…Church Was On the Wrong Side, As Usual
http://www.theguardian.com/global/live/2015/may/23/counting-underway-for-irelands-referendum-on-marriage-equality
Ireland becomes first country to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote
Irish voters have decisively voted in favour of marriage equality, making Ireland the first country to do so through the ballot box. Only one of the 43 constituencies voted against the proposal – Roscommon-South Leitrim – while the yes vote exceeded 70% in many parts of Dublin. The no campaigners have paid tribute to their opponents, and the archbishop of Dublin has said the result should be a wake-up call for the Catholic church in Ireland.
[title shortened by Lizzie]
hotshoe said:
Unfortunately, if there is no objective good that morality must refer to, then all of the above is, categorically speaking, equally moral, because “good” is whatever a group thinks it is. Your moral outrage and condemnation is not logically derivable from subjective morality.
How convenient.
Why should anyone take your assumptions seriously?
Rumraket said:
Well, maybe to see if the logic that extends from those assumptions is sound, and to see if those assumptions are logically necessary as grounds to establish rational coherence between belief and behavior?
But then, I don’t expect anyone here to take anything I say seriously.
Rumraket said:
No, it wasn’t a convenient assumption. It was a necessary assumption. I wasn’t a theist prior to adopting that assumption, but there was no logical way around it. It was a necessary assumption in order to accommodate a meaningful, non-subjective moral system. I was basically amoral at the time.
Ignoring another thing, too. Ignoring the fact that Catholics are quite cheerfully depriving thousands of such cute toddlers of their mothers by denying abortion even when the mother’s life is in immediate danger, when the fetus is dead or dying, and when the woman already has children at home who desperately want and need her to live to continue mothering them. That cute toddler needs her mom “for life”? No, they don’t believe that at all. They believe “To hell with the born children, to hell with the mothers, to hell with women.” All that matters are the fetal cells, and (presumably) the souls saved for god.
The reason why Ireland’s maternal healthcare isn’t recognized for the death-risk that it is, is because England and safe abortion is available [at some cost] just across the
channelIrish Sea. [edit for correction supplied by Alan Fox, thanks! ]Tee hee. I bet you say such cute things to all the girls.
Though that option comes at a cost that not all can afford.
(Nitpick – the Irish Sea separates Ireland from Britain; the Channel is between Britain and mainland Europe.)
Oops, yeah, you’re right. I meant the Irish Sea, and yeah, it’s not as if travel has no cost in money (or time) for Irish women who need an abortion. Some women can’t manage travel at all, because they’re already too ill, and those are the most vulnerable to the illegitimate Catholic healthcare.
But I think I shouldn’t derail my thread more than I already have. I keep seeing reminders of the joyous celebrations from Dublin yesterday. Love wins, this time!
hotshoe_,
Not at all. Thankfully, no: their particular lunacies are of other kinds.
RDE: “…and the State must not legalize wrong choices because at the end every choice will become acceptable, even pederasty if it is conditional.”
People make wrong choices all the time. That is called free will. I believe that is fundamental to your faith.
It is attitudes like yours that drove one of the people who had a huge role in shortening the Second World War to committing suicide because he was persecuted for being gay.
Why are these issues on a origins forum? It implies evolutionism is part of a bigger agenda eh.
anyways.
\Yes the decisions on gay marriage should be only up to the people of a nation. IN Canada/America they try to do it with dictatorship from the courts. Immoral and illegal and breaking contract with the people on how they are governed ala John Locke.
Ireland never gets anything right. However if the people decide they the people can decide against and Pro-moral marriage folks can strive to persuade enough.
God and mankind has settled forever that only marriage between opposite sexes is moral and beautiful.
If pro gay strived to persuade enough people then simply reverse it by persuasion.
The beauty and cuteness of a man marrying a woman is made ugly by same sex marriage being allowed.
Europe seems to be more that way. However votes have gone against gay marriage in America and right away they are made illegal by Judges.
