Bob_Ag said:
This is really quite simple. Relative morality is a reductio ad absurdum argument. All you have to do is take it to its logical conclusion to see the fallacy.
If we are to individually determine what is moral, or more accurately, what is ethical, then everyone's claim is equally valid. If I say rape is good and you say rape is bad, on what basis am I wrong or you right? Without the presence of a standard, then there is no possible basis for saying what is good and what is wrong. As I mentioned previously, it is not a logical argument to say societal standards are the basis for right and wrong because they too can't be relative. Societies are often called out for war crimes or crimes against humanity, but by what basis are we able to say what they are doing is wrong?
If I have a blue lollipop and you call it purple, how do we know who is right? Well we objectively have a color spectrum of visible light and the reflection of light into our eyes allows us to objectively determine the color based not on ourselves, but on an external standard. Without that standard, there is no basis of objectively determining the color of the lollipop. Without that standard I can't tell you you are wrong.
All of your post boils down to a view that "morality must be objective, because I don't like the implications involved if that isn't true." You've done nothing to show that morality cannot be relative.
Who gets to decide what is absurd? Maybe I think its absurd for a God to send bears to murder children, or to tell people to stone to death heretics, adulterers, witches, and people working on the Sabbath, or annihilating a town (women and children included) for some of their sins, or drowning the entire planet (women and children included) in a flood, or killing Egyptian babies, or telling His favorite people to burn a civilization to the ground, kill all the men and children and older women, and take the younger women as sex slaves. I'll stop here, because there is no point in listing all of the horrific things that OG God apparently did. Do these set of morals not apply to us today? Maybe I think its absurd for a God to give moral direction to some people and then different moral direction to other people.
I know, I know. . . . Old Testament doesn't count, right? Lets talk about Jesus, who threatens us with eternal punishment. Maybe I think the morality of Hell is absurd. Infinite punishment for finite crimes is absurd.
And maybe I think its absurd for God to have an objective morality and to disseminate that information to a few illiterate bronze age people only in one region of the world with the hopes hat the message spreads to 30% of the world over the next few thousand years - including vast stretches of time where most of His own followers believe in and practice slavery, genocide, religious war, torture / murder of non-believers, and all forms of bigotry.
None of the above is evidence against objective morality. But it is evidence that, if objective morality, Christians haven't the slightest clue what that is. You are a man, just like me. So is every other Christian poster here. And every priest, deacon, bishop, and pope that has ever lived. None of you are God (I don't think). And I don't believe that any of you get to claim that you speak for Him either.
Yes, relativistic morality is uncomfortable. If you say rape is good and I say its bad, I have no objective external basis to tell you that you are wrong. I can make a case and argue why I think its wrong based on experience, empathy, and philosophical arguments - but you don't have to agree.
The lollipop analogy is prefect for why I believe you are wrong here. Repeatable, testable, tangible, predictable experimentation and observation will tell us the frequency of the visible light associated with the lollipop. There is no equivalent mechanism with morality. Provide for me an experiment we can (hypothetically) perform to prove what is moral or immoral - without appeal to emotion, religious moral presupposition, or opinion. One of the problems with your position, in my opinion, is that there is no reliable way to reference or receive feedback from the claimed source of objective morality. As I type this, I am imaging a Gary Larson drawn comic with God behind a kiosk and a line of people coming to ask him questions to further their understanding of right and wrong. Wouldn't that be great if we had that? But, we don't. What we do have is ancient texts, many of which we don't know the author, that were hand selected by a committee, translated, rewritten, retranslated, and that is now interpreted differently by everyone who reads them. Again, even if objective morality exists, you have zero basis for claiming to understand it.
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However, when you look at our world empirically, morality is not actually relative. There is general consensus that things are morally wrong. We all agree that rape is immoral. But that's not possible without an external objective standard. Morality can't be relative because human society can't function in that manner or it would be chaos.
Does general consensus make things morally right or wrong? This paragraph is directly contradictory to your position, no? There are things that have been generally considered moral for most of human history (including by Christians) that you think are wrong today. Is rape wrong? How can you claim that it is? God orders it to be done in Judges 21:10-24 and Numbers 31:7-18 and Deuteronomy 20:10-14 and Zechariah 14:1-2. In Deuteronomy 22:28-29 God instructs that raped women should be forced to marry their rapist. In Deuteronomy 22:23-24, a women is put to death for not yelling load enough while being raped.
Do you claim these things - these instructions from God - to be immoral?
And in your last sentence - are you seriously arguing that efficiency of societal function is a good judge of morality? How should I interpret this as anything other than brutally utilitarian?
So again, maybe objective morality exists. If it does, religion offers nothing helpful toward understanding it any any sort of absolute, repeatable, definitive way. You've just got a bunch of people that say they talk to God and they all offer a different message for us. When everyone has a different subjective opinion on what is objectively true, it sure sounds to me like we don't understand what is objectively true.
