Are there any good philosophical arguments for secular ethics?

Morality is completely subjective. There are just ideas that basically all civilised people agree with, such as murder and rape being wrong. Generally I think the NAP is a good model for secular ethics.

>>131255708
No. They're all falsified.

Religion has zero influence on your morals unless you are a fundamentalist. How many christians do you know that believe in killing people who work on Sunday?

People get their morals from culture then pick out bits of the religion that fit their morals.

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>>131255708
yeah its called a gun
you point it at the guy's face, and you tell him he's wrong

also you take his money

>>131256134
But the culture initially gets its morals from religion. Or at least they evolve together.

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All thing seek to impose upon, oppress, or sedate your willpower.
It is your duty to overcome these so that you may transcend all the little bullshit for the bigger picture.
Becuase if you zoom out far enough, everything can look like a spec of dust.

This objective morality appeals to no higher power other than your own.

>>131255708
1. The object of morality is man
2. Man is not the same object in all circumstances
3. Therefore, a particular system of morality cannot be objective in all circumstances

Immanuel Kant said the best maxim he could think of for his morality of the categorical imperitive was to not treat other people as a means to an end.

>>131255708
'Veil of ignorance'
Not truly objective but good way to get things that apply in all circumstances.

>>131256224
Nigger detected

>>131255708

did the golden rule originate in judeao-christian culture or has it been recorded earlier?

>>131256481
Ethics are always just norms, informed by our evolution and cultural history. A "secular" morality will simply be one where a god-figure isn't blackmailing you to act certain ways

>>131255708

the golden rule has origins in the ritual sacrifice and has been expanded upon plenty by modern philosophy, so yeah I'd say "objective morals" are well established outside the boundaries of organized religion

>>131255708

Secular ethic's logical end-point is nihilism. Usually either "I make my own values," otherwise known as relativism. The transvaluation of values.

>>131255955
So genetic, inherited morality. Also, my question addresses not whether axioms like the NAP are good, but how to prove that they're correct.

>>131256134
Not a philosophical argument, why the fuck did you even post?

>>131256224
Literal chimpanzee morality.

>>131256340
Why is it correct to transcend the bullshit? Why is it my duty?

>>131256842
>>131256873
Older, I think it goes as far back as the Akkadians or Confucius. But again, can we prove it is correct? Why should we treat others the way we'd have them treat us? In the Bible, it's simply decreed by Jesus.

>Are there any good philosophical arguments for secular ethics?
Are there any at all?

>>131257040
The Golden Rule is a further development of the Lex Talionis, which is the cornerstone of all morality.

First you don't fuck with others if you don't want them to fuck with you. Then, after everyone understood how retaliation works, you start treating people as you'd like them to treat you, at which point cooperation begins and some form of society arises.

>>131257040
>why is it my duty?
Well if you want to live the best life you can you have to make sure you are able to make the right decisions.
I mean you dont need to transcend the bullshit if you dont want to, but sooner or later the bullshit is always gonna stir up conflict, and crisis.

>>131256953
We are always already valuing and caring about things. It is simply the case that it doesn't make sense to think of any ethics being axiomatically grounded

>>131257297
So exploiting a helpless victim is ok as long as you genocide his family tree because then retaliation wont occur.


>at which point cooperation begins and some form of society arises.

and why would this be good?

>>131257308
Yes, but what is the "best" life and what are the "right" decisions? Why are conflict and crisis preferably avoided?

You seem to be completely missing the point of this thread.

>>131257479
Thats actually how alot of royalty got deposed back in the day

I think the laws of omerta also state it. Competing crime families will often try to wipe out entire bloodlines.

>>131257479
>So exploiting a helpless victim is ok as long as you genocide his family tree because then retaliation wont occur
What makes it okay or not depends entirely on how a society reacts to it. It might be favorable or not depending on the circumstances. I don't doubt for a second that such behavior was "ok" or perhaps even necessary at some point in history.

Deontological ethics will probably tell you that it is always bad, but deontological ethics is mostly oblivious to reality.

