Fanghole

joined 2 years ago
[–] Fanghole@reddthat.com 0 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

Classical Greece was just one of my examples. My main point is that, even if all documented groups had spirituality and religious practices (which I don't refute), is that you have not convinced me of the cause and effect between morality and spirituality in human society.

  1. I do believe people did not need a modern formal education or a ton of free time to reflect and think at a high level. If that belief is an issue, then we fundamentally disagree on that point.

  2. You continue to state that all societies have documented spiritual and religious practices, and I apologize that I didn't make it clear enough that I understood you meant all societies and that I was only using a few societies as an example, but you have not stated why that means spirituality caused morality or needed to have caused morality. Genuinely, could you explain to me how it is implausible that any moral principals found in those religions were the product of societal morals of the time and not the other way around? Even if morals are subjective, religious interpretation is also subjective. As far as meanins to humans and structure goes, neither is more objective than the other in my opinion. Or maybe morals are more objective if we assume they were developed as guided by survival of the species rather than as guided by religion.

  3. If you want to ignore everything else, here's as simple a summary of my question as possible: Why do you insist religion -> morals? Why can it not be morals -> religion?

[–] Fanghole@reddthat.com 5 points 20 hours ago

Garry's Mod. There is a centralized location you can all get the relevent files from, or uploaf them to (Steam). Your game could be on a publicly accessable server. But, you are able to and pretty much must host the server yourself (or you could use a hosting service, but GMod won't do it for you).

[–] Fanghole@reddthat.com -1 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

I feel a lot of the people disagreeing here are making assumptions about your beliefs, missing the point, and then simply refuting you to refute you without providing explaination. I think this is a fair and interesting premise. I disagree with it and will ecplain why, though do note I am not invested enough to specifically look anything up so if I say something inaccurate, please evaluate if the logic falls apart or not.

I think the first part of your main justifications has been hard to refute. Most, if not all societies we have known have had religion or spirituality. However, I think your following conclusion, "those societies must have then used morality based on those religions", is where the flaw is. I think most societies had religion as a form of a "God of the gaps" and used it to explain phenomena they couldn't. I would say that is the main reason they did have it. However, that doesn't yet mean they didn't use it for morality. To see that, I'd ask you to look at Greek and Roman mythology, or as known to them, religion. Now I believe, Zeus turning into a swan and doing Zeus things doesn't have a moral (or not a useful one, it's mainly that Zeus is an asshole).. Likewise, Aphrodite turning Arachne into a spider didn't really inform some Greek moral of don't be too pretty, just showed Aphrodite is, for lack of a better word, a fucking jealous bitch. Let's similarly look at Norse mythology. Loki makes Fenrir and tries to kill other gods and generally does shenanigans. There's not really a moral attached to that, he kinda just does shit cus he's a hit of a dick.

My main point here is that while these religions existed, they did so to explain phenomena or were then essentially fanfic extensions of the reasons/personifications of those phenomena, and often were not the basis for morality of a culture (but very well likely were themselves molded by a cultures morality in a reversal of causation). Because Greece, Roman, and Norse cultures were more secular, they could therefore have stories without morals that just had assholery abound. Because the time around the formation of the Christian church was more tyrannical (now I'm guessing), the bible had much more heavy handed morals (ten commandments, 7 deadly sins etc).

I hope that was a better argument for disagreement. And, I don't think your premise was as outlandish as so many others are making it out to be, despite my disagreement.