What IS good, and how do we determine it?

[abaris]

It means that it IS immoral regardless of what some people believe. So, going around butchring infidel men, women, and children for the sole reason that they are not radical Islamists, is immoral, period. This is a moral truth.

I keep using Isis as an example because it's the big thing going on right now. But it's just an example and is not limited to them.

I agree with your point #3.

And how about pastors (not catholics, but christians) calling for killing gays and transgender people? How about them praying for the demise of people? It's the same spirit, only held in check by a thin layer of society. What about capital punishment? What's your stance on that issue?

What about catholic priests and monks abusing children, thereby ruining their lives and their abilities to trust? I live in Austria where this is a big issue. Not as big as in Ireland, but big nonetheless.

What about Brejvik, whose outspoken goal was to save christian Europe from Islamisation?

Religion isn't a safety belt that somehow, magically, conjures morality and decency from the skies. Truth is, if you want, you can justify every vileness by reading any holy book.

[The Grand Nudger]

Then instinct gets added to the pile of means by which we know what -is- good.  Instinct doesn't depend upon any objective standard either.

[Catholic_Lady]

The existence of objective morals has never been demonstrated. There is also no evidence for any god, let alone God. Pointing the unsubstantiated claims of God and 'objective morals' at one another in an effort to give either some validity is dubious.

I understand. I am not trying to convince you guys, trust me.

And I know it seems unfathomable to the vast majority of you here, but Christianity really does make logical sense to me. It would honestly take more faith for me to *not* believe in God or in moral truths.

[Mister Agenda]

Muehlhauser continues:

Do those arguments look familiar? They should. They are the exact same arguments atheists reject when they are given for the existence of God. Atheists are skeptical of these arguments when given for the existence of God, but they are credulous and gullible toward these arguments when you replace the word “God” with another mysterious thing called “moral truths.”…It would be hypocritical for me to reject subjective experience and popular consensus as evidence for God while at the same time accepting subjective experience and popular consensus for moral realism.

(Luke Muehlhauser. “Many Atheists are Hypocrites about Morality,” Common Sense Atheism, May 9, 2010. Available online at: http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=8859)

Except axioms are pretty much inescapable in philosophy. You can debate whether a particular postulate is self-evident enough to be a valid axiom, but at some point your reasoning has to rest on something that can't be proven. It's a virtue to minimize your axioms, but it's no sin (not even hypocrisy) to have a few.

[robvalue]

I totally agree with how you determine morality, CL. I think however you are added another unnecessary layer by demanding someone has set these rules.

If you want to point to anything, it would be evolution. We have worked out this way, that's how we are. It doesn't need any magic ingredient. Clearly we don't all agree on morality, so there's no reason to think there is an actual "right" answer because it depends entirely on how you value different things. For example I put a much higher value on animals than most people, and so I tolerate far less on their behalf than most people do. I'm not right, other people are not right, we just have different values. You have to establish those values before you can make comparisons. It just so happens that we do share an awful lot of values, so we can build a pretty decent framework around that.

If there is a god, I couldn't care less what his opinion is. I work out what is moral for myself. And it's based almost entirely around that one rule you gave. Who needs God for that?

[Mister Agenda]

The existence of objective morals has never been demonstrated. There is also no evidence for any god, let alone God. Pointing the unsubstantiated claims of God and 'objective morals' at one another in an effort to give either some validity is dubious.

I understand. I am not trying to convince you guys, trust me.

And I know it seems unfathomable to the vast majority of you here, but Christianity really does make logical sense to me. It would honestly take more faith for me to *not* believe in God or in moral truths.

It would take more 'something', certainly.

[Catholic_Lady]

Hello JHC.

Are you asking me why I believe God knows what is good? I believe things are intrinsically good because God made them that way. I believe God, being master of the universe,  is the one who establishes goodness and morality. But the point of this thread was not for me to sit here and preach and tell you guys what I believe. My purpose for creating this thread was to hear *your* views and discuss them with you.

So, ya got anything?

Are you sure you're asking us? We get so many people trying to tell us in the guise of asking us that our abillity to trust such claims has been severely eroded.

However, hope springs eternal.

Normallly functioning humans, like other closely-related primates, have instinctive senses of reciprocity, fairness, and empathy. These are the emotional basis for morality. They're why we care about right and wrong. Over centuries of cultural experience and years of personal experience, we gain experience in interacting with othter people and life forms, and learn that some ways of interacting are more beneficial than others; that is, more likely to lead to good outcomes for more people. We are also able to use our reason to work out moral issues. This is what makes moral progress, however halting and mistake-ridden it may be, possible. We can learn that it's wrong to own people. We can learn that it's wrong to torture people. We can learn that it's wrong to rape. And we can reach these conclusions with very little help from Iron Age scriptures. Banning torture reduces our risk of being tortured, and understanding that there are better ways to elicit desired information from a prisoner helps us understand that we don't have to do it to protect ourselves.

There are centuries of writing on moral philosophy that doesn't revolve around God.

Thank you for your well thought out response!

[The Grand Nudger]

-and if a person can own those comparisons and give good reason for them - rather than attributing them to some other authority...then that person might actually be able to come to further agreement with other people, with differing moralities.  Hell, they might even be able to change the way that person looks at something. An objective standard, even if it existed, is useless in that context. If a person says "I don't agree with the rules" and the response is "them's the rules"....there really isn't much opportunity for resolution.

[Catholic_Lady]

The big "gotcha" is when theists accept your moral system as a moral system, but then they pull out the trump card and ask "without an objective source of morality how can you claim your moral system is better than any other society's moral system, it's all just opinion."

And then go out, speaking about universal truths and murder being wrong, while supporting capital punishment.

Not adressing Lady here, since I don't know her stance, but we get that often enough.

I am 100% against capital punishment!

---

Therefore, ISTM that we have to examine WHY God might have instructed the Israelites to take certain actions at one point in OT history, only to command something different later in the NT.

But in order to discuss that intelligently, we have to agree on some examples of that behavior. To what are you referring when you say that God acted immorally in the past?

Sounds like a conversation you should have with your fellow follower of Cathol?   She says it was all allegory.

Catholics are free to read the OT allegorically, or literally. If Randy believes it is literal, he is not going against Catholic faith.

[Mister Agenda]

I do find the notion that morality is completely relative and completely subjective, a deeply flawed one. And I don't even say this as a Catholic, I say this as a person who really does try to think logically. Even if I were an atheist, I don't think I could ever make sense of the notion that morality is always subjective.

This would mean that as long as a particular society or culture thinks something is moral, it is. I could never see killing infidel children or burning alive women who were rapped or cutting off a 12 year old's clitoris as ever being moral. Regardless of whether or not that particular culture thought it was, I would still believe those things are intrinsically immoral and so it would follow that I would still believe in some sort of moral truth.

Not aiming to deconvert you, but embracing universal moral relativism and subjectivity is not a requirement to be an atheist. Esquilax doesn't fit that description, for instance.