>and why would this be good?
Because there are mutual benefits. One evolutionary benefit being the fact that a more cooperative social group or tribe has an advantage against a less cooperative group, and is therefore more likely to succeed.

>>131257663
This is why the onus is put on you.

You decide what the best life is.
And conflict and crisis are to only be avoided if you dont know how to handle them.

I mean just look to psychology if you dont want to look for some sort of symbolism or metaphor.

Without belief in a higher being you cannot have objective morality, truth or beauty you are left only with the self and our own experiences. There is only nihilism and suicide at the end of the subjective postmodern moral rabbit hole.

>>131255708
No. The closest you can get is utilitarianism, but that is subjective.

You cannot coherently argue objective morality without a god

>>131256842

the golden rule has been recorded as a "tale" as far back as 2000BC in egyptian mythos, but the core idea of "you get what you give" and all it entails has even deeper roots in acts of ritual sacrifice (which have been going on probably since the dawn of our species)

>>131257040

>can we prove it is correct?

define correct

we can prove the golden rule is useful for human societies, because what happens when you don't follow the golden rule is the story of cain and abel: envy, murder, revenge, utter destruction

it's no surprise that this idea has evolutionarily spread itself through human populations since the beginning of times, it is a testimony to how invaluable it is to our survival: the golden rule is the basis for much of our morality because it produces successful human societies and that's the gist of it

could it be somehow "more correct" in this sense? I don't think so, not if you believe in the efficiency of evolutionary processes (there are no buts and ifs to the golden rule after all)

Sup OP if you read Nietzsche you will see that ethics and aesthetics are the same thing; What is good is what you find beautiful. (Protip: beauty is strength) [hidden level data: its being white, proud, and not apologizing for shit]

>>131256481
That is not the categorical imperative.
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law"

So only lie if you want everyone to always lie.

>>131256508
John Rawls is a leftist coward. he asumes that all humans would act the same if only we could take away their selfishness.

>>131257951
Slippery slope much.
What about embracing the absuridty of your own failures?

>>131258183
Fuck yeah, 'straya John Rawls is a fucking socialist with a stupid theory that only appeals to other socialists

>>131255708
I suppose you could say a cultural religion could act as a form of moral paternalism.

>>131257951
If it's objective it exists and directs moral phenomena regardless of your belief or lack thereof. It'd be more accurate to say that you need to *disbelieve* in a higher being or higher order of things to act contrary to a presumed objective morality.

Then again, that leads you to the concept of free will. It's only by believing that you're free to make moral choices that morality can be abstractly conceived in the first place. But at the end you're objectively just a meat puppet of either a God or self-sustained ordered nothingness.

>>131255708
being amoral tends to be non utile
people will notice you are an asshole and your life will become harder for it

>>131258522
That Dark Triad though

>>131257479
it's only ok if you have such overwhelming military control over everyone that you have no reason to fear being deposed or arrested or assassinated over your actions

even then there are probably better ways to solve whatever problem you're having that will make people more willing to work with you

>>131255708
I've read a lot of philosophy in search in this the answer to this question and the only philosophy which offers a coherent understanding of secular morality is Objectivism.

Yes, Rand was a jew who literally fucked her husband blah blah blah. We know.

But her non-fiction, specifically virtue of selfishness and Intro to Objectivist Epistemology, are great. Intro changed the way I think and VoS changed the way I live.

>>131255955
>There are just ideas that basically all civilised people agree with, such as murder and rape being wrong.
these thing happens today, so it is false. try to be rational once.

>>131258477
Nice! but i was meaning from the perspective of a philosophical understanding.

Freedom must be the first principle, without freedom there is nothing. It is very easy to beleive in free will and a higher being.

but come on guys ethics are much much more complex than mere reason and utilitarian civil law.

If your child died naturally why/is it immoral to eat him?

>>131258604
nobody likes PUAs

>>131258728
Because it's gross and beauty is all that matters.

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>>131257297
>>First you don't fuck with others if you don't want them to fuck with you.
then why do bullies in school exist?

>>131258728
prions
it's not immoral so much as it is unhealthy

>>131258784
because pussies exist
bullies sense their lack of willingness to retaliate and punish them for it

>>131258782
I agree.

