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I see someone struggling with something that might take a minute or two tops and help them.
Expanding on that I don’t think I’m a good person. I think the minimum people should do is help others if it’s no real skin off your nose.
Good people are the people who volunteer, the pekple who do good for the sake of it and spend meaningful amounts of time helping others.
Most people don’t, religious or not.
It makes me feel nice to do good things and be nice to others. I usually go by that.
How do the gullible decide which parts of their faith count and which don’t?
JK lol they just do as their told.
If in doubt, remember what Granny Weatherwax said:
'And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’
I have yet to find a counterexample.
That’s a good rule of thumb, but it runs into difficulty when you map it to the marco scale.
Whether we’re talking individual human capacity (Dunbar’s Number) or a question of public policy (for instance, in the Trolley Problem scenario) or even just common accounting and logistics principles, people become indistinguishable from things in significantly large numbers and anonymous contexts.
Bureaucracy has a de-humanizing effect on individuals. But bureaucracy is fundamental to administration of large populations. I don’t know how you square this circle without committing some degree of “sin”.
I’m not sure I agree. A person doesn’t need to be in your Dunbar group to still be treated as a person, and bureaucracy doesn’t have to be dehumanizing; though I’ll grant that doing so is an easy trap to slide into. But you can plan for the needs and behaviors of large groups of people without treating them as anything less - just look at something like event planning!
In response to the trolley problem - It does get tricky with something like triage, where you have to evaluate who gets saved on the basis of their injuries. In this case, taking a cue from Weatherwax again, I think the key would be making sure that even those who don’t get saved still get treated humanely - pain relief, comfort, etc.
A person doesn’t need to be in your Dunbar group to still be treated as a person
Not incidentally, sure. But they need to be in your Dunbar group to be seen as a person.
As soon as “treating another person” carries a price, people charged with delivering treatment are going to start falling off of it.
bureaucracy doesn’t have to be dehumanizing
Again, not incidentally. But the impulse in a bureaucracy is towards expediency. You have a large volume of people to manage and a limited amount of time / manpower / resources. So you cut corners in order to mitigate shortfalls or appease overworked staff, because you don’t see the consequences of your actions or experience guilt over it.
I think the key would be making sure that even those who don’t get saved still get treated humanely
I don’t argue that this is the strictly moral path. But it ignores the biases, the capacities, and the temperaments of the people doing the triage. At some point you need people to do the things. And people routinely put their own comfort ahead of others’ health and well-being, because personal comfort is immediate and real while the experiences of others are remote and abstract.
It rings consistent with the Wiccan Rede (Do no harm) and the ethic of reciprocity, aka The Golden Rule.
Curiously this sheds light on the common sickness of the ultra-wealthy, who are surrounded by sycophantic courtiers who readily agree with their every word bur also want a taste of their sweet, sweet lucre. Inside weeks, they start seeing themselves as experts in everything, and everyone else as NPCs.
probably mostly because of Greek philosophers
A lot has been written over the ages about the nature of goodness. The Greeks weren’t the first, nor were they the last.
Ideas such as natural law have been attested in the ancient Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope for instance. On the other hand, in European thought, Thomas Aquinas was a highly influential figure, as well as Bentham and Kant.
And then, of course, there’s the whole rest of the world.
How can we know bad a good thing without someone who is guiding us? Would someone who has a slave think slavery is bad? It’s normal for them because they saw it every day.
i’m not sure whether this is a serious question.
How can we know bad a good thing without someone who is guiding us?
modern theology is almost always based on universal principles, i.e. insights that apply everywhere, at any time. in western literature since aristoteles, these have mainly been identified to fall into three categories:
- mathematics
- physics
- biology / chemistry
(or in the medieval ages, they were called “theology” / “law studies” / “medicine”, but these topics have been abstracted a whole lot since then.)
to your specific question: slavery is bad because it contradicts the self-determination of the person who is able to think for themselves. modern views (e.g. calvinism claim that every human is physiologically able to make their own decisions wisely enough; therefore they should also get the practical possibility to decide things for themselves).
this is not “somebody” guiding us; it is some ideas guiding us. there’s a crucial difference there.
Who decides universal principles? It’s like putting humans in a town which doesn’t have any human and they know there, they won’t know anything. Even a language, ethics etc.
And, thanks for the answer.
I need some advice, regarding some other elements of God’s Laws and how to follow them.
- Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?
- I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
- I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of Menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.
