[QuantumDelta]

"God" didn't write any morals, people did, and then attributed it to a fictional character because they thought it would carry more weight with the brainwashed masses (who'da thunk it did?).

Common moral codes occur because we are in a common society, you will find that segregation, and general degrees of culture separation lead to ENTIRELY different morals. If you haven't had enough evidence of that in this thread then you should consider reading 1984, or versing yourself a little more in tribal and third world cultural 'values'. They are very different to 'ours'.

Japanese is different from German which is different from English... yet all of them have some form of grammer and units of meaning.
Our morality follows similar rules... only the content may be different. Yet that content is also the end product of evolution and certain content like, for example "the indiscriminate killing of others" is rather a huge disadvantage for the evoultionary fitness of a moral code.... hence, you will find with great statistical significance that any moral codes that are somewhat stable in historic terms have some say against random killings. You seem to be hung up on the word absolute, when the word that explains it much better would be "emergent" due to our shared human condition and due to the prerequisites of stable societies. Or in other words: If a certain moral code violates certain principles it necessarily will phase itself out before long.

This is like saying apples and oranges are similar because they're both fruit.
If you're going to be intelligent enough to derive that morales are produced for evolutionary benefit then be intelligent enough to realise that ALL morales will be produced for evolutionary benefit.
The link B posted ages ago falls over because people intelligent enough to get that far into a philosophical debate will realise that.
And on that premise I submit that it's pretty obvious (to anyone who isn't clinically insane) none of those tennants came from anything 'divine'.

God is not "defined", which is why s/he is so hard to disprove. It's quite difficult to prove that something that doesn't exist, doesn't exist, especially when you don't know what you're looking for precisely.
And, you realise from a Psychiatrists point of view it is religious people that are /ACTUALLY/ mentally unhealthy? Escaping from reality and relying on fiction to support their view of the world and prevent themselves from falling into ego-collapse?

So don't start.

Of course God is defined Quantum Delta. Existence is not a prerequisite for definition. You can define anything you want and if your definition includes that it can't be verified by worldy means it naturally becomes impossible to prove or disprove, which is essentially the nature of god.

As far as religion being "unhealthy" goes... it would be fatal to approach the issue without some pragmatism: I.e. what would be the alternative for that specific person in that specific situation?
If "curing" them from their current religion means they inevitable join some more fundamentalist sect or cult or become suicidal...  then is it a really good idea to fight against that specific religion? Can you justify such an outcome of your actions in the framework of your own subjective morals?

If the definition of something is that it's existence cannot be defined it cannot exist (*This is different to 'beyond our current ability to define', which is temporary).
Except in fiction.

[Scotty]

This is like saying apples and oranges are similar because they're both fruit.

Apples and oranges are similar because they're both fruit.

[Mikes]

This is like saying apples and oranges are similar because they're both fruit.

Now we're finally getting somewhere.

If you're going to be intelligent enough to derive that morales are produced for evolutionary benefit then be intelligent enough to realise that ALL morales will be produced for evolutionary benefit.

...  biological evolution can explain why we have certain predispositions left over from thousands of years of natural selection.
It is totally worthless in explaining "all moral values" in all our various societies, especially not  when confronted with the memetic evolution that is only starting to really take off since we hit the information age.

(I.e. just like our faculty for grammar can explain why our languages share similarities....  but is totally worthless for explaining recent features and changes of particular languages or even the Great Vowel Shift.)

I dunno what else to tell ya really... except that it has nothing to do with absolutes or universals, but with how things evolved. It leaves the fact of these shared principles and similarities being there, but does not tell us anything about their value for our modern societies.

If the definition of something is that it's existence cannot be defined it cannot exist (*This is different to 'beyond our current ability to define', which is temporary).
Except in fiction.

You are merely pointing out the rather obvious fact that a scientific mindset can not grasp the concept of god.

Of course you can define anything as anything you like and even if it's just by defining what it is not. There is no problem at all.
You would only get a problem if you wanted to verify anything scientifically... but no one wants to! People just want to believe in it, don't you get it?

And you know, when you say it's all fiction I, personally, would completely agree with you - but you have to realize that in the eyes of a believer it is you who is irrational, it is you who can not grasp the most basic truth, it is you who denies part of self-evident reality...    i.e. you do not have the shred of an argument to convince someone who really believes; the whole reference system that either of you would argue in is simply not compatible, making it easy to see that you would only frustrate but never convince each other.

[Bobboau]

I have no clue what you're trying to say here.

person says that because the sky is green it is immoral to eat vegetables. it doesn't matter that this doesn't make sense, what matters is that the sky is not green, so they wouldn't have any leg to stand on even if what they were saying was logical to begin with.