>>131255708
More true than religious ones.

You are seriously brain damaged if you think morals come from a higher power.

>>131258077>>131257297

>>we can prove the golden rule is useful for human societies, because what happens when you don't follow the golden rule is the story of cain and abel: envy, murder, revenge, utter destruction
if the golden rule has been applied before, then why was there ''envy, murder, revenge, utter destruction'' before the application of the rule, during the application of the rule and after the application of the rule?

Why do you think rule makes people behave, when people do not change because you have written a rule on paper?
Why can you not become an empiricist and base your behavior on experience, instead of clinging to a rule which is ineffective?

>>131258839
prions scare the hell out of me.

ok lets change skin them and make clothes out of them, instead of eat?

>>131258728
>>Freedom must be the first principle,
that's an opinion, nothing else

>>131259019
>being this autistic
i encourage you to murder and steal and see how it works out for you budd

>>131258728
>It is very easy to beleive in free will
if free will exists, I must admit it exists, so I do not have free will

>>131259051
too expensive

>>131259141
that's not what free will means you stupid frog
>gravity exists
>I can't fly
>therefore free will doesn't exist
pull yourself together

>>131258728
>If your child died naturally why/is it immoral to eat him?
This guy is right >>131258782

It's hardly morally relevant to society and no one actually gives a shit until they are forced to confront the idea of eating dead children.

>>131258742
They get to slay all the pussy though

>>131258784
Because power dynamics. Retaliation still happens, but within a certain margin that allows stability within groups.

That is, all things considered, the group is still more cooperative and functional than not, and there's probably an optimal ratio of bullies/betas for any given society (see Game Theory and predatory behaviors)

>>131259203
>he thinks "slaying" ugly desperate bints is anything worth aspiring to

>>131259083
To me it is objective, to you all things are merely an opinion?

"if i am free i am forced to believe in freewill so i am not free" cool story.. hows logic working out for you?

>secular
>ethics
Complete meme-tier trash. How could anybody stand around and say "Hey guys, we're all going to die and there will have been absolutely no real point to any of our existences, but you should refrain from doing things that I don't like because then my feelings would be hurt" and expect people to just hop on board? You just aren't willing to accept the consequences of your belief system. You're hoping to leech off of moral frameworks that your own ideology says are ultimately subjective. Nothing other than degeneracy awaits as future generations would find no reason to comply.

>>131259051
also would be seen as desecrating the body which is disrespectful because people have sentimental attachments to the bodies of their loved ones

>>131259313
nice job dude you really crushed that strawman

>>131259203
>Because it's gross and beauty is all that matters.

What if i told you beauty and morality are the same thing?

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>>131259019
>Why do you think rule makes people behave
The fear of retaliation is all that matters for most people to behave according to the rules.

Laws are neither for the good nor for the bad, but for the mediocre.

>>131259261
Never claimed that.

>>131259551
Then something ugly is necessarily immoral according to your definition of morality.

>>131255708
no

>>131259648
Act beautifully. Do not Act ugly...

>>131259648
>The fear of retaliation is all that matters for most people to behave according to the rules.
yeah and dracon eradicated crime amirite
plus rules are your power fantasies and have nothing to do with the ''good of the people'', but you daydream to much to acknowledge this

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>>131256134
>religion has no impact on culture

something something full retard something something

>>131259648
>>Laws are neither for the good nor for the bad, but for the mediocre.
yeah, nothing better than living in terror because some guy cling to his fantasy of making people behave through his rules and terrorism. You think like a liberal.

>>131259387
Explain how any code of "secular ethics" wouldn't just boil down to "Don't do this because otherwise my feelings would be hurt."

>>131259886
What if I'm really hungry and there's this dead baby lying in front of me? If I eat it I become ugly and consequently immoral, but if I don't I die and become a corpse, which is also ugly and consequently immoral.

>>131260050
Eradicating crime is unrealistic unless you have some eugenics project to do it. But that doesn't change the fact that laws are necessary to keep the populace under (relative) control.

>>131260238
Why are you suddenly equating the rule of law with despotic government?

