Not to say the victims of those crimes did not deserve that recompense, but just imagine if the crimes had not happened and that money could have been spent on educating the poor, or digging wells, or providing medical care, or....

I read an article recently that stated that between 2013-2014 alone...yes one year, the Catholic Church paid out over $30,000,000, yes, I said Thirty MILLION dollars in compensation to victims of child abuse. Quite a number, wouldn't you say??!!

Your morality is not objective, Imago; you only fool yourself into thinking it is. You are offended and perhaps even repulsed at the actions undertaken by these religious people. Your offence is in solidarity with ours. Most of us are offended, perhaps even all of us. That is an almost unanimous, near-universal consensus between us that says: yes, these actions are wrong. That doesn't mean our consensus is based on objective analyses, quite the contrary in fact. For why are these actions wrong? For you, within the reference frame of your deontological morality (deontology, which you confuse with objectivity), they are wrong, primarily (not exclusively, but primarily) because a several thousand year old religious development based on the teachings of a violent, misogynistic, slave-keeping, warring tribe from the most backwards part of the middle east tells you they are. For us, they are wrong, primarily, on various levels; they offend our desire for human solidarity; they niggle at our emotions; they ignite our empathy and sympathies; they oppose our own personal wishes for our children and families (do any of us want our children raped?); they offer danger; they are actions undertaken by motivations which are alien to most of us. None of these, however, are objective reasons to oppose these actions. Not even your adherence to the teachings of a violent middle-Eastern tribe who professed to know objective absolutes, is an objective reason to oppose these actions, and yet, I would say everyone in this room opposes them all the same.

All morality is subjective, because morality is in its very essence a social convention; a human construct; an applied practice for behaviours created, developed and maintained by the human psyche and its social manifestations, however, that does not make our moral bases any less reasonable or valuable than yours are. There does exist an almost universal basis for moral deliberation. It's not objective, but it is near a universal basis. It's a fairly simple basis actually, and it is one which is innate in almost all of us. It's empathy. If you can look past your religious construct it's the same reason you oppose these actions and it's the same reason your children and their children will in all likelihood oppose these actions. Empathy, fittingly enough, is also the emotion the fundamentalists like to emote when it suits their agenda, yet it's the one they ignore when we're talking about gay marriages and transgenderism. You say many of us propose there's no moral duty, or that there are no moral authorities for those in absolute power -- that a person with total state authority bends to no moral will other than his own -- and you say these things as though your adherence to the teachings of a historically barbaric cult is somehow objective, as though these teachings are somehow authoritative, when in fact your adherence to these teachings is a projection of your own will and the teachings themselves are a projection of some other historic figure's will. Your choice to believe in them is as subjective as my choice to believe in the tooth-fairy.

No. Consistency, solidarity, personal liberty, the right to not be violated against one's will. These are near universal human desires (the latter is most definitely universal), but calling them objective, Imago, in no way, shape, or form, means that they are.

As far as a constructed moral system goes, it's simple in my eyes. None of us want any physical action undertaken against us, in violation of our personal liberty and will. Thus, we should not, as a society, allow any physical action undertaken against us in violation of our personal liberty and will. If such a violation is undertaken by an individual, that individual must be rehabilitated mentally into the concept of non-violation of others' wills, and rehabilitated also within the means of that concept itself, for to kill someone for killing someone else is to defy that concept entirely. The liberty of the individual within the symbiotic society, so long as utilization of that liberty does not infringe upon another's liberty, is in my opinion the highest moral right. And it is a self-regulating phenomena: if I should desire my personal liberty, as do others, all should respect others' such desires and in return have theirs respected in kind.

@Imago,

By saying that we atheists have no objective standard of behaviour, juxtaposed with Christians like yourself, you imply that you yourself have found an objective standard for behaviours. Morality is concerning behaviours, and this conversation is concerning morality. If you imply or assert to have an objective morality, it is my duty to show you that you cannot and do not have such. In continuing to create a dichotomy which does not exist (your objective morality vs my subjective morality), I find myself having to keep repeating the same things: you choose, willingly, to adhere to the religious conclusions of a religion branched from a violent Middle-Eastern sacrifice cult. That is a subjective choice. You believe in God: that is a feeling — it is not objective. You believe in the sanctity of life, whether because of adherence to the Christian ideology surrounding it, or because of other subjective cognitive processes. None of what you believe therein could honestly be considered “objective” in any way, shape or form.

