Atheism and morality

[Inigo]

A moral belief is a belief such as that 'Xing is wrong' or 'Xing is right'. To believe an act is wrong is one and the same as believing it to be immoral. That's a moral belief.

If one believes an act to be wrong, the 'wrongness' can't be the belief, for reasons just given. One has a belief that the act has wrongness. The wrongness and the belief are different. What is the wrongness? What is one believing about an act when one believes it to be wrong? No good saying that one believes the act to be harmful or some such, for then all one is saying is that one believes 'harmful acts' to be wrong. And we are non the wiser about what this 'wrongness' is, only a bit wiser about the kind of things that give rise to its presence.

So what is the wrongness? Well, first the wrongness is an instruction not to do the act in question. In other words, part of what we mean when we say 'that act is wrong' is 'that act is one you are instructed not to perform'. Second, the instruction is one that is inescapably rationally authoritative. So another thing we mean is 'and so you have reason not to perform it'.

So, and I really don't know why I bother doing this as it is just going to be ignored, part of what we believe when we believe an act to be wrong is that the act is a) instructed not to be done and b) the instruction creates a reason not to perform it.

I have then reasoned that there would need to exist a god and an afterlife for there to exist instructions of that kind. And thus for any moral belief to be 'true' there would need to exist a god and an afterlife.

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You don't refute a position by calling its proponent a shit. And that's all you're doing.

No, I'm not calling you a shit. I'm calling your argument shit. Sure you put a suit on it and give it airs but that doesn't stop it being total crap.

I understand your frustration. I have presented an argument that has as its conclusion that atheism is incompatible with morality - an argument that thereby damages the plausibility of atheism (at least to some degree). You cannot refute this argument. It has very compelling premises and it is deductively valid. That must be incredibly frustrating. And you can vent this frustration by swearing at the argument like a little baby. I understand that. I was a baby once. it must be like discovering your father's stash of pornography. It is horrible. Distressing. You can't tell your father yo found it. But you now know he has one and it is upsetting you. I'm showing you your father's porno stash. Nasty me.