America and canada are where it matters.
In both cases the people are denied the right to decide this historic right to decide their marriage customs.
Anyways Ireland once again must free themselves from wrong ideas.
I would not be alive if it were not for Alan Turing (and the men and women who worked with him to decode the German messages).
My father didn’t get shipped overseas until right before Germany fell. If not for Alan Turing’s work, Dad would have arrived to fight in some German territory flush with many more German victories, and to fight on the side of Allies weakened that much more by unstopped German aggressions. Even if Dad had lived — and that was a fair likelihood, most did — he would not have been shipped back to the states so soon; he would have been in for the duration of a grinding and maybe unwinnable war. He would never have arrived at school in time to meet my mother.
Of course I also owe my existence to Churchill, and Roosevelt, and the skipper of the troop transport, and the sailors … and an infinitely complex network of causation. But what slays me is that we remembered and honored all of those men, the leaders, the veterans, but Turing’s story was kept secret as if it were dirty. As if his accomplishments were not just war secrets – which would have been declassified and shown to the public eventually — but dirty secrets, contaminated by the stupid charge of sexual deviancy. So English bigotry deprived us not only of Turing himself (and god only know what miracles he might have worked in computing, once the electronic technology started to catch up with his brain) but also deprived us of the chance to honor his legacy as a hero.
It’s true what they say: religion poisons everything. A decent people, a civilized nation, don’t hate and criminalize homosexuality except when they’re poisoned by religion. Even the mild-mannered CofE is a stain upon the planet.
hotshoe_,
I think you should replace the words “catholic church” with society, and then Lizzie can be perfectly happy with any decision the society make about what girls can and can not do.
hotshoe_,
What’s wrong with bigotry if the society debates it and decides it useful?
I can’t understand the scope of your question until you give me an example of some society openly debating bigotry with all adults participating fully and honestly in the debate and still ending up deciding that bigotry is “useful”?
What’s your example of this ever happening?
hotshoe_,
You have never heard of Jim Crow laws?
Study up and get back to me.
RB: “The beauty and cuteness of a man marrying a woman is made ugly by same sex marriage being allowed.”
It is this argument, and others similar to this, that I don’t understand. How is my marriage made any less meaningful because we allow same sex couples to Marry? Anyone who thinks this must have a low opinion of their own marriage to start with. I have been married for over thirty years. Even if we opened up marriage to inanimate objects, my marriage would be just as strong.
That doesn’t tell me I should take your assumption that your god’s standard is a good one, seriously, at all.
If you’re going to assume that right out the gate, why not just become full-blown presuppositionalist and just assume everything you want to believe? Why bother with logic in the first place?
Assuming god is a good god is a necessary assumption for what?
You assume the very basis of your morality to begin with, in order words, the accusation you erect against atheistic moral systems you’re guilty of yourself. You have simply defined, according to your subjective whim, what is good. God’s nature is good. This was just assumed by you for no reason.
That’s actually fine with me, you are welcome to assume that, just as I’m welcome to assume that what is good is determined by how it affects human wellbeing. Both of these methods are ultimately based on a subjective assumption. You’ve solved nothing, you’re doing the exact same thing you scold “materialists” for.
What’s worse is you can’t even objectively determine what god’s nature or moral standard is supposed to be. All you can do is offer subjective interpretations of scripture, or even worse, relay your entirely subjective intuitions about what you “feel” is right or wrong.
What have you solved then? Nothing. Your entire position regarding your percieved failues of atheistic moral systems collapses under hyprocrisy. Your system is guilty of the same fundamentally subjective-based assumption.
Now you might say that god has some particular nature, and that if this can be determined, we have some “objective standard” against which to base our actions. But the same is true in the atheistic system. Human beings have a particular nature, there are objective facts to discover about how actions affect human wellbeing. In fact on that account the atheistic system is superior, because human wellbeing is extremely easy to investigate, whereas god seems to hide all the time.
