RE: Christian morality delusions
November 20, 2018 at 8:29 pm
(This post was last modified: November 20, 2018 at 8:37 pm by Reltzik.)
(November 20, 2018 at 6:50 pm)tackattack Wrote: Here are my thoughts on morality
There is subjective morality- what I feel internally to be right and wrong as according to my experience and beliefs
There is societal morality- what is commonly accepted to be right or wrong for a people within a particular society
There is universal morality (possibly)- things that rational people of any time and any place find right or wrong
There is objective morality- A being I call God exists outside the universe that influences us through the Holy Spirit to inform of objective morality.
You were simply asking if your framework qualified as what someone else was describing in the context of another conversation, so I won't tear into this like I would if you were trying to lecture us on these points. I do have questions, but since I'm a third party to this conversation and not familiar with the original context you should feel more than free to ignore them.
Regarding objective morality (as you describe it):
How is objective morality knowable, either in its existence or its content? I don't mean just what steps can people take to know it, but also how they can confirm and verify that those steps are the correct one? (So, "read the Bible" doesn't count as a way of confirming unless we can also have a way to confirm that reading the Bible is the right approach. Otherwise we have no way to confirm that method over, say, reading Dianetics.)
By what means do we distinguish between objective morality and universal morality? If every rational person in the world perhaps thought that, say, cannibalism was bad, that would be a universal morality, but how would we then know it was objective morality? If the Holy Spirit was influencing large numbers of people to believe a certain way, that would count as objective morality as you have defined it. But if large numbers of people believe a certain way, how could we tell whether that was because it was (approaching) universal morality or because of objective morality?
What is the distinction between objective morality and God's subjective morality? Is there any difference, as you have defined them, beyond the extra step of God then being able to communicate his subjective morality to people through the Holy spirit? If not, why have the extra category?
Suppose that instead of God there were some non-conscious, non-personal supernatural essence of right action, akin to the Tao, that humanity could sense through some spiritual means. Would that also count as objective morality? If so, what other things besides this or a god's decree could count as objective morality?
EDIT: And you snuck in a reply while I was typing which seems to cover some of the questions I asked. I'll look at it later this evening.