For us here who enjoy the religious debate, I am certain that we have all heard at a point or another, some religions, and certainly many theists, speak of their God(s) as the objective source of morality, without which you can never "know" that something is actually wrong. They would refer to their holy texts as gospel that needs no change, update or recontextualisation. The word of the prophets are the words of God in human speech etc.

However they bring it up, they have this preconceptions that there needs to be some being that determined X is wrong / evil and Y is desirable / good, or else X and Y can never really, actually be good or evil, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable. Moral or immoral.

One of the most common responses of atheists, agnostics or sometimes more moderate theists is, of course, to ask, (in the abrahamic example) "Well, how can that be the case if in the old Testament, God does and orders things we think of as completely wrong today?"

The religious side here (provided no fanaticism) has no choice but to give a crafty response and speak of either metaphor, symbolism, the human element, our fallen nature, the use of religion by the political or vice versa.

All in all, because they cannot in their good human conscience justify ateocities, they will use such responses to promote the idea that through all this and provided correct interpretation you can find sets of rules that are for a certain context and others that are for all time and all people.

Of course, atheists then immediately point to cherry picking and the lack of objective rules for determining what is and isn't metaphorical, symbolic, contextual or timeless.

This is when the debate usually goes down the gutter, and this is precisely because, and this is the Crux of my point here, we are not debating about the right things.

It is clear to me, and anyone with a moderate understanding of history that even as these religions claim to have an objective morality giver behind them, they all live and behave and act somewhat in line and according to the moral imperatives of the society or culture or time period they exist in. (excepting fanaticism again)

In short, religions and their practitioners completely understand that their morals have changed over time, and, that falls in line with the earlier idea that there are rules for a context and rules for eternity.

Meanwhile, the atheists are attacking these very things that, while stated in the holy books, have already been abandoned by most theists, like slavery, as if that was a "got you" moment on the entire belief system.

This is because we are both arguing the wrong thing. I believe the whole debate should be shifted towards a new frame of reference. If we are to talk about the objective message of religion, then surely, the best way we can even determine what we are talking about is the following :

Theists : ask yourselves, from the original holy texts until today's iteration of your faith, what values have transcended all that time and cultural changes ?

Atheists : ignore all that the theists have already willingly abandoned or modified and look instead to what they hang on to nails and teeth.

With this, I believe, both sides will find what Theists and Atheists could agree are the "core values" of a specific belief system, and then we could have a real debate about the objective or timeless morality of these religions, with a good set of topics that actually matter in the here and now, without all the fluff about determining what is and isn't literal or contextual.

In essence, Atheists are attacking morals Theists have already stopped believing in, theists are forced to defend or contextualise things they don't think are moral, and we should all shift this to what has been consistent through all time within a belief system, because, after all, that is the point of objective morality as described by theists, and there is no point for atheists to argue any other aspects of it, as they were clearly not timeless.

I believe more can be gained from this, than by the constant asking of, for example, a 2024 AD Christian to explain why the entirety of bronze age texts don't fully resonate with our modern lives.

This leads nowhere. But finding out what Christians have thought to be moral/immoral for 2000 years straight just might.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.