WOTM: Objective Morality, Part II

Our good friend Joseph Smith once said, “That which is wrong under one circumstance, may be, and often is, right under another. God said, 'Thou shalt not kill'; at another time He said, 'Thou shalt utterly destroy.' This is the principle on which the government of heaven is conducted—by revelation adapted to the circumstances in which the children of the kingdom are placed. Whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is, although we may not see the reason thereof till long after the events transpire.” ― Joseph Smith Jr. So, I love it when Mormons tell me there is an objective morality, when their founder did not believe that.

I think Chad is pretty much on the point: believers do not care for any substantial discussion. To me, any religious scripture and their representatives are simply not "maßgeblich" - a german language word that contains merely all of the following: "leading, relevant, significant, representative, material (to), authoritative, applicable, controlling, decisive, definitive, important". But since I broke free from my religious chains (some 20 years ago) I experience a sensational freedom. Suddenly, I breathe the fresh air of real enlightenment, live every day with reason and responsibility. Having felt like this, I will never ever let an ancient book impose it's questionable "moral" on me, again. If only I could spread this experience...

Take care of yourself, we cannot afford to lose your voice. Besides, I am paying for it!

The Argument From Moral Autonomy (This is from James Rachel’s “God and Moral Autonomy:”) 1. We are moral agents with moral autonomy and a responsibility to exercise it 2. Abandoning one’s moral autonomy is immoral 3. God is a perfectly good being worthy of worship 4. Worship is the recognition of one as inferior and subordinate to a greater being 5. Worship of God includes the total abandonment of one’s moral autonomy in favor of blind, non-questioning obedience of God 6. This is immoral, unless we can continuously be sure the being we are worshipping is (perfectly) good, and that the being we are worshipping is indeed a (or the) “God” 7. To continuously evaluate whether a being is good requires moral judgment, which requires moral autonomy 8. Therefore it is not possible to continuously evaluate if a being is good while also worshipping it 9. Therefore, worshipping necessarily requires abandoning one’s moral responsibility, which is immoral 10. Therefore, no being is worthy of worship 11. Therefore, God does not exist In short – worship makes it impossible to know the object of worship is good, and a non-good object of worship isn’t worthy of worship. It is said that it can be known that God is good, and that God is worthy of worship, which is a contradiction, which cannot exist.

Yes: "thank Darwin"! The problem with fervent believers is that they assume we humans are born as a "blank slate." They therefore think that, without their god's dictates, we would be devoid of morality. This is nonsense, as Steven Pinker so aptly refutes in his book "The Blank Slate." We are all born with genetic proclivities passed down through our DNA, and in the case of our species some of those instincts determine our sense of morality. The proof of the pudding is that many of our genetic "cousins" demostrate similar proclivities, as Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan observe in their book "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors." Indeed, one example in their book describes an experiment in which our macaque cousins actually behaved more morally than most humans when subjected to an experiment like Stanley Milgram's "Obedience to Authority." We can —and should— recognize that such hereditary traits come from within us —not from some invisible sky-daddy.

If God invented "objective morality" then it becomes "subjective morality" with God being the one making subjective decisions about what is moral when.

I recently watched a video of a science outpost in Antarctica. Several of the people they talked to said they keep coming back year after year. The reason, they love what they are doing and they love the community. The community is all about science. Collecting data, analyzing the data, discussing the data and coming up with new experiments to collect more data. The work, of course, is to understand our planet and the current changes it is presently going through. The reason I brought this up is that it is a picture of a community in which they all talk the same language, they are all on the same page. It's a glimpse of what what humanity is capable of.

Sub-jective = under judgment; ob-jective = without judgment. Morality is a value judgment. It's amazing how some uninformed people will twist words.

It's a tragedy that complex discussion like this (relatively speaking) has relatively no hope of being ingested by those who need it most. Perhaps this was more a video to help the thinking atheists not fall into the trap of discussing Objective Morality as if it were a thing.