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

[orangebox21]

Externally granted by some function of the universe. I mean, you do take god's commandments as inviolable and given by a perfect source, yes?

To answer your question, Yes I do. To address the definition of 'objective': perhaps I was assuming a definition you didn't intend. I was taking it to mean: the state or quality of being true even outside of a subject's individual biases, interpretations, feelings, and imaginings. I was also interpreting 'objective' to be measured quantitatively. Could you explain your definition a bit more? What is the 'external' that 'granted' it?

We would need evidence of the cause first, before we could believe in it. So far all we've established is that X action produces beneficial effects, and that this was written in a book. Since we've just shown that human beings can notice this, it rather detracts from the notion that such things must be divine in nature.

I'm taking the effect to be evidence of a cause. An observation of the effect is not itself the cause.(further development in next response)

How would reasoning that out be circular? What part of "X action produces Y effect, and Y effect is beneficial/detrimental for my group, and therefore it should be encouraged/discouraged if I wish for the group to flourish," is circular?

When discussing the origin of morality I'm looking for the cause. I'm looking for a logical argument/proof that would have 'Therefore morality exists' as it's conclusion. If said logical proof would have a premise(s) like, we observe morality, or we observe the benefit, or this is bad, or that is bad, etc, all of these premises assume a standard of morality. This is how the argument becomes circular reasoning. If one assumes the conclusion within one of the premises that is circular reasoning. The argument you have written above is not circular because it does not argue for the origin of morality because the observation of morality is not an explanation of the origin of morality.

Only slightly: a society requires at least some people to... be, right? I mean, that's just objectively true. Larger social groups can accomplish more, that's also just true. And a world in which everyone is allowed to kill anyone else runs the risk of losing all those people that are required to form a society, and therefore, in an objective sense, there's more of a risk associated with allowing indiscriminate killing than with preventing it.

I agree the first statement is objective, without people there can be no society. The second statement is subjective. It depends what the specific task is as to whether a larger social group can accomplish more or less. For example building a house. A larger group could accomplish more. On the other hand, for example, accomplishing world peace. It's more reasonable in this example that the smaller the group the greater the chance of world peace and the larger the group the less chance of world peace. So here larger social group equates to less, not more. I do agree with your argument that indiscriminate killing runs the risk of eliminating all the people within the society and therefore should be discouraged. These statements are based upon our personal biases (society is a good construct, human life should be preserved to accomplish tasks, etc) and are therefore not objective.

Yes, people can disagree on moral precepts. That's where evidence and rational argument comes in. I'm not claiming that human morality is perfect or unanimously agreed upon, just that it can be determined through discourse and evidence without the need for a divine source.

I've heard it said that human morality isn't perfect. I understand things to be judged as relative to something else. In other words measurement requires a standard to measure against. What is the standard by which human morality is measured so as to determine it is not perfect?