Have you killed yourself? No, then you choose to continue to exist, which means you believe that you have a reason to exist. The reason must be more important enough for you to choose to exist; if you had no reason important enough then you would not choose to exist anymore. This logical reasoning of self existence is what keeps people from committing suicide: this moral choice to not commit suicide is chosen through logical reasoning.

>>131255708
The golden rule is the core of objective morality, and it's pretty easy to extrapolate if you know the least thing about economics.

>humans need multiple things to survive
>specialization allows multiple humans to be more productive (making survival easier) in concert than acting alone
>specializing necessitates trade
>trade necessitates trust that other parties will honor their end of a deal
>honoring past deals is the best objective evidence that you are trustworthy
>do unto others as you would have others do unto you

>>131258784
Humans are not rational, simple as that.

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>>131255708
moral rules exist to make society better for everyone in general from an ethnointersubjective estimation of value. it's like stealing is bad because you don't want your shit stolen.

>>131255708

>>131260392
Eating the baby is immoral. weather you are prepared to do something immoral is your own choice and often we must chose between two immoral choices.

>>131261031
That can just be explained by human ego. People don't kill themselves because they think too highly of themselves. They want to bide time and wait things out in the hopes that they can find an escape route.

>>131261350
You're operating on the assumption that human survival is objectively good. Wouldn't environmentalists disagree with that? After all, human proliferation comes at the expense of nature.

>>131262066
Environmentalists are idiots, and anyone who draws a divide between humans and nature is a double-idiot.

Any living thing on earth, given enough leeway would consume and reproduce until it rendered the environment incapable of supporting it. The two main things that control populations are predators and disease/starvation from overcrowding.

What sets humans apart isn't our destructiveness, but that we can actively try to alter the environment to preserve or extend its ability to support us.

>>131262673
So your secular code of ethics starts out by branding all who disagree with it as idiots? That doesn't sound objective to me.

>>131263025
>starts out by branding all who disagree with it as idiots
if you're going to shill this hard for jeebus try a little harder. maybe by addressing the argument against the idiots instead of the fact they were called idiots.

>>131264139
You're calling me a shill for Jesus even though you started out with the golden rule? Yeesh. All I did was point out that your supposedly "objective" and secular code of ethics starts out by saying that all who disagree with it don't count.

>>131265048
objectivity is independent of whether or not anybody agrees with a positon.

>all who disagree with it don't count
and again you're ignoring the part where the entire post was an argument refuting your "environmentalist" straw man, fag.

>>131265951
If it's so objective then why does it completely fail to take hold with large groups of people? Objectivity, by definition, is something that is true without regard for opinion. If your system relies on an opinion, one that many people don't share, then it isn't objective. Your ethics are rooted in the assumption that human proliferation is good, which is entirely your opinion. Not fact.

How about the fact that morality is a natural occurrence which means morality is objective and we've only been conditioned to to think otherwise through countless years of being indoctrinated with religion all around us for so long that we associate natural morality with a religious upbringing.

>>131266813
That's obviously not true. Do you think that primitive tribes had morality? Hell, even now you can just look south to Mexico and see cartels dismembering people while they're still alive. Then you can go online and find whole communities reveling in it and asking for more. Come to think of it: Holy shit. How the hell are you on 4chan while still thinking that people are just naturally good? Remember when this place used to host guro?

>>131255708
You dont need religion to be a good person. Religion should be outlawed. If you act like a cunt thats on you, not some mumbo jumbo about a man in the sky.

>>131266577
What kind of fucking special are you to think "proliferation of a species is good for that species" isn't an objective fact? Whether it's sustainable over a given interval and how to increase that interval is the real issue, but if you copped to that you couldn't pretend you were right anymore.

>>131268328
You've made a few subtle mistakes there. For starters, if you have to tack on "for that species" then it becomes subjective, not objective. If it were objective then it would just end with "is good" with no need to clarify who it seems good to. The statement "proliferation of a species is good" is a matter of abject opinion, not fact.

