It is irrational for God to hold humanity to a code God does not follow

I have indeed noted the above point, and I shall briefly outline and defend this assertion... I will accept my opponent's points A-D above, with a short enhancement of point E. Morality is not simply right action in accordance with sort of code of morality - it involves the judgment of what, given a particular situation, is the action that best brings about the "end" prescribed by whatever standard of morality one adopts. This involves the additional component of selecting such a system, which in turn involves a normative theory about the way things should be and what is actually moral. This is where I wish to outline what I'll refer to as Rights-Based Act Utilitarianism (or RBAU). Without getting into a huge discussion about what rights are and whether or not we actually have them, I'm going to state that for the purposes of debate, we have certain basic rights like a right to life and self-ownership of body and labor, etc... My opponent can't really argue these points anyway without undermining the moral system he is supposed to defend - after all, you can't have prohibitions on murder or slavery without the two aforementioned rights. So I propose that we accept that we have a right to life, travel, ownership of self/labor, ownership of property insofar as the extent of these rights does not infringe upon the rights of someone else - basically Locke's "as good and as much" proviso. Act-utilitarianism is simply the notion that the rightness or wrongness of an action should be judged based on the results of that action, as opposed to the notion that right and wrong should be judged based on the consequences of a rule - i.e. that we should judge the rightness or wrongness of, say, killing someone based on the circumstances of the scenario rather than our rules about killing. For example, we would say that killing Hitler was "right" even though it may have violated rules about killing. So in the end, we are presented with the idea that the act-utilitarian should consider what is moral to be that which maximizes the benefit of the most actors while respecting their rights. For example, slavery may be highly beneficial to many people, but violates the proviso concerning ownership of self/labor. I also make the case that what is beneficial can be understood in empirical terms - we may have the right to impose education or health care upon children even though it makes them unhappy, because it is a beneficial action. Likewise, though cocaine makes the addict happy, it is not beneficial to the individual as an organism and can thus be called immoral. Under this framework, I make the following contentions: 1) That the laws of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, etc... where a chapter begins with note that God is speaking to Moses are laws that have moral import. For example, when God tells Moses to tell the Israelites that buttsecks is bad - this is part of God's moral law. 2) That consideration of rights and a beneficial social organization (i.e. community) should incline one towards RBAU and away from the moral system imposed by God. 3) That a moral system wherein the criteria for what is moral is routinely negated in a "moral" fashion is an irrational moral system - i.e. it is irrational to believe that violating moral criteria can be a moral action. 4) That God is in fact not the source of morality, EVEN FOR THE RELIGIOUS, and that a better system for establishing moral principles exists. 5) And that the moralization of one's own actions creates a subjective standard of morality that cannot be rationally imposed upon others as an objective system. ************************************************************ Just some final notes: - I consider the notion of an omnibenevolent God to negate moral responsibility, so for the purposes of this debate, I'd like to stay away from the attributes of God. I'm not entirely sure they're relevant to the debate anyway. The notion that God can impose these systems because he's omnipotent is not a moral distinction because it's simply saying that whoever has the biggest gun gets the last say. - To command that one's own code is moral is circular in this case - so if my opponent introduces the notion that God's law is moral because God says so should be ignored by the reader. I believe this is an adequate opening statement - I eagerly await rebuttal. AFFIRMED.