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Comment by thinkingemote | Hacker News Reader

History will also show you that it is religion that has formed the moral and social framework for today's values to be opposed to oppression. You might think they, human rights, good morals, fundamental truths, are innate and fundamental but then look at geography and history together and you will see that it's religion that is the origin for these beliefs.

The twentieth century featured many deaths caused by 2 different philosophies in 2 different places explicitly opposed to religion, for example!.

It's a paradox and irony in many cases.

Just some perspective and nuance for widening ones thoughts.

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The notion that humanity would be morally lost without the guidance of religious belief is laughable. For sake of gaining some perspective and widening one's thoughts I'd suggest reading the works of any of the number of major philosophers.

And if you need to read in some book that oppression is bad, that murdering people is bad, that basic human rights are a good idea, etc. - if you need to read that in a book and have these concepts crystalized for you as capital T True by dogma fed to you by a church of some kind... then, my friend, you're just a bad person. And we do have bad people and will continue to have bad people but religion has done nothing to abate this. Moral compass is innate to human nature, not something you learn from a book.

"Moral compass is innate" is a belief. Science cannot provide evidence for it.

It's such a good belief, that we are blind to it being a belief and blind to its origins.

It's a belief that is so successful because it is true. It comes from the belief that every person has an intrinsic value. Philosophy isn't about rational atheistic science. Science cannot prove or disprove the idea that every human has value.

The Nazis didn't belief that and used science to back up their abhorrent beliefs. They murdered millions of religious People.

The communists also hated religion and murdered millions more of people who thought different. The irony is that they did so in the name of ending oppression.

History and geography will help you see that ideas about innate rights come from religion. But we don't need religion to keep these ideas going.

Just looking at how the human rights movement started should be illuminating.

False dichotomy.

There's a big gap between "morality is innate" and "morality can be achieved only through religion."

The argument isn't "you can only be moral if you're religious", it's: "modern Western moral attitudes, even explicitly atheistic ones, are strongly influenced by historical religious ideas, and therefore the idea that religion is inherently immoral is incoherent; and contempt for religion is unjustified." Seems reasonable to me.

Your argument ignores cause and effect.

Religion was created by man, not by god. Religious ideas, including religious morality, are the results, not the causes, of the prevailing cultural attitudes of the societies that created them.

In the modern West, such as the US, "religious morality" is mostly synonymous with the morality of the ancient societies in which those religions originated, which is why religion is so out of step with modern sensibilities.

Thomas Aquinas saw a connection between the metaphysical existence of God and the values of morality in the sense that they are both grounded within His existence.

In other words, Aquinas saw God as the basis for and to all we experience. From the theistic perspective, my question is if moral subjectivism is true, it seems to be self defeating as the concept of truth is fundamentally underwhelmed.

There are plenty of atheistic and some theistic philosophers who see morality as independent of God. I wouldn't necessarily agree with them, but it's just a thought

I remember listening to Steve Peters, English psychiatrist, talk about brain imaging of psychopaths.

It seems there is some component of evolved morality; psychopaths would have been excluded by the tribe.

> And if you need to read in some book that oppression is bad, that murdering people is bad, that basic human rights are a good idea, etc

I mean, you just called generations upon generations bad people.. Like, morals also evolve with society, and everyone is influenced by the society they grow up in.

Just a very easy counterexample -- gladiator fights were perfectly acceptable in people in Rome. Were they bad people for that?

Yes.

Okay - do you think you would/wouldn’t have participated in the games as a viewer were you born in the times?

A man can be made to say or do anything, with enough conditioning; we are animals after all. I'm not arguing the irrelevance of context here, but I am saying that people have natural tendencies which amount to an implicit innate moral compass. People want to be good and chill.

Most people want to be nice to their neighbors / tribe.

Most people find violence disturbing.

That they live in circumstance that encourages, requires, them to kill, to manipulate, to be an asshole - is just circumstance. That's why being a Good Person is Hard. You need to remain true to yourself, and fight against all kinds of external forces that seek to corrupt you.

