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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (17281)	4/26/2004 3:37:02 AM
From: Greg or e	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 28931

"Why is it that whenever you find something especially stupid to say, you like to repeat it endlessly like a witless parrot?" Why can't you have a discussion without resorting to name calling. "<<<you have no basis to call anything actually wrong>>>" You want to reject revelation (both special and general)as a basis for morality. Without natural theology there can be no natural law. Without natural law all you have left is to make stuff up and appeal to peoples emotions to try and manipulate people into accepting things without foundation. I'm tired and going to bed. Here is something that shows the moral vacuousness of your position. Logical Positivism "Shortly after the end of the first World War, a group of mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers began meeting in Vienna to discuss the implications of recent developments in logic, including Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Under the leadership of Moritz Schlick, this informal gathering (the "Vienna Circle") campaigned for a systematic reduction of human knowledge to logical and scientific foundations. Because the resulting logical positivism (or "logical empiricism") allowed only for the use of logical tautologies and first-person observations from experience, it dismissed as nonsense the metaphysical and normative pretensions of the philosophical tradition....... Ethical Emotivism The central tenets of logical positivism clearly have serious consequences when applied to moral philosophy. Attributions of value are not easily verifiable, so moral judgments may be neither true nor false, but as meaningless as those of metaphysics. Among the original members of the Vienna Circle, only Moritz Schlick devoted any attention to ethics at all, and he regarded it as the descriptive task of cataloging the ways in which members of a society express their feelings about human behavior of various sorts. It was the American philosopher C.L. Stevenson who worked out the full implications of postivistic theories for expressions of moral praise or blame. The most vital issue to be considered is the meta-ethical question of what moral terms mean. Although Moore had correctly noted that good cannot be defined simply in terms of the approval of human beings, Stevenson made the even more radical suggestion that moral judgments have no factual content at all. Analysis of moral language should focus instead on its unique function as a guide to human behavior, what Stevenson called the "magnetism" of moral terms. In "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms" (1937) Stevenson argued that we must distinguish clearly between the descriptive or cognitive content of a term and its non-descriptive or emotive meaning. At a purely literal descriptive level, statements about moral value are indeed unverifiable and therefore meaningless, but considered as appeals to human emotions, they may have powerful dynamic effects. Saying "Murder is wrong," may have no factual significance, but it does succinctly convey a host of expressive suggestions, including (at least) "I don't like murder," "You shouldn't like murder," and "We should disapprove of murderers." Stevenson's ethical emotivism, further developed in Ethics and Language (1944), quickly became an influential twentieth-century noncognitivist theory about the meaning of moral language." philosophypages.com