On Moral Authorities

[Tonus]

3. That can't be. I presume that misunderstanding of the general rule is the source of apparent contradiction.

Allow me to explain.  Your first two answers make the case that good or bad is dependent on God's commands.

For example, there was a time when stoning a man to death for working on the Sabbath was moral.  Working on the Sabbath was bad, and killing the person who broke this rule was good.  God made it a capital crime-- there is no question as to the good/bad of the action or the expected response.

I am taking a guess here that today you do not consider it bad or immoral to work on the Sabbath or that killing a person who works on the Sabbath is a bad or immoral act.  Instead of the moral application of justice to a lawbreaker, it is murder.

Therefore, working on the Sabbath is not intrinsically a good or bad thing.  Nor is killing a person who works on the Sabbath.  As the moral value of these actions is subject to God's command, they are an example of subjective morality.  What is objective is not the morality of the acts, but the absolute power of God to enforce his designation of them as good or bad.  God praised Abraham for his willingness to follow the command to kill his son and offer him as a sacrifice.  Had he not been stopped by a new command, his action would have been good/moral.  Had he ignored the new command and killed his child, he would have committed a bad/immoral act.

The thing is, if you ask religious people about the morality of various acts, actions, or attitudes, they are likely to try to reason out an explanation.  What they should ALWAYS say is "this action is moral/immoral because God says it is moral/immoral."  Applying any kind of reasoning to the morality of the action is blasphemy because the only morality is that which is based on God's explicit commands.  If you apply reasoning to arrive at a way of determining morality, you may find yourself at odds with God's command and that would be an immoral act.  Anytime a believer uses reason to determine why an action is right or wrong he is undermining God's authority.