RE: As a nonreligious person, where do you get your moral guidance?
October 16, 2022 at 12:24 pm
(This post was last modified: October 16, 2022 at 12:32 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(October 16, 2022 at 12:20 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Religions can't start out with bodies of beliefs that are not moral, as a religion is the shared normative code of a given community as they relate to the sacred and the taboo.
There's a fair chance that much of what people consider to be religious is more accurately categorized as superstition - these beliefs are neither explicitly religious nor do they need to be a moral proposition.
No, many religions no doubt started out with an inherited set of beliefs about origins of the world, cause of natural phenomenon, and what is there in the rest of the world outside the immediate environs over which the religion initially held sway. You can call it superstition. But religion is just superstition with some more superstructure built on top of it.
They also tend to start with some body of stories about the founders of the religion. No doubt these stories only made it into the religion at the beginning because some body things it helps to exhibit some unique credentials of the religion, but these are not in themselves necessarily moralistic.
