Secular arguments for social conservatism

[Confederate Farmers]

What secular arguments agianst public nudity, profanity, and other agendas of social conservatism to protect family values?

If I weren't that religious and in my nation-state, I would still ban some religions such as satanism and some occult practices. Because while people will praise and criticize religion, a religion of pure evil without disguise would still be a bad influence on any society. https://assets.grammarly.com/emoji/v1/1f4a1.svg

What are the advantages of being catholic vs. evangelical Protestantism? Can sex education be taught in a biblical atmosphere? Because if the point of the class is to prevent teen pregnancy and STDs, it sounds like a yes.

Government should protect the family unit from being destroyed if they meet some success and moral laws often are health and safety laws.

How can a government discourage unhealthy lifestyles outside of God's plan without always using religion, such as sexual immorality? What can other arguments for social conservatism be made?

Are there secular arguments in favor of blasphemy laws, such as cursing the Judeo-Christian God or a deist diety? How about laws governing one's modesty preventing nudity or saying women can't wear pants unless they are for jeans or work relating usage they must where a dress or skirt or some shorts?

workers do enjoy getting days off such as an allowing a period of rest every 7th day and workers getting off on holidays

How can the government protect the family from being destroyed in your opinions ?

[Cerna Gora]

Public nudity

1. In the north, it can be harmful to health.
2. No need to scatter things like the remnants of shit on an ass that wasn't wiped well enough.
3. You can't just destroy this prohibition. In order for it not to exist at some point, it will have to be canceled at some earlier moment, and this cancellation can give you an unpleasant time.

profanity

This thing is a full part of the language, but it shouldn't be abused as it can start to "replace" the finer elements of the language.
Upd: In addition, the constant use of swearing devalues it, and thus destroys some of the richness of the language.

to protect family values

This can be an argument in itself. The family is a proven and good institution that can serve humanity well. If something really needs to be done to protect family, then it must be done.

[YuriFornia]

I just wonder about the secular arguments against LGBT rights (especially the LGB, as I've heard most of the T arguments so often and found them lacking in the science department)

[Independent Cossack Ukraine]

I will go for two conservative arguments I strongly believe in (with a twist). I myself am neither conservative nor liberal and just choose based on each issue.

1: Arguments against sexual immorality/promiscuity. Simply put, use statistics to show increased rates of STIs as well as worsened mental health. Frame it as a health argument. This is how I back my view against sexual misconduct.

2: Family values. To me, this means "family comes first." Show more statistics about how two-parent households (Opposite-sex and yes, same-sex too) are far superior to single-parent households in terms of child outcomes. Demonstrate how children from single-parent households have higher rates of being high school dropouts or committing crimes.

(These trends hold true across race and ethnicity, I have had people make disgusting accusations of racism about the whole single-parent thing. It has nothing to do with race and I don't like people bringing race into it. "Family comes first" is found in basically all cultures around the world.)

[The Rich Port]

I will go for two conservative arguments I strongly believe in (with a twist). I myself am neither conservative nor liberal and just choose based on each issue.

1: Arguments against sexual immorality/promiscuity. Simply put, use statistics to show increased rates of STIs as well as worsened mental health. Frame it as a health argument. This is how I back my view against sexual misconduct.

2: Family values. To me, this means "family comes first." Show more statistics about how two-parent households (Opposite-sex and yes, same-sex too) are far superior to single-parent households in terms of child outcomes. Demonstrate how children from single-parent households have higher rates of being high school dropouts or committing crimes.

(These trends hold true across race and ethnicity, I have had people make disgusting accusations of racism about the whole single-parent thing. It has nothing to do with race and I don't like people bringing race into it. "Family comes first" is found in basically all cultures around the world.)

Which yeah do you even have evidence substantiating them. Says a lot there's only two you could come up with.

1.) You could fold that easily into just the sociological and psychological problems that are common in America that have nothing to do with "promiscuity" and everything to do with just bad systems and bizarre cultural attitudes.

2.) Families aren't sacrosanct. Two parents aren't some kind of magical number, unless you mean children should have more caregivers, in which case, yeah sure, bring back polygamy then so they have 7 parents instead of 2. Parenting is a numbers game because it's main factor is economy; of time, of resources, and of emotional and psychological labor. Plenty of orphans raised by the state go on to have successful, fruitful lives and sometimes remember their time with their "parents" (doctors, psychologists, caretakers, nurses, etc.) fondly. While I agree that families are better for that, it doesn't mean families are somehow magical. Villages are, but we're not tribal societies anymore because we're not allowed to be by capitalism.

Which yeah if we're sticking with this kind of basic kindergarten level sanitized morality, boy is this gonna be a short thread.

Y'all realize witchcraft isn't real, right, OP?

