try.
Fine. But once you allow self-attestation to be a criterion for judgment, you must realize the massive hole this opens up, do you not?
Different people see different things as self-attesting. Indeed, a great number of Christian believers, including myself, hold that the biblical revelation is self-attesting. For us, the self-attesting nature of the biblical revelation of God is enough basis for us to pattern our lives and actions, including those actions that affect others, after it. And so the question is this: on what basis can you ask us to accept your set of self-attesting truths instead of our own?
Every time you try to condemn the idea of religious knowledge while trying to hold onto an unbiased valid-across-the-board basis for knowledge and ethical action, you impose at least one double standard. You admit what you see as self-attesting truth into the arena, but insist that our alleged self-attesting truths are disqualified from the get-go. We cannot enter the contest with you unless we enter on terms which guarantee your triumph. It’s hardly neutral, and no God-fearer should be willing to play allow unless he’s too dull-witted to realize he’s being led off to an intellectual slaughter.
So far as I can see, you cannot back up your contentions as to what you think is self-attesting. I admit that I cannot back up mine. I hold that this is an irresolvable impasse between the believer and the non-believer, and that this divergence will have consequences for the political policies we attempt to impose on each other. I am betting the farm, so to speak, on the correctness of my beliefs by making them the basis of my life. You, however, seem to want to hedge your bets, by creating for yourself a ethical standard for political action which will hold true even if you’re wrong about God. But so far no basis for such a neutral ground has appeared. And if it fails to appear, then you’ll be stuck with a worldview with starts with nothing more than a collection of things you happen to feel are true — in effect declaring that you are unwilling to have religious discussion and demand that your detractors simply accept your point of view because you say so. Which is funny, because that’s what you accuse religion of doing.
What do I propose is correct knowledge?
I propose that the bottom presupposition underlying all things is the reality of the God described in Scripture, and that all things must flow from that fount. That may sound bizarre, but that’s what I was raised to think, and I’ve yet to see any other basis for knowledge and ethics that doesn’t descend into utter incomprehensible gobbledygook. And until a coherent alternative arrives, I’m not going to ditch the philosophy I’ve got.
You missed the point entirely. I do not have any self-attesting truths that you are denying. If I do, please point them out. Here’s what I believe is knowable:
1. We should value others.
2. Certain scientific laws.
3. The reliability of sensory data.
As far as I can tell, you are not denying any of these. I am not asserting any “truths” that I believe, such as the non-existence of God. I am standing in the middle saying “neither side has been conclusively proven”. You are unfairly brushing over the concept of knowledge, the difference between scientific truth and religious belief isn’t a difficult concept. No one rationally denies scientific truth, it is there and we can prove it.
Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are not knowable no matter how much a person believes it is. Certain beliefs may end up being right, and everyone who holds them believes theirs to be the one that is correct. However, even with zero knowledge of a deity, we can rule out all but one religious system as false simply by the contradictions they have with each other. You cannot claim that religious beliefs are knowable when the vast majority, if not all, religious believers are provably holding false beliefs. I am not asserting anything here, the contradictions do it for me.
“None of these things can you prove”
That is where you are completely wrong. We can prove logic, science, etc. They are self-proving in a way, after all you can’t use irrationality to defend logic. But the reason it is proved is that it has proven results. I can know 1+1=2 without any doubt by concept, as well as know it because whenever I add 1 apple to another apple, I have 2 apples.
We’ve been going back and forth on this debate without getting anywhere, and I feel it’s mainly because you are brushing over the argument and making the connection between no concrete definition of knowledge -> knowledge is subjective. That is simply not true. Me believing that the earth is flat does not mean others cannot know the earth is roughly spherical.
So here would be my argument to you, to move this along: if you can classify your beliefs as knowledge, can Muslims classify their beliefs as knowledge? What about Scientology? If so, how do you reconcile the fact that Scientology directs contradicts your beliefs?
I also want to bring up a past quote from you:
“When I choose world D — and I would love to choose A if only it were more than a mirage — I do realize that a Muslim will act on his Islam, that a Hindu will act on his Hinduism, and that you will act on your unbelief. Acknowledging that every belief system will work to impose itself on society is very different from saying that every belief system is equally valid.”
This is where my biggest issue with your argument likely lies. You are claiming that your beliefs are more valid because you believe it to be true. What basis do you have for this, other than your beliefs (as your beliefs cannot make a system more valid anymore than a Scientologist’s beliefs make his/her system more valid)?
Further, I would like if you responded to the 4 point argument I made in my last post, it’s the clearest I can make my argument.
Another note: if I were to accept your argument that secularism is anti-religion (which I don’t), what proposed solution would you have to the competing religions in politics? Is it the religious majority who should make policies, regardless of what religion it is?
Lastly, I would guess that the main reason you are not accepting my argument is that you see the absence of religion as anti-religious, which has been our main secularism argument so far. I’ve already made the distinction between atheism and secularism (anti-religious vs. religiously neutral). If you try to group the two together, and claim that the absence of religion is anti-religious, what do you think is the middle ground between pro-religion and anti-religion? Thinking that there is no middle ground is a pretty black and white philosophy, but I believe that is what you are arguing. I guess the reason this debate is going on so long without much recent progress is that I don’t understand how exactly you make the jump from “religion is separate from politics” to “politics are anti-religious”.
The last thing I want to be doing is unfairly brushing over the concept of knowledge. Regardless of whether you prefer the label “self-attesting,” “self-proving,” “knowable,” or what have you, you do treat some things as simply true, period. And so do I. And we both have a different set of things we treat that way.
Your list of three things is incomplete, because you leave each of those three undefined in scope. To actually solve any real-world problem, you will have to use other criteria as well as those three. And, like any secularist, you will be forced to sneak those assumptions in through the back door, as it were, in order to keep your list from growing too large and unmanageable. Because if the full list were to be revealed, it’s chaotic and arbitrary nature would unmask the real underlying presupposition of all forms of humanists thought: I, autonomous man, am the ultimate judge and am not accountable to anyone or anything outside myself for what I think.
Just for sport, here’s an example of another one of your assumptions: the democratic nature of truth. It’s come up quite a few times that you think truth is found in numbers. The latest example is this: You cannot claim that religious beliefs are knowable when the vast majority, if not all, religious believers are provably holding false beliefs. What you are saying here is that I may not say things unless they are accepted by a wide enough audience. If we are to follow this assumption to its final conclusion, you will have to admit that some things are knowable in an Amish community or in medieval Spain which are not knowable in today’s US. What is knowable, then, changes from time to time and place to placed depending on the spirit of the age.
This is a serious issue. Whenever a humanist seeks to demonstrate the validity of his views, he has to constantly fall back on ad hoc constructions. These ad hoc constructions, such as the democratic nature of truth, will be used inconsistently, because if they were taken to their ultimate conclusion they destroy all knowledge. The humanist sets up a way of knowing that is ultimately, if taken seriously, a sort of intellectual nihilism which implodes under the weight of its own logical conclusions. The fact that the typical humanist never makes it to full on nihilism is in spite of his humanism, not because of it.
The truth of the matter is that the humanist is essentially leaning on his own rightness as the ultimate principle, his own rightness and nothing more. The theist, on the other hand, looks to another as the ultimate judge. That’s the primary difference.
Let me assure you that I’m not trying to brush over anything. But I’ve got no idea what you mean by saying that making the connection between no concrete definition of knowledge -> knowledge is subjective. I will confess that bit sounds incoherent to me, but I’ll try to respond to the parts of what you’re saying that I can make sense of.
I do not think that the Muslim has true knowledge regarding all of his religious system. My problem with Islam is that it relies on the truth of the biblical revelation, and then teaches things wildly at odds with the biblical worldview. It only continues to survive on fundamental inconsistencies. Looked at too carefully, Islam collapses upon itself — it is an unworkable combination of humanism and theism mixed together into utter inconsistency.
Scientology, on the other hand, is just a particularly bizarre form of humanism. As L. Rob Hubbard once said, For a Scientologist, the final test of any knowledge he has gained is, ‘did the data and the use of it in life actually improve conditions or didn’t it? In the words of its founder, then, truth is really completely irrelevant, and all that matters is pragmatics. The practitioner is the ultimate source of and judge of knowledge. Finding what works for you is the stated aim of the whole religion. The thetans and eons and dynamics are simply some odd garnishes. The dish itself is plain old humanism, which I reject for the same reason I reject the more commonly seen flavors of humanism.
I thought I had responded to your four-point argument, but I’ll try to be more clear. I dismiss your ideas about knowledge. I do not pick (a) or (b), because I am neither a thoroughgoing skeptic nor an accepter of all ideas. I pick an option you did not list: believing that the biblical God is the only starting point for knowledge, because all other systems of knowledge self-destruct when their presuppositions are taken to their logical conclusions.
Again, I’m not trying to make you believe what I believe. What I believe probably sounds absurd. All I am trying to do is point out the distance between us.
I do believe that there is no consistent middle ground between an all-embracing theism and fully autonomous humanism. Many people, of course, do inhabit a sort of “middle ground”, but that middle ground only exists due to the inconsistency of these people as they vacillate between the two eternally opposed systems. If one did want a middle ground, one could, I suppose, randomly give the humanists 50% of their demands and give the theists 50% of their demands, or randomly believe half humanistic things and half theistic things. But any such middle ground, either in practice or in theory, will be arbitrary and artificial — perhaps useful pragmatically for a temporary solution to some difficulty, but not sustainable long term. In the end one side or another wins.
Sorry for the late response, I’ve had a pretty busy week. Anyway:
The list of three types of knowledge is incomplete, and I left it that way because I wasn’t trying to go over every route imaginable. The first one shouldn’t have been labeled as knowable, rather it is an assumption that people who are governed accept as a value the government should promote.
#2 and #3 are knowable, and they are just examples. The existence of gravity, in some form or another, is knowable. The fact that I can see this laptop is knowable. These are meant as examples, not a complete list of all knowable facts.
What assumptions do I need to push my ideas forth? I believe we need healthcare because people who have healthcare are healthier than those who don’t (rough generalization for simplicity). My assumption is that we should care about the health of others. My knowledge is the fact that doctors can help people get healthier. I don’t need any “secularist” assumptions to make that point.
So, my rebuttal would be: what assumptions am I making that aren’t knowable? If I am, then my ideas would be equally unjust as laws based in religious faith. I am not denying this. however, I am not making any other assumptions. I do not need to assume “no God” to argue that healthcare helps people. That is the point of my argument, and why secularism is religiously neutral: it does not work on or require assumptions about God in either way. If you think I’m wrong, please lay out any assumptions you believe I’m making on any position that I hold about law, and explain how that assumption is necessary for me to argue that position.
A side note about your quote: ” I, autonomous man, am the ultimate judge and am not accountable to anyone or anything outside myself for what I think.”
This is true in a way, we all control our own thoughts and are responsible for our own thoughts. What I think you’re trying to say however is a form of moral skepticism, or that if God does not hold us accountable for our actions then morality doesn’t exist (correct me if I misunderstood you). Without getting too deep into this argument (since it would last a long time), I’ll simply point out how I, and many ethicists do not require a deity for morality. morality is a societal/group concept, and people are held accountable to each other for their actions. The exact route to morality/the truths of morality are up for debate, and that’s what I’ll hopefully be studying/arguing about for some time.
About the democratic truth: I completely disagree with that idea, and I did not make that argument. The point of religious beliefs clashing was to show the flaw between the logical connection between religious beliefs and truth. Basically, you cannot claim that because you believe in a religion, it is knowable. In logic form, using R to stand for religious beliefs and K to stand for knowledge, I’m saying that you cannot use the argument since R then K. This is because there are provable cases where R leads to not K (this is proven by the clash of religious beliefs, the “majority” point was that the clash logically necessitates most R’s to lead to not K’s). This is basically my “reliable route to knowledge” argument used in some previous posts. (Side note: the democratic truth argument is flawed, and is ironically used to justify religious beliefs far more often, such as “how could so many people be wrong about their beliefs?”. It would be really sad if I was using that same logic).
So after getting rid of the idea that I used that type of argument, how do you come to conclude the connection between humanism and nihilism? Intellectual nihilism is an illogical conclusion, I’ve been directly arguing for several types of knowable facts that disprove intellectual nihilism.
“The truth of the matter is that the humanist is essentially leaning on his own rightness as the ultimate principle, his own rightness and nothing more”
I think you have a very flawed view of humanism. It isn’t a philosophy that is arbitrarily based in people’s ideas. It is, to the extent I understand it, a focus on the knowable values of humanity, like life, happiness, health, etc. As a society, we can know that these values are good, and this knowledge isn’t dependent on the opinions of every individual.
Another issue: this flaw you seem to think humanism has is much more rampant in theism. On the humanistic side, you have to argue why something is good or bad for humanity based on provable values/facts. On the theistic side, knowledge is subjective to your own interpretation of scripture. If you argue that “God believes this” because it’s how you interpret scripture, then you don’t need any provable values. This arbitrary interpretation is what leads to the comical amount of denominations within each religion.
A concrete definition is one that will correctly define an idea as knowledge or not knowledge in every scenario. I’m saying that this definition is not required to know that certain ideas are knowledge and certain are not, especially because there are grey areas in knowledge.
I agree with your ideas of Islam and Scientology, I do find them both unacceptably flawed. As you probably already know, I feel the same way about Christianity, but I do not want to yet get into the contradictions in the bible. That would take too much time and isn’t necessary to move on with our debate.
Here’s the issue with your idea of knowledge: you have no basis of “proof” besides your own beliefs. I don’t have to disprove them to point out that beliefs are not reliable in predicting knowledge (as pointed out in the earlier paragraphs). So instead, I would ask: what happens when Biblical stories clash with scientific data? Which is “knowable”? An example:
The Bible describes the creation story as happening in six days (whether literal or, if you want to bend meaning a bit, metaphorical). Animals were not evolved, they were created as is. Further, if you take the age of Adam and count down to Jesus (through the lineage provided by the NT books), you can calculate the Earth to be only thousands of years old.
But then scientific discovery points these out:
1. The earth is billions of years old and took billions of years to develop to its current state.
2. Human ancestry can be traced back much farther than 6000 or so years, and modern humans probably can trace their anatomy to the evolution of our species 200,000 years ago.
3. Animals evolved through micro and macro evolution from simple celled organisms.
So, what do you believe? On a purely Biblical basis, the three scientific points are false. If you believe in any of the three, you are using a different route to knowledge than just biblical scripture. And honestly, i don’t believe that you would deny any of the three scientific points.
Lastly, I’m not asking for a middle ground between humanism and theism. That system would implode on itself. Instead, I’m saying that humanism is a middle ground between atheism and theism, where religious assumptions are not made in either way to make law. To support this, I refer to my earlier challenge: what humanistic law requires an anti-religious assumption, what is the assumption, and how is it necessary?
You are right in saying that healthcare, in general, makes people healthier. We can even agree on that despite our religious differences. It could, at first glance, seem that this is the basis for some neutral common ground. But where we disagree isn’t over whether people should have healthcare. We disagree over whether it is okay for the government to use its monopoly of force to take away money from some people and give it to other people in the form of healthcare. And that difference does rest on the difference between our religious outlooks.
You believe that the concept of ownership is a useful legal fiction. In your world, you would probably generally allow people to keep property in their own names, to exchange that property more or less freely, etc. But you do not believe that, really and truly, people own stuff in a deep moral sense. Their ownership, in your world, is a limited construct which can be taken away in service of the greater good. In a sense, anyone who owns something is holding it in trust for society as a whole. If I get to keep my car, it is because in a Rawlsian lottery people would be happier entering a world in which I got to keep me car. If my car is taken away for healthcare of others, it is because in a Rawlsian lottery people would be happier entering a world in which I got to keep a car. The real core value is the Rawlsian lottery, not in property of any other right that people might claim. Property is just a convenient means to the lottery, only to be used when it would help make the lottery better, and taken away when it does not. Similarly, all other rights must bow before the Rawlsian lottery and give way when called to.
I, on the other hand, believe that ownership is not just a handy construct, but inherent in the nature of the universe, because God holds ultimate property title. Who owns what, then, is derivative, based on whatever principles he decides for the handling of property. That is, while you believe “This is my land” is a legal shortcut to a better Rawlsian lottery and nothing more, I believe that “This is my land” is a truth-claim that is either actually true or actually false based not on social utility but who has legitimate, real ownership of it. I believe that the right to property is decreed by God, and that he will enact negative sanctions upon a nation that disregards his command. And among these negative sanctions, according to my understanding, are debt, increases in poverty, and social unrest.
Now, put yourself in my shoes for a moment. Believe, just for the sake of the argument, that such a God exists, and that he has commanded these things. If you actually believed in this God, and, for whatever reason, felt confident in his existence and right to say these things, you could not vote for healthcare without violating this God’s moral law. Furthermore, in helping to defeat healthcare, you would believe that you are helping to hold back judgment in the form of increasing debt, increasing poverty, and social unrest. If this were the case, you could not look at government-run healthcare and say it was religiously neutral.
So, while you do not need to argue that there is no God to pass healthcare, you do need to believe that my God as I describe him doesn’t exist. And, for me to go along with you and accept your way of doing politics, I also would have to believe that my God and his promised consequences for disobedience did not exist. Your political theory demands that I and all those like me act against our own consciences. And this is why I say neutrality is impossible.
What I think you’re trying to say however is a form of moral skepticism, or that if God does not hold us accountable for our actions then morality doesn’t exist (correct me if I misunderstood you). I haven’t been trying to say either. I’ve merely been trying to say that the morality you construct and the morality I try to follow are mutually incompatible. That’s all. But since you’ve given me the opportunity, I’ll come right out and say what I think: real, objectively binding moral law cannot exist without God.
As to the idea of democratic truth, you’ve never explicitly made that argument, but you’ve implicitly leaned on it a number of times. You still are, really. You’ve said that lack of consensus about religion makes religion an invalid basis for political action. Oddly enough, you do not apply the same rigorous standards to your own views. If I wanted, I could turn the game around entirely and say that because secular systems of ethics so often disagree with each other about morality, secular ways of looking at morality are not a valid basis for political action. You’ve set up a double standard that rules out religion from the get-go. The game is rigged.
The reason I believe that intellectual nihilism is the ultimate logical consequence of humanistic thought is that, as you’ve repeatedly demonstrated, the humanist can know nothing except on the basis of simply declaring it knowable. The humanist is forced to conclude, if he is honest and rigorously logical, “I know so because I know so.” This way of looking at reality, when pushed to its logical conclusion, means that no two people have any real basis for communicating truths of any kind. They either both happen to “know” the same things or they don’t. This destroys the basis for any real knowledge about anything.
I figured that sooner or later you wouldn’t be able to resist going into biblical specifics. So I’ll start with your first concern. What do I do if the Bible and scientific findings are at odds with one another? First, I try to see whether the two are genuinely at odds with each other. If scientists genuinely are at odds with the Bible, I will go with the Bible any day. Everyone, Christian or not, must deal with the fact that some of the various sources we go to for truth contradict one another. Such contradictions are inevitable. And when they come up, we must go to the more certain source of knowledge. For a Christian, that means God trumps human understanding every time.
But, specifically, you ask about the creation in six days. If I was convinced that it was the position of the Bible that the world was created from nothing approximately six thousand years ago over the course of six literal days, then I would abandon anything any scientist said to the contrary and believe the biblical position. However, there is much within the creation stories themselves (both the story in Genesis 1:1-2:3 and the alternate story in the rest of chapter 2) to indicate that whoever put Genesis into its final form did not intend its opening chapters to be read exactly as straightforward history. I can walk you through those reasons if you like, but the short story is that they depend on (1) a knowledge of the differences between ancient and modern “historical” writing, (2) the glaring differences between Genesis 1:1-2:3 and Genesis 2:4-etc., (3) the treatment of numbers in an ancient Hebrew context, (4) a few interesting things said in Genesis 2-etc., and (5) parallel literature among the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians. I’m studying primarily biblical Hebrew here at college, and so this is exactly the sort of stuff I’ve had to spend a great deal of time on. I don’t think it’s immediately safe to say that “On a purely Biblical basis, the three scientific points are false.”
And so there is some ambiguity in the creation stories. What to do? I propose that we let each group educate its own children in its own particular view and leave it at that. You, on the other hand, propose that no one be allowed to opt out of the current evolutionary teaching method until they first subsidize it for others. That, to me, is the religiously non-neutral option. That is a soft way of imposing your views upon people who disagree, and it is on issues like that where modern leftism shows its ugly face and drops any claims of being tolerant and equally respecting all views.
Lastly, you are indeed asking for a middle ground between humanism and theism, in that you seek to construct a method of approaching politics that will be workable for both humanists and theists. And so far, every exposition you’ve made of that sort of system relies on the religious people giving up and acting against their own beliefs. That’s no middle ground. The real problem with your way of looking at what you call “religious neutrality” is this: every affirmation of anything is a denial of its antithesis. So, for example, by the very act of demanding a politic based on knowledge gained without any reference to God, you are acting on the assumption that God has nothing useful to say about politics, if he exists at all. Even without ever denying the relevance of God in so many worlds, humanism announces that he is dead by saying that all major decisions are to be made without consulting him. He may be treated as a comfort object, but certainly not as ruler of the universe. The fact that this is not said directly changes nothing.
A system of atheist law would be based on the assumption of the non-existence of God. A system of theistic law would be based on the assumption of the existence and relevance of God. A system of humanistic law would functionally be identical to a system of atheistic law, because it holds that God, if he does exist, is simply irrelevant. And to call that religious neutrality is to fall back on technicalities and ignore the reality of the situation. If you want specific laws in which humanism shows itself non-neutral, we’ve already discussed public education as an extra tax on the religious and tax-bribes for the church keeping its political mouth shut.
Your view of property rights is overly-simplified. What does God say when land is unclaimed, and two different people both want it? What happens when someone makes a bad deal because he was given false information? And so forth.
Here’s where property rights become dependent on the state: what happens when your property is stolen? You can claim that God gave you the right to that car since you paid for it with your money, but what will that do? To get your car back, you either have to steal it back or have the state enforce property laws to get it back for you. So how do you get the state to enforce property laws? You have to pay public officials like politicians, police, and if things get drastic the FBI and such. Where does this money come from? Should only you have to pay for the car back, or should others be “forced” to communally pay for the cops so you can get your car back?
Your take on my views is somewhat accurate, though the only real note I’d make is that the “Rawlsian lottery” focuses on which rights people have, not on individual situations. Other than that, I think you’ve correctly understood our differences on this and I doubt either of us will budge here.
For a bit, I will assume that the Biblical God exists. Even so, this faith does not lead us all to the same conclusions that you are claiming. It takes a certain angle or interpretation to come to the beliefs you have, and here’s a few verses with proof:
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
- Matthew 7: 1-2
“If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?”
- 1 John 3:17
“Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker,
but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.”
- Proverbs 13:31
“Whoever shuts their ears to the cry of the poor
will also cry out and not be answered.”
- Proverbs 21:13
Now, you most likely also have verses to defend your position. But what makes those verses more valid than these? If I fully believed in God, I would easily be able to assume from Matthew 7 that God does not want me judging the morality of others, and that only God can do that. From the next three verses, I could easily assume that God values helping the poor far more than our material rights. From this, I would claim that any policy that refuses help to the poor is anti-Christian.
And this isn’t a mistranslation or taking the verses out of context (it’s NIV, but you can look up the translation of whichever Bible you believe most true to the original). Further, you cannot deny that universal healthcare would help the poor, uninsured patients are 1.5 times likelier to die from the same illnesses. Further, it is the poor that cannot afford the insurance plans. It isn’t difficult to understand that when someone has only so much to spend to take care of their family, personal health insurance is an expendable “luxury”.
On top of all this, I wouldn’t even need the above argument unless I conceded that religious beliefs are a valid way of forming policies. And I clearly do not. You still have not come up with a solution of how so many different beliefs can come together and form a coherent government aside from the democratic truth process you are attacking.
“real, objectively binding moral law cannot exist without God.”
That is moral nihilism, a stronger form of moral skepticism. And it isn’t difficult to disprove. As I did earlier, imagine that you share my beliefs. There is no God. Now, is murdering someone still morally wrong? What about torture? What about genocide?
Another note: morality evolved as a social construct to protect each other. Those willing to work together and sacrifice things (like the urge to rape/kill/steal) for others survived as groups, those that did not most likely died. Ancient cities had laws against stealing, killing, etc. long before modern religions came up.
The point about objective morality is that you, as do most religious believers, feel the need for a power above us to objectively make morality for us to understand. A secularist like myself, on the other hand, would simply point out how morality can be an objective social construct similar to laws or mathematics. They all work toward their desired goals: morality to promote the welfare of people, laws to maintain a society, and math works in a ton of ways.
