Do Athiests have morals?

[Mohammad Nur Syamsu]

Ok, that is enough. I have no idea what your doing or why. You ignore every request I make. The only thing you did quote was my saying I was wasting my time. Your position is not even a minority view in any religion I ever head of especially not Islam nor Christianity. You do not address the emphatic points I make but only obsess on a very cryptic verse you deny anyone but you understands regardless of the scholastic conclusions. You could not even find a single Islamic scholar that agreed with you. I don't have any idea what your doing and so cannot justify responding. Have a good one.

Straightforward understanding is part of Islam. We do not get the trinity of God the father the son and the holy spirit, because it is not straightforward, and neither I assume does any muslim get how knowledge of good and evil is forbidden, yet then it would be a virtue to try to discover the "objective facts" of what is good and evil.

The straightforward understanding of thou shalt not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, is not to take what is good and evil as fact. It is a clear message from God, the most significant sin among all sins, which message you turn upside down on it's head. God is very great indeed.

 

[ArtieE]

1. If we obeyed and applied the bible's commands about life, hundreds of millions of lives destroyed in the womb would be alive.

And you would be responsible for the care of all these unwanted lives because you are the one who insisted they should be born. Good luck. Are you ready to take on that responsibility if all women decided to give birth to their unwanted babies and hand them over to you?

Bonus: The Bible if obeyed would have prevented approximately 95% of all wars.

Interesting. Please quote your sources for this number.

 

[1robin]

If you didn't have your objective god telling you that murder is wrong, would anything else stop you from murdering people? If so, what?

My preference. The same thing you have if God does not exist. I happen to not want to hurt anyone and not want to go to jail. Neither of those makes anything wrong but they might make a thing not worth the effort to me.

 

[Cephus]

Interesting. Please quote your sources for this number.

Just like everything else, they pulled it straight out of their backside.

 

[ArtieE]

My preference. The same thing you have if God does not exist. I happen to not want to hurt anyone and not want to go to jail. Neither of those makes anything wrong but they might make a thing not worth the effort to me.

I see. You have the survival instinct. It makes you prefer not to murder because it would be detrimental to everybody including you on many levels. Could murder be wrong because it is detrimental to everybody and not just because a god says it's wrong?

 

[lewisnotmiller]

I will give an example to illustrate this (two actually). You do not even have to agree with them for them to be justification.

1. If we obeyed and applied the bible's commands about life, hundreds of millions of lives destroyed in the womb would be alive. We may have cured cancer and diabetes by now if we had only listened. That would be true even if God did not exist.
2. If we obeyed it's sexual commands millions of people would have had to restrain their sexual desires but millions of people would not have died long slow painful deaths. That would be just as true even if God did not exist.

I can probably post thousand of these but these are among the most emphatic.

Bonus: The Bible if obeyed would have prevented approximately 95% of all wars.

Sure, but that just means a message of peace is worthy, regardless of source. To whit, consider the following commandments of Dave (ie. Me)

Don't be an assclown, take responsibility, and use contraception.
People are people, and each time you treat them as less than this, you rob yourself of your own humanity.

There ya go. All the benefits of the bible, but some poor kid in Idaho isn't badgered into topping himself for being gay, or jacking off.

 

[1robin]

Straightforward understanding is part of Islam. We do not get the trinity of God the father the son and the holy spirit, because it is not straightforward, and neither I assume does any muslim get how knowledge of good and evil is forbidden, yet then it would be a virtue to try to discover the "objective facts" of what is good and evil.

The straightforward understanding of thou shalt not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, is not to take what is good and evil as fact. It is a clear message from God, the most significant sin among all sins, which message you turn upside down on it's head. God is very great indeed.

I am not reopening that same discussion but I wanted to respond to your statements here about Islam.

1. I know what Islam believes in all in the main categories. The point I was making is the they do not believe what you do about sin. The Quran specifically says to know and do what is right.
2. As for the Trinity, I think it is true but I can understand why Muslims would not. The thing that does not make any sense is why Allah did not even know what it was. Muhammad said the trinity was the father, the son, and Mary. No Christian has ever believed that. It is easily explained by Muhammad who visited Arabian Churches and saw statues of God, Jesus, and Mary because you cannot make a statue of eh Holy spirit and so wrongly thought (as he did so often) he knew what Christians were claiming. But it is inexcusable that Allah did not even know what the doctrine he was denying even was. Another reason the Quran is just a literarily mess Muhammad created and no God had anything to do with. It was only long after the Quran was written that Muslims figured out the Quran had gotten it wrong and now understand the holy spirit not Mary is the third member of the trinity.

