Atheism

so you're saying there's an objective set of morals out there, but by and large people practice and judge each other by subjective morals. what's the point of an object set of rules, then? i mean, aside from the concern about judgment. and if judgment is a concern, are people who owned slaves all going to hell?

 

not in an objectively universal way, no. right and wrong are defined by society. if society said rape was okay, then it wouldn't be long for the world, imo. some other society where people didn't condone rape would probably see in influx of people who didn't want to be raped.

societies are much like living organisms. they change and evolve and the ones that aren't fit tend to die out. if your immune system suddenly thought it was a good idea to attack your red blood cells, you'd die without passing on the genes that programmed your immune system to do that. it's the same way with customary raping of your citizens -- it's a societal dysfunction that prevents your society from flourishing.

i suspect you could find weird cults here and there that actually have bizarre notions of morality that fit your examples -- abuse, rape, etc of "the flock". they don't go anywhere as a movement because they're incapable of providing what societies need to provide -- generally things along the lines of mutual protection and respect...

 

I'm not just saying there are an objective set of morals out there. To say there would be to contrast that there are other real morals out there.

My position is that morals ARE objective. They are a code of conduct set forth by God. Every human on earth has evidence for this because everyone has a conscious that tells them, inherently, what is good and what is not.

I say that every single person in the world when of an age to cognitively understand knows that certain things are wrong or right. Murder, rape, slavery, abuse. These are universal regardless of culture or society. They may not be universally acted through society but I believe they are known.

Now, things can restrist this knowledge or people in certain situations or raised in a situation where they cannot freely without over bearing bias decided for themselves may be exceptions. Or people can just plain be wrong. That doesn't affect the moral because it's not depentent on society or the indivudual.

If I believe rape to be moral that doesn't make it so. I don't think that evolution or society answers the question of the origin of morals as well as a transcendent perfect entity.

If morals are not objective then they are subjective and if they are subjective then one persons morals are not better or worse than anothers. They're just whatever you want them to be. In that case there wasn't anything inherently wrong with the holocaust. They were just different. Nothing wrong with the rape of a child. There would not be any real difference between man and animals. The only incentive for me to act "good" would be the opinions of society and herd instincts. Those reasons don't adequately explain morals.

If I see a child beaten my reaction of revultion isn't just an act of biology or socitial pressure. What in biology or evolution would cause me to care about a child I have no relation to? Why should society care? I think we care and react the way we do because God put that knowledge inherently inside us and God is good.

Forgot to answer you question about slave owners. If a person realizes or knows that owning a slave it wrong and does it anyway it is a sin. Sin in and of itself doens't send you to hell. You're still thinking of Hell as a place of fire and brimestone. It's not. Hell is just a seperation from God. The more you sin, the more you seperate yourself from God and if you die without God then you'll be eternally seperate from him. That's hell. Seperate from all goodness (God) forever. This is getting into a whole separate discussion thought which I'll be happy to discuss aside from the moral question.

 

If all that is true then how does it work so well in the animal kingdom. There rape, killing, and torture is commonplace yet their societies flourish.

 

yes. exactly.

 

In agrarian and developing economies, child labor is a necessity. It wasn't until the industrial revolution that child labor became an object of scorn. Even more recently, in our Southern culture, child labor was a necessity for the family farm and sharecroppers alike. The advent of mandatory schooling played a huge role in lessening child labor but if you only have to look back to my parent's generation to see there was nothing immoral about child labor in certain sectors of our society. It was actually seen as a virtue.

We only have to look back a few years to see masters using slaves in this manner or back a bit further for Lords' and Dukes to have sway over their serfs.

Even further back, we have gladitorial combat, singles combat, human sacrifice, etc. Death and even what we would consider murder was moral and honorable.

As for slavery, it is generally shown in the Bible to simply be a fact of life. We may consider it immoral, but even God threatened others with slavery such as in Joel 3:8. Ephesians addresses how a slave should obey his master as he would Christ and in Exodus 21 we are given guidlines on how to properly handle a Hebrew slave. It seems that God may have only objected to the slavery of his people. His tribe.

Was it moral? By the standards of the day, yes. By our standards now it is reprehensible.

I think it comes from human wisdom. Over the millenia we've learned a few things as noted above. That wisdom is found all over the world in both philosophical teachings and religious teachings. While I don't believe in a god, I do believe there to be some higher truths to our existence. Some ideals to strive for that make us better people. That make our short lives on this speck of dirt have some meaning besides our own selfish desires and worst inclinations. One doesn't have to believe in your God or any other god for those ideals to have meaning.