[Existential Cats]

I don't see how it's at all difficult to imagine secular arguments for social conservatism. It's still possible to believe in the importance of traditional values and strong group cohesion while also supporting secularism.

[Archinstinct]

What are the advantages of being catholic vs. evangelical Protestantism?

None. Everybody is equal as Christians are all one in Jesus Christ. This is indisputable as it is laid out in the bible itself.

[Space Squid]

There are a lot of very cynical reasons to support social conservatism, as it exists in (I presume) the United States. Things to do with group cohesion. And shared identity. Maintaining what Ibn Khaldun would call "asabiyya."

These arguments often have a lot of similarity to the argument that you should say you believe in God, even if you don't. They're saying that what matters more than honesty, or even what is right, is adherence to the group dynamic. That the strongest groups are always the ones where everyone is basically in agreement, and stand together.

I'm not sure if this is actually true. But I don't know if it even matters, because unfortunately modern conservatism (again: in America) achieves its group identity almost entirely through othering, and not even by othering foreigners (which is what you would do if you wanted to actually strengthen your country). Instead they other people in their own country, who oppose them politically.

Which makes it very hard to make an argument for supporting conservatism as a way of maintaining group cohesion.

[Adamede]

Depends on what exactly you're trying to conserve.

[GuessTheAltAccount]

Public nudity: Arousal reduces bloodflow to the brain, and may in turn impair judgment (why else do you think teenage boys aren't deterred from sex by the risk of it ruining his life?) to say nothing of the embarrassment one would go through for an involuntary physical response when someone else could've more easily just covered up. I would consider laws against public nudity in this sense analogous to laws against public drinking.

Profanity: That's more of a freedom of speech matter than a secularism matter. Take away people's right to say "fuck" and you take away their right to say "fuck war". If profanity offered nothing to say you couldn't have otherwise said, there would be no reason to restrict it. No secular argument for this one, but frankly, I'm not sure there's much of a theocratic argument for it either. And with blasphemy the usefulness is even more obvious; the contempt expressed for deities in whose name so much harm has been done.

Sex ed: Obviously different people see different purposes in it. Some see it as incentivizing abstinence until marriage, even though in some jurisdictions teenagers' marriages, even to each other, aren't legally binding like they were in ye olden days. Some see it as incentivizing abstinence until one can afford children, but with a $200000 price tag according to the USDA, not everyone is sure they'll ever get there anyway, so that's a lot of potential boning time missed out on for a goal one might never reach. I would presume most people really do value just giving kids the facts and letting the chips fall where they may, as those who say otherwise have been wrong about people's motives before.

Family unit: What's funny is even on this very site there are seemingly secular people who are very fervently opposed to polyamory. I think it's more a matter of who you believe about human nature than who you believe about religion. (Lot wasn't exactly married to his daughters, after all.) I'm not religious and I semi-sympathize with the idea that polyamory could provoke jealousy... it's just that monogamy doesn't always hold firm anyway and we as a society need to re-evaluate whether or not the concept was a mistake. If it is, it's a mistake people of various religions, and some of no religion, had a hand in, and there's no sense pretending religion is the only thing standing in the way of re-evaluating it. The most fervent theocrats would be hard pressed to explain why if people care about monogamy are serial adulterers like Trump insulted more for their weight and their penis size than for their adultery, or why such politicians' supporters voted for an adulterer in the first place. And the most secular of people would ignore such points as much as any theocrat... sometimes more. That and never enforce the family unit with mandatory paternity testing.

Sabbath day: I do recall having colleagues who lamented having to work on Good Friday. However, where do we draw the line? We certainly need doctors working on the Sabbath, since you can't pray away a heart attack. We need firefighters working on the Sabbath, since you can't pray away a church fire. I'd say let individual workplaces decide whether the Sabbath should be a day off and how necessary a willingness to work on it is for the job. That should be between customers and businesses, not voters and the government.

. . .

To me what just stands out to me is the stem cell research debate, as with the lives stem cell research could've saved it's more high-stakes at least than most of the above, possibly more high stakes than all of them combined. I can agree to disagree on some of the above noted issues, but the whole attempt to make this philosophical "well, if we don't draw the line at conception, where do we draw the line?" (I dunno, sentience?) thing seems like a thinly veiled attempt to avoid admitting it's about the belief that zygotes have souls. And either way... how come that one never carried the day when it came to abortion, or for that matter when it came to IVF clinics discarding spare embryos in the first place?

. . .

Part of the problem with this debate is that even from a non-secular standpoint, the Bible can be used to argue either position on just about any issue because of its contradictions. At best, you can only correlate self-professed views on specific issues with self-professed Christian beliefs. One cannot actually define the "Christian" stance on any of these issues in and of themselves, let alone what the "theocratic" one is.