- When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbours. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
- I have a neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?
- A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination, Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I do not agree. Can you settle this? Are there ‘degrees’ of abomination?
- Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I must admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?
- Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?
- I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
- My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two diverse kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev.24:10-16. Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14) I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.
lmao that’s hilarious. saved to my disk! yeah i think that religion is like … how do i say this, like you’re asking an antique person to build an electric vehicle for you … they have neither the tools nor the knowledge to do it properly. it’s quite bizarre to think that people refuse the progress of time, and especially the progress of society by clinging onto principles of the past.
You’re taking those passages too literally:
When God (in verse 45) said that slaves are ok to buy, he meant that people, all from the start, each have slaves within their hearts. Things that we have sold or boughtten that are forced to pick our “moral cotton.” God calls for us to set these free, free our hearts from slavery.
And as God goes on to explain the logistics of buying and selling slaves…
‘logistics of buying and selling slaves’? I need some advice, regarding some other elements of God’s Laws and how to follow them.
- Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?
- I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
- I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of Menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.
- When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbours. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
- I have a neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?
- A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination, Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I do not agree. Can you settle this? Are there ‘degrees’ of abomination?
- Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I must admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?
- Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?
- I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
- My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two diverse kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev.24:10-16. Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14) I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.
“I don’t need the threat of eternal punishment, we’ve got punishment at home.” --Me, a bad person.
punishment at home
😳🥺👉👈
Let’s be honest, they do so by adhering to cultural norms with the exact same devotion and lack of scrutiny that religious people do.
“Why do we do it this way?” “We’ve always done it this way!” “Why is it wrong?” “Because it’s just wrong!”
The very small subset of actually moral people decide between good and bad choices not depending on social norms, not depending on laws, not even depending on morals or ethics, but by what motivations their actions arise from, whether they come from Ego or understanding.
You can never know whether an action is good or bad, you can only know whether your motivations are good or bad.
but by what motivations their actions arise from, whether they come from Ego or understanding.
i’m sorry to shatter your worldview, but this is wrong. people need an “ego”, and more “understanding” is not always better.
The “ego” is a symbol for the human stomach. Every time we eat, it’s actually a gross and disgusting thing. nobody wants to see it, how you put your teeth into the soft and defenseless food. you’re literally devouring, destroying precious food. gross. anyways, people need to eat, otherwise they die. it’s the same with what you call “ego”. sure, people are “egoistic” sometimes, but if they never are, they never gather the resources that they need and then they die. does not work that way.
“understanding”: the more people understand, the less physically active they are. people who do science often sit around all day. nobody would work physically and society wouldn’t advance. there need to be people with limited understanding. just saying.
Eating isn’t gross and that’s not what the Ego is. Ego is the idea that you have of yourself as a concept in your mind, the image of yourself. From that comes the idea that rhis imaginary image can be enlarged or diminished by other fictional things. Like how you think if someone insults you you have to fight them back, or if you people like you, you’re more important. It’s a complete absurdity where people fight over mental images and go to wars over ideas that do not exist in reality.
that’s just thorough bullshit. i can have an image of myself perfectly fine without trying to enlarge or dimish it and without engaging in fights with strangers.
in fact, a meaningful self-image makes you a more meaningful part of the world, makes your life less chaotic and less feeling of pointlessness, reduces depression and anxiety, and allows you to understand what you can and can’t do, so you’re both more productive and less probable to overstrain yourself and get in accidents.
You’re literally getting into a fight about it right now and trying desperately to disprove it. Simply the shadow of a threat to a made-up image in your head that isn’t even remotely related to who you actually are has you huffing and puffing on the internet and calling “thorough bullshit”.
Once you’ve fallen into the illusion that you aren’t you, but instead this 2D caricature in your head created by a cloud of words strung together, you want to attach the good words to yourself and you don’t want the bad words.
And just by someone suggesting that the words you’ve attached to are not in fact the right words, and you’re getting yourself red in the head your heart pounding your breath heaven and you’re ready to use violence to destroy whatever seems to threaten these words you’ve attached to, only the fear of punishment and the law forcing bad words onto that self-image, stops you from doing so.
Think about it, sticks and stones which can actually hurt your body, you don’t care much about, but if someone says the wrong word you can’t focus the whole day out of anger.
