Atheism vis a vis Relative Morality

Not all atheists believe in relative morality. Objectivists, for example, base their ethics on what they claim are objective criteria.

Bob Marks

Objective as in:
1b : of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers : having reality independent of the mind
1d : involving or deriving from sense perception or experience with actual objects, conditions, or phenomena
3a : expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/objective

So an objective criteria is either independent of all minds/brains or objective as without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations. The latter has been tried and it always ends here - you can value anything you like, but that means that you have chosen not to value something else; i.e. you have chosen with personal feelings, prejudices, and/or interpretations.

No, I don't think my beliefs should be foisted on others.

Since "absolute power corrupts absolutely," it is a good thing that your question is hypothetical. I would hope that given such power I would not use it. But the temptation might be overwhelming, and it would probably get easier to use such power each time it was used.

No. You don't foist. You may, however, persuade.

Bob Marks

That it is objective that you need food(the objective part) if you want to live, but that you want to live, is the subjective part.

A related story I noticed on CNN - Famous atheists and their beliefs. This is a short of list mostly actors and writers, but they could easily add hundreds more to the list, especially with various European folk who are not well-known in the US. A couple of well-known American atheists would be Carl Sagan and Joss Whedon. Like I said, even limiting the list to famous people, it could be much, much longer.

www.cnn.com/2013/05/25/living/gallery/atheists/index.html?hpt=hp_c3

No liberal denominations? Hey, in my childhood believer days, all of those would have been considered either liberal or at least suspicious. 8-D

Guess it all depends on what you mean by liberal. I've met many liberal Christian individuals, but am not aware of many liberal denominations. Only one comes to mind - Unitarians - the faith for those who have lost belief but miss going to church. LOL.

Whether a fact is a fact or a question of morality is a human construct. You, raybar, don't hold objective authority whether a fact is a fact or a question of morality or whether morality is a human construct or a fact. Each individual can to the effect of cognitive and ethical subjective relativism get away with everything is physical, (from) God or meaningless. Or any other variant that makes sense to the individual! The makes sense part is the subjective part of reality and yes, it is connected to the objective part.

Well, some people say that it's all subjective, including everything that some other people consider objective, because we do not experience anything directly, but only through the filter of our senses, which makes everything we know a human construct, and therefore subjective.

But I usually don't expect that what I say will be analyzed all that closely, so I am usually speaking from an ordinary human perspective where we don't have to worry too much about it.

No. It is a fact that water consists of two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms. If you claim otherwise, please give me the name of the people who constructed the water molecule.

Bob Marks

Let us play science, I will concentrate on 4 aspects - falsification, observable, replication and objective in the strong sense as far as the observer goes.

For something to be science in the Popper sense it must be open to falsification through observation. What you anticipate to observe must be able to "go wrong", i.e that you can observe something else.
First example - can we image a world where people don't believe in God(hypothesis); yes. Further we can deduce from the words that belief in God is something people do, so we can ask them and we have 2 possible outcomes: They believe or they don't(there is more variance that this, but we can reduce it down to yes and no). It means it is open to falsification because there are different outcomes. Further it is objective in the sense that the answers we get are not dependent on how we as scientists think/feel. Whether other people believe in God or not is objective in relationship to you. And you, I and everybody can do this - ask and that is the replication part.
So do we live in a world where all people don't believe in God? No, it is a fact that some people believe in God!

So that is it for now, only one example for now and a question to all the functional atheists - is it a fact that some people believe in God? For all I care we can vary God to different Gods and other variants of the supernatural, but the question still stands - is it a fact that some people believe in the supernatural?

Well, we can always play therefore at some point, but first I want to play everything is objective versus everything is physical versus everything is (from) God. The first question I will ask I will phrase so: What do these claims have in common?

• Everything is a pronoun - "any of a small set of words in a language that are used as substitutes for nouns or noun phrases and whose referents are named or understood in the context"
• Is is a verb - "an intransitive verb is a verb that has no direct object"
• Objective, physical and God says respectively something about what everything is - it is a naming act

See, Bob - all 3 are definitions of sorts or "naming acts" or words about words. So let us do it differently - besides thinking "everything is objective" and writing "everything is objective", try this - do "everything is objective" otherwise. What I am asking you to do is something I can do also; try this - do "everything is objective" otherwise. Otherwise as not thinking/writing "everything is objective" but do something else with "everything is objective".
So here is what I have found when I try to do all 3 variants otherwise. I can't eliminate that they all 3 takes place as something I think. Further when I try to do them otherwise they end up in part being the idea that everything is not me, but is to me a contraction. So everything to me is rather about relationships between something and something else. Or if you like - everything appears to be an interconnected web of a multitude of regularities/variations.

So here it is as a limit of logic - everything is A and/or non-A. It appears to be so, because logic is about something as it is how ever it is, but never about something else. That is "eliminated" away the moment someone goes "everything is A" and all I do is to do something else - namely non-A or no!

With regards
Mikkel

Okay, I click on the quote button, and than I get the quoted stuff all bunched together in a couple of lines, but in 2 seconds it's out of that format, and I can't tell where the quote ends and even when I space down, my reply and the quote all mooshes together. Let's see how this one turned out.

Also, why doesn't my "Preview" button work?