I'm fascinated by the fact that laws across various cultures and people groups, no matter how diverse, have often adhered to a few common points -- do not murder, do not steal, do not lie. This seems to belie that morality is entirely subjective. While morality may be interpreted differently according to different cultural contexts, the underlying principles have remarkable consistency.
oh, i agree. i just don't need an invisible sky friend to tell me these things. because people with no invisible sky friend or many invisible sky friends or are indifferent to the existence of said invisible sky friend also have pretty much the same conclusions. so it's less that morality is objective, and not so much that it's entirely subjective where black can be white and up is sometime down, but that it is defined and shaped by cultural context, and constantly evolving and always complex.
for whatever reason, i am reminded of the 2 months i spend loafing around Scotland about 8 years ago. i remember reading and hearing stories about how, say, thousands of people with the Plague were walled into the city alive and left to die. i remember taking a ghost tour and hearing stories of public torture. i remember hearing about the finer points of highland warfare and how some weapons were designed to aim up and under the kilt so they could catch a man in his abdomen and better disembowel him. i remember the story of the "real" William Wallace who captured the man who killed his first wife, tied him to a chair for a week, and slowly stripped off his scalp so he could rub a lye mixture into the raw, bleeding flesh.
and that's just Scotland and what i can remember off the top of my head.
while we can find any number of stories today of equal brutality, but i would guess that our understanding of both the self and of the selves of others as being of equal weight of our own, has evolved over the centuries. commonplace brutality back then is, i think, greeted with much more revulsion now, and we live today (at least in the west) with a remarkable absence of violence unthinkable just a few centuries ago.
are we more moral? yes. i'd say so. i'm not terribly concerned about whatever lack of "moral language" we might have. if anything, i'm glad we're dispensing with language that divides up the world into easy categories, for it's categories that dehumanize ourselves to one another and allow us to bury people alive, torture them, or rub lye into their raw, bleeding scalp as a method of revenge.
it's this stark right vs. wrong that supports the death penalty, for bloodshed deserves more bloodshed, justice is an eye for an eye.
You and I are going to disagree about the notion of whether or not we are broken, but I guess I look at the presence of laws, moral codes, rules and regulations as a sign that human behavior requires direction, since there is a constant tension between our higher and lower angels.
i don't feel this battle between myself and my bad self. i don't think Jesus and Satan are waging a war for my soul. i think the world is messy and imperfect and defective and cruel, but i don't think that there's a perfect version of it, or of myself, out there somewhere and i have to find it.
i use my intellect and my heart to live the best life that i can. when i do something wrong, i try to understand it. when i do something right, i try to understand it.
it's a process, a dialogue, and i don't feel the need of an external force telling me that i'm good or bad, right or wrong. i did when i was 8. i'm not a child anymore.