Or maybe what makes Lizzie(actually myself in this case)happy with decisions society makes is how it affects happiness and wellbeing of all the people in society, not what the catholic church declares it says in old fables.
You poor dumb goose.
Jim Crow laws were NOT “society openly debating bigotry with all adults participating fully and honestly in the debate”. All adults, not just the white male ones.
I’m sure you honestly believe that you’re responding sincerely, so the problem must simply be that you have a learning disability or some medical condition that prevents you from reading simple words. Simple words like “all” are apparently beyond you.
It’s always been obvious that complicated words like “society” are beyond your understanding.
Maybe you should study second-grade reading before you advise me to study up on Jim Crow laws.
hotshoe_,
What are you talking about, the majority decided! Black people could talk about it all they wanted. What stopped the blacks from debating. The laws were debated all the time. Black leaders questioned them. Newspapers wrote editorials about them. The civil rights act of 1875 was a direct response to those laws.
You are not only ignorant when it comes to logic, apparently also when it comes to history. The morality of the laws was debated all the time.
Now if you are arguing that the blacks didn’t have equal power to apply their opinions, well, right sure. So what? Where do you get this concept that everyone should have equal power. That sounds totally objective. Almost like its a given that to have morality, you must have equality. How weird.
I can’t imagine how your materialist worldview came to that conclusion.
walto,
Indeed, though I’ve long since given up on trying to persuade anyone here that (a) “objective” and “absolute” are not synonymous, equivalent, or coextensive; hence (b) “relative” neither entails nor is entailed by “subjective”; and consequently (c) there is no incompatibility in treating our knowledge of a domain of inquiry as both objective and relative.
As my various attempts over the years to make this point have fallen on deaf ears, I’ve given up trying.
Interesting OP.
Voters in Ireland did the popular thing, defined as, more voted for than against.
Therefore, it was the right thing.
Backwards, Mung, backwards as the church (as usual)
It’s always been the right thing to allow love to legally flourish. Something you christians are always harping on about: love your neighbor, god is all-loving, you should always be a walking example of god’s love. Peculiar, very peculiar, isn’t it, that you suddenly decide to mock the Irish people for believing that love is the right thing.
Since allowing love is the right thing, of course all decent people hoped that it would win the popular vote. But it wasn’t sure; the malign influence of the dishonest church could have made the right thing unpopular. Hence our rejoicing when it turned out that the voters did choose the right thing after all.
It’s the right thing.
Therefore, it’s the popular vote (thank god!)
See, Mung, backwards from what you said.
Yeah, gee, how weird, almost as if to have a moral society, you must have marriage equality. Imagine that! Just what the topic of this thread said all along: we finally have righted the previous moral failing of Ireland with a recognition of inherent equality.
I can’t imagine how your religious supposedly-objective good-god worldview ever came to the conclusion that it was okay to be bigoted against homosexuality and deny the equality of love to all of “god’s children”.
Well, neither can I, but I can certainly imagine how a materialist could come to the conclusion that its ok to be bigoted.
I just use Lizzies logic; if the society debates and decides, it must be right. I am sure Lizzie thinks its fine that woman don’t drive or swim in Saudia Arabia, because of course she is always consistent in her philosophy, right?
Wait, by “neither can I” do you mean that you DON’T SEE how your religious worldview can ever support being bigoted? Do you mean that YOU, personally, AREN”T bigoted against homosexuality like so many of your co-religious buddies?
Well, in that case, what the fuck is your problem here? Why the hell aren’t you rejoicing that all the “materialists” and at least some “religionists” have joined forces to bring Ireland into the light? I mean, you don’t have to agree that we’re doing it for the “right” reason (for your objectively-moral reason, that is) to still have the decent human reaction and congratulate everyone on their cooperation in getting the right thing done.
