What IS good, and how do we determine it?

[Esquilax]

You should already know I don't make baseless assertions.
http://atheistforums.org/thread-26392-po...#pid679293

16 is the age of consent where I am. Bit shaky, but I don't find this particularly objectionable on its own, and certainly not enough to label the guy a pedophile. Seems like classic theistic stretching beyond their means to me.

That is both a sentiment I stand behind, and not a defense of statutory rape; GC brought up Milk being a pedophile, which is simply factually incorrect both under the definition of a pedophile, and in my view, morally. Like I said, the age of consent where I grew up is sixteen, which I feel is a sufficiently knowledgeable age, and no less arbitrary than eighteen either; I don't have this automatic assumption that younger folks shouldn't have relations with older ones, it depends largely on the circumstances surrounding the pairing. It's context dependent.

Given this, I don't find myself personally bothered by Milk's actions just presented as they had been in the thread, as nobody had established that Milk's actions were predatory, and so the contention GC had within that thread isn't the hypocrisy he seemed to think. However, this is a separate issue entirely from whether or not Milk was a statutory rapist, which he absolutely was, given the laws at the time of his actions. But whether something is legal is not the same thing as whether something is moral; they're separate questions which you're conflating, either through ignorance or through dishonesty I don't know. From what I know about you, it has even odds of being either one.

I didn't dodge anything, I explicitly addressed that.

You're doing that conflation thing again, only this time I'm pretty sure it's ignorance: I asked you, in a previous post, whether a soldier would be a rapist if he and his army kidnapped all the women of a given group, regardless of their consent, with their virginity being the determining factor of whether they're taken or killed. You responded with the statutory rape thing and nothing else, which is a dodge to avoid answering the question I asked, which you still haven't.

You made the statement: "I remember one of my first interactions with Huggy was on a certain rape-related issue in the bible, and his entire position was that no rape happened because the actual word "rape" was never used in the text, despite the context making it very clear what was happening."

it is YOUR position that a rape has occurred in fact you used the phrase "very clear what is happening".

If it is  "very clear" that a rape occurred yet it is my contention that none occurred because (insert reason here), then by definition I am attempting to justify or excuse the act.

Not if you literally think the act did not occur. Like I said, a person who thinks the holocaust was a huge fabrication is not attempting to justify or excuse the holocaust, because their position is that there's nothing to justify or excuse, period. If I am to take your own words seriously, then you don't believe that the act in question was ever depicted in those passages, and therefore you have nothing to justify either. The context of my statements there was specifically about the ridiculous lengths you'll go to to act as though nothing immoral has ever happened in the bible, not the lengths you'll go to to excuse the immoral actions within it.