Is morality objective or subjective?

[Atla]

God is checking on IC's progress and raising an eyebrow

[FlashDangerpants]

you couldn't care less about him? (That's the grammatically correct way to say it, by the way.)

Erm....?

Ah, you're right.

Now I'm having that iced tea anyway.

I never cared about that, I am making a point. The problem here, more or less every day, is that you are driven by a certain compulsion to condescend. And when you excercise this vile need, as you do, multiple times every day, you miss the point of our arguments.

You pay no attention because you respect nobody. Whixh is why after I wrote that I don't get my morals from atheism, you dismissed me and demanded an atheistic moral truth, even though I am also expressly telling you I don't beleive in these moral truths either.

You are a disprespectful, obnoxious nobody who only ever argues in bad faith because you don't show enough basic respect for other people to make any effort at understanding us.

[popeye1945]

This is a philosophy-Forum and the protocol and default is, those who make positive claims has the onus to prove their claim.

Then the Atheist should stop short of saying, "God doesn't exist," and stop at, "In my limited experience, I know nothing of God."

But how many Atheists do you know who are happy to be that modest and honest? Certainly not any of the well-known ones. And not any here, it would seem.

Believers should be honest and modest enough not to say they know there is a god, it works both ways, the only real possibility is, what's the probability, agnostic all the way. How likely, an anthropomorphic god?

[Immanuel Can]

The problem here, more or less every day, is that you ...

Nope. Irrelevant.

If I were Hitler himself, it would still not save Atheism. It would not make it rational, it would not make it evidentiary, and it definitely would not make it able to generate even a single moral precept.

That's the only point that really matters. Deflection notwithstanding.

[Immanuel Can]

This is a philosophy-Forum and the protocol and default is, those who make positive claims has the onus to prove their claim.

Then the Atheist should stop short of saying, "God doesn't exist," and stop at, "In my limited experience, I know nothing of God."

But how many Atheists do you know who are happy to be that modest and honest? Certainly not any of the well-known ones. And not any here, it would seem.

Believers should ...

That's an et tu quoque fallacy. Atheism's flaws are not addressed by attacking the alternatives.

[FlashDangerpants]

The problem here, more or less every day, is that you ...

Nope. Irrelevant.

If I were Hitler himself, it would still not save Atheism. It would not make it rational, it would not make it evidentiary, and it definitely would not make it able to generate even a single moral precept.

That's the only point that really matters. Deflection notwithstanding.

That is both the beginning and the end of your circular argument.

[popeye1945]

Then the Atheist should stop short of saying, "God doesn't exist," and stop at, "In my limited experience, I know nothing of God."

But how many Atheists do you know who are happy to be that modest and honest? Certainly not any of the well-known ones. And not any here, it would seem.

Believers should ...

That's an et tu quoque fallacy. Atheism's flaws are not addressed by attacking the alternatives.

No flaws, we simply do not believe you, by the way, how many gods do you not believe in, round it off to the nearest decimal point. Pout all you like about it; your religion is just silly, Silly but dangerous. We cannot afford these divisive conflicts of the retarded, when you "all have nuclear weapons, and killing for gods is still in fashion. Atheism is not a belief system; we just are not in one of the in groups, and don't cluster together for reassurance. By the way, morality is subjective until it is made manifest in the physical world by conscious subjects. This thread goes on as if there is no answer to the question, absurd.

[Immanuel Can]

Believers should ...

That's an et tu quoque fallacy. Atheism's flaws are not addressed by attacking the alternatives.

No flaws, we simply do not believe you, by the way,...

And yet, I can prove it to you beyond any reasonable doubt. I can prove Atheism isn't just "flawed," but is totally useless for morality.

All I have to do is ask you to give me one moral precept...just one...that is grounded in Atheism, and if you can do it, you win. If you can't...

You can't.

[FlashDangerpants]

Immanuel Can wasn't granted a learning disability at birth, it took decades of hard work and dedication to grow one for himself.

[Veritas Aequitas]

This is a philosophy-Forum and the protocol and default is, those who make positive claims has the onus to prove their claim.

Then the Atheist should stop short of saying, "God doesn't exist," and stop at, .."In my limited experience, I know nothing of God."

But how many Atheists do you know who are happy to be that modest and honest? Certainly not any of the well-known ones. And not any here, it would seem.

Not too sure of your point.

Generally what had been going on is, theists believe God exists as real, delivering commands & ought[s] on ALL humans and threatening non-theists are not SAVED if they do noy comply with. For some God, the command is to kill those who do not believe in God, e.g. Islam.
Obviously, theists will counter 'God doesn't exist' and thus by default and protocol [..in a philosophical sense, like here] it is the onus on the theists to prove God exists as real if they expect non-theists to comply with God's command.

As such, there is no obligation on non-theists to stop insisting 'God doesn't exist' which is a negative claim which by default has no onus to provide proof for a negative claim.
There is also no need for non-theists to state .."In my limited experience, I know nothing of God."
All a non-theists has to insist is, 'If theists claim God exists, then prove it.'

