Back To It in a Bit

Hi all,

I'll be back to blogathonning soon. I'm planning on doing a post an hour now between the post that comes up after this one until 12 AM Central, just because I'm a bit exhausted and would like to analyze the few topics I still want to cover a bit more in-depth than if I was doing every half hour.

Before I'm back to it, though, I would just like to thank everyone who has contributed so far and given me stuff to write about. Pretty much all of you have been students, and I certainly know that none of us have money, so it means even more that you're willing to donate to the SSA to see me write about stuff. It's a truly great organization, so know that you're supporting a good cause.

Also, thank you to everyone who has pointed people my direction today. Greta, Dan, JT, Brianne, et al, I have had more traffic today than in this blog's existence. Thanks for letting your readers know!

Finally, thank you to Chana, who previously spent six hours in a cafe with me writing, talking, and generally being cool as shit like she always is. If you haven't been reading her stuff today, you're doing yourself a disservice.

See you soon!

Habermas and Taylor, Part 2: The Modern Moral Order

This is part of my blogathon for SSA Week. Donate, and suggest topics for me, here!

In a previous post, I briefly detailed Jurgen Habermas' arguments against political theology and his view that a "postsecular" stance is required in order to formulate a society that is truly secular, where religion is incorporated but given no primacy. In this post, I will examine Charles Taylor's response to Habermas.

Taylor objects to Habermas in many respects, most importantly for my purposes in that he views the latter man's conception of a state that incorporates religion as "treating religion as a special case." It's a symptom of secular society as we have known it; he cites the US and France, though very different cases, as examples of how churches, in this case Christianity, have always managed to maintain an apartness from secular government, and are allowed by said government to essentially play by their own rules; take for example tax-exempt status.

This happens, Taylor contends, due to the need of citizens to have common points to rally around, what Taylor calls "collective agency," or that with which people of the same nationality identify with as expressing their freedom and cultural expression, in most cases both. In the democratic era, such notions are not set in stone, and so the legitimacy of the state might seem to be under greater question; that is, unless, the modern secular democracy has a very strong collective identity, which, Taylor believes, is much greater than that expressed by a dictatorship, as democracy requires "much more solidarity and much more commitment to one another in our joint political project" ("Why We Need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism"). This task can never be completed, as the project is not unilateral; as such a problem always exists, and can never truly have the same answer, but the fundamental goods remain the same: liberte, egalite, fraternite.

In this sense, Taylor argues that governments labeled "secularist" must be ones that are not primarily aimed as being "bulwarks against religion," but those that best satisfy the needs of an increasingly diverse world; by attempting to maximize the goals of liberty and equality amongst vastly different viewpoints, Taylor believes that the current issue that we atheists so often angst about, having to balance out respect for people's self-determination while not letting their beliefs that we believe to be harmful slide, could be solved, and as a result, the state could truly accept everyone and treat all groups equally.

Later, I will finish this series with my own thoughts.

Break Time.

Hey everyone, Chana and I are going to be packing it in for a bit. Being new to this whole blogathon thing, and also still being fried from finals, we need to refresh and recharge for a bit.

My next post in the Habermas/Taylor series is coming up, and after that I will be back by 7.

Well, all right then.

My friend Evan, who I have known for a really damned long time now, is a terrible person. He has asked me to prove the statement that Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon" is in fact a critique of US foreign policy.

Frankly, I don't know how it could be so, as the song is so obviously a love letter to Iran. Just check this out:

Desert loving in your eyes all the way.If I listen to your lies,would you say I'm a man without conviction,I'm a man who doesn't knowhow to sell a contradiction? 

You come and go, you come and go.
Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon,You come and go, you come and go.Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams:red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green. 

Didn't you hear your wicked words ever'y day.And you used to be so sweet. I heard you say that my love was an addiction.When we cling, our love is strong.When you go, you're gone forever.You string along, you string along.

I think it's obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of international relations that Boy George is clearly playing the role of the United States post-1979: the US is a jilted lover (of oil), stunned by the nation's sudden turn away from its love (money), taking off its Shah hat for its Ayatollah crown. Red and gold and green? Red and green for the flag, gold (at the center of the arrangement), standing for gold.

The US' love was an addiction. To oil. The line "When you go, you're gone forever," clearly refers to the closing of the Suez Canal.

Damned Iran. Such a tease.

In which we play with puppies...

... instead of blogging. It's gettin real, folks.

Why Does Sam Harris Matter?

You know who I'm talking about. Sells a lot of books. Says things like this.

I mean, really? Why do we like him?

All he seems to have offered, aside from Letter to a Christian Nation, seems to be Islamophobia and long-since debunked philosophical arguments.

I would really like to know this, everyone. Please help me out.

Can We Define Objective Morality?

This is part of my blogathon for SSA Week. Donate, and suggest topics for me, here!

This one comes in from Mike Mei, formerly of the Secular Alliance at the University of Chicago: he asks how we can define objective morality.

I'm not really sure that we can.

See, my philosophical beginning was with Albert Camus, and to this day I still view one of my first touchstones in my worldview as being the absurdist assertion that there is no intrinsic meaning to the world, but instead we create meaning based on experience. I believe that each and every freethinking person probably views morality in very different ways, but that does not, for me, necessarily mean that one viewpoint is better than another. 

I suppose more than anything I would define myself as a consequentialist. Defined simply, this means that we evaluate how moral an action is based on whether or not it created a good outcome; I'm not a utilitarian, as that relies far too much on Enlightenment notions of ethics for my comfort. But, empirically, we know that actions considered by many to be "good" are not always so; take, for example, a person who gives food to a homeless person out of kindness, without knowing that said homeless person is allergic to an ingredient in the food they were given. And indeed morally "bad" actions can be said to have good outcomes, such as if someone managed to kill a person threatening to kill innocents before they could pull the trigger, as it were. These are basic examples, but I think illustrate the point.

Hence my dilemma. I know, for instance, Dan Fincke over at Camels With Hammers has argued in favor of there being objective morality, but I have yet to properly engage with that material. As such, my answer, for now, is that I do not personally believe it is possible for there to be a set of morals that is objectively right or wrong.

But, I will be happy to hear opposing arguments, and maybe be proven wrong.