surreptitious57 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 25, 2019 8:08 pm
Immanuel Can wrote:
Its the only place it could possibly come from actually
Why then is there not universal consensus about morality within all of the major belief systems
Why would there be? Who says all "major (and presumably minor too: numbers aren't relevant, surely) belief systems" are supposed to have right answers? Where is it written that all people are equally guaranteed to come up with the right answer about anything? And logically, by Law of Non-Contradiction, we know that such a thing would be impossible, even if we were to imagine we were owed it.
What we should expect, and what we do find, is some wildly wrong answers, some better answers, and perhaps some best answers or the right answer, even. That's what we also find.
Even within the three Abrahamic religions there are differences about what is and is not moral
The term "Abrahamic religions" is an artificial construct. There is no such reality. Perhaps one might make and argument that Judaism "worships" Abraham, but I Jewish folks will deny that stridently and regard it as a slander. Christians respect Abraham as an important historical and symbolic figure, but they don't name their faith after him. And Islam doesn't even acknowledge the same "history" of Abraham as the other two agree upon, and would regard "Abrahamism" as a form of idolatry or man-worship.
So for none of these religions is that a correct term. All it captures is the vague idea that Abraham, as a figure, plays some role within the narratives and thinking of all three groups. It certainly does not promise agreement. And indeed, there is statistically a zero chance that if two of them have one history of Abraham, and the other has another, that they agree about what they say about him.
So if you claim that morality can only come from God then there should not be any disagreement about it among his believers
No, that does not follow.
Jews and Christians do indeed seek the same God, as the Christians acknowledge the Torah entirely. Muslims have a different view of Torah, which they claim has been Jewishly corrupted, and a different conception of God. For one thing, theirs is much more distant and fatalistic than anything you'll find in either of the other two. "His" commandments and wishes are quite different. He is described by different features. Neither his descriptions nor his purported character match up. The sole point of comparison is really that all agree there is only one God: but they disagree with Islam as to who this "God" is.
So whose morality is the truly objective one - they are different to each other and so cannot all be objectively true
Right. No problem. It's exactly what we should expect to find.
Anything you say about atheism with regard to morality is therefore irrelevant until this question has been addressed
Well, logically, that isn't true, of course. You may
feel so, but logically, that won't make it so.
I might be completely wrong about the nature of God, if you wish to believe so; but that would not say anything about whether or not Atheism was capable of supporting a view of "evil" or "good." On that question, Atheism has to "man up" and stand on its own two feet, because it would be true regardless of what anybody said about the various religions.
If Atheism requires that there is no plan, no objective purpose and no teleological direction to the world, then it automatically leads to the conclusion that there's no such thing as any true moral criteria either. And even if other ideologies failed to the same degree that Atheism does, that would not help Atheism one iota in the matter of grounding morality itself.
But that's Atheism's problem, not anybody else's.