Well done and edifying. I read “Chesterton” as saying that there is a givenness to human nature, and morality is such as it is because it suits that nature and works to its flourishing. Moreover, even absent faith in God, most people have a voice of conscience that (praise the absent Almighty) makes our hearts inclined to respond to and act in accord with what is right.
This is something beautiful. I am moved to say still more, that there is something heroic (if that's not too strong of a word) about those who can live a decent and happy life without explicit faith in an explicit deity. I was never successful in doing so. I was deeply discontent until I came to faith. Yet I know plenty of good-hearted "secular" people who seem to be thriving well enough without faith, and it's not uncommon that one of them will outdo me in an act of generosity or richness of spirit.
Yet what troubles me was never the conviction that there could be no consistent moral order without God. What sat like a weight of sadness in my chest before I was established in faith was the horrid surmise that there might finally be no there there. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and if God, Who is self-subsistent being itself, does not undergird our transient being, then there is no lasting and rooted meaning or goodness here—though my heart of flesh and my firing neural synapses, caught up in this place and attached to the people in it, may like to protest otherwise. I found the thought unendurable, with its deep existential insecurity, and the sadness of knowing all the good that people strove to realize could not outlast time and loss.
Though I do consider sometimes whether that might bespeak a lack of subtlety on my part, an undeveloped taste, a wooden literal-mindedness, a wounded existential clinginess. A world without God, in all its delicate, desolate, windswept and passing beauty might stir up a real and present, an exoteric yet lyrical, a sweet and wistful delectation that outdoes what a clumsily plodding dogmatism can offer. I can see why one might rather be an unbelieving artist enchanted by fleeting beauty than a stodgy theologian caught up in passing judgement and making all-important distinctions.
Yet finally I conclude in faith that all that means is that God’s story must be even more beautiful than the sensitive artist's: nothing cheap, predictable, preachy, worn-out, or exhausted about it, though multitudes who cleave to Him may give a different impression.
One could almost believe that God did such a good job in making us that His presence was no longer required, and so we grew up and came to know the world for ourselves. Nevertheless, one fine day in human history, a beautiful girl was born, whose heart gathered in all the goodness of this place so that it filled to overflowing. She sensed that among all of this, Love Himself was present just out of reach, and she conceived such a desire to see His Face that He came to her, and to us, our Emmanuel. And God was present here once more. I believe that story, and would go on believing it up until my little life is rounded by a sleep, if that's what is to come.
I find these AI arguments unimpressive. Not only because of the attempt to imitate Chesterton, which falls flat. (The style and substance are much more typical of the early 21st century Internet writers, which the AI was trained on; a common complaint I've heard about AI is that, when it tries to summarize or imitate a specific essay, person, or argumentative style, it not only simplifies the arguments but makes them more boring and conventional.)
But also the arguments themselves are weak - for instance the machine argues that morality without religion must be possible because it's self-evidently good to protect the weak, saying things like: "Consider the example of protecting the unborn child, who is surely among the most vulnerable of all... To abandon the unborn, or the disabled, or the aged, is to deny the very principle that makes morality possible: the recognition of value beyond utility, of dignity beyond power."
And yet in real, actual human history, as it actually happened, protecting the weak - for instance, by being bothered enough by abortion or infanticide or even slavery and pederasty to do anything about it - was almost exclusively something done by religious people. Pre-Christian Greece and Rome weren't bothered by those things; the Christianization of the Roman empire is what made them taboo or, at least in the case of slavery, moderated them. (Medieval serfs weren't free by modern standards but they had way more rights than a Roman mine or brothel slave.)
In Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, which don't make such a big deal about mankind being uniquely created in God's image, the whole "all life is valuable" thing tends to be expressed in vegetarianism... but still it is basically a religious thing. Vegetarianism is common in India because of the religious beliefs of dozens of generations of Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs... not because ancient India's equivalent of Peter Singer argued on secular grounds that eating meat is immoral.
Granted, I'm not so attached to any specific religion that I would argue that morality depends on someone sharing my religious beliefs, or even that it depends on revealed religion. One can be a Deist and believe that God's will was manifested through the act of creating the natural world, and not through any particular book of scripture or volume of revealed laws; such a person can still believe that respect for that Creation requires one to act in certain ways that are widely viewed as "moral."
