You have already been shown to be out to lunch on the issue many times over – not my fault if you refuse or fail to see how obvious this is.

“I have asserted that what you call objective morality is in fact fluid over time, or differs wildly between sects and among religions, and I substantiated that with examples.”

So very wrong it is shameful!

Your examples are all faulty as stated and your statement is clearly a perfect example of “wrong” as I demonstrated. Either you know nothing of history, historical religions and society or you are terribly blind to the most obvious thing in this world.

“There are extremely few culture & time invariant moral prohibitions: incest, and in-group murder, rape, and deceit are about the only ones that make the list.”

Way out in the boonies again! Ever heard of justice, goodness, mercy, truth, faithfulness, loyalty, kindness, patience, love, humility, candor, honesty, fair play, benevolence…….????

Apparently these words mean nothing to you – and logically so in your weird scheme of things.

Find a religion that doesn’t include *all* of these in it’s creeds! You cannot and I dare to to try. You will fail as have all the others who tried.

“No, I don’t.”

Well, yes you do.

” Every religion has its own “objective” morality, and they are, to significant extents, mutually exclusive. ”
And no, their moral values are nothing like significantly different. Rather significantly similar!! A child can see this.

Wake up and taste the wasps in your mouth!

“Nothing is the product of random selection, because there is no such thing.”

Do you actually read what’s there before responding? Apparently not. You’re a very sloppy and negligent thinker – like the guy in the OP title.

“By simply defining it out of existence, while ignoring the contained tautology.”

Nothing is easier than defining this *dilemma* out of existence. There is no dilemma in the 1st place!

The pretended dilemma argues what it does not understand and founds it’s argument on a falsity.

In one phrase it may be undone – “God is the Law and the Law is God.”

God is the inspirited, incarnate, Living Law – they are one. Not independant entities.

What is said of God is exactly what may be said of the Moral Law “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature”

And of course, this is the view of the bible and Christianity. “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because *God is love*.”

Love is good willing. It is benevolence. It is seeking the highest good. “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

The Law is One. An indivisible unit all summed up in one word “love” – agape – disinterested, unselfish good willing.

“Do as you would be done by” is the worlds oldest, most universal command. It describes love which describes the Moral Law which describes who God is and what he is like.

As fo tautologies and contradictions, the are the very well documented territory of Darwinism and atheism as you would know if you’d really done any proper homework.

You’ve have swallowed many wasps while straining out the fleas of insignificant details. And you still show up here trying to prove there is no objective Moral Law by assuming one of your own feeble imagination.

I suggest you change your approach and re-think your life. You are accountable to the absolute Moral Law whether you like it or not.

Sorry, you lost a few posts ago.

Seeing as I waste my time with you, this is my last entry on this thread. I suggest you go pawn off your cheap, broken-down philo on some dupe with no brains if you can – you should many on the 1000′s of atheist “let’s pretend there is no god” sites.

I can be demonstrably correct. I have asserted that what you call objective morality is in fact fluid over time, or differs wildly between sects and among religions, and I substantiated that with examples.

This is not the same as relativism, at least in the sense you are talking about it. There are extremely few culture & time invariant moral prohibitions: incest, and in-group murder, rape, and deceit are about the only ones that make the list.

Bad logic again. You assume every specific religions deity is fundamentally different and opposite to every other. Another falsehood.

No, I don’t. Every religion has its own “objective” morality, and they are, to significant extents, mutually exclusive. The reason Mark and I continually bring this up is because it is the fundamental problem you simply ignore. It is beyond human ken to objectively know whether the Bible, the Book of Mormon, or the Q’uran (to name a few) is the true depiction of God, his intent, and his direction. A plethora of objective moralities is simply a contradiction in terms.

As I noted above, and I trust you agree, humans are social animals, unless you are a closet Communist, for whom human nature is purely a social construct, then you must agree that requires our behavior reflects that inescapable fact.

“Like it or not, consensus response …”

Wrong again. If you cannot even see reality outside your own little atheist world of nothingness, how are you to judge?

Simply saying “wrong again” falls somewhat short of persuasive. Outside that short list I provided above, perhaps you could give me even one example?

And why are you here? Do you think you’re doing some objective “good” in the universe? Of course you don’t. You cannot in your own view!

So your very presence is indication enough that you do indeed perceive a real objective absolute “truth” to exist.

