Atheism and morality

[max-greece]

Xing in your example is confusing. Can we use a real example?

Abortion. Essentially 2 sides of the argument. The first is that the rights of the unborn child trump everything else. the second that the woman's right to choose trumps all.

If that is a dispute over the same moral issue then the role of your God is merely to flag up that abortion is a moral issue and then the individual comes down on one side or the other.

Doesn't seem like much of a role - seems far more like a decision to be made by an intelligence, us, independently. That decision would be made on the basis of upbringing probably more than anything else.

No, it is better to use 'Xing' as if one mentions a real case someone will dispute the normative issue of the rightness/wrongness of abortion rather than focussing on what the fact of disagreement tells us about our concept of morality.

I am entirely unclear how you arrive at the view that the role of the god is just to highlight that it is a moral issue. This is clearly not what my view is. A god's instructions determine the rightness or wrongness of a deed as wrongness in an action just consists in the fact it is an act a god instructs us not to perform. Moral disagreement is simply disagreement about what, exactly, morality instructs us to do.

Now that I did not get. You are now arguing for an absolute morality which I reject out of hand. There is not, nor can there be, an absolute fixed morality for the ages. Morality moves. God's morality is useless. Nothing remains morally fixed. No moral position can be taken, ever, that should not be contradicted by a morally sustainable position under certain circumstances.

We then get to the further problem of God's communication with us. Even if God could hold a perfect moral position at all times if he/she/they cannot communicate that to us in an unambiguous way, consistently, then they may as well not exist for all the use they are.

Fortunately - he/she/it/they are not there. Problem solved.