Nero's Boot

Suppose your God comes down in all His glory, and you know beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's Him you're looking at. God then hands you a gun, and says, "I want you to shoot your best friend in the head, and thereby kill him. I'm feeling particularly nasty today, and want to watch someone die. And no, this isn't a test of your loyalty; I want you to kill your best friend, just so I can watch." You suddenly realize the God you've been worshipping all your life is not pulling a test or attempting to trick or con you: He literally wants you to kill in His name.

Do you kill at His command? Or would you refuse? If you refuse, then you acknowledge that good and morality do not depend on God, and that God is wrong to command murder; but isn't morality dependent on God for its very nature? If God says "Kill!" then you kill, right?

--would you kill the one you love if your God honestly asked you to do it? NB

buckshot23

He wouldn't especially the way you phrased the question. NEXT :wave:

Valmont

The God in whom I have faith would not ask such a thing. If my faith was shown to be misplaced, my God not to exist and another, crueller god asked this of me I would hope that, in such a moment of dreadful epiphany, I would stand by my morals.

But how about you, as an atheist? Suddenly having the proof that you have always asked for, would you acknowledge him and take the gun?

Hiero5ant

Oh, horsepuckey and balderdash.

"My girlfriend, the woman I love, would never suck some guy's cock just because she met him at a party and thought his European accent was sexy -- I know this by definition."

Do you understand how deluded this sounds?

Yikes! So morals don't derive from the nature of Yahweh? That's the relevant conundrum of the OP. Everything else is details.

I'd take the gun and unload the clip in his sick fascist groin, and keep pulling the trigger until the cops came.

Who is more moral, the person who reacts this way, or the person who offers to jam a blunt stone dagger in his only child's throat and murmur the incantations of blood sorcery as his life's essence spills over the altar, and then condescends to lecture to others that "y'all just wouldn't understand; it's a Worldview thing"?

seebs

Hmm. I have no idea; I can't imagine feeling such certainty about things.

Let's generalize. Let's say you're a humanist, and you have adopted the classic humanist principles. And someone shows you a proof, an absolutely flawless proof, that according to these principles, you must kill someone who is no direct threat to anyone.

What do you do?

Hiero5ant

There is a relevant disanalogy between theism and any secular moral system here that the OP is trying to elucidate and which this post is yet another example of.

Fallibilistic secularists are capable of admitting that these principles are in error, and of changing them in a reasons-responsive fashion. Infallibilist Divine Command Theorists are not so capable. It is the DCTist who, if he wants to hold on to his Invisible Hebrew Who Lives On The Moon Theory, must either a) say that pointless sadism is moral, because Yahweh commands it, or b) concede that ethics is not contingent on Theism -- abandon the claims that "only a worldview based on Yahweh can provide a basis for morality".

seebs

Huh. Well, I've never held anything like the latter. To the best of my current knowledge, God is an accurate source of moral guidance. I am aware of dozens of ways to derive essentially equivalent moral values; in fact, if this were not the case, I would be very skeptical of claims that God's moral judgments were accurate.

If I am to believe that the morals I live by are an objective part of reality, I must expect that they can be independently discovered. Otherwise, that works against my claim that they actually mean something.

Hiero5ant

Fair enough. But it is routinely argued, in pop-culture, in the apologetic literature by people such as C.S. Lewis and William Lane Craig, and on these very boards by people like BGiC that classical theism is the only "worldview" that provides a "source" of moral values. In fact, I would say that, after abortion, the subject of the relationship of theism to morality is the most popular topic in MF&P.

seebs

It could well be. My own opinion is that theism doesn't really solve the underlying moral question. So there's a God; so what? What gives this God any moral authority? The underlying question of what morality is still needs an answer.

Worldtraveller

A better, more in depth discussion of this type of question (warning, it's a long thread) is here.

Cheers,
Lane