No one has to behave like a dick all the time. Honestly, it’s okay for you to act like mr. nice guy for a few minutes a night. God won’t mind. God might even like you better if you set a better example of christian niceness instead of sarcasm and meanness all the time.
It isn’t an “origins forum”.
Well, you could consider the possiblity that you might be mistaken.
You could also try to parse your own posts and check whether they actually make sense.
Yes indeed 🙂
In that case, and, contrary to your inference, I am really trying to understand you William, what on earth do you mean by: “Theism is the only source of an absolute, objective morality.”?
Murray has been quite clear (I think) in claiming that epistemic and ethical norms must themselves be grounded in something external to human life. For while our norms do indeed constrain our actions, what constrains the norms? And while the norms constitute what counts as a wise, prudent, virtuous, or just action, what determines if the norms themselves are the right norms? Must the norms conform to a ground transcendent to them in order for the norms to authoritative and binding for us?
There’s a deep and pervasive gap, accompanied by mutual unintelligibility, between those who answer those questions in the affirmative — call them “Platonists” — and those who answer those questions in the negative –call them “pragmatists”. To Platonists, pragmatism looks like nihilism; to pragmatists, Platonism looks like mysticism.
As one of those voters, please understand that my view – and that of the great majority of others who agreed with me – has never been that simplistic.
Rights, in a liberal democracy, are assured at the widest level of application and the minimal level of restriction. The choice of those levels should be informed by an understanding of capacity and potential consequences. In the absence of good reasons not to permit same-sex couples to marry, it is unjust to deny persons that right. In a world that stigmatises gay people simply for being gay, there is a moral argument in favour of taking a step that sends a strong normative message: in terms of their capacity and their ability to contribute to society as married people, these persons are no different from anyone else.
This was not a fashion statement. It was not a matter of ‘liking’ something trendy on social media. This was a considered response to a long-standing injustice.
Yet he balks at calling them “god-given” while claiming “theism” as the only “source” and refuses to give any methodology by which these “correct” norms can be accessed that is not identical to secular methodology.
We cannot check that our norms “conform to a ground transcendent to them” without making deeply subjective judgments about the nature of that ground. So the whole notion of theism being a source of “objective morality” fails, because theism itself is subjective.
I don’t think that is the relevant gap here. I’d be happy to hear a platonic argument from William, if that’s the case he wants to put. I’m happy to make the assumption, as I’ve said, that there exists some ideal set of norms that would, if we knew what they were, tell us what actions are good and what actions are not.
But without a method of accessing them, it’s useless, and even if it were not, it would have bugger all to do with theism.
hotshoe_,
Why is it “good” that gays can marry again?
hotshoe
Therefor they don’t have a physical problem, its all about choices.
If something is important it doesn’t mean it is big in size. Homosexuals hurt themselfs and they spread diseases since anal sex is the most dangerous type of sex on earth, sodomy (both in straight and gays) is responsible for all the sexual diseases on earth.
God exists because Randomness Nothingness and Luck doesn’t exist. If God doesn’t exist the Universe came out of Nothingness, assembled itself through Randomness and we are here due to Luck, can you prove it please?
First of all the Vatican state has the smallee persentage of
pederasty in the whole world, that shows that religion leads to humility and opresses sick desires.
Whoever protects the devil he will go to Hell with him, no matter what job he hold on earth, a Christian is the one that follows Christ as a way of life not someone that puts a robe. You seem to live in the Pagan Roman Empire where the Cesar was divine, no….no human alive is sinless.
,
Who told you that Free Will equals goodness?
Christianity is about us not God, we care about these children therefor God cares, we are the images of God not separated entities. We are equal with God in understanding and behavior.
On Atheism there is no way to say that children suffered since suffering can’t be shown on matter.
No objective basis for morality exists on Atheism.
LOL! Good one! The people that made Africa and other countries starve to death care about the little children HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA
You have been brainwashed. They hate Christianity because it is the Truth and goes against their plans about pan-religion and globalization, that’s why they don’t care etc about pederasty in atheistic states which the numbers are really higher. During the time of the USSR pederasty climbed at 12%.
