{"id":662,"date":"2008-12-08T06:35:41","date_gmt":"2008-12-08T14:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=662"},"modified":"2008-12-08T06:35:41","modified_gmt":"2008-12-08T14:35:41","slug":"the-ancients","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/the-ancients\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ancients"},"content":{"rendered":"

When a secularist attempts to create a distinction between “ethics” and “morality” in order to argue that the public sphere should focus on the former, religious people often become sneaky and try to point out that ethics are informed by or derived from<\/em> morality. A usual form of their intellectual appropriation is to say something like: “Your ethical values are a by-product of a Judeo-Christian heritage.”<\/p>\n

There are numerous effective responses to this and mine generally focus on the role of ancient, pre-Christian, philosophy in the development of ethics. Some sneakier religious people will acknowledge the role of the ancients but then try and suggest that the ancients were influenced by Judaism, and since this is a “Judeo-Christian” country, even the ancients were really informed by religion! (It is usually a Christian who has never read the Old Testament that tries this).<\/p>\n

What other viable responses can you think of?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When a secularist attempts to create a distinction between “ethics” and “morality” in order to argue that the public sphere should focus on the former, religious people often become sneaky and try to point out that ethics are informed by … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":663,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662\/revisions\/663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}