(02-09-2015 12:22 PM)miko33 Wrote:  

(02-09-2015 12:04 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  He's applying a dichotomy created in the 20th century to explain behavior from 1000 years ago. He's operating under the false premise that we can apply commonly held beliefs and ideas of today to situations 1000 years ago without correcting for differing circumstances. It's like trying to put legos together that don't fit.

In today's world, knowing what we know now and knowing how we perceive life today as opposed to 1000 years ago, IMHO your statement reinforces the point the author is trying to make. They DIDN'T know any better. That doesn't mean that they were dullards. It means they lacked knowledge and made decisions to the best of their abilities knowing what they knew back then. I understand you thought the author gave medieval europe the shaft in this discussion, and frankly a lot of people do because they think human progress lept from the ancient roman and greek thought straight to the renaissance - with the middle ages being a stagnant regressive mess. But the fact is that the middle ages DID lose some knowledge. They did take steps back when Rome fell and they DID have to reinvent the wheel on a number of occasions. This does not mean that there still wasn't progress made in medieval europe. But they simply did not have the same knowledge at their disposal. They still used reason to draw conclusions about the world, but that reason was firmly entrenched within the framework in place in medieval europe that included a strong papacy and monarchies - which utilized feudalism as the means to manage the affairs of the kingdoms. This plus using the bible as their moral guidebook (plus what the papacy spread to the kingdoms) - they need to fill in a lot of blanks and make assumptions that we do not have to today. I think we're thinking the same way but are getting tripped up by the terminologies.

I must point out thought that your statement that I'm quoting can be used just as logically for us today when it comes to how people continue to utilize a book that was written in the bronze and iron ages - that was meant to be utilized during those time periods - as a guidebook for today. But that's another discussion entirely.

I think you are committing a number of errors when it comes to historical fact that are skewing your opinion.

His application of that "witch" idea is predicated entirely on his mistaken belief in historical falsehoods.

BTW, as to your second point, no it cannot. Morality and logical/scientific reasoning are separate issues. Just because the Bible may not be a great source to decide where to plant corn or make antibiotics doesn't mean it is not a good place to find fundamental truths about human nature and morality in general. The two are separate and distinct things. But, as you said, that's a different argument.

As to the entire topic, we both see what he is getting at. If he wanted to make it convincing then he has a very long way to go. Between just you and I we have seen enough holes to make his entire argument worthless for the point he is trying to make. If, as I suspect, he is just talking to hear himself talk then his ideas are going where they belong regardless of anything you or I say or agree on, the trashcan.

BTW, I found out more about the guy. He has his own Wikipedia page. He seems to be a loon and works out on the periphery of academia. I certainly couldn't imagine the old school philosophical world of the universities in this country embracing such obvious mistakes and errors.

(02-09-2015 10:39 AM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  That piece should make any person's who has even just taken philosophy 101 skin crawl.

psy301 was my first and only.....first semester, freshman year...

...the lunacy of it all....

I choose to drink and smoke at this point....it's unnerving the things I read at times....

intentional edit: at southern miss, psy301 is logic.....screwed on brains.....took 10 mins to take final.....only class I truly understood.....

it's actually funny when the left meets the right.....

Dixie I was unaware that the jury trial system was born in the Church. I knew a little about the university systems.
Also, the creation of the hospital was born in the Church, for obvious reasons. That article sucks wind bad.
Did that writer ever hear of the Magna Carter? I think that first appeared around 1215?

(02-09-2015 12:29 PM)miko33 Wrote:  

(02-09-2015 12:17 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  

(02-09-2015 12:09 PM)miko33 Wrote:  

(02-09-2015 12:00 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  

(02-09-2015 11:49 AM)miko33 Wrote:  I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know the intricacies of English law during that time period aside from the feudal system being discarded for something else - which I would assume is property rights for all (if you could afford it!). Honestly though, I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater because nothing is in a vacuum because everything has an origin somewhere. The article is not terribly long, so no doubt he took shortcuts and is making you do some work. Strip away his obvious bias against religion if you are a believer and understand the limitations that science is simply knowledge and has nothing to do with wisdom, and it's an interesting piece.

I think it is interesting for different reasons than you. If nothing else, it is a good conversation piece.

