Thanks for your very thoughtful responses, marc. Just a few things to pursue further...
marc9000 writes:
... I do believe the US is capable of being a pluralistic society. I’m like anyone else, I have less fear of my own worldview destroying liberty than I do of another worldview destroying liberty.
When you say "another worldview", do you mean "any other worldview that is different from my own", or do you mean "some particular worldview(s) that I could name"? That is, given a fairly complete list of worldviews different from your own (i.e. the ones attested to exist in our pluralistic society), do they all pose equal risk of "destroying liberty", or is it rather that some are especially bad and others are merely benign in their differences from your own worldview?
(In the latter case, if that applies to you, it would be interesting to consider what separates the "benign" differences from the "risky" ones. I'm not asking for an enumeration; I'd just be curious about the kinds of differences you consider threatening vs. non-threatening.)
Admittedly, the piece that I quoted above is something that I might be prone to say myself, despite the obvious dilemma that it poses ("pluralism is okay, but..."). For my part, I do draw distinctions among the various worldviews that differ from my own: Some seek to promote ignorance and promulgate dishonesty by denying observed facts and disallowing objective investigation, and these are a significant threat to liberty, because liberty cannot survive in an atmosphere of ignorance and dishonesty. There are others that allow and support refinements of supernatural beliefs in acceptance of facts and objectivity, or that at least accept peaceful coexistence with such an approach, and these are not a threat to liberty.
Humans are the only species on the planet that organize societies to the extent that certain humans main function is to focus only on that organization. From policemen to politicians, and so many others in between.
... including clergy. Especially clergy. In the U.S., at least, police and politicians are supposed to restrict their focus to purely secular issues. (Police in America normally succeed at this extremely well; many politicians tend to be less successful, and this is a problem.) But the clergy, and the active evangelical congregations, such as Mormons and Jehova's Witnesses, have it as their main (if not sole) explicit duty to intrude physically on other people with regard to pushing particular worldviews and beliefs.
I know of no society, present or past, with liberty equal to the US, that was founded and operated only by naturalistic reasoning.
And yet it appears you do not acknowledge that the great extent of liberty we have in the US
exists by virtue of the secular foundations -- the "naturalistic reasoning" -- built into our Constitution. It is crucially the separation of church from state, of religious authority from political governance, that assures our liberty. But that's a topic for another thread (or a few).
I think it’s because a supernatural being can have motives and goals that are more deep and noble than humans can understand. The meaning stays constant and doesn’t change.
This is a concise distillation of the central paradox in every theistic conception of "meaning", or "morality", or whatever else you want to attribute to a supernatural being. If we can't understand the motives and goals, how can we possibly assert that the "meaning" doesn't change? How can we possibly assert that we even have a clue what the "meaning" is?
If we can't really know for sure -- and we really can't, because we're talking about the supernatural -- then it just comes down to the word of this priest vs. the word of that preacher (vs. the word of some mullah vs. the word of some other mystic vs. whatever Joe Sixpack makes up in his own mind vs. ... vs. ... vs. ...
ad infinitum).
It is exactly this paradox that makes religious schism an inescapable outcome of religious belief. It reveals the inherent lie that is being told every time some theist expounds on God's True Intent™. And every time some other theist expounds on some other incompatible version of God's True Intent™, it's just another lie, competing for the attention of gullible minds. If these are not lies, they are hallucinations or rationalizations or just bare assertions. Whatever they are, they have nothing substantial to back them up. They all have equal "authority", which is to say, as much authority as can be enforced by whatever group has adopted a given fantasy.
And the people who accept such fantasies are the ones who are still having trouble understanding what it means to apply objectivity to every aspect of their lives; in the most extreme (fundamentalist) cases, it's as if objective thought does not exist for them (and so cannot exist, period). Hence the title of this thread.
The major difference between us is that your position can only be held and promoted by appeal to religious belief or dogma, whereas mine can find confirmation in real-world observations.
That accusation can go both ways. I can find confirmation in real world observations in un-scientific things, like the history (predictability and un-predictability) of human nature. Yours can appeal to humanistic dogma, such as new understandings of the world that require political overhauls, like dismantling capitalism to control global warming, or move toward a one-world government.
Nice little sample of Tea Party diatribe there -- I knew I could count on you for that -- and like all Tea Party stuff, debunking it is child's play. Obviously, the entrepreneurs who are working on commercially viable wind and solar technology do not see a conflict between capitalism and addressing the very real problems of global warming -- they still are not getting the level of subsidies and indulgences that have been the routine gift to oil companies for several decades. And are you really saying that you are opposed to things like the UN, IMF, WTO, etc, that try to solve international problems through international cooperation? I've never seen a good explanation as to why, exactly, they pose a threat, or what makes them worse than the alternative (which would be having no cooperation and leaving international problems unsolved).
In any case, I really have no dogmas that require political overhaul. As a US citizen, I'm fine with using our current secular system of national government in order to address the societal and environmental problems we face -- many of which can only be solved by international effort. This obviously has to include working on international treaties, but doesn't include stuff like invading some country just to topple its dumb-ass dictator and take over its oil wells.
As for your "real world observations in un-scientific things", that's a bit of a muddle; if you're drawing conclusions without keeping close track of what you've actually seen -- and if you aren't being careful (as any honest scientist has to be) about avoiding biased sampling and invalid logic -- then your "confirmation" is likely to be false.
For example, you might assert the superiority of Christianity with regard to "family values" by pointing to the divorce rate among non-Christians, but if you fail to notice that the divorce rates among Christians and non-Christians are actually about the same (or maybe it's a little higher among Christians), then you've clearly made a mistake.
Edited by Otto Tellick, : minor grammar repair
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
™ Version 4.2
(1)