There Is No Sin!

[Mister Agenda]

What are some of the basic objective facts of morality, what are they based on?

Let's take the most obvious - life.

The deliberate taking of life without good reason is a crime - called murder.

How can that be a crime, given the supposed history and tendencies of evolutionary so called life?

As Chimp said, there is no such thing as sin?

You can have an objective system of morality, so long as you take a premise or two as axiomatic. Don't worry, religion does the same thing, so the playing field is level. The vast majority of people would accept as axiomatic the idea that human flourishing (maximizing the opportunity for people to have the best lives possible) is good. From that, you build a consistent, objective morality be comparing actions to whether they help, hinder, or are indifferent to human flourishing. There would be disagreement on how best to accomplish it, but that's something science can help with; determining (within the limits of our tools) whether the results of actions help, hinder, or are indifferent to human flourishing, and to what degree.

So we regard the deliberate taking of a human life except for specified exceptions to be a crime. Most of us agree that we do not want to be murdered, do not want our loved ones to be murdered, and really, most of us don't want to murder anyone. So in the best interest of our society and safety (and human flourishing), we have decided that murderers have to be stopped; and that murder is a crime. To our moral sensibilities it is a crime because it is shameful and wrong; legally it is a crime because we have made it illegal. Since evolution is descriptive, not prescriptive, it does not enter into consideration when determining that murder is a crime. As a bonus, not considering evolution lets us avoid the Naturalistic Fallacy.

Sin is an offense against so-called divine law, not human law. An offense against human law is a crime.

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You bounce from here to there like a rubber ball, Banned.  I keep suggesting that you take breath.  Is there some specific reason that you just can't do that?

If you can't, if you can't help but be the rubber ball....would it really be all that strange if people decided to just run with it, and fling you back and forth between them for the lulz?  Would there even be anything wrong with it?  You are, after all, intent on -being- the ball.

Your earlier statement that morality has nothing to do with evolution - is refuted by the majority of evolutionists like Dawkins, who make it very clear that morality developed in the animal world and that humans are just an extension of that.

So I take it you represent yourself here and not that community.
That's fine - your opinion on its own is important.

Khemikal does a fine job of representing our community. The only thing evolution has to do with morality is that is has produced a species for which moral considerations are relevant. It wasn't inevitable, I suppose evolution could have produced a species of highly intelligent loners that reproduce by rape and otherwise kill each other every chance they get, though I have trouble imagining the circumstances under which such a species would be selected for. Morality wouldn't exist for such a species, culture would be impossible, and there would be no value in them being able to talk. They would not be human at all.

If such a species existed in the real world and was a threat to humans, we would wipe them out through the power of cooperation, language, and the sort of weapon-making that it takes a culture to develop.

The morality isn't in evolution. It is in ourselves, because of what we are.

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BTW evolution science teaches that morality was developed by the process of evolution.
If you disagree you don't have sufficient backup from that community, to be able to call it accepted by that community.

There is much more to morality than our innate moral sentiments. They are what make us care about interacting with others in ways that are fair and kind. On their own, they're weak against our selfish desires to take what we want. They are not morality on their own except in a very primitive sense, if you can say social primates like baboons have morality, that's the sort of morality they have.

The sort of morality humans have depends on cultures that promote pro-social behavior and constrain anti-social behavior. The sort of morality humans have is based on thinking about our actions and their consequences, sharing our thoughts with others, developing moral philosophies and traditions, and changing them when we find a better way.

Evolution got us to being early homo sapiens, barely able to live in a group larger than a family without severe violence. Culture, philosophy, and science got us to a world of nations where we can argue about what morality means on the internet.

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I don't disagree with the value of the moment at all. The point is very valid.
I am questioning the values set out in evolution theories.

What's the difference between a child who died and an old man who died?
Nothing.

If that child has a name, and is set for the resurrection and eternal life and recognition, that's a different story, especially if every treasured moment in that person's life is able to be relived through a restored memory, but I am dealing with the dark side here.

There are no 'values set out in evolution theories'. The modern synthesis is a scientific theory about he natural world. It has no more moral implications than the theory of gravity. You can't get from an 'is' to an 'ought'. If given the opportunity, a puma will kill your sheep. That's an 'is'. It does not imply that you 'ought' to let it do so. The ToE finds that nature selects for those organisms which are adapted to their environment well enough to have more descendants than organisms less well adapted to their environment. That doesn't mean that you ought to have as many children as possible. There are no 'values set out in evolutionary theories' for you to question, you are either strawmanning or projecting.

The difference between a child who died and an old man who died is, for starters, that one was a child when they died and the other was an old man. The child had a short life, and the old man had long one. The loss of the child was a tragic loss, too soon, for the child's parents. The old man's death was a loss to his friends and relatives, but not unexpected and his friends and relatives could find comfort in all the things he had a chance to do with that long life...if he didn't do much for them to find comfort in, they probably didn't like him that much anyway.

You keep asking questions that a person who feels normal compassion and understands how humans work should already know the answers to. Why do you do that?