Can you prove me that you are a random cosmic accident that nothingness spewed without free will or purpose?
There is no reason for gay people to get married.
Same reason as it’s good that straight people can marry, phoodoo. There’s no reason why the right to marry the person you love should be restricted to straight people is there?
It makes them happy while hurting noone. That’s basically it.
Where on earth did you get that idea?
What is true is that multiple sexual partners increases the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. But that is usually advanced as an argument FOR marriage, not against it.
William J. Murray,
The Brick Wall Has Spoken:
(My emphasis).
Imagine the following characters floating above my head:
???
I think I’ll pass on reading the rest of the thread; this is getting tiresome.
Rumraket said:
For a morality worth caring about.
No, not to begin with. Remember I said it was a logical necessity. This means that after I began to examine the concept of morality and compared it to how I and every other sane person actually behaved, the only logically viable answer was that if morality did not refer to some objective commodity, then morality didn’t exist as anything substantially different from “because I say so, because I can”. To escape that logical consequence, morality had to be objective (real, independent of individual human mind) in nature. For morality to have that quality, it had to refer to a universal purpose, because oughts only refer to purposes or goals. Therefore, the existence had to be created for a purpose in order for there to exist universal oughts – a creator god, of some sort, imbuing creation with intent/purpose.
So no, that assumption did not come first; what came first was the logical examination of the the evidence (how people actually behaved and argued about morality) and the arguments thereof, which logically led back to the necessary, grounding assumption.
No, I haven’t defined what is good. What is good is available through conscience. I have accepted that the necessary source for an objective good would necessarily be an intentional, purposeful entity that created our universe/existence. It is, as I said, a necessary assumption.
Not at all. Ultimately, all of our worldviews depend upon some unprovable assumptions. I don’t scold anyone for anything, and certainly not for assuming things. What I point out is that their actual behavior cannot be logically derived from their worldview assumptions. IOW, assuming that morality is subjective is fine, if you actually behave in logical accordance with that assumption. I’ve actually told a couple of people here that I have no argument with them on certain issues because they have admitted what the logical consequences are of subjective materialism in those situations.
All experience is perceived and interpreted subjectively. Even science. Once again, it all depends on your assumptions. You assume, for instance, that conscience is an entirely subjective feeling. I do not. I assume it is a sensory capacity because my relationship with what my conscience says is much more like my relationship with my physical senses. It tells me what I must do, not what I feel like doing – what I must do even if I don’t want to, and don’t feel like it.
When my conscience perceives a serious immoral occurrence, the process is much like watching someone about to step off a cliff – I must intervene, even if it puts my own safety or comfort at risk. If I disobey my conscience, I can be deeply wounded and carry scars for the rest of my life. It is not at all like other internal preferences and feelings; it is much, much more like I am sensing an actual, real thing that I must react to even in spite of my preferences.
But still, either way, it’s an assumption for both of us about what conscience is sensing. However, the way we act according to conscience is in accordance with the idea that it is sensing an objective moral landscape we must take into account, and is not in accordance with the idea that it is a strongly felt personal preference.
That would be true if my problem with atheistic morality was that they simply assumed that morality was subjecitve; it is not. My problem is that they do not act in accordance with that assumption and its logical entailments/ramifications.
Your error in thinking here is that you are sneaking in an objective form of morality by definitional fiat – that it definitionally has to do with “human wellbeing” in the first place, and how you would characterize “human wellbeing” in the second place. There are several billion people on the planet that would take issue with that definitional fiat. Your are attempting to objectify your admittedly subjective concept of what morality is, demonstrating my point: you cannot live with the logical consequences of what morality necessarily is under materialism and subjective morality.
