CX

Come on. ALL debates on EOG? I can think of several that wouldn't be wastes of time at all. Like a "strip debate" between me and Pamela Anderson on the finer points of the Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God.

Hedwig

You think this is annoying...the first Battle Royale that took place, if memory serves, was Knight vs. Zak on absolute morality. I admire Zak's willingness to argue with these people, but how he can handle the blunt force trauma to the head that he must sustain in dealing with those medieval nutjobs is beyond me.

Spenser

The scariest part of the whole thing was the way some of the commenters of that posting were carrying on. I made fun of Diana once in jest and I thought she was gonna stick her arm through the monitor and pummel me, well not really, but light hearted remarks that were taken as insults were immediately edited (BTW I saw that she is no longer a moderator, could this be due to complaints?). What's the point of the moderators on this other site? I guess it's OK to insult others as long as they are atheists...

Theli

I wasn't refering to this as a legal issue myself.
But wouldn't such a judgement on their part be based on an emotional response, and not on reason?
I mean, I don't think it's wise to put such a decision in the hands of people that are that much involved.
And ofcouse, would you argue that no judgement made by the parents in question could actually be immoral and unjustified?

The problem I see here is that if morality is based on whatever a person thinks in any given time than there is no real morality to speak of. It would just be plain decisions, with no restraints.
So, if an action is to be taken against a person because of his race, then the basis for such distinction (racism) must be in question also. I don't see how we can have two seperate conditions.

Steven Carr

There goes the free will defense to the problem of evil!

If God existed, he would do what is inherently right.

So he would stop people doing evil.

As no such intervention takes place, we can conclude God does not exist.

Theists just love trashing their own arguments, by arguing out of the other side of their mouths when it suits them.

Howard

Partly, yes. But don't you think there is a difference between killing someone because you don't like his skin color, and killing someone who murdered your family and got away with it? Would you not say that killing Hitler at any time by any means would have been morally justified?

Quote:

I mean, I don't think it's wise to put such a decision in the hands of people that are that much involved.

I'm not suggesting that revenge killings be made legal, I was just using an extreme example.

Quote:

The problem I see here is that if morality is based on whatever a person thinks in any given time than there is no real morality to speak of. It would just be plain decisions, with no restraints.

I didn’t suggest it was. But the same action can be moral or immoral depending on the circumstances.

Theli

Excacly, the old problem of evil. We have yet to find a reason for evil to exist in the world, so the theory of an omnimax god is incomplete and shouldn't be considered.

Theli

Ofcourse there's a difference, not in the action itself but in the intention and the justification. Nevertheless they should not be held to different standards.
Taken from a previous post writen by you:
Are those circumstances governed by the mindset of the people making the judgement? So that, if a person is angry or dislikes someone involved, morality changes accordingly?
I repeat the question you neglected in my last post.
Would you argue that no judgement by the parents of the murdered children can be an immoral one?
Not at any time. If killing Hitler would result in a decreased number of casualties during WW2 then yes it would be morally justifiable. If Hitler were to survive WW2 and was now a drooling vegetable with no power over anything, or in another condition where he couldn't cause any more death, then no. His death would serve no purpose and would just be another death.

Thomas Ash

I'd just like to point out that when people ask if atheists believe in absolute right or wrong (particularly in this context, with reference to atheism's impact on morality) they hardly ever mean it in the sense you've taken it to mean, that is non-situational morality. I mean hardly everyone believes in that, or they'd think that all killing, even in war or assisted suicide, is wrong, that tax is equivalent to theft, that stopping someone leaving a prison room is the same as stopping them leaving a kidnapper's room, and a whole host of patently ridiculous assertions. But this is what a lot of people who say they don't believe in absolute morality think it means, making their objection rest on what is basically a misunderstanding.

By absolute right and wrong, what more or less everyone who says that they believe in these terms (like me) means is that some particular action can be right or wrong and it can't be both at the same time based simply on your culture, religion or opinion at that time (ie. relativism.)

Wyrdsmyth

I couldn't disagree more. At least we live in a time when we are free to debate the existence of God, freely and -- if we choose, like here on the Internet -- anonymously. Not everyone was exposed to these debates in the past, or had access to them. The more these debates occur, the more they can open people's minds. The debates may seem like a waste of time because often there is no clear way to declare a "winner," or it may seem that opponents are often firmly entrenched and there are often what seem like foregone conclusions. But if they are thought-provoking to the audience, then I think they have value.