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I think you'd have a pretty difficult time constructing a history of morality that doesn't involve what we refer to as "religion." Certainly that doesn't mean t

I think you'd have a pretty difficult time constructing a history of morality that doesn't involve what we refer to as "religion." Certainly that doesn't mean that all religious beliefs are good or justifiable, but that isn't what I claimed, either. I just claimed they were the foundation.

2024throwaway 3y ago
I would argue it's the opposite. "Maybe killing people is bad. How do we get people to not do that? Tell them god said not to!" It starts from the ethical perspective, and uses religion as the blunt hammer to drive it into the masses.
efdee 3y ago
Sure, but that is hard because religion is such a big part of our history. There aren't many large scale things from the past you can describe without talking about the influence of religion, because well, religion was there and it was pretty prominent. However, that doesn't say much about whether religion was necessary for morality to substantiate. In fact, so many immoral things have been carried out in the name of religion, that you might as well wonder if we would have been much more morally advanced by now if it hadn't been for religion.
- keiferski 3y ago
  > if we would have been much more morally advanced by now if it hadn't been for religion. Kind of an unanswerable question, but I think my tentative answer is "not really." Mostly because the moral viewpoints that underly atheistic criticisms of (usually Christian) religion tend to themselves be derived from earlier Christian ideas. I don't think it's likely that we'd have a universalist sense of democracy/human life without the underlying Christian soul concept. The Romans, for example, had no qualms about human life being divided into "valuable" and "not valuable" groups. You could use the criticisms of someone like Nietzsche against Christianity and say we'd be more advanced without it, but I don't think this is probably the type of "advanced" that most people today would have it mind.
mrguyorama 3y ago
> I just claimed they were the foundation. That's an extreme claim that requires extreme evidence. You don't just get to pretend your preferred interpretation of a history that humans don't even have (prewriting society) is correct just because you want it to be.

2024throwaway 3y ago

I would argue it's the opposite. "Maybe killing people is bad. How do we get people to not do that? Tell them god said not to!" It starts from the ethical perspective, and uses religion as the blunt hammer to drive it into the masses.

efdee 3y ago

Sure, but that is hard because religion is such a big part of our history. There aren't many large scale things from the past you can describe without talking about the influence of religion, because well, religion was there and it was pretty prominent. However, that doesn't say much about whether religion was necessary for morality to substantiate. In fact, so many immoral things have been carried out in the name of religion, that you might as well wonder if we would have been much more morally advanced by now if it hadn't been for religion.

keiferski 3y ago
> if we would have been much more morally advanced by now if it hadn't been for religion. Kind of an unanswerable question, but I think my tentative answer is "not really." Mostly because the moral viewpoints that underly atheistic criticisms of (usually Christian) religion tend to themselves be derived from earlier Christian ideas. I don't think it's likely that we'd have a universalist sense of democracy/human life without the underlying Christian soul concept. The Romans, for example, had no qualms about human life being divided into "valuable" and "not valuable" groups. You could use the criticisms of someone like Nietzsche against Christianity and say we'd be more advanced without it, but I don't think this is probably the type of "advanced" that most people today would have it mind.

mrguyorama 3y ago

> I just claimed they were the foundation. That's an extreme claim that requires extreme evidence. You don't just get to pretend your preferred interpretation of a history that humans don't even have (prewriting society) is correct just because you want it to be.