Once again what you say and what the Quran says are not in line:

"And behold! Allah will say: "O Jesus the son of Mary! Didst thou say unto men, ‘Take me and my mother for two gods beside Allah?" He will say: "Glory to Thee! Never could I say what I had no right (to say). Had I said such a thing, Thou wouldst indeed have known it. Thou knowest what is in my heart, though I know not what is in Thine. For Thou knowest in full all that is hidden." Qur’an 5:116

3. Lastly I asked you to provide a single Islamic scholar that agrees with your views on right and wrong and to respond to what the most respected Christian commentator said of any of the other commentators I gave. You did neither. You just keep repeating what you think our scriptures mean.

 

[1robin]

I see. You have the survival instinct. It makes you prefer not to murder because it would be detrimental to everybody including you on many levels. Could murder be wrong because it is detrimental to everybody and not just because a god says it's wrong?

That is not what I said. I said I just have no desire to kill anyone. It is not based on any survival instinct, I can kill anyone I want without risk from them if I wished. The only risk in many states is to my freedom not to my life and that is even if I got convicted. I imagine if I planned it well enough I could avoid anything but a guilty conscience. Natural law has no role in my thinking or my statement. Nothing is wrong because it inconveniences something else alone. If it was then we are the most immoral creatures to have ever existed because we inconvenience and/or kill every other species on earth for our own convenience. This is self interested speciesm not morality.

 

[1robin]

Sure, but that just means a message of peace is worthy, regardless of source. To whit, consider the following commandments of Dave (ie. Me)

If you have 750,000 words in a text that can be evaluated then maybe it beats the bible. However comparing the bible to every other moral code man has ever invented, especially modern ones and the bible is by far the best.

Don't be an assclown, take responsibility, and use contraception.
People are people, and each time you treat them as less than this, you rob yourself of your own humanity.

Ok that is the one and only time I will respond unnecessary sarcastic personal commentaries. I do not care enough to be offended but I am not wasting my time debating some false moral outrage position. Evidence and reason have no effect against emotion and preference. I am suggesting we make laws to limit man's inhumanity to man and by some bizarre rip in the fabric of the contrived secular universe you think that is treating people less than human (which is an absurd and meaningless tautology to begin with).

There ya go. All the benefits of the bible, but some poor kid in Idaho isn't badgered into topping himself for being gay, or jacking off.

How did you at failure and get worse? I hope you can do better than this, I can't justifying spending time on posts this absurd.

 

[viole]

I can beat that. I saw your "you saw abortion coming" coming. That is why I added that I chose the most extreme examples.

Of course we have aborted a whole mess of criminals. However how many thieves and miscreants would we accept to get rid of cancer? I would take thousands of OJ's to get one Pasteur.

I don't get this. If we apply the bibles morality we get the same temporal effect whether God exists or not. If we do not murder then no one is killed without justification whether God exists or not. Your contending with the result by questioning the nature of the source. I have no idea why? If we are talking about a moral system without God why are you blaming him for stuff. Even with God your assuming he killed those children as an act of specific will. I have again no idea why?

Again your all mixed up. I am not arguing about objective evil without God, I can't. I am assuming we agree that evolution justifies survival and so the lack of survival is not the goal. The problem is not over population. Everyone on earth can fit in one county in Florida. The problem is the minority is consuming that majority of supplies but even then we are not running out currently. If you mean that we should prevent any potential lack then that justifies killing everyone beyond a necessary breeding population. Your making me miserable with this line of anti-reasoning.

I am not trying to prevent you from thinking anything. I like God give you the evidence and allow you to accept or deny. prove you are right or wrong about what exactly? I covered the statistical mistake, the mixing up with foundations and results, and the over population issue. What is left? I even anticipated your anticipating my abortion claim. I think that pretty impressive.

Yeah, I have been losing some focus recently. Too many things at the same time, I guess. Now, my little vacation has been delayed and I have therefore some time for you.

Let's back out for a second and analyze the moral reliability of the Bible, under the premise that God does not exist.

You say the Bible forbids killing without moral justification. The problem is that I do not know what this moral justification is.

There is indeed a lot of killing in the Bible: (pregnant) women, children, donkeys, etc. I actually think the "good" book should include a parents guidance: I doubt today's kids would be allowed to go to a movie that faithfully depicts what is written there. But I am digressing.