Naturally you don’t have a self-image, you’re not words. Animals don’t have anything like that, and you’re nothing but an animal with a brain capable of abstraction. You can imagine a flying cow, but there is no such creature, it is pure abstraction. Similarly just because you can imagine an image in your head and think that that’s you, naturally, it’s a complete fiction.
Words are a symbolic language, purely referential and conceptual, not related at all to reality. Once your mind creates an abstraction of itself through a language that can’t even describe something as simple as a rock, you’ve gone and lost yourself completely to illusion and from then on, it’s only natural that you commit all the evils of humanity over nothing. You’ve even got those religious people, who are ready to kill over what they think are the right and wrong words.
i think there is an instinct to get angry at people who are very stupid, because such people easily pose a threat to the community. imagine a person sets things on fire just through their immense stupidity; getting angry at such a person before-hand is an attempt to make them shut up and be quiet.
Religious people act like they’re more moral or have morality that’s special because they believe in God. However when you ask why all those pious people back in the day: cheated, stole, murdered, adulterer, were racist, had slaves, raped kids and stuff. They would say that it was the norm at the time and nobody else knew better.
To paraphrase Stephen J Fry: “then what are you for?!”
Sure, but so do atheists. They just believe their morality is special because they believe in the current social norms, within the current societal context. In 10 years they’ll be different, should a catastrophe happen it will shift completely. It’s just as flippant in its own way.
There’s pretty solid evidence supporting empathy as a beneficial evolutionary trait, it’s not like it’s random that “don’t be shitty to each other” is a social norm.
if empathy was truly universally favored by evolution, then there wouldn’t be any non-emphathetic humans today and we wouldn’t have this discussion, just saying.
That’s not at all how that works. First at no point have I made any “universally” claims. Nothing in evolution or psychology is 100% universal. Second, empathy, on average, is good for the health of the species. Selfishness is a gamble: it can dramatically increase the individual’s odds of passing on their genes but it requires enough non-selfish targets to exploit or it actually has a negative impact. More simply, jackasses fighting each other are worse off than pacifists working together.
So what’s favored is for most people to be altruistic and a small percentage of predators take advantage of them.
But social norms aren’t empathy. They are adhered to because of the punishment that will result if you break them. Before you have any chance of developing empathy or emotional intelligence, you are taught as a child that breaking social norms will result in punishment, and from then on your only motivation to follow them is fear of punishment.
And that is exactly the same mechanism as religious morality.
you are taught as a child that breaking social norms will result in punishment, and from then on your only motivation to follow them is fear of punishment.
I didn’t give up meat because I was worried about angry vegans coming to my house and beating me up, I gave up meat because I rationally evaluated the effects eating meat would have on the world and determined that those weren’t effects I wanted to cause.
Am I just built different?
Yes, in all likelihood you have some kind of neurodivergence. That’s why you’ve probably noticed people around you rarely function through rational choice the way you do.
People are generally programmed to follow the tribe, keep opinions to confirm and demonstrate fealty to the tribe, and to avoid committing any taboos that could cause them to be cast out and die alone in the wild.
And the people who did not do this mostly just had this exact happen and died.
I am neurodivergent, but I’m not prepared to accept the implication that neurotypical people lack moral agency. Anyone is capable of thinking critically about their behavior and changing it. Not every vegan is neurodivergent.
you are taught as a child that breaking social norms will result in punishment, and from then on your only motivation to follow them is fear of punishment.
I’m sorry to hear about your sociopathy, but no this is not how most people work.
Deflection beats introspection, eh? It always amazes me how easily insults come to the “morally righteous”.
At least now you know how people become bad - they don’t have the courage to question whether what they’re doing is actually good.
It’s not an insult It’s illustrating the ridiculousness of your claim. Your faux-intellectual philosophy is not convincing.
Interestingly, law is considered a more effective deterrent for immoral people than religion itself!
Religious law and civil law are not very different, the latter is based on the former, historically speaking.
The difference is in who gets to judge and dole out punishments.
Religious law and civil law are not very different, the latter is based on the former, historically speaking.
Hammurabi’s Code disagrees with you.
He derived his laws from the god Shamash. He just codified and imposed his interpretation. I am well aware of the stele, I’ve seen it! As sure as Shamash is my witness!
Have you got a citation for the claim that the laws were supposed to be the divine commandments of Shamash? All the articles I can find on the code or the stele just talk about the laws themselves with no mention of religious connotations.
By his Noodly Appendage!
Ironically, biblical morality is absolutely fucked in the head.