Human wellbeing is “extremely easy to investigate”? Who’s idea of “human well being” do you employ in this investigation? The Christian concept? Muslim? Hindu? Atheist? Humanist? KKK? Nazi? Black Panther? Or, are you willing to impose your personal concept of what morality means – “human wellbeing” – and your personal concept of what version of “human wellbeing” should refer to – and impose that system on everyone else because you feel like it, because you can?
No good person lives by the norms when they perceive via conscience that a thing is wrong. Indeed, this is the root of how norms, wrt morality, change. Without something transcendent to norms, how can we call those who defied the norms at great risk to themselves “good”? A norm-based morality can’t.
EL said:
I balk at your constant re-phrasing because I have no idea what you mean by them. I don’t know what you mean by “god-given”. Do you mean god setting up the rules and giving them to us of what is good and what is not? If so, that is not what I mean. God doesn’t “set up the rules” of what is good and then “gives them to us”. God is good, and that good quality is necessarily imbued in whatever god creates, and we have the sensory capacity to perceive it.
Second, I have never argued that the methodology between this version of theistic morality was different from any particular secular version. In fact, I’ve said repeatedly that even so-called moral subjectivists, atheists and materialists often actually use the same methodology (sometimes, however, they put too much emphasis on empathy, and not enough on conscience in their arguments) and achieve good moral results. I’ve repeatedly said that the problem is that materialists do not act in accordance with their premise because they treat the information that comes from their methodology as if it is universally applicable instead of being subjective preferences and feelings.
That’s where the problem begins for materialists; once you experience that a thing is wrong via conscience, what now? How do you categorize that “wrongness”? What does it logically indicate via the lens of your worldview? How do you justify imposing it on others, if it is ultimately nothing more than your personal preference (even if shared with many others) about how humans “should” behave?
You cannot derive “The Irish Did The Right Thing” from subjective morality unless you also would have said they did the right thing had they done the opposite. You can only say “The Irish Did What I Preferred They Do”, because the “rightness” of their action was entirely subjective under materialism.
Well, only if you consider logic “deeply subjective”. One can use logic to locate the transcendent premises necessary to govern norms. Unless norms are informed by something absolute, then norms dictate what is right, and if the norm is “kill all the jews” or “burn all the witches” or “lobotomize all the gays and lesbians”, then by definition those things are “good” and “right”, and then by definition any attempt to change the norm or act in defiance of it is wrong and evil.
Are you really willing to embrace a morality where hiding Ann Frank and her family can be correctly identified as an evil thing because those are the norms of the society at the time? Or where tossing infants off a cliff is a moral good? Or where treating gays and lesbians for their “sickness” is a good thing?
Sorry, but no good person lives by the norms when they perceive via conscience that a thing is wrong. They will act in defiance of the group, the community, the society, and the culture, even to their own peril, and we love and honor them for it, and often call them the most good of all of us. A norm-based morality cannot call these people good, because they defied the norms of the time. Logically, they were evil.
How does a norm-based morality accommodate a good person acting in defiance of evil norms?
Sigh. Everything, ultimately, is received, processed, interpreted and categorized subjectively, EL. Even empirical science. It’s the problem of Plato’s Cave.
What’s at issue is not what is objective or subjective, but rather if how we have organized and labeled what we experience with those terms matches how we act. In the case of morality, do we act in accordance with how we have categorized and labeled it? For materialists, the answer is “no”. For theists, the answer is “yes”, even if their brand of theism has other problems which must be sorted out logically.
Kantian Naturalist,
I think you are being somewhat unfair. I have repeatedly pointed out that subjectivism /= relativism, to the extent of reducing it to that very slogan to save typing the longer argument out over and over and over. It goes nowhere with those taking the stock theistic ‘objectivist’ position, but as ‘anyone here’ must include people on both sides, I resent the application of a broad brush.
…. but why anyone in their right mind would actually want to get married is way beyond me. 🙂
(Just don’t tell the missus I said this!)
KN said:
I appreciate that.
