Objective morality as a proper basic belief

[Astonished]

Saying one group has X attribute that gives it an exemption is preposterous if the concern is the consequences and not the identity or characteristic of the agents involved.

When did I say any such thing?

Wasn't responding to your comments about anything, simply clarifying the position you called me on since you didn't seem to understand what I was getting at. Just disputing Henry's pathetic attempt to say god has a unique privilege to not be culpable for anything and yet the rest of us are.

Henry, I really don't see what's so difficult about this. If you value being alive you can't really fall back on any axiom for morality than well-being. To value the idea of a god or an afterlife more is to express a backward value toward life because they're in direct conflict as life is utterly meaningless in the face of a theistic theology that makes these promises. Since you're better off dead you can hardly argue that morality itself has any meaning, objective or otherwise, since this life and everything in it have to be completely pointless. None of it has any place in the discussion. The fact that there's zero reason to even believe any of that in the first place just rams it home even harder.

If we didn't exist, there's no universal law like gravity that says right and wrong even exist, let alone that x action constitutes either. We have to decide on a value, namely well-being, if we want to remain alive personally or as a species, otherwise we'll slowly go extinct burning witches, killing cats that would otherwise help prevent the spread of plague rats, and breed completely out of control until we all stave to death. Luckily we have certain instincts that make us fear death (odd how god would program that into us too when it's supposed to be the most wonderful thing, hm?) and pain so gravitating toward well-being as our axiom for determining how we ought to behave is also practically instinctive, but for the imposition of ill-fitting gears in our mental machinery that religion and indoctrination introduces.

To fail to acknowledge this is to open the door to nothing but answers like 'because god said so' and the absolutely deplorable precept of 'do as I say, not as I do' as the only lesson to contemplate in regards to what actions to take. Maybe I can't say with absolute authority (not that it would matter either way) that those are wrong in a cosmic sense, but you can't argue that those don't objectively result in far more harm to human well-being than not, because they do. And the fact that not even theists believing in the same god can agree on their own derivative morals should be more than enough to demolish your argument about deferring to an absolute authority, since how can an authority claim to hold this knowledge and be the paragon of all morality when it fails to be clear?