Replacing Religious Morality

[henryp]

We fancy animals don't live in a vacuum, though. Parents nurture, teachers teach, hell...farmers in foreign lands provide sustanance. If you only see need to concern yourself with others' well being due to commandments, etc...you're missing the big picture. We need each other. There is value in treating others as you would be treated. I don't need an invisible hobgoblin or his book of sage(obvious!) advice to know it, either.

Here's how I've discounted our 'value'ing' of other people. You and I have money. Money, essentially, can saves lives via purchasing food, medicine, etc...

Every dollar you spend is a choice. I bought Grand Theft Auto. That's 60 dollars I could have spent on food for some starving person in Africa. My own mindless entertainment BY FAR outweighs any interest in that person getting food. As a religious person, I felt a bunch of guilt over this. Now I realize that this was silly, because there's no reason to care about people starving in Africa outside of society/religion telling us 'its the right thing to do'. The thing is, once you realize you've been conditioned, you can react to that conditioning. Probably something that sets us apart from animals a bit? Or maybe it's just a different type of conditioning trumping the original conditioning. Who knows.

You say there is value treating others as you would be treated, but to what extent? Maybe you are very nice, and don't buy a bunch of somewhat useless stuff when you could be spending it on causes that I'm sure you would appreciate in their shoes. But in the end, we make those choices with dollar after dollar and very few of them end up buying food for starving folk.

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If you only held those morals because of your faith, then those morals were never really yours to begin with.

I've always believed there were two possible realities. One with God, and one without. I did not see them as overlapping. My belief in God stemmed from vastly preferring the realities of the existence that a benevolent God would entail.

When I decided God wasn't real, I automatically switched over to reality B.

If you like, you can think of it as replacing your faith based morality with a sense of social responsibility.

One thing you have to give to religious people, is that while the premise is severely flawed, God Says So is an iron tight conclusion. If an all-powerful being who runs everything says X, you can feel pretty comfortable believing X.

Sense of social responsibility? It's ingrained. Parents, teachers, religion, evolution. But there isn't a lot of authority in any of those things. People say X, so I should do X. But I know if I was born in Uganda, people would say Y instead.

If I'm looking to behave rationally, I think I need a bit more than other people say so, no?