But the morals held are certainly not absolute. Even on an individual level what you believe to be morally justifiable on day may not be the same the next. And from one culture to the next?
The presence of moral disagreement, as well as some people changing their minds, does not constitute any sort of argument against absolute morals. All it shows is that people often disagree over what morals are or are themselves unsure about what they are.
It is entirely possible that when two cultures disagree over a moral matter that one culture is wrong and another is right, or that both are wrong. Similarly, when a person changes their mind, it's possible that they've corrected a past error, or made a mistake and exchanged a correct conclusion for a false one.
Have a think about the arguments a bit more. Of course, what I've just said is not an argument in favour of absolutism. I merely point out that what you've presented isn't evidence that morals are relative in the slightest.
The individuality thing for me is an easy answer; I think therefore I am. I have memories that define who I am and whom I have been. It may be that I was a differenrt person when I was 16 than who I am now but that "different person" was once and still is a part of me.
That answer doesn't fly philosophically.
Why are
you, the person reading this right now, the
same person who existed ten years ago? Or the person who existed just a few hours ago, when you wrote that post. What is it that
makes you the same? Let's have a look at some possible answers. It may sound patronising, if so, I apologise, but I'm never quite sure whether it's best to assume you know these things or don't. Think of it as an introduction to some of the problem's complexities.
1/ Your physical body. The person reading this is the same person who wrote the post I reply to because it's the same physical body. The problem with this is obvious, though. Your body changes. I forget the exact figure, but a human replaces every molecule in their body over just a few years. The person you were ten years ago shares no physical similarity with the person you are now, so logically must be a different person. Not many people like thinking this, so -
2/ Your spatio-temporal continuity with past bodies. This is more or less the same as 1/ only it takes into account time as well. You're the same person as the person you were ten years ago because your body occupies the same space-time coordinates as that person's body, and we can see that, across time, the body ten years back has grown and evolved into your current body. However, if this is what makes you the same, then death should make no difference. After you die your corpse will share spatio-temporal continuity with your body when you were alive, but most of the time you wouldn't say that your dead body is
you in some fundamental sense. So, is the self entirely independent of the body?
3/ Your soul. A tricky prospect because souls are hard to define or observe. In this case we're talking about some sort of insubstantial non-physical force that is connected to your body in some way, and provides for your continuing identity. There's a common objection to this, though, originally raised by John Locke (I think; could be wrong, it's been a while) that runs thus - if you cannot observe your soul at all, how do you know you've still got the same one? For all you know souls could flit from body to body. Supposing you have a soul, how can you be sure the one you've got now is the same one you had ten years ago? There's no way of telling it's the same, and if so, the presence of any one specific soul has no effect on your behaviour. How can it be this, then?
4/ Your memories. This was the one Locke favoured. You are the same person you were ten years ago because you remember being that person. Again, though, this view has some obvious problems. Suppose a mad scientist came along with a machine that could tinker with memories, and swapped out your memories for someone else's. Would you then have
been that person? A clone might have all the memories of the original, but does that mean that the clone was the person who did all the things the original did? Were they both that person? Neither? On a less outlandish level, suppose you get really drunk, do some things, and wake up the next morning with no memory of those events. If memories are the key to selfhood, then you were not the person who did those things - it was someone else. There's also a rather convincing thing called the brave officer objection you can Google.
5/ Nothing. You are
not the same person you were ten years ago, or even the same person you were one instant ago. Those people are dead. The only person alive is the one who exists this exact moment - and by the time you finish reading this sentence, the person who started reading it will be dead. You have no continuing self. Not many Western philosophers think this way, but if you're curious Googling the word '
anatman' can show where this line of thought comes from.
6/ Some combination of these different factors?
7/ Or something completely different?
As you can see, it's not an easy question to answer.
And the rock and roll churches...what these folks call worship...their god made angels to do that for one thing. For another Jesus never said "hey worship me."
No man comes to the Father save through me? I'm not about to go Gospel-trawling but there are some things you could interpret that way.
Take World War 2. At the start of the war, the allies considered it a war crime to bomb cities yet by the end of the conflict the fire bombing of German and Japanese on a scale that Goering could only dream of in 1940/41.
That's not evidence that universal moral standards changed. That's only evidence that the Allies were willing to do things by the end of the war they weren't willing to at the start.
