Yea I think so. Well to the extent that one seeks a religion after childhood, you know after the stage we are indoctrinated by everything around us in early years.

As obviously there is the dynamic that kids will adopt predominant cultural beliefs as their own; which is why 99.9 percent of middle eastern children identify as Islam in adulthood (as example).

Though if one was neutral or ambivalent on the subject until adulthood and began looking for a “higher power”- I’m pretty sure they will seek a sect which allows them to be who they already are. Someone geared toward hateful thinking, vengeful punitive thinking would no doubt align to the more negative barbaric religions with a “cause”. I’m remembering all the westerners who subscribed to sharia law and negative forms of Islam through the past age of “terrorism”.

They found a “higher power” that gave them authority to be who they already were. Likewise a person largely compassionate/forgiving by nature would never accept such a “higher power”.

I think there’s a pretty wide diversity of religion; ranging from quite fundamental, toleration, abusive, ignorant, and violent sects, to very helpful, community oriented sects.

In that regard, I think a person who seeks a religion, either seeks one which matches their own heart (alignment to compassion/love; or one with mis-alignment to compassion/love) or otherwise are simply born into it and are consumed in the fundamental ideology and for lack of a better term “programmed” to see only that version of reality.

I don’t think religion it’s self is a compass for moral rightness; but that people with moral rightness (people having the innate sense of moral rightness from genuine compassion/love) is the compass.

A mother holding her new-born, an elderly man tending to his sick beloved dog; share universal attributes in that love; compassion, empathetic sensitivity, innate desire to serve the other, an automatic valuing of the others innate worth; and from these qualities come a wisdom of right moral action.

And of course anyone who has developed a visceral state of alignment to that particular state of consciousness.

The positively religiously oriented may attribute that love to Jesus (or fill in the blank) and I pick no bones about that; though love is not an abstraction, or a 2000 year old story, or a “belief”; it’s a here and now available state of consciousness to develop alignment with.

Any religion without that of course has no moral compass regardless.

Yea my pleasure. Very nicely written. I’d never heard of professor Taurek before. I can’t believe he even shared his theory out loud! What difference do numbers make he says????

Uh.. only that pain, or suffering, or violence is multiplied that many times! What a blind spot in his thinking.

Good article. Regarding Prof. Taurek, I think he’s full of shit with that theory numbers don’t count. What a dummy!

Personally I don’t think morality can ever be qualified in strict binary (this or that) terms across the board. Certainly there is a central section where moral response would be near universal in agreement.

A lot of it has to do with circumstances being defined in narratives and narratives are less objective. Or when sticking to facts; facts not accounting for nuance.

It’s not easy being human 🤷‍♂️

I think a heart genuinely centered in love and compassion will come as close to proper moral response as one can.

Well to be fair, I didn’t argue that humans can’t find truth. We seem to find plenty of it in discrete contexts of physical environments; where measured validations confirm with confidence a representative of truth was found. This is even contextual on the prior basis of developed “truth” though, as one thing builds upon another.

There are times where some new revelation happens (such as light is not infinite) and models of what we owned as “truth” have to be rebuilt. And that will hold until another revelation comes.

I think this notion of “truth” is much like Happiness in the Bill of Rights. “A pursuit of happiness” - “A pursuit of Truth”. The pursuit is ever present, the realization of it… a “maybe-ish”.

But then to move into philosophy, where all notions are abstract, metaphorical, and hypothesis that is incapable of scientific validation… the notion of Truth becomes far more wiggly. Truth may even be an inappropriate word to define outcomes. Perhaps “workable models” is better.

Of course the domain of beliefs (everything we believe as explicit “trues” about reality is largely as subjective as objective. (E.g. Capitalism is good or bad, theology is right or wrong, etc.)

There is not really any absolute truth in this domain, it’s more a truth of “believing is seeing”. And the seeing becomes evidence again for believing.

I do think it’s very safe to acknowledge we can and do develop very reliable models of “true’s” (a “true” being an outcome which can be verified externally) though that is a different notion than truth is. To me anyway.

Perhaps I would go so far as to say we can (in some cases) access as much of a genuine truthful view as is possible within our contextual frame. To be honest though, one would have to be omniscient to have complete absolute truth; as any absence of any truth is an incomplete truth, so not “the” truth.

That sounds like a very strong confident assumption about you and me; I wonder if you can easily act outside that contextual believed-in framework ? 😁

Exactly. No one can remove themselves from the context of who they are in any moment (culture, personal lived experiences, language, beliefs, scientific views of the era, etc. etc.). Like a whale, you might float to your own surface, but in the water you still are ha.

I think to the idea of philosophical stances guiding behavior, it’s probably more true that a persons natural inclination will influence which stance they resonate with. Or which theology (or it’s absence) as well.

Though I’m not arguing against the point that philosophy can be meaningful, and that thoughtful introspective people might develop personal growth and philosophical views together as they grow.

No doubt about it. For every philosophy exists an equal and opposite philosophy. I’ve never met an unbiased self described philosopher. Any exposure to philosophic theories inevitably lead to choosing a side, a team, a theory; then good old confirmation bias kicks in, and then a lifetime of debate with all who disagree lol. It’s an exercise of validating belief. True as rain.