Are Fundamentalists Inherently Immoral

We have a couple threads already that are based on this question, but I have two answers. One is a direct answer to your question: Morality is defined by our society in general and by ourselves in specific. For instance, I may decide it is moral for me to kill all the people with hair longer than my own. My society, however, would disagree with me and stop me from acting in accordance with that part of my morality.The second response is the one I like to throw back to religious people who assume God is necessary for morality. Where does morality come from? Is something good because God says it's good, or does God say something is good because it's good? Now, be careful how you answer. If morality comes from God, then something is good only because God says so. That makes morality arbitrary. God could say anything is moral if He wanted to. He could change his mind tomorrow and say rape and murder are moral (let's ignore for a minute the question of whether he has already said this according to the Bible), which means morality still isn't absolute, it's relative to whatever God wants.If God says something is good because it's good, then "goodness" and morality exist outside of God, so while he may point us in the right direction, he isn't necessary.So, is all morality relative, or is God unnecessary for morality? Those are your two options.

I can judge another society to my heart's content. I may not be able to do anything to change their mind, but I can judge it all I want, and I can try to change their mind by appealing to the things that are similar among all human beings (or at least the vast majority of them), namely their empathy and rationality. No they're not. I think morality is subjective. Using that subjectivity, I have created a moral/ethical code by which I try to live. Under the code I ascribe to, rape is wrong, therfore, ipso facto, thus, when I see rape, I consider it wrong. QED.

Interestingly, I can conceive of such a scenario. If some time traveller went back in time and raped Hitler's mother before she gave birth to Adolf, and assured that she was pregnant a month or so before she would have conceived Adolf, then you could say that raping her prevented the holocaust. However, I would still say raping her is wrong, because 1) rape is wrong and 2) despite being his mother, she is not responsible for the Holocaust and capital punishment of the sort rape would have to be is not justified.

I would be hard pressed to believe it is possible to go back in time to rape Hitler's mom with any 100% certainty that she could not abort (either intentionally or not) or somehow still give birth to Adolf, while at the same time not having any other way to reach the same result.If my time machine works to a date shortly before Adolf's mother conceived him, but won't work to go to a time 5 years more recent and do something to Hitler himself, then perhaps there would be an argument there.But in general, could I do something to an innocent person in order to save other innocent people? It's akin to the train question, if a train is heading toward a chasm with 100s of people on board, but in front of you is a switch that will put the train on another track that doesn't go over a cliff, and on the new track is a kid who is stuck and can't get away, would you pull the switch?It comes down to active participation and passive participation. Actively raping Hitler's mom is far different from passively letting the Holocaust happen through someone else's actions. To be perfectly honest, I don't know what I would do in the situation and I'm not sure what answer I would want my ethics to return.{AbE} The actual moral theory I subscribe to would say, yes go ahead and rape his mother if you're sure it will result in saving 100,000s of people, but I'm still not sure if I could do it.{/AbE}Edited by Perdition, : AbE above.

Yeah, I got at that with the beginning of my post, detailing that in this scenario, it would be hard to force the situation so those two options are all that are available.But, constrained to those two, and only those two, scenarios, then my code would tell me to rape her. Now, even with that, whether or not I could actually follow through on my ethical plan, I'm not sure.

This is very true. In one of my ethics classes, we were looking at Utilitarianism, which I have a soft spot in my heart for. One of the papers we looked at claimed to be a refutation of Utilitarianism. IN it, it created a very contrived situation in which it could be shown that Utilitarianism would pick a nation that instituted slavery as a better place than one that didn't. It was claimed that, since we know slavery to be a preeminently immoral act, any moral code that would require slavery in any situation must be wrong. The problem I had with the scenario was that the other option was preeminently immoral as well. What this did is merely show that there are degrees of immorality and, according to Utilitarianism, there is something worse than slavery.Similarly, in this case, we are merely showing that in our respective codes, there is something worse than rape, namely the genocide, torture, and forced relocation of 100,000s of people. That sounds about right to me.

Let's see. To make this equal to what supposedly happened in the Bible:If I could have my child tortured for three days, after those three days, my child returns to me to live at my side, no longer in pain, for all of eternity, and after that, everyone on the entire planet has a chance at eternal happiness and joy?If I knew for a fact that this is how it would work out, and I knew my child consented to it as well, then yeah, maybe I would do so.But of course, if it turned out that I was the one who made the rules that people are breaking, and I had the power to change those rules, or make those people stop breaking them, or give people the option for eternal happiness and joy without sacrificing my child for even a second, then doing so would be a pretty heartless and evil thing to do.So, me being human, would I do it? Yes.
Me being an omnipotent and omniscient deity with command over the entire universe, would I do it? Hell no, I'd be a monster if I did.

Where did I say not punishing people? I said, change the rules if they're not working, make it so people can't break the rules, or give people the option that the sacrifice supposedly gives. We're talking about me here. What would I do? If I cared about free will, I would let people make the choice without needing to punish them for choosing incorrectly. I wouldn't tell my child, pick between bananas or apples, then punish him/her for choosing bananas when I wanted him to pick apples. Why? Because I made it that way? Why would I need to make it that way? Why can't the price of sin be $50.23? And this is my point. An omnipotent, omniscient being who gets royally pissed off when his own creations behave in the exact way that he made them, but not exactly as he would have them do it, is a tyrannical monster who does not deserve our respect, much less our blind obedience and faith. The fact that you think it does just shows how stunted your own moral growth is.