what are we supposed to say again when christians ask us where we get our morality?

[Statler Waldorf]

I see. So, whenever someone presents information that shows your argument is bogus, rather than confront it, you pretend it's not topical.

No, when something is not relevant to the topic I properly identify it as such. The argument is that atheist’s cannot postulate a logically coherent and consistent definition of morality unless god exists and then you come in from left field babbling on about how few atheists are in prison. It has nothing to do with the topic. Nobody is arguing that atheists never do nice deeds or must believe in God in order to do so; we are arguing that nice and good are completely meaningless terms in a purely natural world. Besides, disproportionate representation in prisons does nothing to demonstrate that that people group is somehow more immoral than any other.

I don't buy into your presuppositional bullshit, from your 2000-year-old tradition that has no claim to general ethics nor morality other than what they've stolen from other extant cultures.

Whether or not you buy into it is irrelevant, people do not get to simply opt out of the moral imperative contained in God’s commandments. Secondly, making an appeal to the age of the book is also logically fallacious.

Try to stay on topic, yourself. Repeating a claim doesn't validate the claim, it simply shows you have nothing else to support it.

Which claim are you referring to? Pointing out your fallacious logic?

You don't have an "argument." You have dishonest trickery aimed at fooling the reader into believing your petty religious tradition has any bearing on the moral framework that existed far before your Abrahamic, myth-stealing tradition.

Well if I do not have an argument then it should be pretty easy to refute, give me a logically coherent and consistent definition of morality that would apply in a purely material universe. I’ll wait…

You advanced the claim there is no moral action without your God.

Correct, no action can be defined as moral or immoral without God existing.

I presented statistics that show your claim is false.

No, you did not; you presented statistics dealing with the religious affiliation of prisoners. This has nothing to do with whether or not an act can be defined as right or wrong without God.

You repeated the claim, and seek to restrict the debate to within the fallacious claim you've hijacked this thread with, hoping no one would notice. What's it like to be a Compulsive Liar For Jesus?

No, I corrected your fallacious logic and attempted to steer you back on course so we could have a rational discussion. You seem to be perfectly content with dragging the discussion down rabbit holes about the irrelevant and then whining when I cast light upon your irrationality. Lying for Jesus? No, we live in a Christian Universe which means lying is morally wrong. Being logical for Jesus? Absolutely.

The same unsupported assertion, with nothing to back it up. What are you afraid of?

I asked you a question; I did not repeat any assertion. I figured you could not answer it.

Your holy book supports abortion, ordained and ordered by God. Red herring.

That’s actually false; even an accidentally induced miscarriage was punishable by death. They were far more civilized on the subject than we are today.

“If men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she gives birth prematurely, yet there is no injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman’s husband [v]may demand of him, and he shall pay [w]as the judges decide. 23 But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”- Exodus 21:22 (NASB)

Again, you are the one who entered a thread and threw down presupposed claims with nothing to back them up that "Without God, people behave immorally," and then ignored the statistics that show you're full of shit. What's it like being that full of shit?

No, the original post was concerning a very specific Christian argument. Namely, that the very definition of goodness requires that God exists. If you want to be ignorant and think the argument is something else and waste your time arguing for the irrelevant by all means continue to do so. However, every time you run into a theist who understands the argument you are going to get drubbed just like you were against me. Your stubbornness and ignorance makes my job easy so I cannot say I mind it.

Sniveling and backpedaling has no bearing on relevance. If you can't support your argument by anything other than bald assertion, tap out.

First you claimed that your statistics refuted my argument, next you claimed that my argument was something different from the one in the original post, and now you seem to think it is something entirely different. It seems you’re going to have to get on the same sheet of music with yourself before any sort of debate is even remotely possible.

[Are behavioral dispositions moral because they evolved or did they evolve because they are moral?

That’s awesome Chad; Plato just smiled a bit in his grave.

Better to say that prosocial behavioral dispositions evolved because they had survival value. Does that make them moral? No. Does it underpin what we describe as moral. Most likely. Morality is more like beauty than it is like reality. There is no objective basis for morality.

If morality is like beauty then could someone stipulate that raping children is a morally good act? You still seem to be supporting the Christians’ position on this. Without God, morality is meaningless because any act could be arbitrarily defined as a morally good act.

Humanity evolved morality, much like ants, bees, and termites, because moral action is evolutionarily conductive to the survival of the species.

