Comment by baryphonic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baryphonic | Hacker News Reader

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> Frankly, growing up in the church left me with a broken moral code. It was only once I left it in my teens and had to work things out for myself that I feel like I could properly ground myself ethically. Having a moral system imposed on you can do that.

How did you derive your moral code yourself? Any action you take has side effects in the outside world, and so some minimal, common understanding of morality is necessary for any beneficial interactions with the world and especially other people (I'll leave God aside for a second). Did you rely on the authorities of non-theistic moral authorities in the past, and if so, how did you examine the bases of their moral beliefs? Were you just relying on personal feelings and maybe some experiences? Did you discover the joys of hedonism?

I want to understand.

Edit: looking at some other comments, it seems you might be referring more to "fire and brimstone" preaching? I never experienced that growing up, despite being on the conservative end of mainline Protestantism and still practicing today, so I can kind of understand the reaction.

I'm still curious though.

Not who you were asking, but I had a similar experience.

Ultimately what I ground my beliefs in is empathy, and the understanding that my actions have an impact on other people. The second very important piece is every human being counts equally.

Our society and inner psychology is complex. So we'll mess up and cause harm at times. Occasionally it will be intentional. But I think it's straightforward to understand committing to this as a guiding principle.

If you do that, and also agree with every human being counting equally, then I've got no problem with you or your faith. What disturbs me is how many people use religion as justification for inequality, or how they use concepts of forgiveness and grace to avoid fully owning and learning from their moral failures.

I find the argument that religion is required to understand and practice morality doesn't hold any water. In fact, I'd say religion makes it harder.

Religion gives you a set of rules, and usually involves some horrible cosmic punishment if you break those rules. But those rules are easy to derive without the need to invoke the supernatural. E.g.

- "What goes around comes around."

- Lying tends to produce more lying, leading to consequences for the liar

- Turning the other cheek gives you peace and endears you to others

- Charity is its own reward

- The 7 deadly sins are all eventually toxic to the individual committing them

- etc.

These would all be true even if religion never sprouted up in our world. Religion coopts basic, secular morality and claims it as its own divine truth. It's done this so effectively that people like you become confused about how non-religious people learn to be good people, and some go as far as to equate spirituality with morality.

My question to you (I'm assuming you're Christian) would be, how do you know that you shouldn't kill someone who works on Sunday? The bible explicitly says that you should (Exodus 35:2). If you know that your morality doesn't line up perfectly with the bible, then how did you arrive at it? There are prominent Christian figures you agree with, and plenty that you do disagree with. How do you decide which is which?

I can only speak for myself, but I drastically simplified things down to 'If it doesn't hurt anyone, it's probably ok'

Just because a very old book says that X, Y, or Z is sinful, doesn't mean those actions are immoral if there's no harm to anyone.

You don't need religion to learn about morality. Watching Mr. Rodgers or reading Winnie the Poo would do. As you get older you can get into Machiavelli and start really becoming a principled person.

I never grew up with watching Mr. Rodgers and only really know about him through the recent film about him, but it definitely seems that his Christian faith shaped his children programs, see: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/how-mister-rogers-faith-sh...

But he never threatened you with hell, promised heaven, or invoked god at all, which is are all parts the parent post found strange.

The parent said that: "You don't need religion to learn about morality. Watching Mr. Rodgers or reading Winnie the Poo would do".

My point is that Mr. Rodgers doesn't take all these teachings out of thin air, as is mentioned in the PBS article.

It seems that major themes are taken from Jesus Christ's teachings, and His Sermon on the mount. See: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5-7&ver...

I meant the grand-grand parent:

> Having the Church community while growing up was great. But the fact that admission to this community required total philosophical adherence is just bizarre.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26621224

At the end of the day, the basic moral tenets of the christian faith can be found in every other faith, this aspect of the christian faith is the least unique IMO. "Love thy neigbor," being able to let things go, and helping the less fortunate are also in fact Buddhist rhetoric. Mr. Rodgers leaned on his faith because that's the philosophy he knew and understood how to use examples from. If his mother raised him with Eastern philosophy instead of scripture, he probably would have put up words from the Buddha which convey a similar message instead of that bible verse.

I sort of feel the opposite, that a moral code that appeals to some authority is much poorer than one justifiable by some first principles. You can get a lot of milage out of just assuming that you do not want to be hurt in some ways and that other people are like you in that regard, and iterate from there.

Moral code is at least partially cultural. Somethings are consider immoral in some cultures while not in others. Although the major ones seem pretty aligned.

However religion isn’t needed for it, as different people from different religious backgrounds more or less got to the same place.

> How did you derive your moral code yourself?

By thinking about it.

I also read a lot of Spinoza.

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