I guess they've never read article 5:

How do you keep right from wrong, then? Do you use your intuition?
I think they would find it righteous when asking their intuition, so you are no different then.

Didn't watch it, I'm not really that faint-hearted. I just don't want to see that.

Ah, Islam, the religion of "peace".

I'll comment anyway.  He probably wouldn't take part in this.  The Bible calls for the exact same punishment for mostly the exact same crimes, but you'll be hard pressed to meet a Christian who would stone someone to death, at least outside of Africa.

Islam in these regions has not reformed.  In other cultural groups Islam *has* reformed.  You can easily find some Islamic preacher who will give you an excuse about why this behavior is not consistent with the Koran.  The difference is Islam never had a Jesus figure who re-defined their religion to a more gentle place.  I doubt it will either, not when it is such a mega-religion.  We're stuck with it as-is.  The only hope for these people is their societies modernizing.

Greeings:

I  haven't been on this site in a year or more.  I thought I'd would observe a few topics or so.  First of all; the creator of this topic has this postscript:  '"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck

My question is this; what experiment can you use to prove that experimentation is the only means of knowledge?  You are using a category fallacy by mixing a philosophical claim with an empirical one. 

On to the topic: What is the absolute moral law that makes stoning wrong?  Where can I find this law?

Chaz

This begs the question.  Why must one be morally obligated to seek social cohesion, given a naturalist world view? You are presupposing a moral law to justify your moral laws; that is, the moral obligation to hold to that viewpoint.  If morals do not supersede or transcend man, then they are arbitrary at best.  Where are these 'evolved traits' located; in the brain, the human body, etc.?  Can we know which cells are moral cells in the brain or body if that is case?  If you follow arbitrary morals based upon 'mob rule' or 51% or more vote, then you are the true sheep.  What is right today can easily be wrong tomorrow in that case. 

How can you know my motives for obeying moral laws?  Can you read my mind? 

I find the quote slightly misleading. I would say that a philosophy based on observable reality i.e. science, is the only means of knowledge. Experimentation allows us to isolate variables and test hypothesis.

Btw, can you start a new thread instead of hijacking a random one?

Correct. There is no such law. There is no moral obligation. Completely arbitrary. It is all preference.

There are no "moral cells." Evolved traits are not necessarily objects that you can "locate." Can you locate your "favorite ice cream" cell? Our preferences are indeed a product of the workings of our brain, but it is not so simple as to point to a single brain cell and identify that as the cause.

Good thing that's not what we do then.

Why do you like your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Actually, butter, we might be able to.  In Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene, he cites an example of an early result in neurological research.  Sometimes prior to epileptic surgery, electrodes were directly implanted in the brain to locate the exact location of the lesion causing the seizures prior to surgery.  One man had a neuron that would respond to "Jennifer Aniston".  The experiment was to read or look at pictures while they recorded the output from the electrodes and then attempted to correlate firing with particular activities.  Brain mapping.  They knew which neuron it was because that was where the electrode was implanted.  The neuron responded to any photo of Ms. Anniston, full or partial, any clothing outfit, and it would also fire when shown the words "Jennifer Aniston" or "JENNIFER ANISTON" or any other variation.  Cool, huh?

pages 130-144

Of course, not all of our thoughts can be linked to one particular neuron.

Semantics are the most powerful weapons of choice for theists.

For all intents and purposes (sic), there is no distinction between arbitrary and random, as the salient point is that they imply no 'order' and an abscence of adherence to the laws of physics and logic, and as such, are completely void of any predictability and method of distilling how outcomes could have occurred.

Which basically means:

STFU with your BS semantics and mindfvcks, and stop trying to blow smoke up everyone's arse with your intellectual dishonesty, because going round in circles makes you feel that you views are actually gaining in veracity...

Only if they don't want to be stoned to death for holding hands before marriage.

No-one said social cohesion was a moral obligation.  I think you've missed the point.  Social cohesion is only valuable *if* you value the type of society that brings.  If you want to live in an environment without social cohesion, by all means, abandon the idea as having no moral significance.

