[antibasilisk]

>In what way is atheism a danger or harm to society except that it violates your proposed monoculture?

Violating said monoculture is a problem in itself because it leads to a population that cannot collaborate or agree even broadly on morals that concern day to day life. We're seeing this right now in America, where each side of the aisle (which broadly speaking is cut across religious lines) is becoming progressively angrier as they realise the others beliefs necessarily requires capitulation from their side on some issues, in ways that cannot be accepted, such as abortion or the integration of homosexuals and transgenders. This is gradually destabilizing the country.

[hawkesnest]

Religion is in no way a force for bringing people together. Anti-Semitism is rampant among many Christians. Catholics and Protestants have quite a history of not seeing eye-to-eye. Shia and Sunni Muslims are pretty notorious at this point for their battles.

Your examples are counter to your own point. Jews don't seem to have the same views on abortion that the evangelicals appear to have. The United Methodist church is splitting because of differing views on homosexuality and other LGBTQ+ issues.

Having common values is very important, but predicating it on all the doctrine of a set of religions or a single religion seems shaky at best.

I also noticed you still haven't given a good reason. Your opening line is circular - violating the monoculture is bad because it disrupts the monoculture. Instead of proposing a broad set of morals outside of religion, you intend to (by force?) push a set of morals that YOU dictate based off ancient texts of dubious origin.

[antibasilisk]

>Religion is in no way a force for bringing people together. Anti-Semitism is rampant among many Christians. Catholics and Protestants have quite a history of not seeing eye-to-eye. Shia and Sunni Muslims are pretty notorious at this point for their battles.

People will not cease to differ, yet despite all of that they agree that atheism is disastrous.

>Your examples are counter to your own point. Jews don't seem to have the same views on abortion that the evangelicals appear to have. The United Methodist church is splitting because of differing views on homosexuality and other LGBTQ+ issues.

This is a very shallow understanding of religion. There will always be fringe groups who differ. The fact is religious texts have a meaning, that someone wants to negate that meaning makes no difference. If text did not have meaning you would not be able to understand what I am saying.

Jews, Muslims and Christians all have slightly different beliefs on abortion between them for example, but they all agree the unborn have certain rights. The differences are minor such as when the unborn is a person, if the unborn can be mourned, what constitutes necessity that could justify an abortion etc. None of these groups permit elective abortion.

>Instead of proposing a broad set of morals outside of religion

It is not possible to believe that religion dictates morals, while also believing in morals external to your religion, because it entails contradiction.

>you intend to (by force?) push a set of morals that YOU dictate based off ancient texts of dubious origin

If my morals were based on conjecture, they would be just as baseless as your moral conjecture, regardless what the conjecture was.

You have no moral basis from which to criticize me, you only have personal preferences, and there is no god of liberal humanism that will punish me in a way that I cannot escape if I fail to comply.

[hawkesnest]

It's clear you've not researched ethics thoroughly. I guess all those philosophers just needed to agree to use the same exact interpretation of the same holy books and there would be no need for discussion, right?

The Methodists are hardly a fringe group.

Atheism is "disastrous" only in that it is based on non-belief, not that Atheists themselves are detrimental to society.

The hundreds/thousands of protestant sects counter your statement that "religious texts have a meaning." They are long, often self-contradictory, and open to many interpretations. Not "a" meaning, but many "meanings." Again, the things you are claiming to be strength do not bear out in reality.

I think you to be better than the sociopath you claim to be. Do you only abstain from murder and rape and lying and cheating to avoid punishment in the afterlife? Because while I may have "baseless" moral conjectures, a simply moral code of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is superior in a myriad of ways.

You admit yourself, morals are based off standards. We can agree to those which bear out healthy, happy, productive societies or ones which do not. It's funny how most people consider theocracies to have a negative connotation.

Still waiting to hear what punishment is befitting a person of non-belief.

[antibasilisk]

>It's clear you've not researched ethics thoroughly.

Au contraire, subscribing to hard DCT is an active choice I made.

>I guess all those philosophers just needed to agree to use the same exact interpretation of the same holy books and there would be no need for discussion, right?

Wholly negating meaning on the basis of usually minor differences is sophistry.

>Do you only abstain from murder and rape and lying and cheating to avoid punishment in the afterlife?

Yes. Reading Stirner helped me to realise that there was very little difference between disliking heights and disliking murder aside from God telling me that avoiding the latter leads to unimaginable reward. Absent that I could simply decide to start liking things if it so pleased me, just as I did with heights.

>We can agree to those which bear out healthy, happy, productive societies or ones which do not.

Except that all of these terms are based in belief systems, of which mine and yours are wholly different.

[hawkesnest]

Still waiting to hear what punishment is befitting a person of non-belief.

Really, just say it. Say the quiet part out loud.

[skissane]

> Au contraire, subscribing to hard DCT is an active choice I made.

