Nice company. Keep them, please.
Rdb3, there are two camps in the conservative movement: One camp (mine) believes in individual rights & responsibilities because of the facts of reality we see around us in the mundane, natural world, such as Man's nature as thinking beings & what kind of society is required for us to acheive our highest aspirations. (Our "eudaimonia", as Aristotle would put it.)
The other camp (yours, apparently) believes that things like objective morality & rights cannot be inferred, even in principle, from the real world. So you (in our opinion) construct a mythical, supernatural, all-powerful Authority Figure who acts like a deus-ex-machina in a Greek play: He solves the intractable dispute by stepping in & arbitrarily laying down a set of laws we must follow or else. This provides an objective standard for us to follow that "reality" itself does not provide.
Your side cannot understand how we can claim any possibility of objectivity in our moral codes, and therefore we must collapse into subjectivism & eventually nihilism. But our side sees your side as the true nihilists: As nihilistic as the most wanton libertine, since you deny the possibility of objective morality altogether! Except you see the world's essential meaninglessness & recoil from it, while the libertine accepts it & tries to grab whatever immediate gratification he can.
In reality, "meaning" is a, um, meaningful concept only in the context of a person who can think about such things. That person is us. (We know we exist, & we know we can think.) This is just as true whether we came to exist because of purely natural processes or some lonely god's science project. And our requirements as human beings for a fulfilled life are just as real. Unfortunately the best kind of societies & moral systems that fulfill these requirements are not self-evident - we had to learn those thru historical trial & error, and presumably we're still learning & refining. But objective Truth is still here.
In practice, most of the time we agree on specific issues. But in our opinion your side carries along this unnecessary baggage of your mythical Authority Figure, with his Big Book of Regulations, which was really written by sheepherders, & later refined & interpreted by church/state bureaucrats, all over 1500 years ago. (Do you really think it was objectively more moral for ancient Jews to never wear clothes made from mixed fibers? :-)
I've seen these exact same words ("mythical," "Authority Figure," "sheepherders") by numerous primordial ooze believers on several threads. What's the matter? All of you cannot afford a thesaurus between you?
But, uh, don't you want to take back this lie you all are telling? You just lied through your teeth. Point out your lie, for I have laid it before you in plain sight.
Lively thread, isn't it?! Your side is losing. I suspect that some of the Bible students here could even find a biblical prediction to that effect. It's time for the third 19th century godfather of 20th century's atrocities (after Marx and Freud,) to retire to the proverbial trash heap of history. As for the sheepherders and bureaucrats, Homer and Aristotle were sheepherders themselves or something close to it, and Shakespeare didn't have an indoor toilet. Your side's heroes Darwin, and let's be honest, Freud and Marx, didn't even get cable television where all the truth is decided. I imagine your side would rather discuss science and religion with 20th century university graduates such as O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinski than with some dirty 5th (or whatever) century sheepherders. All this to point out the cheap shots of your argument, which I for the life of me aren't able to comprehend. And bureaucrats too? What else, now Dracula? Jeez! Cheers, anyway!