| Slimebeast said: You pulled it out of context. It's an arguing method, to reply like that. The background is that I felt Highwaystar hadn't gotten to the core point I'm discussing. And the background is also that he objected to my statement of objective morals being false. What's his evidence for objective morals being false? He simply demonstrates there are different cultures with different morals in history of mankind (as if I wasn't aware of that) and from that draws a conclusion that morals are culturally relative and can not be universal. In my opinion that was a poor argument. Btw here is Highwaystar's statement I replied to: "I ask, how can two societies be so radically different in their moral code, and yet their morals be absolute? It's actually impossible." But I never said that every person and every culture has a full understanding of the absolute moral code. I never said that all expressions of morals on our planet are absolute. Nothing like that. My original statement in this thread (that Highwaystar objected to) was: (the logic of the second part of the statement goes something like this: absolute morals needs an external cause, or at least they make a strong argument for something supernatural like a God, aka "the moral argument" for the existence of God, which is an age-old argument). Yes it's off-topic. |
I pulled it out of context to try and argue what I saw as the gist of your case, and because to properly quote the context I'd kind of have to quote several posts. No ulterior motive :P
Anyway, you were the one saying there are moral absolutes, you should be the one providing evidence :P
What I tried to argue could be divided in trhee main points. First that you can't really act like you know right and wrong on an absolute sense better then anyone else, which you did by stating those crazy guys were simply wrong when answering to Higwaystar's position.
So his argument is valid to show that the stance on cannibalism isn't a moral universal, and your rebuttal can't logically go against that. Of course, even if that's not an moral absolute, that doesn't mean there's no such a thing at all, just means there's no one single, complete, absolute moral code. There may be a few moral concepts that are universal among humans, but there's not one complete, universal moral code which is "right". That's what he was arguing, and you can't prove him wrong.
Now second point follows and it is that, if there's some kind of moral absolute you can actually find, it's burried very deep down, and in most cases could be translated without much trouble as simple self-preservation, with the actual "moral codes" deriving from this so dsitinctic and varied one could argue about the usefullness of ascribing it such a tittle.
Anyway, the third point and more important point, which follows from the second, is that self preservation makes complete biological sense, so the fact we don't use to go around ripping baby genitallia off can't really be used as an argument for the supernatural, as there are other, natural explanations for that.
So yeah, I simply don't think you can go from some people's belief on some absolute truth and derive a god figure from that.
