Secular Morality is superior to Christian morality

"I agree with pro on what morality is; morality is the idea dealing with what we should or should not do to other sentient beings (the only thing that I disagree with his definition is that morality also takes into account ourselves, not just the needs of other people, but that is not vital to this debate). An act is morally good if it is meant to have a net improvement on the well-being of ourselves, others, or both; an act is morally bad if it does the opposite. " I am glad we can agree on definitions, that makes the rest of the debate much more straightforward. "My reasoning for Christian morality being better than secular morality is hinged upon the fact that there is something to compare your actions (whether they be moral or immoral) to something and confirm whether or not this is moral or immoral (an agent of God - a priest, or the Bible, or something similar). This does not exist in secular morality - all that exists is the belief that something is moral because we think that it is; we are not given a set of commandments to follow to say what is or isn't moral from someone who is above us all." This runs counter to the definition we agreed upon. The standard that secular morality relies upon is well-being. You do not need any authority to refer to when asking if an action promotes or diminishes well-being. Additionally, if you want to use the Bible as an authority, you need to provide justification for asserting that the rules given in the bible are actually morally correct. The Euthyphro dilemma I posted addresses this problem. Another way to look at is that you need some way to verify that the book is useful for morality, but to do so you would need an independent way to verify it. I see no reason to refer to this text to determine if an act is morally correct if you already have an independent method of verification. We can determine the outcomes of actions and assess whether they benefited those impacted using our secular tools of assessment. "In a Christian setting, if there is a dispute over whether or not lying is a moral or immoral action, we are able to confirm that this is not a good thing by referring to the decalogue within our holy text; the Ten Commandments. The moral worth of this action is able to be assessed first with what our texts or religious leaders say, and then what our intuition says. For example, there is not a commandment saying "thou shalt not rape" (and if we can imagine that there exist no verses in the Bible dealing with rape), but that does not mean that it is a moral act. " This is where more problems with Christian morality arise. The Bible explicitly condones and provides rules for slavery which is clearly counter to the well-being of the slaves. For example, "When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money." Exodus 21 https://www.biblegateway.com... You will also see in Exodus 21 that he condones the sale of your daughters as slaves. Additionally, homosexuals are to be put to death which clearly diminished their well-being. "'If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads." Leviticus 20:13 http://biblehub.com... The God himself is responsible for genocide in the story of Noah's Arc and he murdered innocent Egyptian children in the story of the Exodus. What makes the latter crime so severe is that it was a punishment for something he forced Pharoah to do. Pharoah tried to free the Hebrews very early in the story and God "hardened his heart" to force Pharoah to not release the Hebrews. He then murders the Egyptian children because of Pharoah doing that which God forced Pharoah to do. Exodus 9 http://biblehub.com... God's laws force a raped virgin who is not engaged to be married to her rapist if he pays her father 50 pieces of silver. Deuteronomy 22:28-29 http://biblehub.com... "In secular settings, this is not the case at all; we look to our own circumstances (and we do not necessarily look to evidence as my opponent suggests, but I will touch on that in a later time), and immediately assess the moral weight of something. This is essentially a circumstancial stance on morality; if we believe that it would benefit us all to sacrifice someone (as the Aztecs thought, but they were not secular nor Christian) due to the circumstances in which we would do so, that does not mean that it actually will benefit us all - and a secular sense of morality does not ensure that any potential actions would be in an objectively moral sense "good". " Human sacrifice fits Christian morality, not secular. At least not in a general sense. Yes, there are cases where one must be sacrificed for the many. A classic example in philosophy is being given a choice where if you take no action many die and if you take action, only one person dies. We look to see what actions will bring about the greatest well-being. Secular morality, however, will not accept something like human sacrifice to pay for the sins of others. As to it being circumstantial, a consequentialist view is, by definition, based on the circumstances. Some acts will be immoral or moral depending on the circumstances. For example, it is immoral for me to punch an innocent old lady, but it is moral to punch a man trying to rob her. In this case, a rule banning punching would lead to very immoral conclusions because it would ban defending that innocent old lady. "A secular stance on morality is a circumstancial stance on morality; a Christian stance on morality has a check in place which first makes it an objective stance of morality (God's morality), and then a circumstancial stance on morality, if it is necessary. " As I have shown, that check would not be needed if it was useful, and it is not useful because the authority to whom Christians appeal is extremely immoral based on our agreed upon definition. So to recap, using the agreed upon definition of morality, relying on the Bible leads one to commit heinous acts and secular morality can easily assess what is in fact a moral act. A society run under Christian morality would be one in which Neil Patrick Harris would be executed, slavery would still exist, and we would be appealing to the authority of a monster, the Christian god.