Well, that is certainly a good point, but not in the way you think it is. There is undoubtedly some set of objectively true statements about existence, and that set of statements might contain and equally true subset of invariant moral statements. One of which might be, BTW, the statement that moral codes are largely situationally dependent.

The problem is, no one knows. Competing, irreconcilable, revealed texts are absolutely no help.

Wrong again! Once again, Reason is what brings the moral considerations, not human response to material consequences.

Human response is a combination of emotion and analysis, in varying proportions. And when you say I’m wrong again, perhaps you could give me an example of a moral prohibition that both imposes negative material consequences and lasts.

Now this, is clearly a contradiction of Darwinian thought. We are the results of billions of unlikey concurrent accidents – random mutations and selection – yet we are not empty nor random you say?!

No. It. Isn’t. Nothing is the product of random selection, because there is no such thing.

So the conclusion that naturalistic evolution would, by definition leave us without an inherent, and conflicted, nature is thoroughly wrong. What’s more, it puts God in a box of your making. Who are you to say that God could not have chosen a non-random recursive system to produce a being capable of admiring His Creation?

Those so-called answers to the Euthyphro dilemma boil down to this: Could God simply decree that torturing babies was moral? “No,” the Christian answers, “God would never do that.” It’s not a matter of command. It’s a matter of character.

So the Christian answer avoids the dilemma entirely.

By simply defining it out of existence, while ignoring the contained tautology.

Sorry but by the very fact that you persist in attempting to demonstrate that there are no objective moral values (material consequence based values are not objective and are often useless), you only dig in further to proving there are.

Obviously you believe you are objectively “right”. But then you cannot be “right” or “wrong” about anything if what you state is true!

Relativism cuts its own throat and you know it.

“Where it is similar to every other morality in history, then any particular notion of God is beside the point…”

Very bad logic. Your conclusion does follow at all. You completely ignore the universality of morals and the universality of belief in a higher authority throughout all ages and in all peoples tribes and nations.

“And where it differs, all claims to objective morality vanish, because the claims are dependent upon a subjective opinion as to which deity is correct.”

Bad logic again. You assume every specific religions deity is fundamentally different and opposite to every other. Another falsehood.

Here you are brining in deity again. As I keep saying you and Mark are the only ones bringing this up all the time – yet no one has even gotten that far yet. Get over it.

Moral values – their very existence – can easily lead us to conclude there must of necessity be some overgoverning power to moral law. But that is not and has not been to point.

“Like it or not, consensus response to material consequences is the way societies decide right from wrong.”

Wrong again. If you cannot even see reality outside your own little atheist world of nothingness, how are you to judge?

And why are you here? Do you think you’re doing some objective “good” in the universe? Of course you don’t. You cannot in your own view!

So what’s the point? It’s all useless in the end, in your view, and will persih in short time.

So your very presence is indication enough that you do indeed perceive a real objective absolute “truth” to exist. Otherwise you would know you are wasting your time trying to objectively prove there is none. Time which you could use to go out making whatever personal pleasures for yourself.

And worse is that, like I said before, you keep focusing on external details – usually minor; polygamy, and etc. – in the actual outworkings of law, to find your arguments against objectivity.

But even in this you must assume an underlying rule over-riding all. Your persistence of focusing on outward details is clearly a wrong approach.

Why don’t you focus on child rape? Find me a religion that has approved of this besides satanism or its cousins! There is none and never has been – except of course certain atheistic sex cults who believe there aer no objective morals and so they need not answer to anyone – like the afore mentioned NAMBLA member.

You again miss the assumed underlying values you yourself are using to argue against objective values!

“It is the human response to results that is the basis of what we consider “right” and “wrong.”

Wrong again! Once again, Reason is what brings the moral considerations, not human response to material consequences.

Is this the way you live every day? I don’t think so, nor could you – you’d end up in the cell block of the asylum.

“But human nature is neither empty, nor random”

Now this, is clearly a contradiction of Darwinian thought. We are the results of billions of unlikey concurrent accidents – random mutations and selection – yet we are not empty nor random you say?!

We are, in the materialist view, without soul, spirit, heart. Without free will. Without anything but bio-chem processes in our brains and nervous systems that dictate what we are and even what we believe, as per the OP – yet here you are stating the contrary — when it serves your own purpose of course.

“All such claims are comprehensively dismantled by studying the basis for any specific set of claims, the irreconcilable contradictions between competing claims, and the fluidity of claims over time.”

