The question is flawed.  It is not a dichotomy between God changing his mind and slavery being moral.  Slavery is an act without any inherent moral implications.  It simply refers to using a human as personal property.  There are instances where that can be moral and instances where that can be immoral.  If someone in a particular time period offers himself as a slave to pay a debt, then that is not immoral.  In the modern age, it is not necessary because we have developed more advanced mediums of exchange.  The race-related slavery of the Confederacy was nothing like the slavery of the biblical era. Africans were being kidnapped and enslaved without consent.  

So no, God never changed his mind.

Nothing like slavery-defending apologetics to reveal intellectual bankruptcy. What's that you say? God advocated kidnapping foreigners to be used as slaves? Just like kidnapping Africans I suppose.

Starting from Lev. 25:44:

"You may have male and female slaves, but buy them from the nations around you. You may also buy them from the foreigners living among you and from their families born in your country. They will be your property. You may acquire them for yourselves and for your descendants as permanent property. You may work them as slaves."

Sounds like chattel slavery to me. Permanent life-long human property taken from foreign nations that will be the property of your children after you die. Keep in mind that an Isrealite owning another Isrealite is following a system of temporary indentured servatude. An Isrealite owning a foreigner was life-long chattel slavery.

And how did these moral, freindly Isrealite slave-masters treat their chattel slaves?:

Exodus 21:

 ²⁰"If a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod and he dies at his hand, he shall be punished.

 ²¹"If, however, he survives a day or two, no vengeance shall be taken; for he is his property

Hmm, so beating a slave so severly that the slave needs 24-48 hours to recover as A-OK. Just don't kill the slave. Severe beatings are fine, but killing is crossing the line. And this is the morality-neutral slavery as justified by the Bible? Or perhaps should we condem all forms of slavery, even those that weren't practiced by certain US states historically? I think that I'll condem all slavery, even the Biblical kind, as amoral and undefendable.

But please, enlighten us as to how slavery is morality neutral. Explain how robbing someone of their freedom so that you can work them (and I suppose senslessely beat them as Exodus 21 condones) and own them as property is morality neutral.

You forgot the passage about how, if an indentured servant's time was over, and he/she wanted to stay, the owner was supposed to nail the servant's ear to a post or door and then keep the servant for the rest of his/her life. Yah. Real defensible.

From the OP I imagined a unit table along these lines.

So reflecting the premise that Not Moral has a higher payoff than Moral.

Then, OrdinaryClay adds an end-game arbiter who can reduce all the 2's to zero.

Basically it is like the prisoners dilemma and concludes that rational self-interest drives the players towards the riskiest category, in this case the risk is, essentially, Pascal's Wager. However we're not asked to analyse the risk, the suggestion is to compare the behaviour of players under this condition to the behaviour of players not under the condition.

To draw this conclusion we're, further, asked to take the Moral action as being agreed upon by the players. Presumably the Judge also agrees, as Nigel pointed out, or we would be unable to conclude which categories are at risk of being nullified. So... assuming that everyone agrees what is Moral.... then only payoffs gained by pre-defined not-moral action are at risk AND when someone gets a not-moral payoff every party agrees it has happened.

So we have:

a. knowledge of which payoffs will be reduced to zero (by extension we have defined what players under the condition know will happen to their payoffs at the end game)

b. a definition of moral as agreed by all parties (not particularly realitisic but it's there) implying that we would also agree.

From that he concludes that actions every party agrees are Moral have been given a boost in numbers by the presence of the judge and says that the judge ensures the players choose morality over rational self-interest.

Jeez, how stupid do you think we are? We're not just saying that if the term slavery is used, then whatever was done was immoral. The passages we cited are very descriptive and specific about what was done.

For example, look at the 4 verses below:

"Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them. They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the Lord in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the Lord's people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man." Numbers 31:15-18

This is really one of my favorite excerpts from the Bible. It demonstrates just how pathetic the Bible is as a source of morality. Do you realize that's Moses talking and that this procedure was supported by God? Do you realize what he's saying? Apparently, you don't, so I'll explain it to you. Moses is telling the Israelites to kill all of their prisoners of war, but to keep all the virgins as slaves.

"The plunder remaining from the spoils that the soldiers took was 675,000 sheep, 72,000 cattle, 61,000 donkeys and 32,000 women who had never slept with a man." Numbers 31:32-35

Earlier, you said....

Clearly, these girls did not willingly become slaves in order to pay off debt. Their entire families were massacred, and they were taken by the opposing army as booty (pun intended).

