Maximizing Moral Virtue

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, if something must be a certain way solely because one person (God) commands it, then it would need to have very good credibility that it really came from him. This way it might have come from him but was changed through centuries of oral re-telling or just completely made up.

Possessing certainty that a message originates with you answers the question of who the message came from - but not whether the message is of moral import or even further.... is, in fact, moral.  

But this is not what believers in the so-called objective morality from the Bible claim. They claim that something is good or bad simply because God says it is that way, and not if it makes sense or not.

That would be a subjective morality, not objective morality, assuming it was morality at all.  This is one of the easiest beliefs to discard when discussing whether or not there are realist ethics to maximize - because you can simply concede that when you use the term morality you are not referring to what a subject may or may not say or feel or command - but what is or is not good or bad about that thing itself.  If they like they can keep the word morality and you can use fleflarp - it really doesn't matter what terms are used.  You can concede that maximizing compliance with subjective normative statements is a thing, but not the thing you're talking about when considering maximizing moral virtue.  Or you can say that maximizing moral virtue is a thing, but not what you're talking about when considering fleflarp virtue.

Ultimately, I think you'll find that the faithful are just as compelled to reach into the fleflarp column as anyone else. That good is what god commands, and what god commands is good - are not interchangeable statements. It may be for their lack of rhetorical skill or conceptual grounding (or yours, or both) that the former seems like the latter. I think this is one where the rough shape of the misperception on either end has a good sociological explanation. There are people who believe - first, that their god is wholly good. Those people appear to weight fealty as-a-virtue higher than people who do not hold such a belief. With these two beliefs in mind, and confronted with a difficult to reconcile text - the notion that whatever god commanded is good is an expression of frustration. They don't know how, but they know there must be mitigating circumstances, and to seriously consider otherwise would be disloyal - to boot.

Consider the many..many...many posts on this board from the faithful swirling exactly that drain.