We can demand such things because...well, we can demand anything we want.  If society A advocated things like not murdering random passers-by and society B advocated the opposite, I'm *fairly* certain which society will flourish.  I know which one I'd rather be a part of.

Well, truth by definition must be logical and logical concepts are falsifiable, because an alternate state would prove they are false.  It might not be practical to falsify a particular thing, but there has to be some method to falsify a claim or you're just being random.

I'm not even going to get into the inherent silliness of claiming an immaterial deity is the source of morality.  This thread is hijacked enough already.

Again, no you are most certainly not obligated to do anything.  However, if we were neighbors I would attempt to force basic concepts of social cohesion upon you out of self-interest.  I'd also much rather you supported such an idea because you thought it made sense, rather than supporting it because you feared divine retribution or wanted divine reward.  That is like living next to someone who only avoids raping your kids because they don't want to go to jail, versus those who think raping kids is a bad idea in general, and something to be avoided.  Just me though.

1: We are not morally obligated to do anything.  Moral obligations are your bag, not mine.

2: The thief scenario is describing hedonism, and a particularly moronic kind of hedonism because everyone around him would make sure he was either dead or imprisoned.  I'm not advocating hedonism anyway, I'm not sure where you got that from.

3: Who said I know what is best?  I do know that societies without a principle of social cohesion don't survive though...so I can be fairly certain that such a thing is an important concept.  Do you want to live in Somalia?  No?  Do you want your nieghbors to see your sweet new TV and murder you for it?  No?  I rest my case.

Honestly, this isn't even to the point of being complicated yet.  The kinds of questions your posing don't even make me rely on a more sophisticated system of morality, all your questions make me do is rely on basic self interest...that can cover a whole range of secular moral systems.  This is just pragmatism at this point.

I'm disgusted you chose this thread to have this debate in, to be honest.  I just watched two people be tortured to death in the name of God, and here you are furiously defending the concept.  The Muslims would make *exactly* the same arguments you're making.  Doesn't that make you a tad uneasy?  Your 'logic' can be used to justify *anything*.  It *is* used to justify anything.  You can't say the Muslim is wrong any more than the Mormons can say you were wrong, or Jews can say the Nazi's (haha, Godwined!) where wrong.  You all rely on the exact same, "Special revelation from an immaterial being."  The only one of you who is 'right' is the one who can force compliance on the others and claim moral right by force.  Yuck.

Look - I'm not completely happy with the Planck quote, and it's his quote, not mine. Given there are things like astronomy that can be known based on observation and not experiment his point does not always hold true. But observation too, is based on what can be observed or known in reality.

Regardless, it's unlikely I am ever going to find any common ground with an epistemologist. Your base position must be an argument from complexity. I will always admit there are things that I don't know while you need to think you know in order to be saved in this life.

Morality governed by a being existing outside this space time is one thing I can't come at. I think morality is a social development and passed on to children by parents, teachers, siblings and experience. The idea it's wrong to throw rocks at a young girl for being unable to resist feelings of love seems obvious to me though it's clearly not universal. Some muslims are fine with killing defenseless people, obviously. 

There's no absolute moral law. My subjective moral law is against it. Some muslims feel differently.

Does everyone have a moral obligation to hold to that view?  Morality is an abstract and immaterial proposition or obligation.  It is not material in nature.  If you hold to philosophical naturalism, then how can you hold to such entities?  Secondly, how can you be certain, as you are finite and cannot know all things by the methodology of demarcation or empiricism as the sole means of knowledge. 

The Bible does not allow anarchy of individuals to stone.  The death penalty is to be carried out by a legitimate civil authority.

The Bible distinquishes three types of killing; willful murder, self-defense, and retribution by the civil magistrate. 

Sounds arbitrary.

Yes; glad that you agree that there are some moral absolutes.

"The Bible says"

Funny how our species survived without Christianity long before it's invention, and most of the 7 billion people survive without it today.

