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Location: By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea
68,327 posts, read 54,350,985 times
Reputation: 40731
Quote:
Originally Posted by Avondalist
I don't mean an uninhibited culture.
But many do and deem it 'immoral' if you do anything that offends them, be it drinking alcohol, using tobacco, recreational sex, you name it and we can probably find someone who calls it evil and a sign America is collapsing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Avondalist
I mean a violent, anarchical culture driven by clans and blood feuds.
Because that's what you get without social order and shared norms.
I think you're discounting how awful life is in "wild" cultures.
Are you really counting what life is like under dictators?
The stories I read of Kim Jong Un and those he's sold off as slaves both in country and out lead me to believe I'd still rather take my chances with clans and blood feuds.
I just get tired of the 'The Sky is Falling and it's all (fill in the blank's) fault'.
Are you really counting what life is like under dictators?
The stories I read of Kim Jong Un and those he's sold off as slaves both in country and out lead me to believe I'd still rather take my chances with clans and blood feuds. I'd rather die fighting than live enslaved.
I just get tired of the 'The Sky is Falling and it's all (fill in the blank's) fault'.
We certainly have our problems but collapse?
Sounds like hyperbole to me.
Was Iraq better off under Hussein? Was Libya better off under Ghaddafi?
What I do know is no where does the Constitution task us with building other countries around the world.
Judging by the millions who have fled those places since we destroyed their governments, I think they were.
Democratic institutions are costly because they are inefficient. But those costs can be reduced if a culture is relatively homogeneous. The more heterogeneous a culture, the more inefficiencies are introduced by democracy. At some point government becomes so unwieldy that it falls apart and you need a dictator to impose order on the cheap.
The USA is a long way from collapsing, the thread title is hyperbole, but the quote from Adams hits on a very important truth.
The best governments are democracies of like-minded people such as in northern Europe. The US used to be like minded when the powers that be pursued an assimilationist strategy, but since then our culture has fractured and our government is becoming more corrupt and less effective than it used to be.
I still can't figure out why supposedly self-described "religious" people voted for Trump, who clearly embodies so many classic evils - greed, adultery, a propensity for fraud, indifference toward the poor, etc.
A gram or a meter have set standards that define them, there is no such objective measurement for morality, or qualifications for those whose judgement we should accept.
God would be the objective measure for morality under Christian meta-ethics.
Even those founding fathers who were deists would be able to underpin their ethics in a similar way.
Denying an objective morality doesn't help you here. All it does (in this context) is disqualify you from disparaging the OP's moral world view. That puts you in an awkward situation where he can criticize your morality and you can't criticize his.
the fbi has been revealed to be a corrupt organization that threatens the very foundation, the democracy of this nation. however, the press suddenly discover the "children-in-a-cage" story, and use that to bury this very important fbi story.
Failed, has-been Hollywood stars call for terrorizing the children of ICE agents, and kidnapping Barron Trump and handing him over to child rapists.
etc, etc, etc.
I wonder if america is descending into a civil war, a catastrophe that I'd previously thought was far enough into the future that I'd never see it. Now, I'm not so sure.
Location: By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea
68,327 posts, read 54,350,985 times
Reputation: 40731
Quote:
Originally Posted by Avondalist
Judging by the millions who have fled those places since we destroyed their governments, I think they were.
Democratic institutions are costly because they are inefficient. But those costs can be reduced if a culture is relatively homogeneous. The more heterogeneous a culture, the more inefficiencies are introduced by democracy. At some point government becomes so unwieldy that it falls apart and you need a dictator to impose order on the cheap.
The USA is a long way from collapsing, the thread title is hyperbole, but the quote from Adams hits on a very important truth.
But if many slave owners of the day considered it immoral as has been put forth in this thread, how can we take Adams seriously when so many framers/signers of the Constitution were slave owners? Just a classic case of 'good for me but not for thee'?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Avondalist
The best governments are democracies of like-minded people such as in northern Europe. The US used to be like minded when the powers that be pursued an assimilationist strategy, but since then our culture has fractured and our government is becoming more corrupt and less effective than it used to be.
I agree with the bolded but don't necessarily believe a multi-cultural society is its root cause. There's certainly enough corrupt mono-cultural societies/governments to refute that theory.
Location: By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea
68,327 posts, read 54,350,985 times
Reputation: 40731
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hightower72
God would be the objective measure for morality under Christian meta-ethics.
Even those founding fathers who were deists would be able to underpin their ethics in a similar way.
Denying an objective morality doesn't help you here. All it does (in this context) is disqualify you from disparaging the OP's moral world view. That puts you in an awkward situation where he can criticize your morality and you can't criticize his.
How can you say there's an objective morality by defending it with Christian meta-ethics?
Making it Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, whatever makes it by definition a subjective morality.
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