Just break that relationship, highlighted. The feudal system was the perfect incubator for the legal system. That legal system is probably the single biggest contributor to social change in history, not grand social science theories.

In my opinion, it is far more rational and likely that slow political change came about as the lower orders became more and more aware of their individual legal rights and practiced those rights than any theory born in the minds of a minority of elites put on paper that was inaccessible to the common man.

That is at the heart of my opposition to his argument, not his obvious bias against something else, like religion.

Do you know who the writer is by any chance, other than his name?

I don't disagree with you that the legal framework assembled by the English common law system had profound effects on the Western world as it was part of the philosophy that John Locke, David Hume and the founding fathers utilized to build our nation. But I wouldn't sell scientific knowledge and the reason developed during the age of enlightenment - or to some the rediscovery of Ancient Greek philosophy reinterpreted for more modern times - as fellow travelers to building a more moral society either.

Regarding the author, I only know him by his bio at the bottom of the article. Admittedly, I may be putting words in the author's mouth since I do not know much about his writings. My inclinations are towards skepticism, but I never read the magazine.

"Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for ScientificAmerican, and an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University and Chapman University. This article is excerpted from his new book, The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom (New York: Henry Holt, 2015)."

I think that is precisely why we are seeing his writing differently.

I don't think anybody can say that claim and be correct. Reason was not the creation of the Enlightenment. Reasoning at its heart if logic. Logic was honed and developed into something useful in an academic and scientific setting in the Middle Ages, scholasticism in particular.

About the author, the fact he wrote a book is scary. I sure hope he spent more time doing actual research before writing it than he did before writing this article. LOL

OK. Replace "reason" with the philosophy developed during the age of enlightenment. A number of greek and roman philosophies and even technologies were lost to medieval europe after the fall of the roman empire. If I remember correctly, the church preserved the philosophy of Aristotle, but did not for Plato. I believe Platonic thought was saved by Islamic peoples - back when they cared more about philosophy and learning - and that wasn't rediscovered either around the time of Aquinas or later. Wasn't logic during the middle ages built upon Aristotle's work? I thought that it was. Regardless, the way we approached the world from the age of enlightenment was different than the middle ages. Papal influence waned even more so after the reformation into the 1600 - 1700s.

Which begs the question, what philosophy are you, or rather him, referring to? Science?

Science is not a philosophy.

All sorts of works from the classical period were all over Europe. Ireland in particular. The Middle Ages saw the rise of the institution that sat down and fleshed out those ideas. What Aristotle and Plato wrote would not have been sufficient enough to form the basis of "reason." They were observations. It is probably supremely ironic that keen logic used to answer stupid questions like, "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" is where useful logic was born.

That's also a matter of fact, not opinion. The movement is called scholasticism.

An aside, can you name a technology lost during the Middle Ages because of intellectual stagnation?

(02-09-2015 12:40 PM)SuperFlyBCat Wrote:  Dixie I was unaware that the jury trial system was born in the Church. I knew a little about the university systems.
Also, the creation of the hospital was born in the Church, for obvious reasons. That article sucks wind bad.
Did that writer ever hear of the Magna Carter? I think that first appeared around 1215?

Yup, it has its roots in the ecclesiastical courts where priests would be forced to defend themselves in front of a group of their "peers."

The ideas of appeals and court hierarchy also have their roots in that system.

(02-09-2015 12:44 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  

(02-09-2015 12:40 PM)SuperFlyBCat Wrote:  Dixie I was unaware that the jury trial system was born in the Church. I knew a little about the university systems.
Also, the creation of the hospital was born in the Church, for obvious reasons. That article sucks wind bad.
Did that writer ever hear of the Magna Carter? I think that first appeared around 1215?

Yup, it has its roots in the ecclesiastical courts where priests would be forced to defend themselves in front of a group of their "peers."

The ideas of appeals and court hierarchy also have their roots in that system.

Thanks

(02-09-2015 12:33 PM)miko33 Wrote:  

(02-09-2015 12:30 PM)EigenEagle Wrote:  For being a "post-enlightenment" time, the 20th century sure did have a lot wars and carnage..including mass murders by very much non-religious people.

Hitler was religious. He was NOT an atheist. Kaiser Wilhelm was religious as well as most people in power during the advent of WWI.