I did not implicitly imply the democratic truth, you are simply misunderstanding my position. If everyone believes in Santa Claus, it is just to make laws with that belief. Not because it is true, but because everyone is okay with that belief being used to make laws. There’s a difference. I can’t justly impose a tax to fund Santa if people don’t believe he exists, but I can if they do.
Another note: I am not asking everyone to accept my own views of morality. My views aren’t held by many, and I understand that. I simply am asserting the views that people already hold: killing is wrong, don’t steal from others, don’t allow rape, laws should help people. Where my view of morality comes in is the debate of how laws really affect the matters we agree on.
So I ask again: what views am I asserting that Christians do not agree with (that I am using to make policies)? If you can find even one, you have proved your point. If not, you have to admit what I’m saying here: my view only uses what everyone agrees on (the benefit of promoting human welfare) and what can be objectively proved (some science).
There is a fallback to the humanist view of knowledge, but it isn’t “I know because I know so”. That would be nihilism, and that would equate a belief in Santa with 1+1=2. You have to fall back on the reliable routes to knowledge: sensory data, logic in some cases, science, etc. So “I know 1+1=2 because of logic, and I know logic because it is a reliable route to knowledge”. Or “I know I see this laptop, because my sensory data”. These don’t need further explanations, because they can prove their reliability. On other hand, religious beliefs by contradiction are not reliable routes. That is the difference between my view of knowledge, and your odd idea of nihilism.
First, about the Bible verses: I don’t actually see the contradiction between Genesis 1 and 2, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
Anyways, my rebuttal would be: would you claim that Young Earth Creationists are wrong in their beliefs? If they believe the earth is 6000 years old because of the Bible, are they wrong? You can’t both be right, and if neither can be proven then you nullify your own idea of the Bible being a reliable route to knowledge.
And I am all for people teaching their own kids their own views, and people already do that. Government subsidized schools, however, are no place for religious views. You teach objective scientific theory (evolution, which has far more evidence in its favor than any alternate theory. Further, I know a devout Christian scientist who laughs at people who deny the evidence of evolution, so I don’t believe evolution is entirely against Christianity. This anecdote isn’t conclusive proof, but it’s something). In schools, they teach that evolution as a theory is the most valid one out there, and that is undeniable. If parents what to teach their children other things, they can do so even with the schools teaching. I hate to use another anecdote, but I’m using them as examples of what I mean, not as proof of my ideas. Anyway, I grew up in a Protestant family but went to a Catholic private school. My parents, and my church, were pretty clear that Mary was not sinless and that she was not someone to be prayed to. So I held on to that belief in spite of what I learned at Catholic school.
“every affirmation of anything is a denial of its antithesis.”
This is true, in that if I claim P then I am also claiming not not P. However, I am not claiming that about God (P). What I am claiming is that it is either P or not P, and either way, we should promote welfare. Neither P or not P is needed to make that statement, since both P and not P are consistent with that statement.
Here’s a difference between atheism and secularism: in secularism, a value is placed in the freedom to believe whatever you want. From this, we allow churches to be tax exempt and prohibit any laws that directly claim that religion is false. If atheism is the national law, no exemptions for religion would even be considered. We’d all assume that christianity is akin to a belief in Santa, and that people can believe what they want but the government is allowed to claim it’s falsity and make laws upon that assumption.
The issues we’re discussing have sprawled out of control until we’re each addressing a whole bunch of things at once. So, in order to pare things down, let’s pick any one of these eight issues and we can discuss it. And then, if we still feel like it, we can go back through any of the other issues you want to address, one by one. I hope that approach sounds good to you. Otherwise we’re in great danger of writing entire scatter-brained books to each other each round.
To my mind, there’s eight basic issues presently at hand:
1. The simplification and ambiguities in my view of property rights, including the issues of what the role of the state is with respect to property rights.
2. Your odd distinction with regard to the Rawlsian lottery between rights and individual situations.
3. Whatever it is that you’re trying to prove with those verses — which will turn into a discussion on the difference between moral and civil law.
4. Whether moral law can exists without God.
5. What views you are asserting that Christians disagree with.
6. The difficulties between Genesis 1 and 2 — which are more or less taken for granted by Christian and non-Christian biblical scholars, except for highly conservative ones who generally don’t know Hebrew and who studied in a sectarian college.
7. Whether the Bible must be an exhaustive source or merely a sufficient source of basic knowledge.
8. The differences between atheism and secularism / the distinction between the epistemelogical basis of law and the scope of belief enforcement.
Yeah we have gone over a ton, so here’s what I think of each topic:
1. I want to talk about this still, as I feel that your position makes property rights an almost absolute entity that cannot be infringed upon. Refer to my last post for arguments about this.
2. This isn’t much of an issue, just a clarification. Doesn’t need to be debated unless we want to delve into normative ethics.
3/5. These are the same point to me. I was alluding to the thousands of demonitations of Christianity that disagree with one another, and how different verses can be taken to have different interpretations. Basically, the point was that it isn’t a straightforward humanist vs. Christian debate, it’s a humanist vs. Catholic vs. Protestant vs. Muslim vs. Scientologist etc.
4. I want to keep talking about this as well. I feel it’s crucial to understand how a secular society can have morals, and how these morals are not anti-religious.
6. This isn’t a debate, I was asking for clarification because I don’t see the discrepancies from a straightforward reading.
7. I’m arguing that it is faulty for either. Exhaustive is laughable, as you can know what an atom is, what water is chemically made of, what math is, and learn it from a source different from the Bible. Sufficient is where the debate is. If I can find even one false fact in the Bible, then I have disproved the sufficient relation between the Bible and knowledge. So first I’d ask you what you believe about evolution and the age of the universe. Next I’d ask why the Bible claims that insects have four feet (Lev 11), why it claims that the Earth is fixed and cannot be moved/is motionless (Psalms 104, 1 Chronicles 16), and so forth. I left out the commonly brought up ones (stars falling from the sky, earth being flat, elijah physically going into heaven on a chariot) because of the weak but persistent metaphor defense.
8. This is where the main debate still lies, and it is sidetracking into individual points that one of us is trying to attack. Anyways, back to focus:
I mainly want to stay on #8, and I’d be fine if we ended on 1-6 for now (7 is an integral part of 8 though). Getting into them is hindering my pursuit of the main answers I’m looking for from you. So here’s mainly what I want you to answer:
1. What assumptions am I making as a humanist that Christians are not okay with? How are these assumptions necessary for any of my positions?
- A few notes about this question: I am taking about secular laws, that look to help people with knowable benefits.
2. Do you deny that there are atheist positions that a secularist would not support? (My examples: forbidding religious practice of any kind, forbidding religious indoctrination of anyone under 18, eliminating religion as a charity)
3. How do you envision religion being allowed in politics (how do you compensate for the clash between Catholics and Protestants, and Muslims, and Scientologists, etc)
4. If the government made no laws concerning religion, and did not allow religion in politics, could you envision any possibility of religious neutrality, at least in theory?
- A few notes: I don’t see the issue of allowing religions to privately pursue their ideals, through things like conversions and events (privately meaning not through government).
All right. If we must talk about them all at once, so be it.
1. Property rights, in my mind, aren’t something to be trifled with, for specifically biblical reasons. This does not mean there will never be questionable cases where it is not exactly clear who has title to something. To the best of my knowledge, God has no clear instructions for when land is unclaimed but two people want it. The legal system will have to muddle along and deal with that issue the best they can. If someone is given false information, that’s fraud, which is just a fancy form of theft, and restitution must be made. If my property is stolen, I can either get it myself if it is legal to do and worthwhile, or the state can retrieve the lost property. There is to my mind nothing wrong with the state carrying out this role, and there is nothing wrong with the state collecting taxes. The need to pay taxes has been a clear biblical command in both the Old and New Testaments.
2. I would like to hear your clarification of the Rawlsian bit. It seems that you might approve of a law confiscating cars if you thought that made our world better in the Rawlsian sense of the world, but you might not approve confiscating my individual car if just that act made the world better in the Rawlsian sense of the word. If it is true that you’re willing to be Rawlsian about general laws and not about specific instances, that’s an interest bias toward rights that you have. If I am understanding you correctly, you might defend my right to my car even at the expense of a little bit of the Rawlsian goodness of the world. If that is so, you seem to have a non-utilitarian bias toward law and order that you haven’t accounted for yet. This, to my mind, is more than a minor issue, but rather a large one that calls into question the very foundations of your moral system.
3/5. It is true that this is not a straightforward humanist vs. religious debate, and you love to cloud of my side of this by pointing out that the “religious” camp, if there is such a thing, is divided into Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, etc. And you have repeatedly written as though the fragmentation of religious folk into all these categories disqualifies religious ethics from having anything to contribute to politics. But to be fair, that compels you to acknowledge that the “humanist” camp is likewise scattered into Marxists and Owenites and Democrats and Minarchists and Anarcho-Capitalists and Anarcho-syndicalists and all manner of other groups whose ethics all contradict one another. Does this disqualify secular ethics from having anything to say about politics? And if not, what justifies the use of the argument from disagreement disqualifying “religious” approaches while the so-called “non-religious” approaches are not similarly disqualified across-the-board? If you take your argument from contradiction against religious ethics seriously enough, its logical conclusions destroy the basis for any kind of ethical knowledge at all, and humanism descends into its nihilistic conclusion.
6. This point is part of why I tried to separate this discussion up. I tell you what — I’ll address the differences in Appendix A to this comment.
7. You claim that if you can find even one false fact in the Bible, it is disqualified. That’s a fascinating claim, because it seems to see the Bible as an absurdly large collection of truth claims rather than as a set of books which claim to teach foundational truths about God and man.
To, for example, condemn the Bible on the basis of Leviticus 11 is laughable. It avoids at all interacting with what the text is clearly saying. “20 All winged swarming things that go on all fours are an abomination to you. 21 Yet these you may eat of all winged swarming things that go on all fours: those which have jointed legs above their feet, with which to hop on the ground. 22 These of them you may eat: the locust of any kind, the bald locust of any kind, the cricket of any kind, and the grasshopper of any kind. 23 And every winged swarming thing which flies and has four feet will be an abomination to you.” Regardless of who we think wrote Leviticus, there is no reasonable doubt that both the author and his readers knew that locusts, crickets, and grasshoppers, when counted, would show themselves to have six legs. This is the Middle East we’re talking about. The phrase “going on all fours” is clearly a reference to the way insects crawl. The reason it needs to be introduces is that the word “winged things” described any and all winged things, and the writer was introducing insects, differentiating them from birds, which had been covered in the previous verses, by pointing out that these creatures come in swarms and crawl on all fours. If we read the text as people actually listening to what it has to say, we know what is happening here: all insects except for those of the grasshopperish sort are being outlawed as food. If we read the text as though this were a failed attempt at writing a modern scientific dissertation of animal anatomy, of course we will find errors.
Your jabs at Psalm 104 and 1 Chronicles 16 are the same sort of thing. Two authors who are writing poetic odes to the glory of God as found in nature marvel at the fixedness and stability of his earth. To try to attack their work by saying that their description of earth does not dovetail with modern gravitational theory is to completely and utterly miss what it is they are going about saying. It would be rather like deciding that you will from now on shun the medical work of some doctor because he happened to mention a “beautiful sunset.” Why, if the man doesn’t even understand the basic truths about the motion of the earth, how can we trust him in any way for the even harder science of medicine?
8. Here’s my attempt at each of your four points:
A. The first and primary assumption you are making as a humanist that this Christian is not okay with is the assumption that anything God has to say is irrelevant to how we organize our political lives. These assumptions are necessary for you because they are the means by which you dismiss religiously grounded objections to your policies. Such as, for example, redistributionary welfare taxation, for which your assumption does not allow any religious objection. Similarly, your belief that religion is not an essential component of a child’s education leads you to be at ease with a system that forces the religious to subsidize the non-religious. You say I am taking about secular laws, that look to help people with knowable benefits. That is exactly where we disagree. I don’t see the laws you propose as “secular” in the sense you mean, and I don’t at all agree with your assertions about of what is “knowable.”
B. Some atheistic systems of ethics might openly stomp on religion, and a secularist of your kind would certainly be opposed to that. Sure. I don’t see what that has to do with whether your brand of secularism is truly religiously neutral, though.
C. How do you envision religion being allowed in politics (how do you compensate for the clash between Catholics and Protestants, and Muslims, and Scientologists, etc)>. I do not know what you are asking with this question.
D. No. Any political system is based on a view of moral right and wrong. If government “did not allow religion in politics” in the sense of the word you mean, then government would be imposing a non-religious system of morality on religious people and not vice versa. That asymmetrical imposition of moral law rules out neutrality.
1. “There is to my mind nothing wrong with the state carrying out this role, and there is nothing wrong with the state collecting taxes. The need to pay taxes has been a clear biblical command in both the Old and New Testaments.”
-So you are allowing the state to infringe upon property rights somewhat, in the form of taxes. I’d guess the distinction is what the state is allowed to do with those taxes, or what is a “legitimate function of the state”. Ignoring levels of taxation for now (as how taxes are collected and how they are spent can and should be two different debates), why would it be wrong for the government to pursue a healthier public through the use of the tax money they justly acquired? If you continue to want to be against government funded healthcare, you’d have to tell me what you consider a legitimate function of government, and why you believe that way.
So my questions for #1: What method can be used to determine what a legitimate function of the state is? For the things that are not legitimate, why?
2. I’m a utilitarian to start out with, in that ultimately the goal of ethics is to promote the welfare of people. The reason I made the distinction between cases as a whole and individual cases is because of the “Voting Problem for Consequentionalism” and the “Prisoner’s Dilemma for Consequentionalism”, two posts I’ve written earlier. Basically, I feel that if you focus on the issues of each case solely on a case by case basis, you’ll ultimately end up promoting less welfare than if you looked at it as a whole.
So for the car case: A strict utilitarian would claim that taking your car is justified and morally obligatory, since it produces the most happiness for that case. My view is that you have to look at the rights: your right to keep the car, and the rights people who would be helped by taking car. You have a right to the car since society, as a whole, is better off when people have property rights. The people who would be helped have rights, but it depends which rights. A society is not better off when people’s rights to happiness outweigh property rights, so taking your car (infringing on your property rights) is not justified by the increased happiness. Your property rights aren’t absolute however. If, in some weird way, someone was going to be murdered if your car wasn’t taken away, then it would be justified to defend the person’s right to life by infringing on your right to property.
Basically, ethics focus on increasing human welfare/happiness. This goal is done on a societal level by establishing rights that ultimately protect/improve this goal. The rights affected are judged individually on a case by case basis, but the effect on happiness is not.
3/5. I keep bringing up the distinction because I feel this debate has been too focused on secular vs. Christian. The “argument from disagreement” is not what I was using, and that is an illogical argument often used to argue for moral skepticism. If religions just disagreed on ethics, then they wouldn’t disprove each other. That is what seculal moral theories do: they disagree on ethics but they do not disagree on certain facts that the moral theories are based on (human value, life, etc.). Religions, on the other hand, have their ethics based in religious doctrine that are disagreed on. These are things like: what/who created everything, what/who determines ethics, and so forth. The contradiction in these facts prove that, at most, only one religion has it’s ethics based in real fact.
7. The reason I said that is because you offered the Bible as a sufficient source of knowledge, meaning that there is a logical relation between “is in the Bible” -> is knowledge. So if anything “is in the Bible” but is not “knowledge”, then that logical relation is false. Another example, if I say that “is written by George Orwell” -> “will come true”, then if you find anything George Orwell wrote that didn’t come true then you disprove the logical relation.
My jabs aren’t worthy of debate, they are just small pokes to prove how hard it would be to defend every single sentence in the Bible. I’d just like to point out how scientific facts (like evolution, the age of the universe, place of the earth) were previously denied by Christians on basis of the Bible. All this proves is that Biblical verses aren’t straightforward to knowledge, and that you can interpret the “facts” in ways that suit you.
8a. That isn’t an assumption necessary for the secular policies. That is an assumption necessary to reject Christian policies. There is a critical difference, and that difference is what I’m trying to point out.
I do acknowledge that Christians will not be able to put forth all the policies they want. I also acknowledge that certain policies will not pursue the Christian ideals that they want. But so does every other group (Muslims, scientologists, etc.). As an atheist, I honestly believe society would be better off without religion. But I would not vote for a policy that prohibits religion because that assumption doesn’t belong in politics. That doesn’t mean that secularism is anti-atheist.
Instead of focusing on individual cases, look at the theory behind it. We can’t argue about those cases with such a huge gap in our view of the theory. So once again, my point is that there are no policies in secularism that rely on assumptions that people are not okay with. When I say this, I mean that they do not promote values that Christians disagree with.
You’re somewhat claiming that by ignoring the additional values Christians secularism is anti-Christian, but that is an illogical, non-compromising view. We all have our different views, and wanting them all to be in politics is absurd and results in nothing. What I am proposing is that people put down their differences religiously, and focus on what they do agree on, which is promoting things like human life, health, and welfare.
B. This point talked about in 8A.
C. If I gave in to your argument (which I obviously don’t), how do you envision politics working? If everyone is allowed to use religious beliefs to form policies, how do you resolve conflicts between different religions in politics?
D. See 8a
Appendix A: that’s interesting actually. Not debating this, was just curious.
Appendix A: The differences between the creation stories.
For the purposes of this discussion, the “Genesis 1″ story is Genesis 1:1 – 2:3, and the “Genesis 2″ story is 2:4-25.
The Genesis 1 story calls God “Elohim” (generic word “God”) throughout. In this story vegetation is made on the third day, followed by land animals on the sixth day, and finally humankind, both male and female, are the last thing created. The narrative sequence is plants, animals, humans.
The Genesis 2 story calls God “YHWH Elohim” (“Jehovah/Yahweh God”) throughout. In this story, we open with the author explaining that there are no plants, domestic or wild, because there’s no rain for them yet and there’s no man to be a farmer. Then the male human gets made — before plants, animals, or the woman. Then, now that there is a man, God makes some plants for man to live among and take care of, and he provides water. Then God notices the man is alone. Uh oh! So God makes a whole bunch of animals next. The man looks through all the animals and names them all, but there’s none that are a suitable companion for him. Finally, God finishes the creation off by making a woman, and he institutes marriage. The narrative sequence is male human, plants, animals, female human.
The typical conservative historicizing response is to say that while Genesis 1 is written in order, Genesis 2 is a perfectly historical account which is written out of order. The NIV is so intent on making these stories historical that it goes so far as to abuse the Hebrew tense system in 2:19, changing “formed” to “had formed” in order to cover up the way that the Hebrew text in the Genesis 2 narrative clearly places the creation of the animals after the man.
The orders of the two accounts are so different it is difficult to imagine that whatever author put both of them back-to-back in Genesis thought he was writing a work to be judged by modern historical standards. But if you do want the value of the Bible to stand or fall based on whether Genesis 1 and 2 pass muster when judged as modern historical treatises, you and the Young-Earth Creationists are approaching the text in the same exact way. The differences between the two of you is one of conclusions, not method.
1. I am indeed allowing some infringements on the right to property. Some people, like Murray Rothbard and Walter Block, don’t ever allow for it. They, by the way, are fascinating thinkers, and if I didn’t feel the need to conform my thought to biblical thought, I would basically be a Rothbardian, probably on every issue except for abortion, the welfare of children, and possibly slavery. Everyone who wants to know about politics should read at least one of the major works of Rothbard — to do otherwise is to fail to grapple with one of the most powerful and original moral/social/political minds of the past few centuries.
The problem with government is that it, unlike every other non-criminal institution in a society, is based upon the coercive use of violence to force cooperation upon other people. This is not something to be taken lightly. Because people vary so much in their opinions of how the world should be, and because people generally want to impose their ideas on others by use of force (that’s what voting is), there has to be some sort of method by which to limit government.
Biblically speaking, an unlimited government is considered a disaster (for which see 1 Samuel 15), and history has borne this out. The mission of government is spelled out in Romans 13 as a God-ordained violence-wielding institution for the purpose of suppressing public evil. As far as I can understand the biblical record, that is basically all the power it has been given. To assume more power is to use coercive violence where one does not have authority to use coercive violence — it is tyranny, whether the infringement on rights is large or small.
2. Fair enough. But if I understand you right, the idea of valuing rights over individual cases is simply a heuristic that will generally lead to a better result, and nothing more. Am I right about this?
3/5. The debate is focused on secular vs. Christian because those are the two main powerful forces seeking to determine ethics in our world. To bring in other options can be a fun mental exercise, but in the world today I don’t think it will help settle the predominantly secular vs. Christian struggle.
7. You dislike the way that some readings of the Bible may lead to different conclusions. But that is a problem for any basis of knowledge. Personal experience leads to different conclusions, consciences lead to different conclusions, and yes, even scientific investigations have lead to different conclusions. The fact that interpretations differ is a problem with every way to knowledge.
None of these bases of knowledge are “straightforward to knowledge” in the way you demand. Again, you’re applying to religion a double standard you do not apply to yourself. Your conclusion, then, is implicit in your methods.
8 A. I think we’re going around in circles on this point. Your way of thinking demands that all politics be constructed without any reference to the truth-claims of Christianity. You cannot expect me to call that neutral. If you want to call that neutral, go right ahead, but realize that you are using the word neutral in a special sense that has little to no meaning in the real world of “individual cases” that you want us to look away from. It is to ask the religious person to cede all the ground from the beginning. It’s a fun idea, but it’s simply not workable.
C. There is, so far as I know, no way to resolve conflicts between different religions politically. Most secularists take for granted that they have the right to take all the country’s children and put them in buildings where they will be given a secularist education at everyone’s expense, and they claim the right to tax the religious to do this. Either the secularists succeed in imposing their will, or they don’t. There’s no compromise resolution to this issue.
The Qur’an calls for a world ruled by Muslims, with possible tolerated but inferior status for Christians, Jews, and Sabeans. Either those who believe in the politics of the Qur’an win, or they don’t. There’s no compromise resolution to this issue.
All competing frameworks for undestanding the world are at war with one other, either physically or by other means. I don’t have a way for all the various belief systems to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. The only end-game I can see is one of the truth-frameworks winning out over the others. Anything in between now and that is a series of temporary ad-hoc solutions to the problems caused by the war of ideas.
hello,
I was doing some research behind rationale and concept and history of conservatism and i found this blog post and have been reading it. It has been interesting to say the least. I realized behind the rhetoric,talking points and emotional charged professional pundits there is no rationale. No facts, Nothing.
The Conclusion is
Conservatism in itself is Irrational, there is no logic. Its almost useless to try debate logically and present sound arguments. (see above for examples) no offense i respect your opinion and your courage to put your thought process and how draw your conclusions randomly on the internet. Most conservatives just stop at this point and start name calling. I know this because I was a conservative and did the same thing.
Conservatism is anti-civliazation
Conservatism is anti-education
Conservatism is anti-everything that results in the advancement of humanity in general.
How was i duped into believing this garbage is that .Conservatism is masked behind a very complex and sophisticated public relations campaign that can make people effectively believe rampant lies and half truths. The main mechanism that fuels this PR machine is Anxiety. It feeds on the anger and anxiety of American citizens.
What is conservatism?
Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy( Justified by having Divine influence).
Conservatism has no place in the modern world.
I have done thorough research on conservatism and these are the only conclusions that can be made.
Say, John — are we allowed to feed the trolls?
Ironically, I think that was a spam post aimed at me o.0. Don’t feed trolls unless they’re smart enough not to copy and paste a message to any blogs that have “conservatism” and “argument” in it.
Anyways, sorry again for the late response, no internet access in SB right now so can’t reply while I’m there.
1. I’ll keep Rothbard in mind, though I have to wonder what his view on slavery is that you’re not sure you disagree with o.0.
About the content: It seems to me that you’re blurring the way government works. Yes, there is violent coercive force involved in enforcing any law. But that isn’t really what I’m trying to debate here. Violent force is usually involved when someone breaks a law, or commits an action that is illegal (in theory, we both agree that this is okay). Violent force can sometimes be used to force people to preform actions, or fails to commit an action (in theory, I feel this is most often wrong but not always). On the other hand, I see taxes as a different realm of law. Violent force is only necessary when someone does not pay their taxes. To put it clearly:
You allow the collection and use of personal income to fund legitimate government functions. So if the government taxes 20% of all personal income (regardless of the distribution), the citizens of the country are obligated to pay that money both legally and from Christian text (“give unto God what is God’s, and to Caesar what is Caesar’s”). The issue I’m focusing on is what the government is allowed to do with that money. You support paying law enforcement, and I assume that you support paying the army and politicians. In your own words, these are methods of “suppressing public evil”.
What I don’t understand is the line you draw at healthcare, schooling, and such. Illness is a “public evil”, death is aswell, and it isn’t hard to argue that a lack of education is a public evil. If the government has the money through justified taxes, why can it not spend it on things like healthcare and subsidized food? What definition of “public evil” does the government have to run by?