Why do you need a cosmic dictator telling you what is right and wrong. How is it we can ALSO condemn this barbarity and at the same time not believe in magical super hero's in the sky?

I'll tell you why. BECAUSE secularism and pluralism in the west has made law a common thing and not a religious thing and we have evolved to shed the old honor tribalism that causes this type of crap.

BUT you are taking your own Bible out of context of history. Your current desire to paint a positive picture on that book of myth is just a form of backpeddling. It wasn't that long ago when that same book was used to justify slavery, sexism, genocide of Native Americans and burning of witches.

You can cop out to "misinterpretation" all you want but that still would not change the fact that the book WAS and still is used as a weapon against outsiders. Even today both the left and the right claim Jesus to be on their side and use it as a political weapon to gain office over the other. Watering down the book doesn't make it less tribal.

The Bible took over 1,000 years and 40 authors to write. And the fact that you are here saying "they got it wrong" says tons about this fictional super hero you claim to be real. If I wrote an instruction manual on how to assemble a 12 speed bicycle as ineptly as this alleged god, I would go out of business.

MAYBE you need to consider that the bible was written by humans as a splinter sect of the Jewish myth cult and that humans make up gods and god claims exist, not because any god is real, but because those claims are successfully marketed. Much like McDonnalds is successful in selling you junk food.

All god claims will go extinct when our species goes extinct because there wont be a future generation to sell the myths to.

Out out Brief Candle......Macbeth act 5 scene 5.  Although the line is in context to the play, it can also apply to the futile effort to make up gods to avoid our finite existence as a species.

"full of sound and furry, signifying nothing".

Why should it frighten you to think that this is all there is? It doesn't frighten me in the least. Knowing that death and finality and being finite does not take away for me, the good things in life that I do find.

THE BOTTOM line is, that for the same reason you use the bible to condemn their behavior is the same reason they use the Koran to justify their barbarity. Both you and they believe that your god/s are telling you what is right and wrong.

Religion is nothing but political superstition and is used to ignore reality by attempting to create utopias that don't exist.

Not that it's relevant to this thread OR my post, but the UN is about as useful for determining morality as reading the Bible. The weak, half-assed attempts by many UN countries to meddle in the affairs of others amuses me to no end. It's also highly unnecessary. Despite what many politicians both US and European may tell you, baby sitting everyone else is not necessary, nor is it easily justified by reason and/or logic.

And despite what Bobspence and Magus want me to believe, the greater cause for worldwide dissent against the U.S. isn't apathy to the plight of others; it's our continued attempts to babysit everyone else.

Thanks for the strawman, though.

How can you test anything without observation? Observation IS empiricism. We cant see the center of a black whole, true, but just like wind, we can observe it's affects on the objects around it which require OBSERVATION.

Old philosophy is nothing but mental masturbation. Kicking the tires to insure quality control of data is what empiricism is. So unless these comic book claimants of fictional friends in the sky can come up with a better tool than empiricism, I'd say they are screwed, and maybe THEY need to give up on old tribal comic book stories and relegate them to the myths of the past where they belong.

Making shit up only constitutes making shit up. Making elaborate shit up only makes it elaborate shit. So when billions of people go around making billions of different claims, what do we as a species use to cut through the competing claims?

Funny how the Christian, Muslim, Jew and atheist can all type on their computers and can know what DNA is. DNA was not discovered through myth or making shit up. It was discovered through empiricism and observation.

MYTH making is a thing of the past. Wanting a god to be real is merely the wishful thinking of our species as a placebo to ignore our finite existence.

SLAP any label onto your claimed deity and you will still have the same amount of evidence for your claim as others do for theirs.

We no longer believe the earth is flat. It was because of empiricism and observation, not "poof" "god did it".

And if one wants to argue either way, there has to be a cause, OR something can come from nothing, NEITHER require cognition as a starting point.

Assuming a magical "who" does not answer the chicken vs egg question. It is a distraction and conflates the gaps in human knowledge to comic book status. It prevents us from breaking the barriers we seek to break in discovery by throwing a wall up and saying, "well this is all we know, so therefor we can stop here via "god did it".