But without any sort of God to give order to the world, morality is just a matter of one person's preferences against another's. A Roman atheist might as well say: "You may refrain from burying your unwanted baby girl alive if doing it makes you uncomfortable, but is doesn't make me uncomfortable, so I'm going to go ahead and do it, without feeling any guiltier than you feel when you eat fish and lamb."
Unless you believe that there is actually a higher Intelligence to whom human beings owe respect, and that this Intelligence created the world and the things in it - you and me, and the baby girl, and the fish, and the lamb - with some degree or artistry and purpose, then it makes no sense to argue that there's a moral and immoral way to interact with said world. If you grant that there's a Creator, then moral disagreements still exist (did God make the lamb because he wants us to eat it? To sacrifice it on an altar? But only on this one particular altar in Jerusalem, and not anywhere else?) but at least it's possible to have morality. Also, even laying aside fears of eternal punishment, people are just more likely to sacrifice for a common moral vision, and pass down their beliefs to future generations, if they believe that Someone wiser and more powerful than themselves is the author of the whole enterprise.
But trying to have morality without religion is like planting a plastic flower in a flowerpot and expecting it to grow.
"the attempt to imitate Chesterton ... falls flat"
I think that's fair, to a point. Chesterton is sometimes impenetrable, with his too-clever-by-half liberal use of tautological reasoning. It took me three readings to actually "get" Orthodoxy, but when I finally did, I thought it was brilliant.
Still, most people never make it that far. The AI doesn't suffer for making Chestertonian arguments in not-quite-Chestertonian prose.
"Pre-Christian Greece and Rome weren't bothered by those things; the Christianization of the Roman empire is what made them taboo or, at least in the case of slavery, moderated them. "
They weren't irreligious. They were pagan. And the pagan gods were cruel deities.
But since Massa Damnata far exceeds the cruelty of any pagan practice, I am not moved to find this sufficiently damning.
"But without any sort of God to give order to the world, morality is just a matter of one person's preferences against another's."
This is clearly not true, or virtually every society over the span of the ages wouldn't have come to an agreement about certain core legal/ethical principles.
The fundamental basis for non-theistic morality, it seems to me, is reciprocity. The Golden Rule. You can't have a functioning society where I can steal from you and sleep with your wife and kill your child with impunity, and you can't have a functioning society where you're allowed to do all of that back to me for the purposes of revenge.
The question of the sufficiency of this kind of morality is certainly valid fodder for debate, but I think it's no small thing to establish that man as a social creature cannot exist in pure anarchy.
"trying to have morality without religion is like planting a plastic flower in a flowerpot and expecting it to grow."
I think trying to have religion without evidence is like planting an invisible flower in an invisible flowerpot and expecting everyone to give up all worldly pleasures and goods to watch it grow.
It's easy enough to take any system apart if you're so inclined.
I think you're anger at the Catholic church is causing you to overlook a lot here. For instance, I never defended Massa Damnata, or said that followers of cruel religions (i.e. Greco-Roman Pagans who aren't bothered by infanticide) aren't cruel.
Nor do I accept the argument that "an agreement about certain core legal/ethical principles" disproves the idea that morality without religion is just preference. There are certain preferences that are very common! Others are more niche. This is why every society has taboos on killing noblemen, and not every society has taboos on killing unwanted baby girls, or killing animals for meat, or what have you.
And in any case, the Golden Rule is a religious principle. It shows up within religious systems (Judaism, Christianity, Confucianism, etc.) and only makes sense if there is some spiritually meaningful community of persons among for whom reciprocity is necessary - so for instance you have early Christians rejecting infanticide since they believe that all human beings are created in the image of God, or Pythagoreans and Hindus refusing to eat meat because they believe that the same souls can be reborn as both people and animals and that mistreating them produces bad karma. Absent a religious belief that that some supernatural force wants you to follow the Golden Rule, there isn't any good reason to follow it.
As for the "functioning society" arguments - well, the very idea that one ought to care about the well-being of one's society is not universal. Some people do, and other people don't. And those who do want to have a functioning society will generally disagree about how to get there - for instance, some societies believe that, if someone else sleeps with your wife or kills one of your relatives, it's immoral NOT to get revenge. Just read Hamlet or Titus Andronicus.
As for your last point, "I think trying to have religion without evidence is like planting an invisible flower in an invisible flowerpot and expecting everyone to give up all worldly pleasures and goods to watch it grow."
