Thats pretty much because morals laws are "written in the heart" ,and "in the fabric of reality" that people disagree about morality .
Nothing better than a bit of absurd.

Viva la Vida wrote:

MattHunX wrote:

The belief that moral law is written into the heart is not a belief that was always held by christians. It is only a recent invention by christian apologists and those of other faiths to get rid of the notion of having to base their morality on scriptures, in effect to evade any questions in relation to scripture based morality.

You are quite clueless.

Here is Paul speaking about the Gentiles and how they observe the moral law absent of scripture:

Romans 2:14-15:

"For when the Gentiles who do not have the law by nature observe the prescriptions of the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law.They show that the demands of the law are written in their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.."

To go old school:

Jeremiah 31:33

"This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the LORD. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.

And to teach other individuals as clueless as you the common christian view on morality has never been deontological. SO your attempt to argue that it was invention of modernity is an epic fail.

All this just goes to show how naive and unlearned the understanding of religion and Christianity is among atheist, even those who have went to church.

Oh?

Then care to tell me why slavery was abolished only a few centuries ago? Or why, in the U.K., the Sharia Court is still of the opinion that rape within marriage is not possible, that non-consensual sex is not regarded as rape? Or why they still stone women to death in the Middle-East? Or why christians are protesting and gloating on funerals over the death of homosexual soldier? Or why every abrahamic religion seems to oppress women and not give them equal rights?

Many still follow scripture to the letter and base their morality and consequently their behavior on scriptures. If they didn't we wouldn't have suicide bombers, christians protesting gay marriage and celebrating the death of gay soldiers, or stoning women to death and throwing battery acid int their face for wanting to study.

And since you like quoting passages, would you like me to quote dozens of others were the same LORD does some truly immoral acts, and demands that people do the same, both in the bible and the quran? So as to not single out christianity. Besides, if you believe scriptures are not the source of morality why quote from them to make a point? And why do you believe what Paul says, anyway? Jesus wasn't so easy-going as to allow or just simply state what you have quoted from Paul. Now why is that? Could it be they are contradicting each other? Want examples?

Viva la Vida wrote:

MattHunX wrote:..... the blatant audacity of many of its adherents to still claim monopoly over questions of morality.

They do, in fact it's not only their adherents who point this out, purveyors of the enlightenment, like Jurgen Habermas have pointed to the failure of godless morality, and argued that the secular sphere must borrow from the religious in order to posses a moral language.

The religious may not have a monopoly on moral behavior, but they do hold a monopoly on questions of morality, because they believe in human duty, an inherent "should". You don't.

, sure religion , wait abrahamic religions created the notion of responsability and morality , maybe that's why every human societies with a wide range of mutually exclusive (including atheistic) superstitions have moral laws that varies and are also mutually exclusive on different subjects.
The secular sphere borrows from history , and of course religious morality is part of history , but unfortunately the moral laws you tend to speak of are being modified and part of it simply discarded as "amoral" and pure nonsense .
And anyway , one can simply affirm that there is an universal moral law concerning all humans simply by pointing at our shared biology.

Viva la Vida wrote:The religious may not have a monopoly on moral behavior, but they do hold a monopoly on questions of morality, because they believe in human duty, an inherent "should". You don't.

I don't know if you're equivocating or just clueless. In one sense, the "inherent should" is a given; most of us have the internal dialogue which we use subjectively to determine should-ness. Evolutionary psychology provides numerous plausible explanations for the development of the internal moral dialogue, and furthermore explains it in terms of duty to each other. Your religious (Abrahamic, at least) "inherent should," on the other hand, is a duty to God, for which there are good reasons to consider inferior.

These arguments are all besides the point, it doesn't matter if theists could demonstrate that atheists don't have a moral compass, nothing in the action of atheists makes them any less moral than theists.

Just another thought about religion and racism in general.

We have to get to a point where we look at religion the same way we look at racism today. It being a product of a by-gone era. Dangerous, divisive and detrimental to societal development, an impediment, in many ways, to the well being of people. We have to reduce religion's status to that of racism, astrology, homeopathy...etc. The only way to do that is to not tolerate intolerance any longer.