Time after time in scientific discovery we have gone from a super natural gap answer to eventually explaining reality with a natural answer.

If one can accept that a raindrop does not need to think about falling to the ground, then what came before the big bang, IF ANYTHING, would not need any more thought than the raindrop and would be caused by a "what". The "what" being a non-thinking process like the storm that manifested to making the raindrop.

Claims of the super natural in the form of deities/god/s or ghosts or spirits is nothing but humans projecting human qualities on the world around them. It is nothing but simple anthropomorphism. Organizing this false placebo into a "religion" and having humans successfully marketing ANY religion, does not make the deity real. It just makes the belief popular, not true. Otherwise the sun would be a god and the earth would be flat.

Claims are like assholes, everyone has one. To expect the skeptic to buy a naked assertion OF ANY KIND is absurd.

It makes much more sense that our evolution has lead to filling in the gaps with false beliefs PRECISELY because evolution isn't about perfection and for every gene that gets passed on, there are as well, bad claims that get passed on as well.

Before the thread got derailed I wanted to say thank you for this insight mellestad. There are no absolutes to an individual with regard to behaving like the individual's group. It is encouraging that someone, somewhere will read this forum and hopefully realise that they can have integrity and not bow to mass behavior. We come back to the issue of moderate religion being a platform for extremist behavior: and yes, I think change is coming. Taking my gentle man colleague he would be horrified if I suggested this is the kind of behavior he should be involved in and there are Imams who are now speaking out to encourage modern behavior like birth control, using condoms to prevent AIDS and Imams who discourage activism in their mosques. 

Media is the way that we can progress - 30 years ago I would not have been able to watch this segment or comment on it. This is the way forward!

I suspect he is implying the really stupid fallacy of, "You have no objective right to say that the Muslims are wrong. Ergo, you should let them stone people."

So does yours/god/s/dess sound arbitrary.  It is perfectly okay to murder women, children, fetuses, the elderly if you do so in the name of retribution by a civil magistrate.  But don't have an abortion - that is bad - even if the fetus is incapable of living on its own and the life of the mother is in jeopardy if carried to term.  Self defense is okay - deliberately purchase a weapon with the intent of murdering a total stranger which sounds like willful murder to me - no problem.

For me, sure I have moral absolutes.  There are certain actions I can not envision myself committing.  That does not mean that we couldn't find some situation where I might violate my moral absolutes.  The difference between us is I don't pretend to believe that I am perfect.

You, on the other hand, can do whatever you damn well please, violate any command in the bible - do you beat your slaves? - pray to jesus for forgiveness and - tah-dah! back in heaven.  Christian morals suck big time.

I have to live with my moral decisions and the only person who can forgive me is me, so I am very careful about my choices. 

Wow you guys.  Finally a thiest comes here and proves us all wrong in just a couple of totally unique posts about the objective morality that comes from the Christian god (the first of it's kind, never heard this before).  Am I ever glad you came, we were all fucked up and confused before you got here.  I didn't know whether to stone my dog, or eat my mom, now that you are hear, it is clear these actions are wrong because god says so. Dammit, I soooo wanted to fuck shit up, untill you told me god would punish me if I did, then I decided I would selfishly restain myself, not for the good of others, but for the good of myself.

What is the absolute moral law that makes stoning wrong?  Where can I find this law?

Well in the "secular objective morality hanbook" ofcourse, lol    

 If you follow arbitrary morals based upon 'mob rule' or 51% or more vote, then you are the true sheep.  What is right today can easily be wrong tomorrow in that case. 

You mean like slavery, mass murder, witch burning, being forced to marry the man who rapped you, selling and exchanging daughters like property, statatory rape, incest,  SHALL I GO ON???  All deemed OK by your religion not to long ago, where was your gods objective morality then?   It is a DAMB good thing that our moraliy is ever changing, and that we are better refining it every day.  It is this that makes the quest towards better morality such a great one,   and I hope we NEVER say we've perfected it, so that we contiunue to discuss rationally as a species what basic morality is, and improve on and fefine it as time goes on.  Objective morality from god is so bunk, bunk bunk BUNK!!!