2. No. The reason I make that distinction is not only to lead to an ultimate better result, but because valuing happiness solely in moral calculations unfairly discriminates.If you want, I could list some examples of cases where this happens.
I’m mostly saving a long description of my view for a book I’m in the works on, but I can explain some if it doesn’t make sense.
3/5. That isn’t true. In America, Christianity is the current majority. However, there are more countries in the world with a different religious majority than Christian than there are that have Christians as the majority.
The reason this is important is because you can’t rule based on a majority’s religious opinion. That discriminates against the minorities, and creates a sort of relativist stance on government law based on each individual country’s religious majority.
7. Here’s a couple differences between my routes and your religious route: mine are open to improvement, and are only as valid as the proof they stand on. Personal anecdotes are only good to the person who experienced them, they are not reliable guides to facts (see: any ghost story). Personal perception, like the senses, is generally reliable. If you think you see a chair, more often than not there will be one to support you if you sit down on it. For science, any theory has to be proven, and proven again, and is open to anyone else to try to disprove it. Science isn’t a “straightforward route” to knowledge, but it has shown consistent progress and has led to greater and greater knowledge over time.
“Religious knowledge”, on the other hand, is not held to any sort of standard. “Truths” are taken as is from the religious text, and open to the interpretation of whomever reads it. So the credibility of the Bible is completely dependent on the accuracy of its interpretations. If even some are wrong, or some interpretations clash, then you cannot accept it as a valid source of knowledge as there is no way to “correct” or “improve” the original text. Until there is some form of proof that can verify the Bible, it isn’t a reliable route to knowledge. Using the Bible to validate the Bible is circular.
8a. We have been going in circles here, but that’s because I feel you’ve missed my point so far, and likely you feel the same about me.
The reason I feel that is neutral is because I don’t see political views as an all or nothing game. I don’t believe it is unreasonable to ask people to put conflicting views aside and agree on the things that aren’t conflicting to work on.
A simple metaphor to liven this a bit: Imagine 10 kids trying to play a basketball game. None of them knows the exact rules that are supposed to be used, but every kid has some ideas. All 10 kids want there to be 2 point and 3 point shots, and for there to be even teams. On top of this, each kid wants his own rules implemented. One kid likes half court shots to be 4 points, another wants there to be two balls in play, another wants there to be no shot blocking, and so on. True “neutrality” in this case is playing a standard game with the rules everyone agrees on, without arbitrarily accepting the special rules of the strongest kid.
That is basically what I mean with my view of political neutrality. There is no possible way to accommodate everyone’s ideas in politics. Most will get ignored and not be put into law. That doesn’t mean law is against those who don’t have all of their ideas implemented.
8c. This view of yours is obviously derived from your view in 8a, so not going to delve too deeply in this yet. I will say that it seems you have a very bleak look at politics. I don’t deny that I’m pessimistic about the intent of politicians, but it seems that you are pessimistic of any government even in pure theory.
As said in 8a, it seems that you are denying the possibility that people can accept having certain ideas implemented, but not all of theirs. Or, you believe that different religious people have no common ideas (unlikely).
1. — Morality of Government Programs, and their Utility
I do not have a specifically moral problem with the income tax. When it comes right down to it, as a policy decision I’d rather have a sales tax than an income tax, but again, no moral problem. What I do have a problem with is overly high taxation rates. Again — and I realize I’m leaning on religion here — I object to any taxes higher than 10%, 10% being the income tax rate that in 1 Samuel 15 is describes as tyrannical. 20% is massive — at 20%, we’re all practically serfs working for our land-owner, the government. In Genesis, the 20% tax of Egypt is described as national slavery. Now, it is true that in the US, paying taxes at 20%, we’re far better off than ancient serfs, but the fact that we’re richer serfs doesn’t change the essential problem.
To get away from religion for a bit, history and economics also seem to uphold the idea that such high tax rates are a good idea. Throughout all the history of monarchy the whole world over, it will take a lot of work to find a single king, no matter how oppressive, whose government consumed even 10% of the national income. In recent governments, which have adopted far higher spending than 10% of GDP, we’ve seen escalating debt levels, war on a scale never before seen in human history, and constant inflation. If you want a secular perspective on how high tax rates help tear a society apart, I recommend just about anything by Hans Hermann Hoppe, who lays it out nicely.
I do think that, if a government decided to tax 20 or even 40%, it would be the duty of Christians to pay their taxes. Christianity has long demanded that its followers put up with oppressive government practices — that element of Christians ethics is what gave us the modern phrase “go the extra mile”. That a Christian should go two miles with a Roman soldier or pay his Muslim ruler the 2.5% Christian tax or fork over 30% of his income to his local democracy, I’ll grant. That doesn’t mean, however, that the Romans or the Muslims or the modern democracies are in the right in making those policies, though.
Theologically speaking, I draw the line where I do in terms of the role of government because those are the only things that I see any scriptural warrant for. In those passages which lay out the idea of “suppressing public evil”, it is always in the sense of bringing punishment on public “evildoers” not generic and perennially existing evils not poverty or lack of health insurance or education or anything like that.
But my reason for this belief isn’t limited to scriptural passages. We also have to consider the history and economics of government intervention in these sorts of fields: Professor Jacob Huebert has demonstrated the way that government meddling in insurance since World War II has caused healthcare prices to balloon as services in sectors not so heavily controlled by government have become more affordable (“Libertarianism Today”, starting at page 94). Another fun article is the Mises Institute’s Dale Steinrich’s provocatively titled “100 Years of US Medical Fascism“. And for a bibliography of online articles from a free-market perspective on healthcare, see here.
Publicly funded schooling, as we previously discussed, has lead to levels of illiteracy that colonial America would have found shocking, a problem which has only grown deeper despite attempts at reform every ten years or so. It’s enough to make me think that a democracy like the US cannot run education governmentally. (The fact that I wouldn’t let it do so even if it could is a separate issue.)
As to subsidized food, our food policy as it currently exists is so bass-ackwards that it involves the government pushing some prices up, pushing other prices down, and destroying vast quanities of agricultural production while deliberately flooding foreign markets with US products at a loss to the US and a massive loss to the unsubsidized or less subsidized farmers in those countries. Again, even if we drop the specifically moral objection to these sorts of programs, I think there’s still more than enough evidence to strongly suggest we not do them anyway.
2. The Rawlsian Lottery and Unfair Discrimination
Examples would be great. I’m having a bit of trouble getting exactly what you’re saying on this part.
3. Whether the World’s Politics Struggle is Primarily Christian vs. Secular (Formerly 3/5).
We disagree here. While it is true that there’s a bunch of Muslim countries, they’re so rapidly secularizing that I don’t think Islamic law will be all that relevant long term. Hinduism is so pliable and lacking in specific legal thinking that I don’t think its all that relevant to a discussion of where world politics should go. Same goes for Buddhism, Shinto, Baha’i and most of the other little ones. Other than Israel, I still think that politically the way a country runs its politics depends on whether it adopts a Christian or secular understanding of politics.
4. Religion and Knowledge (Formerly 7).
I don’t think secular routes to moral knowledge are uniquely open to improvement. To the contrary, secular routes to morality are always arbitrary, because secularism provides no basis whatsoever for determining questions of “ought.” On questions of “is”, of course, science has a vital role, but no matter how much we study, say, male prostitution in Malaysia, science cannot tell us about whether male prostitution in Malaysia ought to exist, or even about whether the world is on the net worse or better off because male prostitution in Malaysia is tolerated. There are simply too many variables to chase down. And I don’t see the slightest hints of a way forward for these problems, other than a Rothbard-style “property axiom” style construction. And even that has its difficulties.
Your assertion that religious truth is not held to any sort of standard is not quite accurate. I think what you mean to say is that you reject the currently existing standards for evaluating theological questions. The mere fact that there are varying interpretations of the biblical text does not disqualify theology any more than disagreements over global warming disqualify climate science. The Bible, like any other collection of books, contains specific books from specific times by specific authors trying to convey certain ideas. While it’s true that we cannot have exhaustive knowledge of every bit of stuff that’s going on in the Bible, we can have some knowledge. And, so far as I can tell, the Bible does a better job of explaining the basic facts of existence far better than any other proposed approach I’ve seen yet.
I find it interesting that you keep asserting that there is no form of proof for the Bible, as though it were categorically true that religious claims simply cannot ever be evaluated in any way. A great number of people have advanced attempts to demonstrate that the truth-claims of the Bible are supported by the evidence of the world we live in: from the (in my opinion) clumsy historical method of Josh McDowell in his “Evidence that Demands a Verdict,” to the more scholarly historical method of N. T. Wright as found in his trilogy (“The New Testament and the People of God”, “Jesus and the Victory of God”, and “The Resurrection of the Son of God”), to the dense and philosophical presuppositionalist approach of Cornelius Van Til (especially in his “Christian Theory of Knowledge” which might be right up your alley) to the more popular but essentially similar philosophical attempt of Francis Schaeffer (“The God Who Is There”).
Here’s what I’m asking about your denial that any religious view has been proved. Are you denying this as a categorical assertion (“No religious claim is ever capable of being proved true”) or as an experiential assertion (“So far I have looked over the relevant arguments and been unconvinced by all of them”)? Specifically, with regard to the four authors above, would you say you:
(A) know what their arguments are and have rejected them,
(B) already have decided their arguments are not going to be worth your reading,
(C) are going to go find those books and read them (though I’d recommend you not start with McDowell, who in my opinion is the weakest of the four), or
(D) none of the above.
5. That Basketball Metaphor and a Neutral Politics
You’ve hit on the problem indirectly: there is no set of rules everyone agrees on. And while in the world of sports, there is always the option of choosing not to play, your ethics do not give me and my fellow believers the choice of not playing with your government. To get to a set of rules agreeable to both camps, either the secularists or the religious folks are going to have to abandon what they believe.
I think I understand your point: that we can theoretically construct at least the idea of neutral politics. Where we disagree is on whether this construct has any relation at all the real world. So far as I can tell, I’ve yet to see you solve the problem of neutrality for even one issue that secular philosophy and religious philosophy disagree on that doesn’t involve one side losing. And yet you persist in thinking that somehow, the entire history of the world and all the experience of humankind can be erased, and somewhere a policy world with zero “religious impact” can be created. I, for one, think that’s just as utopian as a workers paradise in which there is no more need for government because the New Socialist Man has arisen: both rely on a radical discontinuity between everything we know about how the world works and how the world works in the proposed model.
So far, I look around the world and see, in area after area, situations where nothing other than victory by one side can end basic disputes about the role of government. Until I see a reason to believe that situation will change, I have no interest in constructing imaginary ethical utopias in my head. I’m interested in real-world solutions to real-world problems.
6. Pessimism About Government.
I think peanut butter is a good and useful thing. It accompanies celery and white bread nicely; it is a cheap source of protein for children who are too picky to eat meat; it reminds us of the work of George Washington Carver; it helps us to catch mice; it creates jobs for farmers and industrial workers. All these things peanut butter can do. In all these realms I am optimistic about peanut butter.
On the other hand, I believe that any attempt to use peanut butter in place of water as a society will result in clogged pipes and deaths by dehydration. I believe that making “child traps” and setting peanut butter in them will result will either fail to catch children, result in childhood trauma, or end with kidnapping or murder charges. I am firmly convinced that any attempt to build houses or cars or space ships out of peanut butter will be a waste of money. I think drowning all red-heads, lefties, and twins in peanut butter would be downright barbaric. And I wouldn’t worship peanut butter. If I found a society that was constantly trying to use peanut butter in these fashions, I would argue against these uses vigorously, and people would probably think I was pretty pessimistic about peanut butter.
That’s how I feel about government. I think it’s useful for some things. For other things, I think it’s very much a bad idea. When I see government being used those ways, and I see the disastrous consequences, I start talking. If that’s negative, so be it.
I definitely agree with you that there are certain common areas. We would, for example, both oppose the legalization of murder. On the other hand, there are divergences. I, for example, would oppose a 10% of GDP cap on US government spending, while you would not. On that issue, either one of us will change is mind, or one of us will win. I don’t see neutral ground there. If you find some way that we can simultaneously have things your way and have things my way, let me know. Till then, I’m still not seeing a route to neutrality.
1. Alright well in the interest of bringing this debate toward a conclusion, I won’t argue much with your view of %’s, as that is an entirely different debate that could last a while.
A few notes I agree with you on:
- The government shouldn’t tax excessively
- The government shouldn’t have needless wars
Where I disagree:
- Your focus on the %, rather than the product
- Your use of past countries as comparable to the United States.
For the first disagreement: if 10% taxation was the ideal way to promote overall welfare, I’d be all for it. I obviously don’t see a value in raising taxes for no overall purpose. I still strongly defend taxing greater %’s to the rich than the poor, but that debate is too long for here.
The only note I want to continue on for this part is your comment about higher than 10% being serfs. As you mentioned, we have far higher quality of lives than they did back then, especially considering disease/food. 80% of income now is much better than 90% of income then. For the sake of argument, and to separate the ethics from the economics, imagine that the government taxing 20% instead of 10% would ultimately give people better lifestyles. So the people who keep 80% of their incomes have greater wealth/health/economic power than the people who keep 90%. Would you still be against raising taxes from 10 to 20%, on a purely ethical basis?
For the second disagreement: You’ve used a few of these comparisons in previous posts aswell. While it is important to look at history’s mistakes, broadly comparing the modern economic world to a time before global markets/unbacked currency/global communication doesn’t work (especially considering things like the internet, credit cards, governments bonds, etc.). Today’s economy, although in a bad place, is in a different ballpark than ancient economies.
About healthcare: I see the same problems, but my solution is universal healthcare, not a completely private system. Though I’d rather save this debate for a different time.
About schooling: issues discussed already, I think we know which issues we’re divided on.
About food: that wasn’t the area I was talking about. Government funded crops, like our debacle with sugar, are ridiculous. What I was actually talking about are programs like food stamps, where the government pays for groceries for those who can’t afford it.
2.
First example (slightly skewed version of the Utility monster): Imagine a man who physically cannot experience happiness (due to some neurological issue). He does not want to die because he is scared of death, but he does not enjoy any moments while living. Further, he lives on a deserted island so he does not have the capability of giving others happiness. Is it okay to kill this man?
-Using happiness as the ultimate judge, you would be eliminating no happiness whatsoever by killing him (in fact, you would probably be preventing misery). Therefore, it would either be permissible or even obligatory to kill him.
-I think this is intuitively wrong, and that the man has a right to life. The right to life is established by the claim that all humans are better off/happier/higher quality of life when they all have a right to life than they are without it. The man’s lack of individual happiness does not nullify his right to life.
Second example: Shoplifting. In most shoplifting cases, the person who gets away gets more happiness than a company loses from that item (especially if its a large company, like walmart).
-Using happiness as the ultimate judge, every time this is the case shoplifting is morally obligated.
-Shoplifting is still wrong because the companies (which are owned by people) have a right to property. This right is established the same way, and is not overridden by individual happiness.
3. That’s interesting, but that sounds a lot like the Secularization theory (if I named this correctly, where all countries will eventually become less and less religious). In fact, I feel Muslim countries have religion play a far larger role in politics than Christianity does in any country.
4. Key note: I was talking about secular routes to knowledge, not moral knowledge. So science is open to improvement on knowledge like physics, biology, and chemistry.
Side note: You kind of implied the “you can’t infer an ought from an is” argument. If you want we can argue that, as I dismiss that claim. For now, I’ll leave it off to see if you want to first as it is 3 in the morning and I’d have to do some reading before making that argument.
About your main argument: I am pointing to the circular nature of “it’s in the Bible, so it’s true. And the Bible is true because it is/God said so/i believe so”. That is invalid.
Religious claims are indeed capable of being proved true. They are not capable, however, of proving themselves true. Quick question: if you are not using the Bible to prove the Bible, what are you using to prove the claims in the Bible?
As for your ABCD: I’d choose none for now. I would much rather you explain their arguments to me, or argue like them, than for me to do a superficial reading/wikipedia search. I feel that would do them greater justice/I would get the material better.
Specifically, I’m most interested in Van Til and Schaeffer. Lay out what there best argument(s) are, and we can go from there.
5. It’s not a “set of rules” that I said they agree on, it was individual rules. That was the point: there was no set, but there were certain points.
And you are right, I’m not trying to classify our entire government as neutral. I don’t claim to know the true motives of any politician, and would be shocked if any less than 50% of politicians had ulterior motives.
What I am trying to argue is that secularism, as a theory, is a neutral starting point for political debate. Once we establish that, and we get past the “all or nothing” approach that prevents any compromise, then we can find a neutral government.
However, this isn’t a theoretical fantasy that cannot be applied to the real world. Take one real world case: abortion. Using secularism as a starting point, the debate can justly contain:
-the mother’s right to her body
-the fetus’s potential right to life
-the real world effect of an abortion
The debate cannot justly contain:
-what (insert any deity) wants
A key point here is that secularism as a background theory does not provide all answers, no theory does. It’s a starting point, and from there the debates can happen.
Also, I am not advocating compromise on every issue, that isn’t neutrality. Victories in debates are necessary to implement policies.
6. A few things:
-Neutrality does not demand compromise. It disallows for discrimination.
-What I keep trying to separate is the ethical debate about government and the real world application of that. We can correctly debate ethics, its not a concept that needs future predictions to justify it. We can attempt to debate real world applications, but we can’t mix the two in.
For example, about taxation, there are two debates: whether or not it is just to tax some people more (the ethics) and whether or not that system has the intended result (application). For the ethics, you would have to argue that, even if the application had the intended result (better society), it would still be wrong. For the application, there is no need to argue it unless you concede the ethics debate (by saying that it would be just to tax more if it had x good result, but in reality x won’t happen). It seems to me that you are using the application a lot when debating the ethics, and that shouldn’t be.
The reason I’m bringing this up:
“That’s how I feel about government. I think it’s useful for some things. For other things, I think it’s very much a bad idea.”
We can discuss either what the government can justly can, or we can discuss what the government is capable of being effective at.
In quick summary, since we’ve somewhat gone over this, my arguments are:
1. The government can justly do what will ultimately benefit the people.
2. The government is capable of being effective at benefiting people.
Your arguments against 1 must ignore what will actually happen, and your arguments against 2 are only relevant if you concede #1.
SOME OPENING STUFF
For the sake of argument, and to separate the ethics from the economics, imagine that the government taxing 20% instead of 10% would ultimately give people better lifestyles. So the people who keep 80% of their incomes have greater wealth/health/economic power than the people who keep 90%. Would you still be against raising taxes from 10 to 20%, on a purely ethical basis?
Here we reach a problem spot. In the biblical worldview, ethics are not separate from economics or from the effects of ethical decisions. We do not believe in a God who tells mankind one thing while another thing is best for them. What is ethically correct, according to the Bible, is also what is ultimately best for people. Government, at least in the biblical worldview, exists for the people’s own good, and ought not to do what is bad for the people. So if a tax rate of 20% were actually better for people, I would support it. But so far, every indication, whether biblical or economic, seems to scream out to me that not only is 20% excessive, 10% is also.
We definitely have a different view of history. I see the basic facts of human nature, human relations, and the state as essentially unchanging. Global markets, unbacked currency, and global communication have all existed, from time to time, over the centuries. Only the details have changed. The same diseases that plagued the Assyrian and Roman Empires plague that US Empire today, and the lessons of history hold true. Though we may be in a different ballpark, we are still in a ballpark nonetheless, and the basic rules of the game continue to apply.
As to healthcare, I do not think we see the same problems but merely differ as to the solution. Foremost among the problems I see is the socialist calculation problem. From it, along with the incentive problem, all the other problems flow. Clearly, you do not see the calculation problem as a real problem, or else you would not advocate universal healthcare. Our disagreement is not merely about how to deal with the present state of affairs: we do not even agree as to what is the present state of affairs.
I’m glad to see that we agree on crop subsidies. But as to food stamps, I’ve lived among recipients of food stamps living in government-subsidized housing, and my observations, along with those of economics, strongly suggest to me that far from being helped, they are being crippled by the social welfare that they are receiving.
With regard to the utility monster, you are now holding that intuitive rights trump utilitarian arguments, but then you go seek to ground those rights in your original utilitarianism. Surely you see the inconsistency here. You start with utilitarianism and use it to destroy itself, like the mythical snake that devours its own tail. This construction of “rights” does not at all solve the problem, because it requires serious inconsistencies for it to function. For example, you have decided that the “right to life” of the unhappy man outweighs his own happiness. (Keep in mind that this is exactly the same sort of elevation of principle over human well-being that you feared might come from my ideas about taxation.) With shoplifting you also lay out the same sort of inconsistency, but this example is even worse, because in some other cases, like taxation, you see the right to property as something to be overwhelmed by utilitarian considerations. Such an inconsistent approach to the creation of rights leaves one with little more than gut feelings wrapped in a veneer of logic. If it is so that, as you claim, you want law to be constructed on the basis of intuition, we arrive at a problem. There is left no basis for choosing between the intuitions of two conflicting persons. And with no basis beyond their intuitions for judgment, all that is left is only brute force to decide. This is the essential problem of modern western secular democracies. Once all basis for argument is removed from a society, all that is left is mob rule: stronger groups decide for weaker groups what the rules are. All is naked power, and a democracy constructed on this basis is at best a slowed-down sort of mob rule. In time, with such nihilistic foundations, any secular order of this sort will collapse upon itself into chaos as it becomes more consistent with its own presuppositions.
The question of what ought can be derived from is, is much more than a mere side note. It is, in another way, a restatement of our central problem — our disagreement as to what consistutes a sufficient basis for knowing and acting. Since you’ve offered to give it a go, I would definitely like to see by what magic you intend to pull the rabbit of ‘ought’ out of the hat of ‘is’. If I’m right, careful observation will show that somewhere along the line some sleight of hand is resorted to.
AN ATTEMPTED PROOF OF CHRISTIANITY . . .
The question of how I and Van Til go about trying to ‘prove’ the truth of Christianity are one and the same. As far as I can tell, his is easily the best apologetic out there (though not the only good one), and it is definitely the only one that goes straight for the jugular so quickly. I’ll try to summarize the bare bones of Van Til’s apologetic.
Van Til’s apologetic begins with the assertion that the worldview of historic, biblical Christianity is the only basis on which other knowledge of any kind can be built. (It is a variant of the transcendental argument.) From the assumption of the Triune God of scripture, a number of other consequences flow, consequences which provide the basis for every quest for knowledge, whether moral, theological, scientific, or otherwise. From any other basis for knowledge, problems arise which are fatal to all knowledge and cause any attempt to know anything to become futile.
I realize, that at first sight, the above paragraph will look absolutely stark raving mad to anyone who is not already convinced of the truth of Christianity. After all, it presupposes the basic epistemological principle of Christianity: that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” And, as you have pointed out several times when presented with hints of this approach, it is circular. It requires that the person making the arguments already presuppose the truth of Christianity. (This, by the way, is where it gets the name “presuppositionalism.”)
Had Van Til stopped right there, you would be right in saying that the demonstration is worthless because of its circularity. But there is more. The next step in presenting such an apologetic is to take up any rival to Christianity and demonstrate how and where it hits irresolvable difficulties, and how it falls apart. Then, Christianity is shown to provide a coherent answer to that difficulty. That is the essence of the method. The method is carried out by taking a rival system to Christianity and boiling it down until its presuppositions show themselves. Sometimes these presuppositions are relatively explicit, sometimes they are more carefully hidden. Invariably they are simply assumed without justification. And invariably, following their presuppositions to their logical conclusions will eventually lead to devastating contradictions within the system which render it unintelligible and unable to provide any solid basis for anything. In book after book, Van Til applies this method to philosophy after philosophy, serving as a sort of mental demolitions expert. And when every visible contender is demolished and Christianity is all that’s left, we have two basic choices.
It is true, of course, that non-Christians have arrived at a variety of truths. But when their methods of reaching these truths are examined, it is shown that they have always reached these truths by means of presuppositions which their non-Christian worldviews cannot justify, but which flow easily from the presupposition of the Christian system. Therefore, they are not reaching these truths because of their non-Christian view of life, but in spite of it, because they have, although inconsistently, assumed the truth of the Christian God while simultaneously trying to suppress that truth. And it is this basic inconsistency that will implode their system.
The amount of coherence that does exist in the non-Christian mind is due only to one thing: the non-Christian refuses to follow his beliefs to their logical conclusion. He exists in a sort of logical limbo, in an unstable place, on an unsure footing, and is liable to come crashing down at any time.
Of course, everything I’ve said above is all in generalizations. To make things really interesting, we have to start trying it out on actual worldviews. In the preceding comments, this is basically what I’ve been trying to do to yours (a fairly typical sort of humanism) — but only because you asked me to. I have no desire to force my beliefs on you, but, when called upon, I am at least willing to try to justify them. I do not necessarily expect agreement. Agreement would be a drastic and life-threatening thing for anyone who has lived a life which has assumed the falsehood of Christianity. Christianity’s claims are total, drastic, and offensive, and people only accept them if they choose to. But at the very least working through the idea of presuppositionalism tends to make for some interesting conversations.
