I was actually discussing another poster's claim, which was that parents should admit they're lying about God when confronted, because they are happy to admit they are lying about Santa when confronted. I didn't think that moral equivalency was justified.
Maybe so, but then answer to
him? I've yet to figure out why something responding to Delvo then was not just in an answer to one of my messages that's not even on the same page, but below a quote from me. Especially after my saying twice that I don't see the deliberate lying as part of the analogy.
Well, it's just a suggestion, you know, to keep things less confusing...
The keyword there is probably 'consistently' - I think I mentioned that in my discussion as well... what I'm disputing is the claim that parents 'obviously' are lying to their kids about God as some kind of widespread hoax similar to stories about Santa. I don't think there's a shred of evidence to support that claim.
Well, that's just as well, since I didn't say anywhere that parents lie to kids specifically about God. What I was commenting about was the more general idea that parents totally share their beliefs and values with their children, which is trivially false.
And if I remember the only counters you had anywhere near that topic were:
- that yeah, you lie to your daughter all the time, but it's not evil. Which is just as well, since I never said it was necessarily evil. I just said it's very common.
- that (although you do lie to your daughter all the time), parents wouldn't lie to their kids because they're afraid of some non-existent consequences. I mean it's trivially silly as an argument, since they're obviously not afraid (and with good reason) of any consequences for lying to the kid about Santa, or a dozen other topics. The notion that they totally wouldn't lie, although actually they do, because of some consequences, which they know they don't exist for almost anyone ever, is almost funny in its being complete nonsense.
Not to mention that in the course of that argument you actually offered a motivation for why someone WOULD lie even about God. Way to move the posterior probability in the wrong direction
But, be that as it may, I would still suggest that if you're actually arguing with something actually said by Delvo, it might be best quote a message from Delvo then.
Well, I'm not sure that's correct. In fact, it's an issue whenever people fail to meet their personal goals, change habits &c. Human physical needs compete with our mental needs all the time. Perhaps I'm over-aware of this as an ex-athlete: on many occasions I wanted to exceed my pain threshold, but could not. I don't think this means I didn't really want the medal.
If you actually have to overcome a pain threshold to not drink, when you profess that drinking should be avoided, then that's beyond even normal alcoholism. I don't think you can make much of an argument from
that analogy.
People don't have to overcome any pain to stop lying to their kids, at the same time as telling their children that lying is bad and must not be done. Nor do they have to overcome any pain to stop telling their kids that caring is sharing, while at the same time trying to outdo the Joneses in collecting more status symbols. Nor is there any actual pain involved in admitting that fitting in a group is important, instead of giving the "if all your friends jumped off a bridge" talk. Etc.
Not saying any of those necessarily apply to you, but they're rather common examples of people telling their kids some values that they don't actually have.
And I'm not even saying it's evil, or even that one shouldn't be a hypocrite. I'm just noting that, no, far from being usual that they share their own beliefs and value with their kids, they're more commonly just BS-ing the kid.
At any rate, it's easy to come up with extreme examples that involve overcoming actual pain or intense fear or whatnot, but it's funny how those end up trying to excuse by analogy stuff that doesn't actually involve any of the core element of what excuses it on one side of the analogy. Sorta like how the "there are no atheists in foxholes" ends up trying to justify religion in people for whom the most fear they ever had was whether they'll lock the car door fast enough when they see a black.
Most people fail to meet their professed principles simply because in practical situations, it turns out that far from being principles, they're stuff that's overridden even by the most minor convenience in doing something else. That's not a value or a principle, it's just a rather unimportant idea.
Plus, it seems to me like if there are exceptions to rules, the honest thing to do is acknowledge them. If you believe that drinking is bad except given conditions A, B, and C, the honest thing to do is say it with those exceptions. If they come into play only when you have to explain why you don't meet what you just said, then that's just special pleading.
This relates to another thread about a Sam Harris argument that Moslems are not really Moslems because they may not act according to what he thinks is their one defined set of beliefs. This evolved into a discussion about whether actions prove beliefs. ie: if a person volunteers for the army, they are proving they like murdering. If a Pole did not risk his family's lives hiding Jews in 1942, he was proving he wanted Jews killed.
No, it doesn't. It's not even remotely analogous.
For a start, here we're talking about stuff one professes, not what someone else decided they should be professing. If a Pole actually went on and said that one should hide the Jews and then didn't, then they'd be a hypocrite. If someone else decides that for them, not so much.
Plus, that's still some invalid
argument from analogy given the situations at hand. Unless you have the threat of the Gestapo bashing in your door and dragging you to Treblinka if you don't drink, no, it's nowhere near excused in the same way as for that Pole.
You can't really make an argument from analogy, if the key elements of the compared things are not really similar. You can't use a similarity to a situation which involved overcoming actual pain, to justify something that's just a choice whether to pour a glass or not. Unless you're actually that alcoholic that not drinking causes actual pain, the key element is missing in one of the terms. Nor is a comparison to a Polish citizen living in fear of the Nazi occupation usable in an argument from analogy where no such threat exists if one decided to act according to one's professed values and principles.
And to return to that, you have no actual analogy between
A) "X says one should do Y, but X doesn't actually do Y" and
B) "Z says X should do Y, but X doesn't actually do Y"
This is an older philosophical topic, and has been resolved long ago that it is possible for a person to simultaneously hold a belief and act differently because of competing practical phenomena, such as physiological imperitives, instincts, impulses, &c.
Maybe, but when those impulses and instincts and needs routinely override their professed principles, without any actual duress being involved, then you know that actually those principles don't really rank very high on their list of reasons to choose one course of action over another.
Either way, it's pretty clear that the poster's implication that all parents should feel guilty about telling their children about God because they feel guilty about wholesale fabrication of Santa - that these are morally similar - is hard to justify. I think it is an extraordinary claim that parents almost universally tell their children God exists despite knowing he is a hoax.
Maybe so, but since you're still arguing with something Delvo said, rather than what I said -- and in fact after I said more than once that I don't see that as part of the analogy -- it would still be more productive to put that under a quote from his message, not mine.
