I don't think you really know what you're talking about. You are a moral realist but not a *strict* moral relativist? If you are a moral realist, you can't go anywhere near moral relativism.

Why?

The act of having small feet can't be moral or immoral. If a child was forced to foot-binding, that is something that can be morally judged.


But why? Can you explain why any of the things you listed here are immoral across all cultures, but other things (like blackmailing a person into self-mutilation) aren't?

Also, what does it mean to say that homosexual activity is immoral across cultures? There clearly are cultures which don't view it as something immoral. Earlier you were saying that it's wrong to impose your culture's standards on other cultures, and now you seem to be contradicting yourself.


And what makes you think that my example with the church asking their members to amputate all their limbs, nose, and penis is not culturally unacceptable within our society?

You are going back and forth from being a moral relativist to a moral realist. Let's summarize:

You think homosexuality is ALWAYS immoral, because of YOUR culture/religion, even though according to OTHER cultures/religions it isn't.

You think blackmailing people into self-mutilation is NOT ALWAYS immoral, because according to SOME cultures/religions it isn't.

You think forcing yourself sexually on a child is ALWAYS immoral, even if according to SOME cultures/religions it isn't.

Do you see the inconsistencies in your views?

Please show me the data! Show me a study that shows that "almost anybody who is abstinent for a long time has some sort of unhappiness." This is the type of data I'm looking for you to provide. You keep making these claims.

LOL -- your sarcasm meter must be broken.

Try again -- you are interested in DENYING someone else's view of spirituality in favor of your own. (Direct analogy: I am interested in DENYING someone else's view of sexuality in favor of my own.)

As I said, I just grabbed the first one I found. I barely skimmed it beyond the title. There are lots of studies out there linking spirituality and religion to health.

Looking at it again, I'm actually not that surprised that 8 year olds don't get much out of the habit of prayer or meditation. Such disciplines are not likely to be well-understood or appreciated by younger children.

There exist moral truths. Some of the facts of the matter depend upon context (context being part of the facts of the matter). However, some do not. There's no contradiction here. Let me give a rough example:

In a time during wars when a lost limb would inevitably lead to a slow and painful death, I think a reasonable moral argument could be made that it is better to kill the man than to let him suffer. However, in a time during wars when medical technology is better and losing a limb would not inevitably lead to a slow and painful death, it is less reasonable to say that killing the man is better.

The facts here are dependent upon the views/understanding of the persons involved. Those facts may be relevant in determining the morality of the matter.

Because it is. It's a mere declarative moral claim.

You keep using the word "blackmail" but I'm not sure that it means what you think it means.

You keep asking "why" because it sounds like you're trying to establish a meta-morality. Certain moral facts simply are, and we either correctly or incorrectly declare them.

Nope. You are failing to distinguish the meaning of the words that I'm using. This is an argument involving some level of subtlety. You've demonstrated in the past an inability to follow such conversations, and you are showing this to be true in this one as well.

With respect to whose moral concept are you asking? Are you asking from the view as "average American" or as "member of hypothetical church" or as "Aaron W."? The answer will vary (which is not a negation of moral realism, but simply as a matter of fact as different people hold different moral views).

If by "consistency" you mean that the answer to different moral questions should be the same, then I'm highly inconsistent. Different moral questions will have different moral answers. Not all moral claims are the same, and not all are answered by the same set of criteria. I would think this to be obvious.

I love how Aaron expresses raw hatred towards his moral gay and lesbian fellow human beings, and then says that his argument is subtle and can't be understood.

His argument is really about as subtle as the "God hates ____" signs at military funerals.

There were people who dressed up the arguments in favor of white superiority in sophisticated philosophical and religious arguments too. But they really came down to "God thinks blacks are inferior".

Aaron, if you were as smart as you seem to think you are, you would see the forest for the trees. Recognizing that gays and lesbians aren't any more immoral than you are is the forest. Getting caught up in all sorts of technical justifications for being intolerant and felling superior to your equals is getting caught in the trees.

The fact that you can't see this is pretty good evidence that even ostensibly intelligent people can be idiots (reminiscent of all the bigots at the Mensa convention).

So you really have no intuition one way or the other here? Seriously? I mean...seriously? You need data showing that sex is integral to most people's well-being?

http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwexa/news/arc...-invcelrel.htm


Lol. I love how you addressed the FIRST and THIRD points and ignored the SECOND one, which addresses precisely what you're saying here. I am not denying Christian spirituality to anybody. I am not blackmailing any religious person into becoming an atheist. I am simply asking people to think for themselves and to not trust authorities like parents or their pastor. If they still want to remain Christian, that's fine by me.


