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

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If a person admits that they believe that morality is subjective then by application they should never condemn the actions of anyone else, no matter how unpleasant they find them to be

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Just one more of your completely idiotic assertions

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Altruism and Natural Selection (survival of the fittest, the strong outcompete the weak for resources) are mutually exclusive.

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You clearly don't understand natural selection and by the way altruism has been very well studied and your assertion is 100% false

Genes don't survive necessarily because you are the strongest they just survive because whatever activities you participated in increase the odds they would survive.

Altruism is easily explained when you realize that's the case

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If it's winter and I give a coat to someone who cannot get one for themselves, that's altruism. Survival of the fittest demands I keep that coat for myself and my progeny.

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So, yeah. You don't understand natural selection.

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If it's winter and I give a coat to someone who cannot get one for themselves, that's altruism. Survival of the fittest demands I keep that coat for myself and my progeny.

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And you likely will in a life or death situation or if your kid needed it. Not too many people are altruistic to the point that it significantly hinders themselves physically, financially, etc.

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So, yeah. You don't understand natural selection.

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Please explain how my example runs afoul of survival of the fittest.

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If a person admits that they believe that morality is subjective then by application they should never condemn the actions of anyone else, no matter how unpleasant they find them to be.

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Incorrect.

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You shouldn’t

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Exactly. But others seem to think empathy is enough to override this selfish desire and amounts to a good basis for morality.

If it's not morally wrong to be selfish, why should I care about empathy as a compelling reason for anything?

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This is an urge most of us feel at some point and it’s almost always overridden by the perceived harm such an action would bring to us.

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Almost always, but not always. But even so, it's still a selfish motive. My point is if morality is boiled down to a utilitarian desire for survival or self-promotion, you can justify a lot of otherwise "immoral" behavior as perfectly consistent with that moral paradigm.

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For instance, there are very few benefits I can think of which outweigh the high likelihood of spending most of my life in prison.

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For you, sure. And yet we have generations of people who wouldn't mind going to prison for "street cred" or other reasons that are more influential to those individuals than the thought of being incarcerated for long periods of time.

So the conflict with a utilitarian framework of morality may not be so bad for those who naturally want to act in the best interest of others because they believe it's in their own best interest to do so, but the conflict lies with those who don't care about others or who don't even care about themselves. We have no basis to condemn them if they are simply acting in a way that they feel is best.

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You're in the same boat.

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Not at all, because a worldview that rejects moral absolutes has no basis for condemning anything. A worldview like the one I adhere to that accepts the existence of moral absolutes has a basis to condemn things that deviate from that standard as immoral.

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If there is a Bible story where someone slaughters a school because God commanded it you... "can't condemn it. That is the logical conclusion to such a view of morality."

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You're right that I couldn't condemn that particular action at that particular time, but that doesn't hold true to other humans slaughtering a school that wasn't commanded by God because the standard is that humans have no moral authority to unlawfully kill other humans because we're made in God's image and belong to Him, and only He can authorize such killings of His creation.

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I hate to break it to you, but this is the case with or without belief in God.

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Not so.

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That is the human condition, and is evident in any instance of corruption or counter-action within a church.

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The human condition is sinful. Sin is lack of conformity to God's law. God's law is the standard for morality.

You don't judge a framework by those who violate it. I have a basis to condemn sin because I know what the standard is that defines what sin is.

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What of the "morality" of pre-Christian societies like the Greeks and Romans?

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What of them? They were sinful like all other societies yet had no basis for moral truth due to their professed beliefs.

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What of the evolution of Christian "morality" over 2000 years.

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What evolution? The Bible is the standard of Christian morality and it hasn't changed over 2,000 years. The standard is still there, regardless of how the actions of Christians have changed over that period of time. We still have a basis to condemn the sins of Christians.

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What about Judean morality? And the difference in morality of the Judean God and the Christian God, when they are the same?

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The 10 commandments are the summary of God's moral law, which Jesus further summarized by loving God and loving each other. The moral standard is the same between the old testament and the new testament. What has changed was the application of the moral law in the civil life of Israel vs. the Church and the ceremonial law of Israel vs. the work of Christ on the cross. The moral law--which the other two forms of law proceed from--comes from God's very character, which is eternal and unchanging.

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this is a premise that you've accepted, not a statement of fact.

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It's a statement of truth.

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i could say the same thing about act utilitarianism, which can objectively define every act as right or wrong on the basis of the principle of utility.

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You're not quite understanding what "objective" means in terms of morality. Objectivity is something universal derived from outside of our particular human minds, like laws of logic. Subjectivity is something particular to ourselves, such as our feelings or personal desires.

Utility, itself, is an arbitrary standard. Why should that be the standard we should live by rather than some other standard?

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the thing is, one has to accept the premise. whether it is christianity or act utilitarianism. so don't confuse the premise you've accepted for proof of that premise.

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My premise makes the concept of moral absolutes intelligible and coherent with the world we live in. Utilitarianism doesn't and can't.

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a good (but heady) book on the topic is alasdair macantyre's whose justice? which rationality?, which reminds us that every idea of morality or ethics has a underlying premise or tradition that we typically espouse due to preference.

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Morality as preference is the natural result of morality outside of the Biblical God, which is what I said in the beginning. While you can espouse that belief, you don't live that way; no one does. In our every day lives, we live as if moral absolutes exist, yet can't justify that notion outside of God.