I really like the way Jmike put it at 20:40 in this show
In 1 Samuel 15:3, when god commands the Amelekites to be–infants to be slaughtered, that would be “good” under your view. That would be a good thing. So long as it’s commanded by the thing–that’s not morality at all, that’s obedience. There’s nothing there about what someone should or should not do. The moral facts can just change on a whim. I don’t understand this high ground of morality from theists when theirs is so vacuous and devoid of anything intrinsic to the actual actions. It’s actually an extrinsic thing. What makes, like, throwing someone off a building “wrong” is if god puts this extrinsic notion that it’s wrong, this command, not that the intrinsic action had anything to do with it, right? It’s so divorced from how we actually deal with ethics. So I don’t get this move of putting the theist at this high moral ground, I dont get it.
From a religious viewpoint, I believe that many theists would would say that their god is perfect and the standard of morality to which everything is compared. Should something waver from this standard, it is immoral. A theist that believes in an unchanging god might then reason that a non theist, or a thiest that believes in a god that changes or is not eternal in its attributes, is not capable of operating under a seperate moral code because their code would be subject to change as they or their god changes. One is capable of acting morally if their actions fall under the fixed code, but their actions would not be moral because of their own seperate code, but because they coincide with the higher code.
Looking back to the example given from 1 Samuel, a Christian would likely reason that the actions of the Hebrew army were moral because punishment of “evil”, as defined by their god, is a moral action. Things are very rarely black and white. While most would say that killing, for example, is not good, it can be justified and moral should the conditions satisfy the proper conditions.
If absolutely any theist I know tells me that it is okay to murder an innocent child because their parents belong to a region that treated your people badly, and because someone said that God said to, I would cut that monster out of my life faster than I typed this comment.
Again, it isn’t a moral framework to say “whatever God says to do is good.” That’s just obedience. It says nothing about the morality of any given action, and provides us with no framework on which to build our moral code. It’s just saying “that guy said he wants these kids dead, so the right thing to do is kill these kids.” Absolutely hideous.
The religious are over represented in prisons.
Lot of good that religious moral compass did them
Or are all those who spread terror and hatred for religious reasons simply not religious enough. Of course, religion does not necessarily have to degenerate into violence, but it is not at all suitable as a measure of morality, as history shows us.