Did humans evolve the ability to commit murder, rape, theft, molestation, torture, bestiality, adultery, infanticide, homosexuality, and deceit? If all evolved actions and desires are morally good then so too are all of those actions. This sort of utilitarianism reduces to absurdity when it’s given anything more than a cursory examination. Without God, anything and everything is permissible.

Rampant insults others because he's a mindless dick with no adequate response to the question he's been asked.

There’s no need to insult the male sex organ like that Chad.

Were we not social mammals the selfish attitude would be the more beneficial, however, being social animals its simply not how things are.

Then why do some humans kill, rape, and steal if they did not evolve to do so?

We know this through the history of our species. There are many examples of activities that would never have happened were my version of human morality not correct. Farming is an example. Can you understand why?

I do not see how this would require your version of morality to be correct. In Genesis man is compelled to work the fields for food. Additionally, I think the history of our species has taught us that many humans get very far in life by doing things that I am sure you and I would both agree are immoral.

Humans do engage in all the activities they are capable of. Some are moral, some are not. Implementation of the tools that support morality through natural selection is merely good enough to maintain the species. If it isn't, the species doesn't survive. No society condones murder or theft from individuals or groups it recognises as being part of that society. If it did, that society would be very short lived indeed.

If species cannot survive by murdering and raping one another then how come many species-including humans-murder and rape one another and seem to survive just fine? Moreover, if these actions are only immoral when done within a society are they then moral when done to other societies?

Religion (and politics) act to identify non-group members within the society enabling people to murder, rape and steal from them with impunity, often with the blessing of their God.

Using your definition of morality what you seem to be complaining about would have to actually be classified as morally good. Since the vast majority of societies are religious then this must serve a particular survival advantage for those societies and therefore according to your definition would be a morally good belief and institution. Being non-religious would then be the outlier and therefore an immoral position.

You didn't understand what I was saying. Our natural behaviours are empathy, reciprocation and fairness. Those are the ones we can overcome to "do evil."

I do not believe that those are our natural predispositions at all. Humans kill one another daily, they steal from one another daily, they rape one another daily. I do not see how you are choosing which of these behaviors are normal and which ones are not when people do them all.

No other animal makes war on itself.

I believe ants wage war. Chimps will fight and steal from other groups of chimps. Most apes will commit rape. Lions commit infanticide. All animals kill. How can you possibly reason from the premise that whatever animals do is morally good?

Survival of the species is the driver for any and all species on the planet. We are no different. God has nothing to do with it. God is about establishing power and allegiance between humans for the lowest cost.

Are you saying that any action that helps to perpetuate the species is morally good?

No - it was morally abhorrent. You are correct, however, that religion is not the only way to get people to behave appallingly. Political ideology is a good substitute. In the case you mentioned it was communism but it could equally have been fascism.

Now wait a second, what if those acts did aid the survival of the Russian people? Would they then be morally good acts?

Within the society, yes, you would be considered morally wrong. Were you in a different place at the same time or in another time you would be considered morally correct. Its easy to see which of these 2 positions is correct - just compare to our inherited characteristics.

I am having trouble pinning you down on this. What ultimately determines whether any particular act is good or bad? The society you live in? Whether it helps the species as a whole? Whether other animals also do the act? I am having difficulty figuring out what exactly your position is.

We determine good or bad morality by our inherited standard. Its not hard to do.

Inherited standard? You mean by what we “feel” is good or bad?

Interesting how useless God's consideration is, to us. What Stalin cared about is not the species concern. Ideally the species is concerned with is learning from the lessons of Stalin, or Hitler, Pol Pot and so on so we don't let those things happen again. Sadly we don't seem to be too good at learning. Maybe that will be the thing that actually kills off our species.

Why should Stalin have cared about the species? He got absolutely everything he wanted in life, why should he sacrifice his well-being so that humans who are born after he’s feeding the worms may benefit? This does not seem to make any sense. Now if there is a God who owns Stalin, hates sins, and possesses the ultimate prerogative to judge him for his sins after his material body has died then it would make sense.

Whoa, whoa, when did I ever say that only sentient beings who engage in moral thought are a part of our moral metrics? My definition concerns the well-being of all living creatures, whether or not they engage in moral thought; even if an animal can't participate in moral conversations, causing it unnecessary pain would still be immoral by virtue of the pointlessness of doing it. Why negatively impact any being for no reason?

