This sort of sums up my stance about the internet, the "New Atheists," and my reaction to a period in time.
Funny. I read that article and thought "Oh, Maurile found rockaction's blog."
Yeah, I get that. But I can't write as intelligently and dispassionately as he does.
But it's funny, because I can relate to what Slate Star Codex is saying. I think his point is that a lot of virtue signaling goes on where progressives aren't really trying to convince conservatives with their arguments, but rather speaking in condemnations and old platitudes that we're aware of, but disagree with.
To engage in signaling is one thing; to engage in debate is another.
His other point...
"His other point is the internecine war that modern atheists, especially on the internet, have brought upon themselves, even with modern progressives. It's a shaming exercise if you believe in God, really, replete with juvenilia and condescension. His question, I think, is what sets this special brand of atheist apart from your average progressive? How did they become black sheep within their own movement when even people like me are sympathetic to their claims? In a way, I understand this. I'm agnostic. But the level of derision with which internet atheists treat their opponents makes nobody sympathetic to their tactics and arguments. In fact, it makes people want to defend religionists and their ilk.
I find myself often in this camp. Sympathetic and agreeing with atheist or agnostic claims; sympathetic and agreeing with religious
people that feel like they've been diminished for their beliefs in some way. I'd personally love to form a bridge between the two; but it seems so personally angry on both sides that I usually stay out of it. " - me, sometime in 2017
the post below the post i quoted is the closest i come on this board to disentangling knowledge from belief. I just don't buy it.
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Switching gears, this is probably the best document I've read about God, law, and power. The man's name is Arthur Alan Leff, and he was a law professor at Yale. He wrote another paper that is even better and shows the six forms of argument that exist and how they resolve disputes between those who do not agree and will not agree about something, and there is an absence of God. Anyway, if you like law and are interested, here you go . . .
"I want to believe-and so do you-in a complete, transcendent, and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe-and so do you-in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and the good and to create it.I mention the matter here only because I think that the two contradictory impulses which together form that paradox do not exist only on some high abstract level of arcane angst. In fact, it is my central thesis that much that is mysterious about much that is written about law today is understandable only in the context of this tension between the ideas of found law and made law: a tension particularly evident in the growing, though desperately resisted, awareness that there may be, in fact, nothing to be found-that whenever we set out to find "the law,"we are able to locate nothing more attractive, or more final, than ourselves.My plan for this Article, then, is as follows. I shall first try to prove to your satisfaction that there cannot be any normative system ultimately based on anything except human will.' . . .
Imagine, now, a legal system based upon perceived normative propositions-oughts-which are absolutely binding, wholly unquestionable, once found. Consider the normative proposition, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Under what circumstances, if any, would one conclude that it is wrong to commit adultery? Maybe it helps to put the question another way: when would it be impermissible to make the formal intellectual equivalent of what is known in barrooms and schoolyards as "the grand sez who"? Putting it that way makes it clear that if we are looking for an evaluation, we must actually be looking for an evaluator: some machine for the generation of judgments on states of affairs. If the evaluation is to be beyond question, then the evaluator and its evaluative processes must be similarly insulated. If it is to fulfill its role, the evaluator must be the unjudged judge, the unruled legislator, the premise maker who rests on no premises, the uncreated creator of values. Now, what would you call such a thing if it existed? You would call it Him.There is then, this one longstanding, widely accepted ethical and legal system that is based upon the edicts of an unchallengeable creator of the right and the good, in which the only job of the person who would do right is to find what the evaluator said. Assuming that I know what the command "Thou shalt not commit adultery" means, then if(and only if) the speaker is God, I ought not commit adultery. I ought not because He said I ought not, and why He said that is none of my business. And it is none of my business because it is a premise of His system that what He says I ought not to do, I ought not to do. It is of the utmost importance to see why a God-grounded system has no analogues. Either God exists or He does not, but if He does not, nothing and no one else can take His place. Anything that took His place would also be Him. For in a God-based system, we do not define God's utterances as unquestionable, the way we might state that a triangle has three sides and go on from there and only from there. We are not doing the defining. Our relationship to God's moral order is the triangle's relationship to the order of Euclidean plane geometry, not the mathematician's. We are defined, constituted, as beings whose adultery is wrong, bad, unlawful. Thus, committing adultery in such a system is "naturally" bad only because the system is supernaturally constituted. Put another way, God, for philosophical purposes, is uniquely in the universe that being whose every pronouncement, including evaluative ones, is a "performative utterance."
http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2724&context=dlj;
