Beliefs matter less than actions. Morals have changed throughout time and have always been subjective. What’s moral 200 years ago may be immoral today. You wouldn’t have unprotected sex with a woman you aren’t married to. I have. Our morals differ which is ok everyone’s do to an extent. Some people won’t eat cows. I’ll eat them every day of the week.
If I don’t murder my parents it has nothing to do with whether or not an invisible being has said don’t murder people. Ironically while calling for murder himself multiple times. Are you saying the only thing that keeps people from murdering is sky fairy? People weren’t murdering every day before the Bible.
Actions matter more. How many “Christians” have committed murder? The basis behind an action is essentially a semantics argument. It changes absolutely nothing when we look at what people do.
I mean what do we say when priests rape kids? Do we say “well at least they have a defined basis for their morals?” That doesn’t make any sense.
Every single day Christians ignore parts of the Bible that do not make sense to their current view of morals. And the churches constantly change what parts of the Bible they are going to follow word by word as their view of what is morally correct for the times change.
No, we actually can’t. What society? Whose society? All of it, or the part I identify with? Who gets to define well being and the good life? Maybe what advances my folks in society until we rule society. Until we our the new society. That is the assumption of a value judgement we have no obligation, moral or material, to adopt in a cold faithless universe. We can order society by any which way, if we even care to think of ‘society’ at all. It can be our clan, our family, or just our own hyper individualistic selves. There is no such prime moral directive.
I don’t think faith helps us here. Faith in what? The Qur’an, the Bible, other holy book. They have differences in the moral code they set forth.
Most religious people only really follow the parts that their group subscribed to anyways. Christians are not throwing their disobedient children off of cliffs, and Muslims are not killing infedels for the most part at least.
The reason faith is so compelling in the “you better behave” department is the “or else.” Without faith, you are limited in punishment up to the taking of your life. The intense crippling fear of the afterlife makes man-made laws look like a joke.
If you want to say there are no inherently immoral and evil acts as an a-faithist, I wouldn’t have much to say. We can’t really falsify such things either way.
But you can’t start off with some prime directive value we’re supposed to understand as the moral good. You’re going to have to adopt it as a matter of faith, which is inconsistent. Gotta step away again.
Without specific beliefs being in the equation, your viewpoint doesn’t work either. We don’t actually have a set of morals passed down from any deity of any language. We have human interpretation of supposed morals that have the ability to fluctuate over time against an unchanging and all knowing god.
So the question becomes from which group of flawed humans you prefer to draw your morals from. Obviously with the religious side of the coin specifically having no official input from the masses.
While I will agree with you that morals are different from person to person. I also think that many people have come to the same conclusion about different actions. Obviously, some gray area exists.
I’ll agree that I don’t think there is some power that dictates to us what morality is. I am not sure that means I think immoral acts don’t exist.
In general, I think it is immoral for me to do to someone else, what I would not want done to me.
We could make a list of things we believe are immoral, even evil. It could include slavery, rape, murder (including infanticide), robbery, etc. Then we could look to the Bible (and thus God) and see that those thing are permissible (i.e., not immoral or evil) and that God Himself has done some of those things or told His believers that they could, and sometimes must, do them.
We could look at the Bill of Rights and Constitution and see a bunch of rights and freedoms we have that God would not have granted us but rather He would have denied us. Freedom of speech? God says no. Freedom of religion? Hell no. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? God must get a real laugh at that.
What exactly does existing human life even mean? Is it a human being? Is it a life form?
Exactly what it says. It is an individual human already in its own life cylcle. Own it for what it is. None of those things you listed are evil in a faithless universe.
Human what? You have used the word human as both an adjective (human life) and as a noun (individual human). When used as a noun are you using human to mean human being?
They are if you want to live among other people. If you repeatedly do stuff to people that you would not want done to yourself, you are most likely not going to fit in with society, or are likely to be punished by society.
Humans have developed social skills and empathy so that the above situation doesn’t happen to them. It doesn’t always work, and people have varying levels of empathy / social skills, thus we have the prison system.
But we are talking about YOUR universe, a universe of faith. According to the Bible slavery is permissible. Yet BELIEVERS themselves, who look to the Bible for morality, believe slavery is immoral and/or evil and/or wrong. Which means that people have taken it upon themselves to correct God. The question therefore is, do we need faith to tell us what is right and wrong since we have made choices that are contrary to faith?