Relating to secularism or theological arguements

I do see where he is getting at particularly in his reply and later must look it up and learn more

Matthew Flannagan (52) Says: 
April 24th, 2013 at 9:32 am

The problem is exasperated by standard liberal views on religion and public life, which demand public discourse be conducted in secular terms. Islamic terrorists can only be refuted on there own terms, when others can engage them on the presuppositions they hold by other people’s of the book. As long as the west continues to marginalise theological moral discourse and refuse to understand or take it seriously. The problem will remain.

Kimble (3,645) Says: 
April 24th, 2013 at 9:46 am

which demand public discourse be conducted in secular terms

This is just “oppressor claiming victimhood” bullshit. And from the oppressors who continue to claim to have the ONLY language with which morality can be discussed, no less.

Atheism isn’t killing your religion. Your religion is a fantasy that evaporates upon application of reality.

Islamic terrorists can only be refuted on there own terms…

You can’t use reason to change the mind of someone who hasn’t set their mind through reason.

Matthew Flannagan (52) Says: 
April 24th, 2013 at 12:48 pm

Kimble writes:

“This is just “oppressor claiming victimhood” bullshit. And from the oppressors who continue to claim to have the ONLY language with which morality can be discussed, no less.”

Actually what you dismiss as “bullshit” without any argument is in fact explicitly stated and defended as the mainstream position in the literature, your welcome to read the stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy which spells out the debate and refers to the view I described as the standard view.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-politics/. It pays to actually know something about a topic before you start dismissing comments about it.

” And from the oppressors who continue to claim to have the ONLY language with which morality can be discussed, no less.” Actually no theologian or christian philosopher I am aware of claims to have the only language with which morality can be discussed. So that’s kinda false, there are arguments that theism provides the only metaphysical basis for certain features of morality to be explicable, but that’s quite different to claiming that morality can only be discussed with theological language. Your confusing moral semantics with ontology, again try and know what your talking about before you write.

As to the rest of your comments, assertions and slogans don’t count for much, to show theism is false you need to actually provide reasons for that conclusion, not simply assert its a fantasy, and the claim that you can’t use reason to refute a position which was not based on reason is actually false. The fact a position is not based on good reasons does not mean there are not good reasons against it. And irrationally form views can be refuted by reason, there is in logic a whole argument form known as reductio ad absurdism which does this. Again try and understand what your talking about before you mouth off.

But in this context what I said is perfectly correct, if one wants to offer an argument that refutes Islamic radicalism one needs to appeal to premises that those tempted by such radicalism accept, arguing that such radicalism is false from a secular view point is hardly going to count as a plausible argument unless you already accept a secular viewpoint to begin with and those tempted to Islamic radicalism don’t. To refute it you need people who are willing to accept certain theological premises for the sake of argument and argue from those and those people need to know and understand those premises well enough to make the argument.

Silly ignorant name calling by ignorant secularists who don’t know the first thing about what they are talking about tends to get no where.

unaha-closp (872) Says: 

April 24th, 2013 at 2:24 pm

Matthew Flannagan:

“But in this context what I said is perfectly correct, if one wants to offer an argument that refutes Islamic radicalism one needs to appeal to premises that those tempted by such radicalism accept, arguing that such radicalism is false from a secular view point is hardly going to count as a plausible argument unless you already accept a secular viewpoint to begin with and those tempted to Islamic radicalism don’t. To refute it you need people who are willing to accept certain theological premises for the sake of argument and argue from those and those people need to know and understand those premises well enough to make the argument.”

Islamists arise from secular issues, they arise from reality – we know this because they exist, they are real. They do not arise from a made up fantasy set of premises, however much Islamists may claim to have an explicit religious cause to their existence they are wrong. We are not going to win by constructing a counter argument on made up premises that suit us better, because our position will also be wrong. Our argument will inevitably fail in the face of observed reality.

Islam is a big religion and like all big religion is flexible/complicated/convoluted/obtuse enough to adapt to reality. It has survived through hundreds of years, by being relevant for hundreds of years. As can any successful religion, it can be made to say whatever you want it to say. If you want to create a Islamic theological argument for peaceable relations and a complete absence of terrorism, you can and it has been done by many people. However secular reality causes some people to make a counter arguments and they can also justify these in Islam.

Radical Islam arises from a very simple secular reality – the House of Saud likes money.

Their money is maximised by extracting the oil and selling it whilst maintaining control over the country. They have a population of fellow citizens that is diverted from taking the control away from the Saud family by religion. The religion is funded for the purpose of telling the population that superiority is achieved through religious practice. The religion impedes economic activity which prevents any competing independent power base arising in the country to challenge the House of Saud, and this impediment is okay as the oil wealth compensates for the loss of internal economic growth. Basically it is a religion that works well for Saudi Arabia inside Saudi Arabia.

Unfortunately the Saudi religious establishment exports its “superior” form of religion to the rest of the world, which doesn’t have inexhaustible oil wealth. (This helps the House of Saud by exporting a lot ambitious young men to be the spreaders of the religion – directing them to correct the moral failings of the world.) In places where there is no oil wealth the religion fails in very secular ways – its adherents become poor, very quickly – and the Islamists interpret this reality on being due not to their religion but rather to the lack of faith in the wider community. They then argue (forcefully) that the rest of the population needs to become religiously pure to achieve success.

What this all means is that terrorism is unsolvable, because of secular reality. We need the flow of oil from Arabia to be uninterrupted, for that to happen the created religion needs to be allowed to continue. Until the oil stops flowing their will be terrorism.

kowtow (4,198) Says: 
April 24th, 2013 at 3:04 pm

uana closp

Islam got to France in 732. Look up Poitiers or Tours.Long before we put the Saudis in power in Arabia  And they've been trying ever since. The difference now is our leaders refuse to resist and actually encourage it in the name of equality or multiculturalism.

Look up Vienna 1683.
Look up the Armenian genocide 1915.

Arab oil?We don’t need it, Canada has shit loads but Obama wants clean oil from the Saudis,how much sense does that make.?

Kimble (3,648) Says: 
April 24th, 2013 at 10:24 pm

Waaaaah! We can’t stop terrorism because we have to discuss things in a public space in a secular way!

Atheism is to blame for religious terrorism? After centuries of religion dominating social discourse, it is now secularism that is causing religious terror?

And you seriously think you, a non-muslim, would ever be able to dissuade an islamic terrorist from being an islamic terrorist if only you were free to show them the truth about their religion? Oh, it says killing people is bad?

How about you go field test that theory in Egypt first?

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