Wosret wrote:
I've always thought that such moral arguments were bad as well. Mostly because it implies that everyone inherently knows right from wrong, and right and wrong are absolute. Yet there are so many conflicting moral views and philosophy.

Without witnesses – by Olavo de Carvalho, 2000 wrote:


Albert Schweitzer, in "My childhood and youth", recalls the moment in which he was, for the first time, ashamed of himself. He was around 3 years old and was playing in the garden. A wasp stung his finger. Amidst tears, he was comforted by his parents and by some neighbors. Suddenly, little Albert realized that the pain was already gone for several minutes, and that he was still crying, merely to attract the attention of the audience. When he wrote about this, Schweitzer was a septuagenarian. He had accomplished a whole life, the great life of an artist, a physician, a philosopher, a Christian soul devoted to the succour of the poor and ill. But he still felt the shame of this first cheating. This feeling had lived throughout the years, in the bottom of his memory, giving his conscience some healthy tugs whenever it was tempted to self-deception in other occasions.

Note that no one around him noticed anything. Only the boy Schweitzer knew of his shame, and only he had to account for his act before his conscience and his God. I am persuaded that the experiences of this kind – the acts without witness, as I usually refer to them – are the only possible foundation upon which a man can develop an authentic, rigorous and autonomous moral conscience. Only he who, in solitude, knows how to be rigorous and fair towards himself – and against himself – is able to judge others with justice, instead of being easily swayed by the yells of the mob, by the stereotypes of propaganda, by self-interest disguised as beautiful moral pretexts.

The reason for this is self-evident: a man must be free of every external accountability in order to be sure that he is beholding his own self rather than a social role – only then can he make a completely sincere judgment. Only he who is master of himself is free – and no one is master of himself if he can’t even bear to look, alone, into his own heart.

Even the most frank of conversations, the most spontaneous of confessions is no substitute for this internal exam, if for no other reason than that they are only valid when they are expressions of this exam, rather than fleeting effusions, induced by a casually stimulating environment or by a vain desire to appear sincere.

Moreover, it is not only the moral dimension of conscience which is developed in this confrontation: it is the whole conscience – cognitive, aesthetic, practical. For this is simultaneously closeness and distance: it is the solitary judgment which creates the true intimacy of man with himself and it is also that which creates the distancing, the inner space in which the lived experiences and the acquired knowledge are assimilated, deepened and appropriated. Without this space, without this personal “world” wrestled from solitude, man is merely a tube through which information comes and goes – as does food – transformed in detritus.

Now, not every human being is blessed by Providence with the spontaneous perception and the accurate judgment of his sins. Without these gifts, the yearning for justice is perverted and becomes the projective inculpation of others and the “rationalization” (in the psycho-analytic meaning of the term). Anyone who was not endowed with this from birth must acquire it through education. Moral education, therefore, is less related to giving and memorizing lists of what is right and what is wrong than to creating a moral environment conducive to the practice of self-examination, of inner seriousness, of the responsibility of everyone of knowing what he did when no one was looking.

For two millennia, such an environment was created and sustained by the Christian practice of the “conscience exam”. There are similar practices in other mystical and religious traditions, but none in contemporary secular culture. There are the psycho-analyses, the psychotherapies, but they only work in this sense when they conserve the religious reference to personal guilt and its rescue by confession before God. And, as society becomes de-Christianized (or, mutatis mutandis, de-Islamized, de-Judaized etc.), this reference is dissolved and the clinical techniques tend to achieve the exact opposite: the abolition of the feeling of guilt, sometimes by transforming it into a selfish hardening mistaken for “maturity”, sometimes by fostering a self-complacent adaptability, without fiber or character, mistaken for “sanity”.

The difference between the religious technique and its modern replacements is that the former summarized in the same dramatic experience the pain of guilt and the joy of redemption – and this is what the “secular ethics” cannot do, precisely because they lack the dimension of the Final Judgment, of the confrontation with the eternal destiny which, by giving a metaphysical meaning to experience, raised the yearning of personal responsibility to the heights of a nobility of the soul with which the exteriorities of a “citizen ethics” are unable to dream about.

For two centuries modern culture has been doing the utmost to enfeeble, smother and extinguish in the soul of all men the ability for this supreme experience in which the conscience of the self is demanded to the limite and in which – only in which – someone may acquire the authentic measure of possibilities and duties of the human condition. The “secular ethics”, the “education for citizenship” is what is left in the outer space when the inner conscience is silenced and when the actions of man no longer mean anything apart from infractions or obedience to a code of conventionalisms and casual interests.

"Ethics", then, becomes the pure adaptation to externalities, without any intimate resonance apart from what can be obtained by the forced internalization of slogans, clichés and propaganda. “Ethics” becomes the sacrifice of human conscience in the altar of the official lie of the week.

Mariner wrote:
This is morality. Keep that in mind when you try to explain it through evolution wink. We're not talking about mammalian instincts here.

Benedict wrote:
In my opinion one of the most convincing arguments for God is that of the existence of moral law. When a small child is ditched in line he somehow knows that "that's not fair!" Why is that? The answer is best given in the reality of the absolute moral law. If a common moral law exists then that necessitates a Moral Law Giver,God.
One looks at the Holocaust and concludes that the Germans' actions were "atrocious" and "evil". This might beg the question "Why is killing evil?". The question is best answered by assuming something was able to write this law on our hearts with intentions to leading us to an even greater moral perfection. Once again that something is God.

The Argument is best summed up in the following:
1.There is a universal moral law
2.Such a moral law would imply a Law Giver
3.Thus, God exists as the Law Giver

There is still the question of evil. If there is such a law then why aren't murders and rapists bound by it? The answer is that they are or at least they were. People aren't born killers. People make decisions that lead to habits that lead to lifestyles.
I once saw an interview with Jeffrey Dahmer while he was in prison. The interviewer asked him to describe how he came to do the monstrous things he did. Jeffrey answered by saying that he basically had to battle his conscience to commit that first rape and murder. After that it became less of a moral issue each time he did it. However, after the fact Dahmer went on to say he became aware of the atrocity of his actions through contemplation of his acts well after he committed them. In essence, even if one is able to shrug off his conscience for a few moments it still comes back to haunt him once he's had time to think about it.
On the other end of the spectrum, we see moral law coming to perfection in the lives of saints and the like. They have demonstrated that when we follow our conscience it ultimately leads to the Almighty and then to moral perfection in God. This manifests itself in acts of extreme self-sacrifice and selflessness in order to help others with no ulterior motives whatsoever.

Besmir87 wrote:
I dont know if an Atheist can be as moral as a "true" christian. I know atheist's like to believe that and argue for that case, but morality and life can't co-exist since life and morality are two different matters. There will come a time in a person's life when they have to choose a moral decision and die or choose an immoral decision and continue to live. Obviously, if an atheist believes that theres no after life, nor a god who will judge their decision its quite apparent what their choice will be. On the other hand if a christian is placed in the same dilemma, where they would have to decide between morality or life, they would obviously choose morality since it would contradict their ideology.