[Australian rePublic]

May not be perfect, but if it's worked for centuries, why would it stop working? Some religions are based on trial and error

[GuessTheAltAccount]

May not be perfect, but if it's worked for centuries, why would it stop working? Some religions are based on trial and error

Which ones are you referring to?

Also, "it's worked for centuries" is a pretty dicey argument given how much better Scandinavia runs in modern times than how the rest of the world has run for the past few centuries.

[Risottia]

I just wonder about the secular arguments against LGBT rights (especially the LGB, as I've heard most of the T arguments so often and found them lacking in the science department)

How about "the gayz aren't producing the wee little future SOLDIERS we need to get our Lebensraum?"

May not be perfect, but if it's worked for centuries, why would it stop working? Some religions are based on trial and error

Trial as in Galilei's?

[Space Squid]

Some religions are based on trial and error

Only in that non-competitive religions or denominations get outcompeted by more successful ones. If your religion requires total abstinence from sex, even for the purpose of reproduction, you may find your numbers dwindling.

Other then that, no. Just no. Religions do not rely on empirical data or methods. You don't calculate the trinity with trigonometry. And most religious believers find the idea of testing God sacrilegious (if mildly funny.)

[The Rich Port]

Some religions are based on trial and error

Only in that non-competitive religions or denominations get outcompeted by more successful ones. If your religion requires total abstinence from sex, even for the purpose of reproduction, you may find your numbers dwindling.

Other then that, no. Just no. Religions do not rely on empirical data or methods. You don't calculate the trinity with trigonometry. And most religious believers find the idea of testing God sacrilegious (if mildly funny.)

No science, no math, no logic and reason, for that matter.

It's why theology exists within philosophical frameworks, not outside of them. Theology existing by itself is only superstition... Isn't that right, Christian Scientists.

[Adamede]

May not be perfect, but if it's worked for centuries, why would it stop working? Some religions are based on trial and error

Nope

[Moroniland]

What secular arguments agianst public nudity, profanity, and other agendas of social conservatism to protect family values?

As a social conservative myself, I don't think there are any. The whole point of getting rid of the Christian God was specifically in order to get rid of Christian sexual morality. They're a package deal. It wasn't that people wanted to get rid of the prohibitions on stealing or coveting or murder (apart from allowing abortion) or even the prohibition on working on the Sabbath. People wanted to get rid of the rules about sex and marriage specifically. That's why people in our society wanted to get rid of God. You aren't going to get rid of God and then go on to also get rid of the only real reason you had for wanting to get rid of God in the first place. The very idea of trying to reconstruct Christian sexual ethics on a secular basis ignores the real reason why people want secularism.

To anticipate a common objection to this observation, I should point out that this doesn't entail the idea that most people wanted to immediately indulge in huge public orgies. (a new god of sexual indulgence would have been constructed if they had wanted that) Instead, people just wanted to get on with having their immediate desires satisfied without public shame and without a guilty or yucky feeling being associated with it. That was the only point of the whole debate over the place of God in public life in the 20th century. Nobody actually cared about creation vs evolution or prayer in schools or any of that other crap. All of those were proxy issues because you couldn't talk about this directly in public.

It becomes easier to see this if we look specifically at the topic of consensual sexual relations between closely related adults a.k.a. incest but in cases without pedophilia and without rape. Now think: why is incest bad in these cases? It can't cause birth defects if you first practice "safe sex" and then have abortion as a backup in case "safe sex" fails. It feels good. Why not do it? The materialist view of sex will not supply you with a reason. Your feeling that this is yucky is just a leftover from the Christian background of Western civilization you grew up with. There is no secular reason for it whatsoever. And with a few years of positive mainstream media coverage, you can even teach people to suppress the yucky feeling -- and even teach them to hate anyone who ever says we should pay attention to that yucky feeling as being the absolute worst scum on the planet. Wouldn't be the first time in recent years.

There ultimately can be no morality/ethics (synonymous) without some ultimate moral/ethical authority. (and this we call "God") Jean-Paul Sartre made that point here:

"And when we speak of “abandonment” – a favorite word of Heidegger – we only mean to say that God does not exist, and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end. The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain type of secular moralism which seeks to suppress God at the least possible expense. Towards 1880, when the French professors endeavoured to formulate a secular morality, they said something like this: God is a useless and costly hypothesis, so we will do without it. However, if we are to have morality, a society and a law-abiding world, it is essential that certain values should be taken seriously; they must have an a priori existence ascribed to them. It must be considered obligatory a priori to be honest, not to lie, not to beat one’s wife, to bring up children and so forth; so we are going to do a little work on this subject, which will enable us to show that these values exist all the same, inscribed in an intelligible heaven although, of course, there is no God. In other words – and this is, I believe, the purport of all that we in France call radicalism – nothing will be changed if God does not exist; we shall rediscover the same norms of honesty, progress and humanity, and we shall have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis which will die away quietly of itself. The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men.
Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism – man is free, man is freedom. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. – We are left alone, without excuse."
-- Jean-Paul Sartre in "Existentialism is a Humanism" (1956)
https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... sartre.htm

