God as the source of all morality.

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Permalink Reply by Skeptical Deb on July 5, 2009 at 1:40pm

One book which you might be referring to is "Society without God: What the least religious nations can tell us about contentment" by Phil Zuckerman.

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Permalink Reply by Greywolf on July 5, 2009 at 4:04pm

Will be exploring your site in short order, Bryan.

As for God and ethics: I've come up with what's slowly starting to become my 'sig'. I call it "Greywolf's Dictum". Hope I become obscurely famous for it.

Greywolf's Dictum: There can be no greater evil in the world than the Creator of evil. That's assuming, hypothetically of course, that the creature "God" exists. (May change "the world" to "existence," though.)

Posted at: http://theatheistobserver.wordpress.com

So Christendom needs to flush that image of a "moral" God who is supposed to be love, goodness, and perfection incarnate right down the toilet. If anything, He's evil!

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Permalink Reply by Jack B. Nimble on August 24, 2009 at 9:59pm

Well, if your goal is to first show that a god is not necessary for morals then I'm surprised that (as far as I know) Euthyphro has only been mentioned once by Ralph McRae.

The core of the argument goes something like this: Is doing good, good because god wants you to do it? Or does does god want you to do it because it is good.

The best thing would be for you to read the Euthyphro argument yourself, but I can't seem to find a copy of it on the internet so i'll try to get it correct here.

If you should do good because god wants you to, then "good" is arbitrary. If god wanted you to rape an murder then doing so would be good. Good could be anything at all.

If someone says that god wouldn't ever want you to do something like that... well why wouldn't god want that? Because it would be evil? Then they are saying that god wants you to do good because it is good. If god wants you to do good because it is good then that means that god doesn't get to decide what is good and what is not but that good is something separate from god.

I'm not sure I made that very clear, but I think it gets the general idea across that God does NOT equate to Moral Standards.

Hope this helps a bit, Sean.

Later days,
Jack

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