What IS good, and how do we determine it?

[robvalue]

You have to be very careful what exactly you mean by "good" and "moral". Do you mean what is beneficial and least harmful to humans and animals? Or do you mean something someone has arbitrarily labelled as good?

If it's the latter, then it means nothing. It may as well be called blue actions and non-blue actions. The bait and switch is that the word "moral" is used with both these meanings at once, in general, by someone arguing for religious morality.

So which is it? I couldn't care less about the second definition. Only the first. So I'll only discuss the first.

The only way there could be "objective morality" is if there are a set of rules in place about what is moral and what is not, which apply to God, and which God can't change. Where did they come from exactly and why should I care what they say? They are again arbitrary. I can't tell if they are actually moral or not unless I use my brain to analyse their effects. If God steps in and sets what they are, then it's subjective to God, so not objective. And again, I don't care what he thinks. His opinion does not make an action beneficial or harmful, just because he says so.

The simple answer is that our morality comes from evolution. We developed as a cooperative species, on the whole. Those who played nice with others fared better so their genes were more widely spread. Like you say, we "just know" some things are wrong. This is one of the big reasons why. We are generally cooperative and empathetic by selection.

I think religion looks for this absolute, objective morality because it can't stand the idea that it could be a matter of opinion to some degree. Well it's too bad, morality is a matter of opinion. It just happens that there are broad areas where everyone, on the whole, tends to agree. Killing people is a bad idea for society. Hurting each other leads to fighting and isn't productive. And so on. But to decide what is and isn't harmful, you need a judge of some sort. Theists would often like that to be God, but instead, it is us. All of us. There is no consensus, but we agree as best we can.

All the bible represents is an attempt to encode the morality of the day (among other agendas). Clearly you don't just accept the morality in the bible, you find reasons to ignore all the things you find horrific. You say the OT can just be ignored when you feel like it because the writers were getting things wrong, or you appeal to allegory. I don't know how God sending in armies to slaughter town after town could possibly be an allegory, nor most of the horrific things he does. Even Jesus advocates for slavery and does not abolish it.

This is my opinion:

If you look deep inside, you will probably see that what you are doing is filtering what the bible says using your own sense of morality. Sure, you can convince yourself of why you are ignoring the vast majority of it, but the real reason I think is that you know it is wrong. So in the end, you just use what is left, which is your own morality. The book has taught you nothing, it's just God, Jesus and Christianity getting the credit for your morality.