List of reasons to believe God exists?

[Pat Mustard]

WallyM, I have a question for you about morality. As I understand it, you believe morality to be a purely societal construct based around what is best for the community in general, and empathy was evolved to reflect that. Is that correct?

Let's go back to the times of ancient civilizations where a powerful Empire enslaved an entire group of people. Let's use the Egyptians enslaving the Jews as the example. Obviously having slaves is good for the Egyptian community. They rely on it for everything, and without the forced labor of these "lesser people" they wouldn't live the comfortable, high quality life they have. Let's say one of these Egyptians is a sociopath... lacks empathy of any sort and to make matters worse has a particular fetish for violence and forced sex. He's super horny one night and so decides to take care of these urges by going out and raping a Jewish slave girl. He's not going to get in trouble for it because no one who matters will believe her instead of him, and even if they did, they wouldn't care... it's just a slave girl anyway. He feels zero remorse, and in his mind, it's not big deal at all. Also, it won't have a single negative effect at all in his community.  

Is what he did still immoral? If so, why?

Your god as described in the bible would consider what you describe a moral act, provided the nationalitites of the man and slave were reversed.

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As far as animals go, I'm no animal expert, but as far as I understand it animals don't have moral awareness. They act on instinct. When I hear or see an animal being violent or cruel to another animal, I certainly don't think "Wow, what a shitty thing to do... that dog sure is super morally depraved." I suppose I could be wrong on that though.

Wrong again. Observational studies have shown that other primates exhibit sets of rules with rewards and punishments which very closely mirror human morality. Anyone who has ever owned a dog will have the experience of being reproached when the dog feels a wrong has been done to them. Just because animals don't have the same ability to form societies & shared cultures as humans do, that doesn't allow us to think we are unique in possessing morality.

Especially when we constantly see behaviour in animals that if we saw it in humans would be judged on a moral scale.