I know this is an old subject, but now we have a new twist: we run under the premise that there is no God dispatching those kids to Heaven. And there was no God giving those orders.

Those kids simply ceased existing in a sea of blood and that was the (human) order, and whoever executed the order was considered righteous, and even punished if he neglected to apply total annihilation.

So, where is the moral justification here, even assuming that those kids parents were really so evil? Can it be found in the possibility that those kids might perform vendetta when they grow up? Hardly. This is what a mafia boss would think.

And more importantly: why don't we do it today? Should we kill the little infants of terrorists with a shot in the head and rip their pregnant women apart because that is what the Bible would approve or, at least, justify? Look: it is written in our moral compass, why are you accusing me of being a war criminal?


Ciao

- viole

 

[Mohammad Nur Syamsu]

I am not reopening that same discussion but I wanted to respond to your statements here about Islam.

1. I know what Islam believes in all in the main categories. The point I was making is the they do not believe what you do about sin. The Quran specifically says to know and do what is right.
2. As for the Trinity, I think it is true but I can understand why Muslims would not. The thing that does not make any sense is why Allah did not even know what it was. Muhammad said the trinity was the father, the son, and Mary. No Christian has ever believed that. It is easily explained by Muhammad who visited Arabian Churches and saw statues of God, Jesus, and Mary because you cannot make a statue of eh Holy spirit and so wrongly thought (as he did so often) he knew what Christians were claiming. But it is inexcusable that Allah did not even know what the doctrine he was denying even was. Another reason the Quran is just a literarily mess Muhammad created and no God had anything to do with. It was only long after the Quran was written that Muslims figured out the Quran had gotten it wrong and now understand the holy spirit not Mary is the third member of the trinity.

Once again what you say and what the Quran says are not in line:

"And behold! Allah will say: "O Jesus the son of Mary! Didst thou say unto men, ‘Take me and my mother for two gods beside Allah?" He will say: "Glory to Thee! Never could I say what I had no right (to say). Had I said such a thing, Thou wouldst indeed have known it. Thou knowest what is in my heart, though I know not what is in Thine. For Thou knowest in full all that is hidden." Qur’an 5:116

3. Lastly I asked you to provide a single Islamic scholar that agrees with your views on right and wrong and to respond to what the most respected Christian commentator said of any of the other commentators I gave. You did neither. You just keep repeating what you think our scriptures mean.

That is just whatever. You didn't even know it mentioned people would be like gods in the old testament. What is worse you trivialized the fall of man as some quaint scripture. Usually the fall of man is seen as the reason for the coming of Jesus by Christians, not some quaint scripture, but a main thing.

Regardless, I must predict that you do not even accept free will is in fact real. As a matter of pure logic, the concept of free will only functions with good and evil as opinion.

 

[1robin]

Yeah, I have been losing some focus recently. Too many things at the same time, I guess. Now, my little vacation has been delayed and I have therefore some time for you.

I guess I will have to halt the Viole has left the forum party.

Let's back out for a second and analyze the moral reliability of the Bible, under the premise that God does not exist.

I don't think reliable is the right word, I argued it was the best. To be reliable it would have to be compared to an objective standard that would not exist without God.

[/quote]You say the Bible forbids killing without moral justification. The problem is that I do not know what this moral justification is. [/quote] The entire bible has to be understood to get the principles to determine this. The bible gives life sanctity, value, purpose, etc...... One possible way to begin is to suggest you can deprive value without the threat to similar value. IOW if a guy has a gun aimed at you then he is threatening to deprive us of value that would justify taking the same potential value from him. It would not be easy to take a system designed for personal adoption and apply it to societal law. I do not say it will be obvious I say it will be better that doing the same guesswork without any framework we have settle issue by. And even if you find places where it is almost impossible to adapt it still wins because it has so many places that are easy and emphatically communicated. No sex outside marriage. That is simplistic even if murder was not.

There is indeed a lot of killing in the Bible: (pregnant) women, children, donkeys, etc. I actually think the "good" book should include a parents guidance: I doubt today's kids would be allowed to go to a movie that faithfully depicts what is written there. But I am digressing.

There are two types of this. One type does not have any role in societal morality and can be ignored. If there was no perfect being to order the death of groups then it does not apply to society and cannot be used. The other type is justified war and war is a messy business. This can be used though it will not produce optimality. We are going to have wars either way but we would have far less if only biblical justifications of the second type were adopted.