Or, as the same point has been made more succinctly in popular culture, "You and me baby ain't nothin but mammals, so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel." Metaphysics, (what people are) therefore ethics. (what to do)

(later edit) I should clarify that there are good arguments for social conservatism. It's just that any such arguments are for a position which is inherently / unavoidably against secularism.

[GuessTheAltAccount]

The whole point of getting rid of the Christian God was specifically in order to get rid of Christian sexual morality.

Nah, I could challenge "Christian sexual morality" by the fact that the Bible doesn't keep its own story straight. The part about religion getting in the way of stem cell research bothers me much more.

Instead, people just wanted to get on with having their immediate desires satisfied without public shame and without a guilty or yucky feeling being associated with it.

And yet, the majority of Americans who identify as Christian haven't made paternity testing mandatory.

That was the only point of the whole debate over the place of God in public life in the 20th century. Nobody actually cared about creation vs evolution or prayer in schools or any of that other crap.

Acknowledge is the first step in applying it to figuring out human nature. A lot of people who acknowledge it don't apply it that way, but acknowledging it is better than nothing.

Prayer in schools is just about the limitations of secularism. Stem cell research might hang in the balance depending on the precedent set.

Your feeling that this is yucky is just a leftover from the Christian background of Western civilization you grew up with.

Didn't Lot fuck his own daughters? Doesn't conservative Alabama have a reputation for incest?

[Ethel mermania]

Gay rights should be a conservative cause. It is about the right of the individual to make the choice they want and not be limited by the state

[Moroniland]

The whole point of getting rid of the Christian God was specifically in order to get rid of Christian sexual morality.

Nah, I could challenge "Christian sexual morality" by the fact that the Bible doesn't keep its own story straight.

My statement was about why you want to do that, not about whatever specific arguments you could bring to justify it. The reason why secularists desire secularism is in order to get rid of the rules about sex and marriage, not because they actually care about what the Bible says or doesn't say. You certainly don't.

The part about religion getting in the way of stem cell research bothers me much more.

And I would believe that to be relevant if the destructive human embryonic stem cell research issue had arisen before the secularization of American society in the 20th century. But in fact, the secularization came first. So history says this wasn't the reason.

And yet, the majority of Americans who identify as Christian haven't made paternity testing mandatory.

How is this fact relevant?

Stem cell research might hang in the balance depending on the precedent set.

"Let us grow new humans in order to kill them so we can harvest their cells to prolong the lives of old humans." say the atheists. This would make sense if they weren't also against slavery. Remind me: what exactly is the problem with slavery?

Didn't Lot fuck his own daughters?

The Bible records that this happened. Doesn't say it was a good example recommended to be emulated.

Doesn't conservative Alabama have a reputation for incest?

Oh, more socially conservative communities are more affected by the social issues they are most concerned about? Big surprise there.

[Moroniland]

Gay rights should be a conservative cause. It is about the right of the individual to make the choice they want and not be limited by the state

That's not conservatism. That's liberalism.

[Ethel mermania]

Gay rights should be a conservative cause. It is about the right of the individual to make the choice they want and not be limited by the state

That's not conservatism. That's liberalism.

Not at all, liberals are generally in favor of government regulation.

[Washington Resistance Army]

There aren't many, and for good reason. Social conservatism isn't even a consistent belief set over time; it has lost almost every major battle its fought with social liberalism and continually has to draw news lines in the sand. It needs to die and stay dead already.

[Moroniland]

That's not conservatism. That's liberalism.

Not at all, liberals are generally in favor of government regulation.

I suppose it depends on which definition of liberalism you prefer.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/
https://iep.utm.edu/polphil/#SH3a

[Moroniland]

There aren't many, and for good reason.

I said there aren't any: not even one. But that's because everything is permissible if there is no God.

Social conservatism isn't even a consistent belief set over time;

This is certainly true. But the same is true of social liberalism. Social conservatism gets more moderate over time while social liberalism gets more extreme over time.

it has lost almost every major battle its fought with social liberalism and continually has to draw new lines in the sand.

And, unless you're cool with things related to sex that I would probably get banned for mentioning again, someday you will be on the other side of the desk.

It needs to die and stay dead already.

Give it a few years and you'll be against whatever the next generation or two is doing because it doesn't match the mores of your generation.