Catholic teaching (both traditional and contemporary) is that objective morality is inherent in the very nature of created things, and hence knowable in principle by anyone who knows those created things–even a convinced atheist. If by "hard DCT", you mean that good and evil are (in the general case) contained in the contingencies of God's free will as opposed to the necessity of God's own nature (theological voluntarism) – such that God could have chosen to command murder instead of prohibiting it, in which case it would be good rather than evil; and that right and wrong are unknowable except through special divine revelation (e.g. the Bible) – then Catholicism condemns that as heresy

Since you advocate taking away the religious freedom of atheists and non-Abrahamists (Hindus/Buddhists/Sikhs/Jains/Taoists/Shintoists/etc) – would you be okay if a Catholic theocracy persecuted you for your own belief in "hard DCT", given that according to Catholicism it is heretical?

Indeed, from a traditional Catholic perspective, hard DCT is a socially harmful heresy – by reducing right and wrong to God's whims, it encourages aberrant sects which justify all manner of evils as God's prophetic command; by falsely claiming that non-believers are incapable of knowing objective morality, it discourages them from seeking to know and understand and obey that morality, and gives them an excuse with which to evade their own moral responsibility. If any heresy is sufficiently socially harmful to justify its persecution, your own "hard DCT" is arguably among them.

I get the impression you are Muslim, or at least leaning in that direction. "Hard DCT" is the Asharite position, so you might call it the mainstream traditional Sunni view. Catholicism's view on this topic has been influenced by Islam, since Ibn Rushd (Averroes) was a big influence on mediaeval Latin Catholic philosophy (including Aquinas), and through that on Catholic theology too. Something close to the Asharite position occurred among Catholics as well - William of Ockham and the nominalists, most notably – but Catholicism ended up decisively rejecting that approach. It still has some advocates among Protestant philosophers (most notably nowadays, Robert Merrihew Adams)–but the Catholicism of recent centuries has rather decisively ruled it out.

By contrast, in Islam, Ibn Rushd's viewpoint was adopted by the Mu'tazilites, but opposed by the Asharites, and the later generally won out over the former; unlike Ibn Rushd, al-Ash'ari and his followers were ignored by Latin Catholic Europe. The Mu'tazilites largely died out, and their theology was not accepted as orthodox in Sunni Islam. However, Māturīdism, which can be viewed as somewhat of a compromise position between the Mu'tazilites and the Asharite views, is generally accepted as an orthodox Sunni theological school–and it agrees with Ibn Rushd, the Mu'tazilites, and Catholicism, in rejecting hard DCT.

My impression is that Asharite theology is more popular than Maturidite theology in contemporary Sunni Islam; while there is no necessary correspondence between schools of Islamic law (madhhabs) and schools of Islamic theology (aqidah), in practice Hanafis tend to be Maturidite while the followers of the other schools of fiqh tend to be Asharite or Atharite instead, and Hanafis are only about a third of contemporary Sunni Islam. Twelver Shi'a theology also rejects the "hard DCT" viewpoint of the Asharites; a basic principle of Twelver Shi'a theology is that right and wrong are an inseparable part of the divine essence, not just what God happened to choose to make right and wrong. I'm not entirely sure what the Atharite position is, if they have one; but if we take Ibn Taymiyyah as representative of Athari theology, he condemned the Asharite position that God could have chosen to make evil deeds good – which suggests that "hard DCT" is contrary to the Atharite position.

[antibasilisk]

>would you be okay if a Catholic theocracy persecuted you for your own belief in "hard DCT", given that according to Catholicism it is heretical?

I would not, but I'm not sure what that has to do with my broader argument, since it doesn't hinge on Abrahamic religions seeing eye to eye on all topics. For example, you wouldn't find Ahmed bin Hanbal saying that he would prefer no caliphate to one that believed in the createdness of the Qur'an, despite being persecuted for that belief himself.

>"Hard DCT" is the Asharite position

Yes, but it's also not exclusive to them. For example Ibn Hazm was a prominent theologian who subscribed to it, despite his vehement opposition to asharism.

>I'm not sure what the Atharite position on this question is, if they have one

My understanding is that Ibn Taymiyyah takes the view that goodness is based on the nature of God, rather than command or foreknowledge exclusively, and that individual commands may take either side of euthyphro's dilemma, rather than being confined to one or the other.

[_npe3]

"You have no moral basis from which to criticize me, you only have personal preferences, and there is no god of liberal humanism that will punish me in a way that I cannot escape if I fail to comply. "

What does this have to do with your argument?

[antibasilisk]

I was responding to the text I quoted.

[hydrok9]

It's a tautology,and you seem to infer that you should not care about crossing boundaries of morality if there is no God to punish you?

[antibasilisk]

I do not believe there is morality without God. The difference would only be in what I consider to lead to the greatest pleasure and the least pain for myself, after all "what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself"