DISCUSS: "MORALITY IS JUST TRUE AND ASKING WHY IT IS TRUE IS LIKE ASKING WHY SPACE HAS LENGTH HEIGHT AND BREADTH"

ESSENTIALS

If a baby is suffering and you have the medicine do you need a God, Bible or anything to tell you to help? A decent person will think morality justifies itself. You will see a baby needing your help as showing you need no justification.

If we mean well, we all want want morality to justify itself. That is safer than having it depend on anything else such as faith in God. A morality that holds it own and does not need a God is denying God because God means that which should be the be all and the end all in life. It is a unifier no matter who you are, atheist or religionist.

A king who depends on himself is the strongest possible one. A weaker one will need to depend on others. So if you want morality to be fact, it has to depend on itself and derive its authority from itself. To say authority has to be always given to something is odd - who gave the other authority its authority? It has to start somewhere without being given.

Religion tries to pretend that love is a nod to God. But love by itself does not mean or indicate that there is a God. It certainly does not prove it or point us to look for proof. So whatever way you want to give authority to moral principles such as love then trying to ground them in God is futile and immoral in itself!  Why?  For love is grey and it is too easy for us to mistake what is not best for another for what is best.  Love might be a good thing but it does not deserve to be turned into something divine.  The argument that God hides himself from us for he wants us to find him through others and how they love us is wrong.  It's only an argument for projecting your ideas of love, your attempts to love with all their perfections onto God as the absolute and ultimate model.

Love by default takes care of justice for you cannot have real justice without real love. If you love at all you will have enough concern for justice.  It is enough to make God an extra perhaps for discarding.

There is nothing wrong with something justifying itself as long as another way to justify it is not being ignored. If there is no evidence that you are truly innocent of a crime then you have to justify yourself and ask people to take your word for it. In that case, morality is justifying itself.

We see each other in some way as creators of love. There can be no real morality without that concept. It does not matter how accurate we are about them being creators.

Relativism - the view that whatever you want to think is moral is all that matters for morality is not factual - is plainly ridiculous. That shows that morality justifies itself even if we do not know how. It is just somehow a fact that setting the cat on fire is wrong. Whether invented or real, we make sure our moral ideas hurt those who flout them. It is not a trivial matter.

Religious attempts to ground morality in God's commands or nature fail for what if God is a relativist? Believers treat him as if he is.

Using God as prop to bolster up morality and its authenticity is objectifying God. Or perhaps more accurately, it is objectifying faith for many when they talk about God mean faith. Faith can simulate a connection to a real God. Faith in God is not God but is often treated as if it is.

Morality is really a collection of moralities. Each moral precept is a mini-morality. Collectively each bit is justified.

MORALITY COMES FROM COMMUNITIES JUST BEING COMMUNITIES

Nature has many creatures form groups. Even a man and a few dogs can make a group. Some level of committing is needed. How can people committing to each other be not enough to ground morality on? Critics say the answer is that you can bond with others and form an evil and nasty group. So loving those in the group can lead to you and the group doing terrible things to outsiders. So love can be bad. These people will swear that their love is good so being convinced you are loving does not prove you really are good. Only the facts can show that. Clearly the problem is in how people are not lining up to truth.

The argument that love can be bad, and by implication justice as well for love and justice are inseparably connected, is supposed to prove that only an all-loving God can ground or decree morality. Anything else is just bad. That is actually a lying manipulative and nasty argument. Belief in God is about its alleged moral import but in fact it offers hypocrisy not moral import.

If it is not the love that is the problem but its abuse then the critics are proven wrong. Love is good regardless of God or society or anything else.
 
MORALITY IS GOD?

Religion denies that morality is just true so you need a God to make it true. That overlooks the fact that if it is not true then nothing can make it true.

Nothing can be more important or irrevocable than a morality that is so true that even if God contradicts it makes no difference.

People try to say morality is made by God's commands. Something becomes moral not because it is but becomes moral because he commands it. What if God commanded you to believe morality was independent of God? This proves that morality is just true and that God is only a diversion.

Sometimes we are told that God is morality so that if there is no God there is no true morality and we are left to invent it. If morality is God then that is tantamount to inventing God even if you say you do not recognise a God! It would be a recipe for evil and turns the moralist effectively into God! So they say they need to invent morality if there is no God. For all we know inventing is what they could be doing!

So far the problems with objecting to, "Morality is just true", show that even if we do not know how or cannot explain how we know by a process of elimination that morality really is just true.

Let us go on and look at more arguments for morality as being that which needs no justification outside of itself.

If morality is not real then it is arbitrary. But arbitrary implies a non-arbitrary. So even calling morality arbitrary implies that there is non-arbitrary morality. Morality is enforced by reality and even God cannot change that. It is thus supreme even over God.

Some say morality can be real and still arbitrary. What do they mean? They seem to mean we can make it real so we can make it right to use live babies as footballs if we so decree! Morality is to be discovered not made or created. The people are talking rubbish.

THE MOUNTAIN

Is something moral whether God says so or not?  If yes then is something made moral simply because God wants it to be?

[The way, this toxic disgusting question is what it is, disgusting.  And it does not arise for the atheist but the believer in God which says something.  It is horrible in a world where babies suffer and die terribly to care enough about the God that supposedly allows this to start wondering if this would be right if he commanded it.  Come on.  This is not a moral quest but an admission of poor empathy.]

The religious answer is that good and God cannot be separated.  They say that right and wrong are grounded in what God is.  So they say God cannot arbitrarily command something and it must be called good even if it is killing babies for fun. 

That is the same as saying a mountain and a great height cannot be separated.  Though a mountain has to be very high it does not follow that great height cannot apply to anything else.  You have spires of great height.  So even if God is moral, it does not mean he is to be counted exactly the same as morality.  Morality at least in principle does not need him.

Most of us today worry if we are told that we have to be religious to be fully human.  The view that follows is more popular.  It is that God designs humans for they are meant to be brave, kind, compassionate and fair is degrading though it does not look it.  It calls the person who falls far short of these things less than human.  It defines a person not as what they are but as what they ought to be in the eyes of some religion or God or Jesus.

Religion might say it considers all people human?  Really?  What if you had to throw a bomb to the left or the right and you had a virtuous person on one side and a shameless "sinner" on the other?  You would be dehumanising the sinner where it counts most, not in theory but in practice.

Religion lying about this dehumanises everybody.  Period.  It treats us as fools not as persons.

With morality we want it to be something objective like 1 and 1 being 2.  Nagel points out that in theory and practice it is not that simple,  He says we should settle for an objective morality that has a subjective side as well.  You can have a morality that is more about your feelings than a maths calculation but yet not as subjective as what kind of curry you want.

FINALLY

Religion says then there is no real morality, no standard, if there is no God or if God is amoral.  It says that if all is blind chance then you may as well talk about a domino falling as an injustice.  Morality would make no sense in such a world.  But if we emerged in blind chance, we may not be blind chance.  We may be effectively gods to an extent anyway.

Suppose God exists and grounds morality.  If hypothetically, chance could make such a God, then what?  Is that God not moral just because he came from luck?

Instead of worrying about such rubbish, admit that morality comes from what we are and does not need a God.  What makes us is irrelevant.