Atheism and morality

[Inigo]

You are as delusional as any theist I have ever met. Your theory has had innumerable holes blown through it but you simply don't recognise the fact.

Well, I'm not a theist. And to say I'm delusional is question begging in this context.

You haven't addressed my argument. virtually no one has. I have presented an argument. Then what has happened is other people have offered banal accounts of the development of our moral sense and beliefs. This doesn't challenge my argument. One might as well tell me about the weather or what you're wearing. it just doesn't address my argument.

Then some people have tried to challenge my premise that morality instructs and favours. The problem, however, is that to do this one would need to explain how a moral obligation is not a directive to do something. And that's impossible. In other words, the premise people have elected to try and show false is one that it is impossible to show to be false. Premise 1 is a conceptual truth that is absolutely non-negotiable. Deny it and you're just changing the topic.

The only premise that can credibly be challenged is the premise that morality's instructions have inescapable rational authority or my claim that only a god's instructions would satisfy this condition. But nobody has done this.

---

What stops morality from being a concept?

And it is not the same as saying time (a concept, dimension, etc) is cheese (food). Because morality and a concept are hard to distinguish from one another - being, you know... invisible ideas.

Time is not a concept, it is something we have a concept of. The only thing that is a concept is a concept. This rather sloppy and imprecise use of terms is what lands you with nonsense like 'morality is a concept'.

Asking me why morality can't be a concept is like asking me why a triangle can't have four sides. Because it isn't a concept, is my answer. Concepts are concepts. Then there are the things conceived - those are the things we have concepts of. We have a concept of time, of space, of morality, of unicorns, of father Christmas, of a god, and so on and so on.