>>131258675
>these thing happens today,
In the US we arrest them, have a trial and then off to prison if guilty.
I Arabic countries for example murdering gays is cool and raping women if fine as long as its the woman's fault and then you get to kill her by throwing large rocks at her in public...

>>131255708
She's hot. Name?

>>131267159
Superstition subverts natural morality. I just said that religion had taken credit for what morality does.

>>131268648
playing at semantics doesn't make it any less of a fact.

But to humor you, my original point about humans being uniquely capable of managing our environments to conserve environmental resources and improve the efficiency at which they are utilized is a clear point in favor of human proliferation being good not just for humans alone, but all life.

>>131269130
But I just gave you some very compelling reasons to believe that natural morality isn't a thing. Are you trying to say that these things are done due to superstition?

>>131269451
Such a statement is completely wrong. Take Chernobyl for example. It is currently a wildlife preserve brimming with nature. Human civilization is more detrimental for nature than a nuclear meltdown.

>>131255708
Yes, an argument by THE philosopher; Ayn Rand. Objectivist ethics blow every other attempt out of the watter.
Read it or listen to John Galt's Speech from Atlus Shrugged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F5nhYo5nx4

>>131255708
Is thaqt Care Blanchet?

>>131269635
All you gave were examples of degeneracy. Whenever morality starts to make a comeback the Satan worshipers double down on superstition and predictive programming. Haven't you ever wondered why self destruction was memed as fun instead of self improvement? It's because self improvement is naturally fun and for good reason. Degeneracy has to be cultivated over and over again to subvert the natural flow of the world towards morality.

>>131270252
Since when was morality anywhere even close to making a comeback? Things started going downhill in the 50s and now we're here.

>>131269739
you cannot refute the fact that humans possess the ability to conserve our environment by listing our failures to do so.

Might as well claim guns are harmless because you once shot at a man and missed.

>>131270461
If humans can only properly conserve their environments by not settling over the wilderness in the first place then how is human proliferation objectively good? Besides, this is all ignoring that some people might genuinely not want humanity to proliferate. Certain circles think that society is best kept to around 100,000 people.

without religion, there is no objective reason for us to not rob and kill you OP

>>131255708
I believe in a social contract based around trying to be decent to other people.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are mental defectives who view everyone else as platforms to hoard shit they'll never use. Exploitative thought and hoarding just to hoard is true mental illness. Fuckers see a kid about to be hit by a truck and stop to think what they could gain if they pulled the kid out of the way.

>>131270698
Conservation of the environment != leaving a certain patch of land completely untouched.

Certain circles are pulling arbitrary numbers out of their ass, and ignoring that eventually we'll have a hell of a lot more than just this one rock for us and every other form of life on it.

Now go get ready for Sunday school, retard.

There's no objective morality. Religion doesn't create objective morality either since there's not just one religion.

>>131271164
A certain patch of land can't contain every ecosystem on earth, bruh. Even if we spread out across the galaxy, what objective good is there in that? How does efficient use of resources make it good if all we do is expand outwards and require even more resources? Why not just pack it up and go extinct?

>>131255708
My (atheist) ethics is clear. Suffering is always wrong. I take it as an axiom. It's a simple statement with a lot of implications. I e.g. think that degeneracy causes a lot of suffering in the long-term.

>>131270353
Objective morality has been in decline ever since the first nature worshipers got tricked into ancestor worship. Then it after a while it made a comeback and they had to bring in diety worship and theistic religions to control the masses. The only reason we're in the state we are today is because our ancestors were tricked into not thinking for themselves and put their faiths into something external to tell them what was "degenerate". Objective morality is expressed when you no longer need that external guidance and can identify natural forms of degeneracy on your own.

>>131271436
If it's objective then how is it in decline? That doesn't make sense. That would be like tricking people into not seeing the sun. Besides: Theistic religion has been in human society for thousands of years. Your views don't like up with reality at all.

>>131271294
Because the goal of life is propagating itself, and in the context of life in general, morals would be best understood as the rules governing that propagation, just as in terms of human society, the question of objective morality is asking whether there is a best set of rules by which to govern ourselves.

Are you sure you want to be late to Sunday school? or does it make your no-nos feel funny when the nuns spank you?