Exactly. And, what gives us the authority to act in defiance of those norms, to consider them “wrong” or “evil”? If it is subjective feelings or preferences, then it is not “norms” at all that define what is good or evil for any of us under materialism/moral subjectivism, but our personal feelings or preferences, and all the talk of “norms” is just a smokescreen to hide the fact that you will behave however you feel like behaving whether it conforms to norms or not.
The only other direction to go is up – as you say, norms must answer to something more authoritative than norms, something that transcends norms, and we must have a means of perceiving whatever that “more authoritative” thing is and be able to judge norms by that higher standard. Otherwise, we’re just doing whatever we feel like doing.
In practice, yes, they must conform to a ground transcendent to them or else will will – rightfully – defy those norms. Norms are not binding when we perceive them to be wrong; but, under materialism/moral subjectivism, how can we perceive a norm-based moral right to be wrong?
I don’t think that admitting what is logically necessary in order to explain behavior is “mysticism”, but rather it is simply a practical matter. Why is it practical to avoid assuming the transcendent if not assuming it destroys the logic of your pragmatism and results in your behavior not being in accordance with your views?
It seems to me that the avoidance of assuming the transcendent, and a means of accessing it, isn’t rooted in pragmatism at all, but rather in an emotional commitment against such things. If it is pragmatic to assume god exists to ground a transcendent good that even norms must abide, why not just friggin assume it?
That’s exactly what I did, and why I did it. I realized I was just resisting an assumption necessary to explain moral behavior because I didn’t personally like the assumption and what else it might entail. Resisting a necessary assumption because one doesn’t like it isn’t pragmatism at all. The practical thing to do is just make the necessary assumption.
That doesn’t mean your assumed god is the same god anyone else believes in; it just means that some kind of god is necessary to ground a transcendent good, even if all god is, essentially, is that transcendent good we can access via our conscience.
I’d go much further — without a way of explaining our mode of cognitive access to a transcendent ground (as both Plato and Aristotle provided), merely positing such a ground is epistemically on a par with fictions. So I’m not willing to grant the metaphysical point without the right kind of epistemology to back it up.
Well, I think that’s what I’m saying. Although not having the vocabulary, I can’t be sure!
Clearly not as I have demonstrated. There are plenty of objective facts not rooted in god’s nature.
For example: Human nature.
No, not opinion. Nature. Human beings have a nature.
That is straight up nonsensical. In so far as human beings have a nature, that nature is objectively their nature, so there’s no reason to base morality on something external to human beings. We, just like you assert about your god, can’t change our fundamental nature. It is objectively what it is.
That simply doesn’t follow. There is no reason, if all you want is your morality to be based on an objective standard, why it must be based on something external to human nature. As already argued.
For all your talk about logic you’re remarkably poor at using it.
Please derive me some moral oughts from some property of god, using deductive logic.
You’ve studied any philosophy? You know it can’t be done, right?
What does that mean “imbuing”? Does god “send” purpose with “purpose beams” so it “infuses” moral beings with purpose?
This is pure gibberish you’re talking. It has no meaning or content.
Those “oughts” by the way, please derive them.
Then do it, construct your morality using deductive logic. You’ve used that word a lot now, “logic”. Time to actually use logic properly. With deductive syllogisms. Lay out the premises and derive conclusions from them. I’d like to see you try.
Sure you have, you just did. That is a bona fide case of defining what is good. You’ve just done the very thing you say you didn’t do. You’ve defined what is good as “that which is available through conscience”. Please tell me how this isn’t simply a matter of convention? You now have the burden of getting other people to agree with you that the contents of their concsiences is what is good. Congratulations, you’ve made up morality in a totally arbitrary way, just like you accuse materialists of.
That’s a textbook arbitrary definition.
If we have a norm-based morality, and if the conscience is not presumed to access a basis for morality that transcends norms, how can a good person justify defying the norms in favor of their conscience?