I caught this video over on Atheist Experience today, which is an old one where they’re desperately trying to attract people to the show, when the old ones were vastly superior. Never mention a better movie in your movie.

However, at one point early in the video, Matt talks about the superiority of secular moral systems that makes morality “objective”. He’s just wrong.

First off, here’s the video if you want to watch it. It’s entirely unnecessary, but I try to provide my sources, even if I’m not going to address them all that much.

So basically what Matt said, and this happens in the first couple of minutes of the video if you want to get that far, is that once you have a goal, then everything thereafter is “objective”.

That is laughably incorrect. First off, that’s not what “objective” means. Granted, people can have various personal definitions, but the one that comes from the dictionary and from philosophy is clear. Objective means: undistorted by emotion or personal bias; based on observable phenomena. In philosophy, it is essentially anything that is true, unbiased by any mind. Gravity is objective. Morality can never be.

Granted, that makes religious claims of objective morality equally stupid and I’ve seen him make claims about that, but he doesn’t seem to be able to examine his own position and apply the same standards. Maybe “human flourishing” is *AN* objective, but it isn’t objective in and of itself.

From the religious side, it’s nonsense. If God came up with it, then it’s subjective by definition. If God didn’t, then God isn’t all-powerful and all those other omni-properties. God didn’t create everything. God is bound by whatever morality that exists beyond him and I don’t think you’ll find a lot of Christians willing to concede that.

Back to Matt though, although it isn’t just Matt because I see a lot of people trying this. They will say that if we define our goal, subjectively, as “human flourishing” then everything beyond that is objective.

Bullshit. I don’t think you could even get a consensus for what “human flourishing” even means. What humans? Flourishing in what way? If every single person can’t agree on what this goal means, how in the world are you going to get there?

You’ve already got problems, but Matt agrees that part is subjective. However, once you get to his “objective” bit, it fares no better. If you can’t agree on the goal, since you won’t have everyone signing on to human flourishing as a goal, then what do you do then? Even if, for the sake of argument, you do get universal agreement on the goal, you’re not going to get agreement on how to best reach it.

Take something simple. “We should stop crime.” You’ll get people on the far left screaming “we should cuddle criminals and they’ll just stop!” And yes, that is realistic. Or you might get people on the extreme right that say “we should execute anyone even likely to commit a crime!” You’d get tons of other options in the middle, but are any of those objective? Obviously not. Are those even workable ideas? No.

Here’s where hard leftists like Matt go entirely wrong. He’s doing what the religious do. He’s assuming that everyone is just like he is, even though, clearly, not everyone is. This is why the left pushes hard-core authoritarian nonsense. What they’re really pushing is fascism, which they’ve worked very hard to redefine in a way that it can’t apply to them, just like racism and sexism. “You can’t be racist against white people!” Bullshit. That’s not how it works.

Fascism, once you excise all of the political nonsense that they’ve forced into it, is just an authoritarian ideology and movement, characterized by a centralized autocracy, dictatorial leadership and censorship of the opposition to maintain control.

Who does that sound like? Pretty much both extremes. Why? Because they are both fundamentally the same. There’s an old saying that if you go far enough to one extreme, you’ll come out on the other side and that is exactly what has happened. Both of them have their blind faith. Both of them have their orthodoxy. Both of them want control. Both of them have their authorities that speak nothing but truth and everyone else has to listen… or else.

That’s why, when you look at governments on either extreme, you have the same problems. They are both running around trying to punish the “heretics” for not bowing down to the established orthodoxy. Whether Matt realizes it or not, when he says “objective solutions”, he means solutions that he agrees with. He means things that will get him where he wants to go. Anyone who disagrees, he’s going to discount or insult or ignore because this isn’t about everyone agreeing. This is about his side getting their way. This is just the left, living in their own emotionally-comforting fantasy land, just like the right does. There is nothing objective here at all. This is just a joke.