How much pain can atheists withstand ?

[The Grand Nudger]

I will borrow from William Lane Craig on this morality from God being subjective because he puts it so eloquently.

"You argue that a God who possesses subjective feelings cannot be the foundation of objective moral values. But this is confused. I’ve argued that objective moral values are rooted in God's nature, not in His will, and that that nature expresses itself toward us in the form of divine commandments, which constitute our moral duties. God may have subjective feelings, but these are not the basis of moral value or obligation. Far from being incompatible with objective moral values and duties, subjective feelings like compassion, moral indignation, sympathy, and so on are actually part of being a perfectly good moral agent.

I suspect that the problem is that you don’t share some of the moral feelings ascribed to God and so reject His being the foundation of morality. But then you find yourself in a rather peculiar situation. For you’ve told us that you don’t think objective moral values and duties exist. So why the indignation about a jealous, vengeful, and self-absorbed God? On your view there’s nothing wrong with having such feelings! On your view the only objection to theistic morality must be a consistency objection, that theistic-based morality is somehow inconsistent. I can’t help but suspect that, in fact, you do believe in objective moral values after all."

OFC a god that possesses subjective feelings cannot be the foundation of objective moral values, but neither can a god that possesses no subjective feelings.  Because objective moral values are not premised on gods or feelings.  Objective moral values can only be premised on one thing - moral facts.  That's what defines an objective moral system.

I am interested in what moral feelings you think I don't share with whatever god you believe in?  Also why it would even matter if we didn't share feelings?  Any rate, I'm a moral realist - I do think that there are moral facts, which is why I reject the subjective moralities of gods and the relative moralities of the communities that worship them.

[Fake Messiah]

Many children starve when resources are not scarce

All resources are scarce, a decent lunch doesn't grow on trees. So, again, children starving to death is completely fine, even beneficial, from your worldview. There are many intellectual heavyweights in this world defending eugenics, and not without reason. Atheism as a perverted outlook on life makes this task even easier.

Let me reformulate that more sharply : the total quantity of available goods to the human species is constant, so less people alive means more available goods for everybody.

You obviously don't know Boru's worldview, and you are using a Naturalistic fallacy:
"The naturalistic fallacy is the idea that what is found in nature is good. It was the basis for social Darwinism, the belief that helping the poor and sick would get in the way of evolution, which depends on the survival of the fittest. Today, biologists denounce the naturalistic fallacy because they want to describe the natural world honestly, without people deriving morals about how we ought to behave (as in: If birds and beasts engage in adultery, infanticide, cannibalism, it must be OK)." — Steven Pinker

[The End of Atheism]

Didn't your god allegedly make me? How is it I came out as an unintended mistake?

Um. because you decided to ?

Either your god meant to make me an atheist, which means he is not perfectly just for dooming me to hell for being his own creation; or your god didn't make me, 

False dilemma. God meant for you to have free will, that's another available option for the theist.

Which queen is it you wish to sacrifice? You cannot have an omnipotent and perfectly merciful god if you surrender any of these components.

Omnipotence is clearly defined: for any possible world W, God can bring about W

But, "perfectly merciful" ... it's not clear.

[Angrboda]

For what it's worth, appealing to God's nature rather than his subjectivity has the same problem as noted in the original formulation of the Euthyphro Dilemma. In the original dilemma addressing Divine Command Theory, the Euthyphro asks whether God's commandments are moral because God commands it, or whether God commands it because it is moral. Replacing the subjective element with that of God's nature yields a comparable dilemma. Are God's commandments based upon his nature good because it is God's nature, or are the commandments moral because God's nature is good? In the former, God's goodness is merely definitional, in the latter, the good has definition independent of God. Nerither horn of the dilemma yields you a moral commandment that is moral by virtue of it coming from God. Indeed, in the latter case, if the good has a definition that God's nature meets, then God becomes entirely superfluous and we can just dispense with the middleman, God, and appeal directly to what is good and moral. In neither case is God the source of morals.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

@The End of Atheism

Quoting other members of the forum inaccurately is against the rules. Any changes in the format of a quote must be called out by the poster with a note (i.e. "bold mine"). 