I'm not going to disagree with this. The fact that so many religions have spent the last two-thousand-or-so years claiming to have exclusive access to hidden truths that everyone else must accept, or else be damned for all eternity... is certainly one of the reasons why those religions are losing so many followers right now, when the Information Age makes it easy to find counterexamples to the truth claims, or to play them off against each other. ("If Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam are all demanding that I accept certain things on Faith, then Faith can't be the answer since they can't all be true." And so forth.)
John Michael Greer (whose work I recommended to you a few comments ago) also writes about this issue in essays like these ones:
Basically, I'm a seeker myself, and like you, I ended up leaving (what I now consider to be) the overly simplistic religion I grew up in. The difference is that I'm not letting my anger toward a specific religion get the better of me, and convince me that because such-and-such thing that some religions teach (i.e. the Massa Damnata, or Aztec human sacrifice) is obviously absurd or cruel, that therefore God doesn't exist, or that he's responsible for our misery (when it was men, not God, who taught the absurd doctrine in the first place) or that life without religion must somehow be better.
There are big questions which I believe you are still avoiding. For instance, if secular morality is possible, then why are the systems of ethics that have come to dominate cultures, and last for thousands of years, always rooted in religion? (The ancients had secular philosophies like Stoicism and Epicureanism, but these lacked religion's staying power.) And also, why are certain ethical beliefs that you seem to still be passionate about - for instance, that abortion is evil, or that premarital chastity followed by lifelong monogamy is the best way for people to order their sex lives - so rare outside of religious communities?
So I am still sticking by my plastic flower metaphor. Just because different religious systems (i.e. different species of flowers) can exist side by side, and have many ethical traits in common (as flowers share botanical traits like having stamens and sepals), and that sometimes a flower will wither and die for no apparent reason (i.e. your painful loss of your Catholic faith) does not mean that the plastic flower will take root and grow just as well as the real flowers. All of the historical evidence suggest that it will not.
I have to run so this will be brief, but I'm not sure where you're reading anger into anything I've said here.
My anger at Catholicism has mostly run its course. There's some residual, it's true, but it comes out mostly in reference to very specific teachings that I find extremely manipulative/coercive/unjust. Massa damnata/fewness of the saved is, as far as I can tell, the bedrock of any Christian tradition that posits the necessity of a savior who dies for the remission of sins. That's THE thing he's saving us from, isn't it? Which is why you don't need to mention it for me to reference it.
I'm merely saying that trading pagan temporal cruelty for Christian eschatological cruelty may look like a good deal at first, but the weight seems to be more heavy on the back end of that scale.
As for the questions I'm allegedly avoiding, I've said a number of times that I don't think you can have a truly comprehensible and effective moral code without religion. I said this in my post about why America needs religion whether people believe in it or not.
This seems to be a defect of human nature. If it isn't imposed from on high, it's very difficult for us to take any particular moral code seriously. But there are some things we all seem to agree upon that we would not like done to us, which invites us to the empathetic consideration of whether we should do it to others. I don't know why you need religion for the Golden Rule (and Confucianism is more of a moral philosophy than a religion in any case.)
I'm just not sure that the plastic flower metaphor works. Non-theistic morality is certainly more subject to change, or even to disagreement, but I think that's only because of the authoritarianism and fear of God deployed by formal religions. Unfalsifiable but terribly severe consequences act as bogeyman deterrents. They've proven very effective, even on folks who know they can't verify whether the consequences are real or not. Like Pascal, who want's to take the chance?
"As for the questions I'm allegedly avoiding, I've said a number of times that I don't think you can have a truly comprehensible and effective moral code without religion. I said this in my post about why America needs religion whether people believe in it or not."
Well then, forgive me if I've misunderstood your more recent arguments, since it seemed the me that you that you had switched to arguing the opposite. But apparently we're actually in agreement on the big thing - that is, it's much more likely that a community will actually live by a moral code if they believe that said code is of divine origin.
For me, religion is essential to morality because ethics only make sense if the world belongs to someone. If God created me and the people around me and the living Earth with some sort of purpose and artistry, then it's my duty to refrain from wantonly damaging Creation, and to help other people live in accordance with this god-given telos. (If, for instance, I help a hungry man to eat, then I'm showing respect for God's creation because the desire of living creatures for nourishment is part of God's artistic design.) The golden rule is a sort of simple heuristic for this - you assume that your own desires are roughly similar to the (natural or healthy or righteous) desires that he has put into other people, too, and act accordingly. Without God it doesn't make any sense.
