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Archive for January 16th, 2009


Dear jajaborduniyay, thanks for taking the trouble to post the vid.

However, the trouble with this debate is it’s framed within theistic terms, monotheistic at that – Mohammedism says, Christianity says, Judeism says, etc, etc.

I politely say it is irrational to take the contents of a book written by humans as evidence for the existence of some metaphysical entity called a god.

I note in passing that in Bukhari Volume 5, Book 58, Number 236: we read

“Narrated Hisham’s father:

Khadija died three years before the Prophet departed to Medina. He stayed there for two years or so and then he married Aisha when she was a girl of six years of age, and he consummated that marriage when she was nine years old.”

The language is quite plain. So either the Hadith are unreliable, or Mohammed did have sex with a child.

To me the debate appears fruitless, since there have been child molesters throughout human history, and I see no point in defending the truth of supernatural or moral claims made by religions.

If you want well-tested theories, study science. If you want to know what is right or wrong, adopt a humanist ethics.

x andrea

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Dear Sepero1, nice vid, but I don’t follow the argument 5:39-6:38.

Why does “determining if objective morality exists” imply “surveying the consciousness of every person” and identifying a common (presumably non-contradictory) set of concepts?

This itself sounds very strawwoman-ish. First of all, why assume in advance that the survey could not be done AND/OR a non-contradictory set cannot be found?

Second (more critically), why the requirement for the all-inclusive survey? ….

…. It comes dangerously close to presuming what you are trying to prove. Viz, that morals are only conceptual, and thus the only objectivity morals can have is some function of frequency of belief.

May I suggest Part II, where we explore a concept of objectivity not based on “present in the external world rather than the mental realm”; but defined instead on availability of a procedure for computing truth-values for a given proposition.

x andrea

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