Killing women because they didn’t scream while they were raped (probably because the uncle or father or brother raping them was either choking them out or holding a knife to their throat or something worse.)
Killing infants and unborn children because someone 3 generations ago did a thing.
Stoning teenagers for being, you know, teenagers.
It really is a good thing morality doesn’t come from god.
A screenshot of a comment I made a while back. Link to original comment
oh I’m well aware of how awful the story is. Basically the entire point was to flex how powerful ‘god’ was.
Not to mention the whole Exodus problem
The pharaoh was bad guy at first but then became a victim of Adonaiyahwehjehovahbob’s torture
I mean, if you believe their stories, god told the first lie. so why would you believe his divinely inspired horror novel when it says someone is the bad guy?
(good news- the exodus never happened. you’d think that rivers turning to blood would be something somebody in egypt would have mentioned/written down. Or the frogs. or the locusts or the whole slew of dead first born sons.)
Not to get into a debate, but someone did write about (something that could reasonably be) it, potential motivated reasoning by the source aside. Sources from that far into the past (or even the relatively closer past) very rarely survive to the present day, especially literary sources (which tend to be written on papyrus that rots away), and even historians of relatively well-attested periods like Rome and Classical Greece basically have a few texts they rely on*, supplemented with archeology, epigraphy (inscriptions on stone) and straight up magic, and that’s a thousand years before the period in which the Exodus is taken to have happened without the advantage of Medieval monks painstakingly preserving the material. Now the Egyptian corpus is uncommonly big (yay for the Sahara), but it’s also very fragmented. For the most part what we don’t and can’t know is orders of magnitude more than what we can know, and it’s not even like we’ve studied the whole Egyptian corpus (we haven’t; there’s a shortage of trained Egyptologists able to do that work), so it’s very plausible that an event of even that magnitude would just… not show up in a way we can recognize. So what I want to say is: Truth of the Exodus aside, our sources for ancient history are nowhere near that comprehensive. Three thousand years is a long time.
*For example Roman military history basically entirely relies on two guys (Livy and Polybius), whose works very frustratingly only survive in part, supplemented by some less reliable sources and fragments. When talking about Alexander the Great it’s basically just Arrian, again supplemented by less reliable/comprehensive sources and fragments. And it can get worse; we get straight up nothing in the way of literature from Carthage. There’s a lot of dumb luck involved in what does and does not survive.
Nope. not really.
it’s an apologist website, and while that in of itself is not something to suddenly dismiss out of hand, it is something to take a skeptical approach towards. for example, there’s more than a few red flags in how they talk about things.
For example, when they’re talking about the discovery of the Tomb of Sobeknakht II, they’re grossly misrepresenting things. They describe an attack that led to the complete occupation- at least, for a time- of Egypt.
Except that the inscription in the tomb they’re talking about, claims that Sobeknakht was successful in his defense at Elkab. At the time Sobeknakht was alive, ‘Egypt’ wasn’t even one kingdom. it was split between the Thebans (Who Sobeknakht led) and the Hyksos to the north. this attack was was in, at the latest 1550 bce (Sobeknahkt II was ruling somewhere in the sixteenth and seventh dynasties.)
it’s this kind of gross- and lets be honest, probably intentional- misrepresentation to conflate that with the Kush Empire’s conquest of Egypt in 700-500 bce. there’s 850 years gap- at the most generous- along with multiple kingdoms and dynastic succession separating the events of Sobeknahkt and the conquest of the kushites in 700ish. Even to suggest that behavior in one case would be the way that Egyptians of another time and another place behaved elsewhere.
And that suggestion would in fact be somewhat wrong. we do have things in the archeological record that show Egyptians suffered defeat. We even have things in the historical record where they’re talking about those defeats and what happened how to keep them from happening again- including, as an example, the adoption of certain kinds of composite bows, the adoption of chariots were brought to Egypt by the Hyksos (asiatic peoples, less a race and more a class of people- that is the “foreign rulers”.)
I have to assume this was an intentional lie, given that it took all of five minutes for me to find whose tomb they were talking about and that they were talking about a military invasion a thousand years later as if Sobeknakht would be there. You’ll notice my opinion of apologists are rather low- this kind of lie is common, and either they’re to ignorant not to believe it or it’s intentional.
which brings us to the next thing.