I know this is an old subject, but now we have a new twist: we run under the premise that there is no God dispatching those kids to Heaven. And there was no God giving those orders.

Orders that require God to be applied would not be adopted for law.

Those kids simply ceased existing in a sea of blood and that was the (human) order, and whoever executed the order was considered righteous, and even punished if he neglected to apply total annihilation.

Even if we used those God specific commands (BTW this was not about human moral duty, this was about divine sovereignty) we still only has a puddle of "innocent blood on our hands" where as our own moral systems has a universe of innocent blood. So again whatever it's faults it is still better.

So, where is the moral justification here, even assuming that those kids parents were really so evil? Can it be found in the possibility that those kids might perform vendetta when they grow up? Hardly. This is what a mafia boss would think.

I hate it when you misunderstand something because your whole post is usually based on it. Commands that involved God's capacity to apply would not be used. Nor would situation specific (as in the flood or exodus) apply. Only the duties he gave as a moral code would be. The thou shall not type of thing. The God destroying the world stuff has no relevance if he is assumed not to exist.

And more importantly: why don't we do it today? Should we kill the little infants of terrorists with a shot in the head and rip their pregnant women apart because that is what the Bible would approve or, at least, justify? Look: it is written in our moral compass, why are you accusing me of being a war criminal?

These are God's sovereignty issues not general moral duties given for even general Hebrew society. We do all those things on an industrial scale anyway. In the 3000 years covered by the OT God only ordered or caused the death of less than ten million. Stalin alone doubled that and abortion has dwarfed it. Abortion dwarfs the entire flood by orders of magnitude.

 

[1robin]

That is just whatever. You didn't even know it mentioned people would be like gods in the old testament.

What are you talking about? First even if it did and even if I did not know it you would have no way to know that. Second it does not say men will be like God's. It says have I not said you are God's which is a legal title concerning adjudication and not divinity.

[quote)What is worse you trivialized the fall of man as some quaint scripture. [/quote] No I did not and unless you can quote where I did, then you are lying. My interpretation is the same as the great Christian scholars and mainstream Christianity and is far more profound that yours.

Usually the fall of man is seen as the reason for the coming of Jesus by Christians, not some quaint scripture, but a main thing.

Invent doctrine out of thin air al you want, but do not distort what I have said especially what I think (and that is something you can't know and so it is a lie not just a mistake)

Regardless, I must predict that you do not even accept free will is in fact real. As a matter of pure logic, the concept of free will only functions with good and evil as opinion.

Search my posts I have defended freewill as an objective fact dozens of times.

You never respond or even seem to read your own Holy texts even when I supply them and not one single said thing you said here is true. This is my last post to you for the foreseeable future.

 

[viole]

I guess I will have to halt the Viole has left the forum party.

I don't think reliable is the right word, I argued it was the best. To be reliable it would have to be compared to an objective standard that would not exist without God.

There are two types of this. One type does not have any role in societal morality and can be ignored. If there was no perfect being to order the death of groups then it does not apply to society and cannot be used. The other type is justified war and war is a messy business. This can be used though it will not produce optimality. We are going to have wars either way but we would have far less if only biblical justifications of the second type were adopted.

Orders that require God to be applied would not be adopted for law.

Even if we used those God specific commands (BTW this was not about human moral duty, this was about divine sovereignty) we still only has a puddle of "innocent blood on our hands" where as our own moral systems has a universe of innocent blood. So again whatever it's faults it is still better.

I hate it when you misunderstand something because your whole post is usually based on it. Commands that involved God's capacity to apply would not be used. Nor would situation specific (as in the flood or exodus) apply. Only the duties he gave as a moral code would be. The thou shall not type of thing. The God destroying the world stuff has no relevance if he is assumed not to exist.

These are God's sovereignty issues not general moral duties given for even general Hebrew society. We do all those things on an industrial scale anyway. In the 3000 years covered by the OT God only ordered or caused the death of less than ten million. Stalin alone doubled that and abortion has dwarfed it. Abortion dwarfs the entire flood by orders of magnitude.

You are deflecting.

You said tht the Bible is a reliable moral compass even without the existence of God. i don't care about Stalin or Hitler, I m not analyzing their books, if any. Telling me that the Bible is still far less criminal than thing like the Mein Kampf, is not very useful either. i am analyzing the good book under this non existence assumption to see how viable it is as a moral manual. After all, it is called "the good book", not "the least criminal" book, lol.