>>131271707
Once again I already told you how. The decline has and always will be manufactured. Self destruction isn't naturally fun. People have to be told and that view has to be constantly reinforced. Look at how depressed the world is. Look at how many drugs people take on a daily basis to keep them numb from the pain.

>>131271778
"Best" is a subjective term to begin with. I think you need to look up what the word "objective" means.

>>131255708
Yes, see Aristotle

>>131272324
That's a recent development that isn't correlated to the spread of religion. If anything it could be more closely correlated to a decline in religion.

>>131272459
If anything we have more religions now than ever. What do you think modern science is? People blindly putting faith in what a consensus of (((experts))) say without even cracking a book or doing research themselves.

>>131272403
>I have no argument
>better bullshit about semantics
>AGAIN

>>131272787
Calling attention to the fact that you don't know what objectivity is isn't semantics.

>>131272646
You're shifting the goal posts so hard. Suddenly now science is bad? So religion and science is bad? Why not just curl up and die?

>>131255708
Natural Law of self ownership.

>>131272969
bullshitting about misuse of a word or words because you can't actually refute a point absolutely is.

>>131273009
What passes as science and education today is beyond bad. Theistic religions have always been bad because they never introduce free thought into the equation and always reinforce repetition and asking a skydaddy for forgiveness instead of learning from your mistakes. There's a huge difference between being spiritual and religious.

>>131273248
Except that this whole discussion is meant to be about objectivity. Are you stupid?

>>131272646
Found the post-modernist

>>131271376
Shet, get out of your momma's basement you dumb fuck. An atheist more afraid of suffering than a monotheist, disgusting, simply kys.

>>131273513
Unlike you I am objectively not stupid.

>>131273917
Then why would you waste my time by posting in a thread when you didn't even know what the topic is? That sounds pretty stupid to me.

>>131274325
it's like you took the words right out of my mouth.

>>131255955
>morality is subjective
>what is rule of law and social contracts

Morality is not subjective. There is only a singlular truth regarding morality in the world and it should be derived from what accomplishes the best outcomes for humanity. That is why we have law and order and why we have social contracts in the first place.

You can't have a subjective morality in a successful society as it leads to degeneracy and the downfall of man. That is why liberals are currently destroying the west - a lack of moral compass that adheres to commonly held practices for thousands of years.

>>131256432
you can't have a system that applies to more than one type of thing? What kind of arbitrary retarded fucking argument is that?

>>131273453

>>131273453

>Theistic religions have always been bad because they never introduce free thought into the equation and always reinforce repetition and asking a skydaddy for forgiveness

Most people don't care about free thought, we can see this in the political realm. Most people just care about their status in society and vote in a manner to which they were conditioned to.

The repetition of a hail Mary was repentance for a sin. It gave the church a physiological power over the way in which people lived their lives.

For many people, the absence of worldly authority means that they could do whatever fucked up shit that they wanted to. Without it, women would fuck around the second their husband left them alone. Godly authority, and actually believing you're going to burn in hell for your adultery, will put ignorant and superstitious people inline faster than anything.

Just look at our largely athiestic society today and see that female sexuality is rampant.

Forgetting Christianity's origins (Jewish cult), we need to see that Christianity became an insulation against the powers of the Jew. Well it was before all the Christian Zionist shit made up in the late 19th century.

I don't care if it is Christianity that puts us back together, if we can build a religion purely around race that would be preferable, but to ignore the NEED in the first place for religion is folly.

>>131275018
It's not possible to get everybody to agree on how to accomplish the best outcomes for humanity, or even what the best outcomes would be. That's subjective, not objective.

>>131275692
>everyone needs to agree or it's not objective
and you seriously accused me of not understanding the meaning of the word?

please kill yourself in the messiest way possible.

>>131275692
outcomes for humanity are independent of peoples thoughts on them. You can't say 2+2=5 because I feel that is a better answer, you'd be incorrect. Objective morality evolves out of necessity for human development and is virtuous. If something is not virtuous and does not aid in human development it is amoral.

