As a nonreligious person, where do you get your moral guidance?

[Belacqua]

It breaks my heart to retype this. For some reason, this forum "ate" my typed post and I can't recover it. But here we go again.

I noticed there was some glitching going on. The "alerts" thing said I had a response from you and then it wasn't there. But it looks as if both your posts have ended up on the thread. Gremlins...

I remember reading a scholar who spoke of Nietzsche's Ubermensch, and that ultimately, the best gauge of the greatness of a moral system is whether or not it is "life-affirming". Essentially, you want a moral system that promotes and strengthens the flourishing of the human race and allows it to evolve into a better ape.

That certainly sounds good to me! Life-affirming and flourishing. 

Naturally the debates start when we define what exactly is the most life-affirming and the most flourishing. 

As I understand it, there's no real consensus over what Nietzsche thought his ubermensch would be like. In a sense it's something we can't define, since a real ubermensch will define himself (that's what it is to be uber) so we can't set out a program for him in advance. One hopes that he won't be selfish, though of course some people have interpreted it that way.

I've always thought that the God Nietzsche argues against is very much a Lutheran one. (His father and both grandfathers were Lutheran ministers.) Much of what he says about Christianity seems to me less accurate if applied to, say, Thomist Catholics. His idea that Christianity is opposed to human flourishing, for example, is true of some Christians but not others. Thomists of course have a different idea from Nietzsche of what that flourishing will consist of. But as mostly Aristotelian, human flourishing is fundamental to the way they conceive of ethics.

One potentially good thing about religion is that it gives us a more disciplined and thought-out conception of flourishing than a less structured, build-it-yourself version. If flourishing is simply increased consumerism, for example, I am skeptical that it's the best we can do. Traditionally religion offered a counter-argument against simple economic success as the goal of life. 

I think that to a huge extent, all world religions aim for that life-affirming ideal.

I suspect that's true with the possible exception of Buddhism, which seems to say that self-extinction is the goal. 

But as I say, how each religion defines "life-affirming" may be very different and perhaps incompatible with others.