For those unfamiliar, The Satanic Temple is an atheistic organization. Here are its tenets. I often ask people what they disagree with and get very little in the way of meaningful response.
THERE ARE SEVEN FUNDAMENTAL TENETS
I
One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II
The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III
One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV
The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V
Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI
People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.
VII
Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
https://thesatanictemple.com/blogs/the-satanic-temple-tenets/there-are-seven-fundamental-tenets
DO YOU WORSHIP SATAN?
No, nor do we believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. The Satanic Temple believes that religion can, and should, be divorced from superstition. As such, we do not promote a belief in a personal Satan. To embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions. Satanists should actively work to hone critical thinking and exercise reasonable agnosticism in all things. Our beliefs must be malleable to the best current scientific understandings of the material world — never the reverse.
https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/faq
She’s 13. Does anyone know if she’s allowed to become a member? The website isn’t clear on that.
That’s the nature of literally every social issue.
Can you provide an objective, philosophical reasoning for why able bodied people should pay taxes to support disabled people?
That’s something I fully believe in, but I’m not able to formulate any good arguments as to why I think it’s the right thing to do. It’s simply what I was raised to believe in.
I think it’s important for us to recognize that most of don’t actually have objective moral explanations to back up our values. For most of us, the values we hold are simply matters of belief in what’s good, in much the same way a Christian believes in the good of God.
I’m setting a reminder to come back to this when I’m at a keyboard instead of on my phone. Because yes, I can provide such an argument! Multiple, in fact! You might not agree with the foundational assumptions behind the arguments but that’s the point of philosophical debate. It will just take some time to present the necessary ethical and moral framework that leads to the conclusion “we should pay taxes to help the disabled”.
People have been working on those sorts of questions for generations upon generations. And we can answer some of them without ever using terms like “good” or “right”.
Read my username as a poor phonetic spelling of a philosopher’s name for a preview of what I’ll say :D
I’m aware of that. My point was that most people are either not aware of those arguments or able to formulate them cogently.
I am not arguing that there is no such justification; I am arguing that most people have not educated themselves on such justifications, and as such their values are merely beliefs, and not objective truths as many people want think of their own beliefs.
Oh ok. I misunderstood your comment. We are on the same page then. Heh
People consider their own lives to have value beyond their ability to produce wealth. Every individual has the expectation that if they were to become disabled or too old to work, they would receive assistance from society to help keep them alive. So you can try to form a moral argument about why caring for someone else is correct, or you can turn it inward and say that you expect to be taken care of if you get hurt and leave it at that. What’s the point of doing all this work if your value ends when you can no longer work?
Because leaving it at that doesn’t provide an external justification for my feelings. That’s literally the exact problem I was trying to explain: people are more concerned about subjective internal opinions than they are with objective external reasoning.