[prometheus76]

There are many things that are true and real that you can't point to in external objective space. Categories. Concepts. Language. Grammar. Numbers. Something doesn't have to be physical or empirical to be real or useful to human experience. So I repeat: empiricism is inadequate for capturing what is true or real. Check out the writings of David Hume. The needful distinction between physical and metaphysical goes all the way back to Aristotle, to be fair.

[jurynulifcation]

Categories are concepts in the mind. Concepts are constructs in the mind. Language is a construct in the mind. Grammar is a construct in the mind. Numbers are constructs in the mind. They're nice easy ways to divide things that like actually exist in external objective space into easy-to-deal-with buckets. The existence of the subjective doesn't make the subjective somehow an objective, externalizable phenomenon, nor does it necessarily imply anything metaphysical.

I'm still waiting to hear how outsourcing your moral judgments to external human artifacts somehow implies moral absolutism, as opposed to self-reinforcing intersubjective moral relativism.

[prometheus76]

Any concept is metaphysical. It maps onto physical reality, but is above it, separate from it. Same with numbers. Same with everything else I said. They are all metaphysical. When I say "metaphysical" I'm not using it to refer to ghosts or to paranormal stuff. I'm using it with the philosophical definition of being "above the physical". Categories map onto reality, but they are not physical.

I don't have any idea what your last sentence means. But I am making the case that something can be real and objective without being empirical.

[jurynulifcation]

Concepts aren't "above" reality, they're just configurations of internal subjective spaces, which is carried out on the computational substrate of the human brain... unless you mean to make the claim that the mind is non-local to the brain, and that the physical realities of the brain have no impact on subjectivity (which would be wild.)

My last sentence is thus: just because you take your morals from a book doesn't somehow imply that there is a universal, correct morality. Christians are all still moral relativists, their morality is just relative to a human artifact and reinforced by the intersubjectivity of the other people who also take moral cues from that book. The only case one can make otherwise is, "Look, I have no evidence for an objective morality, I have no particularly good reason to believe it exists, but I have faith that it does and so should you." Which is fine, even if I find it personally stupid, but I can not imagine a single Christian argument for an objective morality that doesn't necessarily require faith as an axiom. I do not have that faith, yet I am a moral person. Religion is not required to have a conscience or to treat your fellow humans well. Therefore, I will not pay any attention to Christian claims towards uniquely privileged knowledge of the divinely mandated correct morality; instead, I will treat them the same as any other person, based on what they actually do.

[prometheus76]

Check out a book called Dominion by Tom Holland and you might be surprised to find the true source of your current moral structure. He discusses Roman history and contrasts it to Christian culture, which developed out of the carcass of a fallen Western Rome and flourished for a thousand years in the Eastern Roman Empire. so much of what we think of as "universal human values" are actually Christian values. Your adopted morality is a result of centuries of relative peace and the complete domination of Christian ethics in the Western world.

[jurynulifcation]

Yeah lmfao you're literally proving my point, of course there's no such thing as "universal human values," because it's all relative to the individual... hence moral relativism, as opposed to the idea that there is some sort of divinely mandated "correct" universal morality. I certainly do take some moral cues from the Judeo-Abrahamic religions, because even kooky cults can be right every now and then. That doesn't mean the rest of it is sensible, nor even that most people who call themselves Christian are capable of acting like decent people.

EDIT: I also like how not once do you even try to make a clear distinction between absolutism and relativism, nor do you try to explain how outsourcing your conscience to a religious book somehow implies universal absolutism.

We should take what makes sense from religions, cherry picking the parts of social progress that was somehow made under such an authoritarian and mind-numbing mental opium, and discard the rest. Any claims of moral superiority on the basis of religion should be outright rejected. The metaphysics are likewise senseless in my opinion, so I choose to ignore them.