I never said it like that. Also, morality isn't just if I do you good you'll do good to me. It's also living in a manner that keeps order in a society. Again, you don't need to be a Christian to act that way or to even figure that out.

So this is where all my favorite posters now reside

Stalin did a pretty good job of keeping order in a society. One of his ways to keep order was to starve 50 millions of his people. If what is moral is to live in a manner that keeps order in a society then the starvation of 50 million was a moral act.

How you treat others is how you'll be treated

Nope

Vivid

You'd have really been in a pickle if he had turned out to be quite proficient, I suppose.

There are prisons in every state chock full of Christians who lie, cheat, steal and commit murder. Obviously belief in absolute morality or hell didn't stop them from being criminals, so after preaching absolute morality and hell didn't work, informing him that society will take his freedom away did work.

RIGHT ON! Bradford, why don't you try to address his question instead of dancing around the topic.

Why would the reversal of human behavoir indicate inconsistency on God's part? People have free will and history shows there are knaves and fools as well as heroic figures. In some historic eras the former control a country or culture. Other times it is the latter. His question made no sense.

On a practical level, it's worth looking at an issue like slavery. This was considered business-as-usual for thousands of years, but today we see it as absolutely abhorrent. Did God change his mind about it and modify the collective human conscience?

RIGHT ON! Bradford, why don't you try to address his question instead of dancing around the topic.

But theistic moral codes have the same problem. They make two assumptions: (1) That fallible human beings can figure out what God wants, and (2) that God possesses moral authority.

Keep em' coming! Stick with these points and you'll get them on the run.

Point two would be conceded to a being with infinite wisdom but if that is not enough, God's power would suffice for the prudent. Concerning your first point most biblical admonitions are plain. That is true of the Ten Commandments.

On a practical level, it's worth looking at an issue like slavery. This was considered business-as-usual for thousands of years, but today we see it as absolutely abhorrent. Did God change his mind about it and modify the collective human conscience?

Slavery had been around for thousands of years and was only abolished in Europe at a point in history when Christianity's influence peaked. Ironically, slavery made a comeback during the "Enlightenment" before it was once again discarded.

Or is morality not simply a matter of treating others in a way that gets you what you want after all?

I never said it like that. Also, morality isn't just if I do you good you'll do good to me. It's also living in a manner that keeps order in a society. Again, you don't need to be a Christian to act that way or to even figure that out.

to see if they could be answered coherently and with logical consistency.

Which I succeeded with: How you treat others is how you'll be treated & living in a way that promotes the stability of a society.

On a practical level, it's worth looking at an issue like slavery. This was considered business-as-usual for thousands of years, but today we see it as absolutely abhorrent. Did God change his mind about it and modify the collective human conscience?

We just had this same debate over on UD – slavery in the ANE was not the same thing as slavery in the Americas in quite a few relevant ways, such as ANE slavery generally being neither forced nor racial (that's a big one right there) and providing ways for gaining social mobility and for the poor to make a living for themselves (even though God commanded the Hebrews to take care of the poor in quite a ways, e.g. laws about dropping food when harvesting for the poor and the alien). This undercuts your 'practical' case quite a bit.

Add'tl. edit: I should like to add that God doesn't have to "modify the collective human conscience"; Christian thinkers since Augustine have affirmed that God can deal differently with peoples of different times, and indeed, one strong example of this can be demonstrated in the Trinity and more specifically in Jesus Himself.

So the best atheists can give you is relative morality. But when we speak about something being wrong, we don't think "society views this as wrong." We mean "this is wrong."