So, your proofs here, of being objectively right, are thus dismantled by the same rule of logic!

It’s rather surprising you can’t see how obvious this is.

I suggest you go back to post 62 and read the short quotes sections. This, and a hundred others, easily disproves your whole “contradictory claims” argument.

It simply isn’t true that there are so many contradictions in the base principles of morality. There is always and universally an underlying belief in justice, goodness and evil and wrong.

No expetions outside of satanism and it’s relatives. And even the “values” of satanism prove you wrong!

“Do you agree with this, or not?” ref – deut.
Actually – in context – I would agree with this. And if you fully understood what was at stake, in the global context of scripture, you too would agree.

Supposing that one who leads others astray into lies is actually, within context again, leading them to “hell”, what reaction would be the equivalent justice to the value of the precept in your view?

Surely one who is clearly leading others, not to death, but to eternal death, ought to be considered worthy of death themselves.

Of course, in your world, there are no such things so you couldn’t agree. But suppose there really is a hell? Hmmm – would this crime not be worse than actual murder? Indeed. And that’s a mere grain of reasonable analysis!

But again, you pick up an outward working of the Hebrew civil law under the Mosaic agreement – once again assuming there to be something objectively wrong with such a command, and once again again missing the underlying eternal purpose! You have no foundations.

Quite the contradiction – like all atheist thought.

As for your persistence n referring to the old “Euthyphro dilemma” I suggest you read this:
http://www.str.org/site/News2?.....38;id=5236
and this: http://www.charlesgfinney.com/.....ture23.htm

No being can make law. But no law can exist without sanctions. And no sanctions can exist without a Ruling, conscious Magistrate to adiminster them…reason it farther if you can – the ultimate conclusions are obvious enough.

After this you ought to re-think your life.

I’m not going to answer your so-called dilemma here. It’s already been done. It’s a bit like answering the “can god make a rock so big he can’t lift it?” nonsense.

And again, I believe, your persistence in attempting to prove yourself objectively right here is already ample proof that you are objectively and sadly very wrong.

Perhaps : “Oh God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.” would be an adequate prayer for you.

You don’t have a soul, you ARE a soul, you have a body.

I’ve already taken too much space and time here and won’t make a novel of it – So nuff said.

As I said, you do not understand the quoted texts nor their context, nor the christian view of this.

Yes, you did say that. But you failed to provide “context,” or the Christian view. And even if you had, you would still be faced with the task of how the addition of context, or a sectarian point of view would not hole the concept of Objective Morality below the waterline.

As for understanding, the words are perfectly clear. If understanding requires abandoning vocabulary and syntax, then claims to objective morality aren’t worth the page they are written on.

You miss the point again. Why does Islam have morality in the 1st place? And why is it’s general morality similar to every other morality in history?

I beg to differ. You are the one who misses the point. Where it is similar to every other morality in history, then any particular notion of God is beside the point (as the Euthyphro dilemma points out). And where it differs, all claims to objective morality vanish, because the claims are dependent upon a subjective opinion as to which deity is correct.

Appealing to divine authority to decide whether beating disobedient women is moral, as just one glaring for instance, is an exercise that contradicts itself before it so much as gets out the door.

Belief in justice, right, wrong, etc proves nothing. What does prove something is that the details behind each of those concepts varies so wildly between divine diktats, and even within a set of divine diktats over time.

You do assume there is an external, true, objective Moral Law running behind everything. It is a comforting notion, but it simply doesn’t stand up to inspection. Merely asserting the existence of something does not make it so.

Of course in your strange and illogical view, only material results are the objective rule, so being wrong on this should not bother you since there is no material result!

Please do me a favor. Review the history of usury in Christianity. Then demonstrate how that history supports your contention that material results do not have any effect on divine diktat.

Like it or not, consensus response to material consequences is the way societies decide right from wrong.

I trust you agree with the assertion that polyandry is wrong, even to the point of being sinful. Even if that rule didn’t exist, give human nature and material consequences, we would have arrived there in any event.

There is an up until recently isolated tribe in the New Guinea highlands where women mate with many men. In that tribe, such conduct is “right.” At least until recently, they had no idea that paternity is particular; they believe(d) that it is shared. Given the high male mortality, the belief in shared paternity, and the resulting polyandry, increases the likelihood there will be some “fathers” around to care for “their” children.

Is polyandry right, or wrong?

