...[Y]ou don't have to appeal to God to write laws, but you do have to appeal to God if you want to ground them in anything other than human opinion. Otherwise, your "rights" are mere preferences that can be voted out of existence at the ballot box or at the whim of an activist judge or dictator.This should be obvious to any person who has taken the time and trouble to reason this issue through. But atheists seem to refuse this understanding. Nonetheless, they can't simultaneously deny God and justify any sort of objective moral order.
And yet they can still speak of "rights," of good and bad. Yet they hold that good and bad are merely expressions of human preferences, opinions. (Maybe even Darwinian evolution.) They have nothing to base their preferences and opinions on. These are expressions of human will (and would-be power). Reason has nothing to do with it.
Which brings us to polls. It seems we live and die according to "scientific" polling nowadays. Yet the fact remains no matter how "scientific" the poll methodology is, still a poll is a survey of opinion, not of "science." And one man's opinion is just as good (or bad) as any other man's. So what does a poll really tell you? What actual predictive power does it have? It seems to me all a poll is, is a sampling of public emotion, a "snapshot" of surveyed peoples' beliefs at a given moment, frozen in time.
To me, a "scientific" poll is the modern-day version of reading tea leaves, or inspecting the entrails of a sacrificial animal, or casting I Ching sticks, in order to discern future events....
Plus polls can be rigged to produce desired outcomes. Much of this depends on the way the poll question is asked. This Canadian poll is an excellent example of same. First off, "religion" is not defined. So people will read their own definition into the poll question. So how can we say all poll respondents are replying to the same question?
Then again, this was an on-line poll. Participation in such polls is entirely self-selected. Who are these people?
Speaking as a Christian, if I saw a poll like this online, I'd laugh and move on. The poll question is so stupid (to me) I wouldn't bother to respond to it. But someone with a real ax to grind against God probably wouldn't resist the opportunity to weigh in.
One doesn't need a poll to discern that Canada is rapidly becoming a thoroughly secularized society. One needs only notice the evidence -- accelerating loss of God-given individual liberty in Canada; for instance, erosions of freedom of speech (hate crime laws)....
One last thing -- it seems nowadays people of left progressive persuasion are convinced that reality can be transformed by changing the way we speak of it. The power of magical words! The typical form this takes is to lie about reality, on the assumption that if you repeat a lie often enough, sooner or later people come to believe it is truth. But the truth of reality is not changed by this procedure. The result is the widening gap between the actual state of the world as reflected by reason and the state of sanity of the human mind.
That is exactly what is taking place. As a pastoral counselor and family consultant, I studied "narrative therapy" and became acquainted with its philosophical base, constructionism. The bottom line with both is that "reality is the story you tell" and it is not some objective truth that can be studied. (In counseling, it actually is valid to understand how a couple sees the history of their relationship and the "story/narrative" they tell about it.)
One hears often about the power of the narrative being told in politics, of changing narratives, and of creating narratives. Same base on all of it.
As wikipedia explains it:
"In social constructionist terms, "taken-for-granted realities" are cultivated from "interactions between and among social agents;" furthermore, reality is not some objective truth "waiting to be uncovered through positivist scientific inquiry."[4] Rather, there can be "multiple realities that compete for truth and legitimacy."[4] Social constructionism understands the "fundamental role of language and communication" and this understanding has "contributed to the linguistic turn" and more recently the "turn to discourse theory."[4][5] The majority of social constructionists abide by the belief that "language does not mirror reality; rather, it constitutes [creates] it."[4]
Bump.