re: Stunning Admission By Renowned Atheist; Decline of Christianity is Hurting Society

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FooManChoo

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Jesus Christ you're so completely full of shite

Honestly the answer is The Good Samaritan.

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Why? The fact that there isn't a universal, objective moral code doesn't preclude me from judging the moral code of another. Why are the two mutually exclusive in your mind?

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Do you argue with people over the best flavor of ice cream? Because that what you reduce morality to: a preference without an ultimate standard to judge it by.

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If your response is to question what makes my moral code superior to that of anyone else, the answer is that it's not. But if my moral code aligns with the general moral framework of the society I live in (be it "America," or "the Western world," or "Humanity", to speak of several levels), then I can judge the actions of others relative to that accepted framework.

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If your personal moral preference happens to align with the personal moral preferences of the majority in a society you happen to live within, that doesn't mean you have any more basis to condemn anyone whose personal moral preference is different from your own. You can join a group of others whose favorite flavor of ice cream is rocky road but that doesn't mean you have gained any objective ground to stand on to judge those who like vanilla better.

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As it stands, that's exactly what we do. That's how laws are dictated and enforced. An objective underlying moral code isn't required.

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What you've just described is arbitrariness and arbitrariness is not a rational basis for truth, moral or otherwise.

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Just one more of your completely idiotic assertions

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Thank you for your exhaustive rebuttal

The reason why I come to this conclusion is that if morality is subjective, then there is no ultimate and objective standard for moral goodness to compare any person's actions to in order to deem those actions good or bad.

To live consistently with this belief in moral subjectivity, you could not logically condemn the behavior of anyone else as immoral because those behaviors are the outpouring of the subjective moral perspective that is held by the person holding them, who may very well think that what they are doing is morally good. And who are we to say otherwise if we don't have an objective standard to point to and say they are wrong?

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Jesus Christ you're so completely full of shite

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It's interesting that you feel the need to call on a God you don't believe in to condemn someone as being untruthful with a worldview that has no rational basis for truth, nor a basis for the obligation to be truthful.

A conscience is unique to the human species. I dont agree with the modern attempt to include beings other than humans into the realm of conscience beings just because some have awareness. Awareness is not the inner understanding of what is right and what is wrong. Animals act on instinct and conditioning. They do not act on a moral basis of right and wrong. Humans do that...and only humans. It is the battle of spiritual good vs evil that has occurred since humans were created. We are the only lifeform that have this conflict built in at conception. All of the things that you mentioned are decisions made based on the level of morality that you exercise on a daily basis. You know and feel emotions based on these decisions. Animals do not. They don’t have the emotional conflict part of the equation. They only learn repercussions or likely repercussions of their actions and adapt their behavior accordingly. A dog is not going to stop chewing up your couch because it feels sad that it is messing up your property. It stops because it gets its arse whipped or put in a kennel...or both.

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I don't want to live in a society where murder is a normal means of conflict resolution.

It makes for poor civilizations.

Additionally, I'm a human being capable of empathy. I don't want to be murdered so I'm quite certain others don't want to be murdered either.

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But empathy is just a feeling. And some people don't have it. So you don't want to kill people because you have a feeling that you don't like in conjunction with it, but Ted Bundy liked it. He had feelings he liked when he did it.

And the extrapolation from your actions to all of society is a red herring. That's a standard response from an atheist when challenged with the obvious problems with morality. Without an actual transcendent standard for morality, all that's left is individual preference. When challenged, the atheist uses this extrapolation, but just because one person acts on their personal subjective feelings a certain way in no way means that it will extrapolate that way. Everyone didn't start killing people just because Bundy did it.

In fact, a situation in which most people are averse to killing because of their personal subjective feelings about it, but you aren't, is the best position you could possibly be in if that's what gets you off. You don't WANT society to change if that's you in that scenario. You want to be the only one hunting humans like that.

The truth is that atheism has a philosophical problem that it cannot solve when challenged with what ultimately ends up being inevitable conclusions of nihilism. Without a transcendent point to relate life to, there is no morality (other than just subjective preference, which means that Bundy's is as valid as Mother Theresa's), there is no real meaning to life, there is no significance to anything. Atheism necessarily ends in nihilism.

The only people who actually act as though atheism is true are psychopaths.

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 110 million Americans are infected with some form of STD. So with a population of about 323 million that means one-in-three Americans are infected.

People don't need God when they're too busy fornicating.

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No, it's correct. The logical conclusion of moral subjectivity is that there is no actual moral or immoral behavior; there is just what happens in this natural world, like a lion killing and eating a zebra.

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False

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True. Taken to it ultimate conclusion, morality is situational. In every case, there is a rationalization or justification that make immorality OK.

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But there are many versions of this relativism, and not all of them end in moral subjectivity. The version you use (and coincidentally insist that postmodern philosophers use, when they don't) is called meta-ethical relativism, as in that moral objectivist judgments do not have the moral force that objectivists say they do. These people would suggest that truth is relative to the context, traditions, and practices of a group of persons.

The other type of relativist simply says that there are deep disagreements about morality across the varieties of human societies, which is merely descriptive. The meta-ethical view is distinct from the descriptive view, and from other views that reject mind-independent objectivity by virtue of affirming the relative form of truth-values, rather than denying them completely.

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Thank you for providing distinctions between the various forms of moral relativism, yet it does nothing to change the fact that relativism within the context of the individual or within the context of larger cultural traditions or norms is still relative to their contexts and cannot be objective due to the vary nature of morality being products of the human mind rather than the product of a transcendent and personal moral law-giver.

The point of discussing objectivity vs. subjectivity in terms of morality is to show that if we rely on ourselves as human beings to determine morality, there cannot be an objective basis to condemn one version of morality and praise another; we would just have various moral preferences that we like over others.