Why "mysterious ways" don't matter.

[Esquilax]

So, you believe that the only system of moral values that we have is subjective and is therefore a matter of opinion. And these common sense opinions, when shared by a large group of people, can be relied on to form a system of morality that we can all live with.

It's a matter of opinion, based around an objective framework that we call "reality." As I've said numerous times, the facts of our nature as physical beings do not change from person to person; pain still denotes injury, death is not preferable, and these things are not just a matter of opinion. They are the basis through which a human-derived set of morals can be established: you mentioned child genital mutilation later on- which is interesting, since the god of the bible seems to like that- but there's a fairly easy objective argument that can be made for why that's wrong. Pain is bad, the removal of pleasure is bad, and these are just objectively true as a biological reality of humanity. There is no reason for mutilating the genitals of a child that might mitigate those biological realities, and therefore the pain and removal of pleasure serves no purpose.

Hence, it violates certain objective moral principles that exist actually objectively, and not your fake "subjective to god" objectively.

This only serves to create a list of acceptable/unacceptable behaviors. If someone disagrees with the current crowd-sourced list of acceptable behaviors, say, women are not mere objects to own [insert any objectionable act here] there is nothing inherently wrong with that--just that either he has move to a different part of the world or lobby for his position until enough have changed their minds it becomes the new norm.

I believe I've explained my position on this before, making this "it's just majority opinion!" argument from you a strawman. It's not just about the number of people who believe a thing, it's about the objective reality that we find ourselves in. Human beings are psychologically predisposed to freedom, and the person who believes that women are objects to own cannot produce an argument for why this should be so for women but not for men that isn't fallacious, and therefore their entire position is based on special pleading. Hence, it is not consistent, and therefore is not a logically tenable position.

Simple. Do not come back at me with another round of "it's just opinion!" crap, because I've just literally explained to you why it's not.

Or, are you going to say that western civilization has hit on the best list of acceptable behaviors and the middle east's list, African list, the far east's list or some other tribe in the Amazon's list is somehow inferior? It can't simply be a numbers thing (we are outnumbered by other cultures). It can't be a "more or less good" scientific yardstick like Sam Harris believes (because science tells us what is and not what ought to be).

Best? No. But we're learning, and the way to demonstrate a better way is through argument and evidence, not appeal to some non-demonstrable god's opinion. I'm not Sam Harris, I'm not required to worm my way around his beliefs, and I happen to think that science can help us to see what ought to be, by showing us what is good for conscious beings, due to their biological nature. That's the standard, the objective standard that we should be working from: that which maximizes the flourishing of conscious entities. Not some conscious entities at the expense of others, not the majority of conscious entities, conscious entities.

We actually started this conversation with me explaining that. The fact that you've defaulted to the standard theistic "your morals are just majority opinion!" strawman is a bit troubling, in the face of that. Do you have any interest in an actual honest debate, or just bouncing through theism's greatest fallacious hits?

If you do admit that other cultures are perfectly justified in creating their varied lists of acceptable/unacceptable behaviors, then that will bring up the question of why someone in our society should be held to our list?

They are justified, assuming they can argue their case in a non-fallacious way according to the objective yardstick of the real world. If they can't... well, I can't stop them from doing what they do, but they aren't morally justified for doing so. Even in our society, I don't think our current set up is perfect, but it's the best we can do currently, and should be changed where argument and evidence can be produced that it should.

We DO perceive that objective moral values and duties exist. Why would we not trust this perception? We perceive myriads of other things and trust those perceptions. Because naturalism can't be the cause? Isn't that a genetic fallacy?

Our perceptions routinely let us down. More importantly, those "objective morals" you see do, in fact, have reasons why they are the best possible action given the situation we find ourselves in. They aren't just true because they are true, they are moral realities that are often so simple based on the yardstick we're all using that they don't need to be thought about so deeply. That entire list you wrote out earlier, they all have incredibly easy to see reasons why they are wrong, if we take as our metric the health and happiness of conscious entities. The fact that you are unable to verbalize those reasons, or unwilling to think about them, doesn't mean that they don't exist and therefore those moral truths must be magic.