I didn't say Hitler was an atheist. I am saying that you'd have a very hard time arguing the Nazi ideology wasn't ultimately secular when it was part of a wave of pro-eugenics sentiment in the scientific community that followed Origin of Species. People like Francis Galton, Ronald Fisher, and Nikola Tesla among others in the scientific community were eugenicists.

And people like Mao Tse Chung, Stalin, and Pol Pot were most certainly were secular people with secular ideologies and are responsible for some of the worst atrocities in history.

(02-09-2015 12:50 PM)EigenEagle Wrote:  

(02-09-2015 12:33 PM)miko33 Wrote:  

(02-09-2015 12:30 PM)EigenEagle Wrote:  For being a "post-enlightenment" time, the 20th century sure did have a lot wars and carnage..including mass murders by very much non-religious people.

Hitler was religious. He was NOT an atheist. Kaiser Wilhelm was religious as well as most people in power during the advent of WWI.

I didn't say Hitler was an atheist. I am saying that you'd have a very hard time arguing the Nazi ideology wasn't ultimately secular when it was part of a wave of pro-eugenics sentiment in the scientific community that followed Origin of Species. People like Francis Galton, Ronald Fisher, and Nikola Tesla among others in the scientific community were eugenicists.

And people like Mao Tse Chung, Stalin, and Pol Pot were most certainly were secular people with secular ideologies and are responsible for some of the worst atrocities in history.

Eugenics was a mainstream concept until the Nazi concentration camps were laid bare for all to see. The study shortly evaporated practically overnight after people saw with their own eyes how far eugenics could be taken - perhaps to its logical conclusion. But Hitler and his government was NOT secular. I'd argue that he felt compelled to pursue his visions of an aryan race as a mandate from God.

I'd also argue that Mao was revered "like a god", so I'd argue that even there that his version of communism was religious in nature - much like North Korea where the Kim Jong ________'s are revered as gods by their own people. Stalin was different and he took a tack that morphed communism from what would be more of a purely international movement built upon worker rights to a nationalistic one where the Soviet Union was created as a nation that to subjugate all others. Stalin used nationalism to great effect while the communist leaders in the asian nations morphed their versions of communism into a quasi-religious movement that was built on ancestor worship after they died.

(02-09-2015 12:57 PM)miko33 Wrote:  Eugenics was a mainstream concept until the Nazi concentration camps were laid bare for all to see. The study shortly evaporated practically overnight after people saw with their own eyes how far eugenics could be taken - perhaps to its logical conclusion. But Hitler and his government was NOT secular. I'd argue that he felt compelled to pursue his visions of an aryan race as a mandate from God.

There are Christians that think addressing climate change and taking better care of the environment than we do now is also a mandate from God. That doesn't mean that environmentalism is a product of contemporary science rather than any religious dogma.

Any time religious dogma requires what is considered good from a rationalist/imperialist point of view religion will not get any credit for it. Yet if there's even a tinge of religion in a eugenics movement that arose when eugenics was chic in scientific communities, then that's the result of religion and not rationalism/empiricism. See how that double standard works?

(02-09-2015 10:06 AM)miko33 Wrote:  A great read.

http://www.cato.org/policy-report/januar...l-progress

I think the author's major flaw is the presumption of a universal morality that is predicated on the accession of science. The subject matter is far too nuanced for such a simple explanation.

(02-09-2015 03:41 PM)vandiver49 Wrote:  

(02-09-2015 10:06 AM)miko33 Wrote:  A great read.

http://www.cato.org/policy-report/januar...l-progress

I think the author's major flaw is the presumption of a universal morality that is predicated on the accession of science. The subject matter is far too nuanced for such a simple explanation.

What do you mean that he's building a universal morality based on science? Science is knowledge, so are you stating that he assumes that we can achieve a more universal code of ethics if we have more knowledge of how the natural world works? If so, I don't see the issue here. The flip side to terms like universal/objective would be subjective. Are you stating that morality is subjective and depends upon the beliefs of a culture, and that what one culture believes is equivalent to what another believes?

A lot of morality is objective in nature. In most cases, killing is bad, property rights should be respected, and people should have the right to pursue their happiness provided that they are not directly harming others. The golden rule is an objective morality that has been stated in a number of cultures outside of Palestine.