Christian morality delusions

[Angrboda]

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It is asserted by theologians that it is not arbitrary, but by the definition of arbitrary it is.  You can't just define a fact into existence.  If God's morals do not depend upon anything but himself, that, by very definition, makes them arbitrary.  Theologians are simply wrong.  If Gods morals are not arbitrary then they would necessarily have to be based on something which would establish that they have an orientation, instead of being random.  But since God's morals aren't based upon anything but himself, they are random, and that is the definition of arbitrary.  I've had theists repeatedly tell me that God is by definition good, but describing anything as good solely because it has that character is arbitrary, and therefore 'good' in the theist system is a free floating and unconstrained fact.  It is simply incoherent to assert that God is good because he is arbitrary, so the theist assertion is simply meaningless posturing.

And no, I'm not headed into POE territory.  As an example above, let's suppose that according to God's nature, rape is moral.  All the typical arguments you hear then follow.  God is still good, by definition.  God's morals depend upon his nature, so there is an objective foundation for his morals.  And so on.  There is no difference whatsoever between a world in which rape is moral because it is consistent with God's nature, and a world in which rape is not moral because of God's nature.  There is essentially no way to determine which of those two hypothetical world's we inhabited if in fact we inhabited them, and in both worlds the theists would assert that God is good by definition and so on.  If there is an inconsistency between those worlds it has to be accounted for, or else the inconsistency points out that the theist logic doesn't yield a definite conclusion and any and all morals one might imagine would be consistent with the theist's assertions if we inhabited that world.  But only one of those world's can be moral or else we have a logical explosion because of the inconsistency, yielding the assertion that all things are true.  Such an absurdity, and the inability of the theist logic of asserting that God is good by definition to pick out the actual moral world demonstrates conclusively that defining morals that way is arbitrary.  That's something of an our-world-centrism in that, whatever world you happen to be in, that world is the right world, and the morals in that world are the right ones.  The existence of two mutually inconsistent worlds, embracing opposite conclusions, using the same logical forms, is an absurdity, and points to an error in the logical forms.  I think the error is in assuming that you can make God's nature be good by simply defining that as an axiom of your system.  Doing so simply yields a contradiction, so something is amiss in your axioms.  (Unless you want to embrace dialetheism, or engage in a similar maneuver.  I have no idea off the top of my head what happens then.)

So, in a nutshell, I understand you are sincere when you assert that God is good by definition, but that simply leads to absurdities, so that assertion, or something in its orbit, must necessarily be abandoned.  To do otherwise is simply to embrace unreason.  Theologians have asserted it since time immemorial and I'm sure its been a part of your standard worldview as a theist but it simply doesn't pass muster.

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The goodness of God is definitely another thread. First could we tackle definitions. I think I see where people misinterpret arbitrary:
Do you define it as subject  to  individual   will  or  judgment   without   restriction;   contingent   solely   upon   one's   discretion? The point is that it is with description. Look at all the other definitions for arbitrary

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2. decided  by a  judge  or  arbiter   rather   than  by a  law  or  statute.
3. having   unlimited   power;   uncontrolled  or  unrestricted  by  law;   despotic;   tyrannical:
: existing or coming about seemingly at random or by chance or as a capricious and unreasonable act of will
: based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something

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God is constrained by his nature. Your definition stated above "depend upon anything but himself" to atheists reads as subjective, but to theists reads as random. Thought exercise: Are your decisions arbitrary? No of course not, they're based on who you are and what you believe, by your nature. Do you have arbitrary thoughts? Probably, but thoughts without will or action do not equal anything demonstrable.

I'm not a trivialist or using God as a self referencing answer to my moral code to create some nonsensical loop in logic. I also don't believe God's morals reflect my personal morality so I'm up for a thought experiment if you can dumb it down for me. I wouldn't want to have any cognitive dissonance  left to resolve. Please assist me in knocking some stragglers out of orbit and convincing me otherwise.

Using either of the other definitions of arbitrary leads to moral vacuity, so appealing to them simply obfuscates things. Arbiters and judges appeal to justified standards and authorities, they are not standards in and of themselves. And the second definition really does nothing for us as its unrelated to the sense in which arbitrary is being used in our discussion. I am not simply saying that might makes right and that alone is arbitrary, although it is, because I am focusing on a different meaning of arbitrary. If you were just confused by my usage, fine, but it seems uncharitable to blur my argument by referring to alternate ways of understanding what I said if you did in fact understand what I said in the sense that I intended. My definition was not that his goodness depended solely upon himself, but that it was arbitrary, and that the fact that it did not depend upon anybody but himself was one way of illustrating why it is arbitrary. It is not an independent bar in itself and so addressing that, wrongly as you have, is not helpful. His good being dependent only upon himself is not a problem because it is subjective but because it is arbitrary. It implying that his good is subjective, which I was not, was not the substance of my argument. He could have a subjective view of the good and so long as that good was real and not arbitrary, that would be somewhat okay. We object to morals that are subjective not because we have anything against subjectivity but because such things, generally, are arbitrary, or can be arbitrary. It is the arbitrariness which is the issue, not the subjectiveness. And this is reflected in complaints about moral relativism in that, if morals are just something we each decide, then there is no way to determine whose morals are correct and indeed the question becomes inapplicable because all morals then become correct because any arbitrary moral opinion is granted validity. Again, it is the arbitrariness that is at issue, not the dependency upon mind.

You want me to dumb it down, yet you didn't address the rather simple example I gave of two worlds with mutually inconsistent moral beliefs, in which both assert all the same things you do. If asserting the things you are asserting leads to such an absurdity, then something is very wrong in Denmark. You need to engage in some self evaluation and figure out exactly what it is in your arguments that led to such an absurdity and somehow explain it without inavlidating your entire concept or else you are simply not taking the question seriously and are simply papering over a very real problem with your ideas.

You want me to dumb it down? I don't know that the example of multiple independent and mutually inconsistent worlds needs an Einstein to grasp it, but I will offer another hypothetical that may be more to your liking. Let's say that we live in a universe in which there are six Gods, all of whom exist necessarily in the same way that Yahweh has, and all of them who appeal to their natures as the good, yet each of them advances inconsistent and incompatible morals. Before I ask how we would decide which of them has the correct moral values, I want to point out that this is more than just an epistemological question which, we may decline because our inability to form a correct conclusion isn't a bar to there actually being a correct conclusion. My suggestion here is that we cannot justify any of their morals and indeed none of them are moral because each of them is simply an arbitrary definition of the good. Suppose instead of six of them, you had an infinite number of such Gods and all morals were, according to some God's nature, true. Would any of these infinite gods have a possible claim on morality? Not just can we figure it out, but is there even a truth to be figured out here. If we were to say that one of them were the good, it seems to me, the only way we could do so would be by referencing something outside of that particular god. But that we can't do, both because we have nothing outside themselves that we can reference which would substantiate their claims to the good, and because Yahweh explicitly does not appeal to anything outside himself for his morals. So if vindicating Yahweh's morals would require referencing something outside himself, and there is nothing outside him that we can reference, and we explicitly are forbidden from doing so anyway, then Yahweh's morals can't be vindicated, not just in practice, but in principle. If you cannot justify Yahweh's morals as good and not arbitrary, then calling them good is just applying an arbitrary and meaningless name. You might as well refer to them as Schwarzenneggerean instead of good, as that would be just as meaningless.