Okay but it is a political position. Gay marriage has only been around for ten years

Gay marriage is such an interesting one to me because by voting that through we effectively removed regulation rather than added it.

I was such a big advocate for the push to legalize gay marriage because the government has absolutely no business telling people who they can and can't marry, and the legal distinction caused ridiculous ripple effects in everything from healthcare to taxes for anyone that wasn't allowed to marry their partner.

At this point I guess the political debate would be that the government can, in fact, tell us who we're allowed to marry?

When politicians start messing around in people's private lives and try to outlaw such a basic human need for love and companionship, then it's clear that the politicians are not working on behalf of people, but are instead following a different, authoritarian agenda.

Same sex marriage has been around for a lot longer than ten years.

The first legal same sex marriage in the U.S. was 1971

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_same-sex_marriage

> At least two of the Roman Emperors were in same-sex unions; and in fact, thirteen out of the first fourteen Roman Emperors held to be bisexual or exclusively homosexual. The first Roman emperor to have married a man was Nero, who is reported to have married two other men on different occasions. First with one of his freedmen, Pythagoras, to whom Nero took the role of the bride, and later as a groom Nero married a young boy, who resembled one of his concubines, named Sporus.

Religion, at least the Abrahamic kind, is a recipe for morality. Even more, the law in modern countries, at least in the West, is shaped by Roman law and Christianity. Liberalism itself is an ideology that's strongly influenced by Judeo-Christian values.

If you think that you can separate politics from religion, I've got some news for you.

You are conveniently leaving out the fact that religion is just a bunch of made up shit.

Like politics.

And like politics, it's a bunch of made up shit, that when believed by an entire society, will determine how, and whether, you can or cannot live in it.

Humans are defined by making shit up and then believing it.

You only think politics is a bunch of made up shit because a bunch of powerful people have propagandized you into that opinion. They believe politics is real and it is the sad character of the 21st century that the average person thinks it is spectacle.

That's a extremely dismissive opinion of something billions of people believe in.

Its also worth noting that any concept we have written down is a bunch of made up shit, invented by people along the way to try to explain the world around us.

The fact that billions of people believe mutually contradictory forms of religion is one of the best pieces of evidence that its made up shit. Most people believe you can talk about the location of an event unambiguously with four coordinates and wouldn't understand a superposition if they were put into one and yet these are much more reasonable ideas than anything any religion in history has asserted.

What is asinine is suggesting that because all knowledge is provisional there exists a kind of great democracy of knowledge in which we must respect anything anyone has ever believed. Some ideas hew more closely to the real way the universe is than others.

The existence of a God isn't incompatible with the laws of the universe, because if God exists, then it exists outside this universe. As such, it is a textbook definition of a non-falsifiable concept, and you're setting up a strawman.

As for religion, the important aspects about it aren't the supernatural beings that judge us. God and the devil are a reflection of our "soul", and religion is a recipe for morality, being simply tradition that found a full proof way to be passed between generations. Even if you don't believe in God, you should believe in the power of tradition to pass on knowledge in the human culture.

I've also replied to another comment that (IMO):

1) All humans are religious, if we define religion as faith in non-falsifiable theories, with the existence of a God not being required;

2) We are not enlightened enough, and we don't have enough resources to base morality simply on observations of the natural world.

In general, if you're going to be an atheist, might as well be the kind that understands our history. Hubris isn't good, and we aren't more enlightened than past generations, we just have more resources and slightly better traditions; although here I'd add that social progress isn't guaranteed, given how ancient civilizations crumbled.

These aren't good arguments.

I think its pretty disingenuous to suggest that all humans are religious. I don't have faith in anything. Faith isn't an operating concept in how I approach the world.

And I don't even understand what you are talking about in the second point. As a matter of fact, technically speaking, I'm a so-called moral skeptic - I don't believe morality constitutes any kind of universal truth. I see it as an often unfortunate shorthand for social conventions. Not only I am ok with the idea that humans have to live together and come to accommodations about behavior, but I think in general the world would be a better place if everyone else understood that social convention is precisely what we are up to when we discuss morality.

And the mere desirability of moral certitude in itself is neither evidence nor justification for believing things that are implausible.

History, hubris, enlightenment have nothing to do with it, from my point of view. God is just a very implausible assertion about the world and therefor I don't take the idea all that seriously.

Science is full of competing understandings and explanations, that isn't unique to religion. There are quite a few commonalities between many religions also, focusing on only the parts that don't align doesn't give a full picture.

A democracy of knowledge, if that is a thing, wouldn't require respecting anything anyone has ever believed. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy, where everyone may have the right to their opinion one vote doesn't decide anything. A democracy of knowledge would likely look more like scientific concensus where everyone doesn't have to agree but what is considered "fact" is really just what most people seem to agree they believe to be supported. Facts in that sense can change over time, can be built on assumptions or belief, and can have competing ideas held by others.

Yeah, except science has a system to resolve the claims and bad ones are eventually weeded out or discounted. There are new dumb religious ideas all the time and the old ones never die.

That's a stretch and regardless, what influenced the ideas of liberalism is a non-sequitur.