. . . AND ITS IMPLICATION FOR POLITICAL NEUTRALITY
Regardless of whether you accept the presuppositional argument for Christianity, one thing must be reckoned with. At least some people consider the claims of the Bible to have been conclusively been proven true, whether they arrive at that conviction by the presuppositional method of Van Til, by its popularization in historical terms of Francis Schaeffer, by the historical methods of Wright or McDowell or Strobel, or by something altogether different. And for these people, people who believe that the truth of biblical revelation has been sufficiently demonstrated so as to be a secure basis for knowing and acting, truly neutral political ground becomes impossible.
A long time back, we got to this question of whether Christianity is proven when you suggested that the religious and non-religious alike can unite to work out a purely secular neutral politic. Your basic instruction to religious folks was that, religion not being proven, religious folks are obligated to lay aside any claims to truth that come from their religion when seeking a basis for political action. This is indeed a workable solution for the sort of “believers” who consider the secular world the truest reality, and their own “faith” to be nothing more than a hopeful irrational leap in the dark. These sorts of people can work on the same political basis as you, but the reason for this is that, when it really comes down to it, their concept of truth is not too different from yours. You and they are both agnostics. You are an agnostic who chooses to live as a (relatively tolerant) atheist. The sort of believer you are cooperate is an agnostic who chooses to live (in some areas of life) as though he believed. But at the end of the day you are both agnostics, differing not really in your beliefs so much as in your decisions about how then to live.
But where you bump up against an unbridgeable gap is with the sort of believe who actually believes with a certainty that lets him fuly and consistently live out his beliefs. This sort of man cannot lay aside his religious beliefs without betraying his God, because he knows clearly what he believes, so clearly that he is without excuse if he denies those beliefs by pursuing political goals at odds with them. And it is here and in this sense that there is no fully neutral ground on which you and the believer can work. True, you do agree with the believer on some things, like the desirability of outlawing shoplifting and prohibiting murder. But when it comes down to it, neither of you can resolve any disagreement without giving up your beliefs. And we are left with the original problem: that two differing views of live necessitate two different politics. One must win and the other must lose — no other resolution is possible. This is the basic problem of neutrality, and it is why, when you attempt to argue with the religious, you are only making an argument that is persuasive to those who already agree with you on the non-religious nature of truth.
AND SOME OTHER STUFF
In your example about abortion, you desire the debate to stick to such things as the fetus’s potential right to life, the mother’s right to control of her own body, and the real world feffects of an abortion. To discuss what God might want, however, is, you say, ‘unjust.’ For anyone whose religious is the foundation of, and not just an addition to, their worldview, what you are asking is an absurdity.
For the Christian, the fetus’s potential right to life, the mother’s right to control her body, and the effects of abortion are all parts of the spiritual, moral, and physical world God created. Rights and even cause and effect are subject to what God has decided. They are not separate issues. To consider them as separate issues is to ask the believer, from the outset, to act as though his beliefs are false. This is what you call neutrality: a demand for absolute unconditional surrender before the war even starts. Any country that behaved that way and said it was neutral would be laughed to scorn by the international community. The fact that individual people can behave that way in political philosophy and not be called out on it is a testament both to the exceeding arrogance of modern secularism and to the intellectual laziness and timidity of modern Christians.
What you have been repeatedly asking for, though not in so many words, is the defeat of Christianity as a religion and worldview, allowing at best for its existence as an irrelevant and powerless shadow of itself. I would of course wish that you would turn away from such a course. But if you do not turn away from your course, all I can ask is that you call for Christianity’s defeat openly, without hiding behind a facade of neutrality. That at least would be the consistent thing to do.
You say,
What I keep trying to separate is the ethical debate about government and the real world application of that. We can correctly debate ethics, its not a concept that needs future predictions to justify it. We can attempt to debate real world applications, but we can’t mix the two in.
Again, here is another point where we disagree. I believe in a world where the abstract and the concrete must meet and correspond to one another. To simply create an ethical system without any reference to the real world that we intend to use that ethical system in is a fool’s errand. We might just as well separate map-making from navigation and make maps from whatever idle thoughts may float through our brains, with no correspondence to physical reality. Either way, people will certainly get lost. I have no idea at all why we would even bother constructing a system of ethics that has no reference to this world. It doesn’t at all seem consistent with the stated aim of the post with which you started all this, which was an attempt to argue against the real-world things that some people called conservatives wanted to do. Then, once you’re pressed on these things, you seek to retreat into a field of abstractions. You can do that if you will, but what you are left with if you choose to go that route is not ‘An Argument Against Conservatism’, but ‘A Full-Scale Retreat from the Battlefield of Political Theory’.
I’m also struck by your suggestion that ethics is something which does not rely on future predictions. At every turn you have attempted to argue ethics on the basis of future predictions: future predictions about the results of public education, future predictions about the effects of different taxation levels, and a great cloud of other future predictions. Your entire way of constructing your modified utilitarianism rests upon, at the very least, the ability of people to know the future and to know it well enough as to weigh the good versus bad effects of present policy.
This presents a problem. As we both know, any attempt to trace all the results of an act or policy quickly leads us into such a mass of tangled direct and indirect results that we have to way to weigh the whole on our own. We are too painfully finite to ever apply your ethical system to the real world. This is why, when we disagree on the effects of public schooling or some other issue, we each sketch out an image of the future and then have no further way to weigh our supposed futures against each other. The moment we try to apply your ethics to the real world, we arrive at gridlock, which means that the ethics are really not a means of solving conflict, but rather nothing more than an outer shell that we can put over what we already believe to make it look reasonable. Perhaps this is why you are so eager to separate ethics as a theory from the application of ethics to the real world — because it immediately leads to an ethical equivalent of the economic calculation problem that so vexed socialist humanistic economics, and which vexes all other economic systems to some extent.
If we are all held to the standards of your ethics, we all stand condemned because we are unable to fulfill its demands that we be omniscient. In its own strange way, your ethics lead to a system startlingly reminiscent of the doctrine of original sin. All humans, from birth, find themselves condemned by an ethical system whose just demands they can never hope to fulfill. This system of ethics leads to a universal hopelessness. It departs significantly from the Christian doctrine of original sin, however, in that it stands alone without providing man with any chance at redemption. It’s a dark place to go to, if we follow your ethical demands to their logical conclusion. And, because ethical behavior is meaningless, it becomes a mere mockery, a meaningless ideal which taunts us.
The only way to keep holding your ethical ideas without falling into hopelessness is to look away, at all costs, from their logical conclusions. It’s a high-wire act which can only be continued at the risk of one’s capacity to reason.
Christianity, however, does offer a way out of these impossibilities. While it does acknowledge that our finite minds are utterly incapable of working out on their own the vast amounts of knowledge that would be necessary to live ethically, it provides a way of escape. An infinite mind, able to comprehend the future and all the complexities of ethics, has revealed to us a set of principles by which we can make right decisions. Instead of having to rely upon our own ability to calculate outcomes which are too hopelessly complex for us and beyond our ability to grasp, we may instead profit from the results of his calculations which he has revealed to us, and thereby transcend our natural limitations through him. By following in the path he has set out for us, we find ethics to be a meaningful and helpful thing instead of a frustrating impossibility.
That is, essentially, why I choose Christianity. It is the only basis so far for morality and meaning that I have been able to find. I welcome any other contenders to the field.
Finally, you claim that your arguments for your view of government can be summed up in two points:
1. The government can justly do what will ultimately benefit the people.
2. The government is capable of being effective at benefiting people.
That argument, as it currently stands, is utterly meaningless to our debate. We both agree as to (1), though we differ in how we get there. You get there by deriving ethics from benefit, I get there by deriving both ethics and benefit from a God who deliberately paired the two. And as to point (2), we each believe in it only partially. We both believe that in some areas the government is capable of being effective at benefiting people, and that in some areas government is not. Our disagreements have nothing to do with the two-point argument you advanced, and everything to do with our disagreements as to the nature of truth.
Response to Opening Stuff:
“So if a tax rate of 20% were actually better for people, I would support it. But so far, every indication, whether biblical or economic, seems to scream out to me that not only is 20% excessive, 10% is also.”
Then I believe we agree here on an ethical basis, where a high tax rate like 20% is not intrinsically wrong. Rather, we both agree the tax rate should be what is optimal, and what that rate is is a debate for another day.
We definitely view history differently. Global communication did not exist in anything close to what it is today. On top of that, global communication is now instant. Also with unbacked currency. If you get down to it, gold is no more intrinsically valuable than paper money. Gold used to be and still is a universal standard of currency, but a dominant currency like the U.S. dollar has effectively become the same thing. A currency can only truly be “backed” by intrinsically valuable things like food/oil/etc. And I do not think we are playing with the same rules as back then. Back then, money’s main power was in hiring manpower. Today, we have weapons/stocks/companies/patents/resources/etc all of which bring power to the people who own them.
Alright from what I know/have read of the socialist calculation problem, it is a critique of socialism as a whole. Meaning it is a critique of the effectiveness of an entirely socialist economy. I agree with the problem to an extent. I agree that capitalism, by using profit as a motive, often effectively allocates resources to meet market demands. I also agree that the government would have a hard/close to impossible time pricing all goods correctly in a socialist economy. But I am not advocating full socialism. Full capitalism is no better (monopolies for one).
What I am advocating is universal healthcare. If I accept the socialist calculation problem, I would be allowing certain resources to not be used to their full potential, or causing the healthcare business to be less than its profit potential. I’m fine with both side effects, if the benefit is guaranteeing everyone a right to healthcare. Further, it’s clear that this system works due to the examples set by every other first world country.
So far, crop subsidies and legalizing weed may be the only things we agree on. Ignoring government subsidized housing for now, I don’t see how you can think food stamps ultimately hurt the people who receive them. Anecdotal evidence obviously doesn’t work, as I similarly know recipients of food stamps who were able to feed their families/have money to pay rent solely because of food stamps. Before I get into this further, I want to ask: do you believe that eliminating food stamps would do more good than harm?
My view is not inconsistent, its based around the idea of ethics as a universal theory. It is utilitarian in a sense to start, but it views aggregate happiness as humanity as a whole rather than the specific individuals involved. This may sound a bit confusing, but bear with me. I’ve already pointed out why I’m against using happiness as the moral calculus in individual situations (Prisoner’s Dilemma and Voting Problem). With those two problems, I see a system that focuses on human rights as the optimal one to ultimately promote human welfare.
In response to your critiques: I don’t see a right to life as a principle that trumps human welfare. Someone losing their right to life (by being killed) is a consequence of an action that must be valued. In the utility monsterish case, killing the man has the consequence of eliminating a right to life. Same with the shoplifting case. Stealing has the consequence of infringing on a right to property. This isn’t an absolute right, it is a consequence that can be more valuable than a small amount of happiness but outweighed by a more valuable consequence (such as preventing a right to life being lost).
I feel you don’t understand my view of ethics, so I’ll lay it out again step by step:
1. The ultimate goal of ethics is to promote human welfare.
2. The best way to promote human welfare is at a universal level, not individual.
3. To promote human welfare at a universal level, you establish/promote human rights that enhance quality of life.
4. Rights are established in a utilitarian way: if everyone having right X means better human welfare than no one having X, then everyone has a right to X.
5. In individual cases, you look at the consequences to determine which option has the most moral value.
6. Moral value is determined by looking at rights, happiness, and anything else that is morally significant (such as a parent’s moral obligation to their child).
7. Rights are valued based on how greatly they affect universal human welfare (so the right to life is more valuable than the right to property because, at a universal level, it has a greater effect on human welfare).
8. Happiness in individual cases can trump certain rights, depending on how great the happiness as rights are not absolute.
9. To determine when happiness can trump rights, I use a similar principle to Kant’s categorical imperative: if in all cases where X amount of happiness is weighed against Y right, which decision will ultimately promote more universal welfare? (Using the shoplifting example: if the X amount of happiness of shoplifting was chosen over the right to property in every case, then human welfare would ultimately be hurt.)
I use this view of ethics in every one of my ideas, so if you don’t understand any of the above points/want to refute any of them let me know. Also, if you want me to prove my consistency, I can show how I came to any of my beliefs through this view of ethics.
(A note about my view: it doesn’t always give straightforward answers. I feel ethics should ultimately have answers, but that knowing them is difficult and ethical debates are needed and necessary to determine points such as 4/7/9)
My view is not based in intuition. Intuition is not a reliable guide to morality (as you pointed out, intuitions conflict). I simply use intuition as a warning sign; if common intuition is against idea X, then X better have a good defense. Also, I am not eliminating the basis for argument. I actually tried to establish it.
About inferring an ought from an is:
There are two ways to get around this inference.
1. I don’t really use/support this argument, but it’s worth bringing up. Anyways, some theorists see an “ought” as a simple connection to a goal. So if I want to be standing up, I ought to stand up. In terms of morality, moral values are the “is”. So killing “is” wrong, life “is” a positive moral value, and so on. Those who value these moral values “ought” to act to promote them, as these values are a goal of theirs.
2. I see it a different way. I don’t believe the ought connection needs to be made, as I personally feel that compelling people to act morally ultimately ends up with some form of egoism. I focus on the “is” part. So an action that has moral value “is” moral. Morality, as a concept, just “is”. The value of morality “is”. Whether or not people want to act morally is up to them, the value of morality is there and so is the goal. If people want to pursue these goals, then acting morally is the way to do so. But I don’t try to claim that they “ought” to do so.
The reason I feel ^this^ way is that, as stated earlier, I feel morality is based on the assumption that human welfare is valuable, even if it is not your own. If you share this assumption, then we can determine what actions promote this value. If you do not share this value, I cannot compel you to be moral without trying to make things seem worth it for you (egoism).
My Response to Your Attempted Proof of Christianity:
Van Hil’s approach starts on a logical fallacy: by eliminating all other known theories, you have not proved the last remaining one true. There are an infinite number of theories, and to prove one by Van Hil’s method, you would have to successfully disprove every other conceivable logical possibility. That isn’t possible. Here’s a simple example: you see that your carpet is wet. You immediately think of three possible explanations: you urinated on the floor, you spilled a glass of water on the ground, and the fire alarm went off and sprinkled on the carpet. You see that your pants are dry, so you can disprove the first theory. You remember that you haven’t had a drink in the room for a long time, so the water can’t be from that. So by disproving all the other known theories, you now conclude that it must have been the fire alarm. Obviously, that’s wrong. It could’ve been a sewage leak, an animal coming through the window and somehow getting water on the floor, a leak in the roof, etc.
The rest is equally flawed. I would love to see how you support the idea that “biblical Christianity is the only basis on which other knowledge of any kind can be built.”. It would be easier to rip that apart than Van Hil’s attempt at disproving others. We’ve already mentioned the circularity, but also there’s the problem of past Christian “knowledge” being changed/disproved. Further, the history of knowledge has been Christian theory, science, Christians changing theory to adapt to new science. To claim Christianity as the basis of that scientific knowledge is dishonest.
You’re “pre-supposition” argument seems similar to the debate we’ve had for “reliable routes to knowledge”. What’s interesting is that of the methods we’ve gone over, mine (science, math, etc) have led to improved knowledge, while the Bible has not. It’s almost impossible for the Bible to lead to new knowledge actually, as it doesn’t change. New interpretations are no more valid than old interpretations until other evidence supports it (the other evidence being the actual reliable routes to knowledge).
So here’s my challenge again: provide a positive argument for the truth of Christianity.
My Response to Political Neutrality:
I am not asking people to see their views as false, but rather unproven (though I want to keep the unproven argument in the previous section). Even if this is unacceptable, it isn’t asking too much for people to understand that “while I believe X, that person does not so I should not use X to determine that person’s life”. For example, I believe that all religions are untrue, and that the chance of a god is low enough to be logically ignored. I don’t deny this belief when I seek religious neutrality, I simply understand that people have different beliefs and that I should not infringe on their religious freedom.
A key point of my argument is that politics affect how other people live their lives. Supporting religious neutrality does not mean that a person has to change their own life. A Christian can go on in their religious freedom and live a Christian life, but implementing these ideas in politics is attempting to force others to conform to that life. That is simply wrong.
One of the reasons that this debate is hard to resolve is that “neutrality” is a subjective word, and we obviously have different definitions of that word. So to take the word out, I ask:
Which is better:
1. A political system that does not let people choose their own religious beliefs, but rather imposes the view of the strongest.
2. A political system that takes no part in religion, and lets the people choose their own religions/practices.
About the Other Stuff:
Abortion: That is not an absurdity. To ask a Christian to ignore what God wants when making their own decision is an absurdity. To ask a Christian to lay off when a non-Christian is making that decision is common sense.
Here’s what I will say: I call for the defeat of all religious oppression. By this I mean I do not want any religious beliefs imposed on anyone who does not share them. That is as religiously neutral as a coherent system can get.
Here’s where we differ: I demand that a Christian be content with being accountable for their own actions and beliefs. You are not content unless that Christian is able to control other people’s actions according to the Christians beliefs. Do you see how that is wrong?
My Response to the ethics/application distinction:
You missed the point entirely. The reason the distinction exists is because, in several of your arguments, you claim that “it is not just to promote value X at cost Y” and then subsequently claim that “cost Y does not actually promote value X”. The first is an ethical argument, the second is an application argument. If “X is not worth Y”, claiming that “Y does not promote X” is pointless: it doesn’t matter either way. If “X is not worth Y” is true, then Y is not justified regardless of whether or not X is promoted.
In what we’ve debated, X is the value of helping the poor, Y is the cost of taxing the rich (there are several other examples, but this is the easiest to understand). If you claim that it is not just to help the poor at the cost of the rich, then you are making the ethical argument. If you claim that taxing the rich doesn’t actually help the poor, you are making the application argument. If you make the application argument, then you are conceding the ethical argument. This is because that argument is only relevant if it would be just to tax the rich to help the poor. If there are no cases where taxing the rich to help the poor is just, then why would you try to debate the effectiveness of taxing the rich in helping the poor?
“1. The government can justly do what will ultimately benefit the people.
2. The government is capable of being effective at benefiting people.”
^That isn’t an argument, that’s the distinction between ethics/application with government. You said you agree on 1, meaning you agree that it is ethical for the government to benefit people. Then the debate moves to 2, or the application, and how the government can in actuality help people.
This isn’t a “retreat to abstract”. Since we’re debating about what’s “right”, morality comes into play. So we have to first debate about what is “right”, before we determine what in actuality promotes the thing that is “right”.
Also, you have definitely not taken my arguments to illogical endpoints. You’re straw-manning my arguments, and to prove so all I ask is for you to provide a sound argument (with valid structure and true premises) against any of my assertions.
(Non-serious note: this debate is getting really, really long. If you want to end things soon I’m fine with that, though I’m willing to debate this thing as long as you want to. At the very least, it’s been interesting to debate so many different topics)
INTRINSIC MORALITY AND VALUE
a high tax rate like 20% is not intrinsically wrong
We’d have to do a very, very careful job defining “intrinsically” before I’d agree with that. Further you say that “we both agree that the tax rate should be what is optimal”. That is right so far as it goes, but we differ as to how to get there. And how we get there is crucial.
gold is no more intrinscially valuable than paper money
Ahh . . . that old word “intrinsically” again. It’s a meaningless word, you know. No matter how hard you look, you’ll never be able to find a single object anywhere with a scientifically definable “intrinsic value”. Even food depends on what sort of food it is and whether anyone is hungry. Oil was once a mere curiosity; the wheel of technology may roll it back to that place again. What I think you mean to say, in plain language, would be that
gold, when it comes right down to it, is in no way more suitable to be used as money than modern fiat money
If that’s what your trying to say, then we couldn’t disagree more. Money has a variety of functions, and for something to fulfil the demand for money it must be (1) highly divisible and easily measurable, (2) easily portable, (3) durable, and (4) of enduring value. Throughout the centuries, whenever people have been left to their own free devices, the only two substances that have been selected by the markets for international trade have been silver and gold, and, to a lesser degree, paper money backed in silver and gold. Never in the history of mankind have human beings freely accepted unbacked paper money without an armed government applying some sort of coercion to make them do so. You will not be able to find me a single example, not one. Here’s why. People aren’t stupid: they know that paper money can be multiplied indefinitely, and that any government that produces it will keep inflating its value away by printing money to pay its bills.
This is what’s happened over the last century as the US government, in a three-stage process, tore away the backing of the dollar and left us with fiat currency. And ever since then we’ve inflated and inflated and inflated, so that now the dollar can only buy 1/90th the gold it could in the past. Inflation disturbs future economic calculation and makes long-term savings of any kind less reliable and liable to be consumed by inflation. This in turn increases present-mindedness and decreases investment in the future. I’d go on, but others have outlined the harmful effects of inflation better than me, especially Rothbard in the Mystery of Banking and America’s Great Depression.
As we both know, nobody’s been printing new gold, and that’s why it has not only held value but increased greatly over the last few years, as the dollar is in the early stages of imploding on itself and ceases to exist as a currency of international trade. No purely fiat money has continued to exist over a forty-five year period in world history. We’re forty years into our experiment, and the dollar has already lost 98% of its value against the world’s premier historical reserve currency (gold). The other 2% is disappearing as we speak.
History has not changed with regard to unbacked currency. The Chinese tried it and failed with it a thousand years ago, and the same thing is happening today. It is true that global communication has allowed volatility to be even harsher due to instant communication as stupid money systems self-destruct, but the fundamental process remains the same.
As to what money is used for, I don’t think things have changed as much as you think. The buying of weapons was in ancient times also extremely important, and the buying of stocks and companies, though technically new, is largely nothing more than a more complex way of buying what ancient societies also used to buy: land, tools, and human labor. Resources also existed back in the day. The only really new thing you’ve listed is patents, but that’s another conversation for another day. Suffice it to say that the average Joe is not using his savings account to buy up patents.
THE SOCIALIST CALCULATION PROBLEM
It is true that the socialist calculation problem, in its most straight-forward form, is an attack on an entirely socialistic economy. In such an economy, it is utterly impossible to assign reliable values to any single thing, and everyone dies. The closer you move toward pure socialism, the closer you are to the calculation proble, as in the Soviet Union where the people were only kept alive by the ubiquity of the black market which still had rational, though suppressed and distorted, price signals.
But the socialistic calculation problem also plagues to a lesser extent all attempts of governmental provision of a good or service. Though the government can start by approximating free market prices, once it starts instituting changes, the distortions will grow. The bigger the socialist experiment, the larger the distortions. The fundamental reason is that a free market producer can measure everything against his bottom line and therefore has a very accurate thermometer with which to measure the temperature of supply and demand. Anything produced by government, however, has no such mechanism. And so it has no way of measuring the excellence of its product and making adjustments. It tries, but it grows harder and harder and more and more complicated. A classic example of the calculation problem at work is the public school system. Everyone wants our children better educated, and we throw higher and higher amounts of money toward that end, and we try all sorts of schemes to try to measure and enforce success, but things just continue to get worse — not because people are trying to sabotage the system, but because of the calcuation problem.
We disagree as to what the socialistic calculation problem means for healthcare. You think that every other first-world country is an example of successful implementation of univeral healthcare. I disagree. I see a sea of worldwide debt from the increasing costs of funding the social welfare states, and rising costs as worldwide total fertility rates plummet. As more and more old people living longer and longer must be supported by a shrinking pool of new workers, there is every reason to think that the current apparent solvency of many of the world’s healthcare systems will disappear.
I definitely think that eliminating food stamps would do more than good. I won’t bother trying to present anecdotal evidence, given that it is already ruled out. And so we reach another impasse: we need a tie-breaker.
THE MORAL CACLUATION PROBLEM
You claims that your view of rights is not inconsistent, and you lay out a nine-step solution that (as pure theory) almost looks good. But a careful examination of its points will show that not only does it not “always give straightforward answers”, it is really incapable of settling anything. Let’s take a look:
1. The ultimate goal of ethics is to promote human welfare. This point is already unclear, as you give no method whatsoever for calculating what does or does not help human welfare. This is, for example, why we hit a brick wall the moment we try to talk about education or healthcare or food stamps. This point looks good in theory but by itself is powerless to solve any question on which people genuinely disagree.
2. The best way to promote human welfare is at a universal level, not individual. That’s one heck of an assertion. But there’s nothing that would seem to prove it true. Why should the attempt to work out a hypothetical universal rights profit human beings more than the attempt to work out what is right for individual cases? The twentieth century has been the century in which every country has talked most extensively about universal human rights, but at the end of the day hundreds of millions of innocent individual people have been murdered by these governments promoting their universal-level solutions, whether it is the US promoting democracy by senselessly incinerating hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, and children; or Hitler promoting the universal golden age of German-ness by killing off the Jews and Poles and Gypsies; or Stalin promoting a universal fair and just society of the worker and starving tens of millions of Ukrainians to get there. After all the examples of history, it’s fascinating to me that the secular thinker still managed to get up in the morning and imagine that hopefully, this time, a series of logical and rationalistic principles will emerge from the human mind that will help us on a universal level. We’re kidding ourselves if we think that.
