Here's the relevant (if not directly analogous) Calvin and Hobbes story.
(The arc continues through the non-Sunday comics until February 1st, 1990.)
Thanks for reaching out! As a LW lurker, I've felt a bit of unease when I first heard about Intentional Insights or read the one HuffPo article, and it's taken me a while to discern where that unease came from.
One natural interpretation is that I'm not as comfortable with emotional appeals, and since that's expressly what you aim to give, it's going to rub someone like me the wrong way. If that's the case, InIn's community will just be a different subset of the population, probably bigger like you hope, and we should accept that.
A more concerning interpret...
Hmmm, I think a better word than "fantasy" here is "dystopia." Robertson is painting a bleak picture of a world where without moral authority, like the (much longer) bleak depiction of say, Fahrenheit 451 of a world without intellectual freedoms. Again, the natural reaction to reading Fahrenheit 451 or hearing Robertson isn't gleeful cackling, but shocked horror. "Something ain't right."
Sorry, but I'm guessing you don't spend much time around religious conservatives like Robertson. It's actually quite common among them to reason philosophically like this, mainly due to the emphasis on Christian apologetics. I'm sure Robertson has come across an argument of this form before and just reworked it for this.
Let me offer some more evidence. Listening to a recording of it, there are some chuckles in the audience at the beginning, but it grows silent by the end as most people grow more disgusted. The natural reaction, right in his last line, is, ...
What I meant is that you could easily just define your ethics to include by definition "murder is bad" and it'd satisfy all of the other criteria (assuming you could coherently define murder). But if I imagine myself telling Robertson (or somone similar) that, they'd ask how I came up with that rule and why someone else couldn't just come up with the opposite rule "murder is good" and so it was just an arbitrary choice on my part.
As someone who has spent a lot of time with religious conservatives, I've heard the sort of argument given by Robertson many times before. And they use it as an actual argument used against nihilism, which they tend to think follows directly from atheism. So Scott is completely right to address it as such.
I think Robertson conflates the two because he (and others like him) can't really imagine a coherent non-arbitrary atheist moral realist theory. Can anyone here give a good example of one that couldn't include what the murderer he depicts seems to believe?
In an article proclaiming the transcendent use of complicated, modern statistics in baseball, and in particular, one called "WAR" (wins above replacement):
...I'm not a mathematician and I'm not a scientist. I'm a guy who tries to understand baseball with common sense. In this era, that means embracing advanced metrics that I don't really understand. That should make me a little uncomfortable, and it does. WAR is a crisscrossed mess of routes leading toward something that, basically, I have to take on faith.
And faith is irrational and anti-intellec
I downvoted for equivocating between faith and probability.
A doctor walking in with a syringe full of something that he says will prevent measles I would assign a much higher probability to being true than Bob from the car mechanic walking in with a syringe full of strange liquid that Bob says will prevent measles.
Essentially this seems like the fallacy of gray.
Is this an accurate and helpful summary in layman's terms?