Religion is a poor source of morality

[robvalue]

I realised I've seen this video before, quite a while ago. But it's very interesting to watch it again.

I think I agree less with Harris than I used to. Of course his overall idea is good, but I feel there's some hand waving going on over the specifics. I'll comment more tomorrow when I've watched the whole of it.

I still generally agree with the thrust of his argument, don't get me wrong. Informally, he has it right. But he's talking in very hazy, general terms about societies as a whole as if they are a single entity and not concerning himself with individual morality. So really this is more of a scientific analysis in the zoomed out version of things, rather than looking at an individual person's moral choices. Which is fine. But still, I'm not seeing how you can ever objectively assign "correct" relative values to different aspects of wellbeing, where they come into conflict. And other anal objections

I agree that there is a "sort of" overall objective landscape once you've identified the aspects of wellbeing. But I don't believe it is possible to make exact valuations of what are essentially already value judgements of an average member of a society... It's complex. And of course, if Mr. Taliban won't even agree that wellbeing is what is important, then we have no grounds for debate. For him, serving Allah or whatever is the most important thing for example, and everyone's wellbeing comes second. We can't objectively say his "morality" is worse than ours, without defaulting to our own yardstick of wellbeing first. Of course I infinitely prefer our system, but if another society isn't interested in the same goals, or not to the same degree, simple comparisons become pointless.

As I've said before, if we are ever to try and marry two such different cultures, simply announcing our goals to be superior is of no practical use. We must understand why their goals are what they are, and attempt to win them over with reason.

Hey, it's good being an atheist because I'm allowed to openly disagree with my gods.