Who teaches better morals, St. Paul or Mark Twain?

[NoCapo]

Originally Posted by Vizio

The fact that people cannot define morality, much less measure it demonstrates the question has not been answered, and cannot be answered without an objective morality.

Wrong! Just as we can evaluate if a steak is good or not, or a piece of music is good, or a person is tall, we can evaluate is something id moral or immoral, based on our subjective understanding. What you seem to be arguing is that one cannot make any meaningful statement about the quality of a steak, without having a definitive, objective standard for steak quality, and that just isn't true. We have managed to get by for millenia without objective standards for taste, for art, for music, for height, for distance, and for morality...

Originally Posted by Vizio

That was an illustration to demonstrate that we all agree some things are wrong -- so yes, there is such a thing as objective morality.

But this is not evidence of an objective morality, merely a pervasive subjective value. How can you tell the difference between an objective value, and a subjective one that has been widely adopted? I submit that, objectively, you cannot... Thus your decision to chose what is equally probably a subjective value as your objective standard is a subjective choice on your part... And the can gets kicked a little farther down the road...

-NoCapo

[Vizio]

Originally Posted by NoCapo

Wrong! Just as we can evaluate if a steak is good or not,

My wife doesn't like steak. She doesn't consider it to be good.

That's personal taste. That's not the same as morality. We all agree that some things are always wrong.

[NoCapo]

Originally Posted by Vizio

My wife doesn't like steak. She doesn't consider it to be good.

That's personal taste. That's not the same as morality. We all agree that some things are always wrong.

First, you cannot prove that everyone, for all time, has agreed that some things are always wrong. To do that you would need to be omniscient.

Second, it is clear that we are not in universal agreement, since you believe that under some circumstances, slaughtering infants at the behest of your god is the right thing to do. A great many people disagree with you very strongly.

Third, even if you could demonstrate that everyone for all time had agreed on any single moral principle, that still does not make it objectively right, just pervasively common.

Lastly, food is about "personal taste", and yet we still have food critics, yelp, and other tools to help us judge the quality food. We can determine if a restaurant serves "good" steak or "bad" steak without having an objective definition for it. And that fact is not changed by the fact that your wife dislikes steak. Likewise we can determine as a society, as a culture that our shared sense of right and wrong does not include raping and murdering people, and then stuffing the bodies in your crawlspace, and that moral judgement is not invalidated by people like John Wayne Gacy.

Bottom line, unless you can produce both an objective morality and objective evidence for its existence, all we have to work with is a subjective, consensus morality.

-NoCapo

[Vizio]

Originally Posted by NoCapo

First, you cannot prove that everyone, for all time, has agreed that some things are always wrong. To do that you would need to be omniscient.

Please give me a time or a circumstance where torturing babies solely for your own personal pleasure would be good and moral. If not, I'm going to conclude that it's wrong.

[TroutDude]

Originally Posted by Vizio

Please give me a time or a circumstance where torturing babies solely for your own personal pleasure would be good and moral. If not, I'm going to conclude that it's wrong.

Gee, what a deeply empathic humanitarian.



But it's ok to torture babies if your god does it, or tells you to.

[NoCapo]

Originally Posted by Vizio

Please give me a time or a circumstance where torturing babies solely for your own personal pleasure would be good and moral. If not, I'm going to conclude that it's wrong.

And you may conclude that it is wrong, I have. But you are trying to claim that that makes it objective. It does not, it just means it is a general consensus.

And as we pointed out multiple times, you can only find this general consensus for a very narrowly defined question. If you asked me to give you a time or circumstance where torturing or murdering babies because a god told you to, I could not give you a justification for that either, yet you believe it to be moral. If murdering infants is objectively wrong, it wouldn't matter if I did find it moral, it would just mean I was wrong. Your argument here is just not logical. At a bare minimum you should try to reformulate it, but I don't think you are going ot have much success deriving ought from is...

-NoCapo

[Shirina]

Originally Posted by Vizio

The Bible says that God cannot sin. It's not that he doesn't want to....it's that he CANNOT sin.

Well duh!

Of course God can't sin because he's the one who decides what is sinful, is he not? So God can make killing babies a sin - until he needs to do it, at which time he declares it's not a sin - then after he's done killing the baby, makes it a sin again.

Originally Posted by Vizio

God never commanded specifically killing babies. He ordered the Israelites to invade and wipe out a people group...but he never instructed anyone to seek out and kill babies.

Vizio, do you really think your semantic games offer up a good argument? God new full well that there were babies in those cities, so when he commands his subjects to leave no one alive or to kill young and old, God knew exactly who was going to die.

Are you suggesting that when God received the casualty report, he said, "Oh my me! I had no idea there were BABIES in that city!!!"

