This seems like a very noble resolution, and I would like to be able to rely upon it as fact sacrosanct – except that many christians state that they get their morality, "from the bible," and seem to infer that without the bible a person is "immoral". You seem to understand how vapid and offensive this is. Therefore, I would like to ask about your thoughts on this. (That is also a request open to anyone reading this conversation.)
As a Christian, my idea of objective morality depends completely upon God, the Moral Law Giver. By objective morality I mean acts that are right or wrong independently of whether or not everyone agrees they are. As an analogy, consider a stone that is smooth, and hard, and dark in color. These attributes of the stone are objective ones insofar as they exist independently of what a person who sees and handles the stone might prefer. No matter who interacts with the stone, it is always smooth, hard, and dark in color. In the same way, objective morality in the Christian worldview refers to an over-arching, universal, unalterable code of right and wrong. For example, murder, rape, and child abuse are all wrong, or immoral acts, for everyone, everywhere. Courage, integrity, love, and self-sacrifice, in contrast, are all objectively morally good for all people everywhere. For the Christian, this objective morality has its root in God, who is the Originator and/or Definer of what is right or wrong. Because of His position as Creator and His own perfectly righteous nature, God is able to establish for us all what is right and what is wrong. As a result, the Christian can point to God, something outside himself, something higher, more authoritative than he is, when judging a thing to be moral or not.
As a Christian I recognize that atheists do moral and immoral things, just as Christians do. The problem here is that the atheist has no ground for asserting that anything is
intrinsically moral or immoral, that there is objective morality. If impersonal, mechanical, natural processes have brought a person into being and order their conduct, which is what an atheist typically believes, it becomes irrational to declare anything anyone does as objectively right or wrong. We don't say that a lion murders the zebra he kills and eats. We don't say that an eagle who snatches a fish from the claws of another eagle is stealing. No, these are just animals operating on instinct, optimizing their chances of survival and reproduction - just like the human animal (if you take the atheistic view).
An atheist may say, "Murder doesn't serve society well," or, "I don't like rape," or, "Your disloyalty adversely affects my well-being," but asserting that murder, rape, or disloyalty are
wrong - I mean
really wrong, in an
objective sense - does not follow rationally from an atheistic worldview. So, a person like Jeffrey Dahmer, a self-professed atheist and the convicted murderer and cannibalizer of over a dozen young men, cannot be condemned by atheists on moral grounds for his evil deeds. In an interview he gave on
Dateline NBC Jeffrey explained the rationale he had for his behaviour:
"If you don't...think that there is a God to be accountable to...what's the point of trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought, anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we...died, you know, that was it, there was nothing."
Now, I'm sure atheists find Jeffrey Dahmer's vile deeds as repulsive and wrong as Christians do, but they do so without being able to legitimately assert that what he did was really, truly wrong (like the stone is really, truly, smooth, or hard, or dark).
Peace.
ABBA'S FOOL,
