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Friday, June 21, 2013

CMI furious that Christians are against YECism

I have probably mentioned before but I'm on the CMI (Creation Ministries International) mailing list, for shits and giggles. Through this I discovered today that they're really mad because "Homeschooling parents demand evolutionary textbooks". Good on them. I'm not so optimistic that this indicates in any way a strong trend away from creationism, as CMI seem to think it is, but at least it's a start.

I'm not going to link to the article, because CMI never link to anything they disagree with. Fuck them.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Objective Morality

is Bullshit.

While I think the quest for an objective metric of morality is often well intentioned it is extremely misguided. This is particularly the case for quests for scientific metrics of morality. Science is by nature, in the business of figuring out how things work. This helps us hugely in informing our ethical systems, though giving us a better understanding of things like sentience, and its possible implications for other species and so on. What it does not do is provide us with moral imperatives.

Moral imperatives are wholly subjectively derived. I would go so far as to say they are inter-subjectively derived but no further. What I mean by this is that we construct our ethical beliefs based on what subjective effects actions have on other ethical beings (by this I mean being capable of ethical thought). We may be able to detect through brain activity what effect some actions may potentially have, but this does not tell us what is good, only what *IS*. We must then appeal to our ethical construct, which has been inter-subjectively defined. This is what I mean by science informing morality, but not constructing it.

More on this in the future.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Does it matter?

It has been a long time since I last posted here, and there's a good reason why. I haven't converted to theism or anything like that, I'm still very much an atheist, and still think that the arguments for the existence of gods fail. However, the process that I mentioned had begun in my post in August last year, I've moved on even further. I no longer read any atheist blogs, I've unsubscribed to most of the atheist YouTube channels that I used to watch and I've only read three books on religion all year, two of which I actually started reading last year, and the third had as much, if not more, to do with politics than religion.

I am considering getting back into blogging, but it will most likely be on my politics blog, Straight Up Socialist, where I posted today. There is an area of study that has recently been drawn to my attention which I am very tempted to persue in greater depth, and it is known as political theology. I find it fascinating from an analytical and sociological perspective; although I don't buy into the 'theos' behind it, I think political theology has the potential to foster social progress. I also will be doing a presentation in a few months on the is/ought problem in philosophy/ethics, so some of my research into it may get blogged here.

Peace.