Points (3-4) indicate that these rights you speak up must be established on a universal level, and then point (5) turns around and insists that individual case calculations, on the other hand, are the way to get to an ethical world. Number (6) just adds to the conclusion by insisting that all “morally significant” things must have their hand in the decision-making process. Because you’ve provided no way to define what all these morally significant things are, it’s another meaningless point. Point (7-8) just retread the same ground, insisting that on some sort of fuzzy criteria we must sometimes think universally, but sometimes think case by case. (9) is nothing more than an attempt to put the rest of the incoherent method in an algebraic form. The use of algebra would reassure me if we were actually working on something mathematical. But if it is nothing more than a mathematical-looking garnish attached to something that cannot be solved mathematically, it serves as nothing more than a self-deception. It’s like polishing a car with no engine, or swabbing the deck as the burning ship goes down.
I use this view of ethics in every one of my ideas, so if you don’t understand any of the above points/want to refute any of them let me know. Also, if you want me to prove my consistency, I can show how I came to any of my beliefs through this view of ethics.
That’s no reasurrance either. The problem with your nine-point view of ethics is that it explains any and every policy anoyone can ever want to choose. It is a test that is so subjective, so vague, that it can be unfailingly bent to the will of anyone who is applying. It explains to much, and a theory that explains too much explains nothing at all. You can pass any of your opinions through that filter and see them come through with flying colors; I can pass any of my opinions through that filter and also see them come through similarly victorious. And we could each pass each others’ views through that filter and see them fail. That system is like a referee that does fine on all the obvious calls, but shrugs his shoulders whenever something is questionable.
The truth of the matter is that, no matter how much we may kid ourselves, our opinions do not come from your nine-point filter. They come from somewhere else, and then they can be dressed in the nine-point filter to make them look respectable.
Your attempts to go from is to ought makes very little sense. You don’t claim that anyone “ought” to act morally, but of course you support the existence of government which forces people to at least in minimal ways cooperate with your notions of morality. That’s a contradiction, and it leaves morality completely undefendable.
ATTEMPTED PROOF OF CHRISTIANITY
You realize that you’re applying a double standard to religious knowledge, right? If a scientist weighs all the various hypotheses that, say, explain the existence of fire, and then he knocks down all but one, you accept the theory. You don’t say, “Well, there are an infinite number of possible theories and therefore you can never prove anything concerning fire.” No, instead of assuming that the scientist must be ominiscient before he comes to any conclusions, the correct thing to do is only to demand that he knowck down all the relevant competing theories which have already presented themselves, not that he head of theories that nobody has ever thought up.
Van Til attempts to do a proof along the same basic lines that are demanded in any other field, but in his case you’ve decided his method just won’t do. Now, I could understand if you decided that he had not adequately torn down all other major contenders, but instead you seem to be demanding that he do even more than that herculean task. You will never find any sort of proof you are satisfied with if you make such unreasonable demands.
If you actually saw that your carpet was wet, you would only consider a finite number of solutions. And if you saw a cup lying horizontally on the floor positioned right next to the carpet, you would conclude that the cup was the source of the water. You would not continue in an everlasting state of skepticism, insisting that no one can come to any true knowledge of water on the floor because it still could have been an animal, a sewage leak, a roof leak, the tooth fairy vomiting up a clear substance that looks like but is not water, or an infinite number of solutions you haven’t yet thought of. And yet, when it comes to religion, you expect a standard of proof that cannot be met in a single other field ever.
To claim Christianity as the basis of that scientific knowledge is dishonest? We’re definitely going to have to disagree here. Modern science originated in Christian countries, because the Christian mindset believes that the universe is the orderly creation of a single all-powerful being. (The Islamic flourishing of science in the early middle ages comes from the fact that they largely borrowed their view of the universe from the Judeo-Christian traditions.) Polytheistic religions, in which reality is considered to be essentially fragmented and chaotic, have utterly failed to make similar advances.
In the Ancient Near East, it was taken as a self-evident truth by that the sun, moon, and stars were individual agents. Only the monotheistic faith of the early Yahwists was sufficient to introduce the concept of the sun and moon and stars as being inanimate objects which follow a regular set of rules. When you read about the fantastically complicated medieval attempts to model the universe as a series of spheres within spheres, it is an early attempt to find out the regular rules which controlled the inanimate sun and moon and stars — to find the essential unity and regularity of the world. Galileo and Newton, who came up with models a great deal better, also saw themselves as attempted to find the orderly created design in nature placed there by God.
To say that science is not an outgrowth of the Judeo-Christian worldview is the really challenging thing. Science must begin with the notion that the universe is orderly throughout, that human beings have the capability to understand it, and that knowledge is a valuable thing to be pursued for its own sake. I do not see any other basis for that sort of attitude than the Christian worldview. Almost without exception, the people who have advanced scientific thought are members of the Judeo-christian tradition or people raised with it all around them who have accepted a great number of its basic teachings. (See here for an interesting article on the relationship between science and Genesis.)
You say you want a “positive argument” for Christianity. Tell me what you mean by that, and I’ll see if I can do anything for you.
ON NEUTRALITY
You start your discussion of neutrality by throwing out the troublesome word “neutrality” and then substituting another troublesome but more wordy restatement of the same idea. You ask:
Which is better:
1. A political system that does not let people choose their own religious beliefs, but rather imposes the view of the strongest.
2. A political system that takes no part in religion, and lets the people choose their own religions/practices.
You know that I do not support forcing people to become Christians. What you present is a false choice. In point (2), there is also an over-vagueness in requesting that the political system “takes no part in religion.” You really need to define what you mean by “takes no part”, because what you mean by that phrase is crucial.
A government must always “take part” in religion in one sense: it must decide which religious beliefs it will allow people to hold and act on. When members of Native American religious groups decide to get high on peyote, the US government must make a decision. When Hindus in India insisted on their right to throw infants into rivers as offerings to a goddess, the British government had to decide whether to interfere with the Hindus religious practices. When the Hindus burned their widows alive, missionary William Carey sought to use force to impose his Christian belief in not killing widows on them. He succeeded, and for that I am thankful.
Would you allow the Christian to impose those his ethical views on the Hindu in this case, or would you insist that he must realize that his moral beliefs are “unproven” and therefore he has no right to impose his views on the Hindus? I know, of course, that you will agree with the Christians on this case. The fact of the matter is that we both believe some people should be allowed to impose some of their religious values on other people in some situations. The difference is that I am willing to admit my desire to suppress some of the beliefs of others, while you mask yours in a facade of neutrality.
In what we’ve debated, X is the value of helping the poor, Y is the cost of taxing the rich (there are several other examples, but this is the easiest to understand). If you claim that it is not just to help the poor at the cost of the rich, then you are making the ethical argument. If you claim that taxing the rich doesn’t actually help the poor, you are making the application argument. If you make the application argument, then you are conceding the ethical argument. This is because that argument is only relevant if it would be just to tax the rich to help the poor. If there are no cases where taxing the rich to help the poor is just, then why would you try to debate the effectiveness of taxing the rich in helping the poor?
If I make the application argument, I am conceding the application argument? Nonsense. The fact that I am willing to attack a problem from several angles is not in any way a concession. It is a matter of practicality. There are some people who share enough ground with me on moral issues that the moral argument might be all I need to make in some situations with them, but given the fact that many people will not see eye to eye with me on ethics, I also argue the application side. I don’t see why that should be a problem.
Another thing to keep in mind: as a Christian, I believe in the unity of ethics and human benefit. We both believe in the unity of ethics and human benefit, in our ways, but we believe in this unity differently. For you, ethics all hangs on human benefit. The individual seeking to do the ethical thing must think extensively about the effects of a given decision, and then use a vague nine-step filter to rubber-stamp his decision.
For me, on the other hand, both ethics and human benefit hang on God, who gave us ethics for our benefit. A biblical view enjoins us both to listen to ethics and to pay very careful attention to the consequences of our actions. However, here is a crucial difference in our approaches. I believe that the human mind is so finite and error-prone that, unaided by God’s revelation, it cannot be trusted to reach accurate conclusions about the consequences of its actions. Though this is of course a simplification, the basic Christian notion is that we start with the ethics given by God, we submit to these ethical demands, and this obedience leads to generally predictable positive consequences which we can trace if we apply our minds to it.
As to the valid arguments you ask for, I’m exactly sure what it is you want. Would you prefer that I take my assertions and put numbers in front of them? If that would help you, I’d be happy to do that more often, though I can’t see what good it would do.
As to the length of this debate, I’m more than happy to keep this up as long as you want. I could gladly go back and forth every other day for a year — few things are as enjoyable to me as debating important issues. Of course, should you ever decide to call it quits, just let me know, and I’ll be out of your hair.
This is a bit sad but I don’t know how you’re getting your titles bold? Anyways:
Response to Intrinsic Morality and Value:
- Something is intrinsically wrong if it is wrong for its own sake, with no respect to its consequences. So a tax rate of 20% isn’t intrinsically wrong, but you would see it as instrumentally wrong if it led to the bad things you’ve been talking about. We definitely disagree about “optimal tax rate”, but I feel we have enough to debate already.
- That’s basically what I meant. Gold is only valuable because we see it as valuable, the same as paper money. If everyone decided to abstain from gold as a currency, it would hold no value. Things that could be “intrinsically valuable” in this sense would be food cause it can be eaten, and so on. Not too much to debate here though.
- Key note: dollars aren’t printed on regular paper. Neither of us could go print out legitimate U.S. dollars, any more than either of could make fake gold. Both can have imitations made, but the genuine article isn’t something easily counterfeited.
I’m not foolish enough to think the dollar is invincible, inflation can cripple its value if out of control. Its prices go up and down depending on global markets, right now it is down from its previous stranglehold on global currency. However, gold is not exempt from these fluctuations either; the value of gold depends on global markets as well.
My point: so long as the U.S. government doesn’t print money out of control (and they have not so far), the dollar will be as reliable a currency as gold. What you are somewhat outlining is an apocalyptic scenario, where the U.S. government somehow completely collapses from dollar devaluation. I simply don’t see that happening, we have insane debts but our GDP puts every single other country in the world to shame. There’s flat out too much “good”, for lack of a better word, backing the U.S. dollar for it ever to implode.
This isn’t a debate I really want to have, as I’m much more interested in the latter arguments. If you want to continue, I’d want to know how you envision the economic collapse you’re writing about.
A couple random notes: How do you feel about diamonds compared to gold? Also, what would you think if/when currency is almost entirely transmitted electronically? This may be crazy, but this talk of unbacked paper currency made me wonder if we’ll ever get to the point where paper currency no longer back electronic currency.
- Things regular people buy, like food, water, housing, etc. have remained the same to some degree (where most commercial purchases have something to do with quality of life). Buying old weapons (like swords) would only bring as much power as the soldiers who fought with them. Nowadays, one man with the right weapons (nuclear) could take out any army on earth. Thats much, much more power in money than it used to be.
Response to Social Calculation Problem:
Let’s say for now that I accept the social calculation problem completely, and say that a purely capitalist country will have the optimal values and resources will be distributed at their most profitable.
Here’s the problem: this is a value of economic efficiency over human welfare. I am not okay with that, and it’s why pure capitalism does not work. Here’s a scenario:
Imagine a highly paid profession. There is a limited number of people who have the capability to preform this profession. Altogether, these people only have x amount of hours that they can work. Now imagine that a small group of wealthy individuals desire the services of this profession. The services will take up x amount of hours, and will slightly improve the quality of life of the wealthy group. The wealthy group will be able to pay $200 an hour for the professionals’ time. However, there is another group of individuals, though they are poor. This group is in need of life saving services, taking a total of x hours, that can only be provided by those professionals. However, since they are poor, they can only pay $50 an hour.
In pure capitalism, the wealthy will receive the entirety of the x hours of the professionals’ time. The poor group will die from a lack of the services, while the wealthy will have their quality of lives slightly improved. In economic terms, the resource (x hours of service) was optimally distributed. In humane terms, this is a tragedy.
The above situation is loosely based on healthcare, with a focus on doctor’s service hours and services for the wealthy (cosmetic surgery), and services never given to the poor (life-saving surgery).
Another fatal flaw of capitalism is the presence of monopolies. There’s no need for me to explain to you about the causes/problems, so I simply ask: how does a purely capitalist country handle a monopoly, particularly on a necessary resource such as water?
As for healthcare: I see certain facts: the WHO ranks our healthcare system 37th in the world, yet we spend the 2nd highest percentage of our gdp on healthcare. We’re 36th in life expectancy from birth. We also have the highest debt in the world by a large, large margin (greater than the entire European Union actually), so I do not see universal healthcare as the damning cause of debt you do.
About fertility: I’m not sure what the point of this is? People are having less babies for different reason. Some is because of better birth control, some because of the modern emphasis on career, some because of the modern feminist movement removing the stigma that all women must have babies to be successful, and in certain regions the reason is due to overcrowding. I’m not really sure how you linked this to universal healthcare?
About food stamps: I feel this is your most ill-informed opinion. Food stamps give people who have no other options the ability to eat and avoid starvation. In simple terms, food stamps are a safety net for people. Even without a job, people can eat enough to survive and/or feed their children. There are different types of people that this affects. Some will have less motivation to find jobs since they have food to eat, and would potentially go back to work if taken away (the group you’re focusing on). However, most people who get food stamps simply do not have enough to feed their family. A large amount of these people have jobs, but their salaries are not enough to pay for rent/food/gas/etc. Removing food stamps for them means skipping meals, no food for their children, and/or a painfully unhealthy diet (ramen).
The above is actually my main problem with conservative economic thinking. Safety net programs, such as food stamps and welfare, are seen as for the lazy. What isn’t understood is that there are people with literally no other options. Even with these programs, many people don’t have enough to meet basic necessities. When this happens, many people will resort to crime. Simply look at the ridiculous correlation between poverty and crime. It’s simple, people in poverty become desperate for answers. If none are available, crime can be the only solution.
Response to the Moral Calculation Problem:
1. Human welfare is equivalent to human quality of life. It isn’t an exact science, but to expect it to be so is foolish. These are factors that are relevant to human welfare: life expectancy, health, happiness, fulfillment, etc. This point is merely a starting block though
2. There are only three logical possibilities for ethics: universal, relative, or skepticism. They are all applied on a case by case basis. For example, you are either inferring universal principles to judge options (such as the principle of utility), judging based on what that culture expects (relativism), or what you decide is arbitrary (skepticism).
Why I am focusing on the universal: I’ve, in a previous post, outlined why cultural relativism is a disguised form of moral skepticism. And obviously, I’m not a moral skeptic, as I do not require a higher party to give moral rules. Rather, I see morality as a human made system like mathematics that provides real, usable results.
Your points about Hitler/Stalin aren’t relevant. Associating them with modern ethics is no more logical then me claiming that all religious people have the same conversion ideas as the Crusaders.
3-9:
“Points (3-4) indicate that these rights you speak up must be established on a universal level, and then point (5) turns around and insists that individual case calculations, on the other hand, are the way to get to an ethical wor”
Moral theory is establish on a universal level. Universal moral theory is the method how individual cases can be determined. Individual case calculations use the universal moral theory as a sort of moral algorithm to determine the answer to a specific moral dilemma.
“Because you’ve provided no way to define what all these morally significant things are”
Point 6 says exactly how: “6. Moral value is determined by looking at rights, happiness, and anything else that is morally significant (such as a parent’s moral obligation to their child).”
Rights and happiness (human welfare) are the primary consequences to be evaluated in each moral decision. Due to the complexity of certain issues, there can be other factors that affect moral value. Moral obligations (by parents) is an example of a group obligation. If you want, I can go into great detail of how group obligations are determined. They are insignificant to this debate though.
“The problem with your nine-point view of ethics is that it explains any and every policy anoyone can ever want to choose. ”
No, that is not true. There are points up for debate, namely: what, in actuality, will bring about the desired effects? Also, determining how much certain rights affect quality of life is open for debate. That was intentional, I think morality should progress to adapt to universal human needs, and I don’t think every moral decision has a clear answer.
This system is not so vague as you make it seem though, it will give clear answers on most decisions. Here’s a few:
(Taxation debate)
Proposal: Tax the rich an extra 3% to give guaranteed healthcare to the poor.
Consequences if done:
Positive:
Right to healthcare given to everyone.
Negative:
Right to property of the rich infringed upon.
Caclulus: The right to healthcare has a greater affect on quality of life than the small percentage of property right infringement. Therefore, the proposal is morally justified.
I would love to see you put any of your arguments through my system. Just keep in mind how it actually works (rights as consequences, ultimate focus on universal human welfare).
You’re opinions definitely do not come from this system. But mine are all reviewed by it, and in cases where I do not have an opinion I agree with its results. And yes, there are opinions that do not stand when examined by it. Examples: the argument that it is unjust to tax the rich to benefit others, based solely on the idea that the rich shouldn’t be obligated to help. Also, the argument against gay marriage will fall apart.
- The word “ought” implies some form of persuasion to convince a person a certain action should be done. Morality does not need this. Either you choose to act morally or you do not, providing an “ought” will lead to egoism.
The government forces people to act morally because doing so provides a better overall result. Those who need the government’s force to act morally aren’t being persuaded to choose morally, they are doing what is in their best interest given their situation.
The seemingly unbridgeable gap between an is and ought is focused on the gap between “this is what is in my best interest” and “this is what is moral”. Trying to bridge that gap means trying to conform what is moral to what is in a person’s best interest, aka egoism.
Response to “Attempted Proof of Christianity”
-I am not at all applying a double standard. If a scientist came out and said “I’ve proved that the cause of fire is not water, is not dragons, and is not me, therefore it must be my theory” they would be laughed at. They need a positive proof, and positive proofs are how the vast majority of science advances.
What a positive proof is: in metaphor terms, it is the “cup lying horizontally on the floor positioned right next to the carpet”. The cup is positive evidence that water came from that source.
In all other terms, positive proof simply means evidence for a certain theory, where a negative proof (what Van Hil was using) is evidence against other theories. In order to prove your own, you need positive proof for your own, negative evidence against others, unless it is against every alternate logical possibility, is not sufficient.
So what I’m asking is for evidence of Christianity’s truth, not evidence of other theories flaws. A sound, positive proof of Christianity would be one that has true premises, is valid, and directly leads to the conclusion “Christianity is true”. If you can do this, you will be the first to do so in history.
Since you might ask me, here’s my positive proof for the likelihood of atheism:
1. If a being has no positive proof of existence, then it most likely does not exist.
2. There is no positive proof of existence for any particular deity.
Therefore,
It is most likely that no particular deities exist (atheism).
Feel free to try to debate this (by attacking a premise, as my argument is valid by the truth of modus ponens).
- Scientific theory coming from Christians does not equal scientific theory coming from Christianity. If something truly came from Christianity, it would have to either come directly from the Christian God, or from Christian religious text. Neither happens in science.
Also, it’s odd that you stop at medieval Christians when deriving modern science. I could simply go back to ancient Greece and the development of reason/logic/philosophy/virtue ethics and claim that modern science came from Greek mythology.
Response to Neutrality:
I’ll move past the first part, as that would be a rehashing of what we’ve already gone over.
As for your religious examples, here’s how a government could easily decide without invoking religious ideas:
1. Native Americans: getting high on peyote does not infringe on anyone’s rights, therefore the Native American right to religious freedom should not be infringed upon.
2. Hindus: throwing babies in the river takes away the babies’ right to life, which is more crucial to universal human welfare than the right to religious freedom, so the act must be stopped.
3. Hindus again: burning widows takes away the widows’ right to life, which is more crucial to universal human welfare than the right to religious freedom, so the act must be stopped. (Side note: Stopping human suffering/death isn’t a solely “Christian” idea. It’s also a humanitarian idea, a secular idea, a Buddhist idea, and so forth)
In none of those three cases did I assert any religious beliefs, or did I unjustly infringe upon religious freedom.
- It is logically true that you can use the ethical and application arguments, so I perhaps should’ve worded it differently. What is true though: they do not support each other. Using the application argument, however, does entail that you consider it relevant. And if you win the ethical argument, the application argument is irrelevant. So I find it odd that you would claim the application argument is irrelevant (by using the ethical argument), then use the application argument just in case you lose the ethical argument.
About Christian ethics:
I actually really want to debate this, but I want to come closer to a conclusion on the above first. Once that happens, I would love to focus on that. Hopefully within a few posts we can narrow this debate down to two simple arguments: your argument against my universal ethics system, and my argument against your Christian ethics.
-Well I’m actually enjoying this debate, so who knows, we may be at this for a year or so. I love debating and haven’t had a debate this long/good before, so I’m in no rush to end it.
Extra note:
I should’ve asked for sound arguments instead of valid arguments. I would much prefer if you did it this way.
A sound argument is best laid out in number form (as I’ve done a few times) as it’s easier to see the premises and how they relate to the conclusion. If you can get an argument where I do not deny the truth of any premises, and it is valid (the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion), then you would win that argument.
The reason I prefer attempts sound arguments in number form is it forces you/me to include all premises, and gets rid of the hidden/unsaid premises.
Hey, John — the site doesn’t seem to be accepting my latest response. You want I should post it elsewhere or email it to you?
Does it give a reason? I honestly don’t know how the comment filter here works, I set my settings to “allow all comments” but every now and then it decides not to do that. try commenting on it here again, maybe in two parts, and if not fb message it to me and Ill post it here as a quote?
(All right, I’m splitting things into parts then. No reason is given for why the filter is finicky.)
FORMATTING
To make a title, just do this
TITLE
But without the @ signs. On most blogs, the comment sections allow basic HTML tags like bold, italics, and internet links. Sometimes you get lucky and you can even embed a youtube video in comments.
MONETARY POLICY
You say,
My point: so long as the U.S. government doesn’t print money out of control (and they have not so far), the dollar will be as reliable a currency as gold. What you are somewhat outlining is an apocalyptic scenario, where the U.S. government somehow completely collapses from dollar devaluation. I simply don’t see that happening, we have insane debts but our GDP puts every single other country in the world to shame. There’s flat out too much “good”, for lack of a better word, backing the U.S. dollar for it ever to implode.
I suppose the most important phrase in that paragraph is ‘print money out of control.’ What ‘print money out of control’ means is the critical question. It seems to me that government tripling the monetary base almost overnight would constitute out of control money printing (which we did after the collapse in 2008).
Keep in mind that when I apocalyptic scenario, I’m only speaking of the collapse of a currency, not of the world or society or anything. I’m talking about something that has happened before any unbacked currency in the world has lasted even 50 years, something that happens over and over and over. Here’s a quick rundown of instances of hyperinflation:
The US (1779), Poland (1921), Austria and Hungary (1922), Germany (1923), Greece (1944), Hungary (1945-46), China (1948), Taiwan (1949), Argentina (1975-1991), Israel (1979-1985), Bolivia (1985), Brazil (1986-1994), Angola (1991-1995), Bosnia (1993), Ukraine (1993-1995), Zimbabwe (2004,2006-2008).
Hyperinflation and currency collapse are not a bug in the fiat currency system; they’re a feature. And given the massive goosing we’ve given the base currency, on top of the massive deficits we’re running, the 1600 billion in excess reserves that has grown 400 billion since March, the 15% annual growth pace we’re currently running on the M1 money supply, and the insane game we’re playing with interest rates, I’d say we’re showing every indication of moving our currency toward the common fate of all fiat currencies.
As to your random questions: Diamonds are nice, but the problem is that their values very widely, while gold is a simple substance valued by weight. Diamonds can’t serve the calculation uses of money. When I use the term “paper money” I’m really speaking in short-hand about both paper money and the money that only exists electronically as bank accounts. As long as the US government continues its policy of making paper money available throughout the system on demand in exchange for electronic money, the two are functionally equivalent. A breakdown of our banking system could change that, but for all practical purposes the monetary base is equivalent to paper money.
But even as far back as 1930, the vast majority of the monetary base existed only in ledger entries rather than in physical form. So, except in the most technical sense, the monetary system was basically composed over 90% “electronic money” already. The difference between printed money, electronic money, and paper-ledger money is merely a technical one. The difference between a currency that is restrained by actual physical constraints of gold and a currency that is utterly unrestrained by anything other than political will is far more important.
MONOPOLIES
Another fatal flaw of capitalism is the presence of monopolies. There’s no need for me to explain to you about the causes/problems, so I simply ask: how does a purely capitalist country handle a monopoly, particularly on a necessary resource such as water?