And if there is no God, then it follows that the world and the people in it belong to everybody or nobody, and are ours to do whatever we want with them. We might choose to still refrain from murder, rape, lying, and so forth... but only to the extent they make us uncomfortable, or get us in trouble with the larger society. So, for instance, if you're a pagan Roman, and nobody will care if you bury your infant daughter alive or rape your slave (since the law doesn't care, and the gods you worship aren't big on compassion or defending the vulnerable) then you might as well just do it. Or not. It's a matter of personal preference, with about as much moral weight as whether you prefer green or black olives on your salad.
Also, I don't think that the evidence supports the idea that religiously-based morality has to be based on fear of eternal punishment. The eastern religions believe in finite punishment (since if you don't achieve enlightenment you get reborn) but they have still managed to convince a lot of people to live honest and compassionate and chaste lives and even to become vegetarian. Meanwhile there are plenty of people in the western religions who are more concerned with serving God because they love him than because they're afraid of hell. (For instance, the entire Book of Psalms is about how much joy a community of early Jews got from serving God, and the afterlife is hardly mentioned at all.)
The important thing is that you believe that the created world was put here by Someone higher than you to whom you owe a certain degree of respect. What form the punishment takes if you fall short isn't important; the important thing is to just live a life full of love and gratitude for all of creation. But if you think that the Creator is unnecessary and that human beings themselves are powerful enough to dictate meaning to a godless universe... then you are planting the plastic flower.
Well done and edifying. I read “Chesterton” as saying that there is a givenness to human nature, and morality is such as it is because it suits that nature and works to its flourishing. Moreover, even absent faith in God, most people have a voice of conscience that (praise the absent Almighty) makes our hearts inclined to respond to and act in accord with what is right.
This is something beautiful. I am moved to say still more, that there is something heroic (if that's not too strong of a word) about those who can live a decent and happy life without explicit faith in an explicit deity. I was never successful in doing so. I was deeply discontent until I came to faith. Yet I know plenty of good-hearted "secular" people who seem to be thriving well enough without faith, and it's not uncommon that one of them will outdo me in an act of generosity or richness of spirit.
Yet what troubles me was never the conviction that there could be no consistent moral order without God. What sat like a weight of sadness in my chest before I was established in faith was the horrid surmise that there might finally be no there there. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and if God, Who is self-subsistent being itself, does not undergird our transient being, then there is no lasting and rooted meaning or goodness here—though my heart of flesh and my firing neural synapses, caught up in this place and attached to the people in it, may like to protest otherwise. I found the thought unendurable, with its deep existential insecurity, and the sadness of knowing all the good that people strove to realize could not outlast time and loss.
Though I do consider sometimes whether that might bespeak a lack of subtlety on my part, an undeveloped taste, a wooden literal-mindedness, a wounded existential clinginess. A world without God, in all its delicate, desolate, windswept and passing beauty might stir up a real and present, an exoteric yet lyrical, a sweet and wistful delectation that outdoes what a clumsily plodding dogmatism can offer. I can see why one might rather be an unbelieving artist enchanted by fleeting beauty than a stodgy theologian caught up in passing judgement and making all-important distinctions.
Yet finally I conclude in faith that all that means is that God’s story must be even more beautiful than the sensitive artist's: nothing cheap, predictable, preachy, worn-out, or exhausted about it, though multitudes who cleave to Him may give a different impression.
One could almost believe that God did such a good job in making us that His presence was no longer required, and so we grew up and came to know the world for ourselves. Nevertheless, one fine day in human history, a beautiful girl was born, whose heart gathered in all the goodness of this place so that it filled to overflowing. She sensed that among all of this, Love Himself was present just out of reach, and she conceived such a desire to see His Face that He came to her, and to us, our Emmanuel. And God was present here once more. I believe that story, and would go on believing it up until my little life is rounded by a sleep, if that's what is to come.
I am such a huge fan of your reflections in the comments. Thanks for this! It prompts no rebuttal or reply, only consideration and appreciation.
Awesome. Thank you for saying so, truly.