The studies you're looking for are ones that show that atheists are less happy than Christians because their spirituality is not informed by the Bible. Because what you're trying to imply is an analogy between you stopping gays from having sex and me trying to convert Christians to atheists. The analogy is broken for a number of reasons, some of which I pointed out above, but even if we assume that it's a good one:

Your stopping gays from having sex leads to negative consequences for them (higher risk prostate cancer, etc.).

Me converting Christians to atheists leads to... what kind of negative consequences? Again, are there studies which show that atheists are somehow unhappier or unhealthier or un-whatever than Christians?

This is a bit peripheral, but I think we should let the man make his own decision, in this particular example.

This is not an example of moral relativism because you are applying the same moral standard to different situations. Moral relativism is the exact opposite: applying different moral standards to the same situation. That is, if you believe that one and the same action is immoral for you but not immoral for a member of a different culture. Again, if you are a moral realist, you can't do the latter. You say that you are a moral realist, and yet you do the latter.

I don't think you can't give reasons why it is and you are deliberately avoiding doing so, because you are about to make another contradiction. In any case, you should know that nobody would take seriously "mere declarative moral claims". Just to illustrate:

You say that an adult sexually forcing themselves to a child is immoral (and you most likely would want it to be illegal too). But you say you can't give any reasons for your claim, you simply declare it. A consequence of allowing such declarative moral claims is that if, hypothetically, the majority of the United States becomes some sort of weird atheists who declare that Christianity is harmful and want to outlaw it, they should be allowed to do so without providing any reasons for their decision.

Person X believes that the only way to go to Heaven is if he is a member of church Y. Church Y would only allow that person to become a member of it if they amputate their limbs. This is blackmail.

No. No moral facts simply are, and you know it. You would never take anybody seriously who tells you that you shouldn't scratch your nose when it's itching because doing so is immoral (and they give you no reasons whatsoever for why it's immoral). You know very well that sexually forcing yourself to a child is bad because of the physical and psychological harm that you're causing. Trying to deny this just to not admit a mistake you've made and say "no no, it's not that, it's SIMPLY immoral, period." is childish.


Stop with this crap. Believe me, nobody in this forum understands this. Try to explain this "subtlety" in an understandable way. Why are you imposing your culture's standards on others by declaring that homosexuality is immoral across all cultures?

That church's practices would be viewed as highly immoral by the overwhelming majority of our western culture. Yet, you say that our culture should not be the judge of what's moral and what's immoral in the actions of a different culture. At the same time, when I point out that homosexuality is not immoral according to some cultures, now suddenly you say that it is immoral across all cultures, because YOUR culture views it as immoral. If you "fail" to see the contradiction even here, this is just incredible intellectual dishonesty.

No, the inconsistency comes from the fact that in some cases you allow certain actions to not be immoral, if they aren't immoral in some cultures, but others (like homosexuality) is always immoral, because YOUR culture says so.

Btw I ask because if such blindingly obvious facts about human nature elude you, it's unclear why you should have any confidence in your ability to assess what leads to a "better understanding of ourselves as humans, and leading us towards better lives."

I have little time at the moment, but here's the actual article:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3813706?seq=1

This is a *HIGHLY* self-selecting group of individuals, which leads me to doubt the general applicability:

(Just as a note, "involuntary celibate" is defined as someone who wants sex but hasn't had it in 6 months.)

I'll give you credit for having found something. But it sounds a lot like surveying people in AA about their views of alcohol and finding that they all have a negative view of it, and then trying to conclude that alcohol must be a negative in everyone's life.

Ok, I think attempts at logic are just not going to work. I'm taking a quote from the conference and editing. I'd like all the heterosexuals here to read this and tell me what you think about this:


"Now what is true, is that we challenge homosexuals and heterosexuals to live out the sexual ethics...which encourages full sexual expression between a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, in the context of gay marriage, and prescribes sexual abstinence and purity for everybody else."

Maybe that could help with gaining perspective on why prescribing celibacy, something people are very casual about doing itt, isn't very well thought of.

No one said everyone.

As loK2thabrain said, nobody's claiming that abstinence has the exact same results on everybody. Also, your AA analogy is also broken. Why would you ask them about their views of alcohol? You should rather ask them about how the amounts of alcohol they were consuming affected them, the same way you should ask how the length of the period during which celibates didn't have sex affected them. Small amount of alcohol are okay for almost everybody, and so is a short-term abstinence. Huge amounts of alcohol and life-time (or many year long) abstinence are both pretty bad for most people.

