Of course the other danger is that I did Iska a great injustice and have misrepresented his views. I did try to put his case as fairly as I could. But no doubt he’ll tell us soon.
You have, yes, but only up to a point. The bits where you stick to generality are pretty fair (societies which believe in nothing tend towards moral collapse, and so forth) - but when you try to get specific or personal you are very quickly just making things up. Because I was writing in generalities, that rather suggests that you understand what I wrote pretty well.
It may baffle you, but I don’t hold particularly strong opinions on most things - I’ve no interest in condemning most people as sinners, for example, and nor do I think atheists struggle to go about their lives. But what I
really do care about is things being done properly, about the proper structures being in place. The details are secondary, so long as we think about things properly we will usually reach solutions that we can live with. Accept that that’s where I’m coming from—it’s precisely the reason why I wrote in general terms,
because that is what I’m interested in—and by all means disagree but don’t make stuff up, it looks stupid.
It shows why it’s often a bad idea to ascribe motives to people, but if that’s what we’re doing then I’d suggest (as with our similarly frustrating natcon exchange recently) you see these discussions primarily as arguments to be won, so the game is to try to force a different point out of your opponent and attack that instead. Now maybe I’m doing you the disservice, in which case my turn to apologise, but I’m not interested in argument-as-combat so you can take my point or leave it, and we’ll go our separate ways. At any rate you’ll appreciate why the appeal of a discussion like this fades so rapidly - not just that we don’t want the same thing out of it, or that it’s no fun being the fox in a fox hunt; but clicking on this thread to find you ‘channeling’ imaginary Iska is one of the more disturbing things I’ve encountered on here.
What my point comes down to, which it seems you do understand, is that removing religion would be to remove an enormous supporting structure from our society, because one of the things religion ultimately is is the distillation of 2000+ years of moral lessons, of how to think about things. I mentioned rapists in women’s prisons (I think they should be in men’s prisons fwiw, for the poster who got confused about that) because that’s the most obvious example of the new ideology trying to tackle a new issue and going haywire.
You asked about what might be an unpopular idea that isn’t getting carried across to the new. There are plenty, but how about imago dei? Obviously that concept won’t itself be the basis of prison policy, but it does demonstrate a fundamental starting-point - roughly, that people are the way they are made - from which you’re unlikely to make the mistake of thinking rapists should be in women’s prisons. Whereas ditch that basis and try to decide by carrying over only a few principles that sound nice - right to autonomy, respect for personal identity, avoiding hate and so forth - and you end up with an absolute mess, which even has to start making up its own metaphysics of innate gender to try to avoid its own rights-conflicting contradictions.
Where I see the danger is in the repetition of processes like that, because they carry the risk of becoming completely unmoored from any tested moral basis, from tested ways of thinking. A society like that can go anywhere.
