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religion makes learning natural law easier by filling gaps and constructing narratives.
This is something that makes a lot if sense to me. And it is connected to this:
religion probably keeps the bottom of the class from lying, cheating, violence, and stealing better than anything else
Except, I think I'd apply it differently: religion gives most of us a baseline for behaving when not very much is on the line. I suspect that religious people are not more likely to be heroes (nor less likely to be villains) in situations where the stakes are high.
I'm curious about this:
Smart people, absent outlying social deficits, will arrive at Christian-like morality on big picture things independently.
What is it about Christianity that leads people to it? Would you accept a broader definition: something like
Smart people, absent outlying social deficits, will arrive at a morality core that is seen in many religions.
I ask, because I wonder about Confucian morality -- which has always felt very similar to Christian morality to me -- or about something like Stoic morality. I should research this, but I wonder how much of the morality of the ancient world might be describes as Christian like.
Would you accept a broader definition: something likeSmart people, absent outlying social deficits, will arrive at a morality core that is seen in many religions.
Yes, that's a less ambiguous way of saying what I meant. I think the morality core exists outside of religion.
When I was an atheist, I'd say I wasn't going to lie to my kids about Santa Claus. I learned to appreciate that there might be more to it than that:
I'm no longer certain it's better one way or another. There are tradeoffs.
FWIW I grew up without religion and I don't think I'm worse off for it. It forced me to learn ethics and morality on my own which has pluses and minuses; it took time, pain, and energy to reach philosophical equilibrium while equipping me with tools for reaching philosophical equilibriums.
I don't think people need religion to be good people. I think people and the world they are born into encode most of what religions teach, but religion makes learning natural law easier by filling gaps and constructing narratives. Smart people, absent outlying social deficits, will arrive at Christian-like morality on big picture things independently. While I wouldn't say that religion exists to teach the bottom of the class (religion has value to everyone imo), religion probably keeps the bottom of the class from lying, cheating, violence, and stealing better than anything else we could teach them.
At the very least, I think there's a role for cultural Christianity like there's a role from cultural Judaism.
These days I consider myself Christian knowing that I might not meet the label's criteria (depends on who you ask). I believe Christianity is a useful encoding of natural law and I believe in God. I'm not sure that what I call God is the same immeasurable God that other people believe in, but that is consistent with my definition of God; we can share faith in something immeasurable conceptually but we can't share detailed understanding of it.