Morality

[Kingpin]

Alright guys I'm going to 

But I really want to know everyone's personal perspective on some of this.   

Richard Dawkins stated this that there is no good, no evil, DNA just is and we dance to it's music.  Agree or disagree on that piece?

What is your opinion on some of these other famous quotes on morality?

When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality… Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands.

- Friedriche Nietzsche (atheist), Twilight of the Idols p.12

We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons should not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn’t decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me ...
Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.
- Kai Nielsen (atheist), “Why should I be moral?” American Philosophical Quarterly 21, 1984: 90

Outside human desires there is no moral standard.
- Bertrand Russell (atheist), “What I believe” p.62, 1957

In this naturalistic worldview, when you state something is good/evil, right/wrong, isn't that just pure subjective opinion that ebbs/flows with societal/cultural acceptance and personal opinion?  If so, on what basis can one judge any act as wrong/evil both in different cultures/societies or different eras without it merely being personal preference and thus have no grounding in truth.

[Fake Messiah]

Modern society (including morality) is based on HUMANISM. God has been abolished long time ago.

In the past, people went to the priest and asked him what is good and he would tell them "Homosexuality is bad because God says it is bad, or the pope says so." Nobody cared what people thought. But today, people don't care for what God says, or the Bible, or the Pope. What is authority today is what people think and feel. Now, there are some harder ethical questions that need further discussion, but they are all centered around human feelings and thoughts, no one takes out the Bible and looks at what the divine commandments say.

God lost authority in politics - it was considered that bishops had all the answers from their holy books on how to run a country, but now with humanism, it is considered that human feelings are the most important. So you have the voter deciding what is best for the people and you don't ask God or the Pope. You go to each human and ask him or her what they want. You don't go anymore and tell people "Yes, you might think that and feel this, but you are wrong because there is a higher authority saying that you are wrong," like it was in the middle ages, and is in now Islamic theocracies.

God out of education - people were used to be educated on what God supposedly thinks so that they project that into the society, but today people are educated to think for themselves because thinking for yourself to know what you want is the highest part of the authority in a democracy.

And so on.

[Kingpin]

Modern society (including morality) is based on HUMANISM. God has been abolished long time ago.

In the past, people went to the priest and asked him what is good and he would tell them "Homosexuality is bad because God says it is bad, or the pope says so." Nobody cared what people thought. But today, people don't care for what God says, or the Bible, or the Pope. What is authority today is what people think and feel. Now, there are some harder ethical questions that need further discussion, but they are all centered around human feelings and thoughts, no one takes out the Bible and looks at what the divine commandments say.

God lost authority in politics - it was considered that bishops had all the answers from their holy books on how to run a country, but now with humanism, it is considered that human feelings are the most important. So you have the voter deciding what is best for the people and you don't ask God or the Pope. You go to each human and ask him or her what they want. You don't go anymore and tell people "Yes, you might think that and feel this, but you are wrong because there is a higher authority saying that you are wrong," like it was in the middle ages, and is in now Islamic theocracies.

God out of education - people were used to be educated on what God supposedly thinks so that they project that into the society, but today people are educated to think for themselves because thinking for yourself to know what you want is the highest part of the authority in a democracy.

And so on.

So what if what I want/think is the opposite of you.  Am I wrong?  Are you wrong?  Does it matter?

[Angrboda]

As noted in the other thread, you've left some options off the table. For my part, I have no investment in any specific view. I do think order is useful for a social species. What I find most interesting is that morals are experienced as an imperative, something we are called to answer to, yay or nay; there is little else that is phenomenologically experienced in this way, save perhaps the will to survive and the fight-or-flight response.

[HappySkeptic]

So what if what I want/think is the opposite of you.  Am I wrong?  Are you wrong?  Does it matter?

We will compare thoughts, based on our common experience and human experience.

Our answers on morality will depend on culture, values, different life experience, and sometimes small differences in our human natures. 

We may never agree, and that is fine.  If agreement were important to us, we would have to first understand our common grounding of culture, values, life experience and our inner natures.

Or, we could go ask a priest

[no one]

Anything I am not in favor of, is definitely immoral.

[Fake Messiah]

So what if what I want/think is the opposite of you.  Am I wrong?  Are you wrong?  Does it matter?

That is why people discuss with each other following tenants of humanism, which are: that you can do whatever you want as long as it does not hurt others; and "Listen to your heart".

Thus today people marry for love, and it is their inner feelings that give value to this bond.

The same logic dominates current debates on homosexuality. If two adult men enjoy having sex with one another, and they don’t harm anyone while doing so, why should it be wrong, and why should we outlaw it? It is a private matter between these two men, and they are free to decide about it according to their inner feelings. In the Middle Ages, if two men confessed to a priest that they were in love with one another, and that they never felt so happy, their good feelings would not have changed the priest’s damning judgement.

[The Grand Nudger]

In this naturalistic worldview, when you state something is good/evil, right/wrong, isn't that just pure subjective opinion that ebbs/flows with societal/cultural acceptance and personal opinion?

No.

