Atheism and morality

[Inigo]

Because the rational authority of the instructions of such a person would not be inescapable. You would only have reason to comply with such a person's instructions so long as you stay alive. if you were planning on, or about to kill yourself/die you would have no reason to comply with this person's instructions to you.
Moral instructions are not like this. Moral instructions are inescapably rationally authoritative. Only the instructions of an agent who has control over our interests in an afterlife would be like that.

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Just nonsense. the laws of physics are not instructions. You're not 'instructed' to obey the laws of physics, are you?! They describe how things behave, they do not prescribe.

Instructions DO require an instructor. Provide me with an example of one that doesn't have an instructor or shut up.

Instincts, already provided one. Descriptions are a form of instruction. You don't have to follow them because there are other subroutines(descriptions) that can override them. In that method they provide instructions. You keep asserting instructions require an instructor(argument from ignorance), thinking that because you say it's true without evidence it obviously must be true. I get instructions from non-agents all the time, every day, through interacting with the environment.

You say instructions require an agent so therefore god did it. Same nonsense again and again. Please spill it somewhere else. That is all there is to your argument when you simplify it. And you say I'm spouting nonsense.

No, because instincts either aren't instructions, or they are only instructional due to being desires, which are things that can only exist in a mind.

When something approaches my eyes I, by instinct, close them. I am not instructed to close them. They just close. So I assume you do not mean this by an 'instinct'.

Perhaps you are referring to certain desires or urges that may arise in us. Well, they can direct us in a very real sense. However, these do not constitute counterexamples as the desires in question are an agent's and so you have merely confirmed that you can't get instructions from something non-agential. The only kind of thing that issues instructions is a mind with beliefs and desires. YOu don't show that to be false by bringing pointing to a mind's desires. I know desires can be a source of directions.

BUt, for the millionth time, if you identify moral instructions with our desires then you will not be able to account for the inescapable rational authority of moral instructions. Hence, moral insstructions need to have their source elsewhere.

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Because the rational authority of the instructions of such a person would not be inescapable. You would only have reason to comply with such a person's instructions so long as you stay alive. if you were planning on, or about to kill yourself/die you would have no reason to comply with this person's instructions to you.
Moral instructions are not like this. Moral instructions are inescapably rationally authoritative. Only the instructions of an agent who has control over our interests in an afterlife would be like that.

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Just nonsense. the laws of physics are not instructions. You're not 'instructed' to obey the laws of physics, are you?! They describe how things behave, they do not prescribe.

Instructions DO require an instructor. Provide me with an example of one that doesn't have an instructor or shut up.

What about if you care about others outside of your own life, or what happens to people after you die. In this case there are reasons to follow a code of ethics without there being a need for a god.

This whole thread seems flawed to me if I understand it correctly, you're basing evidence upon what a word means.

You're basically saying "this word (normative morality) means an instruction which is inescapably rational to follow, only a god could give such instructions" Well maybe if you don't care about anyone else or what happens to you after you die and you do just want to kill yourself there are no normative morals. It's like me saying "I invented a word bozwollocks, its the feeling you get when the invisible elephant wraps its trunk around your stomach and you feel a bit weird, the word exists, the feeling exists, the invisible trunk must exist." It's only other people who get to decide who is rational, and their decision is surely effected by their own rationality, so logically no one can truly decide perfect rationality, absolute morality, none of these things, they aren't actual things which exist they are just ideas and words, just because someone out there had an idea that there are certain behaviors that all rational people should do and that these are normative morals what makes you think the idea behind all of this is actually true:?

Something isn't wrong just beusae you say so, or because you don't want others to do it, is it? YOu can't seriously be saying that the reason it is wrong to hurt others is because YOU don't want to hurt others or want others to hurt others???

The wrongness of hurting others has nothing to do with you and your tastes. It is wrong to hurt others because MORALITY instructs us not to. Happily, most of us don't want to either. But even those few among us who really like hurting others, or who sometimes have an urge to, do something WRONG if they do so. They have REASON not to hurt others, whether they realise it or not, whether they want to or not. That's the thing about morality. That's what's distinctive about morality.
If you want to rape someone that doesn't make it right to do so. And by the same token the wrongness of rape doesn't amount to you just not wanting to rape someone.
If I want others to rape someone, that doesn't make it right for them to do so. By the same token, if I don't want others to rape someone that isn't what the wrongness of it amounts to.

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I assume you cannot find a flaw in my reasoning or assumptions and so this is what you're driven to.

Assumptions are always flawed. That's why they're called assumptions.

No, they are called assumptions because they're assumptions.