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

[JuliaL]

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People who think moral truths require an absolute justification: No more is required, as far as I can tell, then the appeal

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Blaise Pascal

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invoked when---in all places, Section III of The Pensees otherwise known as "Of the Necessity of the Wager"---he said, "This carelessness in a matter which concerns themselves, their eternity, their all, moves me more to anger than pity; it astonishes and shocks me; it is to me monstrous. I do not say this out of pious zeal of a spiritual devotion.

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I expect, on the contrary, that we ought to have this feeling from principles of human interest and self-love;

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for this we need only see what the least enlightened persons see." Whereas Pascal means theology, which we know is a primitive attempt at philosophy and morality, the combination of which really leaves no room for theology if it is to succeed and be sound, I think it most naturally applies to moral philosophy.

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What better reason could one have for reason, or anything at all for that matter, if not out of "principles of human interest and self-love"?

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Any person capable of reasoning, regardless of whatever perverted behaviors stimulate pleasure for them, is able to judge rape to be morally wrong so far as it harms human interests, of much greater value to the individual and society than any single, momentarily pleasure. A person incapable of seeing the moral worth of reason, on the basis of the only reason that could possibly matter---our own interests---and in other words, can't understand that rape simply is morally unacceptable behavior because of its corrosive effects, I think that person is unreasonable, and unfeeling, for as Pascal also, I think, rightly says, "All reasoning reduces itself to yielding to feeling..." (before incorrectly adding, "Reason offers itself; but it is pliable in every sense; and thus there is no rule"; there is a rule, and it's called the actual brain states that we may possibly experience with greater or lesser probability, depending on the behaviors ourselves and our societies determine are more harmful than liberating, and hence, unacceptable). That person is a sociopath, and we must hope to develop other strategies to reach them if reasoning, with a sense of the future and a broadened perspective of their own interest, fails to influence their behavior more than whatever primal urges their bodily chemistry results produces. I am for medicating such sociopaths.

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It would be refreshing to see an expansion of self-love beyond the individual, even beyond human society. We live in a complex system of changing interactions between humans and our environs including millions of species of other living things. Our short sightedness in recognizing this is destroying them and ourselves at a rate of the same order of magnitude as that caused by an asteroid hit at the end of the Cretaceous. I expect our society would suffer less, destroy less and live longer if we could just see farther than the next quarterly report.
Pascal is right in yielding to "principles of human interest and self-love," where he misses is in failing to recognize how stupid we collectively are in recognizing what they are.