Wow, I’m glad you shared this because I missed it in the comments. Very impressive.
Thanks for sharing this. It's very good and does have a definite "Chesterton sound."
I find these AI arguments unimpressive. Not only because of the attempt to imitate Chesterton, which falls flat. (The style and substance are much more typical of the early 21st century Internet writers, which the AI was trained on; a common complaint I've heard about AI is that, when it tries to summarize or imitate a specific essay, person, or argumentative style, it not only simplifies the arguments but makes them more boring and conventional.)
But also the arguments themselves are weak - for instance the machine argues that morality without religion must be possible because it's self-evidently good to protect the weak, saying things like: "Consider the example of protecting the unborn child, who is surely among the most vulnerable of all... To abandon the unborn, or the disabled, or the aged, is to deny the very principle that makes morality possible: the recognition of value beyond utility, of dignity beyond power."
And yet in real, actual human history, as it actually happened, protecting the weak - for instance, by being bothered enough by abortion or infanticide or even slavery and pederasty to do anything about it - was almost exclusively something done by religious people. Pre-Christian Greece and Rome weren't bothered by those things; the Christianization of the Roman empire is what made them taboo or, at least in the case of slavery, moderated them. (Medieval serfs weren't free by modern standards but they had way more rights than a Roman mine or brothel slave.)
In Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, which don't make such a big deal about mankind being uniquely created in God's image, the whole "all life is valuable" thing tends to be expressed in vegetarianism... but still it is basically a religious thing. Vegetarianism is common in India because of the religious beliefs of dozens of generations of Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs... not because ancient India's equivalent of Peter Singer argued on secular grounds that eating meat is immoral.
Granted, I'm not so attached to any specific religion that I would argue that morality depends on someone sharing my religious beliefs, or even that it depends on revealed religion. One can be a Deist and believe that God's will was manifested through the act of creating the natural world, and not through any particular book of scripture or volume of revealed laws; such a person can still believe that respect for that Creation requires one to act in certain ways that are widely viewed as "moral."
But without any sort of God to give order to the world, morality is just a matter of one person's preferences against another's. A Roman atheist might as well say: "You may refrain from burying your unwanted baby girl alive if doing it makes you uncomfortable, but is doesn't make me uncomfortable, so I'm going to go ahead and do it, without feeling any guiltier than you feel when you eat fish and lamb."
Unless you believe that there is actually a higher Intelligence to whom human beings owe respect, and that this Intelligence created the world and the things in it - you and me, and the baby girl, and the fish, and the lamb - with some degree or artistry and purpose, then it makes no sense to argue that there's a moral and immoral way to interact with said world. If you grant that there's a Creator, then moral disagreements still exist (did God make the lamb because he wants us to eat it? To sacrifice it on an altar? But only on this one particular altar in Jerusalem, and not anywhere else?) but at least it's possible to have morality. Also, even laying aside fears of eternal punishment, people are just more likely to sacrifice for a common moral vision, and pass down their beliefs to future generations, if they believe that Someone wiser and more powerful than themselves is the author of the whole enterprise.
But trying to have morality without religion is like planting a plastic flower in a flowerpot and expecting it to grow.
"the attempt to imitate Chesterton ... falls flat"
I think that's fair, to a point. Chesterton is sometimes impenetrable, with his too-clever-by-half liberal use of tautological reasoning. It took me three readings to actually "get" Orthodoxy, but when I finally did, I thought it was brilliant.
Still, most people never make it that far. The AI doesn't suffer for making Chestertonian arguments in not-quite-Chestertonian prose.
"Pre-Christian Greece and Rome weren't bothered by those things; the Christianization of the Roman empire is what made them taboo or, at least in the case of slavery, moderated them. "
They weren't irreligious. They were pagan. And the pagan gods were cruel deities.
But since Massa Damnata far exceeds the cruelty of any pagan practice, I am not moved to find this sufficiently damning.
"But without any sort of God to give order to the world, morality is just a matter of one person's preferences against another's."
This is clearly not true, or virtually every society over the span of the ages wouldn't have come to an agreement about certain core legal/ethical principles.
The fundamental basis for non-theistic morality, it seems to me, is reciprocity. The Golden Rule. You can't have a functioning society where I can steal from you and sleep with your wife and kill your child with impunity, and you can't have a functioning society where you're allowed to do all of that back to me for the purposes of revenge.
