Moral Argument for God

Hangdawg,I pause at the word "absolutely". Are you meaning this in the sense that an action can be isolated from a context? Are you meaning that the nature of the act itself? the intention itself? What is absolute right? or wrong?It's possible I think to hold a theist belief in a deity and not believe in "absolute" good or evil, right or wrong? The teaching of the Buddha are an example of a moral system that is not theistically based that comes very close to absolute right and wrong at least in the sense that certain acts result in certain consequences i.e. karma serves as a correction to right and wrong actions.Let's say that the atheist position is factually correct. Then believers in theism have attributed a concept of absolute to their relativistically derived morals. Keeping in mind that you've said that a subjective sense is real also. In that case are the theists morals absolute or relative?lfen

Hangdawg,It seems to me we need to consider context. Right and wrong are meaningful only in context that is to say in relationship.I think your theistic basis of morality makes your concept of God the context in which you determine the good and bad, right or wrong of a particular action.I'd ask you to consider that a non theist, even atheist would also have a highest concept that gives a context to their morality. The context I find most repugnant would be men like Hitler, Stalin, Ted Bundy, Rev. Jim Jones, or David Koresh whose personal needs and animosities are the highest context of their morality. I do not accept that their morality is the logical conclusion of atheism.I am thinking along the lines of the Buddhist concept of Dharma as impersonal, universal, and observable "law" vs. the Abramamic relgion's concept of revealed law of a personal nature.lfen

I think we are on the same page. I was just trying to open up the question of how do we define an "absolute" when actions are always contextual. I then saw the possibility that Hangdawg could take his concept of God as his context and then I saw that others could use their own highest context for moral decisions though some of those contexts are very degraded.One other aspect of context has to do with intention. The Tibetans have a teaching story about one of their saints who came up on a badly wounded dog that had maggots crawling in it's open wound. Out of compassion to save the dog he removed the maggots from the wound and then so as to not cause the death of the maggots he cut himself and placed the maggots in his own flesh. His actions were ignorant though and could have caused the death of the dog and most likely the death of the maggots. Maggots only eat dead flesh and act to clean a wound and prevent gangrene and were used during WWI for just that purpose.The idea of absolute morality needs to be carefully analyzed. I think it's more difficult to arrive at then merely attempting to live according to the Ten Commandments.lfen