Uh... all right. You can use anything to judge whether an action is `good' or `bad'. This way of finding criteria for judgment is really not any more interesting than one where you take culture into account because now you take species into account instead.

well at least we are allowed to have the discussion at all then.

[FireSpawn]

All that you people have said is great, but it won't solve the issue.
I propose we get Axem to send his 6th beta tester to teach them all how to be friends. Problem solved. 

[Polpolion]

person says that because the sky is green it is immoral to eat vegetables. it doesn't matter that this doesn't make sense, what matters is that the sky is not green, so they wouldn't have any leg to stand on even if what they were saying was logical to begin with.

right, and that's fallacious.

let A be the set of all clearly stated assumptions, compound or otherwise, and S be the set of all clearly stated moral axioms. now suppose { (x,y) | x∈A, y∈S }. also let R(x,y) be the relation 'y can be based on x', F(x) is a function mapping x to its correctness (eg x = "3 is 4", F(x) = false; x = "triangles have 3 sides", F(x) = true), and G(y) is a function mapping y to its correctness (**** examples).

what you've said can be written as

∀x∀y ( [ ( R(x,y)∧F(x) )→G(y) ] ∧ ¬F(x)) → ¬G(y)

a contradiction arises whenever F(x) is false and G(x) is true. Thus you are wrong and I am right. QED.

more succinctly, people are not always right when they come to a moral conclusion from something.
more generally, you can come to correct conclusions from erroneous work.
more specifically, a christian could hold a correct moral view even if the bible is wrong.

well at least we are allowed to have the discussion at all then.

not that the discussion is in any way more meaningful.

[FireSpawn]

My mind just asplode. 

[QuantumDelta]

Let me rephrase, I found nothing disgusting or alarming and nothing that couldn't be broken through with reason and logic in that article with the superhappy people and the babyeaters, however I realise that they were both anthropomorphised quite extremely, because they were human constructs to start with, if you note, the babyeaters are looked down on, and it's no coincidence that the superhappy people were feared.

Maybe it's all the star trek in me but I want to believe in the natural goodness of social beings, and I find it hard to believe that non-social beings would be able to evolve to a point where their technological prowess would allow interstellar spaceflight, moreover, all these things are far more grand than some crappy "we do **** cuz some 'greater being' we can't explain or anything threw some rocks at us with crap scribbled on them".

Moral codes arise from observing positive or negative reactions (in the surrounding environment) to ones actions, or now, words.
A unification of our species moral compass will happen, eventually. It's also likely to happen with any alien cultures we might encounter, eventually, given enough communication and shared ecological(probably more likely, economical) environment(s).
As it stands our species is slowly drifting towards what the west currently generally perceives as 'good' - equality for all and aspirations achievable by all, but the reality is far from the ideal, and more often than not it's self inflicted.

[Bobboau]

you can come to correct conclusions from erroneous work.

good point.

that does not affect the second issue however, that is that it is perfectly valid to make judgments of actions of other people based on commonly held criteria.

[FireSpawn]

With all these well constructed arguments and counterarguments, I can just tell the lot of you are serious master-debaters. Your master-debating is a skill you must have spent hours polishing. 

[QuantumDelta]

I don't normally do one smilie replies but 

[Polpolion]

I never said that it wasn't a valid way of judging actions, bob. But claiming that judging an action by locally held criteria is less correct is an incorrect claim because they're both subjective judgments.

[redsniper]

You know... AI's being "cold and unfeeling" may as well turn out to be a trope like space being cold or aliens being green and from Mars.

I don't know about you, but I tend to think of the 2.7 Kelvin temperature of space due to cosmic microwave background radiation to be pretty ****ing cold.

.....vacuum.

Well.... yes space itself has no temperature, since there's nothing there. For any object in space, the only mode of heat transfer will be radiation, and so for the purposes of your radiation calcs, you can use the background radiation temperature to approximate the temperature of the surrounding environment. So then, if you were in the shadow of a planet or something, or far enough from any radiation source like a star that it only had a negligible effect on your object's temperature, then its temperature would probably be pretty close to the back ground radiation temp.

[Bobboau]

I never said that it wasn't a valid way of judging actions, bob. But claiming that judging an action by locally held criteria is less correct is an incorrect claim because they're both subjective judgments.

ok, well, in that case.

this is ****ing barbaric, what the **** is wrong with these people?

[LordPomposity]

I never said that it wasn't a valid way of judging actions, bob. But claiming that judging an action by locally held criteria is less correct is an incorrect claim because they're both subjective judgments.

ok, well, in that case.

this is ****ing barbaric, what the **** is wrong with these people?

They can use Rage six times per day?