Your suggestion is that we cannot know what is best, not what is best can be different for everyone. This is a self-centered view and does not account for everyone in society and is an amoral train of thought. You can have objective morality if you think about what is right for the whole and not just your selfish desires

>>131255708
There is one.
If morality is a universal phenomena,even if its subjective then that means universe has a tendency to create moral beings(beings who ask; what should we do?)
Basically we need to know whether moraluty is like gravity. Is it omnipresent, all encompassing, inescapable. Is it a fundamental force like gravity?

I believe it is. Sentient creatures can not escape asking the question of how should we live. Therefore its a property of universe. Therefore its objective,meaning exist outside anyones subjective reality.

>>131275692
if you believe that morality is subjective, then you also believe that nothing can truly be good or evil. That is to say you don't believe morality even exists, and that people could do whatever the fuck they want so long as that's what they think is right.

Do you know what people like that are called? sociopaths

>>131276015
Well of course I accused you of not knowing the meaning of the word. After all, you demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of what objectivity is. As for my post, I didn't mean to imply that a lack of agreement determines subjectivity. The point was that you can't derive morality from utilitarianism because even utility is a subjective thing. What works for some people doesn't work for others, and what helps some people will harm others. Everyone will naturally have different ideas of how to improve things.

>>131255708
Of course there are.
Read this:
https://mises.org/library/ethics-liberty

>>131276199
>>131276493
Maybe if we were in a fantasy land in which we can just wait thousands of years to see which systems work better than others, where superiority is easily determined, where everything is equal and we can see a fair competition between all ideologies, where people care absolutely nothing for their own people and only for the ideologies that they represent, and where people accept the failures of their ideologies and abandon them as soon as they realize that they're wrong, where nobody commits crime and everybody just genuinely contributes to society in earnest, maybe then what you say would be meaningful. The fact of the matter is that we don't live in such a simple world. People disagree about everything, hold onto their ideologies for the sake of their own egos, think irrationally or not at all, and live in a starkly unfair world full of things to blame for their own inadequacies. Nobody is going around thinking "Boy oh boy, I can't wait to hurt society because I'm evil!" Everyone has their own opinion about what the right thing to do is, even from a utilitarian perspective.

>>131255708
Morality does not come from religion. Culture evolves with religion, however, at this stage in history, it is utterly ignorant to assume all culture stems from religion.

The only important thing is that a person actually chooses to believe something. A nihilistic ideology is no more informed than a secular moral ideology, and vice versa, but it's the idea that the nihilist is somehow closer to the 'truth' that makes the other seem like some kind of feeble middle ground between nihilism and religious belief. Religion works because it acts as an institution of belief (with a moral code) that persists beyond the individual. Can most individuals (given that we know that most are sub 100 IQ) be trusted to form their own moral framework? No, of course not. It can be done, and any intelligent person should commit themselves to doing it, but the vast majority of people absolutely require an authority to tell them what to believe. Obviously this is where religion comes in, because religion, by nature, stipulates that God is the moral authority over any individual. Every religion does this, just expresses it in different ways. But there's no fundamental difference in the way that this is believed compared to something like modern liberalism. The belief functions in the same way, but the former is simply more effective for the masses.

>>131277178
Morality comes from belief. You can't possibly think that before religion appeared people followed some kind of secular moral ideology. Religion is how people first began to understand their own consciousness, or rather it's how they began to conceptualise that consciousness.

>>131275380
I agree, if Christianity had taken a similar path like Buddhism as I suspect it was meant to, it would have been a way better spiritual experience for the user without having been tied to the "spirit realms" and "afterlife". That being said, I understand the concept theistic religions employ the afterlife for as a means to represent the unknown that happens after death which for all we know will always be there. The Satan worshiping I could do without though.

>>131277943
At one point in time people were capable of living their lives without religious superstitions dictating what was right and wrong. It may not be what you consider pretty or moral but for the most part it was closer to objective morality than what we have today which is more or less subjective morality based on thousand year old superstitions promising to save every one from "eternal damnation" at the hands of whatever version of satan you worship. Where's the appeal in that? Sounds like thought police in action to me.