Now, we need to separate two things here — monopolies and monopolistic price-gouging. On the one hand, we have monopolies. One example of this is baseball mud. To pitch an entirely fresh and clean new baseball is, or so baseball players say, not optimal for some reason. So in the major leagues, a sort of clayish mud is rubbed upon the ball. Before each game, maybe a hundred balls get smeared with this mud. There’s really only one specific mud that does the job right — Lena Blackburne Rubbing Mud. It’s had a monopoly on the production of this mud for about seventy-five years now. The family that controls this business knows of the one single specific spot on the Delaware River where this excellent baseball-rubbing mud can be found. So they have a monopoly on the product, and make good money on it, selling it for $25-75 dollars based on the size of bucket its sold in. That’s a monopoly. The free market produces these oddities from time to time, and they are generally harmless.
For monopolies to be so bad as to be a “fatal flaw”, they would have to be monopolies on more critically important things than baseball mud. But even a monopoly on a critical product like water would not necessarily be a bad thing. For a monopoly to really be a problem, the monopolist would have to jack prices up to the point that the economy was disturbed and people began to have real troubles. The reason these sorts of monopolies don’t pop up often is that if one is smart enough to get a monopoly on something, one is also smart enough not to waste that monopoly through predatory pricing. Even without predatory pricing, a monopoly is a fragile thing, liable to fall apart at any moment because countless rivals are constantly seeking to break into the market.
Large, inefficient, price-gouging monopolies are always the result of governmental interference in the markets. They are simply too difficult to sustain otherwise. Search long and hard, but you will never, ever be able to find an example of a monopoly arising through the free market and then holding a society hostage with high prices. In fact, you won’t even be able to find such a thing for a single product, with the possible exception of a diamond monopoly that lasted for a while, though even it is a doubtful case.
I’ve searched and searched for even one example to prove that monopolies are a fatal flaw of pure capitalism, and have been unable to find a single case. But, the historical record notwithstanding, advocates of socialism have been parading monopolies about like they were the Achilles’ heel of capitalism for ages now. I’m amazed they get away with it.
MORAL CALCULATION
All right. Let’s put my assertion to the test. Give me just one single opinion I have, and I will put it through your filter. Any policy opinion.
ATTEMPTED PROOF OF CHRISTIANITY and NEUTRALITY
Give me awhile to get back to you on these two. I spent fifteen hundred words on the first bit and I don’t want to simply rush these, so I’ll try to get a coherent response together within a day or two.
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE ARGUMENTS FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ATHEISM
I am truly dumbfounded. Can you not see your double standard? I will show you it in your own words.
In all other terms, positive proof simply means evidence for a certain theory, where a negative proof (what Van Hil was using) is evidence against other theories. In order to prove your own, you need positive proof for your own, negative evidence against others, unless it is against every alternate logical possibility, is not sufficient.
You do not like Van Til’s approach because it involves the falsification of a great number of other arguments, but not an infinite number. It is, you say, negative. Metaphorically speaking, Van Til’s argument is like a boxer who claims to have defeated every other relevant boxer, therefore claiming to be the greatest boxer in the world. You reject this boxer’s claims outright, not wanting to know what other boxers he claims to have beaten or how he did so, on the sole basis that his method of proof is negative and therefore logically fallacious.
Though I find your extreme skepticism a bit odd, it does not even hold a candle to what you follow it with:’
Since you might ask me, here’s my positive proof for the likelihood of atheism:
1. If a being has no positive proof of existence, then it most likely does not exist.
2. There is no positive proof of existence for any particular deity.
Therefore,
It is most likely that no particular deities exist (atheism).
That’s a positive proof? I’ll skip over the fact that “positive proof of existence” is left as a gaping undefined hole in point (1). What I’d rather focus on is point (2). Point (2) is as clear an example of negative proof as I’ve ever seen. You are willing to admit negative proof so long as it is directed against Christianity rather than for it. Dressing it up with numbers does not make it any more positive than it would be had you laid it out in sentences.
If you really want a discussion on what can and cannot be known, and what the criteria are for knowledge, I’d be more than happy to have that discussion. But if you’re just here to play word and number games, let’s not bother.
Monetary Policy
About printing money out of control- That’s a scary point, but such a rapid increase in available money should have had pretty quick inflationary effects. Its 3 years past, and I’d venture to say that the recession has kept prices low due to the more frugal mindset the country is pushing.
But I’m willing to concede this argument, as I don’t strongly believe in the U.S. dollar or anything. It’s more I don’t believe in any apocalyptic scenarios, and if any did happen I wouldn’t believe in gold either.
I will say that I highly doubt that the dollar will go the path that you’re fearing. I don’t see a downward trend as a reliable indicator of future events anymore than an upward trend would be. Things go up and down basically.
Monopolies
Side note about baseball-the mud is used because new balls have a sticky, hard to move freely surface. The mud is used to reduce surface friction. Though I’ve never heard of that company, the pros can afford it because they have an insane amount of money, most regular players just use regular dirt and spit.
About price-gouging monopolies: It’s difficult to isolate one example, in every case due to the amount of money involved there are going to be a lot of weighing factors. A few possible examples:
The diamond monopoly you mentioned (which has only recently lost some power if I recall correctly)
Public utilities: (AT&T, which was government supported before it was split), Standard Oil, certain railway companies
Microsoft
Western Union (I believe it was a monopoly on telegrams)
The easiest way for a monopoly to survive in a free market is if the resource is optimally produced from one source, like electric power or water. Making entirely new water reserves/power generators is less than efficient, so if a company already has a monopoly on one resource, it is difficult if not impossible for a newer company to gain the necessary resources to have competitive prices)
Another way for a monopoly to survive in a free market is if the town/city it is in is isolated. Just imagine a small town without easy access to any major cities. Only one company sells water here. Would it be financially sensible for anyone to start a new company, get the plumbing/water reserves, and be an alternative source of water?
One thing to keep in mind about real world examples is that we’ve never had a completely free market without government influence, so we don’t have examples of what would happen.
So I’ll stick with a hypothetical free market: Imagine that one company buys up all the available water sources and all the means of water transportation. To compete with this company, another company or person would have to build everything from scratch, which would cost too much for their water prices to be competitive. Whenever a new company emerges, the monopoly could afford to lower their prices low enough to bankrupt the other company. Once that happens, the prices go back up. This process can be repeated whenever a new company rises up.
Using macro/micro econ principles: water has an insanely high demand. Everyone needs it, and if it came down to it, would pay whatever it took to get it. There’s no natural price limits people would be willing to pay. If you have ten thousand dollars and water costs ten thousand dollars, you would pay it rather than die of dehydration.
What government does is introduce an artificial price limit, so companies can’t charge $10000 a gallon for water. In a free market, a company would have to go against maximizing profit in order to avoid the above situation.
Moral Calculation
This hasn’t been brought up yet, but if you are against legalizing gay marriage, I would like to see that.
If you aren’t, then try the argument that it is unethical to charge the rich higher taxes.
Christianity and Atheism
Key point: A positive argument is simply:
Christianity is true because ______.
A negative argument:
Christianity is false because ______
Van Hil’s approach is negative because he aims to disprove all other known theories. This isn’t sufficient for Christianity because Christianity has truth assertions about the universe and whatnot, that need to be proven in themselves.
The key difference between your boxer metaphor and the truth of religions: the “best” boxer is a relative term. By definition, at least one person on Earth has to be the best boxer on earth at every moment in human history. If one person can beat every other person, then they can claim to be the best because the truth of that claim is like this:
1. Imagine people listed from A-Z for simplicity.
2. Within group A-Z, one person must be the strongest boxer.
3. Person A beat persons B-Z in boxing.
4. Therefore, from premise 3, A is a better boxer than person B-Z.
Therefore,
A is the best boxer in group A-Z.
Here’s the thing with Christianity: it’s not a relative truth claim. If you want to argue that Christianity is the “best theory we have”, then Van Hil’s approach could work. But what I believe you want to argue is that “Christianity is the truth”. The truth of Christianity’s claims aren’t relative, they are either absolutely true or absolutely false.
Here’s why my atheist proof works: in any truth assertion, the burden of proof lies on the positive claim (Christianity). Without any proof, the negative assertion is considered more likely (Atheism).
“There is no positive proof of existence for any particular deity.”
My 2nd premise is a positive assertion in the sense of proving atheism (a negative belief).
Basically, with no knowledge and no proof of anything, agnosticism is the logical conclusion.
To make the leap to Christianity, you need positive proof or knowledge of the truth of Christianity’s claims.
To make my leap to Atheism, I made a positive proof of negative beliefs (sorry if this is confusing, but its the only way to word it while still getting the meaning across).
Another key note: my proof is of the likelihood of atheism, not a logical proof. I can’t say from that proof that there’s a 100% chance I’m right. I’m saying that the burden of proof and the lack of proof make atheism highly likely to be true.
The reason I’m not trying to argue that there’s no chance that atheism is wrong is because anyone who claims to have 100% certainty of the origin of the universe is kidding themselves.
So from here you can either:
1. Give a positive proof of the truth of Christianity.
2. Disprove my argument that atheism is the most likely to be true, thus making agnosticism the most logical conclusion.
3. Argue that Christianity is likely true, and why.
Let me know if any of the above didn’t make sense, because the above 3 options logically follow from what I said.
Monetary Policy
The frugal mindset has helped. However, there are 1.6 trillion dollars in excess reserves, which, if banks ever resort to their historical norm of lending all excess reserves, can quickly become 16 trillion dollars in extra money, setting off a hyperinflationary spiral. When it comes to the history of paper money, what you call an “apocalyptic scenario” as though the word were a magic wand to keep trouble away, is really a regular occurrence. Some things do go up and down basically. Paper currencies, by design, always and everywhere go down.
Monopolies
AT&T, having been government supported, if it illustrates a flaw at all, illustrates a flaw in governmental meddling, not capitalism. So does Microsoft, which is a monopoly propped up by the ridiculous patent and copyright laws that our government imposes on us. Again, despite claims that monopolies jack up prices and hold prisoners hostage, Moore’s law has been able to function fine despite Microsoft.
Standard Oil’s “reign of terror” saw oil prices drop from about $6/barrel (in 2009 dollars) in the early 1870′s when Standard Oil first appeared on the scene all the way down to about $18/barrel by 1907, when Standard Oil was broken up in 1907 on charges of being a predatory monopoly. In the same time period, kerosene prices fell from somewhere in the neighborhood of $2/gallon to 6 cents/gallon. This price drop occurred despite a massive spike in demand for oil. At the time when Standard Oil was broken up by the government, it controlled less than 2/3 of market share and had 147 competitors. If this is an illustration of the fatal flaws of capitalism, you liberal folk are standing on very shaky ground. Monopoly is like the monster under the bed — one never sees it, but children tremble in fear anyhow.
The excuse that no free market has ever existed is simply a lame defense attempting to obscure the undeniable: truly predatory monopolies never, ever exist without government privilige, whether selling water or anything else. We could both paint hypothetical scenarios all day long.
Gay Marriage
I don’t think government should be involved in marriage at all. The history of government intervention in marriage is a story of unproductive meddling. In 1862, the Morrill Anti-Bigamy act allowed Congress to interfere with the religious freedom of Mormons, which created a several-decade period of witch-hunting as the Federal government interfered increasingly in the business of the state of Utah. The government also used its control of marriage laws to ban interracial marriages.
Marriage, for all the hoopla over it, is an institution which has developed organically worldwide in response to the peculiar fact that human children need intense care and, generally speaking, tend to be most efficiently and beneficially raised by cooperation between their parents. It is also designed, among other functions, to tie down men, who have an annoying habit of producing a few small children with a woman and then leaving her to care for them. For the religious, a marriage is also an entering into a covenant between the marrying parties, God, and those involved in the wedding. (“Speak now or forever hold your peace” being a vestige of the fact a church marriage is an agreement of both the marrying parties and the church to abide by certain terms.)
It is my opinion that gay marriage is an oxymoron. If two gay men want to pretend their married, that’s their own business. They are free to do that, and I am free to think and say aloud that they are making a mockery of marriage. The idea that some central authority needs to stamp its approval on marriages is highly unnatural. (This, for whatever it is worth, is also the position of my gay uncle, who can’t imagine for the life of him why men who want to have relationships with men would need to wrap themselves in an institution designed primarily for child-bearing heterosexuals.)
If you want me to, I can try to rephrase all that and push it through your nine-point seive if you like. I’m sure I could massage the reasoning around and make it work.
Christianity and Atheism
Van Til’s approach is no more negative than yours. Yours is simply dressed up differently. For the sake of argument, I’ll dress his up like what you call a positive argument. This is, of course, a gross simplification:
1. Christianity provides a basis for the essential coherence of knowledge.
2. All other systems do not.
Therefore,
If knowledge is to be coherent in any way, Christianity must be adopted as a starting-point.
I don’t buy your thoughts on negative and positive claims. Christianity is a system full of both positive and negative claims about a great number of things. So is your style of Atheism, which claims a great number of things implicitly and explicitly. Just one example is your insistence that we must, at least to some extent, care about the well-being of others. You offer this as a self-evident truth without any attempt to argue it, and similarly you offer a vague way and infinitely flexible way that we are to calculate this well-being. Oddly, though, you deny Christians the freedom to do the same. After all, a great number of people, including Til, consider the truth of God’s authority and righteous power to judge to be self-evident in the same way that your call to partial and inconsistent altruism is. As long as you are willing to allow yourself the liberty of inventing ethical principles without any proof, and as long as you deny that you all thinkers who fit in the “religious” category, there will be, as I’ve argued from the beginning, a moral gulf unbridgeable by argument between you and the 70-90% of the population that has some sort of belief in the ultimacy of religious truth.
If you really were willing to let your principle of skepticism rule all things, and therefore decided, like Sartre, that there simply was no basis for moral claims of any kind, I wouldn’t argue with you. I would leave you alone in your corner of philosophy arguing things that everybody knows are blatantly false. The only reason I am here to argue is not to compel you to believe Christianity, but to point out that your particular sort of unbelief is capriciously inconsistent.
If you want positive proofs of Christianity, I urge you to pursue the train of thought followed by N. T. Wright in his trilogy on Christian origins. To grossly simplify, as usual, we could put his argument like so:
1. The best historical explanation of a phenemenon is the one that best fits the evidence we have about it.
2. The explanation given by the early Church for the emergence of early Christianity, the rise of a first-century Jew from the dead, best fits the documentary evidence.
Therefore,
The best historical explanation for the rise of early Christianity is the rise of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead.
If I am compelled to play by your rules, the best I think I will be able to do is argue that Christianity is likely true. And, if we both choose to, we could go back and forth till doomesday with you attacking premises and myself then having to make arguments for each premise. The whole attempt to argue the truth of Christianity could easily be made to grow and grow until it is a monstrous tree with an infinity of branches.
However, I’m not worried about the task of creating an impossible proof that all will acknowledge as water-tight, because I am confident that, as the Bible claims, God has placed within all people enough knowledge of him that all non-believers know, on some level, that they are lying to themselves. This truth is the reason that a small group of conquered peasants carrying a story widely derided as impossible were able to take down the world’s most powerful empire without firing a single shot. The truths of Christianity are why Islam, a heretical variant of Christianity which nonetheless carries some of its truth, was able to sweep across all of Saudi Arabia and capture the great portions of the known world in little time at all. This truth is why Europe during the middle ages fell, one country at a time, to the relentless advance of Christianity. And this truth is the reason that Christianity is still on the march, relentlessly spreading through societies where it flies in the face of everything that secular education and cultural tradition say, with new believers taking it up even in the face of intense pressure not to, sometimes including death. The only reason this sort of spread is possible is that people in all cultures, when confronted with its message, know inwardly that it is true. And for that reason, I am confident that Christianity will win the struggle for the world’s belief regardless of whether it ever attains respectability in the intellectual world.
If I play by your ever-changing rules, it is true that I cannot produce the sort of impossible proof you demand. But I don’t see why I should be compelled to play by your rules. They’re inconsistent, and, despite your insistence that they must be adopted until such time as someone comes up with a proof of Christianity that you accept, I see no reason why the general population should be ruled by a godless, arbitrary, and inconsistent set of rules propounded most often by a fairly small group of white male college-educated Democrats.
Monopolies
Few beginning notes: It seems odd that you’re willing to blame any government intervention in the formation of monopolies, yet not the private businesses that, by nature, seek to maximize their own profits. Small side note: what part of copyright and/or patent laws are you against, or are you against them altogether?
Main focus:
To avoid hypothetical scenarios I’ll stick to basic economic laws again. Private companies with a product to sell will try to maximize their total profit. Profit can only be made by selling higher than the cost to make the product. If company A can make a product for $1, then any sale price above $1 is a profit. If company B needs $3 to make that product, then any sale price below $3 would be a loss. If company A sells their product for $2, then company B will go out of business. If company A has no competition, then they can price their product at whatever maximizes their profit. This is determined by multiplying total sales with price, minus the cost to make the product. Total sales are determined by how much people are willing to pay for a certain product (marginal benefit vs. marginal cost)
The problem with monopolies happens when that product’s marginal benefit exceeds any marginal cost. An example would be water. There is no price where water is not worth the money, so a company that has a monopoly on water maximizes their profit by charging higher and higher prices, with no natural ceiling.
My question: do you deny these economic principles? If not, how do you fix the problem?
Gay Marriage
Legally speaking, marriage is a contract that has its legal benefits (taxes, child custody, alimony, and so forth). This is the matter that is being discussed, not a religious marriage. If the Christian church does not want to recognize gay marriages as valid, then they do not have to.
As things are, the argument against gay marriage is the argument that the government should not allow legal, non-religious marriages between gay couples. To a lesser degree, the argument is about whether or not the government should recognize straight and gay couples equally.
So, ignoring religious marriages (as legal marriages do not need to go through a church or pastor), I would like you to use my ethics to argue against legally allowing gay marriage, but at the same time allowing straight marriages.
“The idea that some central authority needs to stamp its approval on marriages is highly unnatural.”
I found that quote a bit ironic, as “God does not approve of gays” is a very common argument against gay marriage.
Christianity and Atheism
“Van Til’s approach is no more negative than yours”
Exactly. But here’s the difference:
Van Til’s argument simplified:
1. Christianity is a theory that explains the basis for knowledge.
2. All other known theories of knowledge are false.
Therefore,
3. Christianity is true.
False because: As we went over, it is a logical fallacy to assume the last known theory as true once the others have been disproven. Also, this fallacy is only relevant if Van Til can completely prove #2, which he cannot.
My argument simplified:
1. There is no positive evidence for any religions.
Therefore,
2. Most likely, no religion is correct.
This conclusion asserts agnosticism. To make the jump to atheism:
1. There is no positive evidence for a deity of any sort.
Therefore,
2. Most likely, no deity exits.
That, plain and simple, is all atheism is. “most likely, no deity exists”. Any other beliefs are not atheistic by definition, even if held by an atheist. Atheism does not put forth positive beliefs of any sort, and therefore does not need to prove any.
” So is your style of Atheism, which claims a great number of things implicitly and explicitly”
This claim is critical to your comparison of my atheism with Christianity. Without this, I am able to use a negative proof to support atheism (as it does not claim any positive truths), and still consistently disprove Van Hil as Christianity does have positive claims (such as the divinity of Jesus).
“Just one example is your insistence that we must, at least to some extent, care about the well-being of others. ”
This is false. My arguments for socialist policies rely on people already having that belief, which is why I kept bringing it up (in that, if someone didn’t have that belief, my argument doesn’t work). I never tried to claim people have to have that belief. I use it as a premise in my arguments on the guess that most people already assume it to be true. For those who don’t it doesn’t apply.
So, in order to maintain your comparison between Van Hil and me, you need another positive truth claim that my atheism asserts.
“If you really were willing to let your principle of skepticism rule all thing”
I’m not sure where you found skepticism of any sort in any of my arguments?
For your positive proof of Christianity:
I’d attack premise #2. “2. The explanation given by the early Church for the emergence of early Christianity, the rise of a first-century Jew from the dead, best fits the documentary evidence.”
This premise is false because a number of other, non-supernatural explanations could have explained it. To name a few: the emergence of Christianity relied heavily on people who did not even claim to see Jesus risen from the dead, so they relied on word of mouth. The disciples could have lied about seeing Jesus in order to keep their feelings of power/importance, could have hallucinated, or simply the story could have been changed and/or edited by numerous other writers and historians before Christianity became a global religion.
Keep in mind that this argument relies entirely on the testimony of the disciples who claimed to see Jesus. On top of the above problems, you also have to consider the countless people throughout history who have claimed religious visions and gained a following (Mormons, Scientology to name the recent ones). And further, the counter-argument that the disciples died for what they believed in doesn’t work as: the story could have been written and/or changed, and further other believers of different religions have similarly martyred themselves for what they believed they saw/heard/felt.
“If I am compelled to play by your rules, the best I think I will be able to do is argue that Christianity is likely true.”
Using logic and arguments, that is the best you could hope for/all I am asking for.
As for the rest:
“God has placed within all people enough knowledge of him that all non-believers know, on some level, that they are lying to themselves.”
Definitely not true since I can say, with all honesty, that I am not lying to myself in any way/shape/form. I may be incorrect, as I am not omniscient, but there isn’t a magical feeling in me that points to Christianity or any other religion.
“This truth is the reason that a small group of conquered peasants carrying a story widely derided as impossible were able to take down the world’s most powerful empire without firing a single shot. ”
Religion is powerful, and it is a great tool. A quote I’d bring up about that: ““Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”
If you get people to believe there is an all-powerful being speaking through you, those who believe you will be strongly motivated to follow you to any end. If you get people to believe there is a place of eternal torture, they will be strongly motivated to do what you say to avoid that. If you get people to believe there is a place of eternal paradise, then they will be strongly motivated to do what you say to get that reward.
Look at any religion or cult for what I mean. Regardless of which/if any religion is true, you have to admit that there are billions of people throughout history who have devoted their entire lives to a false set of beliefs. Why do you think that happens?
“The only reason this sort of spread is possible is that people in all cultures, when confronted with its message, know inwardly that it is true.”
How do you explain people who convert from Christianity to a different religion?
A Few Words
I am tempted to apologize for the great length of the replies that follow, but I think the nature of the conversation justifies it. After all, we are simultaneously talking through a number of weighty issues. Further, while you can try to poke a hole in Christianity with a single sentence, it can take several paragraphs, especially if the matter we are dealing with is rich in detail, to respond to that sentence. And you’ve certainly given me a lot of sentences to respond to. As usual, I’ve had to prioritize in responding, and so I’ve tried to answer all your major points. If I’ve left something out, I’m willing to go back to it, and if you feel that we’ve exhausted the possible discussion on any point, I’m willing to wrap that part of the discussion up. That said, I’m glad for the opportunity, and will keep this going as long as you like.
Monopolies
It is true that private businesses do share in the causation of monopolies and cartels by constantly clamoring for governmental favors. This is true of economic actors as disparate as the American catfish industry, who profit from anti-Swai laws, and the gangsters of prohibition, who became wealthy due to the outlawry of gambling, prostitution, and especially alcohol. The reason I didn’t address the complicity of business in creating these was that, previously, we were not trying to apportion moral blame, but rather trying to figure out whether monopolies are caused, or likely ever will be caused, by lack of government oversight. The central issue at hand is whether monopolies are a “fatal flaw” of capitalism, as you maintain, or whether they are an occasional nuisance that has only ever been observed wreaking havoc when backed up by the guns of government.
Let’s play the game of trying to discover whether monopolies could form. But before we start, I want to make it clear that I acknowledge that, in certain contrived scenarios, oppressive monopolies could form. (I say oppressive monopolies because I am not concerned about the existence of a monopoly qua monopoly: if one company owned all the water and consistently sold it at reasonable prices, I wouldn’t be concerned a bit.)
In your example, company A out-competes company B. That’s fine. I’ll grant that more efficient firms continually displace less efficient firms in the marketplace. But there’s a number of theoretical barriers, in our theoretical story, that company A will have to cross.
First off, company A has to initially be able to out-price every possible competitor for its services. This is not as easy as it sounds, because while there are economies of scale for most products, there are also diseconomies of scale when a firm moves beyond a certain size. (The size varies by the situation of the industry.) With products where the means of production are dispersed willy-nilly across the planet, like water, consolidation is impossible because every rural hick has himself a well and will start pumping water out of that thing and selling it to townspeople if the municipal authorities start holding people hostage with it. Second, once company A has displaced all competitors, then it has to ensure that the product of the new higher price times the newly lowered demand is higher than the product of the old lower price times the old higher demand. With water, for example, a great deal of water conservation is possible if people feel the need to, and so to effectively hold people hostage because every human being will buy a few pints as an absolute minimum no matter what might require a very high price to compensate for lost business. On top of this issue of whether predatory monopoly would even be possible, the monopolist must also be ruthless enough to almost enslave people for money, and feel secure enough to expect that he won’t get killed by some ticked-off guy whose grandma just lost her farm to buy a gallon jar of water. On top of all this, the monopolist always has to worry, when he raises his prices, that a new competitor will appear to topple him, or that substitutes for his product will gain popularity.
