Agnosticism IS the most dishonest position

[The Grand Nudger]

Haven't seen you in awhile Vulcan. Caught ourselves another one, as you can see.

About standing knee deep in shit.......

That's a common state of affairs for human beings. Accordingly, rational moral systems address the inconvenient fact of exclusively suboptimal decision fields. In the context of happiness and necessity, for example...it's an open question as to whether killing a child is wrong. It's likely that singer would think that it was..in a vacuum. Life is not a vacuum. If you have to kill the one to make way for the other- and with total happiness as the "ultimate reference"...there is a real moral dilemma on our hands. Not just in the consideration of the act, but in the doing of it. Knowing (or believing, if we prefer) that what we are about to do is right even as every fiber in our body screams out that it's wrong.

The amount of moral courage it would take to kill a child so that some other child could be happy, in this hypothetical, isn't easily discounted.

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I don't think basing what's right and wrong on gods makes one a subjectivist.

Basing a moral system on the specifics of -any- subject, including god, is the definition of moral subjectivism.  It doesn't matter what you think....because that's a fact...and I think we've already covered this.

Scripture won't change you know, what Allah said in the Qur'an will never be altered. As of the "what if god said otherwise ?" Then yeah, the hell it'll be otherwise - except god will never say otherwise. If God's words are unchanging, that makes religious people morally absolutists.
The famous story of Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac is a good illustration of that, it's in the Hebrew Bible and also in the Qur'an. God literally asks Abraham to perform an unspeakably horrific act, Abraham obeyed God's command which in the end turned out to be a mere test of what comes first : our innate sense of morality or God's command?
The latter two don't actually diverge much : God didn't allow Abraham to perform the horrific act, but he still wanted him to put his word first. In the end, if God is the creator, he's the one who made us see these acts as horrific, so listening to this moral compass - that god put in us - or listening to god .. is the same thing.

Scripture won't change?  Okay...but that's irrelevant.  I may always think that vanilla is better than chocolate, too.  Doesn't mean that it is.  

I see with my eyes, not a god...but lets run with it.  Lets imagine that it;s god "making us see".  Let's imagine that there's a switch in every human being that can utterly disable our moral agency.  If that switch is in the off position, and fucking allah comes around and flips it on, does that mean that a rape suddenly became bad?  Or was it already bad, and you just didn't see it?  I think that it would have to be the latter.  Nothing about the rape changed, the only thing that changed was whether or not I had eyes to see.

So..no, that's not the bad-making property of rape, for example.  Rapes are bad regardless of whether I can see them, and they would be bad even if I couldn't see them, or see them as bad.  Again, moral realist.  

Grounded in subjectivism, yes.  If god said otherwise, would it be otherwise?  As a person who refers to moral facts, I don't think so.  What is good is good no matter what anyone has to say on the matter, and what is wrong is wrong no matter what anyone has to say on the matter.  That's bound up in what it means for something to be a fact.

I don't think moral facts will get you very far on other issues. What distinguishes fornication/cheating from sex with a spouse? They refer to the same act, they're both consensual, but one is hugely immoral.

That's fine...that's fine.  You are certainly free to believe that moral facts won't get me far on issues, just as you are free to reject moral facts.  I think they will..I think that they're the only way to get anywhere in a moral system based on valid inferences.  

What facts, if any, would you refer to when determining whether (or why) infidelity is bad?

As for clear answers, there's a huge set of clear and simple answers to questions that are wholly and irreconcilably wrong.   Clarity is no certification of accuracy...and "god said so" makes nothing objectively right or wrong at all.  Islam is a moral nonstarter - from a realists perspective.  If you wanted to advocate for more reliable moral systems, then you'd need to start advocating for a moral system in the first place.  Following orders is not a moral system.  That you can't specify goodness outside of those orders very persuasively argues that you have no inherent moral sense, or compass, nor any moral agency whatsoever.  If it were true, ofc...which I strongly doubt to be the case.

I actually prefer to follow orders when it comes to skullfucking. Following orders is a very good moral system at least with the basic issues - rape, murder, fornication, etc. I prefer Peter Singer being told that he's not obeying god's law rather than respond with lengthy moral discussions of his utilitarian position. Singer is a good example where it's not worth it to think much about the intricacies of moral systems, we just know something is horribly wrong with his position. If you think Peter Singer shouldn't merely follow the order of not killing haemophiliac infants, you need to play in his territory, namely discussing and refuting utilitaniarism. And by doing so you're already giving his horribly wrong position some credit.
And religions of course go father than just following these primitive orders, they can build jurisdictions based on the holy texts to answer more complicated issues.

The question of your preferences is just max irony considering your moral subjectivism.  I don't care which you prefer, and didn't ask.  At issue was whether or not order following was a moral system.  It isn't.  You might prefer it, but that won't make it a moral system.

If anything were wrong in singer's utilitarian formulation, it's probably the circumstance. As in it would be an awfully shitty world we lived in if the conditions of his argument were met. Where there's a necessity to do bad, and that specific bad, so that a greater good might follow. Thankfully, there's still enough room on this rock for it to be a hypothetical...though starving people make these sorts of calculations with some regularity.

Because it's harmful, I guess.

Attaboy.....and if you know that, you don't need to know whether a god exists, let alone whether a god likes it or ordered it. It's wrong for reasons that are still true regardless of any god existing or having any opinion of the matter.