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[+] -11 points 1 week ago (8 children)

i mean, have you considered the possibility that you know intuitively what is "right" and what is "wrong" because it has been enshrined into you by 2000 years of religion?

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  • [–] 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    What if it has been enshrined into us by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution because altruism is a trait that increases the survival chances of a social species?

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  • [+] -6 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    i'm happy to hear that it works for you to follow purely your own instincts, but if you consider the typical person in for example the US today, there's a 99.9% chance that's not gonna work.

    point is, lots of stuff are "right" because they're socially told, even if you don't call it religion, it's still transported as "common mode of operation". that's what i meant.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 days ago

    That's a pretty pessimistic view!

    In my experience, most people have a pretty good feel for what's right and wrong, it seems to be a basic function of empathy. There is a small percentage who lack this understanding, but more often it seems to me like it's people who have been twisted one way or another that are the issue. They've been taught to value things over people, or that power is the only path to acceptance, or something else equally twisty.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago* (2 children)

    2000 years? Religion has been around longer than that. Is it just Christianity that has "enshrined morality" into the cultures that practice it?

    If you ask me to compare a country that was historically mostly Christian, like the US, against a country that was historically mostly Buddhist, like Japan, it seems to me that Japan is ahead on a lot of metrics. Compared to Americans, Japanese people pollute less, have a lower crime rate, a less militaristic foreign policy, hell, they don't even litter.

    So what, are all religions simultaneously true, despite contradicting each other left and right? If I get a society to start worshipping the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is that going to eventually "enshrine morality" in that society, even among nonbelievers? Or is it just your particular religion that's correct, and the fact that morality doesn't actually correlate with societies practicing it is just a glaring hole in your argument?

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