Ethics

[robvalue]

I think religion tries to make morality way more complicated than it is.

I don't think we would have survived as a species if we didn't develop a natural inclination towards cooperation. All you need to do is weigh up benefit and harm. This is pretty easy to explain to children, and it largely comes naturally.

Stuff like christian "morality" is just a snapshot of an attempt to write up the ethics of that time. Trying to apply that today is ridiculous, and this is clear when most christians ignore most of their so-called objecte morality. Which isn't objective at all, it's subjective to God, and has no guaranteed correlation with our actual wellbeing.

I think the problem is religion's insistence on a black and white truth to everything. They don't like having to consider the subtleties of each situation or that it may be somehow a matter of "opinion". Which of course it is to a degree, but that's only because we're not all identical. Yet we still agree on many fundamental things.