In short, there are so many obstacles to the natural rise of economic monopolies that monopoly is a “fatal flaw” of capitalism in the same way that godzilla is a fatal flaw of nuclear technology. Discussing monopoly, or godzilla, as a downside of policy decisions favoring capitalism, or continued nuclear research, would be nothing more than a distraction based on the overheated imagination of someone who has the capability to create a scary story that has no basis whatsoever in fact. Both the spontaneous rise of monopolies in a market system and the creation of evil mutant creatures destroying are cities might be fun theoretical problems, but neither has a place in any realistic policy discussion. It is to the shame of the economics profession as it currently exists that undergraduates in the United States spend a lot of time drawing graphs about how policy-making can best deal with monopolies to prevent predatory pricing, but are rarely told that the predatory monopolies encountered in the real world.
As to patents and copyrights, I can understand the impulse to provide writers and other creative people with some compensation for their work. But given that 80% of the profit from a book is produced in the first three months, it seems to me that the current rule of copyright lasting for the life of the author plus 70 additional years is just ridiculous. For example, this comment I am writing would normally be subject to copyright restrictions (if my life expectancy according to insurance companies holds up) until about 2140. I would much rather scrap copyright altogether than keep the current system which keeps the economically disadvantages from freely accessing loands of information they otherwise could get their hands on. If we cannot get copyright eliminated, I would much prefer a copyright term of one year or seven years to the current situations.
Patents are a field I do not know quite as well, but based on what I have been able to find, the case for patents is entirely a theoretical one, with no empirical studies of any kind indicating that patent enriches society at large. It primarily seems to be benefitting intellectual property lawyers and companies which have learned to exploit the patent system to extract money from other companies through a variety of unfair and counterproductive tactics. What data we do have comparing patent-protected fields to non-protected fields strongly suggests that patents have not increased the pace of discovery and scientific progress. Even if they have, that upside must be weighed against the downside of making new inventions, especially life-saving medical ones, too expensive for people in need.
Gay Marriage
If you want to get right down to issues like taxes, inheritance, and visitation rights, I’d say let’s give gays the same status on these issues as anybody. (I do, though, feel that polygamists are being unfairly left out of this conversation. Why is it that so many are very sensitive about imposing their preference for heterosexuality why almost nobody has any qualms about forcing monogamy on everyone? It’s a curious inconsistency.) When it comes to children, I of course have some qualms about children being raised in a home that approves of something so opposed to Christian principles, but I’m not about to support the confiscation of children from atheists or other people who oppose Christian principles. So when it comes to child custody cases in which the biological parents cannot or will not raise their children, I would say, let the relevant authorities decide who best will raise these children. I will admit, bigoted though some might consider it, that if I was one of those authorities, I would take moral considerations as one factor among several in custody issues.
If a “civil unions” bill was well-crafted, I would possibly vote for it. If a bill came along getting the government out of the business of certifying marriages, I would definitely vote for it. But if a bill comes proposing that government use the term “marriage” to describe gay relationships, I will vote against it. The reason I would vote against it is the same reason that some gay activists prefer “gay marriage” bills to “civil unions” bills, even if the two bills confer the same rights/priviliges. The fact of the mattter is that symbolic actions have repercussions, and I am simply unwilling to assent to the public sanctioning of gay relationships as morally equivalent to a heterosexual marriage. (And, let’s not kid ourselves, any policy that calls gay relationships “marriage” is doing just that.) Remember that in Judeo-Christian views of historical causation, the moral statements of a country have massive repercussions for that countries welfare.
Christianity, Atheism, and Altruism
Van Til. Til Til Til Til Til. Every time I think we have finally come to the bottom of our Christian/atheist disagreement, we seem to find an even bottomer bottom. What I’d like to focus on most of all is this bit of our interchange:
“Just one example is your insistence that we must, at least to some extent, care about the well-being of others. ”
This is false. My arguments for socialist policies rely on people already having that belief, which is why I kept bringing it up (in that, if someone didn’t have that belief, my argument doesn’t work). I never tried to claim people have to have that belief. I use it as a premise in my arguments on the guess that most people already assume it to be true. For those who don’t it doesn’t apply.
So, in order to maintain your comparison between Van Hil [sic] and me, you need another positive truth claim that my atheism asserts.
Here you make a distinction without a difference. It is self-evidently false that you are perfectly willing to let each individual make up his mind about altruism. If, for example, Howard Ahmanson Jr. decided, on the grounds of philosophical differences, to withhold a portion of his taxes equal to what percentage would have been spent on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, it is my understanding that your policy is to forcibly take his wealth and use it for altruistic purposes. Your argument does not rely on people already believing what you believe about altruism. It relies on you and those who agree with you using the government’s monopoly on physical violence (the original monopoly that begets the others) to force your beliefs on other people. To claim that your position relies on people already believing what you believe is, assuming as I do that you are being as honest as you can about this, self-deception, which we’ll get back to in a bit.
Eye-Witnesses to Early Christianity
I think you over-emphasize the reliance of early Christianity on people who did not even claim to have seen the risen Jesus. Christianity, from the beginning, was a religion based on an arguably impossible claim made by alleged eyewitnesses. The Christian movement contained a large number of early disputes about several important issues, but one thing tied all the early Christians together: insistence upon the historical factuality of a single event seen by many witnesses. Christianity rises or falls on the veracity of eyewitness claims.
To illustrate the importance of documenting eye-witness claims to early Christianity, let’s take for example 1 Corinthians, a letter which is acknowledged by scholars Christian and non-Christian as indisputably the work of Paul, and almost certainly written between 53 and 57 AD in Ephesus and sent to Corinth, 180 miles away. Neither city is in Palestine, the homeland of the Christian movement, and so within two decades, easily during the lives of many of its founders, Christianity had already become an international religion. Even at this early date, after Christianity had spread a good distance and had become established in a number of major commercial centers, Paul made certain to reference eyewitnesses. Here 1 Corinthians 15:3-9, Paul reminds the Corinthian church of what he had taught a few years earlier:
For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received, how Christ died for our sin according to the Scriptures, 4 and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. 5 And that he was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve: 6 After that, he was seen by more than five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part are still living, but some have died. 7 After that, he was seen by James; then all of the apostles. 8 And last of all he was seen by me also, as by one born out of due time.
It is no small thing that Paul claims at least three hundred living witnesses, out of more than 500 originally, to the appearance of a man who had been publicly executed beforehand. In a world as well-traveled as the Mediterranean, and with growing official interest in Christianity, it would have been suicide for Paul to have invented 500 eye-witnesses and then practically invited anyone to go interview them as to whether they all simultaneously saw the risen Christ. (It is also worthy of note that in all the records we have of the early church, both by Christians and non-Christians, we see no sign of any Christians recanting their story, and no sign of any authorities every challenging the facts of the resurrection. All the earliest challenges to Christianity were challenges of physical superiority, not of debate.) In light of this, let’s examine the plausibility of your alternative explanations for the rise of early Christianity:
Your Three Alternatives to the Resurrection
1.) The disciples could have lied about seeing Jesus in order to keep their feelings of power/importance.
Fair enough, but there’s a few considerations which point in the opposite direction. First, the early Christian movement was a lower-class movement, persecuted severely and often from a fairly early date. There is no indication that a single one of the twelve apostles, and Paul, died a natural death. They were all killed, with many beaten and imprisoned in the years preceding their deaths. Paul’s experience more or less stands in for the experience of the early church when he said, in 2 Corinthians 11:24,
Are they servants of Christ. I speak as a fool: I am more — in labors more abundant, in stripes beyond measure, in prisons more frequent, and have faced death often. From the Jews I have five times received the forty stripes minus one. [A reference to the Jewish practice of limiting any judicial beatings at 39 strikes.] Three times I was because with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I have suffered a shipwreck; a night and a day I have been at sea. 26 In my journeys I have often been in danger of waters, in danger of robbers, in danger of my own countrymen, in dangers among the gentiles, in dangers in the city, in dangers in the wilderness, in dangers in the sea, in dangers among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness, often going nights sleepless, in hunger and thirst, often fasting. I have been cold and naked. And besides these things which come at me from without I am concerned every day for the churches.
These are not the lives of people using stories to hold power. If they were doing it to cling to some sort of superiority, it is an amazing length they went to. The plausibility of hundreds of people, a great many of them put to death for their faith, without a single person recanting is, to my mind, highly doubtful.
2.) They could have hallucinated.
The confidence of the early Christian movement, and the universality of the claims made, is inconsistent with the known characteristics of hallucinations. The people who have hallucinations of recently dead people almost always realize that what they are seeing does not have physical materiality, while the united testimony of the many early witnesses in Christianity were all of a very different nature. The ancient world was quite familiar with the topic of hallucinations, but what the early Christians described was entirely inconsistent with what we should expect in case of hallucination. For a more thorough treatment of the hallucination theory, and of the historical evidence concerning the Resurrection in general, I recommend to you the British historian N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, which is easily the most complete work on the topic to date.
3.) Or simply the story could have been changed and/or edited by numerous other writers and historians before Christianity became a global religion.
Of all three options, this one is the most impossible of all. Christianity was an international religion united sround the beief in Jesus’ physical resurrection, by 50 AD, a mere twenty years after the crucifixion of Jesus. Because the international explosion of Christianity occurred within the lifetimes of Jesus’ first followers, and because it was spread by those followers, it is impossible that the basic story of Jesus’ death and resurrection could have been the product of editorial work done to radicalize a more believable earlier religious movement. Whether Christianity is true or not, the most radical components of it were present from the very beginning, presented by a group of people who considered themselves eyewitnesses and were willing to die for this reason.
Other Religious Movements
I have considered the fact that other religious movements have claimed divine visions and gained followers, and what I have noticed in surveying them is that none of them are comparable to Christianity in this way.
Just to name the two you’ve noted, let’s compare the eye-witnesses in Mormonism and Scientology to those of Christianity.
When we compare the rise of Christianity to Mormonism, one of the first things we notice is the extreme differences in the quality of the witnesses. Take, for example, the difference between the behavior of Joseph Smith, who claimed to see visions of angels, and the behavior of the early Christians. The early Christians, even according to the people who put them to death, are acknowledged to have devoted themselves to the care of widows and orphans, to have held themselves to higher standards of morality than were prevalent in the societies around them, and to have suffered greatly for their faith. Joseph Smith, on the other hand, was frequently in legal troubles before and after his revelations due to a variety of allegedly fraudulent ventures. He also took great advantage of his position as a religious leader, taking his followers away from the mainstream of society to live under his leadership, living as a king, and taking at least thirty-three wives to himself, at least eight of whom were less then eighteen years old, two of them being fourteen years old. Of these women, at least eleven were originally wives of Smith’s followers, whom he took for his own use as his rightful privilige. In contrast, the early church forbad polygamists from taking leadership positions in any congregation, and the leadership lived in poverty until they were killed.
Unlike the early church, in which a great number of people saw the central vision — the risen Jesus of Nazareth — Smith’s visions were given only to him, and he was, he tells us, commanded to destroy the evidence when he was done. Other than himself, all he had were the “Eight Witnesses” who signed a statement claiming to have seen the plates of the Book of Mormon, including the smaller sub-group of “Three Witnesses” who claimed to have heard a voice from heaven announcing the genuiness of the plates. All three witnesses later left the movement, including Oliver Cowdery, who admitted when he rejoined orthodox Christianity that the whole thing was a sham. Speaking of the three men, Smith later claimed that he wished they could be forgotten. Note that all three of these men left the movement without any outside pressure, in marked contrast to the legions of early Christians who stuck it out to death. Joseph Smith died in a gunfight, despite having claimed that no one had power to kill him; in contrast to the early Christians, who are known for emphasizing their own human frailty and going to their deaths willingly. There’s no comparison.
As to Scientology, it shares similar characteristics to the Mormon faith. Its leader was a man who profited greatly from his work, and, like the Mormon Church, the leaders of Scientology have been massively enriched by the large financial contributions that they demand of their followers.
Martyrs
You note that martyredoms could have been lied about. Sure — I’ll grant you that no single martyrdom could be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt in court. Any one of the apostles’ deaths could be misrecorded, I suppose. But no matter how you look at the data, one fact emerges undisputed: from the very earliest times, and continued for centuries, Christians were dropping like flies, often put to death in extremely painful ways, for their beliefs, and they remained certain of them even in the face of death. The fact that this persecution started early is clear from, among others, Paul, who admits to his own shame that he was killing Christians before his conversion, which occurred some time in the 30′s AD.
You insist that other similar martyrdoms have occurred throughout history as people died for what they believed they “saw/heard/felt.” The word “felt” at the end of that sentence muddles the issue — Christianity is not founded upon the feelings of the early Christians, but rather upon what they claim to have seen. I don’t know of any comparable situation in which a large number of people, making no attempt to gain political power, died for something they claimed they saw. Ever. Certainly the early Islamic martyrs, who died attempting to conquer neighboring lands, are not to be classed next to the Christian martyrs. Deaths in a war for land and treasure are in an entirely different league from the deaths of Christian martyrs. I don’t know any Hindu martyrs of that sort, or Buddhists. Where are these other martyrs you speak of? I suspect that they are hanging out with those predatory monopolists we can’t seem to find.
The Thoughts and Imaginations of the Heart
“God has placed within all people enough knowledge of him that all non-believers know, on some level, that they are lying to themselves.”
Definitely not true since I can say, with all honesty, that I am not lying to myself in any way/shape/form. I may be incorrect, as I am not omniscient, but there isn’t a magical feeling in me that points to Christianity or any other religion.
This is one of the discussions I least like to have, partially because I have seen firsthand how arrogant it is for someone else to tell me what is going on in my own mind. My over-riding instinct, above all else, it to simply say what it is my mind and to try to get others to explain what is in their own. But the Bible is clear in its statements about the reasons for belief and unbelief, and therefore, as a believer, I am bound by what it says. And this is what the Bible says about unbelief, according to John 3:20 (not just there but elsewhere; this verse is not isolated on this issue):
For everyone who does evil hates the light, nor does he come to the light, lest his deeds be rebuked.
The gospel makes some extremely uncomfortable claims, especially about the problem of sin. It makes excruciating demands on people — there are compelling reasons that people should want to run from it, and John declares disbelief is motivated by a desire to cover one’s own guilt. Becoming a Christian, for those who take it seriously, is in a very real sense a dying to oneself. It hurts at times. As people are creatures who are deeply concerned with the idea of justify their actions (notice, for example, what you are doing with your philosophy major), the need to self-justify is so strong that it prevents full honesty. Whether it is by a magical feeling, a troubled conscience, or whatever it might be — I am not willing to play amateur psychologist here — it is the teaching of Christianity that you are, in some manner unknown to myself, suppressing the truth within yourself. Romans puts it this way (chapter 1):
For the wrath of God is shown from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; because what may be known of God is shown within them; because God has showed it to them. For the invisible things about him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood the things that are made: his eternal power and deity; so that they are without excuse: because, when they were aware of God, they did not glorify him as God, nor were they thankful; but they became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
Now that I’ve denounced your motives, I need to admit a bit about mine. I, like many, was raised in a Christian home, and from toddlerhood believed what I was told about Christianity. I did not come to my beliefs through dispassionate contemplation of syllogisms (then again, nobody does). As a child and teenager I learned a great deal of biblical material, and socially the majority of people I spend time with are of similar beliefs. I have absolutely nothing to gain by becoming an atheist, but I have a great deal to lose, not just in spiritual terms but in the life right here, where I would alienate a great number of people to varying extents if I abandoned the faith. We both, as it happens, have something to lose personally if we are wrong about our religious stance. Please don’t take my comments on self-deception as an attempt to win the argument by tarring your character. I simply need to explain why it is that I refuse to take the statements you make about your own mind at face value.
If you get people to believe there is an all-powerful being speaking through you, those who believe you will be strongly motivated to follow you to any end. If you get people to believe there is a place of eternal torture, they will be strongly motivated to do what you say to avoid that. If you get people to believe there is a place of eternal paradise, then they will be strongly motivated to do what you say to get that reward.
I don’t think this quote has much relevance to the dawn of the Jewish and Christian traditions. A careful reading of the Old Testament will reveal little to no concept anywhere of eternal torture for the wicked, and the description of the future reward of the righteous is fuzzy enough that when Jesus came it was still a very live topic of debate between the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection and indeed no angels, and the Pharisees, who believed in both. Despite this disagreement, Judaism in its various forms managed to spread widely. More than four hundred years before Jesus, probably before the Old Testament took its final form, there was already a Temple to the Jewish God YHWH in Egypt. By the time of Jesus, there were converts to Judaism in most if not all the major cities of the Roman Empire. Judaism was not founded and spread on threats of hell. Similarly, there was disagreement among at least some early Christians as to the nature of hell. Origen, saw the suffering of hell as temporary; while the Eastern Orthoox, to the best of my knowledge, do not and possibly have never believed in hell in the way that Protestants and Catholics do, and both Origen and the Eastern Orthodox fought for and successfully helped to spread Christianity widely.
The use of heaven and hell as a manipulative device is, I will admit, something people have done, and often to the shame of Christendom, but I do not think you can accurately characterize the spread of Judaism and Christianity as a sort of emotional blackmail based on the notion of eternal torture verses eternal bliss. Such a presentation may be what I hear when I walk out onto the Oval, but Christianity as of 40 AD is a different critter from, say, what you might hear on the Oval here at OSU when the sun is out and the street preacher are damning girls in miniskirts to hell. Strains of Christianity and Judaism which do not utilize the threat of an eternal torture chamber have been able to spread just fine.
How do I explain people who convert from Christianity to a different religion? I don’t claim to be able to see into their minds, but I do believe what both Jesus and Paul have said about people who abandon Christianity: they’re engaged in self-deception just like those who never accept it. They are running from the demanding and threatening authority of God. That little bit is all the “explanation” I have.
The Central Political Point about Neutrality
The reason this religion discussion started, if you remember, was not in order to corner you into admitting the truth of Christianity. It was merely to point out that, for serious Christians, any demand that Christianity makes in the political realm will create a point over which argument is impossible with you. And, as I hope I have demonstrated, whether Christianity is true or not there are reasons that some intelligent people believe it is. Given this situation, there is no option way for the unbeliever withdraw among the perhaps 12% of the population which has no theistic belief and try to make policy for the country. In a democratic nation, this is impossible, and the only option you have if your theories are to be the basis for government is to in some way subvert the will of the people and institute an elitist rule by means of what Gramsci would call cultural hegemony. Any other approach to politics is either doomed to failure or will require that anyone who wants serious power, whether religious or not, learn to talk politics in religious terms when necessary.
Any attempt to create a religiously neutral politics is either a mirage or a temporary arrangement designed for expediency. To expect anything else is to fail to comprehend the multitude of ways that religious belief colors the lives of its adherents. Your proposal of a neutral politic is only feasible for those self-identified Christians who are so doubtful about their beliefs that they fear to act upon them. It is utterly impossible for the sort of believers who are confident that they are more answerable to God above than to your vague theories of rights.
And so let’s return to your quote from pseudo-Seneca. If he is right, and the wise know that religion is false, the masses believe in it, and the rulers use it, you, the wise, have a bit of a demographics problem on your hands. It seems that the less wise portions of society are having larger numbers of children in direct proportion to how religious their Weltenschauung is, while the wiser portions have less and less children the less religious they are. The rulers, of both parties, know that they must use religion or perish, because politics is a religious battleground. People get on Bush for being too religious, but Obama’s use of religion has been even more prodigious. They are both willing to let religion into the discussion. All who still hold to the illusion that religion can be effectively disqualified by definition from the public discourse are, ironically, excluding themselves from access to the minds of the masses, and leaving politics in the hands of people with no such illusions.
Opening
Don’t worry about it being too long, I definitely prefer a detailed argument/explanation so I don’t have to guess at what you mean at any point.
Monopolies
I wasn’t talking so much moral blame, as there are plenty of immoral businessmen and politicians wherever we would want to look. The “blame” I was talking about is about who caused the monopoly, whether or not it was immoral for them to do so.
As for our main discussion, I feel we can actually wrap this up as I don’t think we disagree on much left.
“I want to make it clear that I acknowledge that, in certain contrived scenarios, oppressive monopolies could form. ”
That’s basically the only point that I was going for, so I’m satisfied with that. You are right in that it is incredibly difficult, but it isn’t as impossible as Godzilla. I think a better analogy would be that monopolies are to capitalism as deaths are to athletic sports-rare occurrences but definitely worth planning around through better safety standards and such.
I don’t really want to debate the likelihood of a monopoly, as I agree that it is small and arguing over how small wouldn’t really get anywhere. So the last point I guess, which goes with the point you agreed on earlier: if a monopoly were to form, and it is oppressive, it is just for the government to interfere for the benefit of its citizens. If you agree with that, I don’t think we disagree on much else.
(note: Even with a small percentage of possibility, a monopoly would still be a “fatal flaw” of capitalism if it became oppressive and the government did not interfere. It wouldn’t have to happen immediately, but it would happen sometime)
About patents and copyrights: That’s an interesting view. I guess I’d agree that the copyright for lifetime +70 years is excessive, though I think one year is a bit too short. As for patents, I wouldn’t support getting rid of patents altogether, as patents are often the most valuable thing new companies have to get started. Though there is a lot of abuse with the current system, especially in medicine as you say.
Gay Marriage
Quick note: In theory, I have no problem with polygamy so long as they are all consenting adults. So yeah, I’d agree that they should have the same rights. I’m a bit hesitant to fully endorse legalizing polygamy in the real world as I feel societies that promote one man many women polygamy put women in a lower social class. If not though, I have no issue with it.
“The fact of the mattter is that symbolic actions have repercussions, and I am simply unwilling to assent to the public sanctioning of gay relationships as morally equivalent to a heterosexual marriage.”
That is exactly why civil unions are not equal to marriages, and why gay rights advocates demand the word “marriage”. Treating them as legally inferior is wrong, and giving them the same “rights” with a different name doesn’t do any more justice than “separate but equal” did.
Though the reason gay marriage was brought up was to see if you could use my ethical system to argue for a view I claimed it doesn’t, so I’m still interested to see if you can.
Christianity, Atheism, Altruism
Quick, but necessary, note: My arguments for laws are based in my ethical views, not my atheist view. Anything on top of “God most likely does not exist” is not an atheist view.
As for your point (though this is an ethics argument, not a religious one):
My argument only works if the person I am arguing with agrees with the premise that “other peoples lives have value”. When arguing with you, I used that premise because I did not think you would reject it. But the goal of this argument was to argue what the government should do about ____, not demand that everyone agree with either of us.
As for your case, there are several potential “debates” that are all relevant:
1. Should the government be allowed to collect taxes?
2. Should the government be allowed to enforce tax collection?
3. Should the government be allowed to use the collected taxes for altruistic purposes?
Arguing against either 1 or 2 would be fruitless. In order to justify Howard Abrahamson’s decision, you’d have to argue against 3, and that would be a difficult argument to win.
What you can’t argue though is that individual taxpayers should be able to choose which taxes they support, and therefore which ones they’ll pay. The nature of government is that people’s money will go to causes that they don’t support, such as medicare and war. But you have to either argue against the entity entirely or accept it, you can’t treat it as a person to person basis.
As for what I think your main point is (that the government will enforce opinions that people don’t agree with): this is entirely true, and I don’t see a way around it. The ethical debates are simply to argue what the government should do. Most of these debates rely on the assumption of valuing others, but individual cases that don’t agree do not nullify the premise altogether as most taxpayers would agree.
The hidden point I think you’re making (that this ethical enforcement is no different than religious enforcement): this is wrong simply because religious freedom is a right guaranteed by the constitution. The freedom to not have any ideas that you don’t agree govern you is not a right. Right or wrong, religious views have always been treated differently than regular ideas, and the right to your own personal religious views has been held much more sacred than other views.
Early Witnesses to Christianity
“but one thing tied all the early Christians together: insistence upon the historical factuality of a single event seen by many witnesses”
Actually, I don’t know how accurate the “many witnesses part may be”. In Matthew/Luke/John, I believe all that is mentioned is Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene and another woman, two men who didn’t recognize him, and then the disciples. The “500 people” is only referenced by Paul-who may have written the letter before the gospels, but he didn’t even claim to have seen Jesus. In fact, he persecuted people who believed in Jesus until he claimed to have a vision.
It is possible that the gospels left it out entirely that there were so many witnesses, but that seems pretty odd. Also, it isn’t risk to falsely claim 500 witnesses unless he mentioned each by name and city, which he did not. Further, he would have no method to know whether or not “witnesses” were telling him the truth of seeing Jesus, he would have had to just trust whoever told him that they saw Jesus.
“Whether Christianity is true or not, the most radical components of it were present from the very beginning, presented by a group of people who considered themselves eyewitnesses and were willing to die for this reason.”