The argument is “Well, just because we don’t have evidence, doesn’t mean there wasn’t evidence we just haven’t found yet.” The question that needs to be asked is should we find evidence? The historical record we have that mostly survives comes from monuments and inscriptions. things on tombs and such like (like the inscription on Sobeknakht’s tomb) lauding their accomplishments and victories. One certainly does not generally put shameful things on such tombs or monuments.
So no, we wouldn’t really expect to see much in the way of historical records. that is to say, we wouldn’t expect to find much in the way of writings- histories- on the defeats. Not by the Egyptians, anyway. any writings, as you note, would have fallen away and moldered into nothing, etc. But we would expect to find things in the archaeological record. That is- in the artifacts left behind. Things like the trash heaps that have pork bones in them- or no pork bones- or the kinds of weapons, tools, and armor, the vehicles, the remains of humans themselves, the fossil record. all that kind of stuff.
And, if those stories are true and accurate, we would expect to find evidence of those stories being true in the archaelogical record. For Manetho’s story, that would have included Avaris, which has been excavated extensively, finding evidence of the lepers and corrupted people and such like. For example, the wall that Manetho says Osareph ordered built. Avaris had a wall. It was built by the Hyksos in the 1600’s and served as their capital city; where as Osareph and Amenophis were probably in the mid 1400’s. or later.
Neither do we have any evidence at all that the 80,000 were forced to work in stone quarries, nor that they moved to Avaris, and subsequently got crushed by a force 300,000 strong, nor did Amenophis (possibly Amenhotep II or Akhenaten) have major campaigns that saw them removed from their own lands and hiding with nubians to the south. Which is ludicrious to imagine that the Kush would have harbored them. the Kush and the Egyptians did not get along particularly well. (that is to say, they absolutely hated each other.)
As you can see, we have the same reasons for discounting the Exodus narrative, as well. Most scholars believe that the two narratives are separate legendary accounts. It’s absolutely ludicrous that you would expect us to believe that 2-3 million Israelites somehow managed to live in the nile delta (where the population at the time is also estimated to number 2-3 million…) without leaving so much as a trace.
The best part is when God goes " see that guy over there, he believes so much in me, i will torment him beyond reason to proof his dedication to me"
There are so many of these terrible examples of god being this huge asshole. When i read the bible in my early teens, it was reading the bible that ‘made me an atheist’. Seeing that people took this asshole god serious.
Over the years i did get to learn more about Jesus, he is the proto-hippy about sharing love and kindness. But somehow, very few christians follow up on his words and teachings. Christians actively chosing to be assholes when they have Jesus as a deity in their mythological fanfinction. It boggles the mind.
Yup, I don’t believe in God, if he is real, I wouldn’t want to follow him anyways…
I think my favorite morality-thing to bring up is Song of Solomon.
Especially when people get on about purity culture. It’s Bronze Age porn.
I mean, yeah. god is a raging asshole, but that one usually gets more entertaining reactions.
Sending bears after teenagers because they called you bald once is crazy Elijah.
Yeah, but you’re forgetting a really important detail. These teenagers were like, really annoying.
Yup.
In the scope of things that’s fairly mild. I mean god once decided to bio-cide the entire planet. (or so we’re told, heh.) And that was because some angels game down and got it on with human women… who probably didn’t really have a choice…
The great flood? That was a nephilim thing?
Yeah. I mean it’s not the most explicit justification given, per se, but like here’s gen 6, where god decided to, you know, off everything except Noah:
6 1When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, ^2 ^the sons of God saw that they were fair, and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. 3 Then the Lordsaid, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. 6And the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the humans I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air—for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.
Chapter 5, is largely a list of men following the line of Adam through to Noah. Then chapter six kicks off with that little gem, so it certainly seems to be that the think that god found wicked is his children boinking his playthings. (Early on, they were monolatristic, believing in other gods but worshipping only one to exclusion. As they became monotheistic, the sons of god were now angels, not lesser gods.)
(Fun fact. The word used for the ark, just means “box”. Noah didn’t even build a boat. He built a box.)
It’s possibly because they told him to go up the hill where people worshipped other gods, the sinnest of all sins
It’s much easier to be a good person when you aren’t indoctrinated from birth with some book of ancient myths telling you who to hate.
Since religious morality is made up by people it comes from the same source as atheist morality. Humans!
Religion tends to make it easy for people to insert shitty stuff and claim it is a divine mandate. Atheists have to make a case for why something is right or wrong.
The thing is, you can “debatebro” yourself into most of morality, save for stuff like “homosexuality is evil”.