So, very simple question. Would you advise the departement of defense to apply scorched earth, killing babies, (pregnant) women, pets, etc. when engaging very evil terrorists?

I don't see why not, if the Bible did exactly that, and should be followed in order to know what is right or wrong.

If not, why not? How do you decide which parts should be followed and which ones not?

Ciao

- viole

 

[SkepticThinker]

1. Justice is an objective concept. It also depends on all kinds of value judgments that are not objectively true without God.

If you can imagine a moral argument as an equation instead of a variable then it makes sense. If you claim to have justice on one side of the equality then you must have an objective criteria on the other for the equation to be true. Without God the best your ever going to get on one side of the equality is opinion and preference and that does not equal justice.

2. Lets say that you and Stalin disagreed as to what equals justice. What can you point to that is independent of opinion that can potentially settle the matter?

I don’t think justice is an entirely objective concept, and in a lot of cases it depends very much on the context of a given situation. People do have different ideas about justice. For example, you may think justice for the crimes of a pedophile would be the death penalty while I think justice for such crimes should be chemical castration. Who is objectively right? And how do we determine that?


And while I agree that justice depends on all kinds of value judgments, I certainly think we can make those value judgments without god(s). We can do it in the same way we can make value judgments regarding what our moral standards should be - through rational analysis of the given situation and weighing out the consequences of the different actions that can be taken. And I find this morally superior to the “might makes right” method where some god(s) said it (that we don’t even know exists in the first place) and therefore it is so, and we must abide by it.


I see that you’ve tried to turn the table on me here though. We were talking about YOUR moral “system” in which Stalin can get a pass to heaven despite the horrible atrocities he committed while alive. I still don’t understand how you can defend that as any kind of justice. I think you actually said “perfect justice.”

Of course it does, I doubt I said nature lacked properties. I think I said it lacked moral properties. Which molecule is the moral molecule. Without God there is no moral property in nature to detect. Morality if it objectively exists transcends nature.

What you said was, “Nature does not have a just property,” which I mistook to mean you were saying natural lacked properties. Apologies.

Why in the world can you guys not just agree with proposition number two of my primary claims and move one. What is the star wars saying, no it was the matrix? It is inevitable, Neo. I do not even know which claim your refuting.

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, I think morality is situation-dependent to a certain extent, but it is not necessarily confined to a single mind and so I don’t see it as entirely subjective. But I do think that when we are talking about morality we are already conceding that we care about the well-being of thinking creatures, and I think that the question of how to maximize actions in respect to increasing well-being for everyone can be an objective one. The consequences that follow from taking actions aren’t simply products of the human mind, rather they are the collective experiences of physical beings living in a physical universe, confined by physical laws.

 

[Mohammad Nur Syamsu]

What are you talking about? First even if it did and even if I did not know it you would have no way to know that. Second it does not say men will be like God's. It says have I not said you are God's which is a legal title concerning adjudication and not divinity.
......
No I did not and unless you can quote where I did, then you are lying. My interpretation is the same as the great Christian scholars and mainstream Christianity and is far more profound that yours.

You said:
"a single verse... from one of the oldest and most obscure stories in the bible"
That I interpreted as saying it is quaint.

KJB:serpent
"and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

I quoted it once and repeated it, which means 1. you don't know the old testament very well 2. you don't even read my posts

Straightforwardness in interpreting scripture is commanded in the Quran, and the reverse of trying to find hidden meaning in scripture is disapproved.

And I have straightforwardly interpreted scripture, as any man or woman might have done, on reading it, throughout the hundreds of years. People would have understood that a serpent saying "ye shall be as gods", would mean smugness. What I added is that it would be addictive, that it literally releases drugs in the brain, but that is just a more modern way of saying temptation.

That you would deny free will is just a prediction based on your assertion of good and evil as fact. To say the words "free will" and that you support it does not impress, because there are several definitions of free will, some of which use the logic of cause and effect, being forced, to describe choosing. What would impress if you accepted the standard concept of free will, where the soul or spirit chooses, and the existence of the soul or spirit is a matter of opinion, established through revelation and faith.

Because when you say good and evil is fact, then you would not say the existence of the soul or spirit, which chooses, is a matter of opinion. Then you would say that is fact as well. But facts are obtained forced by evidence, and one cannot put a principle of being forced at the center of the concept of free will, without making the concept dysfunction. Freedom is required at the center of the concept of free wil, and forming an opinion operates based on freedom, unlike obtaining facts.