No one has the right to use violence against someone for being gay or transgender. Whether being gay or transgender is immoral or not is a religious question and not something politics can adequately answer.

Morality, as in the principles for distinguishing right from wrong, good from evil, is very relevant for politics. The naive would say, "just let science settle it", but that's not how society works.

Just an example: is banning abortion an injustice to women, as they lose autonomy of their body, or is abortion a crime? Is an abortion 1 month before birth a crime? What about killing a baby 1 month after birth?

I am radically pro-choice, BTW, due to seeing what happened in my (Warsaw-pact) country that banned abortions. But there are no good answers, which is why compromises need to be made. E.g., abortion on request in Europe is usually allowed until 12–14 weeks old.

No one should have the right to "use violence" against someone for their sexual preferences, ethnicity, religion, or gender identity. We agree here. But what about free healthcare? Should transgender people have access to free, universal healthcare for their needs? I, for one, think they do, I think everyone should get free healthcare. But notice how we aren't talking of "violence", but about spending the state's resources, coming out of people's taxes.

Bigots may think being gay or being trans is immoral. But they are, IMO, the minority. Moderates care about other topics that are not bigoted and that often are a question of morality.

Another commenter said that religion is just a bunch of made up shit. That's a silly view of the world. Religion is tradition, religion is a codification of best practices, as a sort of learned knowledge that is passed between generations. Some of those practices are obsolete, or downright harmful in modern times, but some are as relevant as ever.

If you let reasoning, for example, be the only guiding principle in politics, the problem is that politicians and the people are blinded by the fact that science is often biased, doesn't have all the answers, or that whatever findings we have are incomplete. And when nihilism takes over, you can easily arrive at the conclusion that certain groups of people need to be eliminated in order for society to thrive (e.g., the Jews, the handicapped, the bourgeoisie). I, for one, am not happy that one of Canada's answers to poverty appears to be assisted suicide.

The belief that all human life is sacred, and that everyone needs to be free to live and to find their happiness, is ultimately a religious belief, much like liberalism in general. And that's good, actually.

In the context of liberalism and rights, you can certainly establish a system of natural law based on reason instead of the existence of God. Whether or not 'reason' comes from God is an interesting ontological question, but irrelevant to political philosophy. The point is that we can derive ethics from observations on the natural world. It is an apple's nature to fall to the ground, and based on observation of cause and effect, we have described a set of laws for this phenomenon. There is nothing particularly mystical or religious about gravity.

When a government passes a law that prohibits transgender people from obtaining healthcare to treat their condition, that is a violation of their natural right to live.

There is no shortage of genocides and pogroms committed by religious groups, were they being 'nihilistic'?.

Right. Well, we can agree to disagree that we can derive ethics from observations of the natural world. We might be able to do that, if we were more enlightened or had greater resources at disposal, but we are far from being there. Human beings are pretty fallible and irrational, which is why we still need tradition, even if tradition needs to be questioned periodically.

For instance, I think that the most heinous, most damaging ideas tend to come from rationalist philosophers, because with the right set of first principles you can justify anything. In fairness, you mentioned empiricism (observations), however, how are you going to conduct studies on what's "murder"? All kinds of social experiments ended in disaster, we can't even do good studies on nutrition without spending a lot of resources, and studies that can knowingly hurt individuals are deemed as immoral and thus forbidden.

In general, I think that at this point, "secular ethics based on observations" is a pipe dream. At least until we'll be able to simulate society somehow, and in the meantime, mathematical models are bullshit with a really poor prediction rate.

I also have this opinion that ALL people are religious, and by religion I mean beliefs that are non-falsifiable, or close to being non-falsifiable, and in this definition religion does not require the existence of a God.

> When a government passes a law that prohibits transgender people from obtaining healthcare to treat their condition, that is a violation of their natural right to live.

Again, I'm all for transgender people having all the healthcare they need. However, access to healthcare is not a natural right for the simple fact that somebody else has to pay for it. Consider how free universal healthcare is only possible in affluent countries with a high GDP. "Taxing the rich" is also only a solution in countries that have enough rich people to tax. The public budget is never limited and there are always priorities.

Countries like the US could provide free universal healthcare, no doubt about it. It is also my impression that US's healthcare is corrupt, and they could probably do it without increasing current spending, if the corruption was dealt with. But if the public spending goes up (big if), then it's the taxpayers that have to agree with it, and they do that by voting. Which is a sad state of affairs, as all would benefit from universal healthcare, but it underlines the fact that free healthcare is a privilege.

Note that I'm saying this as an asthmatic, a chronic condition for which I need medication, without which I'd be unable to live. I do have access to it, but I don't consider it a right, but rather a blessing to live in a century in which I can have access to it. I might have been born 30 years earlier.

I don't know what it is but authoritarians are really focus on imposing a system on people. Where women are chattel and any exhibition of sexual agency is severely punished. Men can have agency but any deviation from a very limited dominant sexuality is also punished severely. And men are required to jump through a bunch of hopes to prove themselves worthy of sex.

One notes that communists, fascists, religious fundamentalists, and absolute monarchists, are all like that.

So it's political in that regard.