Mormonism claims a divine diktat for polygamy. Religious freedom in the US goes a long way, but it doesn’t go that far (isolated areas of the four-corners area notwithstanding). It is easy to make a material consequences argument against polygamy. It is, however, impossible to argue divine will as a tie breaker with a Mormon polygamist.

That impossibility is enough to torpedo objective morality (although I’m happy to entertain a reasoned argument why not.)

In case that isn’t reason enough, consider this entirely plausible thought experiment: A plague sweeps across the US, killing 75% of the male population, but leaving the female population untouched.

How long do you think polygamy is going to remain “wrong?”

Of course results can never occupy such a role since they are themselves amoral.

Yes, results are amoral. But human nature is neither empty, nor random. It is the human response to results that is the basis of what we consider “right” and “wrong.”

Again your hatred of christianity and indeed of Christ is showing. You have a serious problem.

That conclusion is fallacious. If you can demonstrate that the tenets Communism doesn’t accord better with Christ’s teachings than market capitalism, then I shall apologize for being wrong on the facts.

Rather, it is an analytical argument that claims of possessing objective morality are simply wrong. All such claims are comprehensively dismantled by studying the basis for any specific set of claims, the irreconcilable contradictions between competing claims, and the fluidity of claims over time.

My argument stands, or falls, on its internal coherence and its proper use of evidence. Nothing I have written here can by any stroke of the imagination be taken as a hatred for Christ or Christianity. Where I have made evidentiary mistakes, then please point them out with justification — simply citing the all purpose “context” is insufficient.

However, unless you can point out something I have written as hateful, or even derogatory, than I suggest your conclusion here is not well supported.

…Do you agree with this, or not? If you do not, then you are a claimant of another era contradicting the clear divine diktat of another era.”

As I said, you do not understand the quoted texts nor their context, nor the christian view of this.
Like I said before, you assume too much – in your despite against truth which is quite obvious here.

“Islam does not, in many respects, constitute a totally opposite morality?”

You miss the point again. Why does Islam have morality in the 1st place? And why is it’s general morality similar to every other morality in history?

Do they believe in justice, righ, wrong, mercy, truth, goodness, etc.? If so then that alone proves my point and proves you wrong.

There is the assumption of an external, true, objective Moral Law running behind everything said in this forum and behind every religion and every concept of justice. Denying it will change nothing. And every attempt you make to prove this truly “wrong” it only proves it more.

Of course in your strange and illogical view, only material results are the objective rule, so being wrong on this should not bother you since there is no material result!

You specialize in focusing on irrelevant details. You sift out a flea and swallow a wasp.

“Results. Liberal democracy, … produce vastly superior material results — the only objective rule that matters — in comparison to all other organizing principles.”

Another sifting of fleas to swallow wasps.

Why do results import if there are no objective values on real right and real wrong? What underlying rule makes material results the rule of right and wrong? You have assumed such a rule in your very statement.

Persistent self-contradiction and denial of reality is all atheism ever does.

You have merely assigned your own deemed “superior” material results the role of “higher authority” – the rule by which you judge. All while remaining blind to the underlying assumption that something makes results a rule of action!

Of course results can never occupy such a role since they are themselves amoral.

I noticed you simply ignored the rest of my arguments.

“The attendant morality is thereby deemed “good,” regardless of how many ways it, in contrast to Communism, contradicts Christ’s teachings. ”

Again your hatred of christianity and indeed of Christ is showing. You have a serious problem. You would no doubt have been one of the heralds of “Crucify him!” back in the day since he would have turned your whole philosophy on it’s dirty little butt with one or two sentences.

You keep bringing in Christ, the bible and christians and seek to dismantle them with ill fashioned reasonings. I could refer to some good psy’s if you like?

On such a view, God’s commands may be objectively good, yet our reasoning would be unable to access the necessity or goodness as such of those commands.

There are several problems here. First, you have no means of determining how your conception is more objectively true than a competing conception.

But even more importantly, your conception removes from humanity any possibility of comprehending what that morality might be, which would seem to reduce its effectiveness a bit, don’t you think?

That is false. There is such a thing as objective morality, as right and wrong, good and evil. The fact that you have talked yourself out of acknowledging such things is irrelevant.

Okay, prove it. Provide to me the objective morality, and demonstrate how to assert its truth value in comparision to competing objective moralities.

I never said there was. My clear point is there is no such thing as objective morality, and claiming that the invocation of divine diktat provides it is simply illusory.

