The Mystical Ethics of the New Atheists (Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, etc)

There is no evidence for an innate conscience. And in scientific terms, it's not falsifiable, since whenever someone fails to live up to what you say is right, you can claim they are corrupted by religion or some other false culture.

If humans had innate conscience, why would human history be filled with such violence? If the moral sense is strong enough to be relevant for discussion, wouldn't it have shaped humanity more?

How is innate conscience distinguishable from one's emotional response? And I would argue that emotions are based on one's existing values, which may be different according to different people. Are you and Hitchens claiming to be more pure of heart than the rest of us, so you can see the true innate morality?

A jury is not at all an appeal to innate conscience. A jury isn't supposed to judge right and wrong, they are supposed to find guilt or innocence by the standard of a previously written law.

Why are New Atheists so obsessed with other people's personal beliefs? I have explained to you the problem of zealotry and the imposition of your beliefs on others (which is clearly wrong in most moral frameworks).

Yet New Atheists do not see this as wrong. Some have even argued that parents should be prevented from "indoctrinating" (i.e. teaching children religion and their moral framework).

I can counter your argument by saying simply: A homophobe would only have to see the same thing you do (the men kissing), and would draw a completely different conclusion than you do without the aid of religion. That's why you can't rely on emotional or intuition-based morality. The same situation can cause different emotions in different people.

When you're born, both your conscious and subconscious minds are blank slates. When you choose values and accept premises, those go into your subconscious since your conscious can't hold everything you know at once.

Emotions are the result of lightning-quick value-judgments performed by your subconscious mind. The subconscious is like a computer that your conscious programs, and your emotions are a constant printout.

Because of this, your emotional reactions to various situations depend on the values you've accepted and the premises you hold.

When you and someone else agree that it is wrong to arrest a gay man for kissing someone, based on your emotional reactions, it's because you both share western values such as individual rights and the separation between church and state. This allows you both to -feel- that the arrest is immoral. But someone who deeply disvalues homosexuality or deeply values a religion that is intolerant to homosexuality will -feel- -instantly- that the act of two men kissing is vile and the arrest is just and righteous, or at least preferable to allowing the men to kiss any longer.

THIS is why morality has to be based on facts. Why it must be grounded in reality. A person's wrong premises can easily make them -feel- that an evil act is righteous. Morality must be objectively defined and validated in order to stand up to peoples' whims.

Instead of trusting morality to a person's feelings and intuitions, you should examine the nature of reality and of human beings and determine, based on the way we are, what we should do.

I already linked this in another comment, but I'll link it here too. It's an essay Ayn Rand wrote that does just that. It examines the facts that give rise to man's need of a moral code, and then justifies, based on reality and man's nature, the proper moral code for man to practice. (Rational Egoism.) http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ari_ayn_rand...

If you don't agree with this essay, at least you can take from it an example of how to justify a moral code firmly grounded in reality, instead of in someone's -feelings- of right and wrong. Even if such feelings did default to a correct moral code, they would still be unreliable due to how easily they can be overridden.

Having an objectively defined moral code will not only allow you to be -certain- that you are doing the right thing, but you'll have intellectual ammo to back up your code when it is attacked. "I feel this is right" is insufficient to defend any moral code, even if it is the right moral code.