Argument from Conscience

[Redbeard The Pink]

OK, thanks for your answer

I'm afraid I can't make any sense of it however. But I appreciate you trying.

If we're all immoral, what is the point of morality? This sounds exactly like the thing I hate most about Christianity, the idea that we are all somehow "wrong". That we are doomed to be not good enough, no matter what we do. It's a disgusting idea. This is breaking your leg and selling you a crutch.

If God in person contradicts what other people have told you are god's commandments, you'd pick what people have told you, which is now obviously actually not from God at all?

Let me make a bold statement and see if you agree:

You think rape is immoral regardless of whether God says it is or not.

Yes.  Because I would never want that to happen to me nor would I want to intentionally harm someone else.

Ok, you have just hit on the actual basis for human morality. Rob succeeded in illustrating it to you. Go Rob.

This right here is where all human morality ACTUALLY comes from. Your morality is sourced by empathy. You know what suffering is because you've experienced it. You can imagine the suffering of others even if you haven't experienced it. You know how you feel about people who make you suffer, and you can therefore imagine how others would feel about you if you made them suffer. All of this adds up to the Golden Rule: I won't do to someone what I know I wouldn't want done to myself.

This morality works not because of religion, but in spite of it. The hypothetical here is that Gaud comes down from heaven and tells you what to do, and your answer was "heck no, that's horrible." If god were the source of your morality, you would listen to him without question. Because you're willing to ignore the icky parts of the bible and even the icky parts of what god tells you in person, that means you have an empathetic morality that super cedes your religious convictions. Not only is god NOT a source of objective morality, he's not even the source of YOUR morality. Your humanity (ironically enough) is actually what makes you moral. It's what makes us all moral. We're social creatures who don't like to suffer, and that's all it actually takes.