The Moral Argument for God

[The Grand Nudger]

Right, but the reality is that there is an objective standard which is outside the individual, personal interpretation of the artists themselves. Their works are measured against that standard.

No they aren't..as you yourself so brilliantly demonstrated by excluding picasso........

If the things that we do are good or bad, right or wrong, how do we know this? Is there a standard which we "all" (and I have that word in quotes for a reason) know that we use to evaluate what we "ought" or "ought not" do?

There's this thing between your ears called a brain....I suspect that it plays a part in what we consider to be right or wrong.  I don't know your metrics, you haven't told me what they are.  Why would I even speculate at such a silly question when you could just -tell- me how you've decided right from wrong...or do you not know?  Are you unclear as to how -you- determine right from wrong?  

Are you speaking of this forum or all of humankind? And how could you possibly know that there is not one single exception in either sample?

All of humanity, and I'm completely unyielding on this one.  I'm not a "maybe" kind of atheist.  If you want me to consider the possibility that somebody somewhere actually has some experience of a god..rather than works of human art about a character named god.....then you're going to have to present that person, their god, and maybe one of their objective moral values...you know..those things you claimed but have since become allergic to.................

Are you saying that these believers are basing their moral values on a book (the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita)? Then where did the authors of these works get THEIR ideas of morality from? Were they handed down orally from their forefathers before them? Then where did THEY get them from?

Simple questions deserve simple answers.  The same place that storytellers get all of their ideas from..I hinted at it a couple lines back, it resides between your ears.

Since you mentioned the man was sitting in a chair, let me explore this for a moment. What I'm about to attempt may fail completely, but let's see where it goes.

Close your eyes and picture a chair.

Jesus......fucking..christ........

They don't look very similar...are they both chairs? Sure. So, there's something...call it "chairness" that we can agree upon. And "chairness" is not dependent upon the individual chairs or our opinions of what a chair is. It is not subjective, it is objective, and we know "chairness" when we see it - maybe not every single person...maybe not every single time...but generally, we get it.

Similarly, there is something that has the quality of "goodness" that does not depend on my opinion or yours. But we know it when we see it. Again, maybe not every single person every single time, but generally, we get it.

What do you think of this analogy?

Remember that you asked.....lol.  I think it's incompetent.  How many times will you be appealing to agreement instead of presenting a single example of what you claimed? I could parade images of pots and pans and nuclear reactors and stumps and rocks and discarded foam packaging and say "well, I sit on them..so they're chairs..they have chairness" -all day long-..but it would be as pointless as your exercize above. I'd suggest, instead, that you cease making fallacious appeals and silly analogies and do the one thing, the only thing, you need to do..to make the "argument" you presented even moderately palatable. You will need to present an objective moral value. There is -no- other way to make your argument stick, because that's the claim -you- chose to take as informative. It has to happen. You aren't going to make your moral argument by appealing to cultural mores..and you certainly aren't going to make it by posting pictures of chairs.

What, the shit?