Why science and religious fatih need not be in conflict: It's as easy as 1-2-3!

[Mister Agenda]

The revulsion people feel towards the holocaust is evidence that there are moral opinions, not that there are moral facts.  This is weak, Chad.  The feelings are evidence that people have feelings.  Nothing more.  Perhaps you'd like to explain how you torture moral facts out of this?

You seem to have a penchant for ignoring intentionality. Feelings are not just feelings - they are feelings about something. Feeling don't just arise for no reason in response to nothing. The horror of tragedy, outrage at injustice, and the pangs of conscience are responses tosomething about or in the world. Sorry, but I'm going to go with the idea that the wrongness of the Holocaust is immediately obvious to anyone with a properly functioning conscience. If someone is going to say that it isn't they better have a damn good reason. Do you?

Hmm. Feelings are indeed about something. They are reactions to input from either the sensory world or our imaginations or memories. They seem to act as an unconscious shorthand for our values, and how we react and what we react to with emotion is heavily culturally influenced. Unlike our sensory perception, they are not a registering of some fact about our environment, but some fact about ourselves in combination with a particular kind of stimulus, which can be internal. We don't register revulsion the way we register a bird flying by, we learn to feel revulsion in response to certain stimuli.

I'm not against an objective component to morality, but a moral system is ultimately grounded on axioms, and if we disagree on the axioms, we may not agree on the morality. If we accept as an axiom that human lives are valuable and that Jewish lives are equally as valuable as Aryan lives, then the holocaust was monstrous and we likely feel revulsion. If we hold the opposite, we might feel, as some Nazis did, guilt for not killing Jews enthusiastically enough.

Almost all of us with normal wiring feel the same range of emotions. What triggers those emotions is highly influenced by our experiences. Given the right culture, you might feel bad for not torturing a captured prisoner or enthusiastically look forward to being tortured yourself if captured. You could be outraged if a member of your family refused to eat a portion of your dead wife's body.

Feelings are not where you are going to find the basis for an objective morality, they are at least partly a consequence of the moral views that you hold, not the source of them.