That is false. There is such a thing as objective morality, as right and wrong, good and evil. The fact that you have talked yourself out of acknowledging such things is irrelevant.

Sure there is. You look at each revealed religion. Does the Holy book stand up to the various tests? It is historically true? Is it true in what it says of other things?

The Bible fares no less well in this respect than the Q’uran. You cannot use the Bible to dissuade a devout Muslim about Allah’s intent for the ummah. You can’t even use the Bible to adjudicate competing claims within the Bible. Is it moral to follow God’s direction and murder apostates evangelizing Jews? If not, why not?

As for the so-called “Euthyphro Dilemma”- this has been answered, and I think successfully by many. Here are just 1 example:

I have never seen it answered (and, unfortunately, your link didn’t work). Either we have an inborn moral compass, in which case God is not required for morality, or God is required, and our notions of right and wrong are wholly subject to God’s whim.

Meaning it is moral to beat disobedient women, or murder evangelizing apostates, simply because God says so.

The alternative to acknowledging an inborn moral compass is perilously close to asserting The Good German defense.

And sure there’s a way to decide which knowledge of God is the proper knowledge. Clearly LDS doesn’t stand the test, as the empirical claims made by the founders were wrong.

No, there isn’t.

Sorry, I’m wrong. There is: material consequences. The material consequences of Ferdinand and Isabella expelling the Jews proved their particular knowledge of God, no matter upon which part of the Bible it was based, was “wrong” because it didn’t work.

Fundamentalist Islam, although it closely hews to the Q’uran, is “wrong” because it doesn’t work.

Similarly with respect to the Bible. Our contemporary moral code would scarcely be recognizable to those who lived by the Bible five hundred years ago, and would, in many respects, be repellant to Jesus himself. Unfortunately, if we were to all live by Jesus’ teachings, we would quickly propel our society straight back to the stone age.

Claims to use any instance of a god to substantiate a particular moral conclusion are doomed to failure wherever they contradict another such claim. Absent the evidence of material consequences, you have plumbed the depths of moral relativism, because you have absolutely no leverage over the other equally committed believer.

The fact is- we’re still left with this…if man is mere chemicals, chemicals know not right nor wrong.

That statement is devoid of meaning.

Chemicals can neither know, experience, nor remember anything. Yet somehow we have knowledge, experiences and memories.

So to somehow conclude that a whole clearly greater than the sum of its parts is incapable of having inborn mental constructs that lead to the ability to ascertain “right” from “wrong” requires completely ignoring all the other components of humanity (and life in general).

We’re still back to the claim that what is good is “what works” or what the majority agrees is right. It seems to me that the majority of people in the United States have no problem with sex before marriage, but I think it’s wrong, because the Word says it’s wrong. Reason tells me that this is good practice…if everyone followed this moral dictate- there’d be no AIDS. The one way to wipe out AIDS?

You have completely contradicted yourself in the space of one sentence. Even if the Word had never been uttered, you would still conclude pre-marital sex is wrong, because it doesn’t work, and if the Word subsequently came out telling you pre-marital sex was OK, would you then suddenly change your mind?

Further, this substantiates what I have said above. Our societal attitude towards pre-marital sex is different than it was fifty years ago, because it “works” in ways that were impossible before reliable birth control. Now you, or I, may dislike that change, or find it completely immoral, but that doesn’t alter my point in the least.

Pre-marital sex is tolerated now because, for most people, it works better than the absence of pre-marital sex.

There’s also still NO objectivity to your “morality” explained above. Agreeing that something is right doesn’t make it objective. Objective is empirical- it leaves out all emotion.

I never said there was. My clear point is there is no such thing as objective morality, and claiming that the invocation of divine diktat provides it is simply illusory. And your last sentence seems like it could have benefitted from some reflection. Until we enlist Mr. Spock to make our moral judgments, or until we all become Spock, divorcing emotion from moral judgments makes no more sense than separating fish from water.

What compels us to do right or wrong? Laws? Punishment by the police? Why not gather together to form a society with no laws, no police, no punishment. Every man for himself. Why care if your ulitmate destiny is wormfood in a mere 30, 40, 50 yrs?

Humans are social animals. How would a society based wholly on self-centered hedonism fare against a more prudent society? More fundamentally, you are posing a self-defeating situation: humans that are irrevocably social will somehow suddenly decide to act in such a way as to completely forfeit all the benefits of society?