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You'll have to clarify, then. I'm not sure what you are talking about. Are we talking about morality of the individual (as in: the ability of an individual to know good from evil) or are we talking about the moral basis of laws? Something else?
Right, my point here is that without reference to God 'morality' is an unintelligible term. We can talk about order, or smooth social functioning, or game theory -- all kinds of things! But those are not what we mean when we talk about morality. Morality is what is right above all those other concerns by dint of our relationship to our creator.
Well, yeah, if you define "morality" specifically to mean "doing the will of the Christian God", then it's definitely true that without the Christian God there can be no morality. But then this isn't a very useful statement.
We might more generally define "morality" as "actions in accordance with one's telos", which moves the problem back a step.
But it does leave us in more or less the same position, because now we need a telos, and that is not something we can give ourselves! Maybe 'survival' but that's a losing game at both the micro and macro scales, and we all know it. Also moloch, etc.
For most of Western history "morality" has meant precisely "actions in accordance with the will of our Creator," and a "good person" is one who acts accordingly.
In the pre-Christian West, a "good man" looked a lot more like Genghis Khan. He was the one who brought benefit to his people, typically at the horrific expense of others. Mercy, compassion, and so on were considered weaknesses, even to the point that the Roman goddess of such wasn't really. Clementia -- clemency -- is not the same thing. It's more like, the ability to overlook another's shortcomings to work together more effectively, as is beneficial for bringing temporal benefit to the people. A man who organized others to sail down the coast and rape, kill, loot, etc. was among the best of men.
Christianity changed a lot. All of a sudden it was considered wrong to, idk, kill inconvenient children, slaves, etc. All of a sudden there was this notion that the powerful had an obligation to the weak. And much, much more.
Now, an atheist can say something like, "Of course I can be moral! I can also perform common-sense game theoretical calculations with the aim of maximizing utilons!" But this is really not the same thing at all, and also I call BS on consequentialism because we are at best capable of tracking consequences to a few degrees out, after which we have no idea what the effects of our actions really are, and also I'm highly skeptical of the idea that "everyone matters" follows naturally.
Societies oriented toward a higher divine will (generally Abrahamic afaict) generated higher moralities. Within this moral ecosystem, defectors (atheists) were able to say, "But I don't need to believe in that telos to act the same as everyone else!" And to a point this is true, but it does suggest a frame within which atheism is a moral parasite. Able to crib, that is, but not to generate. And as a society takes its eyes off the telos, it naturally starts to backslide toward baseline human """morality""", which is not, imo, a good thing. But I can only make such normative statements because I'm still fixed on the telos.
Sure it is. Just not for you.
Genghis Khan was a good religious person acting according to the will of his creator, Tengri.
Atheists are 'defectors' to the morality-creating will of one more of such deities.
My morality is nothing compared to the will of tengri. Sure, I can 'parasite' off the morality of the religious when I pillage and rape, but I am incapable of generating something so beautifully circular.
You're the only one here talking about 'religion' like it's a useful or applicable category.
What is the difference between tengri's "good" will and your god's will?
That is a fantastic question. I'm actually writing a book somewhat along those lines. It's a really good challenge to try to figure out how to compress the answer.
The problem I'm running up against is that any angle I want to take would lean heavily on concepts that I don't think we have in common.
First I think I'd have to explain why pagan polytheism is real and true, which would take a lot of time. In the book I'm doing this by going back to the first cell in the ancient ocean and tracking evolution forward to establish how our minds work and what the gods are, and how they interrelate, and then establish that Christ is a real, observable force in the world (even from a ~secular perspective), and then get into what the Christian message actually is, which is unfortunately mostly unintelligible to people who don't first grasp the validity and veracity of both brutal selection processes (especially genetic) and (poly)theism.
Put another way: In the classical world people understood a lot of basic truths that have mostly been lost now, and the Christian message is mostly unintelligible outside of those. (Oh, and this is not an accident, but enemy action.)
I'm leaning pretty hard toward "I can't answer that for you right now and I'm sorry."
Let me float: There are gods, and then there is God, and these are... supremely different categories that play out in very different ways. The attempts I'm making to get more specific keep running me up against walls that I can't see how to overcome within the scope of this conversation. And I could nitpick and complain and get traction on any number of tangents here but they're ultimately nowhere close to central to the question.
Maybe I just need to suggest that Christianity is so much weirder than you know.
So, my apologies, and feel free to take this as an admission of at least momentary forfeit.
Have a good one man.
EDIT: Oh, but do feel free to ask more questions if you want.
All right then, keep your secrets. Good luck with euthyphro.
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And incapable of generating offspring either.
Spouses Marian Stamp(m. 1967; div. 1984) Eve Barham(m. 1984, divorced) Lalla Ward(m. 1992; sep. 2016)
Perhaps some kind of... Natural selection so to speak?
(For some reason your comment only appeared now. )
What does that have to do with anything? Besides, Jesus and his theologians can't brag on that front. Revealed preference, people generally don't care about passing on their genes, you can't 'live on', or take them with you. Oh no, they've lost a meaningless game that has nothing to do with them.
Jesus already created mankind, in his own image, he doesn't need anything else.
His theologians were and are quite prolific.
Why should anybody take somebody's concept of morality seriously if they have no stake in the future?
People generally care about their children.
Since atheists as a group refuse to breed, why should anybody care about what they care about?
Where is a Macron or a Merkel leading a country, when they get to hold power for a decade or two, and they leave no heir behind?
Are renters better neighbors than homeowners?
Dawkins created me in his own image, that really ought to be enough.
Which theologians were prolific ? Augustine, Aquinas and their lot?
They all refused to breed, and so by your logic I don't care what they care about.
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I disagree, I think our brains are sufficiently similar that if we understood them better we could come to formalize some basic universal principles of morality, indepent of trascendental beliefs. This is one way to come to an objective morality without revelation, there are others.
There's also a big difference between claiming that you need a god to define morality vs claiming that you specifically need the christian god.
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