> I'm curious to hear why you need an explicit moral order in your life at all. >Imagine you didn't believe in any religion > would you shoot me? I'm pretty s

> I'm curious to hear why you need an explicit moral order in your life at all. >Imagine you didn't believe in any religion > would you shoot me? I'm pretty sure you wouldn't. You misunderstand morality and religion. Consider the following: 1. Religion is not morality nor is it the source of all moral knowledge. Actually, the problem with the word "religion" is that it's very difficult to define and its current usage is historically speaking relatively recent. I prefer to avoid using it because it seems to accomplish little else than stir up connotations, misconceptions, and confusion. It's much better to address individual truth claims and ask for justification. Religious claims are no different. You just have to know what methods of verification are appropriate to what kind of truth claim. Method, of course, follows apprehension of the real. Also, everyone has a religion in the sense of holding something as the highest good. The question if whether what you hold to be the highest good is the highest good. Failure to make the proper identification is disastrous, even if apparently so or immediately so. 2. What is an "explicit moral order"? There is a moral order in reality that we discover. We reason morally every time we make a decision and that moral reasoning draw from our knowledge of reality and the moral order within it. Now, Cartesian materialists will find this difficult to understand because for them, the world is just a pile of homogeneous dead crap arranged in various configurations (they can't explain the "illusion" that the world is otherwise because they've necessarily reduced the mind to meaningless motions of homogeneous dead crap we call a "brain" for some reason). In any case, we can come to know moral principles explicitly precisely because the moral order is real and not an arbitrarily imposed fiction. In our day to day affairs, we also engage in prudent reasoning that considers the various circumstances we find ourselves in. All of this involves reasoning about the good. 3. Why wouldn't someone shoot you? There must be motive and motive has moral meaning. Of course, it's also true that we live in a society heavily influenced by Christianity, so your example doesn't supply us with the kind of critical experiment you were hoping for.