Atheists only vote please: Do absolute MORAL truths exist? Is Rape ALWAYS "wrong"?

[Esquilax]

I'm sure I'll go through the rest of this thread and find something objectionable to respond to at some point, but before that I guess I'll give my position.

While objective morals don't exist- even under the theist framework where god hands down morals they aren't objective, but we'll get to that later- there is an objective reality from which one can derive their morals. There is a basis that is objectively real; we are evolved creatures, with social grouping and cooperation as our survival niches. We are also biological creatures, with a series of needs and wants that are uniform to our species and most others. From those two things, our evolved nature and the necessities of our survival, objective standards can be found from which our morality can hang.

These are simply brute facts of our existence: life is generally preferable to death, pleasure is preferable to pain, health is preferable to sickness or injury, and so on. They're general rules, there are contexts in which they come into conflict with one another and one must be selected over another, but that doesn't invalidate their usefulness in general. Simply pointing out one specific situation in which one of those rules is not true, as I'm sure you're tempted to do, theist OP, will not make them any less true for the majority of situations.

So now we have a basis, with the recognition that individual parts of it may come into conflict in time. From there, we can evaluate individual acts, in context, and see whether they violate that basis. Let's go with the OP's example: is rape wrong? Well, it causes harm with no overriding benefit, so... yes. Rape is wrong. Furthermore, I doubt anyone could provide a context in which rape does not violate our objective basis, so for the time being, in our current reality on planet earth, I would argue that rape is always wrong.

Now that we've established that, let's take a look at the theist claim, specifically that god's moral commandments comprise some objective moral truth. This is, bluntly, utter nonsense. God is not objective. God is a subject, a being with a mind precisely the same as humans are. If human morality is supposedly subjective, because humans are subjects and it's only their opinions, then how is it any different from god? God, who is a subject, and for which his moral commands are his opinions?

This lofty perch that theists occupy, where they claim to have some high ground where morality is concerned, is entirely illusive. It's pretend; they've mistaken "subjective, from a position of asserted authority," with "objective." Perhaps it's just a mistake, but I can't help but be suspicious, given that their chosen baseless redefinition happens to help them hide the big hurdle to their argument; demonstrating that god actually earns his authority. Bit convenient.