Replies

Well, after all our discussion it seems to boil down to whether someone who doesn’t believe in God can believe in right or wrong.

I'm not certain whether by "Believing in right or wrong" you mean believing in the existence of or the compliance with right and wrong. But never mind that. By the way, I well know that relative right and wrong exists -- all we need to see that is for one or more persons to say "Thus and such is wrong, because ..." But as I keep mentioning, I'm talking about universal right and wrong.

We fundamentally disagree on this and I don’t think we can reach common ground with more discussion. I appreciate your perspective and it might be correct. I think mine might be also.

So you think that there can be a universal wrong (something that is wrong for everybody in the world, regardless of culture, public opinion, manmade laws, etc) without a supreme moral lawgiver? Is not all that is left "Might makes right" or varients thereof? (By "might" I mean either collective might (lots of people in agreement) or individual might (As in clever, strong, or otherwise able to do harm to others without succumbing to retaliation.)

In the long run, I’m not sure it matters. We both agree that we should live our lives doing what is right.

Well, it could matter, depending on what is right. A terrorist is living his life, doing what he thinks is right. So was Hitler. The fact is that a terrorist, for example, is doing what he thinks is right, and what all his like-minded fellow citizens think is right. And in the absence of universal right and wrong, if the majority of people were terrorists, one might well say that what he was doing was indeed right.

So it does matter where one draws their moral rules from. And universal wrong cannot logically exist without a universal moral lawgiver also existing. And if He does exist, and it is indeed true that God will judge in the end, then again it will matter then whether we obeyed Him or not.

Thanks for your comments,

-Jesse

Let me boil it down to something you can either agree with or disagree with, and I already know you’ll disagree with it.

You live in a prehistoric society, or even on your own with no concept of God. Do you have a concept of right and wrong or not? There are no laws. There is no law-giver.

Do you have a conscience or is that merely an artifact of fear of a law-giver?

I think you do. I’m quite sure you don’t.