RE: Christian morality delusions
November 20, 2018 at 8:36 pm
(This post was last modified: November 20, 2018 at 8:40 pm by Angrboda.)
(November 20, 2018 at 8:15 pm)tackattack Wrote: "Where do god’s morals come from, and by what method or criteria can it be concluded that they are objective? "
-By my understanding and personal experience of the nature of God being Holy. I'm certain God's morals are subjective to him, but as he is outside of my known universe they're about as constant as I could fathom. That's not to say they're not mercurial, but I've not had that experience.
God's morals are not constrained by anything, nor is his nature, from a moral perspective. His moral nature and his morals could be anything, and the rest of the theist logic about morals being based in God, yada yada would follow without a smidgen of difference. Because his nature can and is simply a random, brute fact of him and the world, that nature is by definition arbitrary. Arbitrary morals are not moral. Hence God is not a source of morals. (And theology backs me up on this point, as it's asserted that God requires nothing from outside himself.) Additionally, if his nature constrains his actions, then his actions are not free. Morality requires a free agent (as traditionally conceived); the actions of a determined automaton are not moral, they are simply stuff happening. And finally, it is inconsistent with accepted metaphysics to assert that anything has a nature possessed of a moral dimension. If a person had never done anything wrong, we would consider it inconsistent to assert that he was an evil person, yet the assumption that nature or one's being has a moral aspect allows us to say that this innocent person may in fact be evil, and that yields the required absurdity to complete the reductio ad absurdum proof that we don't have moral natures, and neither does God. God, if he is a moral agent, is fully contingent, capable of good, evil, and arbitrary morals, and there is no way to differentiate the list, if they even are differentiable.
As to Min's challenge, that fairness is good might be a universally embraced moral norm. It would exclude psychopaths, but one might plausibly assert that psychopaths don't have a functionally healthy mind and thus their morals are a pathology, and do not threaten the validity of the proposal. It's also possible to postulate that psychopaths may not belong to our species and so the divergence of their morals is moot as they do not belong to the relevant class.