cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/171544
cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/171542
Counterpoint: Decline in religion doesn’t bode well for the republic
This might not seem like a crisis, but the American Founders would have disagreed. These men saw that self-government depended on morality and virtue, which, in turn, depended on religion. As George Washington stated in his Farewell Address, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indisputable supports.”
To be clear: I’m not insulting you, nor whoever wrote the article you linked to. I’m insulting that spot of logic, because it’s my opinion that it is asinine. To save myself the effort of retreading ground that has been positively compacted from the amount of people covering it, I’ll link to the Wikipedia article on secular morality, or quite literally, morals without religion.
While religion does provide a good initial framework for establishing morality, it frequently falls very short, which is one of the things that led me to decouple my beliefs and morals years ago.
It seems to me that if mortality is not grounded in God it’s entirely subjective. Even if it is grounded in natural law, there are differing interpretations of what moral rules natural law entails. It seems to me without subjective grounding, mortality is entirely subjective and is no effective restraint of human action. If every man is a law unto himself, morality effectively ceases to exist.