The question of the sufficiency of this kind of morality is certainly valid fodder for debate, but I think it's no small thing to establish that man as a social creature cannot exist in pure anarchy.
"trying to have morality without religion is like planting a plastic flower in a flowerpot and expecting it to grow."
I think trying to have religion without evidence is like planting an invisible flower in an invisible flowerpot and expecting everyone to give up all worldly pleasures and goods to watch it grow.
It's easy enough to take any system apart if you're so inclined.
Mr. Skojec,
I think you're anger at the Catholic church is causing you to overlook a lot here. For instance, I never defended Massa Damnata, or said that followers of cruel religions (i.e. Greco-Roman Pagans who aren't bothered by infanticide) aren't cruel.
Nor do I accept the argument that "an agreement about certain core legal/ethical principles" disproves the idea that morality without religion is just preference. There are certain preferences that are very common! Others are more niche. This is why every society has taboos on killing noblemen, and not every society has taboos on killing unwanted baby girls, or killing animals for meat, or what have you.
And in any case, the Golden Rule is a religious principle. It shows up within religious systems (Judaism, Christianity, Confucianism, etc.) and only makes sense if there is some spiritually meaningful community of persons among for whom reciprocity is necessary - so for instance you have early Christians rejecting infanticide since they believe that all human beings are created in the image of God, or Pythagoreans and Hindus refusing to eat meat because they believe that the same souls can be reborn as both people and animals and that mistreating them produces bad karma. Absent a religious belief that that some supernatural force wants you to follow the Golden Rule, there isn't any good reason to follow it.
As for the "functioning society" arguments - well, the very idea that one ought to care about the well-being of one's society is not universal. Some people do, and other people don't. And those who do want to have a functioning society will generally disagree about how to get there - for instance, some societies believe that, if someone else sleeps with your wife or kills one of your relatives, it's immoral NOT to get revenge. Just read Hamlet or Titus Andronicus.
As for your last point, "I think trying to have religion without evidence is like planting an invisible flower in an invisible flowerpot and expecting everyone to give up all worldly pleasures and goods to watch it grow."
I'm not going to disagree with this. The fact that so many religions have spent the last two-thousand-or-so years claiming to have exclusive access to hidden truths that everyone else must accept, or else be damned for all eternity... is certainly one of the reasons why those religions are losing so many followers right now, when the Information Age makes it easy to find counterexamples to the truth claims, or to play them off against each other. ("If Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam are all demanding that I accept certain things on Faith, then Faith can't be the answer since they can't all be true." And so forth.)
John Michael Greer (whose work I recommended to you a few comments ago) also writes about this issue in essays like these ones:
https://www.ecosophia.net/blogs-and-essays/the-well-of-galabes/changing-of-the-gods/
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-sense-of-homecoming.html
Basically, I'm a seeker myself, and like you, I ended up leaving (what I now consider to be) the overly simplistic religion I grew up in. The difference is that I'm not letting my anger toward a specific religion get the better of me, and convince me that because such-and-such thing that some religions teach (i.e. the Massa Damnata, or Aztec human sacrifice) is obviously absurd or cruel, that therefore God doesn't exist, or that he's responsible for our misery (when it was men, not God, who taught the absurd doctrine in the first place) or that life without religion must somehow be better.
There are big questions which I believe you are still avoiding. For instance, if secular morality is possible, then why are the systems of ethics that have come to dominate cultures, and last for thousands of years, always rooted in religion? (The ancients had secular philosophies like Stoicism and Epicureanism, but these lacked religion's staying power.) And also, why are certain ethical beliefs that you seem to still be passionate about - for instance, that abortion is evil, or that premarital chastity followed by lifelong monogamy is the best way for people to order their sex lives - so rare outside of religious communities?
So I am still sticking by my plastic flower metaphor. Just because different religious systems (i.e. different species of flowers) can exist side by side, and have many ethical traits in common (as flowers share botanical traits like having stamens and sepals), and that sometimes a flower will wither and die for no apparent reason (i.e. your painful loss of your Catholic faith) does not mean that the plastic flower will take root and grow just as well as the real flowers. All of the historical evidence suggest that it will not.
I have to run so this will be brief, but I'm not sure where you're reading anger into anything I've said here.
