God as the source of all morality.

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Permalink Reply by Deborah on March 22, 2009 at 11:46pm

Faithlessgod wrote on 20 March 2009 - "You appear to be arguing or defending some sort of objective approach. Well what is it?"

My position is that if an action is wrong for a person, it will also be wrong for another person in relevantly similar circumstances.

Some wrongs are self-evident eg maiming a person for fun.

In general, ethical evaluations require one to select, to balance if necessary and to apply relevant values or principles. I am not aware of any ethical theory which provides an adequate account of all ethical evaluations. I don't think it should be expected that all ethical evaluations should be able to be accounted for in a neat sound bite.

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Permalink Reply by Rev Hellbound Alleee on March 28, 2009 at 10:58am

If God is the moral standard, ethics and morality is subject to His whim. As you see in the bible, his standards change when He sees fit.

Religious morality is subjective, not objective.

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Permalink Reply by Karl on April 28, 2009 at 12:52am

I think the answer is to say that they cannot prove that the moral code that they follow came from God or a God, therefore if the moral code was written by a man then it cannot be a gold stardard by which all morals can be judged because that man was human and prone to errors and bias.

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Permalink Reply by Jared Lardo on June 29, 2009 at 9:30pm

"We don't even know who wrote the bible. How can we know it's reliable?"
Based, of course, on "God doesn't write books."

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Permalink Reply by Karl on April 28, 2009 at 1:10am

Fundamentalist christians will also try to portray athiests as having no moral code at all, almost as if you are some kind of sociopath if you don't follow god's rules. What i always say is its always better to follow your own moral compass than to follow the laws of some non-existant deity simply because you are scared that if you don't you will be caught and punished, which kind of makes you a rather pathetic excuse for a human being.

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Permalink Reply by Bob Lloyd on May 2, 2009 at 7:11am

Whenever religious dogma is used as the source of moral standards, inevitably the quality of the ethical principles are compromised. Since ethical values are social in origin, they have a scope which covers all of human activity. By contrast, the scope of dogmatic religious morality is restricted to those areas covered in the texts.

When a novel social situation arises which requires ethical judgement, the dogmatic religious reasoner has to first adapt their dogma, abstract and focus on what they consider relevant (according to their texts), and only then can they offer a restricted ethical judgement. It is no surprise that religious ethical judgements are overwhelmingly reactionary because they can only relate anachronistically to modern social values.

In the case of Islam, since the text of the Qur'an is supposed to be the literal word of god, it cannot be edited and therefore must remain anachronistic.

So religious morality is condemned to be reactionary, incomplete, and tangential to social values. We see this particularly in catholic doctrine about stem cell research, AIDS, gay adoption, and a host of other "modern" ethical questions.

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Permalink Reply by AcesLucky on May 5, 2009 at 7:13am

I guess it would depend on which god. In Numbers 31:1-18 the bible god orders Moses to kill all the Midianites but the little virgin girls they could keep for themselves. If murder and raping children is moral then perhaps the standard set by said god is too low for civilized consideration. So it becomes an issue of which god. The Jains are among the most moral religions (they don't believe in harming anything living whatsoever)... but then, I don't think they have a god. Hmmm.

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Permalink Reply by Tagg Gnostic on May 8, 2009 at 8:02pm

Morals are Internal
Ethics are Societal
Religon's are political

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Permalink Reply by Jim Mo. on July 5, 2009 at 12:37am

I like this summary. I would like to explore this set of statements from an evolutionary perspective in a new thread.

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Permalink Reply by Skeptical Deb on July 5, 2009 at 3:19am

Don't the Jains suggest that you refrain from all sexual contact/pleasure?

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Permalink Reply by Jared Lardo on June 29, 2009 at 9:27pm

Argument around it = "Hitler was a theist." The discussion should end either way.
1. you've demonstrated that their absolutist argument is false
2. Godwin's Law.

so, either way, it's your escape clause.

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Permalink Reply by Dacx on July 2, 2009 at 7:00pm

Stat- the safest countries in the world are the most atheistic. (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland etc)
Stat- the prison population is mostly christian. Atheists make up a very small amount.


It takes time to find these statistics but I've seen them somewhere so that's something you could look into

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