{"id":3229,"date":"2017-03-29T03:16:30","date_gmt":"2017-03-29T10:16:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/?p=3229"},"modified":"2017-03-29T03:17:03","modified_gmt":"2017-03-29T10:17:03","slug":"a-common-question-done-quick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/?p=3229","title":{"rendered":"A Common Question Done Quick"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Question from James:<\/strong><br \/>\nQuick question. How can you say something is bad without some sense of morals? Where did said morals come from?<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<strong>Answer by <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/smartlx\">SmartLX<\/a>:<\/strong><br \/>\nThe quickest answer is that we&#8217;ve answered this a lot.  <a href=\"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/?s=morality\">This link<\/a> searches the site for articles on the same subject, and finds four pages&#8217; worth of titles.  Read a few and see if you get the idea.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nA quick actual answer is that the definition of &#8220;bad&#8221; and &#8220;moral&#8221; in general can be constructed in objective and practical terms using different things as the &#8220;object&#8221;.  For example a simplistic approach might be that something is &#8220;bad&#8221; if it hurts people unnecessarily, but on that alone you get a long way towards doing what most people would consider &#8220;good&#8221; by preventing &#8220;bad&#8221; actions.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nClaiming an absolute basis for your morality is all well and good, but if your basis is a god that might not even exist you&#8217;re on shaky ground.  That&#8217;s just a way of concentrating all the uncertainty into one point so you can defend that massively uncertain point like a bulldog and keep things simple for yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Question from James: Quick question. How can you say something is bad without some sense of morals? Where did said morals come from? Answer by SmartLX: The quickest answer is that we&#8217;ve answered this a lot. This link searches the site for articles on the same subject, and finds four pages&#8217; worth of titles. Read &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/?p=3229\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;A Common Question Done Quick&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[91,269],"class_list":["post-3229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","tag-morality","tag-right-and-wrong"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pB6tr-Q5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3229"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3232,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3229\/revisions\/3232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}