You also said....

Yeah, have fun reconciling the passages I cited with this statement.

Don't forget this one.

Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen forever. Leviticus 25:44-46

Oh, well, if you don't claim that the OT is infallible, then I have no more problems with it.   

"You may have male and female slaves, but buy them from the nations around you. You may also buy them from the foreigners living among you and from their families born in your country. They will be your property. You may acquire them for yourselves and for your descendants as permanent property. You may work them as slaves."

Yeah, you can buy foreigners living among you or foreigners living in other nations. That is not different from buying slaves from Africa (whites purchased Africans that other Africans already enslaved, just like Israelites purchasing enslaved foreigners). Purchasing foreigners for life-long slavery is condoned and that is my problem here.

So how did the Israelites not practice chattel slavery again? Buying foreigners that live among you or foreigners that actually live in foreign lands isn't morally different. You are still buying and selling people for the purpose of life-long chattel slavery. I really don't understand attempts at justifying this. I would have thought that apologists would simply denounce all slavery and try to distance modern theologically inspired moral views from the backwards genocidal/chattel slave owning Israelites.

My mistake: I mixed you up with the original poster.

If my interpretation of the theist's point of view is "false" (do you mean "inaccurate" or "imprecise" or ... ? ) then let me know which road you want to go down for this conversation: means of revelation or justification. I've definitely mixed you up with OrdinaryClay, and I apologize, because you're probably confused at my replies. If you'd like to compare and contrast atheistic morality vs theistic morality, I have no problem as long as we can stay fairly specific. 

I'm not sure that question ("Why is what you believe to be moral true?" ) the right question. If it's about true and false, that's different than "moral", so the question itself makes no sense. We also can't provide a completely rational account for many of our behaviours. Why do people like to swim? Not swim to catch food, just swim. It seems to come from no rational place, and yet, it's one of our behaviours. Morality is also one of our behaviours. I don't know if finding out why we are moral is pertinent to the conversation, any more than figuring out why some of us like to swim. 

So neoplatonism. Neoplatonic though comes up a lot on these boards. If you're not familiar with the works of Plotinus, you should check it out. Your use of the word "worldview" gives me the impression that you learned your philosophy from William Lane Craig and friends, who are the only people who use that word with any frequency.

Agreed.

I can see that morals are justified by their nature (it's convoluted, but I can take it as true for the purposes of continuing) but I don't see how that follows from your last two statements.

I suppose turn-about is fair play if I've misrepresented your idea of morality. Truth be told, I don't think I really understand theistic morality, so you'll have to help me out. As far as secular or naturalistic morality, your characterization is mostly wrong. Not totally wrong, of course, because the naturalistic morality is partially mutable, but not completely.

Here's the problem: there are many points of morality, like murder and torture, where all the societies of the world seem to be in agreement, despite different religious systems or values. But there are differences. From the naturalistic point of view, these are behaviours. Some seem universal, and others seem mutable. 

It's possible, but that's tangential to our discussion. Maybe another thread?

You're right, they're both non-sequiturs. I don't know of anyone who would present either of those arguments. The first is the "pomo" argument (from academic shorthand for "postmodernism" ). Postmodernism, in my never humble opinion, is a total waste of time. That type of universal relativism is removed from reality in a special way.

The second argument ignores my point above, which is shown to be untrue by the very existence of treaties. When we can have a United Nations, and people from the entire world can agree on general principles of the UN, then we know that the second argument is bunk.

So what are we left with? A kind of semi-relative morality. That is, there are principles we can agree on, and there are those we cannot. I don't think that should be a surprise. The only real identifying marker for a naturalistic morality would be the lack of black-and-white principles in the first place.

But you're still setting up a straw man. Probabilistic inference does not give us "what happened could not have been otherwise given the circumstances". Instead, it's "what happened could have been otherwise to varying degrees of probability", and that's a big difference. Pure Cartesian determinism just doesn't work in reality.

If you don't believe your non-belief then you don't believe and you must not be an atheist.
 

Your admission that it is self evident shows its relevancy.

This is because we have constraints on our behavior, which is the whole point of the thread. It is not because of some naive notion that we don't act out of self interest.

It follows from the very definition of moral choices. They automatically imply that a choice preference exists and is agreed to by the adherents of the morality.

And lusting isn't ''inherently immoral'' either.

But the bible does say it's ok.

