True, atheism would reject divine command morality, but this doesn't eliminates ideas of sanctity. It just eliminates an external source of moral concepts. Personally, I view external, deontological rules as a weak foundation for moral reasoning. In fact, it eliminates the need for 'reasoning' entirely, doesn't it?
Do you find it hard to conceive of a strong, internal moral compass? Would you run amok without divine surveillance?
Divine command is a crutch. Some of us can stand on our own feet.
How did Lenin find his way into this discussion, tovarisch?
It's not usually the atheists trying to convert anyone. All we do is point out epistemic errors in your apologetics. You're interpreting that as an attack or as proselytizing.
Okay, I will do a standard analysis using the is-ought difference between facts and what we ought to do. Further I will point out when you conflate different kinds of reasoning, logic and episteme and in effect claim something without evidence.
I will further try to evaluate your hidden assumptions and how you use a sociological we and them.
In general I will use the following assumptions. The universe is real, orderly and knowable. That humans are in the universe as parts of the universe and that the universe is the set of different contexts for different regularities as orderly, but there is no single order.
In praxis I will differentiate between independent of all brains, formal reasoning in brains capable of that, social/moral claims for 2 or more humans and individual humans as how the given human copes.
- "True, atheism would reject divine command morality, but this doesn't eliminates ideas of sanctity."
Atheism don't entail any one moral system and we can find atheists, who claim an objective authority moral system without using divine command. You are doing something, which only in limited sense has to with atheism. Atheisms don't use God, but can use other claim of objective morality.
- "It just eliminates an external source of moral concepts." No, it doesn't. Objective means in effect independent of any brain dependent personal evaluation. E.g. Ayn Rand Objectivism claims as objective as a fact of the world that the objective value of any given human is that person's own life. In effect external doesn't mean God. External means not dependent on internal evaluation.
- "Personally, I view external, deontological rules as a weak foundation for moral reasoning." That is an effect of you being you and has nothing to with you being an atheist.
- "In fact, it eliminates the need for 'reasoning' entirely, doesn't it?" Reasoning in effects is about 5 different categories; physical, formal, social, individual and the combination of those; and can't be done only with one methodology of reasoning. The problem is not if reasoning works, if it has a limit as a human behavior.
So far you conflate atheism with how you do morality and take for granted that only theists claim objective morality and atheists don't do that, because you don't do that. And you conflate reasoning for objective and subjective.
-"Do you find it hard to conceive of a strong, internal moral compass?" The problem is that there is not only one kind of that. In effect you can find atheists, who are external in how they do morality. Look up Lawrence Kohlberg and the different general stages of morality. Atheists don't have the same morality, just because they are atheists. You conflate we the atheists with we with morality. Look up meta-ethics if you need to.
-"Would you run amok without divine surveillance?" The same can be said of people who treat the human laws as absolute including for legal sanctions.
-"Divine command is a crutch." That is a first person subjective evaluation and not an objective fact.
-"Some of us can stand on our own feet." That is an absurd claim, because we are social individuals living in groups as individuals. That is not true of how humans live.
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It's not usually the atheists trying to convert anyone. All we do is point out epistemic errors in your apologetics. You're interpreting that as an attack or as proselytizing.
You are trying to convert others to your morality in effect for how we ought to do morality and you are proselytizing using morality as conflating atheism with morality.
Hi Valjean. Learn to analyze your own subjective reasoning and catch when you do first person subjective qualitative evaluation for how we ought to cope as humans.
In effect you take your subjectivity for granted as better for all humans, but you fail to account for that we cope differently as individuals.
You are not special and I am not. The difference is that I don't claim that I can do morality for all humans and judge other humans as wrong if they use a crutch. But you can with objective reasoning, right?
