Or a civilization devises a system of morals and then invents a higher power to give them enforcement.
Try a simple logical exercise: If God said murder is okay, would you agree that it is okay? If no, then is murder wrong because God said it's wrong, or is murder simply wrong?
For another example, slavery was allowed under God's word (the Bible) and existed for a very long time in Christian societies. Today it is not acceptable in Christian societies. God's word -- and his morals regarding slavery -- remained the same, but the society evolved and decided that slavery was no longer moral despite God's word.
Morality is entirely esoteric...
Plato’s Euthyphro is a great illustration. Socrates advances the argument to Euthyphro that, piety to the gods, who all want conflicting devotions and/or actions from humans, is impossible. (Socrates exposed the pagan esoteric sophistry.)
Likewise, morals are such a construction of idols used by the Left as a rationale for them to demand compliance to their wishes in politics, which most often are a skewed mess of fallacies in logic. Morals are a deceptive replacement for the avoidance of sin.
An atheist who says I am immoral is no different than a rabbi or preacher saying I am a sinner. They just slap a new label on it hoping nobody will notice - - they replace the idea of "avoiding sin" with "morals."
Try an experiment. The next time you are confronted by a neo-pagan, New Age animal rights eco-fascist who claims humans were not "designed" or "meant" to eat animal flesh, ask them about the origin of their creationist philosophy. Inherent in such a claim is the idea that there is a "designer" or some divinity of "meaning" in human existence. Would they apply this to abortion, embryonic stem cells, or homosexuality? No?
It is simplistic to argue that the Bible explicitly commends or permits slavery. The Mosaic code speaks of slaves as being such for 7 years, at the end of which the slave was freed. If the slave wished to stay with his master, then the master could if he wished pearce the slave's ear with an awl which made him a slave for life.(Our nation's beginnings included the use of Indentured servants by some folks who worked usually for a period of time no greater than 7 years to pay for their passages to the New World, an acknowledgement of the Hebrew system by our Puritan forebears)
The NT did not condone slavery per se but rather taught that slaves should remain subject to their masters even though they had become Christians. It did teach however that in Christ all were one, "There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, all are one in HIM"!
So much for scriptural approval...The whole of the Bible speaks of the available freedom from the SLAVERY from sin.... thru Christ Jesus!
Today it's called TAXATION!!
BTW, there is STILL 'slavery' in parts of the world. (Actually, more like man-stealing [or women or children])
Murder is wrong. God said it was wrong.
How about this thought experiment for you: Tell me why murder is wrong, but don't use God in the explanation. Warning: Uses of the term morals or its equivalent is not allowed, since who's morals are you talking about if they didn't come from God?
I would like to hear your reasoning.
This is one of the points addressed by Pope Benedict's talk (I should say his "widely-noted but not widely-enough-read talk") last month at Regensburg University
He asked whether, from an Islamic point of view, God is so transcendant as to transcend His own character; in other words, can God be arbitrary and capricious, can He be deceitful and irrational, can He command evil equally with good?
Or, in contrast, is the Christian tradition correct when it says that God is identified with reason (Logos) and that the truths of reason are ultimately reconcilable with faith? In which case, the character of God is expressed in both the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature; that is, both in his revealed laws and in the laws of His creation: they are actually embedded in the structure of reality.
Everybody knows that parts of the Muslim world reacted to the Pope's question by having a riot and violence spree; but far fewer people know that some Muslim scholars responded with a reasoned discussion --- a welcome development indeed.
"For another example, slavery was allowed under God's word (the Bible) and existed for a very long time in Christian societies. Today it is not acceptable in Christian societies. God's word -- and his morals regarding slavery -- remained the same, but the society evolved and decided that slavery was no longer moral despite God's word."
This is a common misunderstanding. Let's think further about the development of doctrine in Scripture --- the progressive nature of revelation.
The Bible (unlike the Koran) is understood to be a progressive revelation; in other words, God's will and purposes are only gradually revealed. When particular issues are obscure or contradictory, the classic approach is to "let Scripture interpret Scripture" --- in other words, to let later or clearer teachings illuminate earlier or more obscure readings.
God never ordered slavery, but did allow His revelation to be given to a society in which slavery was already an established institution. He later carried out His greatest and most splendid work in ancient history by taking the side of the slaves and freeing the Hebrews from their Egyptian taskmasters.
Later teaching of Hebrew Scripture repeatedly emphasizes that they are not to oppress the poor, or the sojourner, or the foreigner, "because you yourselves were once slaves in Egypt." In other words, they are not to force socially marginal or powerless people into slavery.
Centuries later, in St. Paul's letter to Philemon, we have the matured teaching that Philemon should welcome back his runaway manservant, Onesimus, not as a slave, but "as something better, a dear brother." This again shows the progressive nature of Biblical revelation.
Slavery (or better: dependent labor) came in many forms, some of which were brutal and inhuman, and others of which were benign and mutually advantageous.
Every family that works together as a unit on a family enterprise --- an extremely common and extremely creative arrangement in human culture ---- involves "dependent labor" of, presumably, the wife and kids (assuming the husband/father is the manager and head of household) and has been the key to the prospering of many a "dependent."
Any additional dependent laborers --- including apprentices, indentured servants, etc. --- may be (not "must" be, but may be) almost on the same status level as members of the household.
Think of the portrayal of the "cotters" who worked as serfs or tenants of the exemplary good manager Lavrans in "Kristin Lavransdatter." If you had a good master you were prosperous, productive, respected and respectable.
But then Lavrans was a devout Christian who recognized the essential spiritual equality between himeself and his cotters.
While dependent labor within a household is taken as a given, no form of chattel slavery can be justified by the precept or the example of the Christianity's divine Founder; moreover, Christians who bought and sold slaves, or who did not treat all in the household as brothers and sisters in the Lord, were condemned ---- even at the time --- by their fellow Christians, as having betrayed the cause of the Christ.
Fast-forward to the 5th century AD, and you see St. Patrick of Ireland, whose own experience in captivity left him with a hatred of the institution of slavery; he become the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against it (in his Letter to Coroticus) as being morally evil.
The pastoral insistence that dependent farm laborers had a right to marriage, legitimacy, family, home, and livelihood influenced the replacement of slavery by serfdom : by the time of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century slavery was unknown in Chrstian Europe except at the fringes which interfaced with the Muslim slave trade. Consider too the early Papal outcries against slavery (Pope Eugene IV: Sicut Dudum, 1435; Paul III: Sublimis Deus, 1537)--- and this at the very beginning of the Age of Exploration.
Was it that "slavery was no longer moral despite God's word? By no means. All those Christians who spoke out against slavery explicitly did so on the basis of Scriptural principle. It is a development of doctrine, rooted in the insistence of St. Paul that Philemon's slave Onesimus was to be "accepted as a brother."
Is this the way a fundamentalist would handle the slavery question? No. By no means.
But then, Catholicism is not fundamentalist.