CoffeeFiend

Well, that depends. I don't believe that there is no objective reality and no universal truth. The problem is when someone asserts that they know what universal truth is and back it up with anecdotal evidence and a warm fuzzy feeling he/she gets while praying to the deity of his/her choice. Secondly morality is what the members of a given society agree upon. The objective criteria for the correctness of that moral code is the stability and survival of that society.

seebs

This sounds suspiciously close to argument from popularity.

So far as I can tell, moral claims are totally untestable. Lest someone try to use this as an argument for theistic morality, I'd point out that religious people have major debates over what conclusions to draw from their sets of axioms, so even given a set of "perfect" axioms, moral questions are *still* frequently unanswerable.

CoffeeFiend

Well, it kind of is, but in some cases the majority(or the people in power) may not agree upon rules that are best for the stability and survival of that society. I think the only way to test moral rules is to see what happens when they are applied in real life situations. Also, by stability I mean that the members of that society are happy and content with their lives, no social tensions and polarization.

seebs

The way I see it, there's the moral claim ("People should be happy and content, with no social tensions") which is totally untestable, and then there are claims about how to go about achieving those goals, which *are* testable, although often very hard to test rigorously.

CoffeeFiend

You got me there. But I think it's a pritty decent a axiom to build on Religious and non-religious people tend to agree on that matter. Fundamentalists in the USA often rant about how secularism will corrupt their society and atheists often point to the middle-east to show what a theocracy led by fundamentalists can result in. Both are afraid of unstability and opression.

Soul Invictus

Be careful how you speak because reading the newspapers will reinforce someone's intolerance of extreme fundamentalist religious people. Let's see now the war on Iraq.....Native American massacre,slave trade, all done by Christians. Let's throw in there Jim Jones too. And don't give me the old "oh...those are a few strange cases, which don't really represent the whole body" routine either...

If rejecting Christ makes you a no good person, then what about the people who came THOUSANDS of years before him?

Soul Invictus

Excellent points..I've been trying to think of a way to address this in the philo forum for murder.

premjan

unfortunately nihilism is the truth but it can cause people to lose the will to eat.

Soul Invictus

Could you start a thread in the philosophy forum about this topic? The dictionary def'n doesn't work for me, and I'd like you to explain more about this school or thought. PM me if you do.

Evolutionist

BABLEFISH:

he would probably give you the same cop-out i always hear:

"because it's in his nature to be good- he can't be anything else".