Originally Posted by Vizio

In any event, the description of it happening are not commands to people living today.

Irrelevant. God's actions in the Old Testament shows beyond reproach that yes, God is quite capable of ordering the deaths of babies and children. Oh yeah, remember when Elijiah prayed to God for him to curse those 42 "little children" (because yes, the older Bibles actually say "little children") and so a couple of she-bears came out and butchered them? Ohhh ... well guess what. It would appear that God actually did specifically murder little children. Not babies, precisely, but definitely close enough.

It just baffles the mind how such atrocious behavior by a loving and moral God doesn't affect you. Instead you rationalize it, twist it, and turn it into something morally righteous. And THEN you argue for an objective morality based on the Bible.

How is the Bible objective when God acts one way in the Old Testament, then sends an avatar (a piece of himself) in the form of Christ and acts completely different in the New Testament?

Originally Posted by Vizio

You have no basis for saying it was wrong. All you have is that you don't like it. You can't even define morality, much less determine what is moral or not.

My morality is based on empathy, as I said. It's not whether I like it - it's whether the person I'm interacting with would like it. And I think you and I both know that there are a lot of things we know NO one really likes if they are sound of mind. Whether it is precisely defined or not isn't all that relevant. Unless humans wake up one day and decide that having their arms chopped off is a great way to spend an afternoon, there are just certain things that are universally unwanted. I doubt a tribesman in Papua New Guinea would enjoy being set on fire any more than an American would.

Originally Posted by Vizio

By your logic, you apparently think capital punishment is evil, and is equal to torture.

If you think killing the first born of Egypt was merely capital punishment, then by your logic, if a man is on the run from the cops for committing a capital offense, then all males fitting the description should be rounded up and summarily executed - because hey, one of them just might be the actual criminal. That would be evil.

Originally Posted by Vizio

Again...the point remains...if you can't give me a definition of what morality is....you can't measure it.

Well then, I guess we should get to work abolishing all of our laws since we can't point to some definitive outside source that tells us what morality is.

Originally Posted by Vizio

And your declaration holds no authority whatsoever. All it is is your declaration--your opinion. Your system is morally bankrupt.

This coming from a person who measures morality by determining who commits the deed. If Hitler commits genocide, it's bad. If God commits genocide, it's good. How is that not morally bankrupt? How do I know you won't get some message from God commanding you to start murdering people? It's happened before. And the Bible specifically shows that God is more than willing to butcher innocents without a backward glance.

And, if you try to use the argument that God would never do such a thing today, then that destroys any possibility of an objective morality because even God changed the definition at least once. After all, he directly or indirectly killed children before.

Originally Posted by Vizio

You can't judge objectively...but you pretend to be able to judge God? Wowzers.

You do the same thing. You made the judgment that God is good - and anything he does is good (even when it isn't). When you have a separate morality for God, God's immediate lieutenants here on earth, and everyone else, then objective morality, by definition, cannot exist.

Originally Posted by Vizio

You don't even know how to judge morality, so how would you know?

Because he can tell when there are different moral codes that change depending on who you are. One doesn't have to define morality to know that, in order to have objective morality, a moral code must be the same across all levels of existence - including God. If it's okay for God to commit genocide but it's immoral for Hitler to do it, then there is no objective morality. It's that simple. No need for some convoluted definition of what morality is. If Person A can do something Person B cannot, then there is no objectivity. It becomes subjective.

Originally Posted by Vizio

The fact that people cannot define morality, much less measure it demonstrates the question has not been answered, and cannot be answered without an objective morality.

Which is why there are tens of thousands of denominations, factions, sects, cults, covens, societies, religions, and ideologies. It's because there is no objective morality. If there was, then you wouldn't have Pentacosts saying it's a sin for women to wear make-up while the Methodists couldn't give a damn. Even within Christianity alone, there is no objective morality because of the myriad interpretations of the rules. Some denominations add rules that aren't in the Bible at all while others ignore rules that are in the Bible.

It's pure chaos even within religious circles, Vizio, even among people who point to the Bible and God as the ultimate source of morality. Even THEY cannot reach a consensus, which is why Christianity fractured into untold numbers of little shards.

There is no objective morality. That's why morality cannot be defined. You have your own opinion on where morality comes from - and others who agree that morality comes from the same source will STILL disagree with you on some moral points. If there was an objective morality, then we would all be linked arm-in-arm singing Joy to the World.

Originally Posted by Vizio

That was an illustration to demonstrate that we all agree some things are wrong -- so yes, there is such a thing as objective morality.

No, actually, I don't think there is agreement. Not unless you can admit that if God tortured a baby for his own amusement, it would be morally wrong.