I’m curious as to what proof you have of this. I am by no means claiming this theory to be true, but I have heard an explanation that the gospels were greatly altered by the early church and/or Emperor Constantine for various reasons. What proof is there that this didn’t happen?
The hallucination theory is implausible to happen to everybody, granted, but not to one single person, such as Paul. Of all the early Christians, his testimony is the most susceptible to the hallucination objection.
Other religious movements-there was plenty of corruption in Christianity’s history as well. Crusades, using “heaven/hell” to keep peasants in check. Not to mention the common theme in all religions-money. Tithing/offerings are plenty of motivation for corruption, regardless of which religion it is.
Martyrs
Other martyrs:
A historical Ephraim ben Yaakov (1132 – AD. 1200) describes Crusaders’ massacres of Jews, including the massacre at Blois, where approximately forty Jews were killed following an accusation of ritual murder:
“As they were led forth, they were told, ‘You can save your lives if you will leave your religion and accept ours.’ The Jews refused. They were beaten and tortured to make them accept the Christian religion, but still they refused. Rather, they encouraged each other to remain steadfast and die for the sanctification of God’s Name.”
” Certainly the early Islamic martyrs, who died attempting to conquer neighboring lands, are not to be classed next to the Christian martyrs”
Actually, in Islam, fighting in the name of religion is considered martyrdom. And there are countless examples of this throughout history, where people went to war to spread Islam/Christianity. If you think this doesn’t count, ask yourself this: to the common soldier, which is a better motivator to die for war: to spread political control or to please an all-powerful God? Also, modern day terrorists die in the name of their religion. They see themselves as martyrs.
The general point: People have died for their beliefs in more than just Christianity. Being “sure” to the point of death is not proof of the beliefs validity. Keep in mind that a lot of the early Christian martyrs, Paul especially, did not personally see Jesus’ resurrection.
Inner Motives
Don’t worry, I know that doctrine pretty well and I know it’s Christian doctrine. Going back and forth on it would get us nowhere, but I am curious: if, ultimately, I do not have those inner beliefs (meaning I am not, as the Bible claims, denying any truth), would that prove those verses wrong? From this, would that potentially prove the falseness of the Bible?
It’s a bit of an odd point, but I am curious. If you consider those verses to be written by God, and that falsity would point to the falsity of religion, then it puts you at an odd position. Basically, it puts you at an odd dilemma:
1. I actually have those inner beliefs-> verse is correct -> Bible is true
2. I don’t actually have those inner beliefs -> verse is incorrect -> Bible is false
Without arguing which one is true, do you accept that chain of logic?
Quick note about heaven and hell: I was referring to the spread and sustainability of the giant religions over the past 1000 or so years mainly. Though this does bring up an interesting point: if, as you claim and I believe to be true, the doctrine of heaven/hell emerged later in Christianity, do you believe in heaven/hell? If so, to what extent?
In summary: in order for your positive proof of Christianity to work, you have a lot of needs:
1. You need eyewitness accounts (which is not a slam dunk case)
2. You need proof that the accounts weren’t doctored by historians/early church people.
3. You need Paul to be considered reliable, even though he didn’t even claim to be there.
And even then, you have to prove that those eyewitnesses are more reliable than other martyrs who were similarly sure of their beliefs.
From there, if you somehow manage to successfully prove it all, all you have is the case that Jesus died then was seen again. A pretty good fact for a religion, but it doesn’t entail the entire Bible.
The Central Political Point about Neutrality
Your argument makes a few fallacies:
1. What we have currently isn’t necessarily the correct thing (meaning it isn’t right for current/past presidents to impose religion)
2. The “majority rules” doctrine doesn’t work. Otherwise, racial segregation wouldn’t have been wrong.
We’ve already gone over all these points over and over, so I’ll keep it simple:
1. We either have a freedom of religion or we don’t.
2. If we have a freedom of religion, then laws cant legally impose religious views.
What can be imposed then?
As mentioned earlier in this reply, we don’t have a freedom from imposing of any sort. We don’t have a right not to be taxed, we don’t have the right not to have laws imposed on us. But so long as we have a right to choose our own religion freely, we have a right not to have religious laws imposed on us.
This creates a sort of dilemma, that we obviously take two different stances on:
Either we need to leave religion out of politics to protect the freedom of religion, or we can’t expect people to be able to separate religion from their political views.
I’ve already shown how people can separate religion from politics (by focusing on what we do agree on, and leaving religious values to private life). You claim this is an unreasonable demand, but countless Christians already do so.
So my question is: do you propose we eliminate the freedom of religion, or can we expect people to separate religion from politics?
Monopolies
As to monopolies, John, I still can’t see any validity in your complaint that I have not pinned enough of the blame (moral or causal) for monopolies on private businesses. Until I can find a single oppressive monopoly anywhere not imposed by the government I’m not going to pretend I think it’s a business-generated phenomenon. If you want to cease arguing about the likelihood that’s fine, and it’s what I expect, given your inability to produce a single instance of what you fear coming to pass. In my mind its not at all in the same ballpark as athletic deaths, and we definitely disagree as to whether planning for it is justified, as it is my contention that the fear of monopolies is one of the fears that has been used to justify, in whole or in part, things as various as minor annoyances in the organic food sector by the US government’s anti-monopoly bureaucracy to the slaughter of 80 million in the USSR, which was only possible due to the ability of the communist government to take over Russia by promoting widespread fear of a variety of “fatal flaws of capitalism,” including, among others, “monopoly capitalists.” Any notion that our disagreement over monopolies is merely a matter of words and degrees is an absolute distortion. We remain on opposite ends, no matter how much you try to portray my statements as some sort of support for your position. And, as long as it’s clear that we have not in any way reached anything like an agreement on monopoly, I’m willing to let it drop.
Christianity, Atheist, Altruism
Our think our entire disagreement on this section can be found in one sentence you’ve written: “Right or wrong, religious views have always been treated differently than regular ideas, and the right to your own personal religious views has been held much more sacred than other views.”
It is my belief that the division you think exists between “religious views” and “regular views” does not, in fact, exist. I do not believe that human beings can live in any permanent way while operating according to two ethical standards, one “religious” and one “regular.” You see such a division as a natural beginning point for life in a pluralistic society. I see it as a mirage, a sort of intellectual schizophrenia only maintained in a modern pluralism that is nothing more than a temporary cease-fire.
Gay Marriage
I’m glad you have seen that the central problem is symbolic. While I would prefer that government is not in charge of the symbol of marriage, unfortunately in today’s world it has hijacked the status of marriage-giver, and so I am primarily given the choice between having my values imposed on others or haivng others’ values imposed on me.
Now, my natural inclination, generally speaking, is toward an attitude of laissez-faire — you do your thing and I’ll do my thing, and we’ll leave each other alone. But if I am forced into a corner in the ballot booth where I can only choose between imposing my views on others or letting others impose their views on me, I am not politically suicidal. Given only those two options, I will impose my views on others every single time.
In terms of gay marriage, we’re both trying to do the same thing — to force the other to live under our rules. It’s unpleasant, but I won’t pretend that’s not the case, regardless of your efforts to try to talk me into doing otherwise.
The longer this conversation goes, the more certain I am becoming that you simply do not have an ethical system, but rather pieces of a variety of systems all sewed together in a highly unsystematic fashion: the Bible, the Constitution, Marx, Rawls, Rousseau, feminist thinkers, and a variety of pop-culture notions and simplficiations that Americans use to define themselves. I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re even asking me to do with gay rights, and I’ve got no idea at all why I would want to use your decidedly unmethodical methods to argue against gay marriage.
Early Witnesses to Christianity
To argue the exact details of the documentary evidence for or against the resurrection of Jesus is a subject that has filled entire books. If you want, I’ll read any book on it you choose if you’ll read any book on it I choose, and then we can talk. Otherwise, I’m simply not interested in producing an amateur version online of a debate that has gone on between much abler and better qualified minds on both sides of the issue.
If the gospels were significantly distorted by the early church, it would have had to have happened at an extremely early date, before they were in very wide circulation. Certainly no major change in them after Constantine is possible, and the idea that there were is only believed among a few conspiracy nuts who are either ignorant of or dishonest about the extensive documentary evidence we have of the gospel contents pre-Constantine.
I won’t argue that Christianity’s history has been free of corruption and control. I know the history of my own religion better than to try that.
Martyrs
My central thesis is this: the death of people who are not seeking political power, on account of their unshakeable conviction of having witnessed an event widely considered implausible, is unique. None of the examples you have pointed out share that characteristic, and so I consider them nothing more than destractions to the central argument on this.
Of course I know what is considered martyrdom in Islam. I don’t live under a rock. Modern day terrorists, though they speak of and die in the name of religion, are participating in a phenemenon not even remotely comparable to the death of the early Christian martyrs. Suicide bombing is a political tactic that emerges only under very specific political conditions, in both Muslim and non-Muslim environments. Predictably, it dresses itself up as religious in Muslim environments and does not do so in non-Muslim environments. Focusing on the religious motivation of suicide bombing is one unfortunate tactic of the right to keep people whipped up in fear of Islam. For a pretty good analysis of the real sociological dynamics of suicide bombers, see Robert A. Pape’s enlightening study, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
Inner motives
1. I actually have those inner beliefs-> verse is correct -> Bible is true
2. I don’t actually have those inner beliefs -> verse is incorrect -> Bible is false
Without arguing which one is true, do you accept that chain of logic?
Not quite. First, note that I do not mean that you actually knew internally all the truths of Christianity in all their fullness, or anything like that. All I am convinced of is that you have a certain level of internal awareness that you are lying to yourself about Christianity, or that you once had the awareness and then squashed it out like someone destroying a nerve by ignoring its pain signals too long. Second, I always have to recognize that I could be misunderstanding what the Bible is saying — though in this case I am quite confident that I am not.
No matter how many parts of a case for Christianity I may establish, you can always demand that any of those sub-points must be proved in greater detail for Christianity to be true, and you can do this indefinitely. Neither I nor you really think that an idea has to be explained to the full satisfaction of its critics before it can be implemented — you do, however, seem to demand that standard for ideas you perceive as “religious.” This is where you have created an untenable double standard in your treatment of what you call “religious views.” In particular, your continued insistence that religious people treat their religious views as uncertain is particularly odd.
The Central Political Point
1. We either have a freedom of religion or we don’t.
2. If we have a freedom of religion, then laws cant legally impose religious views.
This two-point summary you believe is, to my mind, an absolute distortion based on an unrealistic simplification of the real word we live in. First, your claim that we either have freedom of religion or we don’t, is simply untrue. In every society, throughout the entire world, there has always been some leeway when it comes to what one can believe and practice religiously, but there have always been limits on what one can believe and practice religiously. In other words, a more accurate statement would be,
We always both have freedom of religion and we don’t — the critical question is how much of each our society allows and imposes.
As to the second statement, you go back again to the idea that there is a definable body of “non-religious” views one can impose and a definable body of “religious” views one must not impose. The trouble with that is that which views fit in which categories is an entirely arbitrary thing. As it exists today, that distinction is primarily a made-up one the left uses to morally coerce conservatives into cooperating on abortion, gay rights, or any other issue that secularists want to push. Many Christians have indeed allowed themselves, at least to some extent, be cowed into being private Christians and public atheists. That intellectual schizeophrenia cannot last — eventually they will pick sides. The rise of the modern religious right, and the large numbers of people raised by such schizo Christians who are simply abandoning the Church altogether, is an indicator that, overall, they are indeed in the process of picking sides. As they continue to do so the illusion of neutrality will keep on fading. And, I firmly believe, the Christians will win because they have greater numbers, a more organized ideology, and a greater motivation to win.
In response to your final question, which is really two different questions, my answer to both questions is a simple “No,” each qualified in different ways.
Monopolies
Well if we are this far apart, I don’t want to end the debate just yet. So I’ll reconstruct the argument and I want to find the points you disagree with me on.
First off, real world examples are null because we aren’t debating about the practicality of real world governments. I’ve been operating under the assumption that you are arguing for complete laissez-faire capitalism. The United States has never been a completely laissez faire government, so any past monopolies that have risen could be blamed on private people, corporate policy, and government policy.
My argument has been that, in a laissez-faire system, monopolies are a realistic possibility. I’ve already gone over the economic principles that show how it is possible, and you’ve already admitted that ““I want to make it clear that I acknowledge that, in certain contrived scenarios, oppressive monopolies could form. ””
So maybe I misunderstood you, but it seems that that statement is an admission that oppressive monopolies could form in a laissez faire society. That’s where I thought we agreed.
From here, my question is: is it just for the government, in a hypothetical situation of an oppressive monopoly, to intervene on behalf of its citizens?
If you say yes to this and the above question, then you’ve agreed to the only two points I’ve been trying to make. If not, we can debate from here.
Christianity, Atheism, Altruism
A few implications of what you said:
Tax breaks for religious organizations would disappear entirely.
Religious views that are not based in provable fact would be looked down on, from a political standpoint especially, as much as wild assertions backed by no provable facts.
The main point of this debate has to deal with religion in politics, so a lot of my response will be later in my reply.
However, there is one point I need to make. Ignoring politics for now, and focusing solely on an individual’s mindset, there absolutely has to be a divide between religious beliefs and regular views. To blur the two is to blur the line between reality and fantasy, and to say people cannot intelligibly tell the difference is wrong.
I don’t even need Christianity to be false for this argument to work. If your religious views are correct, then Muslims are all wrong. As are Jews, Scientologists, Hindus, and Mormons. What you are saying is that all these believers, who have demonstrably false views (if Christianity is correct), cannot tell the difference between their false beliefs based in no objective facts and their knowledge about reality.
Further, the only thing I need to separate religious views and regular views is this question: for any given belief/assertion (to be clear, I’m talking only about beliefs of facts, not opinions or anything subjective), can you acknowledge the realistic possibility that you could be wrong?
For regular facts, this acknowledgement isn’t necessary. There are some theories that have been proven wrong, and others that cannot yet be considered objective fact, but ideas such as “the earth revolves around the sun” and such do not require the acknowledgement of a possibility of being wrong.
Religious views, on the other hand, are the best example of views that any intellectually honest person must be able to admit could be wrong. I know the doctrine of faith demands that beliefs be seen as objective fact, but it isn’t hard to see the fact that most people with beliefs, by simple rules of contradiction, are completely wrong. There is, and always should be, a strong distinction between these types of beliefs and objective facts.
Gay Marriage
“In terms of gay marriage, we’re both trying to do the same thing — to force the other to live under our rules. It’s unpleasant, but I won’t pretend that’s not the case, regardless of your efforts to try to talk me into doing otherwise.”
This claim is ridiculous. Gay marriage, if legalized, would in no way impose its “beliefs” on you. You do not have to acknowledge gay couples as moral. Churches do not have to acknowledge gay marriages as equal before God. Marriage, in this debate, is an entirely secular matter in the same way a marriage between atheists is. I would really like to see how you can justify the “gay marriage imposes its view on me” argument, especially to the extent that your views are imposing on gay couples (actively prohibiting them from taking certain actions/having certain rights”.
As for my ethical system, you seem to be forgetting what started this section of the debate. I’ve already listed what my ethical view is in step by step points, and I have not once strayed from it. Here it is again, quoted exactly from a previous reply:
“1. The ultimate goal of ethics is to promote human welfare.
2. The best way to promote human welfare is at a universal level, not individual.
3. To promote human welfare at a universal level, you establish/promote human rights that enhance quality of life.
4. Rights are established in a utilitarian way: if everyone having right X means better human welfare than no one having X, then everyone has a right to X.
5. In individual cases, you look at the consequences to determine which option has the most moral value.
6. Moral value is determined by looking at rights, happiness, and anything else that is morally significant (such as a parent’s moral obligation to their child).
7. Rights are valued based on how greatly they affect universal human welfare (so the right to life is more valuable than the right to property because, at a universal level, it has a greater effect on human welfare).
8. Happiness in individual cases can trump certain rights, depending on how great the happiness as rights are not absolute.
9. To determine when happiness can trump rights, I use a similar principle to Kant’s categorical imperative: if in all cases where X amount of happiness is weighed against Y right, which decision will ultimately promote more universal welfare? (Using the shoplifting example: if the X amount of happiness of shoplifting was chosen over the right to property in every case, then human welfare would ultimately be hurt.)”
This is my normative ethical theory. The reason that the gay marriage debate got brought up is because you claimed:
“You can pass any of your opinions through that filter and see them come through with flying colors; I can pass any of my opinions through that filter and also see them come through similarly victorious. And we could each pass each others’ views through that filter and see them fail. That system is like a referee that does fine on all the obvious calls, but shrugs his shoulders whenever something is questionable.”
And then subsequently said:
“All right. Let’s put my assertion to the test. Give me just one single opinion I have, and I will put it through your filter. Any policy opinion.”
I then asked you to defend your position on gay marriage. So far, you have used common arguments (the false argument that the two options are equally imposing on opposite parties, and a vague argument that equates marriage to a religious matter). As of yet, you have failed to use my ethical system to defend gay marriage.
Early Witnesses to Christianity
Normally, I’d agree that it’d be foolish to try to debate a concept so complicated and largely unable to be settled. However, in this case, most of your arguments are completely dependent on the truth of your version of Christianity. If we end at “it’s up in the air, neither side has won”, then your views are illogically based in unproven ideas.
Further, it doesn’t help to allude to different people for arguments. We both borrow heavily from what we’ve learned. I borrow heavily from John Rawls and John Stuart Mill. However, their arguments are not weighted better if I tell you to read them. If they are good, and I understand why they are good, I can reiterate to you the arguments. Otherwise, they are either bad arguments or I do not fully understand the arguments.
So, if you have a particular author in mind who would support your opinion, please reiterate their argument, at least to the point where I can understand why their arguments convinced you.
Here’s why this is important:
“I won’t argue that Christianity’s history has been free of corruption and control. I know the history of my own religion better than to try that.”
My point is that even a little corruption could have significantly altered the stories and/or truth of the Bible. I have no doubts that the vast majority of early Christians were sincere in their beliefs. I find it very plausible that people base their beliefs in what they believe to most likely be true.
However, the problem is that your proof of Christianity only works if there is a clear, untainted sequence of events from the ressurection of Jesus to the copy of whichever version of the Bible you deem most accurate. If you want to use the account in the Bible as proof, that sequence of events cannot be tainted.
Martyrs
My main response to your thesis would be what I said in the previous section so I won’t repeat myself.
One quick question: why do you differentiate between dying for what people believe they saw, dying for what people believe they heard, and dying for what people believe? Your argument puts heavy emphasis on the first but seems to dismiss the other two, and I’m not sure why.
As for the religious vs. political gain: I agree that, at the top, most of these “religious” motives for war are likely political. Religion makes an easy excuse/justification for wars and hides the true motive (political gains/etc.). My point, however, was directed at the “foot soldiers”. Even if the politicians/people in power know the real reasons for the war/attack, it will often take religion to convince poor soldiers to die for a cause. I find it implausible to think that suicide bombers die in the name of politics, even though their leaders are politically motivated.
Inner Motives
“All I am convinced of is that you have a certain level of internal awareness that you are lying to yourself about Christianity, or that you once had the awareness and then squashed it out like someone destroying a nerve by ignoring its pain signals too long. Second, I always have to recognize that I could be misunderstanding what the Bible is saying — though in this case I am quite confident that I am not.”
I’m not trying to argue that I don’t have that level of awareness as trying to claim “I’m aware that there is no possibility of something I’m not aware of” would be foolish. So this isn’t ultimately aimed at disproving Christianity, but more of a “if the ultimate truth about this simple matter were proven, would that disprove Christianity?”.
“Neither I nor you really think that an idea has to be explained to the full satisfaction of its critics before it can be implemented”
Actually I do think that for those type of cases. Meaning policies cannot be based in unproven facts and be justified. Basing policies on opinions and educated predictions is a necessity, but basing them on ideas about existence without objective backing is unjustified.
In case this isn’t clear, I’m making the distinction between an idea like “this will help the most people” and “people need blood to survive”. It would be unjustified to base laws to promote the second fact if there was no scientific evidence to back it up.
The Central Political Point
“We always both have freedom of religion and we don’t — the critical question is how much of each our society allows and imposes.”
The first part of this is an impossible contradiction, but I understand what you’re trying to get at. Basically, what you are claiming is that true freedom of religion is impossible, as religious views of some nature or another will always make their way into politics.
But that’s only an argument that neutrality is impossible because of our human nature. We can talk about ideals, and then work out a way to make that ideal possible with human nature. So it seems instead that you are claiming that total freedom of religion is impossible even as a theoretical concept.
That would be ludicrous. Perhaps we are working with entirely different definitions of freedom of religion, so I’ll outline what my definition is:
Freedom of religion has two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions:
1. No legal entity can force or coerce you into changing your religious beliefs.
2. You cannot be legally forced to abide to any religious views.
So far, your argument has been basically that “any religious views” would include any secular views that don’t include Christianity. We’ve already been back and forth on that argument, so I doubt we’ll get anywhere on that front. If you want, we can continue along that line as I believe it is the area where we have the greatest difference in opinion.
To make some progress, I want to outline a certain case and see what you think about it:
Imagine that a Christian politician manages to write up a bill that says: “Christianity is true, and everyone must believe in it. Failure to go to church on sunday will result in jail time. Failure to admit to Christian beliefs will result in jail time, and repeated offenses will result in the death penalty.”
Now imagine that, if this bill were to go into effect, a far greater amount of people would be “true” Christians than now. There would obviously be some who fake the beliefs, but after a while, the number of Christians who would be “saved” would be far greater than the amount if the bill were to be shot down.
So my question is: would you support the bill? If not, on what justification would you go against the bill? If it would indeed end up in more people being saved/Christian, what other basis do you have for being against it?
Monopolies
I’ve made very clear my views on monopolies. I see no reason to rehash the issue. Unless you’ve got something new to discuss about them, I’m done with this part of the discussion.
Christianity, Atheism, Altruism
I don’t want any tax breaks for donations to religious organizations. That’s government subsidy of religious — the first step to government control of religion.
Let me be clear — I don’t buy the distinction between “religious” and “regular” facts. If I did, I would be implicitly denying that religion is true in any real sense. On issues you would call “religious” and on some views you would call “regular” I would be willing to admit that I realistically might be wrong. For some views in each category, I am not.
Gay Marriage
As long as marriage is in the hands of government, government as the monopoly of force is imposing its view of marriage on society. Period. This will show itself in the ways taxes are collected and in the way school-children are instructed, among other things.
As to your ethical system, I fail to see any ethical system at all. The more we talk about it the clearer it becomes that each definition is vague enough and subject to enough exceptions that the system is utterly rigged.
Christianity
I’ve no interest in continuing this debate unless you’re willing to read some authors. I will reciprocate the favor. Otherwise we’re both just playing amateur historian — it’s fun for a while, but I’ve no intention to go round and round in circles doing so endlessly.
A Particular Case
If course I wouldn’t support the bill. It’s completely contrary to the founding documents of Christianity, which insist that Christians are to co-exist with non-Christians. That’s ridiculous.
Monopolies
Actually, you haven’t made it clear. This debate is still ongoing because it seems that you have been inconsistent with your views.
So, once again, do you reject either:
1. Oppressive monopolies are possible in a laissez faire capitalist economy.
2. The government should have the right to intervene on behalf of the people in the case of an oppressive monopoly.
Christianity, Atheism, Altruism
Interesting, and I agree with your stance on the tax breaks.
” If I did, I would be implicitly denying that religion is true in any real sense”
But you already are- you are denying that every religion besides your own is true. Ignoring your views and Christian views for now-do you see a distinction between Islamic, scientologist, and hindu views and objective facts?
Gay Marriage
Then why argue only against gay marriage? If you are against marriage entirely as a secular concept, then just claim so (which I believe you have). Why care about gay marriage, when it is just one of many types of unjust marriage?
And no, my ethical system has been abundantly clear. I’ve already used it to prove my points before, and you’ve seen how it works. If it is so “vague”, and easy to manipulate you would have been capable of using it to make your argument. Still, after me asking you repeatedly, you have not done so. Remember, it was your claim that you could use it to justify any view. Either give up the claim or provide an argument.
Christianity
I have no interest in spending hours reading carefully selected works that you think support your position. I have not asked you to read any works because, if I understood them when I read them, I would be able to argue on their behalf. That’s why I can argue for a need for a universal system of ethics, instead of simply telling you to go read John Rawls.
If you want to concede the debate, that’s fine. But realize that the debate ends with my points unanswered, and you backing out on the basis that you can’t/won’t reiterate what you’ve learned that has convinced you of your position.
Particular Case
I’m curious, which verses are you referring to that demand Christians live with non-Christians?
I don’t deny that these verses exist, it sounds familiar, but I want to see why this verse justifies being against that law but doesn’t justify other compromises and letting people live with religious freedom.
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