So you agree there is an objective morality?
It seems that AtheistHeratic has started this thread to announce a name change. So I'll begin by asking a question that is on topic: AH, did you intend the spelling of your new handle to be "AtheistHeratic" and not "AtheistHeretic"?
Now to address the new topic that has been raised:
The question of how we ground morality is a general one that is often asked of atheists, and geegee appeared to take the name change as an invitation to ask that general question again. I'm not sure that such a question belongs in this thread, but it is a continually interesting challenge to pose to both atheists and theists. How do we ground our morality?
Cimics has posed the question slightly differently, however. He asks whether Heretic (and other atheists such as AtheistHeratic and myself) believe in what he terms "objective morality". Personally, I feel that "objective morality" is a misnomer, since so-called objective moralists seem incapable of agreement on any issue other than the claim that there ought to be a single moral code that exists independently of the vagaries of human opinion.
Heretic has pointed out that evil has been committed in the name of God, but that is somewhat beside the point. The objective moralist will always admit that humans might not be motivated by God's actual definition of morality, but by some distorted personal view of that definition. So one can still be an "objective" moralist without being embarrassed by the apparent inability of so many (most?) humans to get the objective moral code right and abide by it.
Here's my take on good and evil. It has nothing to do with the dictates of God, gods, or any other external authority. What is good is what preserves human survival and human well-being. Evil is whatever impairs it. We might well debate what is best for humanity, but we can do so on a rational basis. God-given morality can be debated, too, but not rationally. That is because we have no rational basis for deciding what God or gods want. Religious faith depends largely on the serendipity of what religious upbringing an individual is exposed to.
So religion-based morality is inherently unstable. Since one can imagine God to bless any kind of behavior, including torture and murder, it can be used to justify literally any kind of behavior. In that sense, religion-based morality can be seen to undermine moral behavior because it disengages the natural connection between good and human welfare and transfers it to the authority of an imagined being that may not always be motivated by the welfare or well-being of humans in general.
