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I have seen this take many times but I have never taken the take from the other side: someone who admits openly that they just want a video game checklist for their own morality. It is so far away from anything I would ever want that it's impossible for me to imagine that real people would reach that conclusion. Do the people who want to live that way know that's what they want? Would they be turned off if they heard their views described the way you've described it?
They don't say it in those words. Instead, they suggest that without the fear of god and the set of rules there's simply no other way to create internal drivers for morality.
It's tough to keep your face straight when someone says the only reason they don't act like a piece of shit is the fear of eternal damnation. The vast majority of Christians aren't like this (IME) but they're out there.
No -- instead I'll suggest that without the fear of God "morality" is an unintelligible term.
If you think it's somehow 'wrong' to put your unwanted infant on a dung heap to die of starvation or be sold into prostitution; if you think it's 'wrong' to sail down the coast to where the people talk funny and kill the men, rape the women, and enslave the children; if you think that all humans are of equal (and infinite) moral worth; you just might be descended from a Christian culture.
Baseline human 'morality' looks like Genghis Khan, and I don't recognize it as such. It's just game theory.
China and india in the middle ages and early modernity were more orderly and advanced societies than europe without knowing christianity. IMO what brings order in society is not any particular ideology but the enforcement, through violence, of the rule of law.
Religion in this sense, probably just offers a cope: human justice isn't perfect but those who escape it will be punished in the next life.
BTW, thinking that morality descends from god directly is not universal in christian theology, IIRC aquinas believed that it was derived from human nature.
Yes. We're not talking about order. We're talking about morality.
You'll have to clarify, then. I'm not sure what you are talking about. Are we talking about morality of the individual (as in: the ability of an individual to know good from evil) or are we talking about the moral basis of laws? Something else?
Right, my point here is that without reference to God 'morality' is an unintelligible term. We can talk about order, or smooth social functioning, or game theory -- all kinds of things! But those are not what we mean when we talk about morality. Morality is what is right above all those other concerns by dint of our relationship to our creator.
Well, yeah, if you define "morality" specifically to mean "doing the will of the Christian God", then it's definitely true that without the Christian God there can be no morality. But then this isn't a very useful statement.
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