My anger at Catholicism has mostly run its course. There's some residual, it's true, but it comes out mostly in reference to very specific teachings that I find extremely manipulative/coercive/unjust. Massa damnata/fewness of the saved is, as far as I can tell, the bedrock of any Christian tradition that posits the necessity of a savior who dies for the remission of sins. That's THE thing he's saving us from, isn't it? Which is why you don't need to mention it for me to reference it.
I'm merely saying that trading pagan temporal cruelty for Christian eschatological cruelty may look like a good deal at first, but the weight seems to be more heavy on the back end of that scale.
As for the questions I'm allegedly avoiding, I've said a number of times that I don't think you can have a truly comprehensible and effective moral code without religion. I said this in my post about why America needs religion whether people believe in it or not.
This seems to be a defect of human nature. If it isn't imposed from on high, it's very difficult for us to take any particular moral code seriously. But there are some things we all seem to agree upon that we would not like done to us, which invites us to the empathetic consideration of whether we should do it to others. I don't know why you need religion for the Golden Rule (and Confucianism is more of a moral philosophy than a religion in any case.)
I'm just not sure that the plastic flower metaphor works. Non-theistic morality is certainly more subject to change, or even to disagreement, but I think that's only because of the authoritarianism and fear of God deployed by formal religions. Unfalsifiable but terribly severe consequences act as bogeyman deterrents. They've proven very effective, even on folks who know they can't verify whether the consequences are real or not. Like Pascal, who want's to take the chance?
"As for the questions I'm allegedly avoiding, I've said a number of times that I don't think you can have a truly comprehensible and effective moral code without religion. I said this in my post about why America needs religion whether people believe in it or not."
Well then, forgive me if I've misunderstood your more recent arguments, since it seemed the me that you that you had switched to arguing the opposite. But apparently we're actually in agreement on the big thing - that is, it's much more likely that a community will actually live by a moral code if they believe that said code is of divine origin.
For me, religion is essential to morality because ethics only make sense if the world belongs to someone. If God created me and the people around me and the living Earth with some sort of purpose and artistry, then it's my duty to refrain from wantonly damaging Creation, and to help other people live in accordance with this god-given telos. (If, for instance, I help a hungry man to eat, then I'm showing respect for God's creation because the desire of living creatures for nourishment is part of God's artistic design.) The golden rule is a sort of simple heuristic for this - you assume that your own desires are roughly similar to the (natural or healthy or righteous) desires that he has put into other people, too, and act accordingly. Without God it doesn't make any sense.
And if there is no God, then it follows that the world and the people in it belong to everybody or nobody, and are ours to do whatever we want with them. We might choose to still refrain from murder, rape, lying, and so forth... but only to the extent they make us uncomfortable, or get us in trouble with the larger society. So, for instance, if you're a pagan Roman, and nobody will care if you bury your infant daughter alive or rape your slave (since the law doesn't care, and the gods you worship aren't big on compassion or defending the vulnerable) then you might as well just do it. Or not. It's a matter of personal preference, with about as much moral weight as whether you prefer green or black olives on your salad.
Also, I don't think that the evidence supports the idea that religiously-based morality has to be based on fear of eternal punishment. The eastern religions believe in finite punishment (since if you don't achieve enlightenment you get reborn) but they have still managed to convince a lot of people to live honest and compassionate and chaste lives and even to become vegetarian. Meanwhile there are plenty of people in the western religions who are more concerned with serving God because they love him than because they're afraid of hell. (For instance, the entire Book of Psalms is about how much joy a community of early Jews got from serving God, and the afterlife is hardly mentioned at all.)
The important thing is that you believe that the created world was put here by Someone higher than you to whom you owe a certain degree of respect. What form the punishment takes if you fall short isn't important; the important thing is to just live a life full of love and gratitude for all of creation. But if you think that the Creator is unnecessary and that human beings themselves are powerful enough to dictate meaning to a godless universe... then you are planting the plastic flower.
Hi Steve. How would you distinguish this definition from Sam Harris' attempts to create a morality without God?
A fair question, but I'm just not familiar with Harris's argument.
Interesting observation. I can't say you're wrong. But the myth that morality is deity-dependent needs to go away.
You CAN have it without God. The question you raise is more like, "But can you have the BEST version?"
And while it seems that the answer is no, god-derived morality has made provision for a great many atrocities as well. So it's tricky.