JoeB131
Diamond Member
You remind me of a smug college freshman who has no idea that he's embarrassing himself.
Nothing in your reply addresses the problem.
First of all, if there's no objective standard for morality, then there is nothing intrinsically moral about not harming others. You still have nothing more than a utilitarian system fueled by ultimate self-interest, which is not true morality and furthermore which you have in no way convinced me is worthy of your pride.
But the real rub is this: who decides whether something is a "good reason" for violating rule #1? Society? Majority rule? What about when the majority in this country thought it was fine and dandy to own slaves? The individual? Surely you see the problem with that as pertains to this topic.
It wasn't a majority that the slaveholders decided to cite to rationalize their holding of slaves. In fact, quite the contrary, the plead states rights and tried to find every dodge to avoid the will of the majority on this subject.
you know what they did cite? The Fucking Bible. God gave a whole shitload of rules rationalizing slaver, such as when it was okay to beat your slave, when it was okay to sell your daughter into slavery, and so on .
Individuals and society both decide that they have all kinds of good reasons for harming others. We can (and have) rationalized just about anything we want into justification.
If that's your definition of "morality," come back when you've come up with something that Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, or Camus didn't already think of first. The atheists from that group of thinkers actually followed it out to its logical conclusion, and they were right. Today's atheists somehow think they can have their cake and eat it too. They can't.
As opposed to a religionist, who tries to pretend that all the bad shit they ever did wasn't their own fault.
The Pope Collaborating with Hitler. Well, he had a good reason.
Inquisitions, crusades, witch-burnings, torture of heretics, molesting altar boys, etc.
Well, that's no reflection on God. The "NO True Scotsman Fallacy" applies.