If so, on what basis can one judge any act as wrong/evil both in different cultures/societies or different eras without it merely being personal preference and thus have no grounding in truth.

 
As a moral objectivist, I try to base my moral opinions on facts of a matter, rather than facts of my preferences (or my societies norms).  I suppose it's probably a little bit more difficult than a morality based on personal preference or thinking exactly as you're told, but not by much.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Alright guys I'm going to 

But I really want to know everyone's personal perspective on some of this.   

Richard Dawkins stated this that there is no good, no evil, DNA just is and we dance to it's music.  Agree or disagree on that piece?

What is your opinion on some of these other famous quotes on morality?

When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality… Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands.

- Friedriche Nietzsche (atheist), Twilight of the Idols p.12

We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons should not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn’t decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me ...
Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.
- Kai Nielsen (atheist), “Why should I be moral?” American Philosophical Quarterly 21, 1984: 90

Outside human desires there is no moral standard.
- Bertrand Russell (atheist), “What I believe” p.62, 1957

In this naturalistic worldview, when you state something is good/evil, right/wrong, isn't that just pure subjective opinion that ebbs/flows with societal/cultural acceptance and personal opinion?  If so, on what basis can one judge any act as wrong/evil both in different cultures/societies or different eras without it merely being personal preference and thus have no grounding in truth.

Yes, when I say ‘this is good’ or ‘this is evil’, it is purely subjective and cultural. There is NO basis on which I can judge an act evil in another culture or era.

But these things are a little more than personal opinion - cultural mores carry a great deal of heft. By way of example, there have been many cultures where killing deformed infants by exposure was not only permissible, but encouraged as a moral duty. You and I would find such a practice repugnant and immoral, because of the era and society in which our morals were formed. Conversely, a Republican Roman would be aghast at the idea of allowing such a child to live -  it would strike her as cruel and inhumane do so.

On a grand scale, morality is both malleable and subjective. Within a particular culture, it can be said to be objective and all but immutable.

FWIW, the observed fact that there are different moral standards in different cultures, while not an argument against the existence of gods, makes a pretty compelling case that morality is a human creation, not a divine one.

Boru

[Paleophyte]

Alright guys I'm going to 

Yeah. Done2Death. Did I mention that I'd actually be interested in an argument that wasn't the same old rehashed balderdash? Let me kick this off by asking how you have the stones to complain about objective morality while cherry-picking the scripture you claim to get yours from?

Richard Dawkins stated this that there is no good, no evil, DNA just is and we dance to it's music.  Agree or disagree on that piece?

Fails by way of trying to oversimplify. The man who begot the concept of the meme should have known that humans dance to more than a single tune.

When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality… Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands.
- Friedriche Nietzsche (atheist), Twilight of the Idols p.12

Nietzsche died raving and spent much of his life in a similar state. You might not want to put too much stock in him. That said, I have no problem with abandoning "Christian morality". Given what it's been caught doing behind closed doors I'm amazed that the Christians haven't given up on it too. Feels like it was marked down because you had to use it before 300 AD or it started to curdle.

We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons should not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn’t decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me ...Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.
- Kai Nielsen (atheist), “Why should I be moral?” American Philosophical Quarterly 21, 1984: 90

Nope. Morality is just the necessary interactions of any social species. You can get computers to produce it in even relatively simple models.

Outside human desires there is no moral standard.
- Bertrand Russell (atheist), 

Nailed it. Find me a single instance of justice, mercy, honour, or dignity that exists independent of a sentient being. Morality is a human invention.

You seem to like quoting atheists at us, as if that means something. How are you with:

"Kill them all. God will know his own."
- Arnaud Amalric, The Massacre at Beziers

In this naturalistic worldview, when you state something is good/evil, right/wrong, isn't that just pure subjective opinion that ebbs/flows with societal/cultural acceptance and personal opinion?  If so, on what basis can one judge any act as wrong/evil both in different cultures/societies or different eras without it merely being personal preference and thus have no grounding in truth.

This is pretty simple, but since you'll insist on trying to mystify it here's morality in a nutshell.

(1) If I hit my hand with a hammer it hurts like hell. So I don't do that.

(2) If a society lets it members hit each others hands with hammers it hurts every bit as much.

(3) So either a society develops morals against this harmful behaviour or it fails and is supplanted by one that does.

Precisely zero gods required and it neatly explains both why almost every society has strict prohibitions against beating the snot out of some other poor bugger and why it's simultaneously acceptable, and even encouraged, to do precisely that to some poor bugger who doesn't belong to your group. Because we're a bunch of nasty little savages evolved for small social groups. Your scripture is rife with examples of good believers doing exactly that.

We actually need to over-ride the very limited instinctive morality that evolution has granted us, but which was never evolved to manage more than a basic hunter-gatherer society. To actually arrive at a global civilization that doesn't sprout some inconvenient mushroom clouds you have to really use the very reason that Nielsen laments. Using some serious skull sweat to avoid the tribalistic instincts of our species became necessary to our survival round about the time we mechanized warfare. Splitting the atom just upped the ante. And in doing so we disprove that quote from Dawkins by refusing to dance to our DNA's self-destructive song.