How can you know my motives for obeying moral laws?  Can you read my mind? 

No but I can read you words though, which are a good representation of your thoughts, I hope!  And you are asking what is wrong with stoning someone without god to say it is wrong.  Inherently you are saying that without god, stoning is OK.  From that we can somewhat conclude that you believe without gods objective morality people (including yourslef, unless you are immune to your own argument) would just be going around fucking shit up without concern for others, and without your gods rules and punishment, the world would be a much more violent place.  There are some big problem here, 1)-Countries with less religion are less violent statistically (and less bat shit crazy in general) this is SOOOOOO blatantly obvious.  Infact people individually who are religious are more violent than non-religious folk in general as demonstrated by prison inmate statistics (atleast in america).  There doesn't seem to be any corelation between violent behavior, and the non-belief in enternal punishment.  Infact the large majority of violent criminals claim to be religious, (is it because they don't believe hard enough? lol)    And 2)-From what we can tell, there is no god (if there is, he is completely meaningless as he apparently does nothing to affect us, he just sits up there and watches), so without solid evidence of his existence and plans to punish the wicked, why are people in general still "good?" Because they really really believe???  Doubtful!  Many people who claim to be religious are completey full of shit, I know many of them.   Maybe it's because they look at someone they love and think (I don't want that person stoned to death, that would be *bad*) therefore they can apply this reasoning to other people and other situations.  Maybe it's just that simple buddy!!!  Objective morality form the Christian god=BUNK BUNK BUNK!!!  FUCKING BUNK!!!

Christian Theism holds to special revelation, previously spoken by inspiration and then compiled in writing by divine inspiration. 

Sorry pal, but this is just what you really really want to be true.  Please demonstrate that the bible is devinely inspired.  Dumdadumdadum...Waiting........ 

I'm so tired of these "Their is objective morality, and it comes from the christian god, I can prove it with my crap reasoning skills" types, what a bunch of turd burgelers.

Hey if your god said to you today, "It is ok to have sex with little girls"  would it then be ok,  would you do it because god said it was ok?  What if god TOLD you you MUST have sex with a 9 year old girl, would you do it then?  What if he asked you to built an alter and kill your son on it, would you do that, if you killed him, would that be moral.  Give your head a shake pal, your god is exactly where to NOT find good morals, and objective morality from him makes absolutely no sense.

you forget the rest of the armour

Can you show me where the Bible says that those actions are OK?  You are pressuposing that those things are objectively wrong.  Is this your subjective opinion, or is this a set of absolute morals you use to critique  your false view of my religion?  Again, nothing from you but subjective opinions and feelings. 

I am saying that without an absolute and personal entity which is transcendent and immanent; yes, there are no universal and objective moral laws.  Can you direct me to the statistic you are appealing to?  Pragmatic appeal is not absolute truth. 

The old 'prison' argument.  When an inmate is admitted to an American prison system, there are limited options as to one's religious beliefs on the forms.  Christianity is the default religion.  The other religions are usually not even known by the vast majority.  We conclude that a person is a Christian if they obey the tenets of the religion, not what they write on a form. 

'From what we can tell, there is no god'  What form of epistemology do you use to determine this?  Inductively, you are finite and not able to empirically examine all things and places, at all times to know this with 100% certainty.  If you use a physical criteria to examine an immaterial entity, then you are categorically defeated in your research. 

What constitutes valid 'demonstration' in your worldview?  I use the Bible as my ultimate starting point as proof.  If you go beyond that, then you have to prove what proves the axiom, ad infinitum.  We are then left with an infinite regress of proofs.  Similarly, you start with yourself as the ultimate arbiter of truth, or some group, etc.  You don't prove why your axioms are valid; otherwise, the proof becomes your starting axiom for truth. 

The Christian God would not say that it is OK to do such, as His nature