Nature's Laws

[Thumpalumpacus]

Actually, I don't think you explained anything.  As some atheists have suggested here, our individual rights come from a consensus within our tribe, group, nation, etc.  So the USA tolerated slavery that was based upon the notion that Blacks are only 3/5 human.  But here, you seem to take a very different approach. Your approach to individual rights involves empathy.  In your opinion, is your personal empathy an adequate justification for anything you might decide to do?

If you don't think I explained anything, you're not paying attention. Exactly what concept is giving you difficulty? Is it the concept of empathy? Or is it the concept of applying empathy to one's own actions towards others? Or perhaps you don't mind having your time, property, or freedom stolen, and therefore you believe that it's okay to do that to others?

Morality is relative.  It is relative in my outlook, and it is relative in the outlook of any Christian. Pretending otherwise is silly.

As for your final question, when I am considering an act, I think about how it might affect others, and do my best to avoid actions that have a deleterious effect on others. Is that "personal empathy" to you? It doesn't even require feelings at all; it can be derived rationally, from understanding people and how they are affected by events.

---

I haven't established any moral absolutes.  But I think that some (a few) moral absolutes exist.  One of these is, "You shall have no other gods before Me."   

So, what you're saying is that you believe in things beyond the natural, because a supernatural entity is alleged to have made some rules?

This is called "begging the question", because you are assuming what is under dispute in order to buttress your point. You are asserting that there is such a thing as the supernatural, using as evidence the alleged dicta of the supernatural entity you're wishing to demonstrate.

Try again, this time thinking with more rigor.

---

That does sound like something that would be from Christianity. Sadly, Christianity can focus very heavily on making you hate yourself. It sets standards that are so high you are almost certain to fail, and fail constantly.

It's a dirty, disgusting trick. Morality, any morality that matters, is about the wellbeing of life on this planet. It's not about the feelings of undemonstrated magical beings. I'd rather curse god's name all day long than hurt someone. This is another trick: the conflation of sins with actual immoral, harmful acts. If you stop and examine them in this way, you'll see the two are not related except by coincidence.

If God values his ego higher than the wellbeing of humans and animals, then he is not worthy of praise.

In part, my reason for bringing up the first commandment is to make the point that we don't actually have to DO something to violate a moral absolute.  If I love money more than God then I condemn myself by my attitude toward money (relative to my attitude toward God) and not by doing something horrible toward others.  Some horrible and detestable crimes are committed every day by people who have taken the attitude that money is more important than anything else.  It always starts with a persons heart; our attitudes about things matter.

This is why Christianity is evil: it bestirs the faithful to hate themselves for the human nature whose creation is ascribed to the god they worship.

Why should you feel guilty for your god's imperfect creation? The Bible argues that the clay ought not question the potter, but quite frankly, if the potter is unable to manufacture a good pot, at the very least he ought not shatter the pot in a temper tantrum without questioning his own role in the failure.

---

Yes, I agree, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. 

---

The objections tend to take one of several forms:

1. I hate your god and his morality.

Link to the post where anyone here has written this.

That's right, you cannot, because no one has.

There isn't much I can do to address number 1 [...]

That's right, because it is a fiction you've invented.

---

I think that in biblical times, slavery was quite often the most obvious and practical alternative to something far worse.  For example, when one tribe went to war against another tribe and all of the men of the losing tribe were killed-off in the fighting, the care of the women and children of the defeated tribe would probably have been deemed an unbearable burden by the victorious tribe.  What should the victors do with them?  Kill them too?  Maybe they don't have to be killed.  Speaking for myself, if I could remain alive by working as a slave rather than die because the absence of slavery means I'm nothing but a hindrance to the victorious tribe, I would wish that slavery existed for my own survival...unless my treatment as a slave was really brutal.  So, although I wouldn't want to put a smiley face on slavery even in those days, I can understand that in ancient times there were often no good alternatives to slavery.  

You're hardly the first Christian to defend slavery here.

Your Bible documents that your god ordered slavery, not because of beneficence, but because the enslaved women and children were to be raped or worked at hard labor for the rest of their lives. This means that he implicitly approves such treatment.

You are trying to distance yourself from that ugly fact because you know that slavery is wrong, and you justify your god's orders about it because you believe he is himself good.

This is moral relativity in action: When my god does it, it is moral. When I do it, it is immoral.

It should be noted that Yahweh also ordered genocide, so that your reasoning behind the existence of slavery doesn't hold water inside the confines of your own worldview. Your god had no compunctions about ordering the Israelites to wipe out entire peoples. To argue that slavery was an improvement on that practice means that either your god knew there was a better way to handle captives, and chose to order the more brutal way; or that your god was at one point unaware of a better method of dealing with captives.

Either way, we have put paid to the notion that you worship a perfect god. You worship a brute. Deep down, you know he's a brute (that's why you're distancing yourself from his behavior even as you extol his "goodness").

So, although I wouldn't want to put a smiley face on slavery even in those days, I can understand that in ancient times there were often no good alternatives to slavery.

See? Christians too believe in, and practice, moral relativity.