You seemed to imply we were only concerned with beings capable of moral thought yes. We can alter the emphasis though and allow them in if you like.
It’s morally wrong to torture animals because it hurts the animal and it is pointless? Why is it morally wrong for someone to inflict pointless pain? What if the person gets a lot of enjoyment out of it? I do not believe they would find it pointless then. What if they just think you are wrong? Is there a morlal imperative for them to follow your definition of morality? It just seems like you have an inherent knowledge of what is good and evil and you are contriving some sort of ad hoc definition of morality in order to hopefully support what you already know is good and to condemn what you already know is evil.

Arbitrary? The more sentient an organism is, the more potential it has for complex thought, emotional nuance, and so on. You lose more potential good, potential anything, through the elimination of a person than you do a fish.

Well allow me to extrapolate then; therefore would the lives and well-being of more intelligent people hold more moral value than the lives of less intelligent people?

You're conflating the sensation itself with the cause of the sensation. When I say we dislike pain, it's precisely because the purpose of pain is to notify us of bodily damage and to warn us away from danger. There's no sense in which pain ever signifies that something good is happening to you.

I am sorry but I simply have to disagree. When an athlete is training and getting stronger they will experience pain in their muscles. Something good is actually happening however. Also, what about the people who enjoy pain? I am not one of them but we both know such people do exist.

Yes, it does sound familiar: Confucius was saying it years before Jesus did.

That may be the case; although the earliest confirmed copies of the Analects we have postdate Christ by over 150 years and even postdate manuscripts of the Gospel of John. Be that as it may, all humans have a knowledge of the truth so Confucius was certainly capable of getting it right (Romans 1). However, in Matthew Jesus was referencing the Ten Commandments which significantly predate Confucius.
You did not answer my question though. I hope you address it later on.

Because we require each other to survive, and a world in which we allow indiscriminate injury for personal gain is demonstrably worse off for everyone involved; our society is what allows us to thrive and become the dominant species on the planet, and that is predicated on a certain level of trust between one another, that we can share resources and expertise with the expectation that we won't turn on one another violently at the first opportunity. We are disparate parts that come together to create a functioning whole, and without that trust our ability to do so breaks down.

You’re begging the question, I asked you why someone should put the well-being of others above their own and you answered by saying because it makes things better for everyone. I get that, but that does not answer my question. Why should Joseph Stalin have treated others as he wanted to be treated when he became the most powerful man on Earth by doing exactly the opposite? If all that exists is matter and there is no life or judgment after death I think you’d have a difficult time convincing anyone in his position they should do anything different than what got them to that position in the first place.

Your local supermarket stays open because the people working there can rely on you to keep to the social contracts and pay them money for your food, rather than just murdering them for it. If they couldn't, there would be no reason for them not to act in their own self interest and not come to work. Consequently, there would also be no reason for the producers of that food to sell it to the supermarket, as they'd have no assurance that the buyers wouldn't simply murder them and take the food. It all breaks down.

What if we only did these things to other societies? We could still have things functioning in our society while treating the people in different societies terribly. This is what the entire antebellum slave trade was based on, whites figured out that as long as they enslaved the people from a society thousands of miles away they could still behave “civilized” in their own society and even benefit from the free labor. Was that morally wrong? This social contract utilitarianism sounds great but ends up being inadequate and rather arbitrary at times.

Is this really such a complicated concept that you needed to be told it, Stat?

It’s only complicated if God does not exist because it’s then rendered incoherent and arbitrary.

Again, we live better cooperatively than competitively.

So? I do not see how that creates a moral imperative to do what is best for everyone rather than the individual. Furthermore, are you say that any act that benefits the society is by definition morally good?

Yes, and he became that on the back of the death and suffering of many other people, and most notably, his regime was in no way self-sustaining. If it had continued, things would only have gotten progressively worse; you can't build a society like that.

What does that have to do with him? He was quite prosperous and I do not see how you can judge anything he did as being morally evil if there is no transcendent law-giver who owns everyone. If this life is all we are given and we all end up feeding the worms then why not put our self-interest above all other things?

It's another facet of the social contract: we stand on the foundations given us by the previous generation, and we pass that along to ensure the survival of our species.

Why ought we to do so? I do not see how you are arriving at that.

Incidentally, are you saying that you only do any good work now because you expect eternal reward later? And you question my moral foundation?