Some non-theists, e.g. me, take on the extra effort to prove it is impossible for God to exists and provide a psychological answer to why theists believe in a God that is real.
In Kant's CPR, he claimed with arguments 'Why is is impossible to prove God's existence'.
There are numerous arguments against God's existence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence ... #Arguments

[Atla]

We are born into the species with the most advanced brains in the known universe. Is it immoral to spend our lives trying to turn our brains into mashed potatoes, like IC does, instead of using them in some better way?

[Harbal]

That's an et tu quoque fallacy. Atheism's flaws are not addressed by attacking the alternatives.

No flaws, we simply do not believe you, by the way,...

And yet, I can prove it to you beyond any reasonable doubt. I can prove Atheism isn't just "flawed," but is totally useless for morality.

All I have to do is ask you to give me one moral precept...just one...that is grounded in Atheism, and if you can do it, you win. If you can't...

You can't.

Has anyone claimed that morality and atheism are connected?

[Peter Holmes]

No flaws, we simply do not believe you, by the way,...

And yet, I can prove it to you beyond any reasonable doubt. I can prove Atheism isn't just "flawed," but is totally useless for morality.

All I have to do is ask you to give me one moral precept...just one...that is grounded in Atheism, and if you can do it, you win. If you can't...

You can't.

Has anyone claimed that morality and atheism are connected?

Good question. And I think there's a reason why IC needs and wants to make the connection.

The existence or non-existence of gods has nothing to do with morality - unless you believe that moral rightness and wrongness depend on your team's god: 'if my team's god doesn't exist, then there can be no morality - no rational distinction between moral rightness and wrongness'.

That this is a form of moral subjectivism goes without saying. Theistic moral objectivism is moral subjectivism pretending not to be. A person who thinks moral rightness and wrongness depend on any agent is, by definition, not a moral objectivist. If there are moral facts, then what anyone thinks about them is irrelevant.

So IC's moral argument amounts to a special pleading fallacy.

The failure of ontological arguments for the existence of any team's god means that theistic moral arguments don't even make it to the starting post. But if they did, they're disqualified anyway.

[Harbal]

And yet, I can prove it to you beyond any reasonable doubt. I can prove Atheism isn't just "flawed," but is totally useless for morality.

All I have to do is ask you to give me one moral precept...just one...that is grounded in Atheism, and if you can do it, you win. If you can't...

You can't.

Has anyone claimed that morality and atheism are connected?

Good question. And I think there's a reason why IC needs and wants to make the connection.

Yes, because, as he sees it, it makes it easier for him to make a sort of straw man out of it. If you notice, he is always trying to present atheism as some sort of belief system, and always capitalises the word as if to prove it. Then everything an atheist does, or thinks, is solely an act of defiance against God. He just doesn't get that common or garden atheism just means leading a life without thought, reference to, or interest in, God. He is determined to make atheism much more than that. And then he seems to think it all justifies the ridiculous situation of his trying to argue that we are not experiencing our experiences when we talk about morality.

The existence or non-existence of gods has nothing to do with morality - unless you believe that moral rightness and wrongness depend on your team's god: 'if my team's god doesn't exist, then there can be no morality - no rational distinction between moral rightness and wrongness'.

That this is a form of moral subjectivism goes without saying. Theistic moral objectivism is moral subjectivism pretending not to be. A person who thinks moral rightness and wrongness depend on any agent is, by definition, not a moral objectivist. If there are moral facts, then what anyone thinks about them is irrelevant.

So IC's moral argument amounts to a special pleading fallacy.

The failure of ontological arguments for the existence of any team's god means that theistic moral arguments don't even make it to the starting post. But if they did, they're disqualified anyway.

In my understanding of what morality is, it has to be subjective; if it were not, it wouldn't be morality. Morality is about what you feel to be right and wrong, not what some authority or other tells you is right and wrong.

[Will Bouwman]

He knew perfectly well that the other arguments for God do not work unless you first assume that God exists.

Actually, he was trying to make the opposite argument: that you wouldn't need to "assume" anything at all to know God exists. He was trying to derive it from "clear and distinct" ideas...he says that right in his introduction: have you read it?

Is that all you have read? This shows extraordinary ignorance:

To my knowledge, he does not even mention -- or think of -- the ontological argument. That's Anselm of Canterbury, actually, not Descartes.

That's one thing that googling really will get a lot of hits; descartes ontological returned this -"About 875,000 results (0.34 seconds)" Clearly you haven't made it to Meditation V. Not only does Descartes set out his ontological argument, he also describes 'clear and distinct ideas':

"For example, in the case of every right-angled triangle, although it does not so manifestly appear that the square of the base is equal to the squares of the two other sides as that this base is opposite to the greatest angle; still, when this has once been apprehended, we are just as certain of its truth as of the truth of the other."

So contrary to your

Ummm...no, not really.

yes really

As a gifted mathematician, he hoped to apply the same axiomatic reasoning to philosophy.

Which, since you ask

Maybe you can show the steps by which you understand Descartes to have built back certain knowledge out of the cogito. Just give them in your own words, as you perceive them.

I will refer you to Descartes work other than The Meditations, for example 'The World', a book by Descartes I very much doubt you have read or even heard of, but in which he uses the sort of reasoning he describes in Meditations, another book I now doubt you have read.