Why did God murder children for making fun of a bald guy?

[Esquilax]

I'll answer by restating what I initially wrote: God gave us His commandments that have a positive effect in reality. You have my proposed cause and effect backwards here. You're proposing that God 'took notice of the good effect' and then produced the commandment. I'm proposing God made the commandment (the cause), and we observe the effect. You're asking me an either-or question that can be answered a third way.

So, what you're saying is that god made a commandment and then arranged physical reality so that obeying that commandment results in a positive physical effect? So then there's no reason that one would need god for morality, since they could see the physical effects anyway.

Or you're saying that god made a commandment and therefore that commandment is good, and whatever effect that happens is also good, in which case you don't have morality, as I said earlier. You just have orders.

You take for granted that we can already 'reason right from wrong'. You would have to presuppose morality to be able to 'reason out the merit...'

You aren't listening, and more importantly, you're putting quotation marks around words that never even appeared in my post, hinting that you either don't know what quotations marks are for, or more likely, you have a script that you're following regardless of what is actually said to you.

What I said was that we can reason from the objective effects of an action, and this is a really trivial claim: if I shoot you in the leg for no reason, are you claiming that the only way we could figure out that this is a less than desirable outcome is by presupposing divine morality? Or could we simply observe that you are now in an unnecessary state of pain and injury, and that most likely you would prefer not to be, and work backwards from there?

See, you christians like to pretend that morality is some huge, complicated puzzle that you require outside help to solve, but it's actually very simple at base, so long as you actually think. One can look at the effects of actions and stimuli with regards to how thinking beings react to them, and work out a moral system based on those observations; after all, what use is morality if it doesn't concern the welfare of thinking beings?

Presupposing morality as proof for morality is begging the question, your simply assuming the very thing you're trying to prove (we observe morality in reality, we can measure morality in reality, therefore reality gives us morality; it's circular).

It's also not what I said.

Where did we gain the knowledge that right exists and wrong exists and where did we get the knowledge to discern between the two?

First question: we didn't because they aren't discrete entities. We label actions right and wrong.

Second question: by observing the effects of actions in reality- not the morality of them but the actual, physical effects- and determining the harm or benefit of those actions.

Which is what I said earlier, before you trundled along on your little apologetic script regardless.