No, I do good deeds now because Christ’s redeeming work made such actions possible, my fellow men are created in the image of God, and I am commanded to do so by He who owns all of creation. That seems to make more sense than sacrificing my well-being for other sentient bags of tissue whom may or may not even exist in the future, whom may or may not even benefit from my sacrifices, and who may or may not be kind to other sentient bags of tissue.

Answered above.

It was not answered though, you simply say because it helps everyone out, but I am asking why should a person help everyone? Simply because you say so?

Unconscious is not non-sentient, Stat. It's a temporary cessation of certain brain functions, but it's not a lack of sentience.

Yes it is. Sentient is defined as “having the power of perception by the senses; conscious (Webster’s)”; so it follows that if you are not conscious you are not sentient.

Adultery is the deliberate breaking of a social contract, albeit a less vital one. I've already explained why it's in our best interests to maintain our social contracts, even if we aren't caught breaking them.

How? If the two people never got caught then how can you say they did anything wrong given your utilitarian definition of morality?

Is there a way to opt out of these social contracts or are they forced upon everyone? Who determines what’s in the contract? This just seems like a garbled mess.

If you don't know what compatibilism is you should refrain from participating in discussions of morality that are more than surface deep.

You really think that I was using the term incorrectly rather than just poking fun at the fact that you were using a term that can have a theological meaning? Oops! You just made yourself look dumb.

“Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. Because free will is typically taken to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility, compatibilism is sometimes expressed in terms of a compatibility between moral responsibility and determinism.”- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

“Compatibilism, sometimes called soft determinism, is a theological term that deals with the topics of free will and predestination. It seeks to show that God's exhaustive sovereignty is compatible with human freedom, or in other words, it claims that determinism and free will are compatible.”- Encyclopedia of Biblical Christianity

Since you clearly were ignorant that I was absolutely using the term correctly are you going to heed your own advice and refrain from any further discussions on the subject matter?

You have this backward. I gave a concrete example. You must then be looking for something more general or abstract.

No, I know what I am doing. Your example was conveniently vague. I wanted to know specifically why you brought up stoning children, what the “obvious answer” was, why this would make morality extra-Biblical, and how this is anything more than the Tu quoque fallacy since even if your points were supported with something specific it would not do anything to refute the original claim that atheists cannot coherently and consistently define a moral system. If you thought your response was specific then I’d hate to see you respond with something you know to be vague.

Believers don't follow all the moral edicts written in the Bible; therefore, the standard of good and evil is outside the Bible.

That’s false because it commits the fallacy of bifurcation. When the New Testament says that certain covenantal moral laws were replaced then believers are still following an intra-Biblical moral system when they follow this teaching. This is where I ought to tell you that if you are ignorant of such basic theological teachings then you should refrain from participating in discussions of Biblical morality that are more than surface deep. However, since I value the opportunity to teach you and gently correct your errors concerning my faith, I will not do so.

You ask me to logically prove it to you while not knowing that logic is universal? That's like trying to prove an equation to someone who can't count.

Nonsense, I know logic is universal because the Universe is the creation of a logical God. Of course as an atheist you cannot use my justification so I am asking how you know logic is universal. That’s quite the claim. It seems like you do not know why logic would be universal in a purely natural universe and now you are just stalling.

First learn why logic is universal and then I'll show you the correlation between the two.

…so you are saying that logic is universal because the god who created the Universe is logical?

I can empathize and sympathize with others, and I would not want to be killed. I am aware that some people kill themselves, but usually it is because they are in a poor state of mind. Therefore I think it's reasonable to think that people do not want to die, and that being killed is bad from that standpoint.

…so goodness is defined as whatever people want?

I think there are two levels; that of the individual, and that of the society or community. A person on his own can use his sense of empathy or sympathy and his life experiences to form opinions on what is good or bad, or right or wrong, and these provide his moral framework. The more isolated he is, the more varied those might be. A society forms laws and cultural attitudes in a similar way, but they do so more via committee. It probably takes longer for a society to determine a set of morals, but those can also be in effect much longer.

Are there any external standards that the individual or society should use to correct and alter their moral framework with?

I'll try not to be peevish toward the word. Is the absence of an objectively based morality identical to moral nihilism? Why not moral relativist? I guess I'd rather not focus on the words. If you mean to attribute to me the belief that morality is personal, elastic and resistant to absolutes then yes, count me in. I don't find that description at all alarming. Should I?

Is morality absolutely personal, elastic and resistant to absolutes? If someone believes in moral objectivism are you going to force them to ascribe to moral relativism?