 

[Midnight Rain]

You can't ignore the exceptions though, especially if the exceptions resulted in 50-100 million deaths. A move away from religious values to totalitarianism is just as valid as one to liberal Western democracy.

Religious people have to accept the Crusades, the inquisition, the Taliban and ISIS after all.

Moves to secularism can bring real benefits, they can also bring real harms. No sense in denying it.

I haven't said otherwise. I have stated that secularism has great benefits and that religion has historically proven to be more harmful than helpful as a dictator of morality.

 

[Midnight Rain]

I don't think the ancient Greeks were burning heretics at the stake if that's what you meant. They didn't have a particularly secular society, they were still looking for signs and portents from the gods, but so far as I know, they weren't out killing the non-religious or the otherly-religious among them.

But they did not decide what was good or bad or laws based upon a list of do's and don't lined otu by a god or goddess.

The point of communism is to guarantee the adherence to the state. Religion gets in the way of that, it splits the loyalties of the people. That is the *ONLY* reason that religion was attacked in the USSR, not because Stalin hated religion, not because communism hates religious belief, only because religion causes problems with state loyalty. In fact, Stalin ended up bringing back some of the churches after communism had taken hold.



Recently, that's because it's much easier to appeal to the religious beliefs of the people when trying to get elected than it is to stick to actual political topics and promises that might be difficult to actually get through the political process. When you can refer to imaginary friends and say "vote for me, I'm on your side", you get votes. It's a masking technique.

Agreed to both of these.

 

[1robin]

I don’t think justice is an entirely objective concept, and in a lot of cases it depends very much on the context of a given situation. People do have different ideas about justice. For example, you may think justice for the crimes of a pedophile would be the death penalty while I think justice for such crimes should be chemical castration. Who is objectively right? And how do we determine that?

Objective things do inform on circumstances. They are not exclusive. In fact I do not think they ever conflict. In every circumstance the idea of fairness is an objective concept though what is fair may not be the same thing in every situation. I know people has different ideas about justice, one thinks it is feeding his neighbors another eating them. That is why humans can't be trusted. If that is all we have the cannibals are just as wrong/right as the missionaries because there is no fact of the matter.

And while I agree that justice depends on all kinds of value judgments, I certainly think we can make those value judgments without god(s). We can do it in the same way we can make value judgments regarding what our moral standards should be - through rational analysis of the given situation and weighing out the consequences of the different actions that can be taken. And I find this morally superior to the “might makes right” method where some god(s) said it (that we don’t even know exists in the first place) and therefore it is so, and we must abide by it.

We can make them, we cannot make them true.

Let me say again that all the arguments non theists make about morality do not seem to be necessary. They all seem to agree with my second proposition that without God we can still have moral opinions. It appears as if you guys agree with that, but then find yourselves embarrassed by having agreed to it and so feel the need to make our opinions look as good as possible. I even see this among secondary scholars. The Scholars I like for their courage o their convictions just point blank state that morality without God is an illusion but the best we can do. I have just been reading entire lists of the most brilliant atheist philosophers in history and they have just said without God we merely have legality. Why can't others just leave it there and be happy?

I see that you’ve tried to turn the table on me here though. We were talking about YOUR moral “system” in which Stalin can get a pass to heaven despite the horrible atrocities he committed while alive. I still don’t understand how you can defend that as any kind of justice. I think you actually said “perfect justice.”

I don't think so, I think I was trying to show you that judging God by your ideas of justice are meaningless. In other words if you thought that justice was not satisfied in your contradictory to reality Stalin case and God did then you are wrong. I think you insinuated that in your hypothetical justice was not served, It was but it was not "your' justice that was served. Mankind cannot offer anything to atone for our actions. God poured out his full wrath on Christ and that satisfied his judgment if accepted. You do not have to agree but if God exists then actual justice took place.

What you said was, “Nature does not have a just property,” which I mistook to mean you were saying natural lacked properties. Apologies.

Problem, I wondered how you got that but I learned to just go with the flow.

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, I think morality is situation-dependent to a certain extent, but it is not necessarily confined to a single mind and so I don’t see it as entirely subjective. But I do think that when we are talking about morality we are already conceding that we care about the well-being of thinking creatures, and I think that the question of how to maximize actions in respect to increasing well-being for everyone can be an objective one. The consequences that follow from taking actions aren’t simply products of the human mind, rather they are the collective experiences of physical beings living in a physical universe, confined by physical laws.

