In Defence Of Objective Morality

[Galloglasses' Alt]

Ok, I am attending a Debate club, (Excuse me, Debate 'society', as some want to call it), consisting mainly of three Athiests, one Evangelical, (who recently turned agnostic), and two or three Catholics including myself.

Now, oddly enough, it was the Athiests who were pretty adament that alot of topics pertaining to Religion should be Debated over. What surprises me is that these athiests were a helluvalot more interested in Religion then the rest of us. Personally I wanted to Debate politics, because it is very fun to undermine everyone's political veiws while not revealing my own, (Social Sadism ftw), eventually I managed to argue out a compromise, three sets of Debates containing three debates of related interests.

Religion:
-Creationism/Evolutionism, (Oh come on, we all saw this one coming)
-Moral Absolutes, (Strangely enough, the Athiests said they were moral people. When I asked to make sure they weren't confusing ethics with Morality, they said Morals for clarity. Altough one particularly said they were interchangeable. Lies.)
-The Qur'an, (Or dissing other religions in general. Strangely this was also suggested by the Athiests. I'm pretty sure they're gonna try to compare and contrast this with the Bible. Lol)

Politics:
-stuff
-stuff
-stuff

Silly/Other:
-PS3 vrs XBox
-Time Travel
-Some other nonsensical thing that I can't remember.

We decided to order the debates from informal to formal debates and choose the next debate depending on what we feel like debating. Now the first one is either Creationism and Evolution or Moral Absolutes, (Or where you get your morals from)

I'm gonna take the Church's rather ambivilent veiw on the debate if C v E comes up first. (Essentially how any Catholic can be a creationist or believe in Thiestic Evolution without harming their faith and use St.Augustine's Teachings as a basis for my arguement if they try to gun me down, since I'm not even gonna remotely touch the scientific theories involved since I've never taken much interest in the debate as a whole.)

However, with regards to Moral absolutes. (THIS IS THE IMPORTANT BIT HERE), I don't know how to argue. and the debate is tommarrow after school.

So Pham, hit me with your arguements in favour of Objective Morality

[Paddington]

Is this one of those things in which if your opponent has a moustache you can say

"it is absolutely wrong to spit in your face for no reason"
and
"if your moustache is on fire, it is absolutely wrong [i]not[/i] to spit in your face " (no bucket of water is handy)

?

Or maybe if they are atheist and point out cultural differences, you can, at the least, slow them down by bring up cultural sexism and whatnot. And then agree with them about the importance of keeping some cultural norms that are weird but not immoral.

[tinytherese]

I'd say to do a search at www.catholic.com.

[Galloglasses' Alt]

Um, debate is tommarrow, I need more help.

Thanks so far for the advice though!

[thessalonian]

Wish I had seen this yesterday. Peter Kreeft is the guy you want for these types of debates. He has some great audios available on his website at [url="http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio.htm"]http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio.htm[/url]
There will be plenty of help there on these types of topics.

[tinytherese]

So how did the debate go Galloglasses?