"If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and slave dies as a result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property." Exodus 21:20-21

So how can you trust anything in the OT? or do you just trust what is socially acceptable?(assuming you trust any of it)

Please stop playing these stupid semantics games. Your pitiful argument requires a totally different definition for "atheist", and no one is buying it. Just face that you're wrong and be done with it.

God told him it is.

This thread went from bad to worse. What about a person who never heard of god before? They're an atheist and they don't have a belief.

God told me that you're a 19 year old gook who has never kissed a girl.

Only to your authoritarian concept of morality, which I see as virtually an oxymoron.

Dude, gooks are Filipino or Vietnamese commies. Butter would be a "chink". If you're going to be a dick, at least get it right.

...

Edit: Just in case I wasn't clear, I don't mind a bit of internet banter, but "gook" is pretty tacky. It lowers the register of discourse without any real sense of humour.

If belief in this being isn't rational, then the believer holding is clearly able to hold irrational beliefs.
If they are able to hold irrational beliefs then this might extend to their moral beliefs too.
This makes them more likely to have errors in their moral beliefs, and cause them too do wrong when they're trying so hard to do right.
So both ways seem to have an advantage and a disadvantage.

In reality, people have found plenty of alternatives to motivate them not to cheat.
One example is making a rational decision to be less selfish and do what's best for the community, i.e. think in terms of "us" instead of "me"
They rationally work out that cheating the system will be bad for them overall so the "rationally selfish" decision would be to promote the interests of community.
Theistic belief isn't so successful. People struggle to have faith.
They can flitter between moments of belief and non-belief, meaning they'll lack belief long enough to cheat, but will just regret it later when they go into belief again.

Not to mention that the majority of the world's problems are caused by ignorance rather than bad intentions.
The atheist might lose the incentive of not angering the omnipotent judge, but I think it's the lesser of two evils.
 

Just a thought, is God infinite years old? or infinite + 2,000? Does each passing year count as 2, one for god and one for jesus? either way that's one big fucking cake to fit all those candles......

I like cake.

Yes, as I indicated, on this you took the words right out of my mouth. The original game is really a premise to the Judge argument and is seemingly stacked to affirm the consequent with an imported bi-conditional symmetry. 

That the arbitrator successfully flips the values says a lot about how they were originally stacked so it can be trivially true while begging the question of whether that is all it is saying.

Yeah, we don't need to follow the game because we're not asked to analyse the conclusions of the game, were being asked to assume them as given. Plus as you said both conclusions are really quite elementary (and this is due to the games being stacked towards those conclusion)

However, since neither game is even the actual argument it seems more appropriate to just state outright  -

P_m1. Assume A. not acting morally has a higher pay-off and B. rational self interested people - such that - not acting morally is a dominant strategy.

P_m2. Since we prefer people to act morally...

Conclude: Moral dilemma

Clay then proposes:

1. If X exists such that moral behaviour is the dominant strategy then the dilemma is solved.

2. A system of belief in which moral behaviour is the dominant strategy is superior. (from P_m2)

So

Let God be X for theists.

Q.E.D.

Quoted for stupidity.

Hahahahahaha, not bad actually. Pat yourself on the spiritual back, you got 1/4th of that right. 

"God told me"

No, God didn't tell you anything. You were talking to yourself again.  

"that you're a 19 year old"

Applause! Woohoo! Winner! Winner! Winner!

"gook"

Awww! Nope, wrong ethnicity. Try again.

"who has never kissed a girl."

Nope, sorry, even your grand finale was incorrect.

Although, I do need a girlfriend.......

Edit: Apparently, he couldn't handle our criticism of his precious book anymore and lashed out at me.

Where did "invariably" come from. No one is saying we are automatons. Human society has structure because individuals act out of self interest more often then not. We form groups and alliances because of self interest. We then try and cheat the very groups we form because of self interest. You can pretend all you want that we don't, but the gross evidence is everywhere. We have thousands of years of history that show it. We have everyday life that screams it.

I've never denied that we exhibit acts of true non self interest, but as I pointed out the set of such cases does not obviate the larger set of cases where we do.
 

The gist of your "flaws" are that in either case (judged or not) the player is not certain they will be judged or they will be caught. (note: risk of being caught in the non judged game is equivalent from a strategy standpoint to having a conscience, it adds uncertainty to cheating or not cheating). The game as presented is not meant to represent exact reality, as I've said multiple times. It is an abstraction that highlights the consequences of an aspect of our behavior. Given who we are and what we are we need judges - plain and simple. The more confidence we have the judge will catch us the more likely we are not to cheat. Pointing out exceptions does not change that fact.