It’s rare to find any ethics professors who argue in favor of moral relativism in this manner. A vast majority are realists or constructivists who would easily claim that Romans were bad for practicing slavery and forced combat for fun.

Sorry, but this is ridiculous. Are you claiming that murder was totally accepted as normal before Moses got the Commandments?

Religion, at best, codified moral values that were already in place in society.

> Are you claiming that murder was totally accepted as normal before Moses got the Commandments?

Pretty much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide read the 4th paragraph.

Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_war which also traces its roots to religion. Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law

I don't think you quite realize how much of modern morality traces itself to religious law. Maybe take a course in Philosophy.

> Pretty much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide read the 4th paragraph.

I asked about murder, not this particular special case. Furthermore, even from the paragraph that you cite, there is nothing explicitly connecting religious law with a prohibition of murder or infanticide. The article states the Christianity forbade infanticide, which I will note is about 1300 years AFTER Moses.

> I don't think you quite realize how much of modern morality traces itself to religious law. Maybe take a course in Philosophy.

Thanks for your unjustified condescension. Maybe you should read the articles that you cite?

As someone with a degree in Philosophy, I have no idea why you think doing a course in Philosophy would make you believe that religion was the basis of morality. There is plenty of philosophy which explicitly rejects that point of view.

Yes that's right more or less.

Slavery and sexual violence could be a better example as it's more closer to now. History is illuminating.

Slavery and sexual violence are explicitly endorsed by the Bible.

Most inmates are religious - that's why prisons have chapels and give out religious texts. It's estimated only around 1 in 1000 prisoners are atheist.

At the same time, the regime that killed absolutely most people last century were staunchly anti religious: the USSR.

The USSR, with a cult of personality around the leader, unquestionable doctrines, restraint on free thinking, and its own set of truths at odds with reality? Funny how they managed to stay anti-religious while keeping all the best bits of religion.

Atheism, more religious than religion, a common theme also on internet today :-/

Yeah but most weren't killed because of religion, and religion lived on for the people in the USSR, just not as societies organising body.

Add up deaths in the name of religion this century and get back to me

We can wrangle around this, but absolutely most civilian deaths in the twentieth century was caused by very atheists regimes.

And yes, that holds true even if you include Hitlers regime on the religious side despite the fact that major religious factions were against him.

I wouldn't be surprised if it would be related to socioeconomic status though, instead of some causation between sin and religion.

The Princess Alice experiments are evidence for the alternative rationale that belief in invisible God-like beings who impose rules is a useful trait for early civilisations which have inadequate oversight for their members.

Superstitious people will obey rules with no actual enforcement out of a mistaken belief that an invisible Deity might punish them for disobedience, this benefits the rest of their society, at least in the short term. Of course it breaks down if a few people in society exploit everybody else's beliefs. "Princess Alice wants you to look after the sheep" is beneficial because it means shepherds do their jobs properly, but "Princess Alice needs you to sell your worldly possessions so that I can have a nice necklace" not so much.

It's a rational looking theory, but is there any evidence that superstitious people exhibit more ethical behaviors?

I have the impression that since those people are not bound by evidences they can justify unethical behavior much more easily. And so this trait that should make them more ethical actually backfires and enable worse behavior.

Ah, Princess Alice doesn't check for ethical behaviour it checks for obedience.

This shows that religion could perform a valuable function in a pre-historic human society independent of whether it's true.

Slave mentality back in the day (2000+ years ago) was converted into religious beliefs and then it got “mainstream” and all the religion that was focused on being a chad became unpopular thanks to this slave religion which made being a slave cool and being a chad uncool.

That’s the tl;dr of your argument afaict. Problem there is that religion was the problem in both contexts - so I don’t think it provided a solution so much as it caused the problem in the first place. Even then - it forced slave mentality onto the masses and that wasn’t exactly great for everyone either… Self-flagellation anyone?

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