Religious Debate with Father

[Darth Wong]

Not only does this guy not know anything about morality he’s also painfully ignorant of history.

More likely he's just being dishonest. There's absolutely nothing in the Bible about sexual equality, human rights, religious tolerance, environmental conservationism, or freedom of speech.

[CaptJodan]

This past Tuesday I had a recent debate very similar to this. Morality comes from religion. His argument centered around the premise that no one can possibly know that murder is wrong without a higher power telling you it's wrong. "If I murder someone, that doesn't hurt me, and if I do it quick enough it doesn't hurt you either because you didn't feel anything; you don't even know you're dead." Other highlights include: "your parents or your grandparents were probably religious and that's where you learned your morality from" and "look at the middle east and how suicide bombing is a moral act over there" (yes by this point I was seeing no sense could be brought to bear on this person).

While he was kind enough to admit that he himself needed religion in order to be a good and decent person because "Without god, why do I care if I kill someone, or steal something? It doesn't affect me unless religion teaches me why it's wrong", he also claimed I was just pretending to be an athiest because I was scared.

He is a pretty typical fundie, but outside of my own family, I hadn't run into someone who would defend their belief that humans cannot make their own moral code based on the good of a society without religion. I also hadn't directly met someone willing to admit that, without their sky pixie, they would not be a moral person (which I did point out to him was a flaw in his character, and not the norm for all human beings).

And yes, there was a great deal of cherry picking. He was one of the less dangerous fundies in so far as he believed he shouldn't judge and should try and forgive others. Thus the main thrust of his morality centered around completely ignoring the OT, and elevating areas in the NT that he agreed with over the contradictions that were less pleasant to him.

[Darth Yoshi]

The counter to this is that murder is bad because it reduces the breeding/food-collecting population, thus impacting a community's ability to survive and thus the species' ability to survive. You don't need a god to tell you that 20 people tackling a mammoth is better than 19, after all. And you don't need a god to tell you that people tend to work better at tackling mammoths when everyone isn't worried about someone else murdering them.

[Knife]

The counter to this is that murder is bad because it reduces the breeding/food-collecting population, thus impacting a community's ability to survive and thus the species' ability to survive. You don't need a god to tell you that 20 people tackling a mammoth is better than 19, after all. And you don't need a god to tell you that people tend to work better at tackling mammoths when everyone isn't worried about someone else murdering them.

Or to modernize it, your father hardly walks through this life all on his own. If he randomly kills someone, he lessens society and himself. The person he killed may have been the one that runs the powerplant that dad gets his power from. Or the guy who trains doctors, or just the guy who stocks the food at the store your dad shops at.

Murder lessens society and as society suffers, so do the people who depend on the infrastructure of said society to live their lives. That's a fairly objective reason not to commit murder. Either from a self centered point of view on not screwing your self and having all the services you can out of society, or more altruistic sense and not wanting to fuck over society in general.

[General Zod]

Or to modernize it, your father hardly walks through this life all on his own. If he randomly kills someone, he lessens society and himself. The person he killed may have been the one that runs the powerplant that dad gets his power from. Or the guy who trains doctors, or just the guy who stocks the food at the store your dad shops at.

Murder lessens society and as society suffers, so do the people who depend on the infrastructure of said society to live their lives. That's a fairly objective reason not to commit murder. Either from a self centered point of view on not screwing your self and having all the services you can out of society, or more altruistic sense and not wanting to fuck over society in general.

An alternative way of handling it would be to ask him if it were still unethical to murder someone if God commanded it. If he says no then demand he explain why.

[General Zod]

Or to modernize it, your father hardly walks through this life all on his own. If he randomly kills someone, he lessens society and himself. The person he killed may have been the one that runs the powerplant that dad gets his power from. Or the guy who trains doctors, or just the guy who stocks the food at the store your dad shops at.

Murder lessens society and as society suffers, so do the people who depend on the infrastructure of said society to live their lives. That's a fairly objective reason not to commit murder. Either from a self centered point of view on not screwing your self and having all the services you can out of society, or more altruistic sense and not wanting to fuck over society in general.

An alternative way of handling it would be to ask him if it were still unethical to murder someone if God commanded it. If he says no then demand he explain why.

Ghetto edit: If he says yes or no, then demand he explain why. Either way he answers his position is effectively boned.

[Darth Wong]

An alternative way of handling it would be to ask him if it were still unethical to murder someone if God commanded it. If he says no then demand he explain why.

He could just answer that God knows more than people, therefore there must be a reason, even if you can't understand it. God works in mysterious ways, remember?

The biggest problem with arguments of this kind is that you aren't so much comparing different schools of ethical thought as putting one of them on trial, with the perception (often accepted by both parties) that religion is presumed innocent until proven guilty, and that it is allowed to use all manner of spectacularly unreasonable defense tactics such as made-up alibis or even alluding to the mere possibility of a made-up alibi.

[General Zod]

An alternative way of handling it would be to ask him if it were still unethical to murder someone if God commanded it. If he says no then demand he explain why.

He could just answer that God knows more than people, therefore there must be a reason, even if you can't understand it. God works in mysterious ways, remember?

He could, but if he starts handwringing then if nothing else it makes it pretty obvious he hasn't thought out his position too well and likely has doubts that he isn't comfortable confronting. Hopefully making it enough to start questioning his beliefs, or at least think about them. Of course he could also just block out the question entirely and not give it another thought, depending on the level of brainwashing.

[Jesin]

I can almost guarantee you can counter any of his arguments on this topic with a combination of a certain chapter of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and the entirety of The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. They are both excellent books.

[Master_Baerne]

As him if he thinks that the rules of morality are beneficial for society. If he answers "yes", then you've got him because if they are beneficial for society, you don't need religion to justify them. All you need is society.

Is that an application of Occam's razor? I’m unsure.
(ie society+morality is simpler than society+morality+religion)

I think so. Another useful one is "Occams Razor suggest that God did not create the Universe. It requires two assumptions: that God exists, and that He created the Universe. Whereas, since the existence of the Universe is a fact, a single assumption, i.e. "The Universe created itself" is required without Gid,