Christian morality delusions

[Belacqua]

There is subjective morality- what I feel internally to be right and wrong as according to my experience and beliefs

Since I'm not Christian, of course I feel comfortable telling everybody what Christians believe.    And since I'm all academic and ivory-towerish, I can ignore whatever they teach in the local Sunday School, to focus on the good stuff. What I want to type out here is a good old theological view, that stretches from Augustine (at least) through Dante and Simone Weil. It may not be known in the rank and file, but it certainly is a part of Christian tradition. 

First, I'm going to avoid the terms "subjective" and "objective" as misleading. But I do agree with your view that there is a personal set of morals, and (for Christians) the belief in an over-arching Good. 

The personal is just what we feel we ought to do, in order to be good people. Christian history says (unfairly to the Jews) that the 613 commandments of the OT were for beginners who didn't know enough. It's as if you have a kindergarten kid and you tell him details instead of general rules: "don't ride in any cars," "come straight home," "don't talk to strangers." This is the kind of detail that a kid needs. If you just say "be good" to a 6-year-old he doesn't understand. Jesus, though, changed things from a set of detailed rules to one big rule: be good. This is what is meant by "fulfilling" the law. It is no longer in a book; it is supposed to be in our hearts. So we have a general sense of what we should aim for. 

There is societal morality- what is commonly accepted to be right or wrong for a people within a particular society

I think that Christians reject this. This is Babylon, this is the symbolic Rome of the Apocalypse, this is the God of This World, which is Satan. Christians are called to do better. 

There is universal morality (possibly)- things that rational people of any time and any place find right or wrong
There is objective morality- A being I call God exists outside the universe that influences us through the Holy Spirit to inform of objective morality.

These, I think, are the same. Or they would be if we understood them well enough. 

In the view of traditional classical theology, God is not a person-like rule-giver. God is just the Good. It doesn't make sense to ask where God got his morals from. He himself is the Good. Morality means aiming toward him. Sin is what distracts us from that direction. 

This sort of dismisses most questions about rules. It is too simple to ask "is lying always wrong?" or detailed questions like that. There are an infinite number of decisions to make in order to be good, no set of rules can cover them all in any detail. We are called upon to think and worry about if what we are doing aims to the Good. 

The important thing about this, for me, is that it demands extreme humility. No living person can know what the full ramifications of his actions will be. We do our very best, but because none of us is God, none of us can see the Good (or, more properly be the Good). And I think this is not a bad lesson for non-Christians as well. But of course I get annoyed when I hear non-humble people -- Christian or otherwise -- who think they know anything for sure.