Break this rule again at your own risk.

Boru

[The End of Atheism]

For what it's worth, appealing to God's nature rather than his subjectivity has the same problem as noted in the original formulation of the Euthyphro Dilemma.  In the original dilemma addressing Divine Command Theory, the Euthyphro asks whether God's commandments are moral because God commands it, or whether God commands it because it is moral.  Replacing the subjective element with that of God's nature yields a comparable dilemma.  Are God's commandments based upon his nature good because it is God's nature, or are the commandments moral because God's nature is good?  In the former, God's goodness is merely definitional, in the latter, the good has definition independent of God.  Nerither horn of the dilemma yields you a moral commandment that is moral by virtue of it coming from God.  Indeed, in the latter case, if the good has a definition that God's nature meets, then God becomes entirely superfluous and we can just dispense with the middleman, God, and appeal directly to what is good and moral.  In neither case is God the source of morals.

Although I'm not really familiar with the dilemma, it sounds too good to be true. If you're right, we have a prima facie reason to dismiss classical theism. It's well known though, that there are no clinching arguments against theism. I'm not saying that because I'm a theist, no, that's simply what the leading atheist philosophers today are saying.

Here's my (attempted) response to the dilemma above: you can't coherently define what's good outside the religious framework, maybe we can even say that good is exactly what God does, without being incoherent. With this defintiion, it doesn't seem to me that there is a dilemma.

[The Grand Nudger]

Yeah, you know those leading atheist philosophers, always going on and on about how there are no clinching arguments against theism.

you can't coherently define what's good outside the religious framework, maybe we can even say that good is exactly what God does, without being incoherent. With this defintiion, it doesn't seem to me that there is a dilemma.

No dilemma for subjective moral systems, no. In fact, that would be a textbook example of a subjective morality. Good is whatever a given subject does.

[The End of Atheism]

Yeah, you know those leading atheist philosophers, always going on and on about how there are no clinching arguments against theism.

you can't coherently define what's good outside the religious framework, maybe we can even say that good is exactly what God does, without being incoherent. With this defintiion, it doesn't seem to me that there is a dilemma.

No dilemma for subjective moral systems, no.  In fact, that would be a textbook example of a subjective morality.  Good is whatever a given subject does.

Looks like you're playing word games. If you're right, then it's no clear how one would define objective morality. You said somewhere above that there are "moral facts", but the theist can easily retort that you don't have any way to assess whether some fact is right or wrong.

Is cutting off someone's leg right or wrong ? impossible to say without access to a reasonable set of known facts. As the set of known facts gets bigger, our moral assessment keeps changing, ad infinitum. 

Is murder wrong? Yes, but it's entailed in the word murder: unjustified killing, it's analytic. A synthetic moral assessment of facts is always limited by how much we know.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's extremely clear how an objective morality is defined regardless of whether or not I'm right about there being one. Sure, some objective moral values or statements take more disicipline, consideration, or information to arrive at than -any- subjective moral value...but is that a problem? How would we answer these questions in the subjective moral system you described?

Is cutting off someones leg right or wrong, murder..right or wrong? Well, does god cut off legs, god ever murder a motherfucker? Yup and Yup...bingo bango, must be kosher.

You could, you're right, insist that I don't have any way to access a moral fact. That's not really a theist thing, believing in fairies doesn't grant you any special ability or credibility on that count, lol. I'd disagree, but if you were right, then that would mean we have no objective moralities, and..ofc, could not actually assess whether our divine moralities were right or wrong..either.

You can see how all of this is amusing as the fallout of attempting to claim objective morality for gods. Yes? Meanwhile, the difficulty I'm supposed to having with my objective moral values in the case of incomplete information is no difficulty at all. I reserve moral judgement when I have incomplete moral information.

[Angrboda]

I reserve moral judgement when I have incomplete moral information.

Is there any moral question about which you have complete information?