Objective Morality

[Neverlandrut]

From what I've heard, many creatures have an Innate sense of fairness. There is disagreement over what is fair some times. Cooperative behavior gives an evolutionary advantage. The "you scratch my back, I scratch yours" concept, for example, leads to a better chance of survival. I suppose "morality" is an advanced and complex form of social cooperation.

[Ousian]

No such thing as objective morality. The "objective morality" that christian teaches are just subjective morality. God kills so many people and that is wrong. And why he continue to do it? because he is evil.

Careful.  It's important to distinguish between mankind's morals and God(s)'s morals.  Just because something is "evil" for us doesn't mean it necessarily is so for a deity who created the morals to begin with.  If one presumes God(s)'s existence, you can't presume God is limited by the own morality he is literally the definition of.  This is called divine command theory: whatever God does is morally good because he did it and he is good.  It's all to easy for us atheists to come around and point out all the atrocities God did in the OT and call him "evil," when that statement makes no sense because we are comparing the literal definition of morality to our own limited ethical code.  

 

This is what really sucks about debating about God.  God, by definition of what a "god" is, operates outside morals, ethics, science, time, even logic and reason in some religious apologetics, and so using any of those to try and disprove him is rather dangerous: you can't hold the creator to the standards of his creation.  The best we can do is compare our moral code (10 commandments, golden rule, etc.) to the ambiguous moral nature of God himself, and make the case that we are more moral by our own social standards than God is.  

 

In fact, God really has no moral limits.  He isn't a moral being in the way we are because he is the definition of what "good" is, and really has no limits to what he can do and still call it "good."  What is "good" for God and what is "good" for human beings are two very different things.  God has his own moral code (which is unbounded considering he is both perfect and omnipotent by nature) and human beings have their own moral code given by God but not represented by God.

 

The nice repercussion of this is that any Christian who tries to justify morality as being representative of God's nature is unsounded in his reasoning because God's moral code is nonexistant; the only moral code humans have is what God gives to them, not what he represents.

[Ousian]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned John Locke yet.  His implicit definition of morals is rooted in reason.  According to Locke, it is up to each individual to determine using reason what is good and what is bad.  This becomes problematic because it is clearly subjective, and hence society comes into play.

 

However, this explanation becomes interesting when you look at the issue of Cain and Abel.  Why did Cain know it was bad to kill?  Nobody had done it before, nobody had even died to our knowledge, and nobody had explicitly or implicitly told him not to.  However, he immediately fled because he knew people would want to kill him in revenge, despite nothing of the sort having ever happened before.  

 

Cain predates the 10 commandments by thousands of years, yet "thou shalt not murder" was still clear as day to him.  Anybody who tries to justify their morality with the ten commandments is really making things incredibly difficult for themselves.  The ten commandments don't include quite a number of things (rape, incest, slavery) and were remarkably limited in scope (until the NT, at least).  Mankind would have had to existed thousands of years without them, and even after they came around only one secluded culture had access to them.  It should be fairly self-evident that morals are not literally handed down to mankind and rather implicit in human nature (e.g. Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve recognizing nakedness, etc.).  One could argue that they are instilled in man by God, but this is completely speculative and really just a desperate attempt at satisfying unfulfilled confirmation bias.  The Bible is less a source of morality than the Book of the Dead (which had a much more exhaustive list of Do's and Dont's). 

[Orbit]

The Code of Hammurabi was centuries before the OT, and has the same basic things as the 10 Commandments. It was secular, and was a basis for morality. Christians seem unaware of its existence. And unlike the 10 Commandments, you can see it, and I have. It's in the basement of the Louvre museum in Paris.

[Aries256]

actually from my observation, and also reading the buybull xtians and xtianity is mostly immoral, and vile. Creating, and causing some of the most horrible atrocities known to mankind, and the instructions to do so is point blank in the buybull. One does not need a crock of bullshit to be moral, or good. If one does then they are mentally weak.