If Sanji ibn Kolkatta chooses to believe in the moral teachings of Islam, and you choose to believe in the moral teachings of Christianity, and I decide to believe in the empathetic morality, not one of us have morals that are objective or absolute. However, I have a distinct moral advantage over both of you: I deliberate a moral dilemma within a consistently genesic, ground-up scope of reference wherein the motivation is singular: the well-being of all individuals. If a starving, uneducated, lonely orphan boy in the 21st century West steals an apple from a rich merchant the outcome from such a moral dilemma in a system wherein men and women utilize their empathy in practice is that the boy is forgiven, the merchant gives freely, the government aligns itself with social empathy to provide for orphans and the social system itself is reformed as to prevent such injustices in future by enabling all people to fulfill their most basic human needs, towards their well-being, as a collective, empathetic symbiosis. Top down moral structures as found in the Abrahamic religions do not provide such outcomes, because they are strictly deontological, thereby authoritarian — some would say totalitarian — thereby there is commonly a dissonance between innate empathy and written rule. In the Islamic framework the legal codes allow for the oprhan boy’s hand to be chopped from his arm, yet I suspect neither you nor I consider that the right outcome. Why so? Did you have a delusion wherein God told you so? Or did you pick it from the Bible you choose to believe in? Or did your empathy ignite and thus you realized the boy was only trying to eat? All those are subjective reasons, however the latter is in my opinion the best.

Empathetic moral structures are intrinsically original, symbiotic, democratic and self-regulating. Within such a moral framework there is no scary monster under the bed; nobody who forces people to conform to moral conclusions drawn independent of an individual empathy and cognition; no brutally unjust, violent punishment for morals transgressed; no rule which when adhered to violates the innate human empathy; and no request for this ridiculous notion you call “objective morals”.

Objectivity is defined as a representation of fact not influenced by feeling. Moral deliberations are always influenced by feelings. They must be. They cannot not be such. Most logically because morality is a matter of social convention on distinctions between right and wrong behaviours -- morals aren't the same as empirical facts -- but perhaps more importantly because without feelings in regards to morals we regress into cold numerology. How is it possible to establish human well-being (in any meaningful opinion, the central motivation for any sufficient and decent morality) if we calculate all issues of morality as abstractly -- as devoid of human context -- as we would a sum? Well being is in and of itself a concept centred on feeling. Am I well if I feel glum? Am I well if I have hunger? Am I well if I am sick? Am I well when I am tortured? Am I well when I am raped? Am I well when I am frozen? Am I well when I am boiled? Am I well when I am imprisoned without cause? No. I am well when I am fed, watered, happy and free. And so are we all. Every single one of us desire our well-being. If we all desire such, we have found a universal desire. The logical progression from then is that in order to realize our collective well being standards for behavior must hinge on the principle that what I do does not lessen another's liberty to pursue their well-being, nor directly violate another human being. You get what you give, as the old saying goes. Empathy.

Recognition of, and motivation towards, universal human wellness is as close to objectivity as morals can possibly get. Anything beyond it, like your implications that your religion has all the correct moral answers, is nothing if not an admission that you consider your religion and all its oppression a higher purpose for humankind than the pursuit of our own collective happiness. Such an idea should be utterly opposed, because feeling, Imago, most certainly is the most motivating factor in all social interaction; and without the existence of humans who interact morality is at the very least utterly irrelevant, but I would say it is in such a case nonexistent. We are the arbitrators, beneficiaries (and often maleficiaries) of morality. Thus, removing morality from its intrinsically human context in order to ascribe its genesis to a fictitious deity is like turning water into sand: useless. Except of course to those who stand to benefit most readily from the conditions created by doing so. Tell me, which people benefit most handsomely from propagating to the populace of a given place that the transcendent, invisible, mysterious creator god, in all his infinite power, needs obedience, subservience, and of course, money? Then tell me who shall benefit most handsomely from a moral system wherein empathy is in all legal deliberations the central premise and wherein the sanctity of personal liberty and the motivation for universal well-being create self-regulation of personal behaviours resulting in symbiotic equilibrium?

Totalitarian Christian moralities are worth just as much to me as a handful of grit is to a starving baby. They do not inspire our humanity, they bleed it dry.