I also very interested in your responses to the other parts of the posts.

How does that not fit the description of homosexuals and unmarried heterosexuals who want to have sex, but aren't allowed to/are denying themselves it because they've been told they should abstain if they want to be followers of Christ?

So true. In fact over focusing on the human body could deepen misery by fostering unhealthy obsessions with it like bulimina or anorexia or other diseases of vanity. I even know a guy who gave himself a hernia by over lifting weights. He's a gym fanatic with huge biceps. I guess it never occurred to him he could over do it and hurt his intestines while being over anxious to maintain his biceps.

I also got this flyer from a local medical center focusing on all these medical conditions and how to deal with them.

It even had a psychology section explaining the key to fighting high blood pressure is on your speed dial or in socializing...having friends. There's no mention at all in the article of people who have God as their friend. It spends a couple of paragraphs saying how isolated people are more at risk for high blood pressure than people who choose friends with similar values and belief systems.

Wow, what a shock, you got a flyer, from a medical center, which concentrated on, and highlighted medical conditions, and how to deal with them, in order to do its job in tending to the communities health.

Responding to stuff out of order:

Time is limited. The new semester is here. I'll get to what I can, and too bad for the rest.

You're failing to understand the analogy. You also apparently don't understand AA. In their understanding, *ANY* alcohol is bad. A conversation about "amounts" isn't relevant.

The point here is about having a biased selection leading towards a predisposition towards certain answers. This is not about the particulars of the conclusions based on the sampling, but an examination of the sampling itself.

If you ask people who are seeking therapy/support because they can't get sex, don't you think there would be a huge bias in their responses that they think the lack of sex is having a negative impact?

I can grant that people who really want something they can't have tend to be somewhat miserable people. This is an effect larger than (and different from) abstinence. Poor people who desire to be rich tend to be miserable (but there are lots of contented poor people -- and yes, I'm saying "poor" and not "impoverished" because there is a difference). There are depressed rich people because they desire something more than what their money offers them. I don't think that "abstinence" is really the issue at all.

I've stated that "abstinence leads to depression" does not sound anything like "smoking leads to lung cancer" to me. I've pointed out that you're talking about a different primary causative agent. Here's an example of what it does sound like: "Driving cars leads to collisions."

It's a true statement under the broadest understanding of "leads to." But when most people read that sentence, there's a sense in which they understand that it's not quite true. They tend to see all of the hundreds of other factors that lead to car accidents (bad drivers, distracted driving, drunk driving, etc.) and there isn't a sense of "Aha! DRIVING is what's causing these accidents." That's how I respond to your "Abstinence leads to depression" claim.

That's right.

What do you think people living in isolation did before they had science trying to tell them everything as if they were the only experts in the world?

We had contemplatives touting meditation and prayer's benefits for thousands of years before science jumped on the world stage to hog the limelight.

Yes but when people had only prayer to rely upon they were lucky to live past the age of 35.

Without the rise of monotheism there'd be no science.

Not true, and not relevant either way.

It is true but not relevant to the thread.

Monotheism made early scientists try to understand the mind of one God.

With polytheism there was no one mind to follow.

lol and exactly how did this stop scientists before monotheism?

There would be no science? Where do you get these ideas and why do you state them as fact? You do realize the huge contributions to science made by Ancient Greeks and Egyptians, don't you?

That darn science with all its arrogance, boasting over the fact that it works!

You know, science is actually big on truth and acknowledges the positive effects that meditation can have on people, especially when it comes to stress reduction. Prayer, not so much. I wonder why. Certain people, on the other hand, do a great job of belittling what medicine has accomplished in the last 50+ years thanks to rigorous science, as if it's by mere insolence that it has gained a foothold as the best method of health treatment.

Science is not hogging the limelight. Anything that's been systematically proven to effectively treat illness automatically becomes science.

How convenient.

How about respond to the relevant stuff? There is a big contradiction in your views of morality (moral realism, moral relativism, etc.). There is also a huge missing of information as to why you think homosexuality is immoral. We get it that it's your culture/religion, but it would be so much better if you gave just a little detail. Is it some Bible verses that make you think it's immoral? Is it what people in your community keep talking about, but if asked about the reasons why homosexuality is immoral would be unable to give a response too?

Also, why do you keep talking about depression alone? There are not good direct studies and the inference is made based on studies about happiness. But you never say anything about all those other negative effects which you are causing by forcing people to not have sex (because if you did, you would also see that your car accident analogy is ALSO broken).