 

sure, but different cultures think of those things differently. abuse in the middle east is not the same as abuse in the united states. murder, slavery, rape... i'll be there are times that these things are justified to the people involved when outsiders would disagree. take capital punishment. many would call that murder and immoral. since you're saying america was built on the back of the immoral slave trade, maybe we're not in the best position to say we're now the moral example to the rest of the world.

but most people in the states justify capital punishment. they don't "know" it's wrong -- they think it's right. just as i don't think people back in the 1600's really considered slavery to be wrong. i'm sure some did -- just as capital punishment has it's detractors today.

(fwiw, this is not an indictment of the death penalty)

so how closely to do you think american morality jibes with the objective perfect morality? and if there is a single objective morality, does that mean everybody knows exactly what is right and wrong? let's leave rape and murder out of it. how about all the difficult moral dilemmas people face? are they acting counter to what they know is right just cuz?

see, i tend to judge people's morals based on my morals. "better" means more like mine, usually. "worse" means less like mine. the holocaust was judged to be bad because it ran counter to what most people considered to be moral. how do you view the nearly complete annihilation of the indiginous people of north america? moral? immoral? plenty of murder and theft, right? so is it comperable to the holocaust?

see, i consider that reaction to be completely biological, but then, i'm a bit of a materialist. i'd suggest you'd care not because you know or don't know that child, but because humans have a deep sense of empathy for each other. it's the means by which we get along. you see something bad happening and instinctually you react as tho it might be you or somebody you know.

how would the person not know it's wrong if everybody's been given the blueprint of right and wrong? it doesn't matter what i view hell as -- the idea behind morals is to reward the good and punish the bad (even if that punishment is simply no reward).

 

i'd wager more humans have killed other humans than pretty much any other animal has killed its kin. and you have to recognize that humans are societal creatures. look at ants or bees. they're very heavily societal and they do what's good for the colony rather than simply looking out for themselves.

 

The quantity has no bearing on the discussion. I do recognize that human are social creatures and social evolution and group dynamics do play a large part in how people live there lives but when it comes to morals I don't think it answers the questions of morals as well as God.

If a bee in the colony get injured another worker bee doesn't stop to help him. The bee doesn't ask itself a moral question. There is no right or wrong to the bee because it is going on instincts and evolution. My exact point is that people are more than preprogrammed animals. Any human in the same situation would think it right to help an injured person. Doesn't matter if they do or not, only when confronted with the questions that they make that moral judgment.

 

If a child is abused in the middle east it is no different than if that child is abused in America from the standpoint of if it is immoral or not. It is. It morals are subjective based on a society than why would they even need to justify themselves. You don't justify moral behavior, only immoral behavior. You bring up capital punishment. Is that immoral? You have to define the question better. The argument isn't "Is murder wrong?". It's, "Is capital punishment murder?" Everyone agrees universally that murder is immoral. We're yet as a society discovered if capital punishment is or isn't murder.

I think everyone inherently knows universal basic rights and wrongs but many times the questions are more complex and difficult than just that basic question. So, just like my example with capital punishment while you inherently know it's wrong to murder that doesn't necessarily answer the question of capital punishment.

That's my whole point. If you judge people based on subjective morals then there is no right and wrong, only different but no one thinks the holocaust was just different. Do you really think that if the majority of people judged the holocaust to be "good" then that would make it so?

To your question of Native Americans, yes, I do think what was done to them was immoral. I'm not an expert on that period in history nor the holocaust so I don't know how comparable they are or what bearing that has on our discussion. We'd just be changing examples.

I agree with your example but not your reasons for it. I don't think biology or instincts answer the question well enough. If a person were in front of an oncoming bus along with a young child their instinctual/biological reaction would be to save themselves. To jump out of the way. A human can override that biological reaction and shove the girl out of the way, even if it meant his death. I think only when you bring God into it that the explanation makes sense.

It's similar to my answer on capital punishment. The blueprint tells us that debasing and degrading another human is wrong. To do harm to him is wrong. Now, there are numerous other factors that go into and persuade our decision making. Society, our family, that way you were raised, etc. That may lead a person to rationalize slavery or to just ignore the question altogether. The person may just not care. A person don't have to be moral. They can choose others things over it, be it material wealth, power, control. The list goes on.

Morals aren't a reward for doing good. People do good and are moral because they feel it is right from within. Look at our example of the slave owner. He got far more rewards from being immoral. I don't think this premise is very logical.