Conservative religions are neither subjective nor based on personal preferences, but are based on clearly defined authorities, interpreted according to formally defined processes.

You are right. Unless we accept that acts of the understanding are specified by their object, no process of discursive reasoning will get us there

Oh well…I have yet to see a world were religious judgments are based on objetive truths, and not on subjective or personal preferences (and please don´t tell me about the existence of religious philosophers, apologists and such…I mean, most people in human history were commited to their religion just as a matter of tradition or emotions….thinking is more the exception for that case).

Human beings depend on each other to help to translate the universal law into practical judgments that conform with that truth. On our own we are much more liable to twist that language to serve our other passions and whims.

Bad example (or “scandal” in traditional terms) is a terrible injustice for the very reason that we all need encouragement in living a life in conformity with the natural law, and are susceptible to temptations to depart from its rigors. This is all the more true in a culture unable to explain and defend the very idea of universal truths.

I think it’s likely that this is a trend that is self-limiting, and that eventually the force of truth will exert itself to right this problem. There may be much un-necessary suffering in the meantime, however.

You miss Pascal’s point: reason can only draw conclusions from premises; all its premises are assumed (and all its conclusions are abstract)…We can only trust this “language of the heart.”

The current “language of the heart” employed by today’s “progressives” is the language of THEIR heart…THEIR feelings…as if they were the only one with feelings.

They want something, so they “employ the language of the heart” – that is, they employ fallacies: argumentum ad hominem, ad misericordiam, ad populum.

They build arguments that rely on focusing (zooming in!) on one stakeholder’s feelings. All the other stakeholders are ignored. If someone tries to bring up one of the other stakeholders’ points of view, they are shouted down. The most glaring, obvious example of this is the abortion debate, where we are told to empathize with a fictitious girl under a particular set of circumstances (chosen to maximize the sense of injustice and/or her suffering). We are not supposed to consider the situation from any other perspective – as if the only feelings that could possibly be relevant to the abortion debate were the feelings of this particular girl, and girls like her.

That’s what “the language of the heart” is, when it is divorced from knowledge, reason, logic, or reality.

You miss Pascal’s point: reason can only draw conclusions from premises; all its premises are assumed (and all its conclusions are abstract)

As he says, we cannot arrive at the notions of “space, time, motion, number” by any process of deduction, because there are no principles more basic from which they can be deduced, nor language more simple in which they can be defined. We can only trust this “language of the heart.”

In moral reasoning, this is equally obvious. We cannot define all our terms and prove all our propositions, in a perpetual regress. Moreover, in concrete cases, probable inference can never rise to certitude, unless we possess some faculty (Newman calls it the Illative sense; Pascal would have called it the heart) that enables us to see the convergence of our inferences, rather like Newton’s celebrated Lemma of the circle and the inscribed polygon.