If it is confined to one or all minds of it's adherents it is subjective. Things do not get any less subjective by popularity. We can technically be semantically consistent with the term morality and still not be consistent with moral truth. Calling a bear by the term bear has no effect on the bear. It is really weird when it dawns on you how arbitrary language is. You can call anything moral, but you cannot make anything moral. Dang, that was well said.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Objective things do inform on circumstances. They are not exclusive. In fact I do not think they ever conflict. In every circumstance the idea of fairness is an objective concept though what is fair may not be the same thing in every situation. I know people has different ideas about justice, one thinks it is feeding his neighbors another eating them. That is why humans can't be trusted. If that is all we have the cannibals are just as wrong/right as the missionaries because there is no fact of the matter.

How do we determine who is objectively right, using your method for discovering this objective morality you are talking about?

We can make them, we cannot make them true.

We can reason our way to them.

Let me say again that all the arguments non theists make about morality do not seem to be necessary. They all seem to agree with my second proposition that without God we can still have moral opinions. It appears as if you guys agree with that, but then find yourselves embarrassed by having agreed to it and so feel the need to make our opinions look as good as possible. I even see this among secondary scholars. The Scholars I like for their courage o their convictions just point blank state that morality without God is an illusion but the best we can do. I have just been reading entire lists of the most brilliant atheist philosophers in history and they have just said without God we merely have legality. Why can't others just leave it there and be happy?

Okay, I’ll try this again. Because I don’t think morality is merely an illusion. Actions have consequences that are not illusions.


Once we determine that the goal of morality is the well-being of thinking creatures, and that it is in our best interest to care about morality, then we can analyze the consequences of various actions in regards to whether or not they achieve that goal. And that’s what we are doing when we declare that we care about morality in the first place. Nature is the objective reality to which we are confined. There are truths about nature that cannot be changed. That is the objective standard against which we judge the actions of our consequences. If the goal of morality is well-being, then murdering another person just for the fun of it, works against that goal. If I murder a person I cannot bring them back to life, no matter what I do. Nature deems it so. I have removed that person’s well-being in terminating them and therefore I have committed a wrong or bad action. Going back to the chess analogy again: Life is the game. Nature makes the rules of the game. The moves we make in that game depend on the goals of the game. There can be objectively good and bad, or right and wrong moves that can be made and can be declared so based on the parameters of the game. So yes, I think there are some truths to be found. So that’s the objective part of my claim I’ve mentioned before.


But again, there are certainly subjective aspects to morality. There is personal morality where everyone individual differs to a certain extent. It’s also subjective in the sense that a lot of moral issues have to be analyzed on a situation-to-situation basis. It differs among people of different religious faiths and also among people of the same religious faiths. Even people who put their faith in the truth of religious texts are still viewing it through the lens of their own biases and preferences. I don’t see how there’s any escaping that. Then there’s the fact that morality changes over time and across populations, as we learn and grow and increase our knowledge base. I think all of this contradicts your point of view on morality and corroborates my point of view.

I don't think so, I think I was trying to show you that judging God by your ideas of justice are meaningless. In other words if you thought that justice was not satisfied in your contradictory to reality Stalin case and God did then you are wrong. I think you insinuated that in your hypothetical justice was not served, It was but it was not "your' justice that was served. Mankind cannot offer anything to atone for our actions. God poured out his full wrath on Christ and that satisfied his judgment if accepted. You do not have to agree but if God exists then actual justice took place.

So this makes my point that your system of morality is not actually a system at all. It’s merely a collection of moral dictates that are to be obeyed without question. In other words, nobody is actually exercising any morality at all. We’re simply following orders and having to assume that an invisible being knows what it is doing and will work everything out for us.


I mean, this view makes absolutely no sense to me. You’ve said before that god has written morality on our hearts (or something to that effect), but you’re also telling me that anything we have to say about justice is just our personal preference and therefore meaningless, and no matter what some invisible deity says we have to follow it, even if the morality in our hearts disagrees with it. I personally think Stalin being rewarded with any kind of afterlife is completely unjust, because that’s what my personal sense of morality tells me (the same one this deity supposedly gave me) but that is completely meaningless because only the deity can actually tell anyone what is just. So did your god write the wrong morality on our hearts?