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Comment by k1ll3r | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

"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.

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