Quote: “@Craig, typical religious scare tactics. Yes, we are just physical bodies interacting with the material around us thanks to neuralchemical impulses. I know that’s scary for you. Great, now that that’s out of the way…yada yada yada”
See Eric, this is where you let yourself down. You admit that “we are just physical bodies interacting with the material around us thanks to neuralchemical impulses” – congratulations, champ, you’ve caught up with modern scientific dogma. (Just quickly, ‘atheism’ declares this in theory but denies it in practice: Christianity denies it outright, if anyone needed to be told.)
But now, let’s see where Eric believes his scientific dogma leaves off as being B.S., and what he knows to be true about the universe takes over…he goes on, and I don’t even have to go far into his rant to find the errors of his ways – in fact, the first two words: “My opinion on morality is that it only exists as an idea.”
Question: Your opinion? Do neuralchemical (sic) impulses have opinions now, do they? Are you ascribing consciousness to neuralchemical (sic) impulses now, are you? I mean, are you serious, bro’? You, being aware, as I said above, of modern scientific dogma, ought to know that the whole concept of ‘consciousness’ has been put away by following the modern scientific dogma to its logical conclusion, but you wanna toss it up hoping you won’t be called on it. But I just did.
As we say in Oz, ‘Check, mate.’
Okay, so aside from goosing yourself in trying to have your cake (“neuralchemical impulses”) & eat it too (consciousness, such that you can have opinions on anything), let’s continue. What you’ve paraded about on here as being your personal philosophy is nothing but Sartre’s Existentialism. Again, congratulations champ, you’ve caught up with modern social philosophy. But does this philosophy work in the real world, where ideas have consequences? Well, let’s see about that one now, too, yeah?
You write, “I don’t know what basis people use to determine which goals are “objectively” better because it’s akin to saying that Beethoven is objectively better than Lady Gaga, an opinion which many people in today’s society would disagree with.”
So you ascribe ethics to a matter of personal opinion – Beethoven/Lady Gaga. Ok, a choice between Beethoven & Lady Gaga doesn’t fall into the category of ethics, something you suggest as well, so the example you give is irrelevant, but does Paedophilia fall into that category? Ok, you got me; I’m being facetious, saying that an opinion choosing between Beethoven & Lady Gaga is on the same level as choosing to be a paedophile. But is it really facetious? See, you’ve only got two choices (maybe three): an absolute rejection of paedophilia, which requires a transcendent standard that you reject at the outset, an acceptance of paedophilia as a personal opinion as valid as any, which the Marquis advocated, and a third possible way – that you are abhorred by it and are determined that the paedophile will be punished becoz he doesn’t hold to your personal opinion, which was Sartre’s position.
Just quickly, if people are simply bags of atoms predestined by electro-chemical impulses in the cranium, what do we do with a paedophile? You can’t arrest him becoz he hasn’t done anything wrong! You could kill him yourself, but what if, following the Hellenic tradition, he is the next stage of evolution? Or you can leave him be: to each his own, right? “Just keep him away from my kids!”, you cry.
Now as I said above, nothing that you’ve written in your rant (and it is a rant becoz I’ve already demonstrated that it’s completely ridiculous ascribing opinions to neuralchemical impulses) suggests that you and Sartre are not singing from the same hymnbook. So let’s look at Sartre – this will prove instructive. What is Sartre’s thesis? Following on from Hegel, who followed Kant’s dialectic, in favour of the rational as the real, Sartre reduced reality to the single unit: himself. The rest of the universe, and, importantly for our discussion on ethics, other people, has a non-reality to it. The only thing that matters is myself, my experience, nothing else.
So to avoid looking like I’m changing the subject in favour of going after Sartre rather than Eric, what has Eric said that means exactly the same thing?
Quote:” The standards are NECESSARILY mind-dependent and thus relative to every individual.”
Beautiful stuff! Sartre could not have written it any clearer! Excellent. All standards are ‘NECESSARILY’ restricted to, once again, the single unit: myself (or ‘yourself’). Having done this, you go on…
Quote: “Yes, yes, I know you think Satan has a hold of me and that can’t be falsified, but my newfound “ethic” is similar to Nietzsche’s “order of rank” where basically I deconstructed everything I knew about morality and ethics and just built up a system that makes sense to me.”
Leaving aside the nonsense about ‘Satan having a hold’ of you, you consistently say that you created a system of ethics that made sense to you. Congratulations again, champ: most ‘atheists’ don’t have the balls to go as far as you in their ‘atheism’.
But lest you get too carried away with your brilliance, let’s see where this logic necessarily leads. In this way, Sartre is far more consistent than you, which is probably why he is world famous and you’re a Neville but anyway…what is Sartre’s governing principle? That Man is a being whose passion it is to be God, and that nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of ascending to that status – for Sartre to be his own God, his own standard on everything, requiring or needing nothing outside himself, and following nothing but his own will. This is what is called ‘Existentialism’, and it is consistent with its governing assumptions, the ones Eric shares.
But when Sartre looks around him, he sees lots of others of existentialists who do not ascribe to his will! Instead of recognizing Sartre’s will, they deny it in favour of their own. Sartre has declared himself already to be God, but if he’s God, then, for him, his neighbour must be the Devil! His neighbour must be made to feel that he is the Devil, and hence subject to Sartre as God. But this, of course, is a futile exercise becoz, even if he should make some other existentialists bend to his will somehow, there are millions more out there that he cannot make bend the knee to him. So he concludes, quite logically, that man is a useless passion. Many of Sartre’s students, following the logic of Sartre’s discourse, committed suicide in response to it. And when Sartre was asked why he hadn’t committed suicide himself, he said “It is true that I can see no reason for living, but then I can see no reason for dying, either.”
Now, again, why, in answering Eric, have I gone after Sartre here? I’ve already shown that there ain’t a whole lotta difference between Eric & Sartre, but, unlike Eric, Sartre was prepared to follow his ‘atheism’ to its logical conclusion. People that are ‘atheists’, particularly ones like you, Eric, who seem to have some knowledge about them, would do well to read Sartre’s ‘Being & Nothingness’ – just to see where Western philosophy, having denied God, has ended up. Unless you are prepared to follow Sartre, Max Stirner, and the Marquis to the abyss, your ‘atheism’ is a total loss. You can talk it up about how you “don’t have to behave like the Marquis”, but you can’t make it stick – you can’t justify it, it’s just a personal opinion, which, as an Existentialist, has about as much relevance as a fart in an elevator.
Then you finish by saying ‘another religious rant.’ No denying I’m religious! But you haven’t demonstrated that it was a ‘rant’ – all you’ve done is illustrate your own bias, which is what I’ve demonstrated here. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard to have an opinion when you don’t know what you’re talking about.